Apparently I've taken a more radical approach than anyone else. I have stopped sitting upright at a desk to type on a computer. Nearly all of my time using my laptop is done in a fully-reclined chair. I am nearly supine as I type this. The built-in head & neck rest on the back of the chair fully supports my shoulders, neck & head. My upper arms, elbows & forearms arm supported by the backrest & padded arm rest. The laptop itself is supported by a cheap plastic laptray. The laptray has pockets on either side that serve as legs. The laptop is separated from my lap by an air space of about 2". The tray pockets hold pens, small pads, TV remotes, occasionally a can of Dew or a bottle of beer (if either tips, the liquid goes into the tray pocket & nowhere near the laptop.)

If I gaze straight ahead from this relaxed position, my line of sight is about 2" above the top of the screen. I wear bifocals. The screen is about 30" away from my eyes. I had my ophthalmologist adjust the prescription for my lower lenses to allow me to read materials from 30", not from 20" as is typically prescribed for reading glasses. The bifocals are the lined type, so the entire plane of the laptop's screen is viewed through the same lens prescription. I once tried using lineless bifocals & found with them I could only see a small fraction of the screen clearly. I had to continually move my head to focus clearly on the screen. The projected line between the upper & lower eyeglass lenses lines up very closely with the top of the laptop's screen. So I can see distant objects past the screen clearly without moving my head.

When I use a desktop scanner, I have to sit or stand bent over at the desk as most anyone would do. My land line phone is on the floor below the right arm rest.

I am retired, so I have to justify my arrangement to no boss who might perhaps believe I am too comfortable to be really working. If I stay up too late at my laptop, I tend to fall asleep in my computer position, it is that comfortable.

A couple of my hobbies are genealogy & local history. I travel around the US to do this & sometimes find I need to work my laptop for several hours at a time to catch up on email and type up my discoveries while they are still fresh in memory. I bought a folding recliner chair, similar to what is sold for use on patios, where a mesh fabric supports the body. I use a small pillow to provide more support for my head & neck, but otherwise it's very similar to my home recliner. This works almost as well as my home recliner.

I think the foundation of RSI for computer users is attempting to sit upright and pound on a keyboard, with minimal support for the arms & wrists. It's an unnatural and pain-provoking position, dictated by the all-too-human thinking of "We've always done it this way."

If the system is down, the patient records can't be pulled up and maybe somebody gets the wrong medicines and dies. All the more reason to have adequate on-site and off-site backup of some kind. You don't need multiple workstations for that.

Hard drives sometimes die or become corrupt and that recovery partition is useless at that point. Better to say they reliably die or become corrupt, and usually at a most inopportune moment. I've owned several dozen laptops & desktops over the last 25 years, and hard drive failure or corruption has been my most frequently occurring problem.

Good point about the increased reliability of a 'pressed' recovery disk vs. a home-burned one. I have never had a pressed disk go bad, but have had plenty of home-brewed ones do that, of all degrees of quality. I have also tried to burn a recovery DVD immediately after starting a new laptop, had that operation fail, and then discovered I could not make a second attempt. I had to pay the manufacturer for their pressed recovery DVD in addition to the price of the new laptop.

The kids who were camping apologized at the end of their patch, saying the repeater was the only way they could contact Dad from where they were. That makes me thing the repeater was an open one. However, I didn't note any of the repeater's details.

"open autopatches" Last week I heard one being used on a 2M repeater near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in an area with no cell phone coverage. Some young people camping in the park were checking in with Dad at home. YMMV.

Who was/were the victim(s) of this convicted murderer anyway? Buehler? Anyone? Not that they matter one bit.

I just did a quick and completely non-scientific study of asking several people about these, all of them hate them. Birds of feather...

the optimal size for fine control and large movements I suspect whatever is optimal varies from user to user. My hands are way too large for netbook keyboards. I have used trackpoints and trackpads, some are better than others.

the solution is to switch engine displacement unit in the US to, say a pint? An easier solution would be to put lies on the back of the vehicle, e.g, "6.9L" when the real engine displacement is "1.2L"

The funny thing is that very few computer salesmen know for which CPUs hardware virtualization is enabled, so the only result of Intel's market segmentation is confusion and dissatisfied customers. --- CPUs are not the only factor limiting virtualization. You have to factor in the motherboard, BIOS, graphics, and RAM. Intel offers a utility you can run that will tell you whether or not your system permits virtualization, but it is misleading. If you put an Intel CPU on a motherboard whose chipset blocks virtualization, the utility tells you the CPU is incapable of virtualization, even though it actually is, while it will not tell you that the chipset is the limiting factor. Motherboard manufacturers may capriciously block virtualization at the BIOS level and months later release BIOS versions which allow it. --- Computer salesmen are not the only ones ignorant of which components permit virtualization and which don't. Just go to Newegg or TigerDirect and search for, say, a laptop or a motherboard that will run virtualization under Win7. The information is never provided. I sent an email to Newegg 3 weeks ago asking for this information and have yet to receive a reply. Generally speaking, computer and motherboard manufacturers act as if they don't know and don't care which of their machines/motherboards permit virtualization and which don't. Various forums & boards on the internet which discuss virtualization from a user's point of view often neglect to give the specifics of successful virtualization.

My only experience was second hand, from an amateur mechanic who races farm tractors at contests. An engine he had been working on suddenly started to rev uncontrollably for no reason, fortunately it was parked & not in gear. He had just enough time to warn everyone, and he ran behind the tractor on the end opposite the engine before the engine exploded. I don't know how long the whole process took, but he described the explosion as a bomb going off with pieces of shrapnel flying & ricocheting in all directions. I would only try the remedy of blocking the air intake on a runaway diesel if I was already under the hood & the air cleaner was already off the machine. It takes too long to open the hood, remove the obstructing parts, and block the air intake with something. The basic cause of this problem is the diesel feeding on its own oil supply through an internal leak, which could be a bad seal, a crack in the block, or whatever. The only limit to the engine's speed would then be how fast the engine oil was getting sucked into the cylinders (something a witness can't determine until later, and maybe never), the amount of oil in the engine, and whether or not a key part seizes up due to overheating or oil starvation. That's why I said it would take a braver man than I to try to strangle a runaway diesel engine.

a runaway diesel (turbo bearing oil seal broke, hot engine oil continued to fuel the engine even with the engine shut-off pulled - stopped, then covered the air intake with my coat to finally choke it before it ran out of oil You're a braver man than I am. I wonder how many seconds of hyper-revving a diesel can take before it violently dissassembles itself.

Written Chinese has heaps of grammar. That is a side issue. What is remarkable is that people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects can use their own written language to make themselves clear to someone else who is literate in his own written language. That's a breakthrough. Which is easier, to learn to read & write a foreign language, or just to memorize several thousand characters with whatever written grammar the Chinese use? Is there a point for a literate Chinese to learn another Chinese dialect, or do they tend to rely on writing? I wonder if knowledge of any spoken Chinese language is necessary to become literate in Chinese, or could a student cut to the chase and simply learn the ideographs and the written grammar associated with them?