While working in a banquet kitchen I once whipped up a batch of Wasabimole complete with peppers, onions and tomatoes. I stuck a bowl of chips next to it expecting to catch some banquet waiter stealing a snack. The first victim was actually the exec chef. Once his nose and eyes stopped running and he stopped laughing, we both resumed watching for new victims. It was fantastic.

During one of my moves we had the a full wall minus one box all set. As my buddy was about to place the last box and complete the wall I called out "Wait! You can't put that box there or all my stuff will disappear." He laughed. Then he thought about it and started a second row saying "Just in case."

Exactly. Reminds me of the old quote: "There are three types of lies in the world: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Define what you mean by "consume" in this case. If we look at the definitions easily available on the internet, say here, we have several definitions that do not quite fit.

If we assume they mean "To expend; use up", I ask... how does one use up data?

How about "To purchase (goods or services) for direct use or ownership."? I don't know how many of you pay for all the data that comes at you... I certainly do not. This does not seem to fit.

Ah. Here is one that makes a bit more sense: "To waste; squander." I know that I certainly do not make good use of nearly all the data that I take in, and not nearly all of the data that I have access to. But this one isn't what they mean, or if it is they are even more cynical than I.

And then, how is the size measured. Information is difficult to quantify. How is it stored? Is it compressed somehow. Why are books ignored in that graph? (I think I know... but the idea that the average American doesn't read enough to count is depressing) A word on a page in a book is information, how does it relate to how many bits or bytes? How about a picture on the same page, is it worth 1000 of those words?

Statements like "Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08" are totally meaningless in the way that statement is delivered. It is devoid of context or content. It definitely fits the definition of "To waste; squander".

I really like the feel of the paper in my Moleskine. But I will definitely take a look at Clairfontaine. Do you know if they or someone like them have composer's notebooks?

Personally I really like my Pigma Micron. It gives a fine line and is acid free. When used on my Moleskine notebooks it should last a couple of centuries under decent conditions. Beats the hell out of my success rate with Western Digital drives.

For those not willing to click through and read:

Abstract

"The present invention provides a highly scalable architecture for a three-dimensional graphical, multi-user, interactive virtual world system. In a preferred embodiment a plurality of users interact in the three-dimensional, computer-generated graphical space where each user executes a client process to view a virtual world from the perspective of that user. The virtual world shows avatars representing the other users who are neighbors of the user viewing the virtual word. In order that the view can be updated to reflect the motion of the remote user's avatars, motion, information is transmitted to a central server process which provides positions updates to client processes for neighbors of the user at that client process. The client process also uses an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the movement of the user's avatar."

So basically they are trying to patent everyone from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson to Rudy Rucker's version of 'cyberspace' or whatnot. And I do think UO and EQ definitely beat them to the punch as far as implementation.