My cellphone provider gives me unlimited internet bandwidth for $10, if I ever bother to activate it. (Using wifi has been fine so far.) These guys are way more expensive than that.
I moved my parents to Linux from WinXP, and they required zero retraining, zero tweaking, and zero time recovering from malware. Also, they decided they liked the games it came with better than the ones that came with Windows. I set them down in front of a laptop with Win7 on it, and they had problems right away. They looked at Win8 at an electronics store, and couldn't get it to do anything at all. Moving to new editions of Windows frankly requires more retraining than moving to a properly set up* install of Linux.
*Properly set up for new users involves not using Gnome3, which I find just confuses most Windows and Mac expatriates into sitting there waiting for the desktop to finish loading, since there's nothing on it.
Agreed. Besides, my mother doesn't like Windows. She much prefers Linux, because it does everything Windows does that she needs, plus it has better games.
within a percent or two of parity, the discrepancy is trivial
Actually, if the estimates I've seen for the cost of this boat (and from the description, they may be) are correct, the discrepancy caused by writing the wrong currency would likely amount to around or over $10k - not especially trivial, especially if that form was then used to calculate the sales tax and such he later had to pay. That makes it fairly significant.
If the agent had to call a superior to do the seizure, and explain the stupid reason... I bet the matter would have evaporated at that point.
That's the great part - the agent did call a superior and explain the reason, but left out all of the relevant details. Their explanation wasn't "There's a significant error on the form, and he wants it corrected before he'll sign", their explanation was "he's refusing to sign", and they refused to allow him to speak to that person to tell them why.
So you're saying you didn't actually read the article, but are commenting on what you imagine it might say instead?
Customs didn't impound the shipment until the paperwork gets straightened out.
Customs demanded that the incorrect paperwork be authenticated anyways despite being incorrect, insisted that because it was _their_ paperwork, it was not possible for it to be incorrect, despite the error being _RIGHT THERE_, and when the guy you're so angry at for having made more money than you refuses to authenticate paperwork listing the value of imported goods with a price that's likely in excess of $10,000 away from being correct, the customs agent didn't say "Well, until this paperwork error is corrected, we can't let you have your boat", she said "The paperwork is correct! Since you won't sign it, hand over the keys and get off the boat" with an implied "Or I will shoot you. Please please let me shoot you".
Frankly, he deserves some respect for having the integrity to refuse to lie under oath, despite the armed thug deciding to commit an act of government sanctioned piracy (I believe the term is "privateer" in that case) to punish his refusal to follow their demand that he do so.
Last, he'd probably be more willing to buy American if he was able to find the thing he wanted to buy at a decent price offering. He definitely won't be buying anything from that particular manufacturer again, for reasons unrelated to armed theft by government thugs, which you'd also know if you'd bothered to read the article.
Your english isn't the best, but I've had to deal with worse in marking assignments, I suspect what you're saying is that you don't think the course topic is worthwhile and belongs at a university, apparently because it included the application of web standards, which you erroneously believe are "well worked out". (Seriously, learn some web development, when you get beyond the basic "This is my cat" page, you'll find out that it's anything but well worked out.) Apparently the only courses you approve of seeing at a university are high level theoretical discussions. Fortunately, you aren't the one who makes such decisions, since the graduates from such a university would be utterly useless to society as a whole, and likely incapable of actually working in the field they claimed to have studied.
As for the merit of the course, first of all, it was what is known as a "service course" - teaching students skills that can then be applied in other courses, and not counting as a credit towards the major requirements of a full degree. Such courses are in fact quite common in universities - as a student, I took an optional class in Vocal Techniques, which personally I found quite helpful later in life, despite a complete lack of "comparison of standards". Thanks to that class, I'm able to spend two and a half hours speaking to a room of 200+ people without a microphone, and everyone in the room can still hear me at the end of the lecture.
The students who took my class? They can make a web page today (or 10 years ago) and expect it to work in a browser from the time it was created, and 10+ years from that time, and still look the same, and still actually work. That comes from actually understanding the subject, understanding the way different browsers work, how future browsers are likely to work, what the actual standards are, what parts of those standards are not actually implemented, how the standards are changing, and knowing how to do things right, instead of just "whatever works". These are all things that can not be learned without practical application.
The sad part is that as the years went by, I had to focus more and more time teaching basic communication skills like spelling, grammar, and proof reading. Seriously, why do so many people think that just because they were the one who made it, that there's no way it could possibly not work, and therefore there's no reason for them to ever actually look at the finished product? (Also, why are so many Computer Science students apparently colour-blind?)
First, the context - I used to teach a web development course at a Canadian university. It was a side-job as a sessional instructor, brought in for knowledge in the area, and since I moved away for my day job, I stopped teaching.
While I was teaching the course, I would have the students develop a web site from scratch, with the primary focus being to showcase their ability to encorporate CSS and javascript, and follow the W3's accessibility guidelines - topic was up to them, and I frequently told the class that their content's accuracy wasn't important, as long as it was their own content being generated. (This produced some of the most entertaining things to read at times... "Reptiles of the World" was all about Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, and their political machinations.) There were always a mix of local and foreign students in the class, and frankly, while some of the foreign students hadn't actually bothered learning the local language before coming to the country (or after), their average writing skills are (and have always been) about the same as those of the local students.
Sadly, I must admit, that over the 10+ years that I taught the course, the quality of writing steadily decreased. At first, the average student was fairly literate, and I only had occasional problems with people devolving into instant-message speak. ("Can u help me?" Seriously people, the "y" and the "o" are both within an inch of the "u" on the keyboard! If you're writing a web page, you've got time to search them out and hit them!) During the later years of teaching the course, I found that more and more of the people coming into my class fell into the category I would call functionally illiterate, and sadly, all I can think of to blame for it is schools no longer actually caring if kids learn to read and write before pushing them out with diplomas.
A relative of mine's daughter in grade school came home with an "essay" she had written and received a good mark on - it was full of horrible spelling and grammar errors, which my mother and the girl's mother both made her correct - when the teacher was asked about why the spelling problems were not corrected, we were told "Oh, we don't do that anymore, we don't want to stunt their creativity."
Considering the current Pope's very public stand against modern medicine in claiming that AIDS and STDs are caused by the use of condoms, getting rid of the delusional old child-abuse enabler is very much news related to Science and Medicine.
In a course I once taught, I had two students of middle eastern descent, who were not related to each other, yet the first 47 letters of their names were the same. After the 48th and 49th letters, which were different, they again matched for another 10 letters, at which point one name ended, and the other continued. Many email programs will stop looking at the "full name" being assigned after a certain number of letters has been reached, and frankly, expecting someone to type that much just to send someone an email, when a 7 or 8 character userid has already been assigned to them, is just plain cruel.
Additionally, many email clients and servers are not really set up to handle non-western characters, so again, fullname@domain.tld isn't always a practical option. Further, while anyone can type out the address "fuji.taro@domain.tld", but only a few people will be able to easily enter that name as actual kanji. (Note: Slashdot itself can not do this in comments. I tried.) Really, setting all emails as fullname@domain.tld does assume everyone has western names, or at least assumes they won't mind their non-western name being converted into a western name.
The short version: fullname@domain.tld is not always practical, or even possible, but userid@domain.tld is. If someone wants a vanity plate email address with their full name, they can make separate arrangements. If your university wants to allow it as an alias, go ahead, but do it on a first-come-first-serve basis, and all conflicts will be resolved on their own, since most people won't care enough to get the longer version, and those who do, but find their name already taken, will simply have to figure something out themselves.
RDP is like being on the same LAN, freenx is like being 300ms away
Rather than freenx, which was never actually completed, try out NoMachine's nx server - I've done comparisons between them for work, and it is faster, as well as having more working features.
Also of note - the server runs only on Linux/Unix, however as asked in the original post, NX Server will allow you to run just a single application at once, and with careful setup (ie: virtualGL), you can even run very graphics-card intensive applications on the server, accessing the server's graphics hardware for GL, and send that rendered application to the client. It's free for limited personal/educational use, and requires a license for large-scale access.
It supports awesome features like restoring sessions - since the session runs on the server, if you are disconnected by a network hiccup, you can re-connect, and your program will still be running uninterrupted.
There are also several projects in progress to attempt to make an open source version, since the protocols themselves are open sourced and freely available. Sadly, I haven't seen any of them that are actually fully completed and working for all of the aspects that my work uses NX for, so we haven't been able to use any of them. Several of those projects look like they were abandoned years ago, though.
Google's NeatX project is one of the most complete that I've seen, and I don't see any development on it since 2009...
it is just not worth the risk that someone might pull out their phone, calculate it...
I have no idea what the antecedent for "it" is here. Calculate what? The price rounded down? How many people will need a smartphone to calculate a rounded-to-a-nickel price? Not many.
The need for calculation here is because we have a 13% "Harmonized Sales Tax" in Ontario, and various combinations of Federal and Provinical taxes across Canada depending on which province you're in. Thus, when you pick up a can of Pringles for $2.99, it really costs $3.38 after tax - which would round up to $3.40. If they mark the Pringles down to $2.97, after tax it's $3.36, which _should_ round to $3.35, but some retailers will try to charge $3.40 anyways, and blame the difference on "tax" - since the tax is _NEVER_ listed on price tags, without a calculator or a super math brain, you don't know how much the purchase is going to cost you. People already do the whole "calculate the tax and yell at the cashier if it's not right" thing, and there are merchants here (like the gas station nearest my home) where the cashier/owner has a tendency to ring in the wrong prices, and blame it on "tax" when it doesn't match the sticker price. (Hint: $3 times 1.13 does not equal $4.)
Also, our taxes are never easy to multiply numbers... it's always 7%, 8%, 13%, and so on...
Larger memory per node is useful when manipulating stupidly huge data sets. Sometimes speed isn't the most important aspect in getting the calculations done, and other factors come into play, like memory size/bandwidth, disk space available, speed of that diskspace, and even network connectivity if you're doing MPI programming.
While I realize it would be great to teach everyone efficient programming techniques, so they could streamline their memory usage down to the bare minimal, it's not always possible, and sometimes it's just not practical to do - our users come from pretty much all disciplines, from Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, and even a few from History. (Yes, a History researcher using HPC to do calculations and simulations. He's actually doing some pretty neat stuff.) Teaching that diverse a group of people to program super efficiently is not going to work - they're not interested in making super awesome code, they just want their numbers crunched, and are only willing to learn the bare minimal to get it running. The worst cases tend to get assigned a staff member to consult with them and get their code cleaned up so that they don't break the clusters, but with a few thousand users, we can't do that with everybody - most of them would never show up to the classes anyways.
The memory they list as an exciting "700+TB" is not actually all that exciting - if you divide that by the number of nodes, and then the number of CPU cores, that leaves only 2GB of ram per CPU core, which is pretty much standard for HPC cluster memory. The only thing impressive about this really, is the number of compute nodes involved, which any single submitted job will _not_ have access to all of. I manage similar, though smaller, research clusters myself, and frankly, the only clusters we had that had less than 2GB per CPU core were retired long ago. Essentially, this means they're running the cluster with the minimum amount of memory that is considered acceptable for the application.
No one disputes that evolution happens, not even creationists
Actually, many of them do. Ken Ham is a great example of this, and despite being what most people would call a fringe lunatic, he still somehow manages to bilk millions of dollars out of his state government to promote his views, and achieve a stage to shout his views from in major media sources who want to pretend they're showing "balance" when covering evolution related discussions. It's him and people like him who are responsible for the Texas Board of Education's constant dumbing down of school science and biology textbooks, and constant attempts to force creationism into classrooms via poorly worded laws pretending to "teach the controversy".
Does all science really fall apart if we don't believe all life came from a single cell?
Actually, the idea that all life came from a single cell is pretty outdated, and was mostly never part of any serious scientific theory - any chemical reaction that would produce protocells (ie: the self-replicating molecules that would eventually become complex enough to call single-celled organisms) would have produced said protocells in the millions. I suspect that what you're really objecting to here is the idea that all life came from single-celled organisms, and no, science itself don't immediately fall apart if you don't accept that, just all of Biology, and a good chunk of the Chemistry that is based on biological processes. Astronomy and Physics for example, would be relatively unaffected by the complete loss of another discipline. The method by which you want to do this however, would have negative effects on all of science.
The reason you see so much about the importance of evolution being said by scientists is precisely because of the well funded fringe lunatics who are promoting the ID/Creationism view, and attempting to push it into schools, and push evolution out - they're doing it for religious reasons, not out of their claimed "value of seeing both sides". When you're presenting one side that has a literal mountain of evidence, proof, and useful predictions made from it, an alternative side that holds up a literalist interpretation of a translation of a translation of a series of stone-age parables is not an equivalent alternative explanation, regardless of how loudly the crazy person shouts. (And yes, Ken does claim that the modern english version of the bible that he uses is the perfect literal one, as do most of the others involved in forcing this idiocy into laws that are then struck down as unconstitutional and generally stupid.)
In short, scientists tell people about how important evolution is because they're defending themselves from nut-jobs who are trying to claim that it's all evil lies from the devil to corrupt our youths, and should be pushed out of schools. You wouldn't be hearing nearly so much about it if it wasn't for Ken and his fellow Creationists, and arguing that it should go away puts you into the same group as those people in the minds of anyone who has been watching the "debate", whether it's the ones on the side of reality who are tired of being attacked by crazy people and tend to get snappish at them after decades of defending themselves from unreasonable fanatics, or the Creationists themselves, who will count you in as they claim "See! Lots of people believe exactly the same as us!".
Going back to your original comment about not needing to know that a car was assembled by a robotic arm to know every detail of how it works, it's not quite an accurate comparison - taking evolution out of biology does in fact stop us from completely understanding how bodies and their internal parts work, as suddenly the commonalities between organisms that came from recent common ancestors have no reason for existing. Why does a squid work so differently from a fish, and why is the fish more similar to a human than it is to a fellow water-creature like the squid?
First, as for the ID/Creationism comments, you _are_ the one who brought it up and made false claims about it. As usual, when it's pointed out that those claims are false, the claimant automatically resorts to "stop being so mean!". Grow up.
Second, "Macroevolution" does not exist as a separate concept, and if I showed dogs evolving into another species, you'd just be shifting your goalposts to say "you're just showing quadruped mammals evolving into other quadruped mammals, which is microevolution, show me some real change!" despite the clearly indicated issue that change of that magnitude in a long-lived species requires time scales longer than western civilization has existed in North America. Further, if you're talking about species versus species, sorry to tell you this, but the definition of species requires the two animals to be able to "meet, mate, and produce fertile offspring under natural circumstances", which means that a Toy Poodle and a Wolfhound are as much the same species as a cat and a rabbit are. If you're disputing "macroevolution", you're also disputing "microevolution", because they are in fact exactly the same thing.
Last, you've shifted your goalposts from the original argument of "evolution" to "common descent" and are now asking the very different question of whether or not that idea isn't accepted will cause the scientific method to fall apart. The problem there is, the scientific method is based on observation and verification of evidence, and incorporating that evidence into explanations of the world, using those explanations to make predictions, and then testing them. To take common descent out of the picture requires removing a large quantity of the evidence upon which further work was done - including all of the "microevolution" you claim only a fool would deny. It isn't the scientific method that falls apart there, it's the results that were produced by using it on the evidence you refuse to allow to be used - you know - the vast majority of the results of modern medicine and agriculture.
(standard creationist attempt to deflect contrary evidence by making up crap about macro/micro evolution here)
There is no difference between macro and micro evolution, they're both evolution, predicted by the same theory, using the same mechanisms, producing the same effects, and both demonstrated very adequately. You can't have one without the other, because there's no separation between them except in the minds of creationists who are desperately trying to rationalize away evidence so that they don't have to admit their dogma is incorrect. Also, "macroevolution" has been demonstrated and documented quite clearly - take a look at your neighbor's dog. What breed is it? Do Toy Poodles or Dobermans look very much like Irish Setters? No? Do they act like them? No? Guess what, they come from the same original base stock, and successive mutations and selective breeding (ie: the same kind of selection Evolution describes, but in this case rather than starvation deciding who gets to breed, the owners and breeders act as the selective pressure) have lead to two completely different animals. Lots of other examples exist, such as the moths in the Black Forest of Germany, the entire fossil record, comparisons of DNA, and even examinations of various human populations in isolated regions of earth. Again, selective pressure resulting in physical change over time. The only reason there are more examples of evolution occurring in microorganisms is because the time between successive generations is on the order of days, hours, or even minutes, rather than years as it is in larger organisms. This does not mean it isn't happening, and definitely does not mean it hasn't been observed, it just means that setting up a lab to test it is not practical, because most institutions have this whole requirement that research result in publications during the lifetime of the researcher who set up the experiment.
As an aside, there is a difference between ID and creationism.
As for the difference between ID and Creationism, no ID doesn't know the limits of anything, it's just a dishonest re-branding of the same old garbage to try and sneak it past the "don't teach religion in our science classrooms" requirement. There was a whole big court case and media frenzy about this several years ago, and the judge agreed: ID _is_ creationism with a shiney new label glued on top of it, and all references to a christian god search-and-replaced with a more generic "creator" term. Still no science actually involved in it, just a lot of dishonest claims to the contrary.
Actually, if Intelligent Design and Creationism (which are actually the same thing under different labels) disappeared, the effect on society would be greatly reduced government overhead dealing with lawsuits from shrieking lunatics. The amount this would save as a percentage of the total US budget is of course miniscule, but sending that money instead to school boards would still enable improvements in education standards.
If Evolutionary Theory disappeared however, you'd lose antibiotics, vaccines, insect and drought resistant crops (and thus a LOT of the world's food supply), and many other things you currently rely on for your comfortable life.
Additionally, if there was no observation of the event and the process cannot be repeated, isn't it outside the realm of scientific discovery anyway?
Ah, I see what's wrong here - you're under the common mistaken belief that Evolutionary Theory says where life comes from. Sorry, it doesn't actually deal with that at all, it deals with what happens when there is already life present. Nothing more, nothing less. As for observations and processes being repeated, Evolution has been observed, and the processes have been repeated. That's why it counts as an actual Theory, while ID and Creationism do not, as they've never provided testable predictions.
If it's so uninteresting, why are you still posting? Wouldn't it make more sense for you to just read a different article that you felt actually was interesting? I think it's kind of sad that you've spent more energy typing in your insistence that nobody should post responses to this thread than the vast majority of people posting responses to this thread have.
Seriously, follow your own advice, if it makes you so angry to see people doing things that you don't want to do - type out your rage filled rant, and then hit cancel.
You know Diebold (of the easily hacked voting machines scandal) still makes ABM banking machines, right? I mean, yeah, they changed the name of their voting machine division to try and get around the shame, but they're still the same people. (Seriously, in my old city, I found their logo on almost a quarter of the bank machines, and that's in Canada - they're more popular in the US.) They handle a lot of your money going in and out of those machines, including the scanners that recognize what currency is being fed into the slot.
Are you really sure they're smart enough to avoid executing any of the recognition data? _Really_ sure? Are you sure the same laziness that caused issues with their voting machines will never ever happen again, from them, or from any of the other (several) private companies that make those machines? It doesn't even have to be the whole company - all it takes is one lazy programmer setting up the recognition software not bothering to prevent a buffer overflow or something else dumb like that, and suddenly a stolen bank card and a plain white slip of paper with a fancy QR code will pwn your local "QR enabled" bank machine.
The problem is, people look at QR codes, and they think "Woo! That's like, SUPER ENCRYPTED!", when really, it's no more encrypted than the plain text serial numbers already printed on every bit of paper currency already, and a whole lot less practical, since the people looking at it won't be able to easily recognize if there's a duplicate, or fake. The only advantage QR codes have is that they can be easily machine-interpreted and can contain things like URLs so small devices like cell phones don't need the user to manually type in the whole URL to visit a website. The only useful bit involved in putting a QR code on a bill would be if they were used to hold a digital copy of the serial numbers, but there are other ways of making a simple, predictable thing like serial numbers on a bill computer recognizable. They're always the same colors, on the same background, using the same font. The software that recognizes and interprets QR codes is actually _more_ complex than the software needed to recognize printed serial numbers under those circumstances.
So you believe in "God" but you think you have the wisdom to kill other people
You should check out the bible some time, it's full of things like orders from God to kill every last man, woman, child, all of their livestock, burn their belongings and salt their fields, and such. That whole "no killing" thing only applies to people who are part of the same tribe/religious sub-group in the actual original written form, and is frequently paraphrased and misquoted to say no to killing in general.
... you build missle launchers? You people blow me away.
Slashdot Mirror
My cellphone provider gives me unlimited internet bandwidth for $10, if I ever bother to activate it. (Using wifi has been fine so far.) These guys are way more expensive than that.
I moved my parents to Linux from WinXP, and they required zero retraining, zero tweaking, and zero time recovering from malware. Also, they decided they liked the games it came with better than the ones that came with Windows. I set them down in front of a laptop with Win7 on it, and they had problems right away. They looked at Win8 at an electronics store, and couldn't get it to do anything at all. Moving to new editions of Windows frankly requires more retraining than moving to a properly set up* install of Linux.
*Properly set up for new users involves not using Gnome3, which I find just confuses most Windows and Mac expatriates into sitting there waiting for the desktop to finish loading, since there's nothing on it.
and I wouldn't put my mom on Windows in 2013
Agreed. Besides, my mother doesn't like Windows. She much prefers Linux, because it does everything Windows does that she needs, plus it has better games.
within a percent or two of parity, the discrepancy is trivial
Actually, if the estimates I've seen for the cost of this boat (and from the description, they may be) are correct, the discrepancy caused by writing the wrong currency would likely amount to around or over $10k - not especially trivial, especially if that form was then used to calculate the sales tax and such he later had to pay. That makes it fairly significant.
If the agent had to call a superior to do the seizure, and explain the stupid reason... I bet the matter would have evaporated at that point.
That's the great part - the agent did call a superior and explain the reason, but left out all of the relevant details. Their explanation wasn't "There's a significant error on the form, and he wants it corrected before he'll sign", their explanation was "he's refusing to sign", and they refused to allow him to speak to that person to tell them why.
So you're saying you didn't actually read the article, but are commenting on what you imagine it might say instead?
Customs didn't impound the shipment until the paperwork gets straightened out.
Customs demanded that the incorrect paperwork be authenticated anyways despite being incorrect, insisted that because it was _their_ paperwork, it was not possible for it to be incorrect, despite the error being _RIGHT THERE_, and when the guy you're so angry at for having made more money than you refuses to authenticate paperwork listing the value of imported goods with a price that's likely in excess of $10,000 away from being correct, the customs agent didn't say "Well, until this paperwork error is corrected, we can't let you have your boat", she said "The paperwork is correct! Since you won't sign it, hand over the keys and get off the boat" with an implied "Or I will shoot you. Please please let me shoot you".
Frankly, he deserves some respect for having the integrity to refuse to lie under oath, despite the armed thug deciding to commit an act of government sanctioned piracy (I believe the term is "privateer" in that case) to punish his refusal to follow their demand that he do so.
Last, he'd probably be more willing to buy American if he was able to find the thing he wanted to buy at a decent price offering. He definitely won't be buying anything from that particular manufacturer again, for reasons unrelated to armed theft by government thugs, which you'd also know if you'd bothered to read the article.
Your english isn't the best, but I've had to deal with worse in marking assignments, I suspect what you're saying is that you don't think the course topic is worthwhile and belongs at a university, apparently because it included the application of web standards, which you erroneously believe are "well worked out". (Seriously, learn some web development, when you get beyond the basic "This is my cat" page, you'll find out that it's anything but well worked out.) Apparently the only courses you approve of seeing at a university are high level theoretical discussions. Fortunately, you aren't the one who makes such decisions, since the graduates from such a university would be utterly useless to society as a whole, and likely incapable of actually working in the field they claimed to have studied.
As for the merit of the course, first of all, it was what is known as a "service course" - teaching students skills that can then be applied in other courses, and not counting as a credit towards the major requirements of a full degree. Such courses are in fact quite common in universities - as a student, I took an optional class in Vocal Techniques, which personally I found quite helpful later in life, despite a complete lack of "comparison of standards". Thanks to that class, I'm able to spend two and a half hours speaking to a room of 200+ people without a microphone, and everyone in the room can still hear me at the end of the lecture.
The students who took my class? They can make a web page today (or 10 years ago) and expect it to work in a browser from the time it was created, and 10+ years from that time, and still look the same, and still actually work. That comes from actually understanding the subject, understanding the way different browsers work, how future browsers are likely to work, what the actual standards are, what parts of those standards are not actually implemented, how the standards are changing, and knowing how to do things right, instead of just "whatever works". These are all things that can not be learned without practical application.
The sad part is that as the years went by, I had to focus more and more time teaching basic communication skills like spelling, grammar, and proof reading. Seriously, why do so many people think that just because they were the one who made it, that there's no way it could possibly not work, and therefore there's no reason for them to ever actually look at the finished product? (Also, why are so many Computer Science students apparently colour-blind?)
First, the context - I used to teach a web development course at a Canadian university. It was a side-job as a sessional instructor, brought in for knowledge in the area, and since I moved away for my day job, I stopped teaching.
While I was teaching the course, I would have the students develop a web site from scratch, with the primary focus being to showcase their ability to encorporate CSS and javascript, and follow the W3's accessibility guidelines - topic was up to them, and I frequently told the class that their content's accuracy wasn't important, as long as it was their own content being generated. (This produced some of the most entertaining things to read at times... "Reptiles of the World" was all about Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, and their political machinations.) There were always a mix of local and foreign students in the class, and frankly, while some of the foreign students hadn't actually bothered learning the local language before coming to the country (or after), their average writing skills are (and have always been) about the same as those of the local students.
Sadly, I must admit, that over the 10+ years that I taught the course, the quality of writing steadily decreased. At first, the average student was fairly literate, and I only had occasional problems with people devolving into instant-message speak. ("Can u help me?" Seriously people, the "y" and the "o" are both within an inch of the "u" on the keyboard! If you're writing a web page, you've got time to search them out and hit them!) During the later years of teaching the course, I found that more and more of the people coming into my class fell into the category I would call functionally illiterate, and sadly, all I can think of to blame for it is schools no longer actually caring if kids learn to read and write before pushing them out with diplomas.
A relative of mine's daughter in grade school came home with an "essay" she had written and received a good mark on - it was full of horrible spelling and grammar errors, which my mother and the girl's mother both made her correct - when the teacher was asked about why the spelling problems were not corrected, we were told "Oh, we don't do that anymore, we don't want to stunt their creativity."
Considering the current Pope's very public stand against modern medicine in claiming that AIDS and STDs are caused by the use of condoms, getting rid of the delusional old child-abuse enabler is very much news related to Science and Medicine.
In a course I once taught, I had two students of middle eastern descent, who were not related to each other, yet the first 47 letters of their names were the same. After the 48th and 49th letters, which were different, they again matched for another 10 letters, at which point one name ended, and the other continued. Many email programs will stop looking at the "full name" being assigned after a certain number of letters has been reached, and frankly, expecting someone to type that much just to send someone an email, when a 7 or 8 character userid has already been assigned to them, is just plain cruel.
Additionally, many email clients and servers are not really set up to handle non-western characters, so again, fullname@domain.tld isn't always a practical option. Further, while anyone can type out the address "fuji.taro@domain.tld", but only a few people will be able to easily enter that name as actual kanji. (Note: Slashdot itself can not do this in comments. I tried.) Really, setting all emails as fullname@domain.tld does assume everyone has western names, or at least assumes they won't mind their non-western name being converted into a western name.
The short version: fullname@domain.tld is not always practical, or even possible, but userid@domain.tld is. If someone wants a vanity plate email address with their full name, they can make separate arrangements. If your university wants to allow it as an alias, go ahead, but do it on a first-come-first-serve basis, and all conflicts will be resolved on their own, since most people won't care enough to get the longer version, and those who do, but find their name already taken, will simply have to figure something out themselves.
RDP is like being on the same LAN, freenx is like being 300ms away
Rather than freenx, which was never actually completed, try out NoMachine's nx server - I've done comparisons between them for work, and it is faster, as well as having more working features.
Also of note - the server runs only on Linux/Unix, however as asked in the original post, NX Server will allow you to run just a single application at once, and with careful setup (ie: virtualGL), you can even run very graphics-card intensive applications on the server, accessing the server's graphics hardware for GL, and send that rendered application to the client. It's free for limited personal/educational use, and requires a license for large-scale access.
It supports awesome features like restoring sessions - since the session runs on the server, if you are disconnected by a network hiccup, you can re-connect, and your program will still be running uninterrupted.
There are also several projects in progress to attempt to make an open source version, since the protocols themselves are open sourced and freely available. Sadly, I haven't seen any of them that are actually fully completed and working for all of the aspects that my work uses NX for, so we haven't been able to use any of them. Several of those projects look like they were abandoned years ago, though.
Google's NeatX project is one of the most complete that I've seen, and I don't see any development on it since 2009...
Answer is: I don't.
it is just not worth the risk that someone might pull out their phone, calculate it ...
I have no idea what the antecedent for "it" is here. Calculate what? The price rounded down? How many people will need a smartphone to calculate a rounded-to-a-nickel price? Not many.
The need for calculation here is because we have a 13% "Harmonized Sales Tax" in Ontario, and various combinations of Federal and Provinical taxes across Canada depending on which province you're in. Thus, when you pick up a can of Pringles for $2.99, it really costs $3.38 after tax - which would round up to $3.40. If they mark the Pringles down to $2.97, after tax it's $3.36, which _should_ round to $3.35, but some retailers will try to charge $3.40 anyways, and blame the difference on "tax" - since the tax is _NEVER_ listed on price tags, without a calculator or a super math brain, you don't know how much the purchase is going to cost you. People already do the whole "calculate the tax and yell at the cashier if it's not right" thing, and there are merchants here (like the gas station nearest my home) where the cashier/owner has a tendency to ring in the wrong prices, and blame it on "tax" when it doesn't match the sticker price. (Hint: $3 times 1.13 does not equal $4.)
Also, our taxes are never easy to multiply numbers... it's always 7%, 8%, 13%, and so on...
They could use it to carve their names on the moon.
Larger memory per node is useful when manipulating stupidly huge data sets. Sometimes speed isn't the most important aspect in getting the calculations done, and other factors come into play, like memory size/bandwidth, disk space available, speed of that diskspace, and even network connectivity if you're doing MPI programming.
While I realize it would be great to teach everyone efficient programming techniques, so they could streamline their memory usage down to the bare minimal, it's not always possible, and sometimes it's just not practical to do - our users come from pretty much all disciplines, from Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, and even a few from History. (Yes, a History researcher using HPC to do calculations and simulations. He's actually doing some pretty neat stuff.) Teaching that diverse a group of people to program super efficiently is not going to work - they're not interested in making super awesome code, they just want their numbers crunched, and are only willing to learn the bare minimal to get it running. The worst cases tend to get assigned a staff member to consult with them and get their code cleaned up so that they don't break the clusters, but with a few thousand users, we can't do that with everybody - most of them would never show up to the classes anyways.
The memory they list as an exciting "700+TB" is not actually all that exciting - if you divide that by the number of nodes, and then the number of CPU cores, that leaves only 2GB of ram per CPU core, which is pretty much standard for HPC cluster memory. The only thing impressive about this really, is the number of compute nodes involved, which any single submitted job will _not_ have access to all of. I manage similar, though smaller, research clusters myself, and frankly, the only clusters we had that had less than 2GB per CPU core were retired long ago. Essentially, this means they're running the cluster with the minimum amount of memory that is considered acceptable for the application.
Actually, many of them do. Ken Ham is a great example of this, and despite being what most people would call a fringe lunatic, he still somehow manages to bilk millions of dollars out of his state government to promote his views, and achieve a stage to shout his views from in major media sources who want to pretend they're showing "balance" when covering evolution related discussions. It's him and people like him who are responsible for the Texas Board of Education's constant dumbing down of school science and biology textbooks, and constant attempts to force creationism into classrooms via poorly worded laws pretending to "teach the controversy".
Actually, the idea that all life came from a single cell is pretty outdated, and was mostly never part of any serious scientific theory - any chemical reaction that would produce protocells (ie: the self-replicating molecules that would eventually become complex enough to call single-celled organisms) would have produced said protocells in the millions. I suspect that what you're really objecting to here is the idea that all life came from single-celled organisms, and no, science itself don't immediately fall apart if you don't accept that, just all of Biology, and a good chunk of the Chemistry that is based on biological processes. Astronomy and Physics for example, would be relatively unaffected by the complete loss of another discipline. The method by which you want to do this however, would have negative effects on all of science.
The reason you see so much about the importance of evolution being said by scientists is precisely because of the well funded fringe lunatics who are promoting the ID/Creationism view, and attempting to push it into schools, and push evolution out - they're doing it for religious reasons, not out of their claimed "value of seeing both sides". When you're presenting one side that has a literal mountain of evidence, proof, and useful predictions made from it, an alternative side that holds up a literalist interpretation of a translation of a translation of a series of stone-age parables is not an equivalent alternative explanation, regardless of how loudly the crazy person shouts. (And yes, Ken does claim that the modern english version of the bible that he uses is the perfect literal one, as do most of the others involved in forcing this idiocy into laws that are then struck down as unconstitutional and generally stupid.)
In short, scientists tell people about how important evolution is because they're defending themselves from nut-jobs who are trying to claim that it's all evil lies from the devil to corrupt our youths, and should be pushed out of schools. You wouldn't be hearing nearly so much about it if it wasn't for Ken and his fellow Creationists, and arguing that it should go away puts you into the same group as those people in the minds of anyone who has been watching the "debate", whether it's the ones on the side of reality who are tired of being attacked by crazy people and tend to get snappish at them after decades of defending themselves from unreasonable fanatics, or the Creationists themselves, who will count you in as they claim "See! Lots of people believe exactly the same as us!".
Going back to your original comment about not needing to know that a car was assembled by a robotic arm to know every detail of how it works, it's not quite an accurate comparison - taking evolution out of biology does in fact stop us from completely understanding how bodies and their internal parts work, as suddenly the commonalities between organisms that came from recent common ancestors have no reason for existing. Why does a squid work so differently from a fish, and why is the fish more similar to a human than it is to a fellow water-creature like the squid?
First, as for the ID/Creationism comments, you _are_ the one who brought it up and made false claims about it. As usual, when it's pointed out that those claims are false, the claimant automatically resorts to "stop being so mean!". Grow up.
Second, "Macroevolution" does not exist as a separate concept, and if I showed dogs evolving into another species, you'd just be shifting your goalposts to say "you're just showing quadruped mammals evolving into other quadruped mammals, which is microevolution, show me some real change!" despite the clearly indicated issue that change of that magnitude in a long-lived species requires time scales longer than western civilization has existed in North America. Further, if you're talking about species versus species, sorry to tell you this, but the definition of species requires the two animals to be able to "meet, mate, and produce fertile offspring under natural circumstances", which means that a Toy Poodle and a Wolfhound are as much the same species as a cat and a rabbit are. If you're disputing "macroevolution", you're also disputing "microevolution", because they are in fact exactly the same thing.
Last, you've shifted your goalposts from the original argument of "evolution" to "common descent" and are now asking the very different question of whether or not that idea isn't accepted will cause the scientific method to fall apart. The problem there is, the scientific method is based on observation and verification of evidence, and incorporating that evidence into explanations of the world, using those explanations to make predictions, and then testing them. To take common descent out of the picture requires removing a large quantity of the evidence upon which further work was done - including all of the "microevolution" you claim only a fool would deny. It isn't the scientific method that falls apart there, it's the results that were produced by using it on the evidence you refuse to allow to be used - you know - the vast majority of the results of modern medicine and agriculture.
There is no difference between macro and micro evolution, they're both evolution, predicted by the same theory, using the same mechanisms, producing the same effects, and both demonstrated very adequately. You can't have one without the other, because there's no separation between them except in the minds of creationists who are desperately trying to rationalize away evidence so that they don't have to admit their dogma is incorrect. Also, "macroevolution" has been demonstrated and documented quite clearly - take a look at your neighbor's dog. What breed is it? Do Toy Poodles or Dobermans look very much like Irish Setters? No? Do they act like them? No? Guess what, they come from the same original base stock, and successive mutations and selective breeding (ie: the same kind of selection Evolution describes, but in this case rather than starvation deciding who gets to breed, the owners and breeders act as the selective pressure) have lead to two completely different animals. Lots of other examples exist, such as the moths in the Black Forest of Germany, the entire fossil record, comparisons of DNA, and even examinations of various human populations in isolated regions of earth. Again, selective pressure resulting in physical change over time. The only reason there are more examples of evolution occurring in microorganisms is because the time between successive generations is on the order of days, hours, or even minutes, rather than years as it is in larger organisms. This does not mean it isn't happening, and definitely does not mean it hasn't been observed, it just means that setting up a lab to test it is not practical, because most institutions have this whole requirement that research result in publications during the lifetime of the researcher who set up the experiment.
As for the difference between ID and Creationism, no ID doesn't know the limits of anything, it's just a dishonest re-branding of the same old garbage to try and sneak it past the "don't teach religion in our science classrooms" requirement. There was a whole big court case and media frenzy about this several years ago, and the judge agreed: ID _is_ creationism with a shiney new label glued on top of it, and all references to a christian god search-and-replaced with a more generic "creator" term. Still no science actually involved in it, just a lot of dishonest claims to the contrary.
If Evolutionary Theory disappeared however, you'd lose antibiotics, vaccines, insect and drought resistant crops (and thus a LOT of the world's food supply), and many other things you currently rely on for your comfortable life.
Ah, I see what's wrong here - you're under the common mistaken belief that Evolutionary Theory says where life comes from. Sorry, it doesn't actually deal with that at all, it deals with what happens when there is already life present. Nothing more, nothing less. As for observations and processes being repeated, Evolution has been observed, and the processes have been repeated. That's why it counts as an actual Theory, while ID and Creationism do not, as they've never provided testable predictions.
This solution of yours - it has some merit, but also vaguely resembles using Global Thermonuclear Urban Renewal to correct world hunger.
If it's so uninteresting, why are you still posting? Wouldn't it make more sense for you to just read a different article that you felt actually was interesting? I think it's kind of sad that you've spent more energy typing in your insistence that nobody should post responses to this thread than the vast majority of people posting responses to this thread have.
Seriously, follow your own advice, if it makes you so angry to see people doing things that you don't want to do - type out your rage filled rant, and then hit cancel.
You know Diebold (of the easily hacked voting machines scandal) still makes ABM banking machines, right? I mean, yeah, they changed the name of their voting machine division to try and get around the shame, but they're still the same people. (Seriously, in my old city, I found their logo on almost a quarter of the bank machines, and that's in Canada - they're more popular in the US.) They handle a lot of your money going in and out of those machines, including the scanners that recognize what currency is being fed into the slot.
Are you really sure they're smart enough to avoid executing any of the recognition data? _Really_ sure? Are you sure the same laziness that caused issues with their voting machines will never ever happen again, from them, or from any of the other (several) private companies that make those machines? It doesn't even have to be the whole company - all it takes is one lazy programmer setting up the recognition software not bothering to prevent a buffer overflow or something else dumb like that, and suddenly a stolen bank card and a plain white slip of paper with a fancy QR code will pwn your local "QR enabled" bank machine.
The problem is, people look at QR codes, and they think "Woo! That's like, SUPER ENCRYPTED!", when really, it's no more encrypted than the plain text serial numbers already printed on every bit of paper currency already, and a whole lot less practical, since the people looking at it won't be able to easily recognize if there's a duplicate, or fake. The only advantage QR codes have is that they can be easily machine-interpreted and can contain things like URLs so small devices like cell phones don't need the user to manually type in the whole URL to visit a website. The only useful bit involved in putting a QR code on a bill would be if they were used to hold a digital copy of the serial numbers, but there are other ways of making a simple, predictable thing like serial numbers on a bill computer recognizable. They're always the same colors, on the same background, using the same font. The software that recognizes and interprets QR codes is actually _more_ complex than the software needed to recognize printed serial numbers under those circumstances.
You punk! When are you going to stop punching the language around?
So you believe in "God" but you think you have the wisdom to kill other people
You should check out the bible some time, it's full of things like orders from God to kill every last man, woman, child, all of their livestock, burn their belongings and salt their fields, and such. That whole "no killing" thing only applies to people who are part of the same tribe/religious sub-group in the actual original written form, and is frequently paraphrased and misquoted to say no to killing in general.
... you build missle launchers? You people blow me away.
I see what you did there.