It's a valid point. I have a confession though: I was a teenage hacker (in the cracking sense). I suspect many people around here were. I didn't break stuff or

It's a valid point. I have a confession though: I was a teenage hacker (in the cracking sense). I suspect many people around here were. I didn't break stuff or steal stuff on purpose, or have explicit malicious intent. I practiced what is sometimes called "catch and release" hacking. It was a game... to me at least. I'm sure it was an annoyance to the ones on the other end, but I was 14-15 and wasn't thinking like that. But boy did I ever learn a lot. By the time I made it to college, I knew more than a lot of the CS seniors. So much that I didn't bother majoring in CS. I wanted to learn something else. At 18 I knew: C, C++, 80x86 assembler, shell script, Perl, how to compose and validate an IP packet, the OSI networking model, basic protocol design, peer to peer protocol design concepts, and quite a bit about cryptography including how to properly construct an authenticated cryptographic envelope and the importance of choosing the right block cipher mode of operation. Password cracking led me to hash functions and SALTs, which led me down the rabbit hole, and I got fascinated with crypto. At one point I worked through the math of Diffie-Hellman and RSA. It was very hard stuff, and required that I delve into a lot of deep math that was way beyond me at 15 going on 16. But knowing it made me more of a badass hacker ninja. Cause it was crypto, and crypto was big time hacker stuff. When I comprehended the one-way trap door function behind Diffie-Hellman I felt like I'd stolen a car and gone joyriding with the archetypal cool kids. More than that, I found that my knowledge was more hands-on than the CS students I encountered. I not only thought in code, but thought in networks. To this day networking and network protocols are completely natural to me, while otherwise very good programmers tend to gnash their teeth at the thought of implementing them. Also, for some reason this network experience translated right into multithreaded coding. Working with threads, even at a low level, with all the blocking and priority inversion issues, is no sweat. Network hacking made me comfortable with non-determinism. I highly doubt I'd know this without the challenge of hacking (sense 2). But wait, you say... why don't we just create a corewar-style game? Why can't schools have Defcon-style attack/defend tournaments. I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole. No rebellion, no interest. That would have been an "organized activity" put forward by adults. Blech. Honestly, a similar ethos got me interested in startups much later. Startups sort of felt rebellious in a way... like little scrappy hack-trepreneurs sticking it to the big guys. It was when startups popped their shirt collars and went all douchey and "mainstream" that I lost interest.