To address the privacy concerns, how about a system where you pay for eBooks via Bitcoin, and your private key for bitcoin transactions is what is used to unlock the eBook? You can always just generate a new Bitcoin ID per book if you wanted to... (oh wait, you could also transfer all funds out of the bitcoin ID you used to purchase the book, then share the book and the private key that no longer holds any value, so shhh - don't tell the publishers this part)

Shouldn't that be: "If it happens sooner then you're not doing it, right?"

Yeah, that quote bothered me too - I'm thinking, why not just design it with the least friction with the air to start with - why have it be less efficient at slow speeds in other words?

Unless Clanet was referring to the design process itself - use an elastic model in a wind tunnel (or simulate the whole thing) and observe it's deformation to determine the shape with the least friction with the air (or call it coefficient of drag, like everyone else does :-)

At first I was thinking it might have been typical media-distorted science, but when they threw in that quote from Clanet, it seemed more that the science is hard to take seriously too.

Why the skies? Doesn't that ship just show up where it probably shouldn't be?

But isn't the shuttle itself up for sale? So I guess we're just upset this guy was only getting $3 million for the information, vs. $28.8 million we'd get if we could get the PRC to buy the shuttle itself?

My first thought too - My blackberry has a GPS reciever in it, but the feature is turned off by Verizon because they want to charge a monthly premium for their navigation service, which is unnecessary with GPS enabled and software installed on the handset itself. Irritatingly, it disables the GPS for other applications (GPS Trace logging for OpenStreetMap anyone?) and I don't need the navigation service enough to want to pay every month for it.

Why the patent, I couldn't guess, unless it is as others here are saying - patent it so you can sue carriers who want to implement the system to prevent them from crippling the iPhone.

You haven't read any of Asimov's non-fiction? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov:

Isaac Asimov ... was a Russian-born American author and professor of biochemistry, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.

I would have thought that most people would conside professors of biochemistry to be scientists...

Isn't the metadata where the filesystem would keep track of what blocks are available to be re-used? How could another process start using those data blocks if you haven't updated the meta-data to record them as avilable for re-use? For truncation, doesn't the truncation happen by writing the metadata?

I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"

'fraid not. I just bought a Navagon GPS navigator, and it had a EULA like screen the first time it turned on, requiring me to click to acknowledge that local traffic laws and directions of traffic officers take precedence over it's directions.