True. Local inflections like that can act as barriers to getting to a much more advantageous trait. I agree.

...but I also think it's wrong to say evolution is random. It's random experiments in a game of procreation. Those experiments which fail are discarded. As such the overall process is guided away from failure and not random.

Maybe I was asserting the positive case (towards success) too much, when the negative case (away from failure) is really the stronger aspect.

It's random in the short term. In the long term, beneficial traits will improve survivability and be selected for. If staying in fever benefitted surviving it's reasonable to assume it would have arisen by chance and then been selected for by now.

Sounds like a classical control feedback loop in engineering.

However if it was just this there'd be no reason the body wouldn't have developed some kind of hysteresis to "debounce" the system, latching the fever on for a period after the viral load drops to ensure the complete eradication of the virus.

I suspect the fever is expensive or damaging in itself. So the best system is something less drastic, but that might take longer to kill the virus.

Oh yes. Atari ST and Amiga mice were all opto-mechanical.

Optical mice first started early 90s (with special mouse pads) for things like Sun workstations.

At least, that was my experience.

Shame we share a planet with them.

Had a pan-european flight recently where I'd left my phone in my bag and forgot to enable flight mode.

At the end of the flight I checked my phone and had 5 or 6 "Welcome to Romania/ Hungary/ Austria/ Germany / etc." messages as my phone had registered with the various networks from 30,000 ft.