For security's sake! Send your kid to hacker camp A computer security expert has called on the United States government to train the nation's youth in offensive and defensive cyber technologies so the country is less vulnerable to attacks on its critical infrastructure. "We need to really encourage young people, high school kids, college students, to embrace cyber security as …
Educating kids in schools that use only proprietary software will prevent many talented young people from really understanding IT. Schools should give children and young people access to software that they can study, investigate, modify and improve. GNU/Linux is really their (and our) only hope - it makes early educational experience with real systems possible.
Well the problem about this is that knownledge about computers is more wide spreadt. People will then stop buying DRM encrippled things or accept current copyright legislation. This would threaten the status quo and then the terrorists would have won.
The only chance of an oppressive government is to keep it's citizens dumb.
>Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik missile.
Should read satellite shirley?
Any approach that get kids thinking again would be good, though nowadays it's more a case of making it acceptable to their peers. Kids seem to think that it's acceptable to be ill-educated and as stupid as possible, since the state will look after you and you don't need to do anything.
They then have kids and 'raise' them the same way - vicious spiral of idiocracy.
ttfn
I agree wholeheartedly.
Even within IT departments it's hard to find many people who really understand, or want to understand, how think work -- and for that I blame Microsoft and it's Microsoft technicians. A good grounding in IT using free software wouldn't be much of a setback to an MCSE, but learning just Microsoft means that you're not learning real IT just how to use MS wizards.
Too true. Sputnik was a satellite, the R-7 (or SS-6 if you're NATO) that put it up was a missile.
But I got that from Wikipedia, so it's equally possible that the R-7 was actually a type of spiced sausage with a back catalogue of successful pop songs and a long career as a professional golfer behind it........
Why restrict kids to only learning *nix systems ? That's like restricting them to one programming language rather than teaching the fundamentals of good and bad programming, which can be applied to anything.
Also, if Windows is the most likely vector for a cyber-attack, surely that's the system that should be studied most closely ? Visual Studio Express is free (as in beer).
No-one is suggesting that *only* OSS is used in schools and education, but that it *should be* used. The fact is that the opposite is largely the case at the moment: *only* propietary software is used.
And the point Diana Artemis made (if you had actually bothered to read what she wrote) was that free (as in freedom) software can be examined, modified and improved by students so they learn, as opposed to M$ free (yeah we'll let you download it and use it in strictly defined ways and if you do something we don't like we'll see you in court) software.
As for your point about using software that is most commonly subject to attack, that is a red herring in this case: for students it is more important to learn *why* a bit of software is crap, not just that it *is* crap.
Hit a sore nerve there. Ian? If you guys would stop ranting and insulting at every opportunity, people might well bother to read or listen to you. As it it nowadays, people generally think, "Oh God. More Linux white noise." What a school (nice idea to try and brainwash kids,) chooses to teach is up to them. If students are that interested in IT and have a PC themselves (which is more likely than not nowadays,) then let them download it themselves. Or shop around for somewhere that uses both, as you''re suggesting. Or just Linux - that's what you really mean, after all. And nope - I'm not under the impression that Linux is the only OSS stuff out there. Nor am I childishly defensive enough to paint anyone who has a differing opinion a troll. Plonnn-kerrr ...
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