Posting to undo a mistaken mod. Your comment is great!

I am a teacher and that's exactly what I have been thinking for many years. One of the things that changed my opinion was Daphne Koller's TED talk

If profit is not necessary, could you give me one reason why anyone would fund a startup? Could you explain how to build a factory if the bank won't give you a loan? How to expand internationally once you've invested all your personal wealth into your business? Why would someone risk being a business owner and not an employee? See, all these are things that are typically solved by equity investment, or (partly) giving up your ownership, and these investors, for the large risk they are taking, expect a return - profit. Interestingly, as an example, in Islamic finance it is okay to turn profit but it's forbidden to give loans and ask for interest which is understood as making money without taking a risk. Or, in other words - the business generates value for customers (otherwise they would not buy its products), for employees (who get wages), for loan providers (because you pay interest on your loans) and finally for owners who are running the largest risk - a risk that there won't be anything left to pay for their investment in the company. You would suggest to let them take losses but not have the option of getting profits... and I think it would not work :)

This seems quite innocent and hugely useful at the same time - can anyone see the angle from which the rights holders will most likely try to attack his effort? :)

Posting to undo my mistakenr mod.

Spreadsheet software such as Excel or Calc are very good examples of flow-based programming, and it seems non-programmers can cope with it. However, we all know how hard it is to get larger-scale projects in Excel to work :)

Assuming that you protect your phone from the random thief, I would recommend installing a tracing app and leaving the phone unlocked - a locked phone will just encourage the thief to hard reset it or turn it off immediately. Same with a laptop - I had some tracing software installed but unfortunately I forgot to enable the guest account so the thief could not use the laptop... and therefore never gave me a chance to locate it.

Phones have strong seasonal sales variations around Christmas - e.g. here, so your point is quite weak.

It sounds like you want FireGPG or Mailvelope. Too bad the first one is discontinued and the second one is not ready for Firefox yet, just Chrome. Is there a widely used browser plugin I missed?

And if they were members of the SEA, would the SEA say anything different?

Plain English: Although their revenue has grown, they are still making losses. It may seem, from a certain point of view, like they are earning a bit of profit for each of their shares, but that's only if you adjust the figures in a way that is not allowed by official accounting standards.

A single-purpose email address that lets any interested neighbors write me and agree on sharing the connection if they wish. I live in a high density area...

Yes, perhaps a good predictor now, but only up to the moment when results of these polls are widely publicized... and some company offers to manipulate the trending words for a price?

I encrypt my AP relatively well but also want to give a chance to neighbors or people who are around often, so the name of my AP is my email address (one of them, anyway). This gives any people who are seriously interested a chance to let me know when they want to connect, ask about my ISP or even share and contribute toward the cost of my connection.

I was unpleasantly surprised that Scratch 2.0 cannot be downloaded and run on my computer - I had to run it "from the cloud". It's so sad because I really wanted to use it with my kids when we were offline, and the new Scratch has a lot of what I missed from the older version 1.4 for years, making it much more useful to actually teach my kids programming: the ability to easily clone objects in runtime, lists as a data type, and the ability to create custom blocks. At least they're saying that an offline editor will arrive sometime this summer....