While I agree with Stallman that eBook and eBook DRM have really destroyed our freedoms with respect to books, I am having a lot of trouble understanding his tax fund proposal.

Doesn't distributing a tax fund to authors by popularity mean that I, as a person, lost the freedom to vote with my pocketbook not to pay certain authors? I have no desire for my tax dollars to go to the author of the Twilight books when I would much rather get my money to a deserving less known author who puts out a much superior work. For that matter, how do you measure popularity anyway? If the funding for authors are from a tax-payer fund, then it kind of means that people have no real direct costs to buy books, right? You can't measure it by downloads because people would download all sorts of stuff if they don't have to directly pay for it and not necessarily read it. The voluntary funding may be a good idea and has shown to work in the past - however, each of those successful voluntary funding schemes were aimed towards a rather small demographic who is passionate enough to donate - I have no idea if this idea is scalable or feasible when it's put to the market at large.

Sorry, not your mother, icknay, but the person who Asked Slashdot.

Don't Forget MIT's OpenCourseWare Intro to Computer Science lectures. It might move at a faster pace than for a high school student, but it should give your mother some idea as to how to structure the lessons and concepts.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/video-lectures/

As far as intro to programming goes, when I took High School Computer Science, our textbook was the Dietel & Dietel C++ How to Program. It was definitely aimed at the beginner to intermediate level programmers and did a pretty good job at explaining fundamentals of programming to a bunch of high school sophomores and making it understandable. As I recall, you can probably go through several chapters per class because it's not so dense and impenetrable that you need bash your way through.

Here's a link to the 7th edition: http://www.amazon.com/How-Program-7th-Paul-Deitel/dp/0136117260
However, there are plenty of copies of 6th editions floating around for pretty cheap. If I recall correctly, copies of the 5th edition are even available for download for free, which makes the curriculum that much more cost-effective.

Anyway, best of luck, hope that helps.

C'mon, Google Wallet is the end of anonymous shopping? No, if you don't want to be tracked by Google Wallet, just don't use Google Wallet. If you want to stay anonymous, use cash.

And wear a hat.
And gloves.
And a fake mustache.

As of earlier today, the law's main sponsor, Dan Patrick, R-Houston, said the law is dead after support for the law collapsed.

http://www.click2houston.com/news/28032459/detail.html

For a guy who's claiming that college impedes innovation, Peter Thiel sure had a lot of it. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Juris Doctor from Stanford.

Gah, what is with Mozilla following Google's every example, no matter how stupid or not? There's a good reason to keep the URL bar - it's a quick and easy way to check for phishing 2 out of 3 times. Hiding the URL bar is just dumb, because now we're reliant on Google or Mozilla or other third-party maintained lists to protect us from phishing, or we have to jump through hoops to check the URL. No, thank you!

Plus, what is wrong with keeping the URL bar where it is? I use the Omnibar addon and it adds the ability to do all sorts of query commands into the URL bar already. It works well and it's convenient to use, and best of all, I keep my URL bar (albeit it's now a long address bar that incorporates the search bar into it). Why not go that direction? Why follow Google towards stupid design decisions? Just making it look nifty is not a good reason to change something or to remove functionality and features.

The reason they don't give customer matte LCDs is because shiny screens look nicer on photographs and on showroom floors because they look perfect and pristine and oh-so-high-tech. The customer will go to the showroom (with their nice, bright, and diffuse lighting) or see the photos online and they'll think: "Wow, that's shiny, it must be new and sleek" and then whip out their credit cards.

When they take it home, they'll complain about the glare, but that doesn't matter to the manufacturers and retailers because they already had your money at that point and they know that you probably wouldn't go to the trouble of returning the laptop just because there's a bit of glare on the screen. Meanwhile, you're stuck with your crappy super-specular screen and you're going to go through any sort of mental gymnastics necessary to justify not returning it. And then, the next time you need a new computer, the same process will begin anew because we, as consumers, are idiots.

I can't quite listen to the Chinese audio since I'm at work, but based on the video alone, is it really against American troops? I only saw very generic urban warfare tactics in a very generic Chinese city and a very generic set of bunkers and pillboxes. The only "indication" that it was against American troops was a very fuzzy helicopter that might be an Apache or might be something else entirely.

In any case, so what? We in the US has been playing games where the Chinese Army was the antagonist for ages. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising and Battlefield 2 are two that I can name off the top of my head.

Look, the compensation that Sony is giving out in the aftermath of the PSN attack is peanuts. It doesn't cost them a hell of a whole lot to set up. The free two games? Sony already has deals set up with developers to provide "free" games to PSN plus subscribers, the additional cost of a few extra free games to all subscribers (who might not even take advantage of it, since most of these games are ancient and they probably already have it) is marginal, at best. The one month of free PSN+ for subscribers doesn't cost much, either, since it's only a small minority with PSN+ accounts. I'd doubt that the compensation would cost them much more than a few million dollars at best.