It's refreshing to see so many other prodigies expressing their opinions on this matter. That's one thing that I like about slashdot--everybody is smarter than everybody else, and it's one of the reasons I love reading everything everybody else has to say.

However, I feel that there is an underrepresentation of the majority at work here: the stupid people, and being one of the token few who make it to slashdot, I feel obligated to express my opinion so that all the smartypantses can understand the perspective of the child's peers. If you stick this kid in too many classes with dumber, older students, you'll de-motivate and humiliate them, which will provoke us into retaliating through socially ostracizing the student. This will deplete his social resources and inevitably drive him to a future of loneliness and depression that will be the cause of his burnout.

I recall fondly the many nerds I de-pantsed in the hallways during my sixth year of high school. Sure, I may not be able to install an operating system without a GUI, but I CAN throw rubber balls in gym class with enough force to smash a kid's plastic frames in two after she makes me feel stupid in math class.

The threat of death won't stymie the flow of low-level underlings and lackeys who peddle drugs on street corners. There will always be somebody jobless and hungry, and whether you're stealing a loaf of bread at the threat of your hand getting cut off or selling drugs at risk of getting killed, the severity of punishment is a minor factor in the decision making of these people. Yes, maybe you'd kill off a lot of awful people and social pariahs by doing this, but you'd be killing a lot of momentarily down-on-their-luck normal people, too.

Just because there aren't drugs to traffic doesn't mean the problem will be solved. Organized crime will not vanish, but merely shift its business to some other form of social exploitation. There's a lot more than just money involved in this trade, and the cartel members aren't just going to go get normal jobs if the demand for drugs diminishes. It's clear already that they know threats of violence can be used to extort money from teachers--and I hate to think how this might escalate if it became their only source of income. But I do agree with you on the legalization issue. We gotta get tax money from somewhere, and I think drugs would provide a wonderful source of funding for social programs.

Hey, I will have none of this 'retarding-it-down' nonsense. I may have mental diffabilities, but being a semi-literate computer user, Gnome is even a bit too simplified for me.

It was a great place to start learning, though.

google needs to convert the Ogg Vorbis files over to MP3, which is neither free nor better. What is the reasoning behind this? Would implementing basic support for Ogg Vorbis be beyond the magical powers of google, or did they have to strike up some evil pact of exclusivity and goat sacrifice with the people who own the MP3 patent in order that their product would have a familiar/attractive format de/compression capability?

Why are responses to pranksterish antics and merrymaking always so boring?

From a resident of Carmel, Indiana, the idea of traffic being stopped around a roundabout for longer than around a stop sign sounds absurd to me. I've lived in Carmel for 20+ years, and the flow on the roads is better than anywhere else I've ever been. I've never seen one of the roundabouts stopped up because people couldn't exit them. This may be true in huuuge cities, but roundabouts have increased the quality of life living in this little suburbia by a good 10% for me.

As a resident of Carmel, I can assure you that they cannot so easily be replaced by stop signs. This may be anecdotal evidence, but the 4-way stop intersection near my house (106th & Gray Rd) used to be backed up for 5+ minutes for anybody going north or south during rush hour, but after they got a roundabout installed, I never had to wait more than two minutes. Yes, they may be terrifying to newcomers, and Keystone ave is an absolute confusing mess, but they have really sped the town up quite a bit.

I think you underestimate the fanatical nature of us Sega nerds.

I don't have money either, so I make the library buy books I want to read.

I've bumped into a few problems with my Ubuntu box, and the tech support has always (eventually) gotten around to helping me out with very well-informed and clear and precise solutions to my problems. The unfortunate part, however, is that I've had to run through back-and-forths with low-level IT lackeys who probably don't know what 'command line' means before they finally refer me over to a linux specialist that I requested in the first place.

I followed IU's recent exploration of ebooks, and it looks like they're pretty keen on making sure that no mandatory ebooks will be platform-specific or without a deadtree alternative, so I won't have to install Windows to read DRMCOPYRIGHTSPAZ publisher's textbooks. I don't much trust the university administrators on this matter, but all the tech people I've met who are in charge of things have seemed very capable, and I hope the final say on everything stays in their hands.

But I'm in the humanities, not CS. (*gasp!*). The only real problems I have is with typing things on campus. All the computer labs (that I know of) only have Windows and Mac computers that run MS Office exclusively, so all my AbiWord/LibreOffice docs like to go through formatting bloat and eventually get corrupted when I try to work on them on campus. Portable apps are my friend, but that has led to corrupted flash drives and even more data loss.

But overall, I feel as though IU takes pretty good care of us, even if users have to jump through a few more flaming hoops.