Auriferous is a pretty good remake of Lode Runner, complete with the level construction tools.My son and I started playing it and building levels (some good, some interesting) when he was four and he loves it.

Otherwise, I can second all the GCompris and TuxPaint recommendations. My son loves them.

It strikes me as more like Atari vs. Nintendo than MS vs. the world, or Oracle vs. Google.

I believe that estimate like I believe the RIAA's damage estimates.

Let me know when I can embed it in my brain.

Fog Creek is a small company. I run a website at a big museum. My group used to all eat together, and it was really valuable. Sometimes we'd have other people join us, etc. But my boss was concerned--with good reason--about how exclusive we looked, and asked us all to make sure we also ate regularly with lots of other people. That helped too, but the group's camaraderie definitely suffered. Once we quit having a regular lunch, we couldn't get it back part-time.

They didn't have to throw in some of their own billions? Bargain.

Would "compactifying dimensions" allow sub-ground states of Hydrogen, for example? Would fusion be easier to make happen inside a graphene nanotube?

Brian Williams said, “It’s just nice to know that if we screw this place up badly enough there is some place we can all go.” Tell NBC News how dumb and upsetting this comment is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29104230/

Crash--a cautionary tale about our love of technology, and a science fiction novel written in the present, with no fictional technology, blew my mind and changed my life. A worthwhile read for anyone (it takes some guts sometimes), but especially for tech people. Give it a shot.

Whether you're an open source project or not, you're only obliged to support your users if you want to have them. If you're OK with not having users, you can probably choose not to support them.