Can you please explain that statement with a car analogy?

It is not about affording private schools.

I am saying that the kind of person who would spend money to send a child to private school is also the kind of parent who is involved with their childs education at home. A school with involved parents can spend half as much as a school without involved parents and get far better results. And yes there are plenty of parents that can not afford a private school and care about their childs education and are involved in it. The point was to consider the parental involvement, not the money.

Children anywhere do better if their parents are involved in helping them learn and teaching them. They will do well in private school or public school.

Learning should start at home LONG before school. I don't mean formally sitting down and teaching 3 year olds to read. Most of them are not ready for it at that point. With our children, every day of life was a classroom for them. They hung out with us. I explained how things worked, answered questions. Read to them. Stopped movies while we were watching them and asked them questions about what was going on and explained what I thought was happening. My wife did this as well.

Though I did not graduate from high school (I had to drop out and get a job to help support my siblings) and my wife only had a high school diploma. We were both well read. My son had hearing problems which caused some speech issued when he was young. At 5 years old he tested out with the vocabulary of the average 10 year old. By the time he was 8 he tested out with the vocabulary of a first year college student. When we used a big word, we explained what it meant. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between a lightening bug and a lightening bolt. Sometimes the larger word is the right word for the job and my kids learned the right words.

It did not always help with them making friends. "I am afraid you have impressed upon me a speech pattern which will attract ridicule from my peer group." But my kids were always able to carry on a conversation with their friends parents.

From a parent who gets it. Tell your wife thank you.

Most kids need new parents. Or at least parents that care and take responsibility. Parents that read to their children, help them pick up the basics, teach good study habits and make sure their children do their homework, will have students who do well in any school.

If Johnny can not read, it is mom and dads job to teach Johnny or to find someone who can. For any parent who is literate, the fact that they can have a child hit middle school who cant read is a sign of laziness. You pay taxes so that your city will provide primary education for your child. However you cant just put a sandwich in a lunch bag and send them out the door every morning for 12 years and expect that someone who is paid to show up for 8 hours a day at a union job will do a better job at loving your child and teaching them than you will.

I have 3 adult children. I am a high school dropout. Most of their lives we lived at or near the poverty level. Two of my three kids manage to get scholarships that pay for 90% of all their college expenses. They were all students who received good grades. Sometimes it was a lot of work for us. If a kid has a different learning style than how a teacher teaches, it was up to us to turn the TV off and spend time with our offspring and help them to learn.

I have worked 10 hours, driven another hour home, and then sat down and helped one child with math and read to another child. Face it, teachers are like any other group. Only 10% of them graduated in the top 10% of their class. College only required them to be right 70% of the time. That is right. Your child may be taught by someone who gets 30% of the material wrong, and that is before they perform a poor job at communicating what they DO know.

Many private schools spend half as much as public schools do per student yet the children learn far better? Why is this? Maybe because someone who is taxed for public schools and then still ponies up money for a private insinuation cares enough about their child's education to be involved and make sure that the succeed no matter what.

if you care about your kids. it is YOUR job to make sure they know the things they need to know. Passing it off on someone else and then acting powerless when your child is in 3rd grade has problems and wringing your hands for the next 9 years that nothing can be done is a cop out.

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie said it best. Every OS Sucks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI

I think the fixed sized menu is useful. A good portion of the menu stays exactly where it was no matter what. We find things on the computer spatially. When I hit that "start" button. I pretty well know where things will be located.

The real problem there is the way many menus are laid out. Most linux desktops get it right. A menu should have less than 10 items on it.

Accessories
Graphics
Internet
Office
Programming
System
Utilities

Is a pretty good layout.

However, having the option to change it to behave to take up the available vertical real-estate and having it disabled by default would be a good thing.

We used to run the Norton Corporate product and we loved it. It is much lighter on system resources than the retail product. Corp 9, then Corp 10 then Corp 11.

Once we hit version 11 we had a problem. Every time it did a download and update, it would keep a copy of the older downloads and updates. Every 3 months our hard drive would run out of room. The solution a) wait for the patch to fix this for customers with this issue and b) uninstall the software from the server, reinstall it, and then manually every client back in. We would lose a full day every 3 months doing this. After more than a year of this and no patch forthcoming we switched products.

As it turns out there are other products that are even ligther on resources, as easy to administer and cost less as well. A 3 year license came to $18 a system. At the cost of $6 a year for a professional antivirus product, it was easy to make the switch.

I have to admit, that I am very pro-linux and very pro-google.

I still think there is a big difference between Google and Microsoft in this case. Microsoft tends to do things to create lock in wherever they can. Back then by doing things with HTML, addons, etc, to tie you to Windows. Now by having a signed boot loader that can only boot Windows 8 on the ARM platform. They play "open" where they have to, but play "lock in" and "monopoly" whenever they think they can get away with it. This means if they could kill off other browsers, they would. if it means making HTML a Microsoft product and a must have, while breaking the internet, they would.

Google has a different goal. The more stuff people do on line, the more likely they are to use Google services, and the more Google services they use, the more money Google makes. Google does not lock people in. If you want to leave google mail, hoock up to it via IMAP and copy your stuff out. You can opt out and go elsewhere when ever you want. Most people dont. Googles goal with web browsers is to make them such a powerful platform that google services run as well as native apps. So they work on their own browser, their improved javascript engine, a replacement for javascript. Why? Speed, everyone else is able to copy what they are doing and make their web browsers better. It does not matter in the long run if you use Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. If they improve so that the google experience is good, they are happy and they have "won".

With Google they want others to take advantage of their work with HTML, scripting and other web advancements. Please do so, on any platform you want, create your own dev tools. We will make it easy for you to use our standard. Versus Microsofts, only our implementation is standard, it only runs on our platform, you should only use our platform.

Setting up Arch Linux is not hard. The article at http://lifehacker.com/5680453/build-a-killer-customized-arch-linux-installation-and-learn-all-about-linux-in-the-process is particularly useful. I did not even need to refer to the guide. Just followed the instructions at LifeHacker and then used the Arch Wiki to configure and fine tune things from there. So yeah, I can do it. But I found a better way.

I now do my Arch setups by installing ArchBang. ArchBang is a riff on CrunchBang. As a live CD, it is Arch Linux with an OpenBox GUI, a Tint2 panel, system info shown in conky and some slick CrunchBang style GUI configuration tools for OpenBox. Now setting up an Arch Linux system takes about 15 minutes. That is all the time it takes run the installer. As part of the install you need to edit two files. In rc.conf you set your hostname. In pacman.d/mirrorlist, you need to move the mirrors in your country to the top of the file. That is it.

After 15 minutes of work, you have a completely working Arch Linux system with sound, X and a Window Manager with font smoothing all set up for you.

In addition to pacman they also include packer. Which is able to install all the standard packages that pacman does but is also able to perform installs from AUR using the same syntax as pacman.

Arch + Openbox + Packer = ArchBang