Um, guys, there's this thing, it's full of rocks, debris, and umm, other planets. While we argue about whether or not global warming is real and if we have enough platinum for solar cells, it's full of minerals and ores waiting to be picked up.

It's called the solar system. You get there with rockets. Look into it.

I call BS. I worked for a state government that bought a piece of license management software for a handful of millions of dollars. The company announced they were ending support for the project almost as soon as it went live, leaving our IS people with barely functional software and a mess of poorly documented code.

Another company I worked for purchased accounting software and support for it from a company that was gobbled up my Microsoft, then suddenly found that their support dried up, leaving my company's one IS guy with barely functional software. You may have heard of it, it was called Great Plains when they bought it.

Nothing prevents a company selling closed-source proprietary software from going belly-up tomorrow, or simply deciding that breach of contract is easier than software maintenance. On the other hand, all you need if the code is open is a few people interested in the project, or barring that you can always hire a coder to make fixes as their needed if you have something obscure enough that the foss movement isn't already doing it.

You can't look into the eyes of a three year human and know what they're feeling?

I have a three year old. At two he liked to play with the little $20 Walmart toy laptop. He also liked to stand on it and otherwise abuse it. He also liked to play with musical instruments, and any number of other things he saw me do, because that's what kids do.

Yes, he's a mimic. That's what kids do. That's how they learn. He sees me on the computer; he then wants to be on a computer. He sees me play guitar, he wants to play guitar. What he sees me do he gets interested in, then I help him and show him how he can do the things he sees me do.

It's called parenting.

As a result, he can now at three and a half quite easily navigate the noggin website and the pbskids website. He can play the games, he can change games himself when he wants to, and when he gets bored he says he wants to do something else and then we do that. We limit the time, because he doesn't need to be on the computer all the time, but he self-limits too. By his fourth birthday he'll have his own system in his room, set up with a couple of kid friendly programs and web links. He'll also have his own bike and know how to ride it, and will hopefully have his letters down enough to read a bit, and speak a little more of a second language than he already does (since we're starting to learn Chinese together). I don't think he's a prodigy, but I'm also quite convinced that any kid can learn faster than what some of the posters here seem to think a kid can "handle". Most kids are brighter than most adults give them credit for.

My advice for the op is get an old system and set it up with a kid-oriented *nix distro, and help the kid understand what to do with it. My advice to the posters saying the op should get a life is that it looks like he has one and is trying to give his kid one too, so maybe you go a little heavier on the constructive and a little lighter on the criticism.