While it's a smaller market (and yes, it is. Way. A number 1 bestseller is barely worth a neilson point) it's already pretty fragmented. It's good that they're trying and perhaps with some luck they can get somewhere, but we're already talking post-itune/zune/et al universe compared to music. Nothing works well with anything else, except of course, if you don't pay for it and just pirate or stick to only the material specifically for your device. As usual, legal works need to be at least as good as their pirated counterparts to those who buy them, as in "if both of these were free and legal, I'd have no preference".

Teaching foundations is obviously the most important thing, and yes, you can do that well in many languages. BUT while you learn the foundations, you get the bonus of getting comfortable in one or more languages as you write in them. Which one(s) should you use this bonus on? Pascal? Not thinking that's wise. For the record, my school used modula2/3 and ML for functional until later when everything went to C/C++. I would have much rather gotten further comfort in C/C++ and Lisp to start with, seeing as they're actually somewhat used and the basics don't change anyway.

and other non-techies. I theory, there's no reason my kids and wife couldn't just pull up what they want to watch like a normal person and in fact they do - even my six year old watch cartoons online, movies off the wii, etc. But they're still used to the DJ-style background mix of cable, and with eight TVs there's no cohesive way to play "anything, even if it's crap" on all of them. Nor does there seem to be way to get "whatever is on" pandora style for TV - it's all on all the time, more choices then they'd like. They still also listen to terrestrial radio, even though there is sat and mp3 with everything on it, because they don't feel like getting stuck trying to pick and just want whatever is on.

..but still expect to be able to log in. I can almost sort of live without internet access, but not really. But a 3g subscription is out of my my league by a long shot, especially seeing as I'm the new lower-middle class. I code like a small farmer, enough to get by but not stacking chips. I rarely go anywhere much and every place I'd stay for any length of time would has wifi anyway. Hard to justify a 3g modem. More and more people stay in one place (or a half dozen places) that have wifi anyway now that their friends have wifi and can hand you a password right off the bat if you need it, yet somehow would like net on the road without parking outside McD.

Hear hear. Eight hours of "paying attention to flying"? Not thinking so. Let them play cake!

v1.0 is always a sucker bet. There will always be a sucker, because word on the street is one is born every minute but it doesn't have to be you. Working out your delayed gratification gland is good for you anyway.

I'm considering something similar because frankly, XP3 catches weird things all the time (and while cleaning windows viruses has a homey retro feel, I don't want to do it all the time) and their hardware isn't really up to running vista or W7. But.. Then they're very used to windows and it'll while the product is free (and good) I'm not signing up to educate/support people for all eternity. Not trying to be obnoxious, but we can't prop up XP forever and not everyone, especially people who consider their computers more of a tool then a beloved friend, can keep their hardware super new.

About damn time. I feel a bit pumped that the tide is shifting here, the things we know are immoral are starting to get called on why they're done, even with the best of intentions. There is a slight drift toward "if it's wrong it's wrong and if you had good reasons for it, we'd like to hear them. Don't worry if you need to state them at length, we'll go over them. A lot. Expect follow-up questions". I'm under no illusions that this will change that much, but I'm excited about the direction things seem to be taking and the realizations people seem to be having looking at the other options *couch*china*cough*.

Hey! We've totally had that since 19VV!

Content and components developed and made by legitimate providers should, in theory, be better then simply just DLing, connecting the HDMI to your laptop and calling it a day. That's of course a pipe dream - pirated components and content is always going to be slightly better, but is this really the time to make the legit side even worse? I've been hearing they're not exactly tolling in dough and this won't really hurt anyone willing to use non-licensed components, only those who bother to actually pay them (otherwise known as the last people you want to alienate further).

Or, get this, perhaps you could negotiate some of that dept away by trading for investments you're not going to use anymore anyhow. Perhaps with some agreements made to continue fixing this clusterfuck until we can sort of just get things done rather then rather then both continue to build bigger sticks.