Alex Payne, in a widely-linked article, wrote today that:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

As far as I can tell, Apple never intended for young Alex Payne to access the Mac’s startup sound any more than they intend for a future programmer to hack an iPad’s filesystem and do some tinkering of his own tomorrow. Sure it’s harder with DRM and encryption, but we’re united by the internet these days, and breaking those walls down has become a group effort. No young hacker today has to learn alone. We change with the territory and so nothing has really changed at all.