I would start with PASCAL or similar to teach basics such as for loops, conditional operators, boolean operators. Then to teach OOP I would probably use C++ (although if there was a simpler language available I'd rather not use C++ to teach OOP).

Aaaah the ingenious Lord of the Rings argument!!

Or maybe we should ship you back to "hate-town".

have it stolen than color it pink.

Yes to all. It surprises me greatly that one has to articulate your point #3. One would think that most people with average intelligence would understand that and respect other people's privacy by not posting work-related or any other stuff that the other person may not want to make private. But unfortunately many people don't understand this. Also, if you have your relatives on your f/b profile that's even worse since you probably have a generation gap with them and many of them don't understand what kinds of things can hurt you in what ways (for example your Aunt XYZ might ask you how you did in that interview for this other company that you had the past week)

There is a choice - It's called "Android".

Are you saying dying in a car crash is the same as dying via brain cancer? Which would you prefer?

Seems to me that she is strongly lobbying for Rupert M. And her strategy against Google seems to be inducing a 1984 style fear (that Google will take over everything) and extreme examples - rather than facts. The fact is that I like to read news over the web, I like the google aggregator - it works for me. Thank you.

I agree that the article makes it sound recent and I got misled too before reading TFA. But can you explain why you differentiate between cell aging and human aging? Isn't human aging a consequence of cell aging?

In my opinion getting a Palm PRE when you have available good Android phones (I just got the myTouch 3G from T-Mobile and so far I love it) or even an IPhone, is a mistake. If your hobby/business-idea is app development, you won't be able to generate enough of a network effect on a Palm PRE as there are not enough users and hence won't be able to make money or be able to get the pleasure of a lot of people using your app. Android, in my view, is a good programming platform and has a good chance of catching on to the I-Phone in terms of app users (or at least generating a non-trivial user base). Of course you get the best network effect with the iPhone but then you also face the challenge of making an app which stands out among the plethora of already available apps (apart from dealing with app-store rejection idiosyncrasies). If you bought the PRE because you happen to love the classic Palm (like me), well, my main reason for liking the Palm was the ability to use the stylo to write on it. It made life easier for me. The PRE doesn't have that...

Never the less...

And even then they were considered cool only by other fellow nerds.

I tried it with mine...and here I am now...on Slashdot.

There is no line (except for those man-made). In absolute, everything, including the dust of the Sahara is alive. Molecules are alive as they are a collective and behave a certain way, albeit unconsciously, and so are atoms and so are electrons and so on and so forth. There is no line.