Old Caprica has high levels of radiation. Remember way back when they kept talking about needing the radiation meds? The colonies did have hundreds of nukes dropped on them. And of course there was no real reason to trust the cylons anyway.

At the end of the show there was a bit of dialog about how the cylons finding them was an accident. They were a light year away and noticed the nuclear explosion. So for a year the 'signature' of the explosion expanded and the cylons just ran into it. Then with FTL they went to the source of the explosion.

Ah... and the number of people is something like 39,000 or so now (in the title card). So about 10K got killed by the nuke.

Ah... I'm such a geek.

As another poster mentioned. If you have a mac you have a excellent set of tools for kids to learn with. Not quite Basic. But close enough.

sed

awk (a whole language in itself)

grep

bash

xargs

less

vi (!)

emacs (!)

etc.

Just show the kid how to do:

man awk

and let them go. They'll learn skills that they will have for life. They will eventually find gcc, perl, ruby and java and then they'll have something to move on to.

I remember way back in 86 trolling through old BSD Unix manuals as a freshman in college learning about all the wonderful unix commands. Sure I had a PC (DOS) on my desk and still had the old atari 800 back home with it's basic cartridge. But unix... there was some beauty, there was some structure.. Piping, redirects and shells... I'm still learning new stuff from /usr/bin

Huge amounts of examples throughout the whole system. Examples that actually make the computer work. Not just nice book code. But real, get the job done stuff.

If you don't have a mac just download any linux distro and install on an old machine. Any kid who has geek in his genes will dive into that with little prompting.

Not to pimp another author (I love Brin's books too):

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Dunno about big bird... but the other 'winners' clearly knew what they were doing. The bush baby guy nailed it when he said that they wouldn't even be there if Simon hadn't insulted him. The guy is goofy looking but not stupid. Hell, I'd do a WIlliam Hung if I could bank $1m. It's winning the lottery. In 10 years no one will even remember.

It's show biz (on FOX no less)... at its core it's about humiliating yourself for cash and/or 15 min of fame.

Those that are really talented can transcend this. The rest of us? Take the cash and have fun.

It was a disappointment? Come on... I wasn't blown away, but hardly disappointed.

Let see:

Movie rentals from all the major studios for 3-4 bucks. The 24 hr thing is dumb and you gotta expect it'll get expanded a bit.

An entirely new class of laptop. Notice is uses 11n.. so don't whine about how you need a hard line. Plus with the SSD i'd bet it'll get way more than 5 hrs. The whole point was to make it amazingly thin and light for those that need something like that. It doesn't need to compete with some lame dell on expandability.

A high speed wireless router that your leopard machines will automatically and smoothly back up to. Only issue would be if you can't add an external drive to it.

A new rev of apple tv that fixes the no-HD and any number of other issues.

Seems to me the biggest problem apple has is that they have set the expectations so high by actually making good products that people want to buy that they can't win unless they do something utterly spectacular. Merely outshining all the other pc vendors (again) isn't enough? I think you gotta give them at least that.

#1 - If you work out of your house a whole bunch of stuff becomes fair game for deductions.

#2 - A friend once told me (before I bought my first house): "When you buy a house you just end up with a cheap a**hole for a landlord." Which was probably the smartest thing the guy ever said.