It's pretty bad in the long term, according to this guy from last year's Chaos Communication Congress.

I was thinking more DVDs + a USB reader. Might be better to store it separately, plus I don't know about bit rot in hard drives, and you don't have to take the netbook apart to get it out if it breaks or to do add more storage.

Maybe use archival DVD's?

This seems like a good idea. Just stash a netbook with some kind of USB storage/reader and a charger. Even if power sockets have inexplicably vanished or changed they're probably the easiest thing to recreate. I don't know how much information degrades on different media, you should probably research that.

That's why Facebook is such a failure right?

Spoken like someone who has never tried a Raspberry Pi.

Convince them that you can see everything they do online - that should keep them away from stuff they know is taboo, but won't protect them from following something innocuous.

The latter I'm afraid. Nominally we have 30 mbps fiber but the pocket loss is so bad usually that it's more like 1 or 2, and Flash just gives up loading videos. Often it gets so bad I just use the 3G on my phone instead. Also, there is a 5 gig quota in the morning and a 9 gig one in the evening, which basically means Steam games have to be downloaded in two batches.

4 of my friends are sharing 21 mbps O2 ADSL and it works fine, so we're definitely going for that next year.

As a Virgin Media customer in Kensington, I can say that's a load of horsesh

This this this. I basically learnt to speak and read English from my dad reading Asterix and Tintin to me out loud when I was a kid. Highly recommended.

Don't you think it's funny that all the Boycott Novell doomsayers were saying Mono was a Microsoft trap every time it was mentioned and now their beloved Java is the reason someone is actually getting sued?

Philosophically, what makes these particles any more quasi- than electrons? Surely all we have to work with is the sum of their effects in either case.

http://learnyouahaskell.com/ Haskell is really good for getting you to think about computation in higher level terms; where does this data go, how am I transforming it, etc. Also, functional languages are much easier to learn if you aren't encumbered with an imperative mindset, but you can easily continue on to imperative from functional. It's also the most beautiful language I know and your son will be a wizard.

My university, Imperial College London makes a distinction. The computing department offers two undergraduate degrees: Computing (MEng) and Joint Mathematics and Computer Science (MSci). I'm currently in my second year of Computing, and there's a lot of focus on practical things - most of the large projects are in groups of 3-4, we've written assemblers, emulators, compilers and parts of an operating system from scratch, learned to use svn, git, project management etc. Besides this we still have courses in Haskell, maths, formal logic, models of computation (turing machines, operational semantics, etc), machine learning, quantum computing, all the classic CS stuff. In fact, JMC do less CS than us, and do straight maths instead. Pretty much everyone I know has obtained an internship this summer from a prestigious company, and I don't know any graduates who are having trouble finding a job.

No, the point is that it was a success for the wrong reasons, and therefore it won't carry on to his future endeavours. I wouldn't go as far as to predict they'll go bankrupt but you have to admit Minecraft is still ridiculously unpolished for a "gold" game - chunks appearing/disappearing out of nowhere, the entire render thread hanging when it needs to generate terrain, etc, etc.