ChairmanOfTheBored said:
(...)
Dumbfuck. I was talking about the clear mouse case paranoia.
Thank you for you concise and brief comments. However, you might want
to work on the diplomacy. It's far more effective to be insulting if
you leave out the profanity.
With the clear mouse case, may I trouble you to explain what benefits
could possibly be derived from a clear mouse case? It makes the
design more difficult because the optical sensor must be shielded from
ambient light. I once owned an early ball type of mouse, with a
somewhat translucent plastic case. The shaft encoders picked up
ambient light and caused the mouse to operate rather erratically. It
would literally only work in the dark.
Perhaps the clear case mouse targets all those latent geeks that might
want to show off all the electronics inside. That's kinda like the
old hot-rods from my youth driving around with the engines exposed. I
believe that Apple was the first to introduce a clear case mouse.
Apple users are not particularly known for being compulsive geeks, so
this market segment is rather dubious. Clear cases are typically
fairly easy to scratch, but Apple chose to use polycarbonate which is
far more durable, but also more expensive than ABS. All this trouble
and expense just to get a clear case? There has to be ulterior
motive.
In my never humble opinion, there's only one possible justification
for an optically clear case. The mouse camera is spying on the user.
It's probably a part of the ever expanding war on terrorism, where
public funds are laundered through the Dept of Homeland Security to
vendors willing to spy on computer users. At a minimum, they now have
your fingerprints from imaging the mouse case. Anyone operating the
computer that looks like a terrorist (ethnic profiling) will be
monitored through their mouse actions and mouse camera.
<
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/jeffl/slides/jeffl-06.html>
Osama bin Liebermann. That was me 25 years ago, but once a terrorist,
always a terrorist. (I shaved off the beard immediately after I
bought my first clear case mouse). Of course, the mouse will scan and
possibly read everything it can see.
Also, the lack of government comment on the clear mouse case issue is
very suspicious. It implies that they are a key player in the
conspiracy. If you see a program to distribute free clear case mice
to the GUM (great unwashed masses), I'll consider my suspicions to be
verified.
There's also the question of what's inside the bloated mouse driver?
MS Intellipoint 6.2 for Vista is 15MBytes (compressed) big. That's a
far cry from the old MSDOS drivers that were perhaps 50KBytes. It
really doesn't take 14MBytes (compressed) to run 3 buttons and 2 shaft
encoders. So, what's inside all that surplus bloat? My guess(tm) is
that it's the video driver, data collector, encryption, and file
transfer utility necessary to do the spying.
You also seem to have something against paranoia. I consider paranoia
in electronic design to be a good thing. One should never stop
worrying about what might go wrong. When you think you have all your
calculations and predictions set in stone, that's when you'll make
your fatal mistakes. Instead of complacency, you should be worrying
about undiscovered screwups, slipped decimal points, and bad guesses.
Question everything, don't trust anyone elses numbers, and never
assume that you're done (until the check clears the bank).
