Yep, get him into Python, he should be able to pick that up quickly enough to keep him interested but it will also offer him challenges for years if he wants it. Or... at the risk of being downmodded (again) for not being a MS/Nokia hater, you could get him a cheap WP7 phone (plenty around right now with WP8 coming) and take a look at the amazing TouchDevelop scripting environment that lets you write anything from one-liners to quite complex apps right on the school bus, mostly without having to actually write anything - you connect up various blocks and pipes to get results. https://www.touchdevelop.com/

Oops. My bad...

...molecular weight is only 1/4 of Helium... There, fixed that for you. And before we all reach for our tinfoil hats, here's why he didn't use hydrogen: http://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths

Just to show I do occasionally RTFA... "...the speed of sound — approximately 690 meters per second..." Not unless the air up there is 911 deg C it aint.

I have a Lumia 800. All of the people who have seen it have said the same two things: "Wow!" and "I never even knew there was a Windows phone" The quality of the product, both hard and software is there and will only improve with the new WP8 models. Take a look at the 920 specs. Everyone will know about Windows 8 in the next few weeks and WP8 will hitch a marketing ride on its coat tails. I don't understand "Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's" problem with wanting to destroy his former employer. Maybe it's just to drive traffic to his blog?

For me his best was "Oath of Fealty" Although he is one of my favourite authors, and who couldn't but love Nessus the Puppeteer? generally his books rely on exceptionally well thought-out and executed physical realities but peopled by two-dimensional characters. Check out the story "Wait it Out" in the anthology "Tales of Known Space" to see what I mean: the most amazing concept but really quite poorly written.

I think Asher carries on the ideas of Banks and Reynolds, with a complex and self-consistent universe setting. Not really 'hard sf' in that he relies on 'U-space' (a kind of hyperspace) to enable the whole concept of the 'Polity' civilization to exist but he definitely adds his own twist. Like the Culture, the Polity is utopian in nature, but the controlling computer (AI) minds are more believable than Banks' in that they run the show based on calculations of most good to most people/entities so the decisions taken can often result in a lot of deaths and destruction. The level of violence is cranked up to eleven. The last one I read had prisoners of a drug gang being digested by eels to make a particularly strong narcotic and then the leader of the gang being eaten by a lizard in the denouement... His characterisations are usually quite good too. If you like Banks he's worth a try. Start with the Ian Cormac series.

True, and in order to keep flying the entire airframe and engines would have been required to demonstrate compliance to near-current certification standards, which means many hundreds of expensive and time-consuming tests, with no guarantee of success, consequent redesigns and retrofits. All in all it would be cheaper to design a new plane from scratch, but still too expensive even for the current luxury market. Else, why aren't the skies full of them?

Utter f*cking rubbish. I just installed W8 preview alongside Ubuntu 12.04 (yes, a sweet combination, Ithankyou). Of course the Winstaller doesn't nicely search out the other OSs but it was a couple of clicks on a bootable Ubuntu CD to fix this.

Concord(e) was an astonishing piece of engineering; it could achieve military jet performance with passenger transport reliability. Yes, it was horribly fuel inefficient by today's standards but it was designed in the 1960s. That is: fifty years ago! It was simply uneconomic in the end and in fact it was the requirement for the demonstration of continued airworthiness that really killed it. BA and Air France made a profit on the routes they flew because they sold tickets to rockstars at a premium and they were given the planes for free. The sinister side is that the USA, at the behest of Boeing, who could not compete with the product, did everything in their power to prevent the success of Concord. The FAA has a remit to protect commercial interests of the USA so it did what it was obliged to do. The sad result is that we no longer have any private or public means of travelling supersonically (unless you are Richard Branson and even then you can't take your Spaceship from LAX to LHR) and this is the result of the success of lawyers over engineers, regardless of nationality. Farmer > Miner > Engineer > Doctor... everything else is payload

I struggle to understand the animosity towards Metro. Have any of you spent more than a few minutes trying to learn it? On both the phone and the desktop it works very well. There's a lot more to it than just 'the tiles'. Even on a multiscreen workstation, if you want to keep the traditional desktop you can, it's one click from metro after a reboot and you never have to see Metro again if you don't want to. FFS, MS are, for the first time in ages, shipping interesting, quality products and world+dog is bitching about them...

And they would be wrong

It was 2002. I was used to using Windows98 at work and there was no Ubuntu or other even reasonably-accessible Linux that I was aware of. OSX was simply astonishing and was the first OS that made me interested in computing and programming.