Perhaps if you could find some "special" orthopedic headphones for his pointy head he could see if music could help him!

Unfortunately, this is classic PHB behavior. "I don't like the look of what you're doing so I'm going to make up a spurious reason to forbid it, and if you challenge my spurious reason I'll perceive it as a personal attack."

_the happy geek

The idea that software that I have no opportunity to audit runs with my privileges when I run it is fundamentally broken. There is no way to clean malware that had a network connection long enough to hide a trojan anywhere and then overwrite itself to appear relatively innocuous. While a complete redesign of the way permissions and permission-delegation would be ideal, it is not practical in the short term. Using systems like http://plash.beasts.org/ can help.

The languages mentioned in the article are all fairly similar procedural languages. Choosing such similar languages makes it difficult to convey the breadth of powerful programming practices and paradigms. A good programming curriculum teaches all of the major programming paradigms, first using languages which emphasize those paradigms, then multi-paradigm languages, then making sure that the student can use any paradigm in any language. Along with learning one or two procedural languages, one of which should be C, I would recommend Squeak, Clojure, Haskell, Mozart/Oz, Curry and Flora2.

_Greg

If non-defensive Copyrights and Patents are a form of property, then let's tax them. When the holder no longer expects to make money from them, they can be sold or given back to the public domain. Heinlein suggested a great way to set property taxes: Let anyone state the taxable value of their property, then that's what it can be purchased for. See his novel "Number of the Beast" for details.

_Greg

Gamow's book covers some of the most interesting areas of mathematics without excessive simplification or condescension.

Another good book is

The "Language of Mathematics: Making the invisible visible" by Keith Devlin. This is an expansion of his earlier book for Scientific American Library.

Finally, consider mathematics which involves interactive projects with a computer. Turtle Geometry is a great starting place. Advanced students can tackle a professional book on computer graphics and will learn a massive amount of projective geometry and mathematical thinking while having a blast doing it.

_Greg