... then I don't know what is. This is as close to election rigging as you can get without actually stuffing the ballot box.

Fortunately, the delegates to the convention are not (always) required to vote for the candidate who garners the most votes in their primaries. They don't have to take the candidates that the other party foists upon them. They can use their own judgment, and hopefully they will.

The answer to "Why teach programming with BASIC?" depends on which language called BASIC you mean, and the answers vary from "You don't know better" to "You want to teach them how to write quick one-off VBA macros, not to program" to "You passionately hate your students."

Assuming that you want to teach them to program, use a language that incorporates some modern language features and gives them room to grow, but has enough in terms of training wheels that they aren't distracted or frustrated by unnecessary trivia. Python, Ruby, maybe C#.

This is a good example, I guess, of how two people can look at the same thing and see two different things.

Consider this screen from that page: http://s0n1c2122.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/ubuntu_netbook_10-10.png

I can hardly read the icon text on my full-sized notebook at full resolution; the default font is unusable, and the white-on-beige color scheme just makes it worse. The toolbar icons are too small for me to reliably press just one, and my fingers, although pudgy, are not unusually so.

Yes, that's true. The internet >> WWW.

And, on behalf of the US military, you're welcome.

Citation needed.

The Ubuntu UI is very nice, but it's designed around the assumption of a big screen and a precise pointing device. The icons are too small, and the menus too long and deep to be navigated in a small screen with a touchscreen, from what I can guess.

It's not like Congress hasn't been busy recently, and presumably NASA and its subcontractors aren't just taking the money and throwing it in a shredder. It takes time and money to properly mothball a project of that size, and in the meanwhile maybe they can make a little progress toward their goals.

I wish I could mod you up.

Three hundred pages to cover a "hello world" app and not "take the reader much further?"

Good lord, there must be a better programming platform for android than this. For comparison, the entirety of K&R is only 274 pages!

While "delete your apps periodically and re-add them as needed" is probably very good advice most of the time, are there any cases where apps are getting worse with respect to privacy, and so having a newer version of an app is worse than having the older version?

It seems likely that someone out there, having gotten a whiff of the money that might be made, is actually getting worse about this...

Maybe it's because I haven't taken the time to learn West Saxon, the language in which Beowulf was written?

Also, I might be lazy and stupid. I'll concede that point, if you'll concede that your metaphor is balderdash.

I don't believe that you've ever been in the same room as a soldier who wasn't made of molded plastic in your life.

This is slashdot. Laws are irrelevant here. Just stick IMHO in front of everything, including this paragraph, and you'll be fine.

It doesn't matter how many modules there are. It matters how many solid, well-documented modules there are that will continue to get updates and support.

I have no opinion over how much goodness there is in CPAN versus RubyGems; maybe RubyGems is really pulling ahead. But out of nearly nineteen thousand modules, how many really matter? (and how many are just another XML library that's just slightly different and incompatible with the bajillion other XML libraries already out there?)

I used to feel that way, but now I don't. I've learned to take some comfort from the fact that if it's already a time-tested and useful idea, I can feel confident that I got it right.

In my own field, there's often as much as a ten year lag before some young upstart grad student comes along and proves that my ideas are bogus, and I hate the suspense.