The grandparent is right though, many people here seem to be seriously bigoted against home schooling as if nothing good can come of it. I was homeschooled by non-religious parents because the local school system wasn't meeting my needs. School in many place has become more about warehousing a bunch of kids than actually trying to teach people anything.

Are people just jealous that their parents didn't let them skip out on all the mindless busywork they had to do at school, and let them actually learn as fast as they could?

How different are they compared to the regular geeky/nerdy kid in school? Are they not getting picked on and harassed as much as the other kids?

There are tons of resources and ways for homeschool students to get together to socialize. While I was homeschooling I didn't suddenly disappear and stop hanging out with the other kids living in my neighborhood. In addition to hanging out with people who lived near me, I met other homeschoolers from other parts of the city and state.

There are many homeschool groups in most states which offer classes, and ways for people to get to know one another. Not to mention one can participate community education classes, theater, or sports to meet others.

Perhaps there's some homeschoolers who just sit at home all day and never talk to peers, but that didn't seem to be the norm where I was from.

You're right that some do it to indoctrinate their kids in religion, but there's also a significant group of people who do it because the school system isn't meeting the needs of their kids. I was home schooled and have some experience with this. About half the people I met were being homeschooled for religious purposes, and the other half had genuinely concerned parents who didn't think the school system was meeting their needs. While I didn't spend too much time with the religious side the non-religious groups typically had motivated parents with higher degrees who took extra time to help their kids succeed.

There were also a handful of people out there who claim to homeschool and don't teach their kids anything. Those people always made me angry since they were doing their children a disservice by keeping them out of school. At least most states don't allow parents to get away with such neglect if properly reported.

Also just because someone is homeschooled in the US doesn't mean you'll avoid religious indoctrination. There are many private schools that parents can send their kids to to learn evolution is nothing more than a lie. As long as we allow private religious schools there will be no way to avoid the crazy.

Plus, in some parts of the US you might actually have to homeschool to teach real science such as evolution. Parts of Kansas and Texas have been trying to exclude that subject or add "intelligent design" to the curriculum for ages.

Charlie doesn't know what he's talking about. Most of the 2xx cards at this point should be GT21x chips which are based on the GT200 high end chip. The 9000/8000 series cards were all g9x or g8x architectures. Though I think at the low end they might have reused g92 as a G210 in the desktop segment.

I agree it would become inconvenient, but in general 99% of games probably will never require it. The big problem is that WoW items have real world value. People sell game items and gold on the black market, and there's real money to be made by hacking unsuspecting people and taking their stuff. Basically criminals are hacking into peoples accounts, stealing their virtual items and liquidating it all for gold, then stealing their in game gold and selling it to other players via black market sales.

Blizzard currently attempts to restore items from accounts which have been ransacked, but it takes a large number of man hours to go through all their logs and investigate all these hacking occurrences. They're looking to add this extra security as a way to significantly reduce the number of hacked accounts, and reduce their costs with investigating these issues.

So until other games on the PS3 and XBOX become big targets for hackers who are trying to make real world money, I don't think we'll see these authentication schemes on your console. There's really no value in stealing my PS3 trophies. The problem here is that criminals have found an easy and fairly lucrative target in trading WoW gold.

Blizzard does have several soft token schemes which don't require that you purchase a physical authenticator. There's an iPhone app you can get for free and use to do generate an access code. They also have apps for a few other phones available.

The only thing they don't offer is a PC application and this is intentional. Using a PC app means some virus/trojan could run your pc authenticator and capture the code which makes it decidedly less useful.

You seem to have totally misunderstood how the authenticators work. They are decidedly NOT USB dongles.

An authenticator is a changing key generator, which shows you a one time key when you hit a display button. You then type this key in after entering your username and password to log onto the game. This is very similar to the RSA SecurID token my work requires I use to log onto a our VPN.

Basically the keyfob contains a psuedo random number generator which generates a new key every few seconds. The authenticating server knows the original seed, and can figure out the currently "valid" number shown on the key. Since each code is only valid for about 30 seconds, this makes is significantly harder to hack the account.

In fact this system is more secure than any system my bank uses, as very few banks in the US even give you the option of using a system like this.

Probably because someone at Microsoft or Intel decided multihead was an important feature and worked around the hardware bug on Windows. (Intel would have to or people might realize Intel graphics chips suck compared to integrated NVIDIA or AMD, and Microsoft might 'cause people would probably blame Windows for Intel's graphics failure).

My guess is that on the Linux side someone coded the driver to some spec and no one bothered to actually implement a usable work around. Just 'cause Intel's driver is open source doesn't mean that it's always going to be better. (Maybe they have fixed this now, but I'm not that familiar with 945 chipset Linux support.)

The problem for me isn't that they have ETF fees, in fact given most phones have a subsidy I under stand that. My problem is that you cannot sign a contract without an ETF even if you provide your own phone. On top of that if you buy a phone without a subsidy it's not like you can negotiate a service discount with Verizon. You pay the same amount in either case and that's not really fair.

If Verizon actually cared about the customer they would offer a choice of the following two plan options.

1. Subsidized phone, contract, and ETF. You pay for you phone over the life of your contract, basically you're leasing the phone.

2. Unsubsidized phone, no contract, no ETF, discounted plan rate. You buy the phone outright since you paid full price for it you should save the difference between the price you paid and the subsidized price over the same length of time as the contract from option 1.

In fact at one point I was going to sign up for a plan with Verizon and bring my own phone, but even if I didn't get a new phone from them to setup new service I had to agree to a 1 year contract which included an ETF. There was NO way to avoid the contract.

This entire subsidy and ETF thing on your phone reminds me of old MA Bell. Before the original AT&T got broken up due to being a monopoly it wasn't actually possible for you to buy a telephone. You HAD to lease the phone from the phone company, and the phone company owned your phone. You basically got whatever phone Ma Bell wanted you to have. Cellphone companies are in that position now. While they say you "buy" your phone, you're really leasing it with no option to truly own it. If these companies were forced to offer a choice of phones, and didn't have these crazy contracts to hide behind I'm sure the cost of cellphone handsets would drop along through real competition.

I believe drivers actually have some optimizing compilers built in for the various intermediate shader languages which get run and spit out actual GPU bytecode. To make the driver useful they'd have to open source their compiler as well and maybe they have some great optimization techniques that AMD or Intel might rip off if they could. It's not like Intel's open source their C/C++ compiler on Linux. How is this any different?

At least NVIDIA's not hindering the Nouveau project.

Which is why this isn't currently targeted at the gaming market (though there is some startup doing "streaming" games, I forget their name but you can play crysis!). The target here is for tasks which used to be sent off to render farms for a day or two and would return a half dozen high resolution pictures. Previously the architect had to anticipate all the possible views/angles that their clients wanted to see.

Now you can get the same high quality ray-traced graphics in almost real time which allows the architect to change the view, lighting, etc based on the clients feedback. Heck you could even just give a pointer to your client and let them play around with in their "virtual" building without requiring them sit at your office.

The other option is to go buy a bunch of NVIDIA quadroplex boards and setup your own render machine, but now you're tied to showing everything off to people in person, on your one machine.

I assume it's "in the cloud" for the same reason people outsource other tasks. The architect doesn't need to invest in the hardware/software platform and a render farm. Instead they contract the work out and don't need to worry about the technical details. This is not much different than what many people do today only instead of getting some static images back they get an interactive utility.

I think it's more that there's no competitive advantage in releasing the drivers. You're absolutely right in saying that AMD's closed source firegl drivers are terrible on Linux, so were Intel's closed source drivers when they still had them. AMD/Intel don't invest much in their closed source driver and it shows. For them releasing their specs and letting the community do all the hard lifting is a big win.

NVIDIA's driver support on the other hand is much, much better. Stuff actually tends to "just work" out of the box compared to the competition. For them releasing their "good" driver open source would only help their competition develop a better driver.

Having a driver with excellent OpenGL support on Linux is one thing which helps drive most Linux workstation sales to NVIDIA. The Engineers which need to run apps like Autocad and don't even bother with Intel even though their driver is open source. All they care about is that support for the apps they need is rock solid. Given the cost of those workstation class cards I'm sure NVIDIA's focus is on that market and the consumer Linux market is probably secondary.

Opening up their driver just so someone who's running a 10 year old graphics card which they don't sell anymore doesn't make good business sense. AMD would probably still have closed drivers as well if they didn't have anything to lose. Also is there even support available for AMD's new 58xx series in Linux? I don't think they've publicly released the specs for their latest and greatest chips yet.

I agree that's the fundamental philosophy behind unschooling but except in a few cases most students won't be able to see the big picture. It's very easy when pursuing ones passion to be come TOO focused and miss the big picture and that's where I think a parent can really "drive" their child's education. But I don't mean that the parents sit down and say you're taking this boring algebra class you don't see a point to because you'll need it later.

From my example the theater majors I knew really just wanted to spend all their time just working on acting skills. To help them do that their parents setup a theater group so their students had an outlet for doing plays. But many of the students only wanted to focus on the acting part because they had to manage a their own theater they got exposed to other aspects of the field. They learn many more useful skills that they would have missed if they had just acted in a few plays, and they enjoyed doing it since the other subjects came up as part of doing what they love to do.

Even if you have a true love of learning it always helps to have a mentor who can give you some guidance.