The link is to a Jan. 2012 product announcement. Are you saying it's only now available, or it's only now hackable? If the latter, where's the info about it -- and if the former, is this a cleverly timed PR bump?

That emulator is proprietary, but this one http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ isn't, and emulates a couple of dozen different minicomputers. Seems like a good candidate for porting to the RasPi.

And to teachers who have to find money for thirty of them.

At the risk of giving away a possibly lucrative idea, my plan is to patent the use of a gavel to bring order to courtrooms. Hopefully, this will allow me to collect royalties for every day of all the various trials I have to attend defending my patent: the more they fight, the more they pay.

"The UN's Human Rights Charter mentions protection from "religious intolerance" but also in the same sentence "freedom of opinion and expression." "

They're not contradictory -- promoting blasphemy laws is a clear example of "religious intolerance" in my book, because it's not tolerant of someone's right to politely say that they think a given religion is incorrect.

A modern high-school math calculator that is solar-powered and can run rings around the previous generations costs around $15 in any fall back-to-school sale, and even less when they're clearing out their school supplies for the Halloween stuff. Both my high-school kids have several old ones (borrowed from teachers when their was forgotten, or lost and then refound after purchasing a replacement) knocking around in their drawers. I've offered them to their friends and friend's parents, but every one just offers me back their old stuff.

Perfectly functional but unwanted electronics crap is everywhere these days: cell phones, DVD players, digital cameras, laptops, and high-school calculators will survive with the rats and cockroaches after we are long gone.

Nepotism

Link is to a June 15th article.

Turbovision (and all the Borland GUIs -- don't forget TurboProlog!) gets my vote.

All based on IBM's Systems Application Architecture / Common User Access (SAA/CUA) standard from the late '80s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Systems_Application_Architecture#Common_user_access_.28CUA.29 . I still have a virgin copy of the SAA/CUA Manual in my amateur computer museum.

I don't actually know -- I haven't used it since the mid-seventies. But back in the day, it used to be pretty geekish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language

'nuff said...

Poppycock!

If race isn't a biological manifestation, then what could it possibly be? Environmental? Chance? Of course there's a genetic difference between various groups of people who share certain distinctive features (e.g. skin colour, nose shapes, eye shapes, lactose intolerance). That doesn't mean that any of the groups are any better than another, that particular individuals always conform to their parent's genotype, or that these genes don't get endlessly mixed and remixed as time goes on.

It seems to me that "race" is just the informal word* we use to talk about these different groups. It's certainly a concept that has started a lot of wars throughout history, and perhaps for that reason it's becoming increasingly politically incorrect to use. But the word does mean something, and that meaning is inextricably entwined with biology.

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* Perhaps we use "race" for human beings because we would be offended if we used the same term that we use for other animals: breed. But that would definitely be politically incorrect!

Are you implying that some of us are descended from some other species of Homo Sapiens (if that's not an oxymoron) that didn't evolve in Africa?

Just lost about 140K bots on my net...

Not even three months ago...

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/16/0240232/why-new-programming-languages-succeed-or-fail

Granted, the previous one is about new languages. But can't we assume every significant old language succeeded for at least some period of time (even if all some of them succeeded in is failing spectacularly -- remember Japan's push for "fifth generation languages" in the '90s)?