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Amen.

"Slashdot is not an appropriate venue to unleash your bitterness."

WTF? Seriously? Man, a decade of frequenting /. and I think I've completely misinterpreted the whole thing.

"...and besides what kind of situation in the real world are you thrown together with 20 or so of your same age people?"

Very nice. I hadn't thought of that particular aspect of the 'socialization' argument. I can finally rest easy that my dismissal of that argument is justified. Thank you.

Pros: your kid may fare better with homeschooling because (may, not will)

1. Public school classes can only go as fast as the slowest kid. Not so at home. Your kid won't be bored because things aren't moving fast enough to keep their interest. Engagement = better learning
2. You don't have to put up with your kid struggling with the latest bureaucratic nonsense du juor handed down from on high for the education system. You can customize how you teach to your kid's particular mental processes to maximize uptake and understanding.
3. Because of #2 you have some extra room for teaching things that the school system doesn't have time, money, room, teachers, or interest in teaching.

Cons: your kid (and you) may fare worse with homeschooling because

1. Teaching is not a job, it is a personality type. Like "artist" or "engineer". If you are not a teacher you will find homeshooling a miserable experience. Your kid probably doesn't think like you and you don't understand each other's thought processes so explaining new concepts in a way they understand is an exercise in frustration. That's what teachers are good at - figuring out what the mind in front of them needs and adapting to it. If you aren't a teacher, it won't work.
2. While being a teacher isn't just a job, teaching is. A full time job. Don't kid yourself. If you homeschool you are committing to a full time job in your own home for no pay. If you intend to do it right, that is.
3. Homeshcooling requires commitment and fortitude on your part. You cannot half-ass it and expect a good outcome. You are talking about twelve freakin years of near-daily hard work for a kid that won't appreciate how hard it is on you. It will test your patience, stamina, creativity, sanity, and resolve. Be warned.


Could go either way:
1. No schedule. There's a lot of freedom in that. But then there is also a lot of freedom in knowing all your hellions will be out of your hair six hours a day for most of the week if they go to public/private school.
2. State requirements. Some are pretty onerous. It can get expensive. Some are so lax it's ridiculous and its easy to get complacent and slack off your teaching duties.
3. Higher education. Acceptance of homeschool education in universities is all over the map. Some are favorable, some are out-right hostile. Choosing a post-secondary path is a nightmare to try to negotiate at this point, but there's good stuff out there and its getting better. So, you know. There's that.

I stopped there. I just know when I install that software the first thing I will see is not some pretty graphic showing the complex relationship between websites but a simple statement in flashing letters:

And that is why malware propagates. Idiot.

A company wants to operate a radio station to make money?! Holy sh*t, this MUST be stopped!

No, not you Clear Channel.

Didn't mean you Entercom.

Of course not you, CBS.

You're fine, Cumulus.

...

Microsoft Security Essentials It's pretty heavy to install on a limited machine, but once you get it going you don't notice the performance hit and it's as good as any out there. Before MSE came along I recommended F-Prot. It is a subscription, but nothing I found could touch it on an old slow machine for low overhead AND effectiveness.

So since the 5th doesn't solve every problem, only one, then it has no value and should be thrown out?

Let me stop you right there. It could be argued that judges are, as a group, above average intelligence (*citation needed) and would understand this. The problem is that we all get trials by a jury of our idiot peers, who are by definition at least 50% below average intelligence. If we're tried by an bunch of intelligent, competent, fair persons then sure, make 'em talk. The problem is that we're being tried by a bunch of common people ("A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.") in circuses presided over by the most reviled members of our society (lawyers) and the ones of that cabal who fought their way to the top (judges).

In that environment, I'd like the right to keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.

Amen. I haven't stepped foot on a plane in many years now. Amtrak picks me up in my home town, drops me off on the other side of the continent within a mile or two of where I want to go. Not once do I have to deal trying to get through a "security" checkpoint while trying feverishly to make sure I don't lose my kid, my bag, or my liberty, or all of the above. Like a victim of abuse, the first few times I traveled without the constant harassment I felt completely disoriented, waiting for the hand I didn't see to knock me down; I just knew the blows were coming at some point. That's just they way it is, right? Now, traveling is relaxing and enjoyable once again. I'd forgotten what it was like.

FYI, Amtrak has a pretty sweet rewards system; I haven't paid for cross-country travel since I left the airlines. Our family runs all our expenses through a Chase card that we pay off at the end of the month & earn Amtrak points (yes, I know, bad for the credit rating) and when shopping online - especially for work - I use vendors that offer Amtrak points on purchases (click-through referrals from the Amtrak site), many times multiple points per $. Google "amtrak guest rewards".

Plenty of time for exposure to tech. At 6 months that kid's brain has only just now figured out the difference between sounds and colors. She's so interested in that tablet because every time that a notification dings and causes a popup she hears butterfly pudding and tastes blue sandpaper. She's been in a perpetual state of synesthesia while her brain tries to figure out what the heck is going on and that tablet is a source of all kinds of weirdness. She's not "interested" in tablets, she's trippin' balls.

And she still needs to figure out how the world works. Experiments show that children that young can have an intuitive grasp of physical laws, like how gravity works. That kid needs training in the real, 3D world, not the fantastic, inconsistent, 2D world in a tablet. Not to mention the emotional training that can only come from other ugly bags of mostly water.

Thanks for the replies. Saved me a couple 'learn the hard way' episodes.

1) Disconnect issue - I kind of had it in my head the X over SSH was for doing things I wasn't afraid to loose & was going right to the console for permanent system-wide changes. Good to know I had a reason for doing that.

2) Speed - My servers and I reside in the sticks of Arkansas. There is no such thing as "slow" here. It's all "normal" and "wow!" to us, so this one is kind of a non-issue for me. (To give you an example of the situation: some guy dug up one cable and 4 counties in NE Arkansas lost all connection to the outside world: cell phones, land lines, internet, everything. We were like Syria for about 8 hrs. Not that anyone but us noticed.)

3) DXPC - Nice. I'll make that next on my list of things to try.

I'm just now getting around to exploring remote admin options. I just recently discovered the joy of X over SSH and decided to be done with VNC. Now I see this...why would I use Splashtop instead of X over SSH?

Not a challenge, a request for info.

Mandrake > SUSE > Knoppix > DSL > CentOS > Ubuntu I'd try it, get dicouraged & quit for 6 months, try again, get discouraged & quit for 6 months...been doing this for just over a decade. Guess I'm one of those people waiting for the desktop to mature. I finally like Linux enough that I feel like if you took away Win & Mac I'd be fine with that.

I'm sick of hearing people getting pooh-pooh'd because there is a "lack of published science to explain the claimed effect". So what? Take a look at the documentation of the vast majority of the drugs you are popping into your piehole. You know what the most common phrase you will find in that stack of information is? "The mechanism of action is unknown." or something similar. Just because no one can explain how it works doesn't mean that it doesn't work. Wait for them to fall on their face before you start kicking them.