The biggest problem I see with the lead-driver approach is: how does a follower gracefully handle a sudden departure of the lead car from his leadership role?
Let's say that John Q. Asshole is driving 75 down the interstate, leading a chain of PMs. John decides, abruptly, that he wants to stop for a coffee at a filling station. Without signalling that he no longer wants to lead, he swerves across four lanes of traffic and barely makes it onto an offramp without killing himself. How will the followers react in such a situation?
Let's say the follower cars are capable of detecting when the lead car does something bad -- a difficult problem in its own right, but we'll consider it solved. We're *still* stuck with a problem: the follower car is suddenly driverless! The driver has been kicking back and is unprepared to take the wheel; the lead car can no longer be trusted.
So, in an emergency situation, the PM must essentially drive *itself* until the driver, alerted of the situation, can take control.
I'm interested in what you've said about health care. How responsive is the Canadian health care system to the liberal application of discretionary income?
That is to say, if I elect to spend some of my 174 XBoxes in exchange for quicker, more elaborate or more experimental health care measures, is it easy for me to do? Or does the socialized health care form a kind of bottleneck through which everyone must pass regardless of his economic status?
If the former, then I'd be willing to take a cut in basic health services in exchange for this secular, socialist society. I'm young, in good health and rarely require medical services anyway. All I care about is getting access to the health services I need, at a similar cost to what I would pay here in the US, if I'm ever in dire straits.
I'm aware that rampant liberalism brings its own problems, and I don't expect that Canada is a utopia. But I honestly believe that one does far less harm by leaning too far toward the left (interference with free markets, inefficiency) than by leaning too far toward the right (bigotry, greed, intolerance).
I would *hope* they'd amortize the cost of a shared mail or attachment between those whose mailboxes contain the thing... but if they wanted to be cheap bastards, I suppose they could count the full size of the thing against anyone's quota...but it's in their best interest to provide every user with as large a corpus as possible of stored email, so they may better analyze it and do what they will with the information.
Do you compress your maildir? I'm guessing those four years' worth of messages would shrink down by quite a bit, if you did. Google are no fools; they're going to use that 1GB to the maximum potential!
If we take our cues from nature, I would expect that long before the predators exhaust their supply of prey, they will turn on each other. Each predator's worms/virii/malware will begin to not only infect machines, but destroy competitors' malware that has already infected the machine.
In fact, come to think of it, the most effective way to own a box is to infect it, destroy any competing malware, and then patch the exploit that allowed you to infect it in the first place! We may begin to see host-healing worms that do just this. (Without the ability to kill off competing infections, however, this practice is only marginally useful.)
You make a very good point. Especially given the recurring theme, throughout Quicksilver, of European medicine and science being vastly inferior to the Turks'.
Substitute 'European' for 'developed' and my statement holds true. But, since Europe was formerly known as Christendom by the majority of its inhabitants, the statement at that point comes dangerously close to being devoid of meaning. ("Christianity was the accepted normal religion throughout Christendom.")
Mea culpa... what else to say? Other than the fact that I was trying to paint Christianity as the dominating incumbent power structure, and my post was addressing the conservative, Christian and probably small-minded author of the parent... so perhaps a few fallacies on my part can be forgiven.
Mostly I base my decision to sleep with him on an appreciation of his talents. Now that I think about it, though, my decision is probably influenced by the fact that Joseph Fiennes portrayed him in _Shakespeare In Love_. My mental image of a young Will Shakespeare has been forever altered to resembled a rugged, moderately attractive Hollywood actor.
If I found myself in a situation where sex with Shakespeare were a distinct possibility, and if he were butt-ugly in the flesh, then perhaps I might feel differently.
As for sexual polarity: I'm a man, meaning that any carnal relation with Shakespeare would be a same-sex affair. Although I'm mainly interested in women at this point in my life, I'm always open to possibilities and Shakespeare wouldn't be the first man I've slept with. So my remark isn't as groundbreaking as it might first have seemed.
By and large, I expect that even the most devoted of Will's heterosexual male fans would be unwilling to drop trou for the Bard. But among those of us who like a little variety in our love lives, it's not a radical idea.
By the same token -- the careful consideration of historical evidence -- I must *disagree* with your statement about Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was almost certainly bisexual with a strong preference toward women. Consider that several of his sonnets are dedicated to a "Mr. W.H." and that his plays are rife with suggestive comments that, even if they give no information about the playwrite's sexuality, certainly suggest a familiarity with, and acceptance of, the idea of affection and sex between two males.
You and I agree that the homosexual lobby tends to paint history pink, using great strokes of its broad brush to imply that everyone from Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover was a mincing namby-pamby. You and I agree that they often arrive at incorrect conclusions -- the simple fact is that most people always have been and always will be straight, irrespective of how "politically correct" that notion is.
As much as I agree with you, I still take exception to your post because you sound like an ignorant homophobe. You seem fixated on the belief that incorrectly identifying a historical figure as homosexual somehow is some sort of smear on his reputation. To me, that suggests some very narrow thinking on your part.
I am white, with Aryan features. If someone walked up to me on the street and called me a nigger, I would certainly laugh due to their making an obvious factual error -- but I would not be ashamed. My reputation would not be destroyed. For me, there is no shame associated with being gay or black or Communist or vegetarian. If you think differently, then I suggest you reevaluate your thinking.
You'd think that pronouncing Neil Gaiman's name out loud ("Gay Man") would be enough to scare off any readers who might be disturbed by homosexual themes.;-)
Given that Daniel Waterhouse's Puritan upbringing and steadfast devoutness in the face of his peers' all-but-secularism is one of the defining aspects of his personality, I would say that Stephenson does a rather fair job of doting on Christianity.
Compared to speculations about Newton's sexuality (which are limited to a few vague hints scattered throughout the book), Waterhouse's faith virtually drives the plot. His mentor is a bishop who believes that the established church is heresy -- that one should be free to worship as he sees fit, unhampered by politics. Many of Waterhouse's misadventures are due to his similar beliefs. Most characters in Quicksilver are devout Christians, even some of the homosexuals (viz Leibniz).
If you read Stephenson's earlier work, you'll see a repeated theme of tolerant, unperturbed spirituality in his stronger characters. Juanita from Snow Crash is a devout Catholic -- she shuns organized religion because she believes most of it is politicized claptrap designed to control the masses -- but she is Christian nonetheless. She and her unswerving faith ultimately play a principal role in the book.
If Stephenson goes out of his way to illustrate Turing's homosexuality, or Newton's probable bisexuality, it is merely to shed more light on areas of human experience that have been ignored by history.
For 2,000 years, Christians have had a rich mythology that teaches them valuable lessons on life and gives them a slew of inspiring role-models. For 1,500 years, Christianity has been the accepted "normal" religion throughout most of the developed world; often it is even sanctioned as the state religion. Until very recently, Christians have been constantly reinforced by unanimous, positive feedback from the community, the state and the church that yes, they are good and right and are going to Heaven.
In the same time period, homosexuals have had little or no public acknowledgement of their existence: no role models, and certainly no acceptance from society. In several places and times during the past thousand years, homosexuals have been tormented, imprisoned, tortured and murdered merely for being who they are. Christians had to endure this suffering at first, but by the time of the Spanish Inquisition it was Christians doing the burning and torturing.
I live in southern California, in a city whose populace largely identify themselves as liberals. Just the same, not 18 months ago, a gay man in my neighborhood was doused in gasoline burned alive as he slept by a Catholic man who had befriended my neighbor before discovering his sexuality. Bigotry, hate and intolerance toward homosexuals are very much alive today, and much of it comes from people who call themselves "good" Christians.
In summary: if Stephenson chooses to showcase homosexuality slightly more than Christianity, perhaps he's merely acknowledging the fact that Christianity has already been showcased enough.
Due to some maths errors (see above), I miscalculated the service life of an inbox for someone with my volume of mail. As numerous helpful responders pointed out, the figure isn't 3 years, but is in fact closer to 15 years!
Let's say that Grandma Smith likes to compose her emails in Word and constantly receives 100kB jpegs of the grandkids. Her inbox grows by 1.5MB per day, or about 4x as fast as mine.
15 / 4 ~= 4, meaning Grandma Smith's inbox will still take almost four years to fill up! At the end of four years it should be safe to delete some of her older mail. How many emails can you name that you received four years ago and are still in your archives today?
Ultimately, I think this effect is what will let Gmail succeed. The useful lifespan of almost all mail is significantly less than one year. Give people a way to forever "lock" truly important messages, use the 1GB of space as a two- or three-year buffer for semi important messages, and index the whole shebang for the users' convenience.
A nifty free side-effect of indexing everyone's attachments would be easy identification of worms and viruses.
If 50 people share an attachment, there's a chance it's a bona fide binary. But if 1000 people all have the same file in their inboxes -- or if one person has the same file multiple times -- then it's almost certainly up to no good. When an attachment's reference count hit a certain threshold, Google could mark it as "poison" and warn people before they downloaded it.
Good point! This is what happens when one posts to Slashdot before coffee.
So, uncompressed and unindexed, it would take 7-8 years for a user to fill his 1GB inbox, we'll say 7 years for maximum pessimism.
Add modest 200% compression and the user has 14-16 years of storage available. Add global optimizations (aggregating identical messages and attachments) and that number increases to... what? I have no idea, but let's be extremely pessimistic and say that 10% of a user's mail is received by other users on the service, which adds another year of service life to the inbox.
So. 15-17 years. Sounds like the makings of a business plan to me!
I'm somewhat skeptical on your figure of 200,000,000 (two hundred million) Hotmail accounts... but, assuming that's a worldwide total and assuming that some small fraction of Hotmail users are abusing the service by using dozens or hundreds of mailboxes for whatever nefarious activities, I suppose it's a halfway plausible figure.
So let's assume, for the moment, that Google really plans to support on the order of one hundred million users. Your numbers clearly indicate that 1GB of devoted disk space per user would be unfeasible -- or at the very least, *very* costly to maintain. Happily, I don't think Google plan to go that route.
I would consider myself an average-volume email user, but after subtracting out the ~300 spams I receive daily, I probably get fewer than three dozen pieces of ham (valid emails) on a given weekday. Those messages have a very small average size (about 3kB) but we'll be charitable and assume that the average ham is 10kB in size.
So, the typical user (i.e. me) can expect to receive 360kB of mail in a day. At this rate one would expect that his 1GB of storage would be exhausted within a year. But emails are plain ASCII or Unicode text, which is very compressible. Google are of course very good at storing text in compressed-but-searchable form -- one might even say it's their core competency, alongside the PageRank algorithm. Given that emails consist of a large amount of redundant information such as headers, and that many list threads endlessly quote earlier messages, a user's entire mail corpus might be compressible by 300%. So we've raised our time to hit quota from one year to three years.
If Google are *really* smart, they'll identify mailing list messages and amortize the storage cost for a list message among all Gmail subscribers subscribe to the list. Since lists are typically the noisiest source of mail in my inbox (most messages and largest size), I would expect quite a bit of savings from this technique.
I agree, cracking and copying my music is none of those things. Hence the words "such as" in the passage you quoted.
Below that paragraph, the law enumerates the factors used in determining fair use. Noncommercial use (point #1) of a published and mass-produced work (point #2) in a way that does not affect the marketability or value of the work (point #4) -- I would say this counts as fair use. If you think differently, just follow the American Way: sue someone for copying a song he bought from his computer onto his iPod. The outcome of your lawsuit may set a precedent!
First of all: Apple Computer holds no copyright over the works they distribute via ITMS. The record labels hold the copyrights to the music. What we are breaking when we decrypt a music file is our license agreement for iTunes, as well as the DMCA.
Second: by unencrypting a protected music file that I've purchased, I am not disregarding the copyright on that work. By converting the unencrypted music file to MP3 and copying it to my Pocket PC (which does not support AAC) I am STILL not disregarding the copyright. I'm merely exercise my fair use rights as defined by the Copyright Act.
Only when I take the unencrypted music file and give it to someone else am I breaking the copyright.
Of course, one can carefully spin the Ender's Game story in a number of ways. By emphasizing the political/social aspects of the Wiggins' actions and glossing over Ender's his troublesome earlier years, they could make themselves a fine bit of propaganda with a powerful anti-war message at the end.
Then again -- we're talking about the same industry that turned Wing Commander into a movie. More than likely, Ender's Game will be filled with shiny things and loud noises. Haley Joel Osmont will probably play Ender, with Macauley Caulkin co-starring as Peter.
Hmm.... can we put a bound on the margin of error for the two-body solution to the asteroid's motion? If so, I could figure out at least whether a mission will be feasible, given the worst case.
IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist), but from playing with the Java applet, it appears that 2003YN1 is going to come surprisingly close to Earth within the next decade.
In January of 2007, for instance, the asteroid will be trailing Earth by about 0.5 AU. In November of 2020, Earth will be trailing the asteroid by a hair's breadth (in cosmic terms) of 0.1 AU.
Now, four light-minutes (or even 0.75 light-minutes) isn't exactly spitting distance, but how often do we have asteroids within such close proximity to Earth, in such convenient orbits? I imagine it would be fairly cheap to launch a probe to match orbits with the asteroid, rendezvous with it and do some science. A return mission in 2020 would be a distinct possibility (if it were useful, which I'm not sure it would be).
Now, the budgetary and planning requirements for a 2007 mission are probably unmanageable at this late date, especially given NASA's (or ESA's) current budgets. But we've got 16 years to plan for a 2020 mission. What manner of experiments might we be able to devise in the intervening years? What possibilities can you think of?
1) Establish an unmanned observatory on the asteroid
2) Land a power source and construct a propulsion system (using a linear accelerator to eject the asteroid's own mass?) and try to change the asteroid's orbit. Depending on the composition of that baby, it might be worth a pretty penny if we could put it into near Earth orbit for mining.
3) Same as #2, only turn the asteroid into a long-term habitat. Free giant space station, anyone?
OK, so these ideas are a bit far-fetched, possibly venturing into the realm of science fiction. But dreams have to start somewhere...
An obvious idea cannot be patented. 'Obvious' means that a person of average skill in the art could have independently formulated the idea without knowledge of the "invention" on which the patent is being filed. "The art," in this case, means the art of camera design.
It doesn't strike me as a great leap that an experienced photographer or optics guy living in the year 1991 with even a reasonable degree of computer knowledge would have been able to foresee the digital camera. Sure, he might not have known about JPEG compression or Secure Digital cards, but CCD arrays were around long before 1991, as were flash memory and good image compression.
So, with your prior art and with much like it, this patent may well be unenforcable. At least the patent is old enough that we can't shake our heads at this patent as yet another side-effect of the recent patent frenzy. It's a simple case of a patent examiner sleeping on the job, or not being creative or imaginative enough to realize what's obvious and what isn't.
What exactly makes a Mac fan? I have never used OSX, don't own a Mac and haven't used any Apple OS since my high school days, some eight years ago. But I derive immense satisfaction from the use of my iPod, and from iTunes for Windows. I find that they fulfill all of my musical needs. Having reverse-engineered the library file formats for both products, I'm also able to copy music at will anywhere I please without worrying about the weak restrictions they place on copying files from an iPod to a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem I see with the lead-driver approach is: how does a follower gracefully handle a sudden departure of the lead car from his leadership role?
Let's say that John Q. Asshole is driving 75 down the interstate, leading a chain of PMs. John decides, abruptly, that he wants to stop for a coffee at a filling station. Without signalling that he no longer wants to lead, he swerves across four lanes of traffic and barely makes it onto an offramp without killing himself. How will the followers react in such a situation?
Let's say the follower cars are capable of detecting when the lead car does something bad -- a difficult problem in its own right, but we'll consider it solved. We're *still* stuck with a problem: the follower car is suddenly driverless! The driver has been kicking back and is unprepared to take the wheel; the lead car can no longer be trusted.
So, in an emergency situation, the PM must essentially drive *itself* until the driver, alerted of the situation, can take control.
Yes yes, but you forget the crucial question: is there kneeling room for a second passenger in the cockpit? If so, then we're not out of the woods.
I'm interested in what you've said about health care. How responsive is the Canadian health care system to the liberal application of discretionary income?
That is to say, if I elect to spend some of my 174 XBoxes in exchange for quicker, more elaborate or more experimental health care measures, is it easy for me to do? Or does the socialized health care form a kind of bottleneck through which everyone must pass regardless of his economic status?
If the former, then I'd be willing to take a cut in basic health services in exchange for this secular, socialist society. I'm young, in good health and rarely require medical services anyway. All I care about is getting access to the health services I need, at a similar cost to what I would pay here in the US, if I'm ever in dire straits.
I'm aware that rampant liberalism brings its own problems, and I don't expect that Canada is a utopia. But I honestly believe that one does far less harm by leaning too far toward the left (interference with free markets, inefficiency) than by leaning too far toward the right (bigotry, greed, intolerance).
I would *hope* they'd amortize the cost of a shared mail or attachment between those whose mailboxes contain the thing ... but if they wanted to be cheap bastards, I suppose they could count the full size of the thing against anyone's quota...but it's in their best interest to provide every user with as large a corpus as possible of stored email, so they may better analyze it and do what they will with the information.
Do you compress your maildir? I'm guessing those four years' worth of messages would shrink down by quite a bit, if you did. Google are no fools; they're going to use that 1GB to the maximum potential!
An interesting idea.
If we take our cues from nature, I would expect that long before the predators exhaust their supply of prey, they will turn on each other. Each predator's worms/virii/malware will begin to not only infect machines, but destroy competitors' malware that has already infected the machine.
In fact, come to think of it, the most effective way to own a box is to infect it, destroy any competing malware, and then patch the exploit that allowed you to infect it in the first place! We may begin to see host-healing worms that do just this. (Without the ability to kill off competing infections, however, this practice is only marginally useful.)
You make a very good point. Especially given the recurring theme, throughout Quicksilver, of European medicine and science being vastly inferior to the Turks'.
... what else to say? Other than the fact that I was trying to paint Christianity as the dominating incumbent power structure, and my post was addressing the conservative, Christian and probably small-minded author of the parent ... so perhaps a few fallacies on my part can be forgiven.
Substitute 'European' for 'developed' and my statement holds true. But, since Europe was formerly known as Christendom by the majority of its inhabitants, the statement at that point comes dangerously close to being devoid of meaning. ("Christianity was the accepted normal religion throughout Christendom.")
Mea culpa
Mostly I base my decision to sleep with him on an appreciation of his talents. Now that I think about it, though, my decision is probably influenced by the fact that Joseph Fiennes portrayed him in _Shakespeare In Love_. My mental image of a young Will Shakespeare has been forever altered to resembled a rugged, moderately attractive Hollywood actor.
If I found myself in a situation where sex with Shakespeare were a distinct possibility, and if he were butt-ugly in the flesh, then perhaps I might feel differently.
As for sexual polarity: I'm a man, meaning that any carnal relation with Shakespeare would be a same-sex affair. Although I'm mainly interested in women at this point in my life, I'm always open to possibilities and Shakespeare wouldn't be the first man I've slept with. So my remark isn't as groundbreaking as it might first have seemed.
By and large, I expect that even the most devoted of Will's heterosexual male fans would be unwilling to drop trou for the Bard. But among those of us who like a little variety in our love lives, it's not a radical idea.
Good point. I concede. One thing is certain however: if Shakespeare were still around, I'd hit dat. ;-)
Newton was not a homosexual, I agree.
By the same token -- the careful consideration of historical evidence -- I must *disagree* with your statement about Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was almost certainly bisexual with a strong preference toward women. Consider that several of his sonnets are dedicated to a "Mr. W.H." and that his plays are rife with suggestive comments that, even if they give no information about the playwrite's sexuality, certainly suggest a familiarity with, and acceptance of, the idea of affection and sex between two males.
You and I agree that the homosexual lobby tends to paint history pink, using great strokes of its broad brush to imply that everyone from Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover was a mincing namby-pamby. You and I agree that they often arrive at incorrect conclusions -- the simple fact is that most people always have been and always will be straight, irrespective of how "politically correct" that notion is.
As much as I agree with you, I still take exception to your post because you sound like an ignorant homophobe. You seem fixated on the belief that incorrectly identifying a historical figure as homosexual somehow is some sort of smear on his reputation. To me, that suggests some very narrow thinking on your part.
I am white, with Aryan features. If someone walked up to me on the street and called me a nigger, I would certainly laugh due to their making an obvious factual error -- but I would not be ashamed. My reputation would not be destroyed. For me, there is no shame associated with being gay or black or Communist or vegetarian. If you think differently, then I suggest you reevaluate your thinking.
You'd think that pronouncing Neil Gaiman's name out loud ("Gay Man") would be enough to scare off any readers who might be disturbed by homosexual themes. ;-)
Given that Daniel Waterhouse's Puritan upbringing and steadfast devoutness in the face of his peers' all-but-secularism is one of the defining aspects of his personality, I would say that Stephenson does a rather fair job of doting on Christianity.
Compared to speculations about Newton's sexuality (which are limited to a few vague hints scattered throughout the book), Waterhouse's faith virtually drives the plot. His mentor is a bishop who believes that the established church is heresy -- that one should be free to worship as he sees fit, unhampered by politics. Many of Waterhouse's misadventures are due to his similar beliefs. Most characters in Quicksilver are devout Christians, even some of the homosexuals (viz Leibniz).
If you read Stephenson's earlier work, you'll see a repeated theme of tolerant, unperturbed spirituality in his stronger characters. Juanita from Snow Crash is a devout Catholic -- she shuns organized religion because she believes most of it is politicized claptrap designed to control the masses -- but she is Christian nonetheless. She and her unswerving faith ultimately play a principal role in the book.
If Stephenson goes out of his way to illustrate Turing's homosexuality, or Newton's probable bisexuality, it is merely to shed more light on areas of human experience that have been ignored by history.
For 2,000 years, Christians have had a rich mythology that teaches them valuable lessons on life and gives them a slew of inspiring role-models. For 1,500 years, Christianity has been the accepted "normal" religion throughout most of the developed world; often it is even sanctioned as the state religion. Until very recently, Christians have been constantly reinforced by unanimous, positive feedback from the community, the state and the church that yes, they are good and right and are going to Heaven.
In the same time period, homosexuals have had little or no public acknowledgement of their existence: no role models, and certainly no acceptance from society. In several places and times during the past thousand years, homosexuals have been tormented, imprisoned, tortured and murdered merely for being who they are. Christians had to endure this suffering at first, but by the time of the Spanish Inquisition it was Christians doing the burning and torturing.
I live in southern California, in a city whose populace largely identify themselves as liberals. Just the same, not 18 months ago, a gay man in my neighborhood was doused in gasoline burned alive as he slept by a Catholic man who had befriended my neighbor before discovering his sexuality. Bigotry, hate and intolerance toward homosexuals are very much alive today, and much of it comes from people who call themselves "good" Christians.
In summary: if Stephenson chooses to showcase homosexuality slightly more than Christianity, perhaps he's merely acknowledging the fact that Christianity has already been showcased enough.
No new math, I'm afraid. I was just operating on Jetlag Standard Time.
Due to some maths errors (see above), I miscalculated the service life of an inbox for someone with my volume of mail. As numerous helpful responders pointed out, the figure isn't 3 years, but is in fact closer to 15 years!
Let's say that Grandma Smith likes to compose her emails in Word and constantly receives 100kB jpegs of the grandkids. Her inbox grows by 1.5MB per day, or about 4x as fast as mine.
15 / 4 ~= 4, meaning Grandma Smith's inbox will still take almost four years to fill up! At the end of four years it should be safe to delete some of her older mail. How many emails can you name that you received four years ago and are still in your archives today?
Ultimately, I think this effect is what will let Gmail succeed. The useful lifespan of almost all mail is significantly less than one year. Give people a way to forever "lock" truly important messages, use the 1GB of space as a two- or three-year buffer for semi important messages, and index the whole shebang for the users' convenience.
A nifty free side-effect of indexing everyone's attachments would be easy identification of worms and viruses.
If 50 people share an attachment, there's a chance it's a bona fide binary. But if 1000 people all have the same file in their inboxes -- or if one person has the same file multiple times -- then it's almost certainly up to no good. When an attachment's reference count hit a certain threshold, Google could mark it as "poison" and warn people before they downloaded it.
Good point! This is what happens when one posts to Slashdot before coffee.
... what? I have no idea, but let's be extremely pessimistic and say that 10% of a user's mail is received by other users on the service, which adds another year of service life to the inbox.
So, uncompressed and unindexed, it would take 7-8 years for a user to fill his 1GB inbox, we'll say 7 years for maximum pessimism.
Add modest 200% compression and the user has 14-16 years of storage available. Add global optimizations (aggregating identical messages and attachments) and that number increases to
So. 15-17 years. Sounds like the makings of a business plan to me!
I'm somewhat skeptical on your figure of 200,000,000 (two hundred million) Hotmail accounts ... but, assuming that's a worldwide total and assuming that some small fraction of Hotmail users are abusing the service by using dozens or hundreds of mailboxes for whatever nefarious activities, I suppose it's a halfway plausible figure.
So let's assume, for the moment, that Google really plans to support on the order of one hundred million users. Your numbers clearly indicate that 1GB of devoted disk space per user would be unfeasible -- or at the very least, *very* costly to maintain. Happily, I don't think Google plan to go that route.
I would consider myself an average-volume email user, but after subtracting out the ~300 spams I receive daily, I probably get fewer than three dozen pieces of ham (valid emails) on a given weekday. Those messages have a very small average size (about 3kB) but we'll be charitable and assume that the average ham is 10kB in size.
So, the typical user (i.e. me) can expect to receive 360kB of mail in a day. At this rate one would expect that his 1GB of storage would be exhausted within a year. But emails are plain ASCII or Unicode text, which is very compressible. Google are of course very good at storing text in compressed-but-searchable form -- one might even say it's their core competency, alongside the PageRank algorithm. Given that emails consist of a large amount of redundant information such as headers, and that many list threads endlessly quote earlier messages, a user's entire mail corpus might be compressible by 300%. So we've raised our time to hit quota from one year to three years.
If Google are *really* smart, they'll identify mailing list messages and amortize the storage cost for a list message among all Gmail subscribers subscribe to the list. Since lists are typically the noisiest source of mail in my inbox (most messages and largest size), I would expect quite a bit of savings from this technique.
I agree, cracking and copying my music is none of those things. Hence the words "such as" in the passage you quoted.
Below that paragraph, the law enumerates the factors used in determining fair use. Noncommercial use (point #1) of a published and mass-produced work (point #2) in a way that does not affect the marketability or value of the work (point #4) -- I would say this counts as fair use. If you think differently, just follow the American Way: sue someone for copying a song he bought from his computer onto his iPod. The outcome of your lawsuit may set a precedent!
United States Code, Title 17, Chapter 1:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
First of all: Apple Computer holds no copyright over the works they distribute via ITMS. The record labels hold the copyrights to the music. What we are breaking when we decrypt a music file is our license agreement for iTunes, as well as the DMCA.
Second: by unencrypting a protected music file that I've purchased, I am not disregarding the copyright on that work. By converting the unencrypted music file to MP3 and copying it to my Pocket PC (which does not support AAC) I am STILL not disregarding the copyright. I'm merely exercise my fair use rights as defined by the Copyright Act.
Only when I take the unencrypted music file and give it to someone else am I breaking the copyright.
Of course, one can carefully spin the Ender's Game story in a number of ways. By emphasizing the political/social aspects of the Wiggins' actions and glossing over Ender's his troublesome earlier years, they could make themselves a fine bit of propaganda with a powerful anti-war message at the end.
Then again -- we're talking about the same industry that turned Wing Commander into a movie. More than likely, Ender's Game will be filled with shiny things and loud noises. Haley Joel Osmont will probably play Ender, with Macauley Caulkin co-starring as Peter.
Hmm.... can we put a bound on the margin of error for the two-body solution to the asteroid's motion? If so, I could figure out at least whether a mission will be feasible, given the worst case.
IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist), but from playing with the Java applet, it appears that 2003YN1 is going to come surprisingly close to Earth within the next decade.
In January of 2007, for instance, the asteroid will be trailing Earth by about 0.5 AU. In November of 2020, Earth will be trailing the asteroid by a hair's breadth (in cosmic terms) of 0.1 AU.
Now, four light-minutes (or even 0.75 light-minutes) isn't exactly spitting distance, but how often do we have asteroids within such close proximity to Earth, in such convenient orbits? I imagine it would be fairly cheap to launch a probe to match orbits with the asteroid, rendezvous with it and do some science. A return mission in 2020 would be a distinct possibility (if it were useful, which I'm not sure it would be).
Now, the budgetary and planning requirements for a 2007 mission are probably unmanageable at this late date, especially given NASA's (or ESA's) current budgets. But we've got 16 years to plan for a 2020 mission. What manner of experiments might we be able to devise in the intervening years? What possibilities can you think of?
1) Establish an unmanned observatory on the asteroid
2) Land a power source and construct a propulsion system (using a linear accelerator to eject the asteroid's own mass?) and try to change the asteroid's orbit. Depending on the composition of that baby, it might be worth a pretty penny if we could put it into near Earth orbit for mining.
3) Same as #2, only turn the asteroid into a long-term habitat. Free giant space station, anyone?
OK, so these ideas are a bit far-fetched, possibly venturing into the realm of science fiction. But dreams have to start somewhere...
An obvious idea cannot be patented. 'Obvious' means that a person of average skill in the art could have independently formulated the idea without knowledge of the "invention" on which the patent is being filed. "The art," in this case, means the art of camera design.
It doesn't strike me as a great leap that an experienced photographer or optics guy living in the year 1991 with even a reasonable degree of computer knowledge would have been able to foresee the digital camera. Sure, he might not have known about JPEG compression or Secure Digital cards, but CCD arrays were around long before 1991, as were flash memory and good image compression.
So, with your prior art and with much like it, this patent may well be unenforcable. At least the patent is old enough that we can't shake our heads at this patent as yet another side-effect of the recent patent frenzy. It's a simple case of a patent examiner sleeping on the job, or not being creative or imaginative enough to realize what's obvious and what isn't.
What exactly makes a Mac fan? I have never used OSX, don't own a Mac and haven't used any Apple OS since my high school days, some eight years ago. But I derive immense satisfaction from the use of my iPod, and from iTunes for Windows. I find that they fulfill all of my musical needs. Having reverse-engineered the library file formats for both products, I'm also able to copy music at will anywhere I please without worrying about the weak restrictions they place on copying files from an iPod to a PC.
So..does that make me a Mac fan?