And of course, with police cameras on everyone, just hope that future such acts continue to be perpetrated by local amateurs who seem to have done virtually nothing to obscure their appearance, and even remarkably little to mask the planting of their payload.

I think the police should concentrate on their skills at apprehending fully identified criminals without requiring massive suburban shootouts (which they don't even win), and their finding-people-hiding-in-backyard-boat skills, before they get any more toys on the table.

Perhaps more basic than what you're looking for, but I've been having a lot of fun with my 5 & 6 year old with KTurtle. It's a Logo based drawing program where you have only a few basic commands to make the turtle draw stuff. It has variables, loops, functions and conditionals; not to mention graph coordinates, polygons, etc. It's also localisable... which is really cool.

To start the kid out I basically would make little programs that make shapes or patterns, and he'd then mess around with them... mostly just changing numbers to see what would happen. Over time his curiosity has caused him to explore more, to the point where he now writes his own code quite often. He doesn't really understand a lot of the concepts he uses... but just fiddles around with things until it does something cool... which is fine with me.

The KTurtle web page is sadly entirely non-inspiring. But the program is great, which gets too little love. http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/

My nearly six-year-old is doing great things (for a kindergartner) with KTurtle -- which is really a pretty cool environment (I was surprised to find). He also spends much time hacking crazy stuff with redstone in Minecraft. The next logical step to real programming language seems to me, keeping it fun and relevant to his interests, is to introduce some javascript (as much as I dislike it) so he can mess up web pages with little effort. From there it seems python is the friendliest, easiest and most resource-rich multi-purpose playground.

Maybe CodeSpell will be something to check out eventually. Though the java example on their blog doesn't look all that fun to me. I hope its fun. If it gets to the point where I'm teaching the kid OOP, and all the verbose java syntax requirements, he'll probably only want to make minecraft mods. That's what CodeSpell is up against in this house.

And before Transformer was the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t, which is still being used here daily, and quite liked. It runs Windows 7 most of the time, but I dual boot Linux on it sometimes... specifically Kubuntu with the plasma netbook interface. Linux works pretty well, the main thing missing for me is "long tap" support -- lenovo and/or windows detects long presses and pops up context menu (like mouse middle click). Interestingly the S10-3t extremely rarely gets the screen flipped around to tablet mode. It turns out the clamshell is more convenient 95% of the time. Even reading in bed with it... just sit the laptop on the bed beside pillow and have the desktop rotate the display (or use FBReader's built-in display rotation). It sits up nicely with no hands needed, while you lay comfortably reading.

The full size lenovo keyboard is very nice on such a small thing; being able to touch click/drag things is icing on the cake.

Hide ya kids! Hide ya wife! And hide ya husband 'cause they're rapin' everybody out here!

(Seriously, is this the best you can do?)

The very blog article you have linked has an "update" at the bottom wherein the writer also says he thinks that CAN-SPAM might be too restrictive! His exact words are "too broad", but his description of the broadness is actually criticising the broadness of the restrictions. (ie. "criminalize the sending of “multiple” deceptive emails or the creation of more than five separate email accounts for sending commercial emails.").

Anyhow, even if your description of the ACLU's position was true (which your reference does not seem to support), don't you think it more credible to give the ACLU the benefit of the doubt that they may have a point, given the vast amount of experience, expertise and examples of them standing up for freedoms?

It's also been observed (somewhere) that people take a lot more risks when riding bicycles if they're wearing a helmet (even if a bike helmet logically doesn't save you from most injuries). Besides a theoretical sense of entitlement, perhaps money is strapped around the heads of the rich, in a similar function?

Then, what you're looking for is the Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Lots and lots of tits. And scantily clad lady ninjas too. And it's actually a pretty good book, also. Believe it or not.

It's been over a year since I read Wind-up Girl, with many books between then and now, so my memory is kind of hazy... but thinking back, I can't remember any electrical energy in that world. Was it all mechanical? If it's all mechanical (for whatever reason), that really limits what sort of energy sources are useful. Especially portable energy sources. Most current energy sources, green or otherwise, are to produce electricity. I'm have no idea why (if I am even recalling correctly) electricity doesn't work, but it would only take a sentence to reasonably dismiss electricity entirely in a sci-fi world. You can write that sentence for yourself in your head while reading, if it doesn't exist.

Of course one thinks first of steam, for mechanical power. But what do you burn to get steam? That's a problem. Also, while the oceans are still abundant, fresh water seems like it might be kind of dear in that world ... at least so it seems, as I'm recalling the torture the Windup Girl undergoes constantly trying to get water to keep herself from overheating, and it not being easy to acquire.

It should be noted that Windup Girl takes place in a world already mostly established by Bacigalupi in his short stories in Pump Six. Pump Six is a collection of short stories. Windup Girl is sort of, in some ways, like a really long short story. Not everything is explained. (I think Pump Six is a significantly better work than Windup Girl, though Windup Girl is still quite well done.)

ixquick.com (or startpage.com) is a privacy oriented meta search engine that's been around a long time. Its current incarnation anonymously repackages google search results. DuckDuckGo is pretty cool. But I don't like Bing's results as much; and also I've been using ixquick for a long time... you hear about duckduckgo a lot these days, but sadly rarely hear of ixquick/startpage.

Nice try, Dr. Zaius, now back to your cage.

Here is a list of 500+ Atheist vs Christian debates if anyone is feeling they are missing out on this one. And you might find it interesting to note that actually, though the list is posted on an Atheist site, the Christian side "wins" most of these debates. The reason isn't necessarily that they Christian side is right, but that the Christian side generally has the better public debating skills: they dominate and frame the questions.

In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.

It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.

These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.

I got an old G1 online for less than $100 (including shipping). It is a bit slow, but still quite functional, unless you want to be running processor intensive games like Angry Birds. I have around 100 apps installed that run fine. The thing is jail broken, and has a cyanogen mod installed (SparksMod currently). And I actually use it for my primary mobile phone -- with no data plan (because I refuse to be gouged any further by our Canadian oligopolies)... wifi is good enough for me. And I'm loving the 4 row physical keyboard.

I've heard nothing but bad about Mugabe over the years -- and I have non-white inlaws from there. However, I don't really know all that much about the place. But reading over the Wikipedia Mugabe page I found the section on "Social Programs" especially interesting. From the indicators reported there, things seem to have improved radically in terms of literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy during the first 10 years of his leadership. After that the IMF imposed it's usual austerity program on them, in exchange for cash... and things seem to have gone downhill from there. Of course this is just wikipedia... so who knows... but it's interesting to consider that besides the complicated and violent political and ethnic internal problems, that the external influence of the IMF may have (yet again) be also a villain here.

My kids (3 and 5) love, love, love, love, love TuxPaint... they run it on Linux, but I see it's available for Windows as well. They also deeply love StarFall -- which just requires a web browser and flash.