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Yet Another Degrading DVD
Aire Libre writes "Efforts to eliminate price competition from cheap DVD rentals and used DVD sales appear to be speeding up. Flexplay Technology's EZ-D self-destructing DVD, which goes dark in a lagardly 48 hours, has been surpassed by a French DVD-D that goes dark in a speedy eight hours. Because neither technology has anything to do with piracy, they both appear marketed at movie studios that might wish to drive up the price of DVD rentals. Presumably, once throw-away DVDs catch on, the studios can for the first time prevent price competition between rental and sales of DVDs by charging more for a regular DVD (rentable and re-saleable) and having the retail sales copies disappear 8 hours after opening so that no one can re-sell them, lend them, rent them or give them to charity. This will also suppress competition from rentals and used copies against currently uncompetitive online movie downloads."
DVDs are manufactured with recyclable plastic. It's your fault if you buy this and don't recycle it. Only you can prevent forest fires.
EZ-D's manufacturers are planning a recyclying program, including the possiblity of including a mailer (a la Netflix) to return to a recycling center.
DVDs are manufactured with recyclable plastic. It's your fault if you buy this and don't recycle it. Only you can prevent forest fires.
DVDs are not recyclable, CDs and DVDs from the manufacturers that have been rejected are ground up for use as filler in building sites.
Here is a site that shows you how to reuses CDs/DVDs as a disco ball, or bird scarer...
Using old Abba CDs to make a disco ball has a certain justice to it.
Haven't you heard?... Recycling is BULLSHIT. For the full story, watch Penn&Teller:Bullshit! on Showtime..... Recycling is the largest waste of time on the planet... ALUMINUM is the only product that is worth recycling, as it's cheaper to recycle aluminum than to mine it.... Every other recycled item, costs more, and also.... Landfills are not a problem, you can't FILL the landfill... ok?.... The garbage created by the USA for 1000 years could be stored in a 30 mile square box.
This is not always the case. I remember the story of paper manufacturing that the real cost of making recycled paper is actually worse for the enviroment than using virgin fibres. The public wants recycled paper, so that is what they get.
Stay tuned for new sig...
That's an interesting point, but I doubt that is a suitable alternative. It costs a fortune to take a family to the movies these days because 'somebody' always gets thirsty or wants a snack. Plus you can't pause the movie when the kids want you to take them to the potty.
It cost me $50 to take the family (of four) to see Shrek II. I got the reduced matinee pricing for seeing an early show. I got the discounted 'combo snack packs' which allowed one treat and a small drink for each person.
Next time, I'll wait for the video to come out. Even if it becomes a limited view video. I'd much rather have more control of my viewing experience to be able to get a beer or a snack without missing a part of the movie.
For those 'single' people that don't have a need to pay for a full family's worth of movie adventure (or who watch the movie anyway). Invest a one time amount of about $300 in a portable DVD player and drive your date to a private area to watch the movie. If you're lucky, you probably won't see the movie anyway, but you're only out the price of the disposable DVD. You can afford to go out the next night and 'watch' another movie.
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Movie Goer to Movie Usher: "The concession stand prices here are outrageous. Besides, I haven't had a barbeque in a long time." - Steven Wright
So yes. Companies do spend a lot of time and effort making crippled products that cost them more to produce than the premium version. And they have been doing it for years.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The DVD burner will be your best investment. As you probably know, Disney movies have 30 minutes of commercials up front and either you can wait until the startup gets to the point where you can actually hit play or you have to hid forward for 5 minutes to skip the commercials.
I would highly suggest you go get a DVD burner really soon, the prices of even a Dual Layer Burner are below a 100 bucks. You can then rip out all those commercials and simply insert the DVD and Walk away and it will play automatically. Download DVD Decrypted and DVD Shrink. You will never touch the originals again. The convenience of a movie playing when you insert the disk is the greatest thing for kids (no waiting no fussing you'll agree).
Glass has always been an expensive business. Recycling glass bottles has been a money earner for decades.
I know people want to hate the green lobby because it does some daft things, but not everything the green lobby proposes is being done simply because the green lobby has proposed it. Sometimes it makes economic sense for businesses to act in a way that happens to be environmentally sound.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
DivX also had the point that you could make a disk "permanent" by paying extra for it. But, you had to have your DivX player plugged into a phone line, and it would dial out and check and see if you were allowed to use that disk or not. You also couldn't take your new permanent disk over to a friends house to watch it, because it would check your unit ID against the movie title. IIRC, they didn't physically degrade... Disney started that bandwagon...
Nephilium
Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort. -- Ace in Starship Troopers
"Recycling, anything but cans, is actually more harmful to the environment than just throwing it away."
I think that's too simplistic.
Recycling has sometimes been given a bad name by poorly thought-out schemes which don't include all energy/pollution costs at all parts of the product lifecycle.
There are so many factors to consider, like:
1/ Environmental transport costs to disposal facility vs equivalent costs to recycling facility.
2/ What you are going to recycle into - recycling paper waste into pristine new white paper may be environmentally stupid due to the purification/bleaching necessary. Recycling high grade waste to lower-grade waste like newsprint and toilet paper makes much more sense.
3/ Recycling a given product may initially be environmentally negative but once the amount reaches a threshhold level you get economies of scale, and it makes commercial sense to develop more energy efficient processes.
4/ More complex items often make no sense to recycle because there are too many different materials mixed together in a way which is too difficult to seperate them. If the products are designed for dismantling followed by a combination of re-use and recycle the equation changes drastically. This requirement is being phased in for example for all new cars in the EU.
It has the additional advantage of making it easier to repair such products by replacing smaller components rather than larger assemblies.
5/ Combined facilities can overcome the inefficiencies of standalone processes. E.g. mixed household waste can be partly burnt to generate energy onsite (no transmission losses etc.) for recycling its glass/metal content.
I'd agree that not all recycling that's done at present makes sense but for example glass recycling has been going on for many years on a commercial basis, before recycling was 'fashionable', so presumably the claims that it can be more energy efficient than manufacturing from scratch are true.
Penn and Teller as a primary source of information? I get my info from old Ziggy comics but I digress.
You are wrong about many things so I'll just focus on a couple:
1. AL isn't the only product worth recycling. There is a little thing known as the scrap iron business that has been a major industry for over a century. In China and S Korea scrap metal is so valuable that people in Mongolia are collecting old junk cars and rebar and shipping it to China.
Glass is another item that is especially energy intensive to make.
2. Landfills fill up my friend. Ever see those big piles of dirt with vents all over them near cities and towns? Those are landfills that filled up or got to big to allow to stay open. The cost of transporting trash is going up as there are fewer and fewer places willing to take it (right now poor towns in places like Africa and Pennsylvania are the world's trashcans). Since I haven't seen a plan for taking every scrap of trash and compressing it into a 30 cubic mile box it will continue to sit spread out near the places that generate it, like, for instance, the homes of slashdotters.
The cost of transporting it away to be recycled is real but should be born by the generator. This would be more fair than how people who drive don't pay gas taxes that cover 100% of the cost of roads and are subsidized by other tax payers. The cost of NOT recycling has to be added in to the equation. Quality of life also has a definite value. I doubt even the most die hard anti-environmentalist (a "brown"?) enjoys living in a trash strewn world.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Cutting down a forest is used for lumber. Lumber is much too valuable to waste on paper. Lumber requires tall, big trees to make big straight boards that are knot free. Paper requires wood chips. To make paper you plant acres of the fastest growing trees you can find (usually in a fallow field) and water the crap out of them to get them to a harvestable size in a few short years. You then pulp the little guys and make paper. If more people recycle paper, you plant a few less acres the next year. Since all those people live in stickbuilt homes, you sill cut the same amount of forest land as in prior years. You can grow paper trees in lots of places as long as you can supply water (which is usually a major reason forests weren't there already).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
What they are talking about is glass containers. Where the bottle is smashed and smelted again to create a new bottle.
Now a lot of the right wing make all kinds of claims that this kind of recycling is actually more costly. Funny thing is that the glass industry itself doesn't seem to think so. Just that the only problem is that the margins are extremely narrow so it is hard to make the business of collecting a real profit maker.
Oh and those who suggest landfills, you are of course the volunteer to have it in your backyard right? Thought not.
Remember the only difference between left wing and right wing loonies is the wich words they spew from the hole in their head. They are both loonies who take the facts and take the ones they like and twist them to suit their objectives.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For glass that is probably true -- it is a fairly plentiful natural resource. However, some materials are well worth recycling. It is extremely expensive, for example, to extract aluminum from bauxite ore. Recycling aluminum is far cheaper, and you just about break even as far as the money for collecting it goes. This also doesn't take into account the fact that thrown away garbage is either taking up space in a landfill (space that is going to become extremely scarce in the coming decades) or adding pollutants to the air from an incinerator. It is also more "fair" to society to recycle than to thrown away, because landfills and incinerators tend to get sited where nobody has the money to fight it.
> Remember DivX (the original, BAD one)?
Yes. Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of its welcome death. How time flies.
I think you're thinking of "reusing" not "recycling". If a company gets their own bottles back they just wash them out and reuse them. Recycling a bottle by breaking the bottle up and putting it back together as a new bottle is more expensive because it involves a separate collection (your milk example would pick up bottles on a normal run - $0), it requires sorting from paper, cardboard, and whatever else people throw in the recycling bin (again, $0 for the milk company), and then the glass is shattered and reformed (I'm sure if you've followed me so far you'll see that this is again $0 for your milk company).
A company reusing its own bottles is a money saver. Society trying to recycle all glass currently is not.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Recycling isn't just about saving money with raw materials. It never was. Materials processing and manufacturing is where the greatest savings can be made. The closer you can get an recycled product to its already processed state, en-mass, the better the savings.
This lesson needs to be drilled into those in charge of the programs. It's not enough to simply try to resell people's rubbish. You have to encourage the rubbish to be seperated by more than just "what it's made of". You have to encourage manufacturers to make things that can be recycled easily.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There are environmental impacts of the chemicals used to separate, break down and sanitize the recycled material. Also the other pollutants created by the facilities that process the material. Now some of this would of course be offset by the facilities that create the raw material in the first place. You are right in saying that the environmental impact needs to be considered, but we also need to realize that recycling may not always have the lesser impact.
As stated above here is a quote from the manufacturer's website
Flexplay discs are fully recyclable and conform to all applicable EPA environmental standards. Flexplay has partnered with GreenDisk and local environmental organizations to develop several closed-loop recycling options to test with consumers.
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Whales do *not* eat algae.
Whales eat krill - small, shrimplike creatures. Krill eat algae. Less whales = more krill. More krill = *less* algae.
In tropical waters it's actually slightly more complicated; some tropical krill eat zooplankton as well as phytoplankton, which muddies the situation.
It's pretty much true about the paper. One thing that recycled paper does have going for it is that it's usually not bleached; production and use of chlorine is really nasty, environmentally speaking. But paper made from fast-growing plantation forests is very "good" for carbon levels. These forests do tend to leave behind rather acidic soils, which many plants don't like, and the forests themselves have terrible biodiversity ("green deserts")... but they do chew up that CO2.