You could also consider that the child will likely have an entire lifetime of interaction with electronic devices. Instead of fostering an early development for something that will likely be inevitable anyway, why not take the kid outdoors out into the real world and foster a love at an early age for the non-cyber world as well?

I am not bragging or even recommending it as a solution for someone else, but for me it is working out.

I wanted the same thing, to get away from spending all my time working on desktops with viruses. I grew tired of it and just felt it was a stupid waste to be doing the same thing over and over all the time. So now I run my own web hosting / Drupal hosting & design business. I started the business 9 years ago part-time. It has not always paid the bills, but has almost always helped to pay the bills. Now, although I am still struggling to get more business, (like everyone else) I am working for myself full time.

I run the entire thing from my Ubuntu (currently) based laptop. My servers all run OpenBSD exclusively. I am 100% Microsoft FREE end-to-end. One of my early goals was to demonstrate that readily available "off-the-shelf" OSS could be used to entirely run a business. It can be done and I do it.

China cracking down on counterfeit goods, eh? First off despite what the article says, I doubt China is really serious about this problem. I suspect it will be just like the problem of how China is "very serious about curbing the digital information available to it's own population," i.e. the Great firewall of China. This prevents information from getting into or or even out China. (My cousin went to China last summer and could not even post to facebook or his own blog) Yet despite China claiming they police their own citizens, in reality next to nothing actually done to control their citizen's attacking my servers on a daily basis. I average 3 to 6 hacking attempts per day. Over 90 percent of that traffic comes from China. Am I supposed to be happy that the situation isn't 10x times worse?

The Chinese government doesn't really seem to be too concerned with efforts make their citizens play nice with the rest of the world... So how are we supposed to believe they are taking the issue of black market / counterfeit goods seriously?

Curbing counterfeit goods or stopping hackers from illegal activity is a moral ethics problem as much as anything and I just don't see the Chinese government encouraging (or enforcing) it's citizens to do the right thing. This seems like another "we're getting tough on crime" PR stunt but in reality it's just business as usual.

I was going to point out that the author could actually spend a little more time than it took to type the question to "Ask Slashdot" and do a little research on their own. But "Check the archives" is a bit more succinct. Bravo.

Seriously?! I thought Facebook was a means of staying connected with one's own friends?

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If you've got more than a couple of hundred "friends" of Facebook then it's not Facebook that you need, it's your own wikileaks...

Actually I was thinking along the same lines... If you don't want to have the exposure to someone else killing your device, don't get a "smart" device. A plain phone that does text and voice is all most of us really need. If you want a smart-phone device that does more then, well, live with the hidden options of the mobile OS creator. The same goes for my Laptop. I don't want someone else's ideas of what they think I need or need to be protected from.

1.) Get to have our lungs protected from harmful dust AND have our women running around "bra-less" Sweet!

2.) Imagine how much more interesting Emergency Prepardness drills will be now.

Oh, if only it were legal to use one in your car...

I could drive around in a bubble of cell phone jamming delight. Just imagine the number of accidents as the idiots frantically tried to re-establish their calls. I'd call those accidents darwinism at it's finest, except the risk to the general public is simply too great.

I think it has to do with money just like everything else. My understanding is that it actually costs less to "crack" (produce) diesel out of oil than it does to make gas. Yet at the pump diesel prices are usually higher. Why? I am guessing this is because the oil companies know you will be needing less diesel so they jack the price up accordingly.