Well, while I feel sorry for you. I really think every child has a right to see / speak both the parents on a regular base, we don;t know if there is a divorce. Might as well that the father is in the army overseas. Or something else. The problem with the phone is next to the fact that these devices aren't suitable for 4 year olds might as well be taken away. I agree with you, if the parent where the kid is, is unwilling, you have very little to fight back with and is something that should change, but it's also beyond the scope of the question from the poster. Anyway, I hope you also will get in touch with your kid on a regular base. You and your kid have that right. Or better, should have.

Read the article, they are being used to sense gunpowder, not drugs. For once I actually think the police has got one hell of a new co-worker, the lady that noticed the mine-sniffing rats from the army could also be used in the police force to quickly get an idea if someone had fired a gun or not. I am sure there will still be lab-tests, but at least they can go on with their investigation based on a pretty acurate source.

Yeps, they are named after famous tv-detectives. I found that rather funny.

I don't feel my tone was like that at all, but I understand your view and for some comments you are completely right. But the author of the comment I posted this comment too, chose to put his comment under mine. So I tried to explain my thoughts. Nothing more, nothing less. I really do wish the father wisdom in his decision and I really do hope he will consider other options. Like maybe regular skype-calls. But I don't think he is crazy for wanting to speak/see his kid at all. Not at all. I completely understand that. Who wouldn't?

Or just maybe you just aren't as smart as you think you are ;)

I don't think that is what most people here are saying. It's not what I'm saying. Just that there might be better ways. While we don't know if this is the case (the father might be just a hard worker, might me overseas, whatever...) if it is, the father might be able to get an agreement with the mother to do skype-talks. There might be lots of other options instead of giving a 4yo a mobile. And there are. Lots of people got divorced, lots of kids have fathers in the army. There are other options, since this is a quitte common problem.

While I don't disagree with you, there is nothing in the question of the submitter that tells me we have a such a wonderkid here. Allthough I asume the kid is exceptional, as all kids are. Regardless of development. It is however also our task as parents to give the kids a chance to be kids. It's nice that you are really gifted and could understand those books and yes, we need these 'odd' people. I do hope your case is documentend btw, because it would give us a chance to learn more about the human brain than we do now.

Dude, just don't. I understand you want to speak and see your son, but the reason 4yo don't have phones is because they are not ready for their use. Let the kid play with playmobil and later lego. Let him be a child and when he's ready for a mobile, he'll tell you by putting it on his christmas-list. I wish you wisdom with your decission and hopefully you'll find a beter way to keep in touch with your kid.

http://tech.slashdot.org/submission/2963385/california-school-district-hires-firm-to-monitor-students-social-media?sdsrc=rel

Thank you for your lengthy response to what I said. I have to agree with you. I used the words true/free based upon my own bias and I shouldn't do that. Good point, I will take that into account for the future. Especially since it's such a 'holy' (as in vi vs emacs) subject. About the ps: I personally don't see it as stealing what Apple did. I consider the BSD license as sort of saying: Here, you can have this. It's a gift. Do what you want with it. And albeit not being too keen on Apple for other reasons, they had every right to use the codebase under the BSD. So no stealing as far as I am concerned. It's funny you mention RMS. I have great respect for him and consider him to be one of the pioneers of the tech-world. When he speaks, I listen. I don't always agree with him 100%, but most of the time I think he's right. To be honest, when I started reading your post for a moment there I thought I got AC'd by him. Again, thank you for this very interesting response. I wasn't expecting such a post from an AC.

You are cherry picking. Theo released that mail to the open on day 1. The guy who made the accusations got a bit scared after a reporter did a factcheck and asked him to remove it until he could answer. The reporter did, but we are still waiting for that answer. promised to respond to a question from a reporter never did. The backdoor would have been installed in 2001 and in SSH only. While it could be true... now, 12 years later that backdoor still isn't found. And it had been checked by everyone that matters and has the skills to do so.

Oh, I have to correct myself. It was allowed to produce porn on it, but the porn industry had adopted the in the US more populair VHS-format.

I don't agree, v2000 had longer tapes, much longer since those tapes where double sided. They had an A and B-side. I had tapes up to 8 eight hours in the end, better image too. You could actually put the video on pause on a frame and it looked good. With vhs for example, it would shutter and colors would blend. Back in those days when I went into the video rental (I am dutch, so v2000 was here very much available since philips is a dutch firm) I really could see that most of the store was filled with blockbusters on v2000. Betamax wasn't populair, VHS not really too. But in 2 years, all that space for v2000 and all those blockbusters went to vhs. But that first year... vhs had a special section. Filled with porn.

Hehe, you didn't try to install 9 with full disk encryption did you? ;) Just saying.

As much as I love freebsd I have stopped using it after their servers got 'served' with the use of 'legitimate' ssh keys. http://www.paritynews.com/2012/11/19/487/two-freebsd-project-servers-hacked/ Given that Freebsd never released a good audit report after that hack I can only be worried more. Add to that, we now that we know the NSA had access to the certs from diginotar and might had done or paid for the diginotar hack I think one might as well use windows. I hate to say it, but the complete codebase from freebsd needs to be checked. Again and again. Preferable with the help from openbsd.