I guess you have not been looking at any reviews for the 7000 series then. The 7000 series cards are not winning on performance/watt except on OpenCL now, but are better for the performance/cost in every level. Check out Toms Hardware Best Graphics Card for the Money for this month, and pretty much the past couple of years, and AMD comes out on top in almost every category. Also, there are generally no Radeon specific features such as PhysX, but that is because Nvidia owns PhysX. And, as far as absolute performance in all categories except the very top ($400 plus range), AMD quite often is higher than Nvidia. Compare the Radeon 7850 to the similarly priced and recently release 650 ti. Take off your green colored glasses and take a look at what the current video card situation is.

As ericloewe said, AMD is more than competitive in the discrete card market. If you check out the tomshardware.com best buy for the price range for video cards, almost every month AMD cards dominate. For example, take a look at the recent 650ti launch for Nvidia. It came out at a price of $150, while the Radeon 1GB 7850 is currently at $160, about 7% more, but has roughly a 15-20% performance increase. The reason Nvidia is ahead is first that there is a perception of being better made by fan boys, and also, that Nvidia throws a LOT of money at developers to make games "Made for Nvidia" (I don't remember the exact phrase actually), which includes PhysX. I have met quite a few people that for no good reason refuse to buy AMD/ATI cards, but slavishly get Nvidia, even when they would be better off financially and performance wise with an AMD. And, AMD is normally many months ahead in releasing next gen cards. CPU wise, especially with their APU's for low end machines, they are also very competitive for a light gaming machine. Their latest APU was about twice as fast in games with better game support than the Intel HD 4000 on a core i7. CPU heavy things, the Intel chips were faster. However, I know a few people with laptops with the AMD A8 APU's, and they do not notice any everyday lag, and they can game on a laptop that has discrete video card performance in a $500-600 laptop.

As a person with Celiac Disease, which by the way is not an allergy, but an auto immune reation to gluten in the villi in the small intesting, I certainly do not wish ill will or accomodation from any place that is not gluten free friendly, I just don't give them my business.

I would like to disagree with the premise that not learning math facts is not important. As a person who has taught College Algebra to many adult non-traditional plus traditional students, I saw a very large correlation between those that did well and those that had the basic math facts down. The problem is that they may get the algebraic concepts without a problem, but get hung up on the arithmetic, and therefore still do not get problems correct. I know it is a correlation, not a causation, but at least from my observations the fundamentals and knowing the tables are important.

I think part of the problem also is the ridiculous requirements put into textbooks by some of the states. Some locales have required multiculturalism parts of classes, even something like elementary school math, which should be pretty much a fact based class.

I live in Illinois, and I know my children's books are not up to the level of what I had 30 years ago. The books seem scatter brained with forced examples of what the states want put into the books. Also, the forced lack of focus on the fundamentals has gone a long way towards lowering the ability of students from the US to compete in a global academic environment, especially in the sciences and computer fields. Another item is what is wrong with timed drills, and letting students know that the world is not equal and that some people are better and faster in math than others. Welcome to the real world! I am not saying advertise who is the best, but don't stop doing timed tests and drills because some helicopter parent is complaining that their snowflake did not get the highest possible score. A friend of mine is a former principal at an elementary school, and he said that the biggest number of complaints he had were from parents who thought that it was traumatic for their children to not be able to complete timed math fundamentals tests.

Yes, the textbook manufacturers are sleazy and always trying to sell the new latest greatest edition, but don't forget some of the ever changing junk they have to put in to make the politicians happy in the big states (thank-you California and Texas). Let the experts decide what needs to be in an effective textbook, not the politicians.

I know that CDMA is an older standard, however, from what I remember it has always had better voice quality and tower transfers than GSM.

The one big advantage of GSM is the use of SIM cards, and that simultaneous voice and data were possible. CDMA also has better spectral efficiency than TDMA used by GSM. Check out Wikipedia's article on it and look at the efficiency of the latest CDMA vs GSM standard.

Don't act like the carriers stuck with CDMA to be dinosaurs. It actually was , at least for voice users, the better technology.

The problem with a 4k screen is not the price, it is the usefullness of it. There are charts out there that show the limits of our vision at different distances. A 4k screen would have to be huge to have a noticable difference in clarity at 3m for most people. I lookup up on Wikipedia the optimal viewing distances are for a 1080p screen, and for a 55" like listed above, the optimal viewing distance for 1080p (limited by human eye resolution) is 2-5m. For a 4k screen, it would have to be closer, and there was also noted in that article a mention that being too close to big screens can cause motion sickness.

I think for most people, a 4k screen is way overkill unless you have a HUGE (I would say 100" or above) screen.

I live in Illinois, and we have zero in the way of education as a second career without getting a full education degree (my BS is Electrical Engineering, and started grad school for Secondary Ed. Physics and Math). I have been teaching basic networking, college algebra, and intro to stats for over 10 years at a couple of small tech colleges, in addition to other systems admin work. I know more about applied math, physics and computers than any teacher in my relatively small district, yet, I can't teach.

When I left grad school due ot personal issues with less than two semesters left. I needed one methods class for teaching, 6-7 (don't remember exactly) classes on history of education and Ed Psych, three 3rd world cultures classes, biology, poetry, American and Illinois Government (yes, the exact same tests I took in High School, but I need to take a class on it anyway) and I don't remember what else. By the time I was done, if everything was done as an undergrad, I would have had a BS in EE, Math, and one class away from a Physics degree too. Yet, Illinois says no way.

Until education requirements are less politicized (and I realize Illinois is one of the worse in that category) and truly qualified people can teach without the BS, you will not really get the best teaching.

One last thing, we really need to get back to fundamentals. Drill drill drill on math, make sure they can write a sentance, paragraph and have an organized thought. Calculators are not needed until you get to roots, exponents, logs, and trig functions. Make the kids have the basics memorized and MAKE THEM THINK AND ORGANIZE!!

My first computer was a Tandy 1000EX (then a 1000TX, 286, yeah baby). I got an expanded memory card for my 1000TX all the way up to1.5MB total RAM. Setup a RAM drive on the memory card and wrote a batch file to copy the OS and commonly used utilites to the RAM drive, then set the COMSPEC to it. Was really useful until I got a hard rive. I was working at Radio Shack at the time and made full use of my measly employee discount.

I sorta miss the days off Plug'n'Pray ISA cards (normally just manually set them anyway, as it never seemed to work). My experience with DOS 1.0 was on my uncles Zenith computer. I remember DOS 2.x needed the hard drive driver loaded to work off a hard drive. I used every version of MS-DOS from 2.11 on up. I hated the built in compression, in the later versions, too flaky. Version 5 and 6.22 were my favorites.

I live in a small town in rural Illinois. I have cell, but service stinks in town due to being close to a boundary between two different providers (the small family owned one goes nutsy whenever the big company signal hits their turf). There is only one provider that has good service in my town. I have a phone through the cable company, which sounds good and has a lot of features, but has an unacceptable amount of down time (we have some medical problems that make it so that we need something reliable). What is left, PSTN through the phone company. The only time we have lost access, it was only long distance when a contractor cut a fiber line. Until broadband reliability is in the many 9's category like PSTN, I want to keep it.The entirety of the US is not big cities, there is a lot of middle of nowhere with a decent amount of population also, and, along with that, unreliable wireless and broadband infrastructure.

My first e-mail account was a fido-net based through a local bbs in the town I went to college in. This was in 1988 I believe. My first real Internet e-mail address was a prodigy address a couple of years later.