But what if the user needs to type the weird bent line on the key beneath escape?

Slashdot won't accept it, as it has no ASCII character any more and some sites still don't get the UTF-8 thing.

With SSDs you can't even hear the drive going - that activity light is more important than ever!

On Excel, scroll lock toggles the action of the arrow keys. With lock off, they move the selected cell one step at a time. With lock on, they move the view one page at a time. The second mode is useful if you work with truly huge spreadsheets.

There are a few such combinations.
Win-P switches dual display mode.
Win-D (Aka 'boss key' or 'teacher key') minimises all windows. A second use restores them.

It's also known as the 'agh-bring-me-back-my-game-I-just-grabbed-the-flag!' key.

This is more a preemptive measure. We used it on a larger scale to keep Nazi bombers away. It worked reasonably well - forced them to fly high, or risk hitting a cable and destroying their plane.

"What we need is a net gun that will disable drones without endangering people."

What you need is some string and a bunch of balloons.
  - A British Person.

"Do people have a right to shoot a home invader? Of course."

That actually varies by state. Not all consider trespass a crime worthy of execution

It would be easy enough to introduce anti-drone defenses. Nothing too fancy is needed: A simple net, thin as thread, strung from fencetop to poles or nearby buildings. Small drones bounce off, large ones get their blades entangled. Free drone!

This thing isn't going to get 1G. No known power source could provide enough power-to-weight ratio sustained, and even if one could the engine would melt in seconds. Forget even 0.1m/s/s, and think thrusts measured in milinewtons.

Bad example. Light does exert radiation pressure, yes - but it is far, far too weak to drive a radiometer. The spinning radiometer isn't due to radiation pressure. It's a more mundane effect: Imperfect vacuum. The black side is warmed more than the white, which heats up adjacent air, which exerts higher pressure, causing the spin. It's just a plain old heat engine.

That works. It just means that your software is sub-optimal - a competitor that pays the license fee can use more up-to-date techniques. It also requires constant legal vigilance - someone has to monitor any submitted code to make sure some programmer hasn't made use of a modern method without thought to the legal implications.

The codec only specifies how the encoded stream is formed and how it should be decoded. It does not specify how the encoder should transform raw video into encoded form, and much effort is devoted to finding new algorithms by which existing codecs may be made to perform better without alteration of the decoding side.

You're not the first to be confused by the coincidence in terms.

That doesn't quite work - the patents also cover useful encoding techniques, so you have to also go through your code and make sure you aren't using any mathematical concepts discovered and patented in the last twenty years.