On second thought you are even wrong about your claim that "most people" would consider a random collection of bits of as ``informationless'' - the keyword is context. Typically a random collection of data indicates that your data does not obey a format you can decode (in human terms understand) and most technological and biological system obey a certain format i.e. some of the data is redundant to protect against loss during transition or storage.
Imaging you wanted to efficiently record the days it rains somewhere in the middle of the Sahara. Probably "most people'' would write a little sentence - I am going to record all the days it rains and then proceed doing so. Basically you compressed a very long file binary file of thousand of years of meaningless (very little information) of ``sunny'' and ``rainy'' days in a very short readable file. If you go further back in time the Sahara was actually a pretty wet place so you probably put in a little sentence indicating that you changed your recording strategy (maybe depending on the season, etc) - this is in essence how compression algorithms work and most people actually understand that. Clearly no amount tricky is going to help you that much if you are trying to record the fairly random weather pattern (a lot of information) of the British Isles.
One last tit bit - the very term ``bits'' actually originate in information theory.
I am generally not a big fan of the patenting business but to use the term immoral seem a bit over the top - it's not like their trying to squeeze you for the last cent of your retiring money to be able to effort a live saving drug (which are often relatively inexpensive to produce and not that expensive to develop).
On a laptop you will often have primary suspension_to_disk partition as well. The boot loader of W2K is probably more then adequate as a primary boot loader - in 4 years of dual booting the NT-loader never failed for me but in a setups with lilo as a primary boot loader I often had to resort to a rescue floppy disk until I got tired of it.
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On second thought you are even wrong about your claim that "most people" would consider a random collection of bits of as ``informationless'' - the keyword is context. Typically a random collection of data indicates that your data does not obey a format you can decode (in human terms understand) and most technological and biological system obey a certain format i.e. some of the data is redundant to protect against loss during transition or storage. Imaging you wanted to efficiently record the days it rains somewhere in the middle of the Sahara. Probably "most people'' would write a little sentence - I am going to record all the days it rains and then proceed doing so. Basically you compressed a very long file binary file of thousand of years of meaningless (very little information) of ``sunny'' and ``rainy'' days in a very short readable file. If you go further back in time the Sahara was actually a pretty wet place so you probably put in a little sentence indicating that you changed your recording strategy (maybe depending on the season, etc) - this is in essence how compression algorithms work and most people actually understand that. Clearly no amount tricky is going to help you that much if you are trying to record the fairly random weather pattern (a lot of information) of the British Isles. One last tit bit - the very term ``bits'' actually originate in information theory.
BTW, the claim that Hawking radiation destroys information is a contentious issue ... just because Hawking believes it does not mean it's right.
I am generally not a big fan of the patenting business but to use the term immoral seem a bit over the top - it's not like their trying to squeeze you for the last cent of your retiring money to be able to effort a live saving drug (which are often relatively inexpensive to produce and not that expensive to develop).
On a laptop you will often have primary suspension_to_disk partition as well. The boot loader of W2K is probably more then adequate as a primary boot loader - in 4 years of dual booting the NT-loader never failed for me but in a setups with lilo as a primary boot loader I often had to resort to a rescue floppy disk until I got tired of it.