Once electric cars become prevalent, the charging time doesn't really matter for the supply and HV distribution side of the grid - each car sucks either 10.2MW for 30s or 10.2kW for a bit over eight hours (30,000s). Once there are enough that the spikes in charging smooth out, the demand increase is the same whichever charging rate you use. The only problem really comes at the edge of the grid, with the connection to individual houses currently being sized about three orders of magnitude wrong for this use. At this point, it's probably not too unreasonable to ask homeowners to pay to have their grid connection upgraded to give them the privilege of a 30-second charge for their car.

Let's see, a 4,700mAh 5V battery has a capacity of 23.5 VAh or 84.6kJ. To charge that in 30s, you'll need a 2.82kW charger output. So whether it's feasible or not probably depends on what jurisdiction you're in - a British 240V 13A socket will give you 3.12kW, so as long as your losses are below 10% you'll just get it. An Australian 240V 10A socket will give you 2.4kW, so allowing for 90% efficiency of the charger you'll get about 40s to charge. A US 110V 15A socket will give you 1.65kW, requiring about 57s at 90% efficiency to deliver a full charge.

Of course, I'm sure now I'll be buried in crap telling me either a) how crap Wordpress is and how much better blogging-platform-XYZ is or b) how useless the advice is because Bennett will never follow it and how my metrics for assessing the advice I give out is all wrong.

Seriously, Bennett? You don't think maybe researchers who devote their lives to figuring out good advice on health, diet and exercise know just a teeny bit more about experimental design than you? Sorry, I forgot, teenagers know everything.

Uh huh. Can someone tell Bennett about Wordpress so he can go get a real blog, please?

This story has been a good opportunity to challenge my own assumptions. Some of the key questions I asked myself:
* Should Mozilla have a CEO who gave $1000 to support prop 8?
* Would it have been sufficient for him to renounce his support of the law?
* Would he also have to announce his support for same sex marriage?
* Would it be different if the campaign were to outlaw interracial couples?

Orthodox Christianity also forbids things like money lending for a profit (usury), most christians seem to have forgotten about this particular bit of sin though. Modern Christianity is so far away from what Christ actually intended he must be whirling in his grave even if he still has the cross attached.

I don't believe in endless copyright either but I do believe that in the initial period (say 10 or 20 years) that copyright should be enforceable. The problem I have is with the great many privileged young folk, still living off the back of mum and dad while they are at university advocating the abolition of copyright law just so they can watch some crappy film without paying.

Usually when people carp on about abolishing copyright it is simply because all they do is consume digital content without actually creating any of their own. This makes them net gainers if they never had to pay anything for that which they create.

So you actively fought in a war to support the capitalist way of life (Desert Storm was a war to ensure Saddam did not gain possession of Kuwaiti oil, not about democracy as Kuwait was very far from a democracy to begin with), you are obviously proud of your child doing the same (Afghanistan is also about securing oil supplies) but neglect to understand that a key part of capitalism is that it also applies to digital works as well as physical goods?

Most of the US GDP now comes from the creation of copyrightable works rather than by physical production, without international consensus on copyright the US would be even more bankrupt than it already is as exporting copyrighted digital works is one of the few things that helps the countries balance of payments. Copyright, is a necessary part of capitalism. Without it, the system will fail. This was clearly understood by economists pretty much as soon as the printing press was invented.

Nothing has changed with the advent of the digital world in this regard yet as we still lack the ability to endlessly copy food and shelter which are the greatest human needs. In order to encourage people to enter the creative arts they need to be able to exchange their services for money in order to buy those essentials.

In Soviet Russia, dash cams are compulsory!

Hmmm, that didn't quite work out like I wanted.

People always spout stuff like that until they have a family to feed. Once you have no other source of income other than that which you earn by creating stuff you look at the world very differently. In my part of the world you need to earn a very good wage in order to afford enough space for a family with 2 kids, that only comes from earning roughly twice what most people earn or by having a mummy and daddy with lots of cash.

Since I come from a single parent family and my mother has sod all I have to earn every penny I ever expect to need in life for myself. That includes any money to send my kids to college, and hopefully one day for them to be as privileged as you sound.

Your right in that money doesn't buy happiness, but if you have ever tried to live and bring up kids without any and with the bailiffs constantly knocking at your door you realise pretty quick that it can certainly stave off misery.

The Japanese mastered that years ago, you do not get much more efficient cooking than eating it raw :)

There is no "your" data or "there" data. There is only dropbox data. It seems at the point you upload a file they check it to see if they already have a copy and of they do they just add a pointer to the existing file rather than store a fresh copy.

By the sounds of it they must actually do a direct file compare rather than use a hash. They probably use some kind of hash to narrow down the options of stuff to compare it with but in the fallback case of a hash collision, and both files being exactly the same size they must have to do an exact comparison. That probably does not happen very often though and it sounds like this is process is only done once at the point a file is stored.

You obviously didn't bother to read the article.

The truth is that they always scan every single file uploaded to make sure they do not already have a copy of that file stored on their network. If they do, they throw your copy in the bin and just add an extra link to that stored copy in your account. That keeps their data usage lower as it means they never store duplicate copies of the same file, even if they are uploaded by completely different people.

So there is no crawling involved, this was done at the point of upload. They found that the same file had already been uploaded by someone else, shared, and that user got the shared copy of that file DMCA'd. Once a file has been DMCA'd in their system it seems it is blocked from being shared so only people uploaded that file also get to download it.

This whole issue can be summarized as:

1) User wants to ignore copyright law and share something they have no legal right to via a public service
2) Public service being used has no idea how many people will want to access the shared resource but they do know it is copyrighted as they auto match everything uploaded so they can avoid keeping to separate copies of identical files and save storage space and had a DMCA take down request for that same file previously.
3) Public service errs on the side of not getting their arse sued off by the various content owner conglomerates legal attack dogs and refuses to allow the file to be shared even though the person who uploaded it can still see it.

All in all seems pretty reasonable. Until copyright law is changed (like that is ever going to happen) dropbox have to follow it to the letter. I suppose they could have avoided the whole thing by storing more data and then not doing the duplicate file scan thing but even that is no guarantee it would prevent them from being sued to oblivion.

The only safe option for them that would also keep things private would be to use encryption keys that were only kept in the client. That way if you needed to share a particular folder you selected to store that under a different encryption key, and gave that key to other person / people who needed to access it.

The big problem with this is that it then becomes more awkward to provide web access to the files. People are comfortable remembering a username and password, they are not so comfortable remembering a bunch of encryption keys. If you store the encryption keys on a server at your end anywhere then you can access the files so you therefore get the legal responsibility to make sure your system is not being used to flout copyright law. The only legal way to run this sort of service and not be liable for it's misuse is to design it in such a way that you cannot see what is being stored at all.

You would be entirely right were it not for one incredibly important detail: His entire business is based around people working for him for free on an open source product that could be forked. If you are in that position you have to be slightly more concious of how the people you represent feel than if you are actually paying them. Mozilla is basically a charity, not a commercial corporation in the normal profit making, shareholder's holding the real power sense so it is bound by different rules even if it might actually have corporate legal status.

Should private beliefs be enough to prevent someone from heading a project they helped found?

No, but he didn't keep his beliefs private, he tried to turn them into law. And that still doesn't mean he can't head the project, it just means a lot of people may walk away from it, and Mozilla.org needs to consider that.

Is the backlash itself justified? Well, to some, including myself, it is a bit like supporting segregation in the 1950s. Right now, it is a mainstream political view to believe that gay people should not have equal rights. There's a hundred thousand years of evolution behind that belief, and it is not realistic to expect everyone to switch that internal belief off at the drop of a hat -- no more than it was possible for people in the 1950s to instantly accept equal treatment of black people.

But what good people did do in the 1950s was stop expressing their prejudice. They stopped supporting segregation, and stopped saying that they found it to be an acceptable practice. Most of them still had that deep internal programming. Most people still have it to some extent today. Hundreds of thousands of years of "different looking means dangerous" genetic programming isn't going to go away overnight. But we have reached a point where we treat those beliefs as flawed baser instincts, like the desire to hit a person over the head and steal their BMW. We repress those feelings because we believe in being better than that.

We have reached a point in our society where prejudicial treatment of black people is no longer accepted. We will reach that point with gay people too, and Mozilla will be as embarrassed of having an unrepentant bigot for a CEO as Walt Disney Corp is of Walt's anti-Semitism. It is not that Mozilla should be forbidden from doing so, it is just a question of showing good judgment.

Mozilla, tell Eich to figure it out and recant his position. It's OK to be unable to overcome your baser instincts; that is a reality of being a flawed human. I'll admit that my instinctive reaction to the idea of gay sex is not pleasant. But it is not OK to express prejudicial beliefs or to support prejudicial laws.