When a Lit or Women's Studies or CA major fails to get a job related to their field, they instead get a job as a secretary, or retail manager, or human resources, myriad other jobs that require a degree but have no obvious/prevalent corresponding major. When a CS major fails to get a job related to their field, they live with their parents making a website that will "make it big someday."

If Google nukes a less-questionable app sometime after this, all your slippery slope arguments are valid. Claiming slippery slope on a single case of anything is mindless paranoia.

Unfortunately, students under Professor Peter Gray's proposed curriculum won't understand what "lowest common denominator" means.

This is the second story recently that tosses the term "0-day" around when "new" would suffice. Yes, 0-day sounds cool, and yes, it's a helpful description in, say, the warez scene (do we still call it that?), but in articles about bugs/exploits it just makes you sound stupid.

How, precisely, is Flash going to send links to everyone on your friends list? Or access anything on your account? It doesn't magically get a pipe to the database or to the underlying server code just because it's served up from the same base URL. At worst, it can do some HTML scraping and load in your images and then POST them off to an "attackers" server... but it'd be a lot easier to do that with... you know... any other programming language deployed in any other possible way, or manually via a browser.

Except that Flash can't handle animation. Toss a few animated clips on the stage, move 'em around a little bit, and watch your performance tank. The biggest deal since Flash 8 (for anybody who cares about performance, anyway) is that it allows you direct access to underlying bitmap data, so those who apply some programmatic effort can get around Flash player's shitty vector implementation and make something that performs reasonably well.

Very few people use the Flash IDE for serious development. Code is contained per animation frame which is absolute hell for anything more complicated than a single button banner ad, and Flash IDE files are completely unmergable via source control tools. The only people using the Flash IDE are banner ad developers and cartoon developers (of which there are surprisingly many -- even broadcast animations are often done in Flash these days, and then exported to Quicktime for delivery). If you're making games or apps for Flash, you're using the command-line compiler (either directly, or more typically, indirectly via Flex Builder). Further, if you're doing anything that requires good performance, you're using the (not very good) bitmap support, and completely avoiding the vector drawing model, as it's so slow to be unusable in most interactive contexts. Flash exists because Flash exists, and for no other reason. It's not a particularly compelling environment compared to, say, Unity3D or some of the other recent browser-and-desktop plugins. Hell, even Java is generally more pleasant to work in. The sole advantage to Flash is that everybody already has Flash installed.

I suspect you're actually a very clever marketing agent for Chevy. Or, depending how much faith I have in humanity today, for Ford.

Agreed. I had an internet enabled computer in my room during most of my childhood. I looked at porn, played online games, swore, had random people on IM ask me for sex, was tricked into looking at Tubgirl/Goatse, and all the rest that goes along with net culture. If your kid is well-adjusted and raised intelligently, he'll learn from it and grow. And if not... well, the world gained another McDonald's employee, but that's true regardless of his free access to the internet.