At my public middle school in Virgina, you had one period per year that was split between art/home ec/tech ed. Tech ed had mechanical drawing, making your own circuit board (silk screen, drop in acid, drill holes, solder components, stain wood, attach board to wood, make fake lie detector), bending metal, playing with torches, making stuff out of wood....overall very cool stuff... totally approachable by middle school kids.
They don't have to grok it, they just have to have the chance to be inspired by it.
Also...if the principal ran into you in the hall and asked you what time it was, and you said "it was time to learn," then you got free slurpee coupons.
Suburbs are good for somethin' i guess.
So, if a firefox vulnerability is worth $10k, then an IE vulnerability must be worth $100k considering how many more people use it. Not to mention the fact that the installed viruses/spyware will go unnoticed by these sheep.
There will always be exploits. Some jerk can always dig through code or disassembly and find a way. This means that our computing environments are inevitably disposable once they become popular (aka targets). One could accept this and use a technology that works for this model. If for example you made a Norton Ghost image of your computer once it was set up properly and then restored from this whenever things went awry, you'd only have to avoid browsing the sketchier parts of the web until you got your security updates. Some people are working on making this much simpler. If you were to browse inside a virtual machine that rolls back to a safe state each boot, then you would automagically throw away any exploits than dug their way into your system.
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At my public middle school in Virgina, you had one period per year that was split between art/home ec/tech ed. Tech ed had mechanical drawing, making your own circuit board (silk screen, drop in acid, drill holes, solder components, stain wood, attach board to wood, make fake lie detector), bending metal, playing with torches, making stuff out of wood....overall very cool stuff... totally approachable by middle school kids. They don't have to grok it, they just have to have the chance to be inspired by it. Also...if the principal ran into you in the hall and asked you what time it was, and you said "it was time to learn," then you got free slurpee coupons. Suburbs are good for somethin' i guess.
So, if a firefox vulnerability is worth $10k, then an IE vulnerability must be worth $100k considering how many more people use it. Not to mention the fact that the installed viruses/spyware will go unnoticed by these sheep.
There will always be exploits. Some jerk can always dig through code or disassembly and find a way. This means that our computing environments are inevitably disposable once they become popular (aka targets). One could accept this and use a technology that works for this model. If for example you made a Norton Ghost image of your computer once it was set up properly and then restored from this whenever things went awry, you'd only have to avoid browsing the sketchier parts of the web until you got your security updates. Some people are working on making this much simpler. If you were to browse inside a virtual machine that rolls back to a safe state each boot, then you would automagically throw away any exploits than dug their way into your system.