Comment GIve him Scratch (Score 1) 742
Give him MIT's Scratch! Definitely.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Comment Scratch (Score 1) 462
Some of the objectives mentioned here can be helped by putting Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) in the hands of the students.
There is a version for Ubuntu (hence Debian) available
Comment Re:They did it with software so why not words? (Score 1) 158
Yeah! If they keep at it, I can see a massive backlash on the horizon. "Enough is enough with these so called rights! From now on, we use information freely like God intended and that's that!"
German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences 158
Glyn Moody writes "You think copyright can't get any more draconian? Think again. In Germany, newspaper publishers are lobbying for 'a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolize speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder. According to the drafts circulating on the Internet, permission shall be obtainable exclusively by closing an agreement with a new collecting society which will be founded after the drafts have matured into law. Depending on the particulars, new levies might come up for each and every user of a PC, at least if the computer is used in a company for commercial purposes.' Think that will never work because someone will always break the news cartel? Don't worry, they've got that covered too. They want to 'amend cartel law in order to enable a global "pooling" of all exclusive rights of all newspaper publishers in Germany in order to block any attempt to defect from the paywall cartel by a single competitor.' And rest assured, if anything like this passes in Germany, publishers everywhere will be using the copyright ratchet to obtain 'parity.'"
Comment Blackbox no, I/O yes (Score 1) 164
Since they are not technical people, it's a waste of time to try to explain what's in the Blackbox at hand.
Focus instead on the consequences of the choices offered. As in "If you go with choice number 1, it'll cost the company 2 millions dollars and there is a high risk of delay. Choice number two, on the other hand, means good integration with our infrastructure, cost less and offers better chances of success." They can understand these choices.
