Will the internal systems check be able to verify that the hub-caps are all clipped on properly, the mirrors haven't been knocked loose (to the point of falling off), etc? The street I used to live on had a railroad crossing with a steep grade on either side of it, and all up and down the street were littered pieces of poorly maintained cars - hubcaps, mirrors, door handles, the occasional fender (how do you not notice that falling off?), and once a mostly intact (though very rusty) car door sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. (I am assuming the driver was drunk for that one. There's no other way.)

Every time I hear about flying cars, I think about that car door, the fenders, and all those hub-caps, and I think "Do I really want these people flying over my house?"

They stated the relevant qualifier. Is it really related to their point if said 15-year-old is named Ezekiel, or has a large collection of shoes? Would their gender be relevant? All that is being expressed here is the qualifier that means "This supposedly grown adult who has passed law school should be more mature than the person they're being unfavorably compared to because of reason X, and in this case, reason X is they're only 15 years old, and has nothing at all to do with their preference of orange juice over grape juice. Gender is not relevant here - male versus female 15-year-olds are both still supposed to be less mature than grown and theoretically adult persons who have graduated from law school. The lack of personal details about the child aren't important here to anyone but a creepy stalker.

Well, that does appear to be the opinion of these particular violent criminals who broke into a lab and released animals to die painful suffering deaths in the wild. Once again, they are wrong.

Do a web search on the site name and "extortion".

One problem that I see with that, is that the event horizon is defined as the place where gravity is so strong that light can't escape - light can easily escape from 1g, so that's not the event horizon.

I suspect that you're confusing gravity with density - as the black hole's event horizon gets bigger, the density gets lower. I can't remember exactly, but if the event horizon is somewhere around the radius of our solar system, you get an average density around the same as our atmosphere. The gravity's still a heck of a lot higher than 1g at the event horizon though.

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?)