http://thenextweb.com/apple/files/2010/09/mac01.jpg This explains it well. :lol: Edit: *Sigh*. No resize plugin on the board? Seriously?

Click the 'report' button. It's at the top right corner of every post and looks like this: This should alert all admins, moderators, etc.

Windows products aren't crappy; you just have to learn how to use what you've bought, and treat your product well. Sure, if you have a Windows laptop, the laptop will eventually have problems if you don't use it well. You need an antivirus (which is free), and you need to do a fifteen to thirty-minute defrag every month or so. The plus with a Windows computer is that you can always get it repaired. There will, 100% of the time, be people in your area who can repair whatever problem there is. You can even build your own desktop - all it takes is a bit of research and the intelligence to be able to put together a Lego set. Macs are good, but, in my experience, they are either un-necessary and useless (the iPad), or they're over-priced for their specs and programs (Mac). Either that, or they break within two or three years, and they have very bad quality (iPod). Steve Jobs has awful business practices that are made to screw the consumer, such as making the fourth generation iPod Touch have a worse resolution camera than the iPhone, even though it could easily be given a better one. He also purposefully made it so the iPod Touch lacked a camera for three generations of it in a row, and there are some features that are obviously not included that could be (like an FM radio tuner), that he just doesn't put in because he wants to add it in in a different generation, so people will upgrade. I love my iPod, yes, but I despise Steve Jobs and his business practices. While iPods have a ton of functionality, they aren't well-made, and I dislike that a lot. Plus, the Apple stores (unless this has been changed recently) can't repair a Mac if it's having hardware problems. I'm not even sure if there is an option to be able to replace hardware; they may just tell you to buy a new computer if there are any problems. I do know, however, that you can't upgrade a Mac PC. You can't add more memory, a better graphics card, etc., later on - they make you buy a new Mac. This, IMO, is a shady business practice, and one of the many reasons why I refuse to buy Macs. The iPad is like an upgraded iPod Touch, with more memory and a lot more functionality, since you can do more on the larger screen. The iPad is a really nice toy, IMO, but even Netbooks can do more. If you want an over-priced toy, get the iPad; if you want something good (again, in my opinion), a $700-or-so laptop would do you. Even a $500 refurb is better than the iPad. I think the iPad is about the size of the Kindle DX, but I'm unsure. I know it's heavier, and it seems like it would be really annoying and awkward to carry around. DS's are about $130 on Amazon, so it would be something good for your children over a longish period of time (birthdays, Christmases, etc.), instead of getting all of you children who are old enough to use a DS at the exact same time. If you want a nice, portable device, where you can play games, use apps, web browse, etcetera, I'd just get an iPod Touch. They're cheaper than an iPad (Marginally), and seem to fit your needs pretty well. I'd still recommend an actual computer, as computers are much more versatile. A laptop can play games, browse the web, watch movies, write whatever you feel like, etcetera, so it seems to me like you would be getting more for your dollar than an iPad or a Mac. Of course (since you've stated you already have a laptop), you could get a netbook and carry that around with you. It wouldn't play games (I don't think; it may be able to play a gameboy advance ROM or something), but you could browse the web, plan for school, and apparently watch movies with one. They don't have disc drives, so you'd need an attachment; I'm not quite sure how annoying that would be. If you want to watch DVDs or something, netbooks wouldn't be great, though. If you've got a Netflix subscription, a netbook could probably run their streaming, but I've never tried. I don't think they have optical drives, so I'm not sure about the quality of the image. I hope my post helps.

I've learned to only listen to people's opinions about me if they know me or my family very well. Otherwise, they're probably not worth listening to, since they don't know you all that well anyway, right? As far as things like critical thinking, you'd be a bad teacher to NOT teach your children that. If people talk to you about it, just change the subject or ignore them; it's obviously horrible advice, so why even think about taking it?

As far as Christian music goes, I mostly listen to Skillet (Christian metal/rock), Thousand Foot Krutch (Christian rock/maybe nu metal?), Lecrae, Trip Lee, Tedashii, Sho Baraka, Da TRUTH, Cross Movement, Tobymac, PRO, and Flame (Christian rap). As far as the gigantic amount of Christian rap in that list, you can blame my Wikipedia-ing (as well as visiting Reach Record's website). I'm probably wasting my time, but it's interesting!

Just pictures and descriptions of what you and your family is up to? Get a Twitter.

Only get an iPad if you need a toy, and not a functional machine that doesn't suck. They can't multitask, they have an incredibly low amount of memory and functionality, you have to buy a real keyboard attachment for it because the 'virtual keyboard' on it sucks to the point where Apple actually made one, and everything on it you have to buy from the Apple Store. If you jailbreak it (this has become recently legal in the US), it will be able to multitask and you'll be able to get non-Aple software, but you'll still be forced to buy apps instead of actual programs. Plus, it can't even play flash. But if you want a crippled, overpriced, all-around useless and horrible device, you can feel free to get an iPad like everyone else who went "OMG NEW APPLE PRODUCT STEVE JOBS SAYS ITS GOOD WANT". And oh my gosh, do NOT buy it for photoshop or anything. It doesn't have the processing power to properly run CS5, and you're a retard if you actually buy an Apple product for photoshop anyway, considering how over-priced and horrible their machines are in general. I've heard a lot of bad things about it on the e-reading front; it's heavy, and has a lot of glare when you're outside or anywhere in general that has a light source.

In my opinion, the public schools serve two purposes: To sort the good, successful people from the unsuccessful ones, and to bring them out and make them uniform. Teach them the same things, throw the same ideas at them, etcetera. This is not the only purpose of schooling, of course (knowledge is required in a person's life in general, and I think public education is an incredibly good thing), but I have noticed that it is a large part of how public schools operate. It's competitive. Failure is shown to be the absolute worst thing, instead of knowledge and success being good. You either keep up with the class, or you get screwed. The student must cater to the school, when in reality, it is the school that should be catering to the student. As for what I mean by the 'students in uniform' thing, I mean that they're trying to make everyone very similar. Yes, there should be some minimums in schooling (there are some things just about everyone should know, such as algebra and at least basic English composition), but, ultimately, nothing is individualized; it's 'one-size-fits-all' learning, and you eventually get everyone becoming that 'one size' (or, that's what I think they're trying). However, I dislike the attitudes of a lot of members in this thread. "That's so great! Your kids are superior!" Implies that most public-schooled children are inferior. I have a big problem with the whole idea of taking pride in being a homeschooling parent, because that isn't the attitude that should be had. Homeschooling is nothing but another alternative for learning. A lot of students will succeed in different areas of flexibility. Some do best in a social environment, like in a public school or a homeschooling co-op, and some do best in a cyber school, where they have a mix of structure in their schooling with freedom in how and when they do it. Some, of course, do best in the individualized learning homeschooling can offer, but, again, it is merely an alternative - it is not supposed to be a solution to some horrible calamity that exists in the public school systems. If you learn everything there is to know in every class you take in highschool, regardless of where you go (as long as you're in an honors or AP class), you're going to succeed just as well as the 'ahead-of-the-class' homeschoolers. There is, obviously, no such thing as 'too smart', 'too knowledgeable', or 'too hard-working'. All things in moderation, yes (for example, you can spend an unhealthy amount of time working), but there is nothing saying that you should be limiting yourself to what everyone else is doing. Many people I know don't have work ethic, intelligence, etcetera, and, while they do well enough for themselves, they have not reached their own potential. They want to feel better about themselves, so they set themselves as the 'proper' standard - so, if you do more than them, you are doing too much. On the subject of minimizing your vocabulary, almost everyone I know with a large vocabulary doesn't use it at all times. I know I sure as hell would have to think for a few minutes before actually utilizing my full vocabulary, and anyway, it would be a really silly thing for me to do outside of the realm of self-expression; it would make me sound long-winded and weird. Shorter words are better, most of the time, because you can just get straight and to the point with them. Anyway, this post is getting long and ranty, so I'll just stop it here.

I'm going to 'bump' this so more people can see it. It's such a great game!

It seems like something that isn't realistically going to become mainstream, or happen to anyone at all, really. If it became a huge thing, maybe it would be warning worthy, but you have to be completely insane to want to do anything like that. A very specific kind of insanity, too (making it even less likely that there are going to be a sudden rush of people suiciding via anorexia). It's probably a troll, or a group of them, like 4chan or something.

Could they mean you're teaching them too much, as in doing it for inadvisable periods of time (such as a twelve-hour school day)? Or did they seriously tell you things like 'THEY KNOW MORE THAN THEIR PEERS, SO THEY'LL NEVER FIT IN!"? Because that's really silly of anyone to say.

http://minecraft.net I've recently discovered "Minecraft", a really fun game that's pretty much suitable for all ages. It's also free (up to a point - it costs $15 or ten euro for an updated version of the game). I've found it's great for me to exercise my creativity, while also being very challenging and scary at times, depending on the mode. There are two modes: Creative Mode and Survival Mode. In Creative Mode, you have an unlimited amount of 'blocks' which you can build with in a pre-made terrain (which is also entirely made of blocks). You can build virtually anything you want with it all, and there's no limit to how much you can do (besides your imagination). In Survival Mode, you have to 'mine' for materials (or chop down trees for wood, for example) - even simple things, like dirt. It's very challenging, because some materials are more rare than others, and some are very necessary. In the day, you can do whatever you want. At night, you need torches anywhere where you don't want monsters to be created (which requires coal - a resource that took me a while to find at first). There's a 'peaceful' mode, though, where nothing will attack you (simply because fighting isn't really a necessary aspect of the game; it's completely optional), which I've been playing on. It seems to me like it would be fun for the whole family (and suitable), so I'm thinking of buying an account for the family. It doesn't come in a disc or anything (It's all done from an account from the website, or from a .exe program you can download to your computer for offline use), so it's not very expensive. It's currently in the 'alpha', so there are a few bugs. It hasn't even reached beta stage yet, and it's a great game! Just thought I'd post this here because y'all seem like you'd enjoy it quite a bit.

Wrong. The most popular kind of Satanism is LaVayan Satanism, which is the polar opposite of Christianity. Is is anti-cultural, full of self-worship and hate for other religions, and believes in no God or theistic being in any shape or form. It is an example of an atheistic religion; a group of people following the same set of beliefs. Atheism, in itself, is not a religion, because it is not a unified group with a unified set of beliefs. A LaVeyan Satanist is just as atheistic as any person who just labels themselves 'atheist', for example. Saying atheism is a religion is like saying theism is a religion; theism encompasses many religions, just as atheism encompasses many religions, and many people who do not follow a religion.

For the sake of religious discussions, I've always included atheism as a religion. Atheism is, in itself, not really a religion, although there are atheistic religions (Satanism, for example, and, depending on who you ask, Buddhism, although it doesn't really fit the definition of a religion). So, for the sake of religious discussion, it should be thought of as a religion, but for the sake of definition, it should not be thought of as a religion.

All of those examples were melodramatic and silly. It's like something written by a teenager who discovered the definition of emotional abuse in the dictionary, then decided "OH HEY I'M ABUSED". All of those things would depend on the context. As one poster said, the crying reaction would be bad parenting if the little girl's dog had been run over, but not if she was crying over something little, like "OMG DADDY I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IIIIIIIT". Part of the problem is that there isn't any context to the quotes to tell if the reaction is overly severe. I know a girl who is probably actually emotionally abused; her father will tell her she's ugly when she's beautiful, and he's told me before that "When I'm done with her, she'll be able to take anything the real world will throw at her!" Attitudes like that are more than a little crazy, and definitely abusive, but in most contexts, the quotes in the original post aren't really abusive in any way, shape, or form. It's like it's saying "IF YOU DON'T ACCEPT EVERYTHING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, YOU'RE BEING ABUSIVE" - including negative behaviors. "His father had ashamed him in front of his girlfriend." (Paraphrased, since I'm not looking at the thread right now - I've got a full 'reply to thread' window opened). There are a lot of problems with that. For example, you can ashame your son or daughter in front of someone they're dating pretty easily, by stopping them doing a negative behavior. "He took away his son's cocaine, and in doing so had ruined the sense of trust the son had in his father. Worst of all, he had ashamed him in front of his girlfriend." It's a bit of a problem when someone defines 'abuse' as 'absolutely anything that can make anyone feel bad'.

This would definitely depend on the person (since most people don't practice their ancestor's beliefs). Sure, some are probably into the whole shamanism nature thing, but probably most are into more mainstream religions, like Christianity or atheism (for the purpose of belief or lack of it, I consider atheism a religion).

According to some people, the last definition means 'emo girl posting on livejournal'. The second one isn't really emotional abuse (it has to be regular and severe - way more severe than 'GO CRY'), just bad parenting. The father's reaction could be explained by stress or depression on the father's part, for example. You can't really tell if it's anything near abuse without a proper context. The first one is silly. I don't get why anyone would go "MY FATHER IS SO ABUSIVE; HE WON'T LET ME HAVE SEX IN HIS HOME!' Especially considering, in this case, the father probably was trusting the son to not be screwing his girlfriend in his basement (since most parents wouldn't let their kids be together if they thought they were going to be having sex). I somehow did that opposite to the order they came in, but anyway, I wouldn't say any of that is severe anything to count as emotional abuse!

Most of what Veoh has is copyrighted material hosted illegally (such as television shows and movies). It's not exactly something you'd want to use. I don't think watching a streaming site is illegal (I think it's illegal for them to host it - not for you to watch it), but still, it's something to consider. I don't think the website gives viruses, but sites like that do have a tendency to have unsafe advertisements that will give you viruses.

Hi! Longtime member (At least, to me), and this is one of my first posts here. I'm more of a lurker than a poster, but I actually have a problem now. :glare: My 15-year-old DS just informed me during casual conversation that he plans to "change the world" someday. It doesn't seem to be a very clear plan, and he feels like he is "meant to do something" with his life. It isn't very well-thought-out, he seems to just want to wait until something needs to change or happen in the world and change it. :blink: How can I explain to him that everybody feels that way, but most of us grow out of it by the age of 15? He seems really intent on this, and I honestly can't think of anything to say. -Wish

*Sigh*. WoW isn't the problem, it is your husband's addiction. =/. What you really need to do is sit down with him and talk about it. If you want him to watch a movie with you, you can designate 1-3 nights a week where he has to spend time with YOU and not his game. Say this calmly, and make sure not to go "YOU ARE SPENDING 3 NIGHTS A WEEK OFF YOUR GAME." Try to take it sloooowly.

Runescape [Runescape.Com] is a great thing. It has all sorts of rules to protect children from unsafe influences.

When I was about 13, I answered the phone (Almost every time!) with "Hola! Come te llamas?" And half the time the answers were "What the heck?" or just hanging up. I thought it was hilarious at the time but my mother reeeeally hated it.

:iagree: Melanie