And if it were something so bad I would have a problem with it, yes I would rather that shit be traced to someone else's IP.

I would most likely just have no problem with the hot site being visited at home.

I seem to be one of the few here who does not object to monitoring and key-logging software. Although I think key-logging is overkill (a logging proxy is my preferred solution) I think software monitors offer a good compromise. More than once a parent has come to me wanting me to install internet filters or netnanny type software and I convinced them to go with a logging solution instead. (Again, I didn't use key-loggers, just proxy loggers, so the parent knew exactly what sites the child went to online, but not what they did there.) I do not think this greatly erodes trust if the parent tells the child it is happening. A simple conversation about it is enough, and simply letting the child know, "hey, there is a logger set up so I can know what sites you are going to if I want to, I'm not going to be looking at every site you go to, but if I get worried about something I can go back through the logs." is not a huge deal, especially if it is done while the child is young. Springing it on a child WITHOUT telling them could cause some problems. I'm not as sure I agree with this solution for much older children, as I think a 16 year old would have a problem if such a plan were suddenly implemented (unless, perhaps, it goes along with first computer in the bedroom or another increase in privileges so can be seen not as reducing their rights, but expanding them less.)

Well, I count my laptop under "loved ones" so that helps.

I like these better. They actually give you the feeling of making a circuit board and make it much easier to visualize what is going on in the project. I got one for a 9 year old nephew, and his almost 6 year old brother has made over 60 of the projects. (You can buy these things at other locations than the link I posted, I just posted the first one I could find.)

I don't know the limit of efficiency that this new engine design will deliver, but at any sane value this does not solve our biggest problem here in the United States (and probably other nations as well.)

Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.

In the best of circumstances this would be worrying, depending on close allies for your ability to survive is harrowing, but sustainable. We are not in the best of circumstances, The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies, but nations with populaces that are predominantly anti-US. At any time the structure in these countries could break down and we could find ourselves at war with them. This would be a war that even if we win could destroy us as a nation. If we conserve all our fuel resources for the War effort, which we would have to do if we want to win with conventional weapons, we would find ourselves bereft of fuel and the fuel production infrastructure itself most likely in shambles due to the war. Our way of life would be over just as surely as if we had been conquered by a foreign power.

We need to switch to electric not because it is more efficient (although it is) not because it will create jobs (though it will) not because it can be more environmentally sound (although it could be); we need to switch to electrical power because it keeps our vital infrastructure requirements in our own hands. It is a matter of national security, no nation can prosper if it id dependent on unfriendly nations for its very survival.

I have volunteered at my local library's booksale many times. We know that we can make more money selling online. Many of the books we have available for $1 we already know we could sell to Amazon for $10. We sell our books for $1 because we think people who can't (or even people who won't) buy books for $10 should still be able to own books.

The people who go through the library sales with scanners are basically equivalent to people going to a food-bank, getting food items, then selling them for profit.

Forthermore, they tend to be some of our rudest customers. They grab a book of a shelf, scan it, and move onto the next book, often sorting books into two piles, one pile for the books they want, another (larger) pile for the books they don't. They often do not pick back up the pile they do not want.

There are other booksellers who come in we mind less. They buy all the books for $1 each, and scan them at home, sell the expensive ones and return the ones they do not want to the library for a sale. Yes, they are still preventing others from getting the best of the books for a price, but they are quite willing to "donate" the cost of the books they do not buy.

Our library has had the no electronic devices sign up for three years now, and every year someone tries to sneak one in. They hide them in purses, pockets, anywhere they can. They do not care about other people's rules. They do not care when we explain to them what we are doing that people are able to get good books at low prices. All they care about is their own profits. They truly are scum.

You can purchase some really high end equipment to manage multiple monitors on a videowall, but you shouldn't. Use standard PC level hardware (or lower end rackmount depending on space requirements) with no more than two display cards each. Drive all your monitors separately then tie them together with Synnergy. You can still administer them all from a single workstation, fairly seamlessly, but you don't have a single point of failure, and you've probably saved hundreds of dollars. The videowall systems can also run some light duty servers especially system monitoring. (I like Xymon over Nagios, but it depends on what you want to do with it.)

So far as the monitors themselves, purchase flat-panel HDTV's. They are likely to be cheaper than similarly sized monitors, and you won't want greater resolution than an HDTV can handle for a video wall anyway. This gives you the added benefit of being able to tie in training videos, or third shift entertainment on to one or more screens if needed. Also, if one of your videowall servers goes down right before clients come to view the installation, you can quickly switch those monitors over to CNN, CNBC or another relevant channel.

The workstation tables should be glass or some other surface that can support either dry erase or grease-pen writing. Being able do simple notes on your desk will reduce scratch paper usage and make maximum use of available areas. Glass cubicle walls will cut down on noise like a cubicle would, but does not give as much of the feeling of being in a box as standard cubicles. They allow unobstructed view of the video-wall and you can write on them with grease pens.

Have more workstations than you need, and do not tie people their workstations. If someone wants to claim one that is fine, but some people will really like being able to log off, walk across the room, and log back on. This will also allow you to bring in off-shift workers when shit hits the fan.

As a security measure, get a dot-matrix printer on your firewall. Feed tail -f /var/log/authlog directly to it. If anyone gets in that shouldn't they will NOT be able to erase their tracks.

Put in a breakroom or break area that still has a view of the common videowall. When your people are taking a break during downtime, they should still be able to see if it is suddenly no longer downtime.

For the love of God (and your staff) put in a drink fridge or soda fountain and a coffee pot.

In Tennessee many of the state colleges are under a single authority called the Tennessee Board of Regents. The board a few years back instituted an online program called, quite imaginatively, the Regents Online Degree Program, or RODP.

You will have much LESS of the problems you were mentioning at such a school, since the regents do not wish to water down the name of every member school. Furthermore, if you enroll in any member school, you can take as many online classes as you want, so the thing to do would be to enroll in the physical school, talk in real life to professors to get department approval to skip the low level classes and enter the higher level classes directly. This will NOT save you time, as you will still need the same number of hours to graduate, but it WILL make it so you are learning more while they are siphoning money away from you.

The only problem is that the only Board of Regents school I ever attended, MTSU, has a really crappy CS department. (I literally had a professor tell me my Linux box was not possible in the late 90's)

If you can find a similar situation elsewhere, or if one of the other TBR has a better computer program, it would be a good thing to look into.

I'm already seeing all the BS going on about how a class-action lawsuit only helps the lawyers at the expense of the plaintiffs. I do not know if this is usually the case or not, but the only Class-Action lawsuit I have ever been a part of, (interestingly against apple) resulted in a solution that I found quite suitable for the offense.

I didn't get a dime, but I didn't want one. I wanted the system I paid for to work. I got a box in the mail with express shipping paid for me to ship my laptop back to Apple. Apple replaced my defective motherboard, and shipped my computer back. All at no charge to me. I did not even pay shipping either direction.

I bought a product that didn't work as it should. I signed up on the Class-Action, I got a product that worked as it should.

BUT LAWYERS ARE TEH EVILZ! CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS ARE ABOUT LINING TEH LAWYERZ POCKETS NOT GETTING ANYTHING TO THE PLAINTIFF!

I chose "waving hands in the air" but that is not QUITE what I want to see. I want to see full-body control. The first generation of this idea would be a combination of a wiimote and a DDR pad. Hand and foot positioning together working to control the system.

Second step I would like to see would be motion sensors that could strap to forearms, shins, and the continued use of a wiimote type device or a glove.

Third gen would simply be a camera attached to the console that monitors your movement.

Full motion video games would first of all just be awesome. In a third person or first person adventure game, being able to defeat the orcs by actually dodging when they attack, then quickly coming back with a kick or thrust would be amazing. Being able to "throw" a baseball, and have the computer work out my body mechanics to see how likely the batter is to hit it would be wonderful. Being able to "push" my armies around the screen in a war simulator would make me happy. Having video games provide a way to be less sedentary, more active, and still entertain could save many lives.

I think if they worked, such game systems would be extremely popular. The existing games and game systems that go for an approximation of emersive reality have all been wild successes. From Duck hunt, to DDR to Rock Band to the Wii phenomenon. All we need is for some company to take this to the next level.

Did they test those same kids for computer literacy before and after they got computers in their homes?

Computer literacy is an important skill. In today's world it is possibly more important than elementary math or spelling, as it to a large extent can substitute for either skill.

Trying to get entry level pseudo professional jobs, computer literacy is more important than the difference between a diploma and a GED. It is more important than how quickly you can add, subtract, multiply or divide. It is more important than your ability to analyze literature.

So my question is, on these important tests that the student did poorly in, did they test computer literacy? If their literacy went up 300% and they had a fairly minor drop in other scores, having the computer are getting them much more prepared for their futures than not having them would have.

So you say that after leaving high school people use a pen for almost nothing, then in the same breath say that we should teach more penmanship? Really? We should focus MORE on the skills that are least likely to be used in any professional setting? Penmanship is on the decline for the same reason that horsemanship has greatly declined in the last three hundred years. It isn't as needed anymore.

Today, if you want to do well in the real world, you don't need to know how to ride a horse, you need to learn how to drive a car. Today if you want to do well in the real world you don't need to study penmanship, you need to learn to type.

Get rid of cursive writing in the third grade (or second or whenever your school system teaches it) and teach touch-typing instead. Let high schools teach cursive as an elective. Don't teach something just because of tradition. Look at the real world and figure out what the value of what your teaching is. If something has more value than another, teach the more valuable lesson first. Then do the other lesson if you have time.

Hmm, either you made an absolutely wonderful analogy, or you just proved you don't understand two different areas of medical science.

Acupuncture has been shown to effective for the treatment of pain. It would be effective in mitigating the pain associated with everything from cancer to cuts and scrapes. It would not, however, treat the root causes. If you were using acupuncture as an example of "junk" medicine that really doesn't work, you fail. On the other hand, if you were using it as an example of something that seems like it would be counterproductive, but actually works for treatment of some conditions, you've hit a home run.

Almost all ADHD drugs are stimulant medication. If you give them to someone who doesn't have ADD/ADHD you will see an increase in hyperactivity, decrease in attention control and a the subject might get a mild sence of euphoria (but only if to much was given).

But in an ADHD patient, the stimulant medication have a CALMING effect. This is strikingly counterintuitive, yet is real double-blind tested science. (Acupuncture, by its nature cannot be tested with a double blind test, so the evidence for its effectiveness might be slightly less conclusive.)

However, from your last paragraph, I'm guessing you understand NEITHER aspects of medical science. Sadly, not understanding something does not make it any less true. You were blessed with sons with "easy" personalities. Congratulations, your sons probably do not have ADD. This is not a result of your parenting methods, it is a result of your genetics. Some people have ADD, for some of these children medication is required so that they CAN learn not to "stand up, escape, run out of the room, [or] throw a random object."

Asking people with diagnosed medical conditions to stop taking their medication, or worse, asking people who's CHILDREN have diagnosed medical conditions to stop treatment because you do not understand the mechanism of the condition or treatment is irresponsible. When penicillin was first discovered, there was a small amount of backlash against it. People claimed that the old folk treatments were more effective, and that the penicillin craze was caused by manufacturers wanting to make more money off an injection. Indeed, the very notion of an injection was, at one time, considered barbarous. Yet again and again controlled, scientific studies show the same results: acupuncture is effective in the mitigation of pain, Ritalin is effective in the treatment of ADD and ADHD, antibiotics are effective in the treatment of bacterial infections. Refusing your child any of the three of these, if he or she has been properly diagnosed with a condition for which they are the most appropriate treatment, should be considered child abuse. Giving any of these to your child if he or she does not have the condition for which they are appropriate treatment is likewise abusive.

Okay, I see, you're a bit harsher than I am, but not as bad as it looked to begin with.