Standard sized batteries are already on their way out. Manufacturer-specific rechargeables are the new standards.

Maybe... or maybe not. Progress is seldom linear, and tomorrow is not specially supposed to me just "more of today". It may on the contrary be very different, and even opposite to some respect (think of the automobile or computer products from 1950 to 1970 and try to extrapolate that to 2010, you get very strange results ;-)

The key to many things is scale economy. If you can offer the same service at 30% less manufacturing and storing cost by having 10x longer series, you win. By the way, this is what ensured success of the Ford T and the VW Bug at a time. The Renault/Dacia Logan seems to be a success too in Europe with its "non-nonsense" approach, as well as Netbooks have been in 2008. Future is almost never "more of the same thing". That is incidentally why the Wii was such a sucess too. See aloso this :

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131098

http://www.arm.com/events/presentations/Robin's%20Semico06%20Keynote%20Speech_FINAL06Mar06.pdf

... and extrapolate that to any other movement, like batteries :-)

... so I am not in a hurry for them to go to the finished product state, because perhaps it will stay free, and perhaps not; and in the latter case it will be a chore to get one's 7 GB of mail back to one's PC, especially if 10 million people are trying to do the same with theirs !

Or they might also say : it is free to stay on Gmail, but you will have to pay to get out ! :-D

"will allow batteries (...) to 'take the shape of their container' rather than creating containers for the batteries"

Wonderful ! Now, instead of having some standard battery sizes (AA, AAA and so on), we are going tu have as many different shapes of batteries as there are products, not only between manufacturers but within the line of the same manufacturer (for the same reason that Gillette has 10 different shapes of blades, or than portables PCs have 200+ type of batteries, or that we hare 20 or so different AC/DC transformers at home), so you will have to buy every time a given manufacturer's battery and throw it away rather than reuse it on a later apparatus.

I am afraid that while technically we have a progress here, our production organization wil make it a regression; it something that happens from time to time.

... can give, from a skull, any hint about the size of the nose and the shape of the ear, both of which are made of just cartilage.

Any hint ?

If you start work at 9:00, put the time switch to boot your computer at 8:45. That should leave a lot of time. Now, if a password must be entered for the boot to proceed, the question is : is it your job ? Then you should be paid as soon as you begin it. If it is somebody else's job, just wait for him/her to do it.

The folks in the governments (be it US, EU or UK) seem to have lost sight of why there's been "copy rights" for the past 200 years...

The constitutional basis (at least in the US) is to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" - US Const. art. 1, 8, cl. 8. And thus gave the exclusive right to the rightholder (ideally, the artist himself, even though this is unlikely nowadays):

• To produce copies
• To import / export the work
• To create derivative works
• To perform / display the work publicly
• To sell / assign rights to others

But since copyright provides a monopoly, there is a limitation in time for it. The main reason is that copyright creates two main incentive -- to create and to diffuse the creative works. If there was no protection provided, creative people might just keep their creations for themselves in fear of being ripped off by other people.

Hence, there is no real fear to have about a "unlimited duration" copyright... in theory. Following the Sonny Bono act, the Supreme COurt printed this wonderful opinion where they basically said that even if the copyright duration was set to a million year, it would be constitutional since it was "limited". With such arguments from the highest ranking source of legal authority, I cannot help but feeling hopeless...

Copyright is not a bad system, just like the Communist Republics' constitutions were great civil liberties manifestos...