Yes, we do a shitty job of reporting information, like leaving out large portions of "what the hell is this and what does it mean", and thats worthy of a -1 troll rating.

I used to think the group moderation scheme was a good one, but apparently many people don't understand how it works. You see, a 'troll' is when someone posts something wrong or unnecessarily inflammatory, with the primary intention of riling people up.

Reporting a story saying "Wow, this is really exciting!" without saying what it is, or why its exciting...well...thats a little less than worthless. If you already know, then you didn't really need the news. If you don't, then reporting incompletely stories isn't particularly worthwhile.

I think its important to follow the whole process from start to finish. Since I've been on both side of this issue, several times, perhaps I have a unique perspective.

The bottom line: you get the justice you can afford.

The system relies on scaring the crap out of people charged with a crime so that they'll avoid the option of a jury trial, since that costs $3000-15000 and up, depending on the scope of the case. This forces people to plea out even if they're innocent, because most people can't afford justice. If you're indigent, you'll get a free lawyer thats worth somewhat less than they're paid.

If you're serious about proving your innocence, you can probably get off if there isn't concrete evidence, although even there a five figure trial and a stupid jury will work in your favor. Most juries are people found to be less than smart, without a lot of well developed opinions, easily swayed by clever commentary. In other scenario's, they're called 'voters'. The only time I get picked for a jury is when I act dumb and appear to have no fixed opinions.

On the other side of the table is the police, who will make up stuff on police reports, labs full of incompetents who produce the "evidence" necessary to force a plea deal, and a DA measured by conviction rate, not just conviction rate. Couple that with a system of fines and high dollar privately operated penal institutions, and you get the idea that we're just herding people through the system to keep the conviction and incarceration rates up.

Lets look at my situation. I was charged with a misdemeanor that carried a couple of grand in fines and related items. Got a lawyer locked in for the case for $2500. He looked things over for a few weeks, we poked the cop and the DA for a couple of hours in court, and he said we could go forward as is and I'd lose. For about $7k we could hire "Some whore experts that will say whatever we want, 50/50 whether the jury goes for it" and for about $14-15k we could "Hire some top notch highly respected experts and put on a show. That'll scare the DA off his plea deal and he'll probably give you something lesser with a smaller fine, and theres a good 80-90% chance of acquittal...but you never know what a jury will do for sure".

In the end I took the original plea deal and bought a bunch of stuff with the money I saved, to make myself feel better about being convicted unjustly. I was able to pay for the couple of days of jail time to serve at home, while the guys with no money had to go sit in jail for a couple of days. I also could afford the fines, while most people would have been seriously screwed. Oh, and I could afford bail, so I got to sleep at home the night of my arrest while most people spent it on a concrete floor.

So we have at least 3 kinds of justice. The kind where many people because of skin color, neighborhood of residence or wallet thickness end up taking the pipe and paying up or sitting in jail, the kind where you can throw a little money at it and get a reduction or practical elimination of consequences, and when you're filthy rich and somewhat less than ridiculously guilty and you get off entirely.

On the jury end of things, I really never saw a concrete case. Lots of slip shod evidence and procedure, questionable test results passed off as solid, lots of 'he said/she said', circumstantial junk and I was never sure enough to put someone in jail. Everybody else wanted to get it over with so they could get home, they 'had a feeling!'.

Lab wise, in my case there was a test involved. The test was apparently done at the beginning of the month, recorded somehow (although its not clear how) and then that recording transferred to the official forms almost a month later. But that process isn't how its supposed to be done, and it appeared that there were many places along the process where procedures weren't followed and the likely result was a bad test. The same lab was later found to have samples with mismatched DNA from the alleged source people.

Yet the DA and the judge were unswayed by this, and said they'd allow the evidence to be presented with our rebuttal. Then the judge told my lawyer that he would have to try the case that week, when my lawyer was already booked for another case, he refused a continuance, and then said he was considering revoking my bail because I was "being difficult". Turns out he was retiring and this was his last case, and he wanted to get it over with. He'd also been censured for looking up hot womens names and addresses in the DMV database from license plate info given to him by a friend, so the friend could then harass the women. Real quality fellow, and a real upholder of the law.

So thats what you get from a close look at both sides of this. Thankfully I'm a wealthy white man that lives in a nice neighborhood. If I were a black kid in a hoodie, apparently I'd be dead or in jail.

The only problem with your thesis is that you presume there is a great chance of getting malware from non repository software.

Sorry, but I'm unlikely to get malware from Disney, Nickelodeon or the long time developers of Kidzui.

Plus my 7 year old appears to have mastered finding the software he wants, asking if he can install it, and doing so. So it seems to be not that complicated.

How many times have we gotten malware on our 7+ home computers? Never. Couple of times malwarebytes or security essentials complained about something, and on occasion they block access to a web site because its been reported to have malware. Zero infections, because we don't surf russian porn sites, we don't install shovelware, and we don't click OK on anything that pops up and says "Hi, can I install your free ?". Pretty straightforward.

Then there is the associated funny business with well established software, which mimics my linux OS installation experience. You always have to edit some files, find some obscure software, or use odd troubleshooting methods to make simple things that work just fine under windows work under linux.

To wit, here's the minecraft for linux download link description:

"The jar is executable and might work as-is. If you run into memory issues, try launching it with java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp Minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame, also please use Sun's JVM."

MIGHT work as is. Or just use this obscure launch string to try to make it work. When that doesn't work, you can post a question on some forum, where 20 eleven year olds will taunt you to read the 400 page wiki, search the last 3 years of threads, and then declare you a dumbass because you can't figure it out on your own. Oh, and someone want to clue me in as to how my 7 year old will determine if he's having a memory issue or not?

Wizard 101 (the other hot elementary school kids game) has two pages of instructions on how to install on linux, including installing Wine and tweaking stuff. On the flip side, the 8 year old from across the street installed it on one of our windows machine, with a few helpful tips from my 7 year old. While my wife and I were watching tv undisturbed.

Then we're back to the original point of "Why do this when the computer already comes with windows, windows works fine, everybody knows it, they use it at school, and we've already determined that there is no killer app or capability that linux has that windows doesn't"?

Answer: People are fond of it for various reasons, but there isn't any good reason to foist this on a young child. You're going to give them something unfamiliar, complicated, and they won't derive any benefit from using it. About the only outcome of that is to make the child more dependent on you to resolve their issues, and when you have kids, you'll find that what you want is the opposite of that. You want to enable them to figure things out on their own.

Oh, and whoever keeps modding me 'troll' on this, grow up. Your little tech toy operating system isn't appropriate for small children or most other people for that matter. Get over it. At best you're limiting their worthwhile development scope by foisting this on them. At worst, you're teaching them stuff they'll have no use for, while skipping a prime opportunity for them to develop skills they can use on the computers at school.

To wit: my kid helps me start up all 30-something computers in the school lab, helps other kids log in, run the browser and get into their apps. He can do this because he's been given experience in the platform that ~95-something% of schools use. His peer students think he's a superhero. If he used linux at home? He'd have almost zero applicable skills to help his fellow students.

Once again, to get people to adopt something, you need a compelling story and capability set that is so much better or only available on a platform that it overwhelms the cost and hassles of adoption. That isnt and has never been the case with linux. Its a solution in search of a problem.

I was on a jury a few years back, and the first thing out of the prosecutors mouth was "This isn't csi. We don't have DNA evidence. We aren't going to bring out 10 dramatic witnesses", etc. Made me wonder why we're contemplating putting someone in jail for the rest of their lives if we aren't interested in spending the money on the evidence needed to really confirm a jury finding.

I know some things that happen on tv aren't even plausible in real life at any price. But some of the stuff that gets passed in front of a jury is pretty weak.

There is an awful lot of very well vetted windows and mac software specifically slotted for kids, and as a parent of a computing child...I'll be involved with the selection of every piece of software he installs. At least for an approval and checkout.

While I'm no expert on repositories and other free stuff, I can't think of a thing that I can't get for Windows that I'd think would be available for linux, at least in the kids education space.

Plus my kid could go to someone elses house and use their computer, and vice versa. I have 2 or 3 kids frequently in my living room playing minecraft or wizard 101 or whatever the game of the week is.

Again, I'm looking for the "aha!" in the linux home desktop space where windows and os x fall down, but linux works or has something the others don't.

Don't get me wrong, I started out putting together Imsai's and Altairs and writing bios/bdos for some early versions of cp/m, and Basic was a pretty common language back then. But when I was 7 I was riding a big wheel and shooting a cap gun...we didn't even have a tv set yet. So I make sure to think about how different things are. He's pretty far along, but it'll be a while before we start installing and troubleshooting OS's and building applications. But he's had some fun with Scratch, for whatever thats worth!

Yep, once I clicked on the article to find out the most crucial aspect of this - the price - I said it was about $50 too much. Considering you can get a $200 used ipad 1 or a $300 refurbished ipad 2, $150 is too much for a second tier chi-tab with a few apps on it. Shoot, over a year ago I bought a $150 android tablet with about the same guts as an ipad 1. I could probably pick that up for $80-90 now.

Kindle Fire's aren't much more than this either, and they have one heck of an ecosystem for free movies/tv shows, apps, music and so forth...especially if you're a Prime member.

I said "Don't pick at it, don't smash it, don't move it when its on, and don't drink or eat anything near it or it'll break and I won't get you another one".

Seemed to do the trick. Granted when he was 8 months old and I let him have at a 150MHz pentium laptop from around 1996, he managed to get half the keys off of the keyboard within about 5 minutes.

He did also have a leapfrog thingy that came with a keyboard and mouse and you could play simple games on it, and that was pretty close to indestructible without tools/rocks, and he used that until I gave him the laptop.

I also put him into a standard user account until he got the hang of installing and tinkering with software/settings (under supervision). At this point he's got so many minecraft mods installed, I'm pretty surprised the game still runs.

Yep, when the teacher found out I used to work in high tech before I retired, she asked if I could come in and give the second graders a powerpoint tutorial. I may have saved their lives by begging off on it, saying I wasn't particularly familiar with powerpoint, although I used to knock out about 100 slides a week...

It did however provide a nice generational bridging opportunity when I told my son about tinkering with one of the first word processing systems about 35 years ago. I had to write a 10 page paper on something for high school, and I only had a little over 9 pages. So I tinkered with the pitch and yaw on the daisywheel and got ten pages by very slightly increasing the character and line spacing, but it still looked standard.

Of course, you can slightly change font size on a laser printer to turn his 3 page paper into a 4 pager. Dad was a genius, yet again :)

You can add a third. My kid had a laptop at 2 and has a desktop now. Not even a snapped off key or busted mouse. Some sticky stuff on them, but I'm already used to de stick-ifying video game controllers, door knobs and pretty much anything else below 6' in the house.

Right, Reading and figuring things out should come second to...ehhh...what now?

This as well...

I know a brazillion people. I've yet to see a kid with their own machine want to play with mom and dads. Well, thats where the parents bought their kids a good computer, not some cheap 10 year old POS. Once they got their own, not only no interest in mom and dads, try and pry it from their little fingers.

But since I see a lot of people in this thread saying to buy a cheap crappy machine for their kids (why is a mystery) maybe thats the problem. When you can buy a refurb or scratch 'n dent dual core sandybridge machine from the lenovo outlet for $199 or less, this seems like a false economy in many ways...you're not saving money, you're getting a shitty computer, and your kid is trying to learn on a slow, crappy computer that'll be completely useless in a year or two. But you saved $100.

My 7 year old reads 5 grades up, has the vocabulary of a grownup, runs his own minecraft server and installs his own software and mods, etc. Because he's had his own computer to work with anytime he wants, and its a damn decent machine...i5-3570k on a z77 motherboard, 8gb ram, a 240gb SSD in an Antec Skeleton case. When his games get more complicated, I can drop a 7770 gpu in it. Since I can upgrade it to an i7, 32GB of ram and pretty much any gpu and its completely overclockable, it should remain a good computer for him for the next 7-10 years.

Whats really cool is you can see all the components, and it has a huge rotating color led fan blowing down on everything.

You also don't have children.

Sharing a computer with a kid is a bad idea unless you plan to hop off of it the moment they sidle up. Otherwise you're blunting the kids interest and engagement, but you saved $150-200 by not getting them their own.

Money you'll spend 30x over in time spent trying to figure out what Junior did to your PC when you weren't watching.

Got my kid a good laptop when he was 2. He started with fill painting Barney, quickly figured out links and bookmarks, and just clicked on stuff until something fun happened. He spends hours a day on it. Learned to read very early and as a 7 year old reads like a 12 year old with a better vocabulary than most kids.

Of course, his is set up right next to mine, so he and his friends can play minecraft or wizard 101 or whatever suits them, and both machines are right next to the living room couch we watch tv from, so I can always see what he's up to.

You don't have or know any children?

My 7 year old and his 7,8,9 and 11 year old friends all use Word to prepare their papers, and use presentation graphics to put together collages and other photo/drawing materials. I work in the computer lab at the elementary school. Every kid in the school uses a windows xp core 2 duo machine, browser, apps, and office applications.

What I can tell you for absolutely certain is that my kid won't ever walk into a school computer lab and see 30 linux machines. This is because (A) they come with windows on them (or in some school districts, macs with mac os), (B) thats what the school has wired into their IT plans, executed by half as many people as they need, with half the money and a change to linux would be very expensive, (C) windows is what the educators are familiar with and what the kids use at home on mom and dads computer, (D) there aren't any educational or business drivers to press for a change to linux, and (E) linux doesn't do anything at all that windows and os x don't do.

Plus given that windows XP hasn't been actively sold for ~5 years, yet its still ~50% of the worldwide installed base, some of which have been running it since 2003, I think my son will have plenty of windows 7 to work with for the next 5-7 years, after which he may see more windows 8.

Kids do have pliable minds, but its best to ply them with useful, repurposeable learning instead of showing them useless stuff they're unlikely to ever see again. I actually quad booted my sons machine with windows 7, windows 8, osx snow lion and whatever the latest ubuntu was 6 months ago...not 12.04 but 11.something. His preference leaned towards windows 8, probably because it looked like a phone and he's been using phones and tablets for a long time. No interest whatsoever in os x. I steered him to win 7 because win 8 isn't quite dry yet.

Ah yes, the Anonymous Coward weighs in. It was pretty easy to imagine that it was space related, but it would have been nice to have a little more detail.

Just tossing in my 2c about article writers who presume that everyone knows the little things they know about.

Sort of like when someone starts a "Why doesn't everyone want linux on the desktop?" thread where everyone debates the technical merits, while not realizing that its a solution in search of problem, and that the technical details aren't relevant.

Now, you do realize that taking the time to snurf on someone elses comment being lame is somewhat more lame than the original lameness, right? Maybe next time you'll post with your actual account...you know, like an actual man?

I'd recommend using an operating system that will build skills in an area where the skills will be reusable. Most schools use windows or macs. Linux is a dead end for an elementary school kid. Linux is a dead end period. Its a solution in search of a problem.

My sons first computer was a pentium dual core laptop, and he got it when he was 2.

About six months ago, we built together an ivy bridge/z77 machine in an Antec Skeleton case. If you want visibility, thats a good way to go. Clear plastic case is good too, but they don't fit well and are a PITA to take apart and reassemble. Obviously I didn't let him socket the cpu, but his little fingers were pretty helpful in a lot of instances. Whole thing probably ran me about $450, and it'll be a good computer for him for 5+ years.

Your 7 year old needs the same computer everyone else has. Fisher Price it and you'll have a throwaway next year.

https://www.google.com/search?q=antec+skeleton&hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS477US477&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Jg5NUKWeLZDbigK_soH4CA&sqi=2&ved=0CB0QsAQ&biw=1920&bih=955