Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator calls this "SGCAP", presumably meaning "Swiss German CapsLock". For a while I was using this to access the lookalike characters, but that was before I started using AutoHotkey. I never used it for the entry of characters with accents and other diacritical marks, as I feel that's a role better served by dead keys and modifiers. (I don't normally bother on "rôle", but I do on "résumé" and "façade", and on names.)

So yeah, this is probably the primary reason CapsLock hasn't gone anywhere – various regional mappings have already addressed this problem, in a variety of ways. Those devoted to English never did, because it simply isn't necessary. This ties right back into my answer, which is to put it to better use like much of the non-English world does.

Right now, CapsLock does one thing. You tap it, and toggle the state of the Caps Lock function. Why not make it do more than one thing, namely by giving it a different function when held down? Perhaps it can act something like AltGr. I personally a held-down CapsLock to generate small caps (via Unicode, so I can't demonstrate here) thanks to AutoHotkey.

I also have other overlapping assignments, such as the AppsKey (aka "Menu Key", which may or may not be what they're calling the "Right Mouse Button" in the article). Tap it and it does the usual. Hold it down and it generates lookalike characters if any exist for that key (otherwise it generates nothing, so you know you didn't get a lookalike), such as a Cyrillic a or capital letters from the Greek alphabet. Why? Because of wordfilters. I encountered one that liked to change all instances of "moot" to "cuck", but it did so with no regard to the characters around the string. Thus the word "smooth" became "scuckh". I dodge this by substituting Cyrillic o in place of one or both of the ones in the word. Another wordfilter I've encountered changes all instances of "wing" to "wang", including when it's part of the word "swing". Time to bust out the Byelorussian "i".

Another option is to map CapsLock to Ctrl (as many people do), or to Backspace (as is the norm in Colemak). I actually use it though, now that it has the additional Small Caps function. I tried the Backspace assignment, but found myself not using it, and now I have a duplicate Backspace to the left of the Left Shift.

Other funky double assignments: NumLock sends a Ctrl-Enter, but only in Skype, otherwise it behaves normally. My numeric keypad is also paired up differently and uses all five rows:

/, 7-PrtSc, 8-ScrLk, 9-Pause
*, 4-Ins, 5-Home, 6-PgUp
-, 1-Del, 2-End, 3-PgDn
+, 0-Ins, Up Arrow, .-Del
Ctrl, Left Arrow, Down Arrow, Right Arrow

You can take a look if you really want to.

In this case, the Windows version is irrelevant. They didn't attack Windows, they attacked the software running on top of it. Since the OS wasn't compromised, upgrading it would do one of two things: (1) break things, either a little or a lot OR (2) absolutely nothing.

It's right in there. Of course that would require reading the article, and I'm sure I broke some unwritten rule by doing so.

It's basically an ATM in reverse, for stores. Put money in, and you're not SUPPOSED to be able to get it back out. Instead, it immediately shows up in your bank account. The bank will come around and empty the safe when it is convenient to them. If the power fails, they'll just have to come back some other time.

At least that's the plan. The exploit clearly shows that someone other than the bank or a Brinks employee CAN open the safe.

But of course, nobody reads the articles before complaining. This is /. after all.

No shit. I've been requesting this exact feature for at least five years.

Speaking of maintenance, one nice benefit of having your own self-driving car will be that it can trot off to get its own oil changed, or a brake job, or a new set of tires, or (if it's not electric) fuel up. Right now, you have to carve time out of your own schedule to do this, or pay extra for someone to come to you and do it. (I was lucky enough to work at an office large enough that a mechanic came by weekly and worked on any cars that needed it, but that's certainly an exception and not a rule.)

I can also see the job of "gas pump attendant" come back, since empty self-driving cars need someone to fill them up.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that an Earthman, Arthur Dent said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapor, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy- now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across- which happened to be the Earth- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

The swastikas and hate speech get modded down primarily because they're off-topic since /. generally doesn't deal in topics where "RACE THE JEWS, GAS WAR NOW" is a remotely logical response. (Yes I scrambled that on purpose. Rule of funny.) But if you browse at -1 as you're supposed to when moderating, you'll see that they do exist. It's much less than it used to be, just like the GNAA has ceased to be much of a concern here, but that isn't just down to the moderation system or the "culture". It's also related to the topics under discussion. If this were a politically-oriented site, there would be times when such posts would be unpleasant and (most likely) trolling, but still on-topic.

Jusers (spelling deliberate, pronounced like "juicers"). If pressed for what kind of juicers by someone who doesn't understand, SOCK juicers. They gain validation by forcing people to conform to their own view of how the world should be, and abuse it like the juice being referenced. And like many of the trolls they wish to silence, they drink up your salty, salty tears (as long as you are a shitlord).

Mars has always been 20 years away, provided the money is dumped into realizing it as soon as possible.

In the 60s, there was a Cold War fueled space race going on, but all manned missions got aimed at the moon. After that, there was very little incentive to dump the resources into it. It probably couldn't have been done in 20 years with 1960s technology anyhow, and naturally both sides wanted to pluck the low-hanging fruit first. Mars is hard. Going to the moon and back is a cakewalk by comparison.

Now it probably is possible to accomplish within 20 years given the current state of technology, and without dumping practically all the discretionary funding into the program, but it still needs large quantities of money -- and a stomach for risk and possible failure, something most government types are averse to. (They'll blow money, but when people start dying, it's all over.)

The reason it's always 20 years away is totally different than the reason for fusion. Fusion throws up roadblocks all its own, no matter how badly we want it or how much time and money we throw at it. Mars hasn't changed substantially in the last couple billion years, let alone the last 5 decades.

It's all down to the money.

RCA connectors flex very little, and where they flex is not the same as where they make contact. The tiny contacts in, say, an HDMI or SATA cable flex a great deal. Flakes of metal would be a very bad thing there. Even USB has enough spring loading for this to become an issue, but that spring loading is on the device side, not the cable side, so nickel-plated USB male plugs would probably be fine. You're going to have to pick something else for the female end though, because of that spring-loading. Similarly, a headphone plug doesn't flex significantly because it is the jack that is spring-loaded, and nickel does just fine here.

Nickel plating is very sturdy when there are no tension changes in the underlying metal, but it utterly falls apart when there are. There are many nickel-plated musical instruments upwards of 100 years old that look wonderful (much better than silver, generally better than lacquer, and up there with untouched gold even though they are hardly untouched), so long as they have avoided taking mechanical damage. Once dented and repaired, the finish starts to fail in long, peeling strips and in smallish (1 mm scale) chips.

Nickel also has the drawback (as a musical instrument finish) of feeling "slick" or "wet", and of causing skin irritation in considerably more people than do silver or gold. Of course neither of these is a significant problem in a cable, but it does explain why nickel never really became a dominant brass instrument plating despite its durability (outside of drum and bugle corps, where they should be wearing gloves anyhow).

Nickel plating peels under mechanical stress. Gold and silver do not. They wear through because they are soft, but they don't flake or peel. Electrical contacts are spring-loaded to retain a good interface, and nickel is about the last thing you would want to use there.

I'm afraid being infiltrated doesn't mean you're being effective. It just means you've been noticed, and the FBI thinks you're vaguely political.

Excellent. I like Eneloop NiMH quite a bit, but my camera doesn't. It's very voltage-picky. In fact, its voltage requirement for the adapter is 3.7V, even though it's a 2xAA device. Needless to say, it reports "low battery" from the very first moment with NiMH -- and then runs for many hours flashing that warning. The problem is that I get no warning when it really is about to keel over, and that this happens only about 50% of the way through the charge.

Eneloops again. They'll hold most of their charge for months, and are shipped ready to use. Now with this fixing the voltage disparity, there's even less reason to avoid rechargables.

I think you're underestimating your own shelf life there. I know from personal experience that most people in their 60s are capable drivers (provided they were capable drivers to start with -- age doesn't imply competence). What they have lost in reaction time and processing ability (which is not as much as previous generations at the same age), they are able to compensate with experience. Just by handling less information through better front-end filters, they solve the problem just fine. At some point the two curves will cross, at which point it does become time to hand over the keys, but for healthy people this is probably going to be north of 70, and possibly even north of 80. By then, you might not even need to do the driving.

Even in my grandmother's generation (I'm about the same age you are), she didn't actually become a rolling hazard until she was pushing 80, and that was largely because she made navigation errors and then did stupid things to attempt to correct for them. The basic mechanics of driving and not hitting things still operated passably, although she really had no business being on the road. Fortunately, her circle of travel shrunk with her abilities.