Near the city of Panama City, Florida, 14-year old high school student Dakota Gates has been incarcerated in juvenile detention for 21 days following his arrest because administrators of his school are afraid that he was planning to come to school one day and start shooting the place up. Their reason? A note he wrote in a cipher inspired by an anime series by himself and some of his friends. A 'school resource officer' (I guess that's what they're calling the armed guards these days) found the note, sounded the alarm, and picked out the weird kid of the school …

High school freshmen in Englewood, New Jersey will begin a puzzling new programme this fall, which will require them to pick their majors in college their freshman year, an act that will then dictate their primary classes and electives for the next four years. The programme was begun as an experimental effort to prop up falling test scores and help the students focus upon their eventual goals (aside from getting the hell out of high school, which is everyone's imperative at that age). Not all of the parents are convinced that it's a good idea, and that it smacks too …

It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network. They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's …