My work maintains several high end graphics workstations, a few of which have sets of four monitors linked together as a single screen (on a mounting frame to keep them in place) - the down side to this is that large windows are interrupted by the monitor's edges between screens. For really tall stuff, xrandr can be used to rotate the screen though, so you can work productively on multiple monitors, and use tall (document-shaped!) windows without putting up with the bars in the middle. For quite a while, I had a 2560x1600 monitor turned sideways (ie: 1600x2560 desktop) to use for long documents. The one I have (HP LP3065) actually has a rotatable mounting on it, which makes things a lot easier. The important thing to remember when doing that though, is to adjust the mouse's orientation in the drivers too. A user I was setting up hardware for had a weird research program that he needed to view the output from, which was producing 4000 pixel high, 600 pixel wide images, so he had me link up multiple wide-screen monitors rotated in vertical orientation, so that he could work with them. (Yes, we could have trained him to modify the output, but this was faster, and he already had a pile of monitors sitting around. Also, it looked cool when it was all set up.) Just because the monitors are all turning stupid doesn't mean your display options are limited to what they're selling.

You'd like to think that. Most people would. Sadly, I can not, because I actually know a (supposedly) grown man who did. Fortunately, he only ate one, and didn't die, but yeah, it happens.

The problem there is that the guy making these wild claims has about as much chance of being right as I would if I picked up a random rock with some algae on it on the street corner, and started claiming the algae was aliens and the rock was from space - I'd have exactly the same amount of proof of all of my claims that Wickramashinge has, and in my own favor would be the fact that I at least haven't made a large number of similar claims in the past that have all been shown false. It's not that the possibility of alien life existing is being discounted, it's that this particular hack is being called out on not doing any of his research and verification properly, and is simply making wild claims without showing that they're accurate.

And once we are eating that diet free of salt, sugar, and all the rest of that, we'll all die of malnutrition since most of those things are (or are our primary source of) vital nutrients. The human body is a badly designed, self-destructing patchwork of bits that are perpetually one bad jolt away from a breakdown, so it's not surprising that they've discovered yet again, that excessive quantities of things we need to live will also kill us.

Even water has an LD50 after all. Too much of it will leach away all of the electrolytes (including sodium chloride) from your body, and kill you.

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.

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.

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.

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...