I'd bet more Democrats feel this way than Republicans. That is very likely.
I notice that it's always been the liberal media's game to try and destroy GOP candidates credibility, since Nixon, and it always works.
Let's see, since Nixon we've had two Democratic presidents: Carter and Clinton. Neither of them got anything like a free ride from the media. To say that the media was "nice" to Clinton during his presidency is a joke.
Of course, if you classify everything you disagree with as "biased" and everything you agree with as "fair", then it's impossible for you to believe otherwise. To make my own (albeit limited) gesture against partisanry, I will say that 1) Ford's pardoning of Nixon was a reasonable thing to do, 2) I think Bush Sr. deserves more respect than he gets (and that whole grocery-store scanner business was unfair nonsense), 3) Bob Dole was not the buffoon he was made out to be in 1996, and 4) Bush's malapropisms are not a sign of mental deficiency, but just the way he talks. (Granted, that's probably the only nice thing I can say about the guy.:)
The WMD thing is a joke, but it works, because most of the population isn't informed enough to know that the people who're calling people liars are liars themselves. Apparently you've been taken in by it also. I agree the WMD thing was a joke; I thought it was a joke since Bush started telling it. Too bad you were taken in by it also. I agree that people aren't informed enough to know that the people who are calling people liars are liars themselves, but I'm sure we disagree about which party is which.:)
Clinton lied to the entire country on camera and had no problem with it, the guy is a damn good liar, lies to a grand jury, lies to his wife and kid. That's about as low as it gets in my book. One lie, versus how many? (Again, the false dichotomy of liars versus truth-tellers.)
(I realize you are probably too partisan to sway, so I only responded for the amusement value.)
You don't seriously think a Democrat is any more forthright than a Republican?
In general? No. However, just because most politicians are crooked doesn't mean there aren't levels of crookedness, and I think that the current Republican leadership has taken corruption to a level beyond that typically seen in American politics. It's a fallacy (false dichotomy?) to argue that because both parties have flaws, they are equivalently flawed. There really is such a thing as the "lesser of two evils".
I am careful to make the distinction between the current Republican leadership and Republicans in general; I have no reason to believe the average R and the average D aren't equally honest.
Comparing Apples to Unices, the shell in OSX always shows the extension of files, just like in Linux. So one should really compare OSX with the window managers in Linux, which I know little about (does Gnome or KDE always show the extensions? I generally use the shell to deal with files in Linux), or argue about whether using the shell is safer than using a graphical interface.:)
Other people have mentioned some safeguards built into OSX, like preventing the hiding of.app in "picture.jpg.app"; I hadn't noticed that before. Probably not foolproof, but a compromise compared to having ".app" tacked on all your software names. Maybe there could be a hotkey which toggles the extensions on names....
I was in quantum information about ten years ago, and if I understand this correctly, the relationship between a qubit and this "qubyte" is not analogous to the relationship between a bit and a byte. A "qubit" does not require entanglement to be a qubit; it is just a two-state quantum system, like an electron (spin-up/spin-down) or a photon (horizontal/vertical polarization). Eight qubits would just be eight electrons; they wouldn't need to be entangled.
The voters elected a Congress with no concern for their enumerated and severely powers. Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Independents are equally evil....
Don't confuse the RIAA with evil. You, the voter, are evil. They just followed the letter of the laws you wanted.
What are you proposing people do here, exactly? If both parties are evil, AND the independents are evil, how are people supposed to vote in a non-evil way? Or are you proposing that the only morally acceptable course of action is to not participate? Or maybe foment revolution?
Fusion Reactors
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I thought Google ads were targetted on specific words. How does eBay get this kind of ad? Are they buying ads for the word "fusion"? "reactor"? (I probably just misunderstand Google ads.)
I was in gifted class from kindergarten through seventh grade, 1980-1993, in eastern Pennsylvania. I enjoyed it quite a bit. There was never any homework that I can remember, and there was a lot of focus on creativity, thinking differently, and so forth. My teacher during the last two years used to do what he called "Dancing Frog" exercises, which involved going around the circle of people and together, trying to think of as many ways to do something as possible (find out somebody's name, carry water across the room, etc). I can remember making up card games in elementary school and playing them in gifted class. Learned a little German at one point.
I think schools have changed in the past 10-20 years, and maybe my school district was exceptional in this case, but that's what I think of as a "gifted program".
That being said, I think all schoolchildren would benefit from this kind of program, and less drill, if possible.
3. Every head of household will receive a monthly 'rebate' check from the federal government to reimburse the taxes collected on basic necessities. The closer to the poverty line you are, the larger the check. For instance, a family of four living at the poverty line would receive a monthly check of $497.00, (estimated at the time the Fairtax book was written).
...
5. No more April 15th. It's just another spring day.
If your rebate check depends on how close to the poverty line you are, that means that the government has to know how much you make, which means you have to report your income, probably on some form, which would probably be due some day like...oh, April 15 maybe. (We can't just rely on W-2's because of contracting, tips, etc.)
I am about as liberal as you can get...But I am absolutely against recent "liberal" attempts to stifle Free Speech by restricting campaign contributions. I think it is paramount to a repeal of the First Amendment to say that you cannot use your money in the way that you see fit. If a person wishes to give speeches on the corner in support of his candidate, it is wrong to take away his right to do so. If a person uses his own money to buy a soap box and megaphone to do it more effectively, it is wrong to take away his right to spend that money. If a person gives money to his candidate in order that the candidate can furnish other supporters with soap boxes and megaphones, is it right to take that right away? Where do we draw the line? Why do we draw the line?
I see your point and agree with you somewhat, but as a liberal I am also concerned about the influence of Big Money on our democracy. Regulating campaigning might not be the best solution (and probably falls under Ben Franklin's "giving up liberty for the sake of security" to boot), but can we come up with a better way? It would be ideal if we could instead neutralize the effect of money on a campaign, so that having more advertising and spending more money does not strongly correlate to greater success. Giving every candidate a certain baseline of funding, free advertising on TV, etc, probably helps, but given that there are some 200 people who run for President every year, that might get expensive. (Or then again, it could be pretty neat.) Or if having too much money were somehow a detriment to public opinion. Maybe if we educate the public about marketing techniques, people would see through some of the ploys (on all sides, of course) which arise in a massive marketing campaign.
It might help if we stopped treating corporations as if they were people. The Constitution provides Free Speech to people, but not for corporations (so much for strict constructionism, btw), so I have no qualms about regulating their involvement in the electoral process. If the board of directors want to give their own money to a campaign, and they can talk their employees into doing the same, well and good. The big corporations are more powerful than the wealthiest people, so cutting off their donations might level the playing field.
EXCEPT...that then leads to putting the same restrictions on non-profit organizations, to be really fair about it. (Whether that's desirable is another question.) Plus, I can already see one loophole to my proposal: a corporation gives an employee some money with the agreement that they give it to the campaign. So....
So it's a tough problem. Just like freedom to assemble doesn't mean you can assemble in the Oval Office, maybe freedom of speech is trumped by the need for fair voting. But we don't want to restrict people from expressing their political opinions either, even if that might be just like campaigning.
Suppose someone started a service where, if you sent them a phrase, they would look through the books they own, and report back to you the sentences containing that phrase. The provider owns the books, and is only quoting little bits of them, so this is clearly fair use. (This may seem absurd, but such exchanges do occur in a limited way; for instance in genealogy, someone might offer to do lookups of a particular person's name.)
Google Print is providing the same service, except it is automated, so I don't think the service violates copyright. What might violate copyright is that they've converted printed material into electronically accessible material. If they actually own the books, then this is the same format-conversion question we've been running into with audio: can someone who buys a DVD transfer it onto videotape for their own use? Same question.
Now if Google doesn't own the books then that is a problem, because they are taking a copy from a library and then both of them own the copy. Either Google should buy a copy of the books it sells (or just pay for it; they certainly don't want a warehouse of physical books somewhere which they don't use), or they should set up the databases with the libraries themselves, so that it's the libraries who own the scans.
Someone mentioned whether it was legitimate for Google to use these books to make money without giving the authors a cut of the profits. As an academic, I use a lot of books in my business and I don't pay the authors anything but the cost of the book.
That all being said, Google might consider not providing the books of the publishers who object; if this is really a boon for the publishers, then they will eventually see the error of their ways.
It's kinda like talking with any politician, since M$ft wants to compete with Google they have to disagree at some level, even if they're trying to do the same things. It's like asking Ted Kennedy what he thinks about Bush's plan for, whatever, helping little children. Whatever the Bush plan is, Ted's gotta disagree with it, that's how the game is played.
This is true, but it doesn't follow that Bill has to disagree with Google's "slogan". For instance, Senator Kennedy could agree with the president's plan (or at least his goals) while opposing Bush's implementation of the plan. We'd all like the economy to be good, for there to be peace in Iraq, for cities not to be destroyed by hurricanes, etc. I (a knee-jerk liberal at this point) even think George wants poor people to prosper, when he gives a thought to them. What we disagree on, in these cases, is the means. (Not about everything, of course; gay marriage is one case where the goals of the opposing parties diverge. Abortion is sort of like that too, except a lot of people on the pro-choice share the pro-lifer's goal that there be no unwanted pregnancies).
Anyway, coming back to the subject, Gates could easily say, "We agree with Google's goals, we just think that we can accomplish them better than they can."
This only works for languages with different syntax but similar semantics (e.g. Delphi and C#, or even Java and Python).
Try learning even the basics of Haskell or Forth in one day if you come from a C or Java background. It's not easy to get used to radically different approaches, such as functional programming; it certainly does take more than one day.
But a good CS degree program (IMHO) would introduce its students to a variety of different programming types: imperative, functional, object-oriented, etc, would it not? (I'm a physicist myself, but the two CS courses I took in college taught me imperative, functional, and (pseudo) object-oriented programming, and even cured me of 10 years of BASIC.)
I'd guess that a CS student would be more able to pick up Haskell or Forth in an afternoon than a vocationally trained programmer, who might not even know that programming languages like Haskell and Forth exist!
According to the
Wikipedia article, Microsoft wrote Donkey.NET, to demonstrate.NET and as an homage to the original. However, in the new version the goal is not to avoid donkeys, but to hit them. Does this say something about their corporate culture, or our society as a whole?
Depends on their crime. If it's just mischief, or "seeing what I can get away with", then they might just be good kids who want a challenge: give 'em a job. If they're stealing money or changing grades or running spam zombies or something, then...no.
Sounds like a good "punishment": put the offenders on the tech support staff and put them to work policing the network and cleaning up after the clueless and the pranksters. Is that onerous enough? It might channel their m4d 5k1llz in a more marketable direction.
Then again, I'm no sysadmin, so what do I know?
You could use morse only for input, the phone can easily convert it to text and display it as a normal text message.
Or, you could have the phone vibrate to morse code as it's received. That way you could receive a message by touch. Don't students do a lot of text messaging under desks in class?
4.) Set modest password lifetimes. Every user may provide his/her own password, but after 90 or so days the password will be (temporarily?) added to a dictionary, which is used in step 2.
I'm not an expert, but how would your dictionary know what everyone's password is? That implies to me that you keep a central list of passwords somewhere, which is surely a insecure situation.
The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use.
That was my thought when I saw the first mention of using the second core for a virus scan. However, a little later in the article, the author devotes a paragraph to the subject:
One of the complaints we've heard from readers is that "protection" programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor's dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is "concentrating" on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.
This looks to me as a little bit more substantial than a mere example. The article doesn't devote a paragraph to any other specific application.
Not saying this is worth putting up on Slashdot's front page, mind you. It's just somebody's article; it might be conversation fodder, but it's not news.
Jeeze, France, explain to us how your country has actually been relevant for 30 years...
Oh I don't know, I imagine France has been rather relevant to its citizens and its neighbors. Not everyone feels this overwhelming need to control the world and everything in it.
And just how relevant have you been in the past 30 years, anyway?
Is selecting the menu item "Eject disk" intuitive enough for you?
But which disk will it eject? My dvdrom? My cdburner? One of my mounted Appleshares?
The same disk that would be opened if you selected "Open" from the menu: the disk that is selected.
(Although it might have worked differently in the older systems, I dunno).
Dragging a floppy to the trash can has the institive meaning of "delete this floppy", not "eject this floppy".
Is selecting the menu item "Eject disk" intuitive enough for you? (Or "Put away" in newer systems.)
The trash-can method is an alternative method, but you don't need to know about it to use the Mac.
On an old Macintosh shitbox I used, using the "eject disk" function would leave a shadow of the disk icon on the desktop. WTF? Was it still "mounted?"
This was so people could transfer files directly from one floppy disk to another, by dragging files onto the shadow disk; the Mac would then ask you to insert the disk you took out. An important capability in computers without hard drives.
One problem with this was that, if you tried to open a "shadow disk", it would pop up a dialog box saying "insert disk <whatever>", which would prevent any other action, and which had no button to cancel it. You could close the window with Command-. (the usual Mac means of cancelling things) but that was not stated in the window. That was an interface problem.
I can sue you for wasting the planet's oxygen. (You're breathing, right?) The court will throw the suit out immediately, but I can file it. This also forces you to defend it, which means hire a lawyer, spend money, etc. It's a form of bullying.
If someone really filed such a frivolous lawsuit against me, what would happen if I just showed up in court without a lawyer? Am I legally required to spend money any time I am sued (assuming it is unsuccessful), or is it just a good idea?
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That is very likely.
I notice that it's always been the liberal media's game to try and destroy GOP candidates credibility, since Nixon, and it always works. :)
Let's see, since Nixon we've had two Democratic presidents: Carter and Clinton. Neither of them got anything like a free ride from the media. To say that the media was "nice" to Clinton during his presidency is a joke.
Of course, if you classify everything you disagree with as "biased" and everything you agree with as "fair", then it's impossible for you to believe otherwise. To make my own (albeit limited) gesture against partisanry, I will say that 1) Ford's pardoning of Nixon was a reasonable thing to do, 2) I think Bush Sr. deserves more respect than he gets (and that whole grocery-store scanner business was unfair nonsense), 3) Bob Dole was not the buffoon he was made out to be in 1996, and 4) Bush's malapropisms are not a sign of mental deficiency, but just the way he talks. (Granted, that's probably the only nice thing I can say about the guy.
The WMD thing is a joke, but it works, because most of the population isn't informed enough to know that the people who're calling people liars are liars themselves. Apparently you've been taken in by it also. :)
I agree the WMD thing was a joke; I thought it was a joke since Bush started telling it. Too bad you were taken in by it also. I agree that people aren't informed enough to know that the people who are calling people liars are liars themselves, but I'm sure we disagree about which party is which.
Clinton lied to the entire country on camera and had no problem with it, the guy is a damn good liar, lies to a grand jury, lies to his wife and kid. That's about as low as it gets in my book.
One lie, versus how many? (Again, the false dichotomy of liars versus truth-tellers.)
(I realize you are probably too partisan to sway, so I only responded for the amusement value.)
In general? No. However, just because most politicians are crooked doesn't mean there aren't levels of crookedness, and I think that the current Republican leadership has taken corruption to a level beyond that typically seen in American politics. It's a fallacy (false dichotomy?) to argue that because both parties have flaws, they are equivalently flawed. There really is such a thing as the "lesser of two evils".
I am careful to make the distinction between the current Republican leadership and Republicans in general; I have no reason to believe the average R and the average D aren't equally honest.
Comparing Apples to Unices, the shell in OSX always shows the extension of files, just like in Linux. So one should really compare OSX with the window managers in Linux, which I know little about (does Gnome or KDE always show the extensions? I generally use the shell to deal with files in Linux), or argue about whether using the shell is safer than using a graphical interface. :)
.app in "picture.jpg.app"; I hadn't noticed that before. Probably not foolproof, but a compromise compared to having ".app" tacked on all your software names. Maybe there could be a hotkey which toggles the extensions on names....
Other people have mentioned some safeguards built into OSX, like preventing the hiding of
Now there's an idea; why not offer rewards to cashiers who catch thieves?
I was in quantum information about ten years ago, and if I understand this correctly, the relationship between a qubit and this "qubyte" is not analogous to the relationship between a bit and a byte. A "qubit" does not require entanglement to be a qubit; it is just a two-state quantum system, like an electron (spin-up/spin-down) or a photon (horizontal/vertical polarization). Eight qubits would just be eight electrons; they wouldn't need to be entangled.
Don't confuse the RIAA with evil. You, the voter, are evil. They just followed the letter of the laws you wanted.
What are you proposing people do here, exactly? If both parties are evil, AND the independents are evil, how are people supposed to vote in a non-evil way? Or are you proposing that the only morally acceptable course of action is to not participate? Or maybe foment revolution?
Looking for Fusion Reactors?
Find exactly what you want today
www.eBay.com
I thought Google ads were targetted on specific words. How does eBay get this kind of ad? Are they buying ads for the word "fusion"? "reactor"? (I probably just misunderstand Google ads.)
I was in gifted class from kindergarten through seventh grade, 1980-1993, in eastern Pennsylvania. I enjoyed it quite a bit. There was never any homework that I can remember, and there was a lot of focus on creativity, thinking differently, and so forth. My teacher during the last two years used to do what he called "Dancing Frog" exercises, which involved going around the circle of people and together, trying to think of as many ways to do something as possible (find out somebody's name, carry water across the room, etc). I can remember making up card games in elementary school and playing them in gifted class. Learned a little German at one point.
I think schools have changed in the past 10-20 years, and maybe my school district was exceptional in this case, but that's what I think of as a "gifted program".
That being said, I think all schoolchildren would benefit from this kind of program, and less drill, if possible.
...
5. No more April 15th. It's just another spring day.
If your rebate check depends on how close to the poverty line you are, that means that the government has to know how much you make, which means you have to report your income, probably on some form, which would probably be due some day like...oh, April 15 maybe. (We can't just rely on W-2's because of contracting, tips, etc.)
Or what am I missing?
I see your point and agree with you somewhat, but as a liberal I am also concerned about the influence of Big Money on our democracy. Regulating campaigning might not be the best solution (and probably falls under Ben Franklin's "giving up liberty for the sake of security" to boot), but can we come up with a better way? It would be ideal if we could instead neutralize the effect of money on a campaign, so that having more advertising and spending more money does not strongly correlate to greater success. Giving every candidate a certain baseline of funding, free advertising on TV, etc, probably helps, but given that there are some 200 people who run for President every year, that might get expensive. (Or then again, it could be pretty neat.) Or if having too much money were somehow a detriment to public opinion. Maybe if we educate the public about marketing techniques, people would see through some of the ploys (on all sides, of course) which arise in a massive marketing campaign.
It might help if we stopped treating corporations as if they were people. The Constitution provides Free Speech to people, but not for corporations (so much for strict constructionism, btw), so I have no qualms about regulating their involvement in the electoral process. If the board of directors want to give their own money to a campaign, and they can talk their employees into doing the same, well and good. The big corporations are more powerful than the wealthiest people, so cutting off their donations might level the playing field.
EXCEPT...that then leads to putting the same restrictions on non-profit organizations, to be really fair about it. (Whether that's desirable is another question.) Plus, I can already see one loophole to my proposal: a corporation gives an employee some money with the agreement that they give it to the campaign. So....
So it's a tough problem. Just like freedom to assemble doesn't mean you can assemble in the Oval Office, maybe freedom of speech is trumped by the need for fair voting. But we don't want to restrict people from expressing their political opinions either, even if that might be just like campaigning.
My apologies if I wasn't sufficiently dogmatic. :)
Suppose someone started a service where, if you sent them a phrase, they would look through the books they own, and report back to you the sentences containing that phrase. The provider owns the books, and is only quoting little bits of them, so this is clearly fair use. (This may seem absurd, but such exchanges do occur in a limited way; for instance in genealogy, someone might offer to do lookups of a particular person's name.)
Google Print is providing the same service, except it is automated, so I don't think the service violates copyright. What might violate copyright is that they've converted printed material into electronically accessible material. If they actually own the books, then this is the same format-conversion question we've been running into with audio: can someone who buys a DVD transfer it onto videotape for their own use? Same question.
Now if Google doesn't own the books then that is a problem, because they are taking a copy from a library and then both of them own the copy. Either Google should buy a copy of the books it sells (or just pay for it; they certainly don't want a warehouse of physical books somewhere which they don't use), or they should set up the databases with the libraries themselves, so that it's the libraries who own the scans.
Someone mentioned whether it was legitimate for Google to use these books to make money without giving the authors a cut of the profits. As an academic, I use a lot of books in my business and I don't pay the authors anything but the cost of the book.
That all being said, Google might consider not providing the books of the publishers who object; if this is really a boon for the publishers, then they will eventually see the error of their ways.
This is true, but it doesn't follow that Bill has to disagree with Google's "slogan". For instance, Senator Kennedy could agree with the president's plan (or at least his goals) while opposing Bush's implementation of the plan. We'd all like the economy to be good, for there to be peace in Iraq, for cities not to be destroyed by hurricanes, etc. I (a knee-jerk liberal at this point) even think George wants poor people to prosper, when he gives a thought to them. What we disagree on, in these cases, is the means. (Not about everything, of course; gay marriage is one case where the goals of the opposing parties diverge. Abortion is sort of like that too, except a lot of people on the pro-choice share the pro-lifer's goal that there be no unwanted pregnancies).
Anyway, coming back to the subject, Gates could easily say, "We agree with Google's goals, we just think that we can accomplish them better than they can."
Try learning even the basics of Haskell or Forth in one day if you come from a C or Java background. It's not easy to get used to radically different approaches, such as functional programming; it certainly does take more than one day.
But a good CS degree program (IMHO) would introduce its students to a variety of different programming types: imperative, functional, object-oriented, etc, would it not? (I'm a physicist myself, but the two CS courses I took in college taught me imperative, functional, and (pseudo) object-oriented programming, and even cured me of 10 years of BASIC.)
I'd guess that a CS student would be more able to pick up Haskell or Forth in an afternoon than a vocationally trained programmer, who might not even know that programming languages like Haskell and Forth exist!
According to the Wikipedia article, Microsoft wrote Donkey.NET, to demonstrate .NET and as an homage to the original. However, in the new version the goal is not to avoid donkeys, but to hit them. Does this say something about their corporate culture, or our society as a whole?
Wouldn't your average lawyer say the same thing about programmers? Except maybe for the "high fees" part.
Depends on their crime. If it's just mischief, or "seeing what I can get away with", then they might just be good kids who want a challenge: give 'em a job. If they're stealing money or changing grades or running spam zombies or something, then...no.
Sounds like a good "punishment": put the offenders on the tech support staff and put them to work policing the network and cleaning up after the clueless and the pranksters. Is that onerous enough? It might channel their m4d 5k1llz in a more marketable direction. Then again, I'm no sysadmin, so what do I know?
Or, you could have the phone vibrate to morse code as it's received. That way you could receive a message by touch. Don't students do a lot of text messaging under desks in class?
I'm not an expert, but how would your dictionary know what everyone's password is? That implies to me that you keep a central list of passwords somewhere, which is surely a insecure situation.
That was my thought when I saw the first mention of using the second core for a virus scan. However, a little later in the article, the author devotes a paragraph to the subject:
One of the complaints we've heard from readers is that "protection" programs, like Norton Internet Security, are useful for safeguarding their systems. but slow their computers to a crawl. Dual-core Hyper-Threaded processors, such as the Pentium EE 840, can help, improving your computing experience because the processor's dual cores can process tasks simultaneously. While most of the system is "concentrating" on making sure your Internet or gaming experience is fulfilled in the foreground, the reserve power that the dual cores provide protects you in the background, running Norton or other antivirus or firewall programs.
This looks to me as a little bit more substantial than a mere example. The article doesn't devote a paragraph to any other specific application.
Not saying this is worth putting up on Slashdot's front page, mind you. It's just somebody's article; it might be conversation fodder, but it's not news.
Oh I don't know, I imagine France has been rather relevant to its citizens and its neighbors. Not everyone feels this overwhelming need to control the world and everything in it.
And just how relevant have you been in the past 30 years, anyway?
But which disk will it eject? My dvdrom? My cdburner? One of my mounted Appleshares?
The same disk that would be opened if you selected "Open" from the menu: the disk that is selected. (Although it might have worked differently in the older systems, I dunno).
Is selecting the menu item "Eject disk" intuitive enough for you? (Or "Put away" in newer systems.) The trash-can method is an alternative method, but you don't need to know about it to use the Mac.
This was so people could transfer files directly from one floppy disk to another, by dragging files onto the shadow disk; the Mac would then ask you to insert the disk you took out. An important capability in computers without hard drives.
One problem with this was that, if you tried to open a "shadow disk", it would pop up a dialog box saying "insert disk <whatever>", which would prevent any other action, and which had no button to cancel it. You could close the window with Command-. (the usual Mac means of cancelling things) but that was not stated in the window. That was an interface problem.
If someone really filed such a frivolous lawsuit against me, what would happen if I just showed up in court without a lawyer? Am I legally required to spend money any time I am sued (assuming it is unsuccessful), or is it just a good idea?