My first-ever exposure to programming was in BASIC, using Learn To Program BASIC by Interplay. This was probably 2000 or earlier--I was about 8 or less. Needless to say, I wasn't very good at it. But it definitely taught me to love programming.

I never really learned anything involving more than simple command line style logic (LTPB BASIC had mouse/sprites/sounds as well), but maybe that's a good thing. I had a magic 8 ball, a program for figuring out the week day of a given date (based on a method my dad gave me), and some other "meh" stuff.

Somewhat interestingly, the next thing I did, IIRC, was learn HTML and JavaScript from WebMonkey. During that time period I forgot most of BASIC, and pretty much all I can remember how to use off the top of my head are REM and PRINT.

Nowadays, though I don't (never did) program all that much, I do "real" programs in C++, and I regularly use Python for quick little scripty things (often helpful for homework, and Python 3 works great as a calculator).

You should see how livid one became with which I was interacting?

If I were helping a clueless computer user, Linux is the first thing I would think of. Why? Safety. Security.

These are the people that are most likely to fall for Trojans, etc. Sure, things like phishing is just as much of a threat on any OS, but why leave more gaping holes than necessary?

.... Seriously, what did they use, FrontPage 2007? The top part of the page is almost entirely images of text.

That said, it works perfectly without JavaScript. They did something right.

To the best of my knowledge:

Without this, if you want to find out the higher up (leftmost) digits, you have to consider every single binary digit (except the last few) to find out what it's going to be.

With this, you can just say, "what's the digit at byte x?" and you will get to digit. But this is just about the same thing as storing bignums as strings (in decimal, hex, base64, whatever).

I go there occasionally to try things out (like keyboards/mice/monitors) so that I can know what I'm buying online. Though the local mouse selection recently wasn't good enough, and I ended up buying something they didn't have. Actually, that was because I didn't like the ones they had. So I guess they're useful for something?

This is all kind of silly. You could see it as an exaggeration or a gross understatement. You could fit your results to your ulterior motives. If you recorded all of the input to your eyes, ears, touch, pain, temperature, taste, smell, etc in full detail 24 hours per day, that would probably be measured in petabytes. If you're at a real theater instead of a cinema, that doesn't mean that you're not taking in an equal amount of information via your senses.