The story here is that it actually is *plausible* that some ordinary fifteen-year-old child could make big companies lose big dollars. And if he could do this, what else couldn't he do? The very thought is spine-tingling. The only thing that would be better would be if "Mafiaboy" were really a thirteen year old girl of mixed Punjabi-Chicano descent who lived in Nashville and she was positively identified but never got caught and lived an underground life until she became ruler of the world at the age of seventeen. And again, the story here is that the gerontocrats - stupid men way past the age of forty who control all the buttons even though they need their secretaries to push them - are scared out of their wits by the internet, and by the fact that mere children can use this tool to great effect, whereas the gerontocrats themselves are of course as clueless about this as they are about everything else, and mere children can actually, at least in principle, achieve power by exercising their computer skills, which (this is the real clincher) they learned **all by themselves** and not from teachers in school. Imagine the outrage. Or if, like me, you think children are gods in chains, who need only the right technology to break those chains, imagine the thrill.
Slashdot Mirror
The story here is that it actually is *plausible* that some ordinary fifteen-year-old child could make big companies lose big dollars. And if he could do this, what else couldn't he do? The very thought is spine-tingling. The only thing that would be better would be if "Mafiaboy" were really a thirteen year old girl of mixed Punjabi-Chicano descent who lived in Nashville and she was positively identified but never got caught and lived an underground life until she became ruler of the world at the age of seventeen. And again, the story here is that the gerontocrats - stupid men way past the age of forty who control all the buttons even though they need their secretaries to push them - are scared out of their wits by the internet, and by the fact that mere children can use this tool to great effect, whereas the gerontocrats themselves are of course as clueless about this as they are about everything else, and mere children can actually, at least in principle, achieve power by exercising their computer skills, which (this is the real clincher) they learned **all by themselves** and not from teachers in school. Imagine the outrage. Or if, like me, you think children are gods in chains, who need only the right technology to break those chains, imagine the thrill.