Or you could make the comm package an unfolding self-guided glider
plane. Balloon pops, packages senses it, unfolds, glides back to
nearest assigned pick-up point using GPS.
Realistically, you'll need a team of engineers for a couple of years
to develop this so that it's reliable. With the risk of the cost
of such a project spiralling out of control as unanticipated
problems arise. And the lost opportunity of delaying deployment
a couple to several years.
Or you could have one employee with a pick-up truck assigned to
retrieve the daily balloon. Even if most of the balloons fall in
inaccessible areas, at several hundred dollars each that's still not
much more
than the cost of a couple of employees. The main thing I'd be
concerned with is whether the balloons are biodegradable.
I suppose such a project could be background R&D as the company
grows, but even so the payback could be very long.
I found out later that my hunch was correct - it's just unlikely for two photons to hit an atom at exactly the same (to within a plancks time) with a low powered laser.
A Planck time (10^-43 s)? How do you conclude that number?
If you shine two beams so that they cross paths, some photons will collide with each other and scatter.
The actual mechanism, I believe, is that a photon can momentarily
fluctuate into
a charged fermion/antifermion pair, and the cross-beam interacts with
those particles.
My town has local buses - heavily subsidized by the mostly upscale
taxpayers, who keep voting in the system because it's "public
transportation" and therefore "green" - that run mostly or completely
empty most of the day, going around and around town in useless trips
that do nothing but waste fuel. In spite of that, a trip from one side
of town to the other (5 minutes by car) can take almost an hour due to
the convoluted routes and
waiting for bus transfers in the center. I would guess that offering
free taxi service during non-rush hours might even save the town
money.
Overall, the problem of efficient public transportation in a
suburban area is not an easy one to solve.
I wonder if any place has tried an "on-demand" bus system. Basically,
on-line you enter your source, destination, and time window, and their
computer figures out the optimal routes - which could be optimized in
different ways, say to maximize passengers per mile or to minimize
passenger inconvenience, whatever is considered most important. Then,
for example, a bus could pick you up at your front door - pretty close
to a specific time they tell you - and drop you off at your destination,
after a few digressions along the way to process other passengers.
..combo with the left/right buttons above the touchpad, just below
the space bar. That way I can move the cursor with one thumb and
click with the other, without my fingers ever leaving the keyboard.
Instead, virtually all laptops with touchpads
have the mouse buttons below the touchpad,
making it very awkward and error prone (like accidentally hitting the
touchpad itself) if I try to stretch my thumb down to press them,
unless my hand leaves the keyboard thus interrupting my flow.
Does anyone know the justification for mouse buttons under the
touchpad? I cannot think of any benefit at all. Even a regular mouse
(that the touchpad is presumably imitating) usually has the buttons near the top.
My favorite computer years ago (early 90s) was a Mac Powerbook
with the mouse switch above the trackball and just below the space
bar. I worked very efficiently with that arrangement,
mixing typing and mouse movements seamlessly, and miss it.
(Unfortunately I no longer have a Mac laptop and don't know how
today's touchpads are arranged. Educate me.)
It does seem that the Thinkpad with pointing stick/touchpad combo
has a second set of mouse buttons under the space bar, looking at photos. Something to
consider for my next laptop purchase. But they still have
a second set of mouse buttons below the touchpad - why? It seems a waste.
If you can afford toys like this, you can afford laser vision-correction surgery...
I am myopic and wear bifocals. Laser correction could correct
distance vision, but then I'd have to wear glasses for
reading, which I don't now and never will even when I'm old - something
my opthamologist (an old man near retirement who is also myopic) said I'll come to
appreciate as a blessing in disguise. Ironically, I prefer
the myopia: without glasses, I can do fine, up-close work far
better than most people.
Anyway,
why couldn't the display optics be adjusted to correct for vision?
Binoculars work fine for me without glasses, I just have to
adjust the focus differently from most people.
Blu-ray has mandatory AACS encryption, and the optional BD+, and as far
as I know, absolutely no format cheaper than a single-layer Blu-Ray disc
(25 gigs). So much for home recording.
So if AACS is not optional, wouldn't that justify possession of its
cryptographic keys and/or DeCSS-type software, in spite of the
DMCA, so that we can
guarantee access to our own content in the future?
Or do we
face a future where our own data archives can be cut off from us,
even
remotely, at the whim of whatever industry/government body
controls key revocation?
In this instance, it's not really Netflix's fault.... The reason they haven't is because the MPAA studios which supply the movies that Netflix's rents won't license them movies unless they use some form of DRM that they approve of.
Well, if DRM is required,
I don't understand why Netflix wouldn't simply provide a refreshed DRM copy
to people who encounter a problem with changed monitors or whatever, rather than
wasting customer's time and Netflix's money with customer support, suggesting switching
to VGA, or telling customers they're out of luck.
Since a refreshed DRM copy doesn't
cost them anything, pissing off customers and probably losing a lot of them would seem far less cost-effective
in the long run, than taking draconian measures to prevent an occasional
"cheater" (who probably wouldn't pay for a 2nd copy anyway if these draconian
measures defeat them).
Are you sure your monitor just doesn't have reverse ordered pixels?
Yes, I am sure. I have played around with every
combination, even going to the MS site to run their tuning program,
and I still can't stand ClearType no matter what the setting
(on my 768x1024 LCD). It just makes me feel like my vision is blurred.
What is worse, I like to use 8-point Andale Mono in my text editor -
easy to read (without ClearType) small letters
with lots of text visible on the
screen. ClearType makes it literally unreadable - I cannot distinguish
a period from a comma, for example, unless I tilt the screen to
bring out the contrast difference that LCDs have at
different angles.
One problem I have with this and other "non-commercial" CC licenses is
that "non-commercial" doesn't seem, to me, to be
clearly defined. Certainly
there can be blatant commercial uses that are easy to identify, but
there are many situations where it is not so clear. Suppose, for
example, the material is posted a personal home page, which is provided
free by the ISP in exchange for advertisements. Does that constitute
"commercial use"? Clearly, the ISP is profiting from the material if it
is drawing people to that page and thus the ads. Who owes who what
money?
Is a Red Cross advertisement commercial or noncommercial? If
the Red Cross paid a magazine for an ad containing a CC+ licensed image, then
the magazine is earning some money from it, even though the Red Cross
itself is non-commercial. (Or is it?)
It is even hard to come up with examples where the
use is disconnected from the slightest taint of a direct or indirect
commercial connection.
Of course, CC+ is also incompatible with GPL-licensed software.
For example, a CC licensed "non-commercial use" icon in a software
package would prevent a commercial entity from using it, defeating the
purpose of the GPL.
I think Planetmath is a place, if
not the place, where in-depth mathematics belongs. I believe it was
started before Wikipedia, and I am pretty sure Planetmath and Wikipedia
"borrow" from each other, with similar FDL licenses. However, the level
of contribution to Planetmath isn't nearly as high as Wikipedia, if only
because of the greater popularity of the latter.
The "meta" discussion wiki for Planetmath is AsteroidMeta.
One topic of discussion I've seen is whether it should be Google-ad
supported. It is qualified as a tax-exempt public
charity in the U.S., and they are completely open about their
finances with detailed reports.
People already fall in love with a car, a boat, a
Playstation, a video game character, a crack addicted ex...
We can love anything. No news here.
To "love" something
means many things. Love for these things (possibly excluding the ex) almost
certainly has nothing to do with finding them sexually attractive and
wanting to "make love" to them. Do you love your parents? Your children?
Your pet? You (and a good number of other posters here) seem to be using
the word "love" with the wrong meaning.
I think the topic under discussion is romantic/sexual love, which
has nothing to do with most things you mention. Well,
maybe a video game character for some people - perhaps if they are
lonely and
can't find a real life lover - although that is strange and
probably involves imagining the character as having sexual
attributes of a
real person in some way. But sex with a car?
That seems like a wild stretch of imagination.
True, but a lot of people don't realize that TV doesn't carry nearly the same intensity/strength as a directed signal...
I agree that individual television signals will almost certainly
be too weak to be decoded into the I Love Lucy program.
However, there is another type of information
being transmitted - the fact that there is a transmission at all.
Someone else will have to calculate the numbers involved, but I would
guess that the existence of TV signals (not as TV per se, but just as
relatively
narrowband frequencies) could be detected vastly further away if they
were integrated over a period of say years or decades.
What the
alien would see would be a spectrum of oddly but precisely spaced average
frequencies (based on FCC / other gov't channel allocation) that didn't correspond
any known natural process, and the
alien might conclude that the signals
are most likely artificially generated. Perhaps even the average bandwidth
could be inferred in some cases, giving a rough indication of the information rate of
the modulation, if they suspect the signals are used for communication.
You trust your ISP enough to give them your
actual email address? You, sir or madam, are a braver soul than I.
This was modded "insightful"? If you don't trust them with your
email address, why would you trust them as your ISP at all,
with the theoretical ability to monitor
100% of your personal and business
Internet activity (including, I'm sure, your email address
passing somewhere in the data stream if it really interested them
that much)? Well, unless you encrypt EVERYTHING I guess.
But even the effort of creating a one-time email address just for them
(forwarded to your real one), if your are this paranoid, would seem
preferable to allowing them to inject their data into your TCP
streams.
And the injection wouldn't work anyway if, being as paranoid as you are,
you only allow anonymized proxied https pages onto your browser.
So just how, exactly, would you expect them to communicate with you?
Audible (the online audiobook seller) has an option in it's playback program 'rip to cd using Nero'. That wouldn't survive in a stricter copying environment.
Several years ago I bought an audio book from the iTunes store and
needed an mp3 version to listen to on a trip. (I don't have an iPod.)
iTunes would not let me create an MP3 because it was DRM'ed i.e. an
iTunes store purchase. I actually didn't know that the convert to MP3
feature was disabled for DRM'ed audio, and their cryptic error message
took half a dozen customer service emails (most of which were idiotic
canned responses having nothing to do with the problem), when they
finally pinned this down and pointed me to a web page saying
this.
I also couldn't burn it to CD, then convert it to mp3, because (at
least at the time) iTunes would not burn it to CD because it wouldn't
fit on a CD.
At this point I asked for a refund, and they refused. At one point I
became so heated in my emails that they interpreted it as a legal
threat, and suggested that all further communications should go
through their legal dept. - which couldn't be contacted directly, but
only through a lawyer who I would have to hire.
Finally, after digging through their site, I found an old web page
that advertised the MP3 conversion feature without mentioning any
special restriction on iTunes store purchases. This was a mistake on
their part, but nonetheless it could very clearly be interpreted as
fraudulent advertising.
After a few more emails debating this web page, they finally
relented and refunded my money, telling me this was a one-time thing
that they would never do again.
Frankly, the time and emotional energy I spent on this far exceeded
the money I was refunded. Anyway that is my story, and it is the reason
I no longer buy from the iTunes store.
P.S. at that time Jazz (I think it was called) could defeat the DRM.
But by the time I found that out I had already invested so much time
with customer service that it became the principle of the thing. By the
end of this debacle I developed an active dislike for the book,
and anyway the trip I wanted it for had come and gone, so
I just deleted it per their instructions, after my refund.
It may be argued that computers are not really an appropriate tool when
truly "correct" mathematics must be relied upon. My response to that is
that as problems of interest become ever more complex, limitations both
of the human mind and the human life span will ultimately limit the
problems we can solve unaided. The task for us now is to create a
system we CAN trust to solve problems correctly, because someday we will
have to trust it to solve problems we cannot handle.
There is a mathematical proof verification language, Metamath, whose
rigor and/or correctness
(meaning freedom from bugs) are probably near the top,
if only because (1) the proof language is
trivially simple and (2) as a result half a dozen independently written
proof verifiers have been coded, in C, Haskell, Python
(300 lines of code), Java, Lisp, and Lua, so the likelihood they all have
the same bug is pretty small. It stands in contrast to some other
proof verifiers or theorem provers that embed complex internal algorithms and
tend to be very large programs that would be hard to formally verify for
correctness - and in some cases are closed source (like Mizar, which BTW
probably has the largest body of mathematical knowledge developed for
it).
A problem with Metamath is that it is very labor-intensive to develop
proofs. The proof of 2 + 2 = 4 has
23,000 steps from ZF set theory axioms, and the computation of cosine of 2
to one decimal place has some 75,000 steps that take several seconds for
the verifier to verify. All of these steps were entered by hand
(although once a collection of theorems are developed they can be reused,
so proofs become easier as a body of knowledge is developed). All of these steps are absolutely,
rigorously correct - assuming that at least one of the independent verifiers
has no bugs. Unlike a 75,000 line computer program, there is no such
thing a a bug in the proof - a proof is either right or wrong (i.e. not a proof).
I wonder how they are going to handle CompUSA-specific warranties.
For example, I just had a new audio system installed by them in
my car. There will no longer be a physical store to take
my car to, and of course I can't mail my car to some central
repair depot. If a problem arises, hopefully I won't have to take
Carlos Slim to small claims court.:)
And there are all those extended warranties they are always
trying to push on you.
But their change isn't under the GPL. If they were distributing a
patched kernel, they'd have problems. But distributing the patch itself
is okay.
So I can develop a proprietary mod of the kernel, diff my binary
against the standard kernel binary, then distribute my proprietary mods
as a binary patch to the kernel? Sounds like quite a loophole.
And last but hopefully not least,
pdflatex and pdftex. You
simply use "pdflatex" in place of the "latex"
command to generate pdf output instead of dvi output, with
much better quality than latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf (which unfortunately
people who don't know better still use).
A couple of years ago I was beginning to suffer some RSI symptoms.
While wearing my fancy wrist brace, I realized a lot of my mouse
movement on my MS Windows machine was from the top of the screen (where most app menus reside) to
the bottom of the screen (where the standard Windows taskbar lives by
default). The simple act of moving the taskbar to the top of the screen
decreased my wrists motions enough so that I no longer wear the brace.
Unfortunately many Windows apps expect the taskbar to be at the bottom and
will open (depending on prefs) either under the taskbar so they can't be
dragged away or over the taskbar obscuring it. I picked the latter pref
and deal with the nuisance of dragging newly opened apps down, but that
is a small price to pay for less wrist stress.
It occurred to me that the classic Mac interface has always put the
taskbar at the top of the screen by default, so in a sense I have resolved
my RSI problem by making my computer more Mac-like. I wonder why MS put it at
the bottom - was it just to be different from the Mac?
The 14-year-old daughter of a friend is selecting new bedroom
furniture, and she is choosing everything in
brown, specifically a dark brown called
"java". Perhaps brown is becoming the new "in" color among
teens? (BTW she has a white iPod, although from before her
java phase.)
Slashdot Mirror
Realistically, you'll need a team of engineers for a couple of years to develop this so that it's reliable. With the risk of the cost of such a project spiralling out of control as unanticipated problems arise. And the lost opportunity of delaying deployment a couple to several years.
Or you could have one employee with a pick-up truck assigned to retrieve the daily balloon. Even if most of the balloons fall in inaccessible areas, at several hundred dollars each that's still not much more than the cost of a couple of employees. The main thing I'd be concerned with is whether the balloons are biodegradable.
I suppose such a project could be background R&D as the company grows, but even so the payback could be very long.
A Planck time (10^-43 s)? How do you conclude that number?
If you shine two beams so that they cross paths, some photons will collide with each other and scatter.
The actual mechanism, I believe, is that a photon can momentarily fluctuate into a charged fermion/antifermion pair, and the cross-beam interacts with those particles.
Overall, the problem of efficient public transportation in a suburban area is not an easy one to solve.
I wonder if any place has tried an "on-demand" bus system. Basically, on-line you enter your source, destination, and time window, and their computer figures out the optimal routes - which could be optimized in different ways, say to maximize passengers per mile or to minimize passenger inconvenience, whatever is considered most important. Then, for example, a bus could pick you up at your front door - pretty close to a specific time they tell you - and drop you off at your destination, after a few digressions along the way to process other passengers.
Instead, virtually all laptops with touchpads have the mouse buttons below the touchpad, making it very awkward and error prone (like accidentally hitting the touchpad itself) if I try to stretch my thumb down to press them, unless my hand leaves the keyboard thus interrupting my flow.
Does anyone know the justification for mouse buttons under the touchpad? I cannot think of any benefit at all. Even a regular mouse (that the touchpad is presumably imitating) usually has the buttons near the top.
My favorite computer years ago (early 90s) was a Mac Powerbook with the mouse switch above the trackball and just below the space bar. I worked very efficiently with that arrangement, mixing typing and mouse movements seamlessly, and miss it. (Unfortunately I no longer have a Mac laptop and don't know how today's touchpads are arranged. Educate me.)
It does seem that the Thinkpad with pointing stick/touchpad combo has a second set of mouse buttons under the space bar, looking at photos. Something to consider for my next laptop purchase. But they still have a second set of mouse buttons below the touchpad - why? It seems a waste.
Opera 9.12 on OLPC (One Laptop Per Child): 55%
I am myopic and wear bifocals. Laser correction could correct distance vision, but then I'd have to wear glasses for reading, which I don't now and never will even when I'm old - something my opthamologist (an old man near retirement who is also myopic) said I'll come to appreciate as a blessing in disguise. Ironically, I prefer the myopia: without glasses, I can do fine, up-close work far better than most people.
Anyway, why couldn't the display optics be adjusted to correct for vision? Binoculars work fine for me without glasses, I just have to adjust the focus differently from most people.
So if AACS is not optional, wouldn't that justify possession of its cryptographic keys and/or DeCSS-type software, in spite of the DMCA, so that we can guarantee access to our own content in the future?
Or do we face a future where our own data archives can be cut off from us, even remotely, at the whim of whatever industry/government body controls key revocation?
There are those who think protein folding is a misguided use of resources. See this comment: "It's a fishing expedition, being sold as cancer research, and that is a sad way to deceive the public". (Also see the replies which of course present an opposing viewpoint, although I am still not completely comfortable about the potential payback of this project.)
Personally I'm running einstein@home but may share some cycles with SETI for their new data.
Well, if DRM is required, I don't understand why Netflix wouldn't simply provide a refreshed DRM copy to people who encounter a problem with changed monitors or whatever, rather than wasting customer's time and Netflix's money with customer support, suggesting switching to VGA, or telling customers they're out of luck.
Since a refreshed DRM copy doesn't cost them anything, pissing off customers and probably losing a lot of them would seem far less cost-effective in the long run, than taking draconian measures to prevent an occasional "cheater" (who probably wouldn't pay for a 2nd copy anyway if these draconian measures defeat them).
Yes, I am sure. I have played around with every combination, even going to the MS site to run their tuning program, and I still can't stand ClearType no matter what the setting (on my 768x1024 LCD). It just makes me feel like my vision is blurred.
What is worse, I like to use 8-point Andale Mono in my text editor - easy to read (without ClearType) small letters with lots of text visible on the screen. ClearType makes it literally unreadable - I cannot distinguish a period from a comma, for example, unless I tilt the screen to bring out the contrast difference that LCDs have at different angles.
Is a Red Cross advertisement commercial or noncommercial? If the Red Cross paid a magazine for an ad containing a CC+ licensed image, then the magazine is earning some money from it, even though the Red Cross itself is non-commercial. (Or is it?)
It is even hard to come up with examples where the use is disconnected from the slightest taint of a direct or indirect commercial connection.
Of course, CC+ is also incompatible with GPL-licensed software. For example, a CC licensed "non-commercial use" icon in a software package would prevent a commercial entity from using it, defeating the purpose of the GPL.
The "meta" discussion wiki for Planetmath is AsteroidMeta. One topic of discussion I've seen is whether it should be Google-ad supported. It is qualified as a tax-exempt public charity in the U.S., and they are completely open about their finances with detailed reports.
To "love" something means many things. Love for these things (possibly excluding the ex) almost certainly has nothing to do with finding them sexually attractive and wanting to "make love" to them. Do you love your parents? Your children? Your pet? You (and a good number of other posters here) seem to be using the word "love" with the wrong meaning.
I think the topic under discussion is romantic/sexual love, which has nothing to do with most things you mention. Well, maybe a video game character for some people - perhaps if they are lonely and can't find a real life lover - although that is strange and probably involves imagining the character as having sexual attributes of a real person in some way. But sex with a car? That seems like a wild stretch of imagination.
Oops, someone may be in trouble... the image on that page is CC licensed for "non-commercial" only.
I agree that individual television signals will almost certainly be too weak to be decoded into the I Love Lucy program.
However, there is another type of information being transmitted - the fact that there is a transmission at all. Someone else will have to calculate the numbers involved, but I would guess that the existence of TV signals (not as TV per se, but just as relatively narrowband frequencies) could be detected vastly further away if they were integrated over a period of say years or decades.
What the alien would see would be a spectrum of oddly but precisely spaced average frequencies (based on FCC / other gov't channel allocation) that didn't correspond any known natural process, and the alien might conclude that the signals are most likely artificially generated. Perhaps even the average bandwidth could be inferred in some cases, giving a rough indication of the information rate of the modulation, if they suspect the signals are used for communication.
This was modded "insightful"? If you don't trust them with your email address, why would you trust them as your ISP at all, with the theoretical ability to monitor 100% of your personal and business Internet activity (including, I'm sure, your email address passing somewhere in the data stream if it really interested them that much)? Well, unless you encrypt EVERYTHING I guess.
But even the effort of creating a one-time email address just for them (forwarded to your real one), if your are this paranoid, would seem preferable to allowing them to inject their data into your TCP streams.
And the injection wouldn't work anyway if, being as paranoid as you are, you only allow anonymized proxied https pages onto your browser. So just how, exactly, would you expect them to communicate with you?
Several years ago I bought an audio book from the iTunes store and needed an mp3 version to listen to on a trip. (I don't have an iPod.) iTunes would not let me create an MP3 because it was DRM'ed i.e. an iTunes store purchase. I actually didn't know that the convert to MP3 feature was disabled for DRM'ed audio, and their cryptic error message took half a dozen customer service emails (most of which were idiotic canned responses having nothing to do with the problem), when they finally pinned this down and pointed me to a web page saying this.
I also couldn't burn it to CD, then convert it to mp3, because (at least at the time) iTunes would not burn it to CD because it wouldn't fit on a CD.
At this point I asked for a refund, and they refused. At one point I became so heated in my emails that they interpreted it as a legal threat, and suggested that all further communications should go through their legal dept. - which couldn't be contacted directly, but only through a lawyer who I would have to hire.
Finally, after digging through their site, I found an old web page that advertised the MP3 conversion feature without mentioning any special restriction on iTunes store purchases. This was a mistake on their part, but nonetheless it could very clearly be interpreted as fraudulent advertising.
After a few more emails debating this web page, they finally relented and refunded my money, telling me this was a one-time thing that they would never do again.
Frankly, the time and emotional energy I spent on this far exceeded the money I was refunded. Anyway that is my story, and it is the reason I no longer buy from the iTunes store.
P.S. at that time Jazz (I think it was called) could defeat the DRM. But by the time I found that out I had already invested so much time with customer service that it became the principle of the thing. By the end of this debacle I developed an active dislike for the book, and anyway the trip I wanted it for had come and gone, so I just deleted it per their instructions, after my refund.
There is a mathematical proof verification language, Metamath, whose rigor and/or correctness (meaning freedom from bugs) are probably near the top, if only because (1) the proof language is trivially simple and (2) as a result half a dozen independently written proof verifiers have been coded, in C, Haskell, Python (300 lines of code), Java, Lisp, and Lua, so the likelihood they all have the same bug is pretty small. It stands in contrast to some other proof verifiers or theorem provers that embed complex internal algorithms and tend to be very large programs that would be hard to formally verify for correctness - and in some cases are closed source (like Mizar, which BTW probably has the largest body of mathematical knowledge developed for it).
A problem with Metamath is that it is very labor-intensive to develop proofs. The proof of 2 + 2 = 4 has 23,000 steps from ZF set theory axioms, and the computation of cosine of 2 to one decimal place has some 75,000 steps that take several seconds for the verifier to verify. All of these steps were entered by hand (although once a collection of theorems are developed they can be reused, so proofs become easier as a body of knowledge is developed). All of these steps are absolutely, rigorously correct - assuming that at least one of the independent verifiers has no bugs. Unlike a 75,000 line computer program, there is no such thing a a bug in the proof - a proof is either right or wrong (i.e. not a proof).
And there are all those extended warranties they are always trying to push on you.
So I can develop a proprietary mod of the kernel, diff my binary against the standard kernel binary, then distribute my proprietary mods as a binary patch to the kernel? Sounds like quite a loophole.
And last but hopefully not least, pdflatex and pdftex. You simply use "pdflatex" in place of the "latex" command to generate pdf output instead of dvi output, with much better quality than latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf (which unfortunately people who don't know better still use).
That should be "...1-kW (1.34 horsepower for our US friends) cell tower..."
Unfortunately many Windows apps expect the taskbar to be at the bottom and will open (depending on prefs) either under the taskbar so they can't be dragged away or over the taskbar obscuring it. I picked the latter pref and deal with the nuisance of dragging newly opened apps down, but that is a small price to pay for less wrist stress.
It occurred to me that the classic Mac interface has always put the taskbar at the top of the screen by default, so in a sense I have resolved my RSI problem by making my computer more Mac-like. I wonder why MS put it at the bottom - was it just to be different from the Mac?
The 14-year-old daughter of a friend is selecting new bedroom furniture, and she is choosing everything in brown, specifically a dark brown called "java". Perhaps brown is becoming the new "in" color among teens? (BTW she has a white iPod, although from before her java phase.)