I've read a metric ton of golden-age science fiction, Gibson, Stephenson, etc. Personally I think that it's not so much darkness at all, but the fact that you need to elaborate on things to turn it into a story and that results in inventing hypothetical problems out of hypothetical advances.

The counterpoint to Gibson is the post-cyberpunk genre, like GITS and it's ilk. Personally I think that the pendulum swung full-circle towards darkness in the 90ies, much as with superhero fiction which I understand has gone through a similar cycle.

That's hyperbole. I refuse to believe that 25% of the population of any western nation has a reading age of 9. 14-16, perhaps.

For defacement, "asshole" is a much better term regardless of skill level. Moral judgment should be separate from judgment of skill.

Why would any of those care about the fate of 15-year-old script kiddies?

Bit too late for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits snoring.

At worst, I guess that a system like this means that some smart children will be crushed. But certainly, a smart child would realize what the expected answer would be. However, what kind of mentality does that set up in a child? Having to lie/embellish the truth to authority figures because they don't know any better would certainly be alienating, and (speaking from experience as someone who probably would be considered "gifted" in the american education system) with all the other children having such different ideals and being angry at you for expressing complex and confusing opinions instead of just rolling along with the groupthink there's just not anyone else there (unless there's other smart kids to hang out with, I guess). This would set you up to go into adult life with the attitude that you're surrounded by dangerous cretins that you have to subjugate for your own safety - and only if they're strong enough to fight back you regard them as human beings. Not to start a flamewar, but this certainly explains the apparent popularity of "Atlas Shrugged".

You know, that's the weird thing I've never understood about american college. In my country this sort of "general education" stops at senior high, and if you want a degree in something after that you simply study for the degree at university, a degree being a certificate of a collection of accomplished courses in that field. Why would you waste an adults time with irrelevant things, especially if that person is paying you to teach it to them?

(I'm swedish, not american, yada yada...)
Aside from a few outliers I've always had excellent teachers, especially in senior high. When I complained to the math teacher that I had difficulty solving problems (l discovered later that I had ADD, simply couldn't keep the numbers in my head for long enough) he borrowed me his copy of "how to solve it" by Pólya. At the first chemistry class the teacher told us an anecdote about how he'd taught students to make fireworks and how a few students later had tried making a batch for new years eve - killing one and maiming the others. So, no fireworks. One of my phys-ed teachers was an ex-jaeger, the other a former acrobat and the curriculum actually included some theory as to why and how you should do things. Shop class guy was a carpenter by trade. My electronics teacher was a former EE (though unfortunately I think he was a bit schizophrenic, he sometimes gave us quizzes on alchemy... nevertheless, he seemed to know his electronics well...), etc.

Even those teachers who didn't have professional or academic backgrounds had at least an interest in teaching the students actual knowledge about whatever they where teaching. Looking back, I think you could say that the only bad teachers where those who didn't have knowledge about the field they where teaching, regardless of being qualified teachers. Excepting those who had personality disorders and such - one female teacher in middle school had "real aspergers" and couldn't deal with people. She once threw a book in the head of poor Johnny (his actual name) beacuse he kept making such noise. Later, poor Johnny was assaulted by the librarian because she had forgotten to take her antipsychotics. Poor Johnny grew up to be a manual laborer AFAIK. Not that it matters here, because professional manual laborers have pretty high salaries.

Maybe someone linked to this already, didn't check all the posts: the official extension repository

The extensions are implemented in JavaScript. You can get a debug console by typing "lg" in the alt+f2 run prompt. The extensions already in the repo includes ones that revert the UI to be more like Gnome 2, as well as at least one system monitor plugin of the type people seem to be pining for. I haven't tried hacking around with this and I don't know how good the API documentation is but people do seem to get stuff done with it.

Maybe I'm some sort of edge case who just happens to have the same preferences as the developers, but I like Gnome Shell. It's minimalistic, it's fast, it does things exactly like I want them. With the theming plugin it even looks less gauche; personally I prefer a uniform dark grey on black as far as UI widgets go. I've used most every window manager and desktop environment under the sun, so it's not like I'm talking out of my ass here.

Protip: you can set a "spawn terminal" keyboard shortcut under the keyboard menu, along with shortcuts for navigating the workspaces.