My mom keeps telling me that UPS is one of the world's largest users of DB2, a statement backed up in this article. They're not switching off for the same reason financial institutions don't; After pouring lots of money into alternatives, they found that mainframes have better performance.

So they're not robots, but if the girls are into fashion it's a a great way to get them started on programming while still keeping their interests in mind, They can make funky pillows for their bedroom or keep out signs for their doors or I dunno something else that a 12 year old girl might actually want. http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad

I think Willow Garage almost had to because they were using lots of open source tools in the first place. ROS is based on playerstage, which is GPL, and a lot of the heavy computer vision stuff is OpenCv, which itself was originally open-sourced by Intel. And the deal with everyone using ROS had a lot to do with development shifting from playerstage to ROS 'cause they were similar but ROS was saner, so they became the standard in large part 'cause they improved on the existing open source standard rather then trying to create some kind of large scale shift in the community. Plus, Willow Garage is as much experimental lab as company, so I don't know if it works as a good case study 'cause it sort of has a weird mix of end goals.

Willow Garage also gained a lot of cred by taking over OpenCV from intel and actively maintaining it, which isn't something a fledgling company can do but is worth considering. They adopted the library 'cause it was critical to their business and considered something of a standard in the vision community, which meant a lot of people were already using it, so it was popular enough that maintaining it was seen as a good thing.

The case study for this type of thing is the ban dihydrogen monoxide movement.

But most people (even on student loans) don't get degrees in accounting (or engineering, or any of the fields that really need post-secondary school training), they get degrees in things like psych and business, which lead them to be qualified for all sorts of generic jobs that may not really need degrees to do.

Cause writers/translators had to use some pronoun and most languages use the masculine pronoun as the gender neutral? Seriously though, God is genderless because he's not a physical being is one of those things Orthodox Jewish (and probably other religious) schools cover in kindergarten.

So do an interactive presentation. The code being in blocks makes it really easy to have the kids code along 'cause you can point at a block and ask the room "so how many steps should he go" and "what should he do next" and run the code every time you add a block.

Or ask, which is what any sensible person would do.

K9 (and likely most other internet filtering software) have whitelist filtering so that the only internet accessible to the person on that account are the sites on the list. It's a bit annoying to configure and requires a few days to fine tune, but most of the filters are designed to be simple enough for none computer savvy people to use.

It looks like they're trying to advert their emergency preparedness campaign, and this is a great creative way to do it.