I think with the OP is really asking for is an easy to use development environment although of course he suggested BASIC. While BASIC is really a pretty crappy language it was easy to use on Windows to produce decent applications. Corona SDK isn't quite that easy (yet), but it is vastly easier than Java for sure and also allows you to produce apps which run on Android or iOS. At $199/year for a single target or $349 to make apps for either iOS or Andriod it is very reasonably priced and of course you get free upgrades any time they release them (so long as you keep paying the yearly license). Free to try as well, great product in my opinion (I am not affiliated in any way with Ansca Mobile).

I recommend Crobots. It is a fairly simple game where you create a program that operates a robot on a battlefield vs another robot that someone else has written. Limited C syntax but it has the basic programming structures. Way back in the late 80s I spent all summer building robots with Crobots.

I call BS anyway. There are only 50, is it too much to have some schmoe simply look the damned tax up on a sheet of paper? WTF?

If only it were so simple. The US sales tax system is a byzantine mess. You have state taxes, city taxes, transit authority taxes, public improvement fees, etc which apply based on where the sale occurred. That is the easy piece though. The difficult part is that the tax rates themselves can be different based off the products. Some products are taxable in one state but not in others. A simple example is plain bottled water which is pretty much untaxed everywhere, and flavored bottled water which is taxable in most states. Then you have tax free holidays where a certain class of products are tax free for 3 days (typically back to school), but it is a different set of days for different areas of the country of course.

To top all that off, cities, states, etc are constantly changing the rules as to which products are taxable and which are not. It is a real pain in the a** to deal with, but all of the national retail chains have to deal with it, so why can't Amazon and the other online retail companies? The best case would be to just have a national sales tax that is the same everywhere instead of the current stupid system. Instead of forcing companies to devote millions of person hours to figuring out what taxes to pay, people could actually be doing something productive.

It is unrealistic for every company to figure out what sales tax applies in every state, that is why there is a company that does it for you: Vertex. I recently worked on a project to implement this software for a large retailer. Amazon has far more technical knowledge than the average bricks and mortar retailer, this is no reasonable excuse as to why they cannot pay local sales tax. It is long past time for the online retailers to start paying sales tax just like every other business.

Not having to pay sales tax is one of my primary reasons that I often buy products online. Online retailers already have a lot of advantages for many types of products, there is no reason that they should be subsidized over local retailers.

So sending out funny emails to large groups of people all the time is going to get me a promotion? Sweet!

Does offering to strike a deal with one of your competitors (Yahoo) to prevent them from joining with another competitor (Microsoft) not count? I remember a time not that many years ago when Microsoft could do no wrong. Just as opinion on Microsoft eventually soured when they began to abuse their position in the market, so will people's opinions of Google and Apple.

Companies are not 'evil', they are just trying to maximize their profits. Sooner or later this always results in a powerful company having to crush some smaller upstart by using their power in the market to reduce competition. Any company presented with the option of 1) "abuse my position in the market" or 2) "accept lower profits" is almost always going to take option #1.