This would be great to use with a DAW when nothing else is at hand, producing music without dynamics can be a real pain.

The car will waste 20% of its engine capacity on keeping the computers running and an eventual update will delete the breaks...

Forget Flash memory, the data retention of 10 years won't be enough even if usb ports remain viable in 25 years.

My tip: print your digital data out in hex along with documentation on how to read it out. Be sure to include redundancy among multiple stacks of paper. Oh and make sure the shipping container you use keeps out moisture...

I recommend the Sennheiser PX 200-II with iphone controls. Closed compact headphones that are still comfortable and have very clear sound. Only thing missing is strong bass but its great for a large variety of music. The reason for choosing the iphone controls is the shoddy quality of the volume control on the normal version (some kind of cheap variable resistor which produces unequal sounds in the headset).

I consider any language which does not have gotos simply crippled.
Gotos are bad if you have retarded labeling systems (coding on a graphing calculator in BASIC *shudder*) or if you jump all over the code like a kid with ADD.
But they are great for things such as nested loops.

Simple example:
I have an array with ten values which I scan through. If a value in the array matches an expression/whatever, the whole loop can be skipped and a small amount of code following the loop (which would be executed by default if the loop fails to find something) can be skipped as well.
With Java you can break out of the loop but you would still need to set some stupid variable etc. in order to ignore the code right after the loop.

Feel free to correct me on this situation. I have been using exactly this for a game I am creating so I think gotos have been very valuable. Then again, I am coding everything in C so there might be OOP equivalents.

Create something for the inevitable Zombie outbreak... we still need a couple more apps for that.

-Consistent Interface (Windows 8 will probably change that)
-No massive Dock to take up valuable space
-Good backwards compatibility (Pretty fed up with OS X Lion breaking things here and there)
-Well supported
-No fumbling around with package managers and incompatible installers
-Driver support
-Relatively bug free
-Applications which run on it

There may be a couple more, Mac OS comes in second place while Linux Distros change too frequently for me to bother choosing one (I used to like Ubuntu until Unity). For Servers on the other hand, Linux is awesome.

You and your fancy registers, I use a specially trained hamster to push buttons depending on the bits it sees on an LED board. And the hamster only taps the buttons in the correct way if fed the correct combination of grains!

Although I am having my suspicions that the little bugger is selling information to the north korean hamsters...

Leaving a clean copy of XP would be my suggestion since you already have the licenses and I reckon the Hardware itself will not likely survive another 2 years (They are Kids after all). But then again that would be too easy so here is another suggestion: Install OpenBSD to provide a solid foundation On top of that install Ubuntu (for an easy to use Linux distro) in VirtualBox, On top of that copy of Ubuntu install Windows XP if the kids need it to run their games In that virtual instance of XP get Firefox to point to jslinux so the kids have something to tinker with if the hardware is not enough spend some money for some more RAM