It can... although usually I dock all my editor windows to one pane, and use tabs.... but the IDE I use allows me to add any number of panes.

It's interesting that many of the things you've mentioned are ideal for you actually are preferences of mine as well, and in fact, why I use the IDE that I do. It's written in Java, but it performs adequately on my hardware, which for me is all that really matters.

Which evidently requires that its size be the same order of magnitude as the wavelength of signal you are trying to guide... in practice, that might tend to somewhate limit one's choice of available frequencies

While I have coded without an IDE in the past, and I still do it occasionally for one-off throwaway programs, when it comes to larger projects, I do find that having an IDE dramatically boosts my productivity. All of the things I do with an IDE could theoretically also be done with vi and an appropriate suite of tools, but for myself, the point of using an IDE is to really just have it all bundled in as one, and not have to switch to a different window just to show a call graph or function definition for what is at the current cursor, for example, when a simple hover-window can do the same thing, and since the window disappears as soon as I start typing or otherwise navigating, I don't even need to switch windows again when I resume editing.

TIR in a fiber requires the core to have a higher index of refraction than the cladding. If the core is hollow and surrounded by glass, light that is not traveling exactly parallel to the core edge will escape the core. When the propagation speed of light is lowere in the core, at sufficiently obtuse angles, the light that would otherwise escape the core simply bounces off the core's edges, enabling it to go for long distances even if the fiber is not perfectly straight

Where in my comment did I suggest that solid fibers would communicate faster? I said being solid is necessary for it to function, but I did not say it was faster. The engadget article that was linked to by the comment is extremely sparse on the physics involved, so I am most perplexed about how the cable manages to keep light from escaping... TIR is not possible with a hollow core, so they have to be exploiting some other phenomenon with which I am unfamiliar to achieve the result of guiding the signal through the fiber. That said, I would be surprised if there were not some pretty narrow limits on the types of communication possible (maybe in the form of acceptable frequencies) and probably the distances that high fidelity communication is possible, particularly on a cable that has many twists and turns.

Communication fibers are solid, not hollow. Making them hollow would would end up completely defeating total internal reflection that fiber depends on to actually send over a distance.

I can see the difference easily, of course... but matters of intent can get really hard to differentiate when it comes to law.... you might not have meant to be speeding, for instance, but if you do, you can still get a ticket despite your intentions.

If a driver is driving 3 other people where he works to and from work, and collecting 10 bucks a week from each of them in exchange to help pay for gas, is that illegal too?

I don't own a gun.

Actually, I have 4 keychains on my keychain... one keychain has house keys, one has work keys, one has car keys, and the last one just has usb drives. They are all latched together via a carabiner, so I can easily remove any of them.

Absolutely, Joe Paranoid is sure the government is listening in on his conversations, so he gets a NSI phone to protect himself from Big Brother.

Why is he worried about the government listening to conversations he has on a phone that he can't even use to have a regular conversations in the first place because it isn't even activated or registered? The *ONLY* number he could call is 911, and every single 911 call is recorded anyways.

While actually holding people accountable, even if you don't necessarily always issue the fine, at least to some extent diminishes the number of abuses that would otherwise certainly occur.

But it would create other problems.

Again with the "would".... you seem to be under the impression that there is no accountability right now. There's already accountability with absolutely any phone line that can be traced to its holder, and with the current amount of accountability, there's absolutely no indication that anyone who calls 911 over what they believe is a sincere emergency would be more worried about being recorded or traced than they are with addressing the emergency.

Before copyright there was little if any protection for those that created and if you didn't have a patron life was pretty rough for you.

This is false. Before copyright, and in particular, before the printing press, copying was sufficiently labour intensive and error prone to functionally act a deterrent... it didn't stop everyone, of course, but then consider that the laws against copyright infringement don't stop everyone today either.

by that logic one may argue that copying has not deprived anyone of income...

True... but copying *HAS* deprived the right's holder of the value behind the exclusivity that copyright is supposed to have, and this is something that until an infringement occurs, the copyright holder actually *DOES* have. Exclusivity is something that works creators have always had... they have it implicitly when they create the work if they simply do not publish in the first place, and before the printing press they had a measure of it by virtue of the fact that copying back then was so difficult that it tended to act as a copying deterrent all by itself.

I haven't been suggesting that they should be enforcing it any more than they already are.... I'm just saying that a traceable phone line at least holds somebody accountable for when and where abuse *does* occur. I don't argue that are some circumstances that may warrant remaining anonymous when reporting a situation to proper authorities, but all of the ones I can think of are not real emergencies, per se. Can you think of *ANY* that are remotely feasible on matters that a 911 emergency response team would be dispatched to? Why would someone reporting that somebody is having a heart attack be less likely to report it if they knew that their identity was more likely known? While actually holding people accountable, even if you don't necessarily always issue the fine, at least to some extent diminishes the number of abuses that would otherwise certainly occur.

The aforementioned post suggested that with the existence of such fines, people may actually hesitate to call 911 in the event that they believed someone was having a heart attack, so yes... you did imply it.

Except of course it isn't feasible... as evidenced by the fact that nobody would ever get fined for calling 911 when the caller sincerely believed that someone was having a heart attack, even if they were mistaken in that belief.

But abuses of 911 still happen... and their chief problem is that they can and sometimes do interfere with their ability to deal with actual emergencies. The fines exist to hold people accountable for such abuse, but with a NIS phone, there is nobody to really hold accountable. Of course, there was nobody to really hold accountable for 911 abuse calls made from pay phones either... which also had no fee to call 911. I would imagine with NIS cell phones, however... it as an issue of scale.

I do not advocate disallowing NIS cell phones from calling 911, however, unless they can show that the 30% of actual emergency calls made from NIS phones, however low that might be considered, would have feasibly been reported just as quickly if NIS phones were not allowed to call 911.