and how pointless parental controls are if the kid is a geek.

I'm coaching my kid's school on how to teach parents to sue parental controls, web filtering... blah blah. I was doing some reading and just learned how simple it is to take over someone's computer if you have physical access to it.

On a Mac, hold down command-S after the chime and you get to a command line with root user privileges. From there you can change root password or create another admin user account which you can hide... etc. etc. I can't believe I didn't know that.

There is a partial fix for that by adding a "firmware password." http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1352

I just can't believe I didn't know that.

Shai