"The US government" is not a monolithic entity. Certain departments (e.g. NSA) might "log everything" already, they just don't (or can't) share it openly with other departments yet -- if anything, because revealing such capability is damaging in itself.
If I understand correctly, from some news I read [1], they are already sharing information with at least the DEA and the IRS. The DEA and the IRS were told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate the information obtained ("Parallel construction" is really intelligence laundering).
one global country would probably fix that... or I guess you could end the Internet... but to tell you the truth, "cloud computing" needs to end instead.
This is a joke only up to a point. The current legal landscape emerged throughout the last few centuries mostly in response to commercial pressures: as commerce grew in range, volume and needs, so did laws, agreements and conflicts.
We now have a situation where global commerce is real, both in a physical and logical sense. The law, both at national and international level, just doesn't know how to deal with it. Companies design hardware in Massachusetts, produce it in China, sell it in Europe, and file their accounts in Caribbean islands. They develop software in Romania, run it on servers in Texas, sell it to the Brazilian market, support it from India, and file accounts in Luxembourg. This stuff could only be done by a handful of players back in the '70s, and we could deal with it on ad-hoc basis ("dude, we know your money is in Switzerland, just open a token factory in my constituency and we'll call it even"). Now it's just how business works everywhere, and we need real processes to scale up.
What rules can be defined and applied? How are they going to be enforced? Who is responsible for amending them? These big questions are the real challenge of this century for us "First World", and some harmonization will eventually have to emerge one way or the other.
I think it's going to be very hard for countries to work out how to deal with the issues. Pretty sure the Internet is going to continue to exist and provoke questions about what "national boundaries" mean in this context.
Predictions are dangerous, but probably the forecast for the future is that it will be even more "cloudy", whether we like it or not. Of course, can't do much about the weather anyway...
Google would not give up the ability to see email content... maybe they would analyze them locally on your phone instead of on a remote server (that might even save them from buying a few server too)
If you can see your emails on your Android device and Google is admin on your device, why do you say that it is impossible for them to read your emails? I don't mean that they could read them in the cloud but if they can read them locally on your Android device and for example they could send a message back to Google saying "I think this guy should get ads for a new router".... but of course they could do much worst (they could send whole messages back for example).
Android was designed to leak as much information about the user as possible all the time, even to third parties. Spy satellites have less invasive software.
No, mathematically speaking the 4th dimension is no different than the 3 that we are used to dealing with, and is held to the same physical constraints.
There are no shortcuts. The straight line connecting 2 points in 3d space is shorter than any path connecting the points that goes through a higher dimension. The same applies to 2d compared to 3d. If you have 2 points on a sheet of paper, the shortest path is on the paper. Any path that went "off" the paper into the 3rd dimension would be longer, so no "shortcuts".
Imagine a strip of paper bent into a U. You can travel from one end of the strip to the other through 3D space with a much shorter distance than along the entire paper.
Sure, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Euclidean 4D space projected orthogonally onto Euclidean 3D slices, not some nonstandard projection onto some weird 3D surface embedded in 4D space.
We don't really know that. Let's suppose the universe was really 4D. We don't currently know if the universe is flat or not. A curved universe can be both unbounded and finite which would be very elegant.
Einstein proposed a test to find out. I'm hoping this test will eventually be Gravity Probe D (Probe C will be a repeat of the failed Probe B).
