Don't count on that. There are lots of jock children of geek parents.

So is "(digital) camera," which isn't really a chamber anymore.

The job of the University of Florida is to produce research (I believe it's an R1 school) and then educate students, but they have to figure out the most cost-effective way of doing it. They aren't going to educate everyone on everything, so they evaluate outcomes and other scenarios (are CS grads getting jobs? Are other depts., such as the math dept., producing more students who get jobs as programmers or placing students into grad programs? Are there viable alternatives in the region? etc.)

There's also the other side of it: if you have a bunch of tenured faculty that aren't performing well, the easiest way to get rid of them is to shut down the department. That may be what is really at play here: a group of ineffective professors who have neither taught students effectively nor produced good research (in this case, winning grants or creating new technologies.) The best way to reboot is to nuke the department. rather than going through the excruciating, legally fraught, and expensive task of winding down your faculty.

I have to especially agree with the idea that chess - and other non-digital games - are going to be a lot more beneficial than digital games. Because when you play a videogame, you're just responding to the game and creating a loose model of the system, but when you play chess (or Warhammer, or Settlers of Catan, or MtG, or cribbage) you have to know the rules completely in order to play. I'm all for my kid becoming a big gamer, but mostly in the non-digital realm.

Well, yes, there will be a little underground economy of these things, though there have been a few effective raids which caught and arrested hundreds of people. But that's a fallacy of its own - that a law is only effective if it is never broken. Dramatically reducing the market for child pornography by criminalizing its consumption is an unmitigated good.

The difference between narcotics and child pornography is huge. There is nothing essentially exploitative about either producing or consuming drugs. Some people find the consumption of some drugs immoral, or (more reasonably) a mental health issue, but the production is generally like that of any other agricultural and/or chemical products. In this case, however, the production of the material (by which I mean recordings of actual episodes of child assault, not imaginary/synthetic/illustrated versions) is the most unquestionably heinous link on the chain.

You're not getting this, are you? Try to work through it. If we don't ban the market, then the production will go to where there is no enforcement - and grow there. That is a moral formula that I and a large majority of people, of virtually all political stripes, would find pretty unacceptable, and will for as long as I can imagine.

In fact, your position is one that others use as a reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the unworkability of that brand of fundamentalist libertarianism.

The problem is that a local market (i.e., in the US) might create supply elsewhere (i.e., Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia). I'm afraid that I'd support criminalizing the market as well as the production, because the supply will just move to wherever enforcement is non-existent otherwise. It's a formula for outsourcing child-rape.

I do distinguish between pedophilia and attraction to teens. I don't think it's appropriate to treat pictures of naked teenagers in the same way as videos of toddlers being raped. In the case of the latter, I think even viewing/possessing them should be criminalized in very strong terms.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrismenning/sharks-in-space

It depends on the class. A history class isn't about learning how to solve problems, so much as it is about having a sophisticated model of what happened before the present day, different models of contingency in human events, and - yes - learning names and dates.