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...

Answer is: I don't.

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.

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? The closer the common ancestor of a pair of creatures is, the more similar they will be internally. In your car example, it's more akin to saying "I don't need to know how an old Model T worked and is related to a modern Sports Car to understand everything about how the Sports Car works - we should just forget all that stuff about car designs having changed over time, they're unrelated." And yet when learning auto mechanics, how a basic internal combustion engine works is going to be taught long before they get into computer controlled fuel injection, and nobody gets angry at them for mentioning that those engines were the first ones, and others were developed from them later on.

Common descent isn't the basis for science upon which it rests, it's the resulting output of science being done honestly, and throwing it away is not only an insult to the people who have put all of their life's work into finding the answers to those questions, it would mean that the results of science don't matter and should just be casually tossed away whenever they make someone feel uncomfortable, thus meaning that if some cult out there decides that the world exists inside of a crystal sphere and the stars and planets are just painted on it, we'll all have to follow the precedent set by the disposal of evolution (to make creationists feel more comfortable) and get rid of any mention of the rest of the universe as actually existing. Evidence favors other stars and solar systems existing, but then it also favors evolution (in all of it's forms, including the bit about common descent) so if we're tossing one out the window for no valid reason, anything else is fair game as well.

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.

This solution of yours - it has some merit, but also vaguely resembles using Global Thermonuclear Urban Renewal to correct world hunger.