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Xerox Reveals Transient Documents
Heartless Gamer writes "Xerox has lifted the veil from some of its research and development work in the field of printing. They demoed the very intriguing 'transient documents.' These offer the prospect of reusable paper in the sense that the content is automatically erased after a period of time, ready for fresh printing. Inspired by the fact that many print outs have a life-span of a few hours (think of the emails you may print out just to read, or the content you proof read on the train journey back home), the specially prepared paper will preserve its content for up to 16 hours."
I've got receipts which fade if left exposed to air, off those stupid thermal printers. And, as a bonus feature, they turn utterly black if you set something very hot on them. Possibly useful for taking pictures of the sun with a magnifying glass, if done with care.
We have a practice in our shop of taking non-sensitive documents and flipping the paper over and running it from a tray for re-use on the blank backside. Fine if people haven't scribbled on it or added a staple.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can see this being used all ov r t e p a e i t a p o m n t w !!
liqbase
Meanwhile, the Disney and Circuit City folks are trying to figure out how to leverage forward-frame synergies and shift new paradigms into cross-functional matrix adaptive committee clusters so they can provide new proactive technology-centric solutions to use this in a new "pay to see" limited shelflife consumer product.
[
...back in the inkjet cartridge.
16 hour pornography? Should be just enough time...
Ladies, call me.
After you run a piece of paper through a printer and then handle it, even a little, it isn't suitable to run through the printer again. Usually it causes jams.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The next use of this paper will be for printing those Microsoft Genuine Advantage certificates with your Windows registration code on them. Made expecially for those rare folk who do know where their documentation is.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This memo is set to self-destruct in 16 hours.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Who speaks for the trees?
I do. They're pleased these printers aren't made of wood.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This will make for awesome practical jokes. "What do mean I just turned in blank pages professor!?"
Interesting, but how many times can you reuse paper that has been out in the real world?
Spilled drinks, people drawing on it with pen, folding, crumping, tearing, chewing.
I know most printers can't handle the paper if it's not in 100% perfect condition.. I can just imagine the kind of paper jams this thing could produce when someone thwoes in 6 pages stuck together with bubble gum, corners torn off and grease from their lunch calzone smeared all over it.
Neat idea with the UV though. I love the idea of inkless printing, as long as the paper doesn't end up being more expensive than gold.
Obviously, you do.
Wouldn't a fire sufficient for Xerox to DIAF need a lot of wood?
sic transit gloria mundi
Disappearing ink http://www.penguinmagic.com/product.php?ID=213 has been around for a long time.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Fred: Charlie, swap in some of that new transient paper and we can pull a fast one on the next guy that uses the printer. We'll get him good! Next morning: Greg to Boss: Hey I have those reports you were looking for. I worked all night and got them ready. Fortunately I printed them at the office because my hard drive crashed right after I finished working on them. Boss: What are you kidding, these pages are blank!
As for destroying the environment that's just FUD.
What about the Paperless Bathroom?
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
What kind of documents do hobos need, aside from IOUs, and you might want those to last a while...
Hey, guys. Big gulps, huh? Cool. All right! Well, see ya later.
A really good way to play a practical joke on someone...
:)
- Term papers
- Contracts
- I could go on forever
DRM'd paperback books!
This seems like it can (and therefore will) be used to add "DRM" to paper.
What about the Paperless Bathroom?
Yeah! How about that?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Interesting tech, but how easy will it be to recover other messages? ...
This could all to easily be a security disaster waiting to happen
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Seriously, think how bad some of the OOPSes will be....
I printed off your email before deleting it, but now I can't find it!
What happened to those photos I printed?
If you don't have your receipt, we can't take it back.
No, that section of the contract never existed. Can you prove it did?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
An interesting application for this would be for printable coupons. You get a piece of this paper in the mail with some sort of promotion. The instructions tell you feed the paper into your printer and visit a certain URL to print a "special one day only" coupon.
Sure, expiration ("expiry" for the rest of the world) dates have been around forever. However, knowing that your coupon will literally disappear tomorrow would be an added psychological incentive to use it. (I've *got* to stop giving marketers new ideas...)
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
... their marketing wizards will probably call it Paper-RW!
Well, Demolition Man introduced The Three Seashells.
Now I just have to find out how to use them.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees!
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Not necessarily a good idea for use with sensitive corporate data...
Paper is for people stuck in the past. This is a ploy to make money off of people resistant to using new technology. There are many more advantages to using digital data than just saving trees.
"Print is dead."
He said that in 1984, mind you.
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
Meanwhile, the Disney and Circuit City folks are trying to figure out how to leverage forward-frame synergies and shift new paradigms into cross-functional matrix adaptive committee clusters so they can provide new proactive technology-centric solutions to use this in a new "pay to see" limited shelflife consumer product.
You mean like DIVX? I could actually expect someone nuts enough to try it.
Congratulations on your purchase of Mickey and Goofy's Opium Den Adventure! Now that the seal on this booklet has been broken you have 16 hours to read and enjoy this publication before it will reset and you will need to return.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's not FUD.
not all paper products come from tree farm, probably not even half.
Of course, the paper farm also destroy the local trees to make way for special trees.
Also, you can pull things out of the soil for so long before nutriens are used up. What's their plane for maintaining the soil?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They should just make a printer (and ink) that can erase and reuse printed pages. I maybe not want something to disappear after 16 hours, or I might decide to keep it after printing it out, or any other number or reasons. I can see wanting emails to self-erase for security reasons, but you'd be able to print it and photograph it so what would be the point?
Xerox can DIAF.
They can Drag In A Fir? Why do you hate trees?
Every time you run a sheet though a printer, it wrinkles slightly. To say nothing of how much you wrinkle it by reading it. Just like running the old sheets through again to print on the other side, this greatly increases the probability that the paper will jam. This "transient document" sounds like a printer maintenance person's worst nightmare!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Xerox must be using inspector Chief Quimby's (gadget's boss) technology: "This message will self-destruct in 5... 4... "
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Bad idea!
If the point is for security, I don't buy it. There must be ways to reconstruct the content after it disappears.
If the point is for saving paper, I don't buy it. no paper that's been in my hands for more than 30 seconds is going to fit back into the paper tray!
So what's the point?
Most paper I see used around an office is not suitable to be run through a printer a second time, it is often dog-eared, creased, distorted from someone holding it too long in sweaty hands, stapled, etc...
It is not uncommon to see loose paper piled next to a printer waiting to be laoded which is already mangled. It is best to store paper in it's pack until ready for use, it keeps the paper clean, dry and undamaged.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Just remove the fuser from your printer, make a printout, and when you're done reading, take a "can of air" and blast the toner off the page.
Wino 5.25" floppies? Poor, neglected ancient technologies...
Finally, contracts that aren't worth the paper they're written on.
i fail to see how this post is baiting people into flamewars
Now when people send me paper documents, I will require digitally signed digital copies as the authentic "masters". Because the "paper trail" could disappear after I accept the paper copy.
Apparently Xerox is trying to get all the electronic voting business that Diebold is losing because the people are demanding paper trails.
--
make install -not war
Assuming that they can make this work, the question that arises is how "transient" are these documents. If there is some possible form of post-processing that can recover the information on a printed document after it has faded from ordinary view, then the risk exists that sensitive information may unknowingly be distributed.
Xerox is proposing the 21st century palimpsest, but, if they are not careful, they may create the same scenario that makes pamplisests of so much interest to historians. (Palimpsests are documents which were written on recycled vellum. The original writing was scraped off the vellum, which was costly, and the vellum reused. Palimpsests are of great interest to historians because it is often possible to recover the original text, which may not exist in other form.)
This is not a legal opinion, no representation is expressed or implied.
But wouldn't this help to reduce the amount of paper actually used? I mean if you can print on paper multiple times, that's quite a bit of savings. 50 printed emails a week suddenly becomes only 20 sheets of paper. Or maybe less!
Now where problems might arise... how many times could a sheet be used? How much more expensive will it be than normal paper? Will that price be worth the usability of this in place of just more plain paper?
I'm sorry, this article has been misrouted. You meant to send it to my boss.
I'll print out a copy and show it to him.
I dunno... the coastguard?
16 hours is more then enough time to get multiple uses out of the paper I'd say!
Just in case you didn't know, Xerox does far more than build and sell copiers. They also have significant investment in digital document management systems such as workflow solutions, content management and DAMs. The also propmote zero-landfill remanufacturing for thier print engines, have a corporate policy of using recycled paper where ever possible including client presentations (at least in Australia).
I notice you left HP and Lexmark off your list of DIAF candidates, did you realise that most organisations use MFDs (multi-function devices) now, and that probably 80% or more of their volume is PRINTING not COPYING.
Also, on the topic of recycled paper, can I suggest you find a copy of the "Penn & Teller's Bullshit" episode on recycling. You might find it enlightening.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
"i didn't sign this paper - i swear ! you have to believe me !!"
It's been quite a while since Xerox has come out with something that the rest of the market will do better and cheaper and take over dominance of the innovation. Nice to know that they're still providing the world with cool stuff that they'll never figure out how to make money on.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
I have been sending out hundreds of resumes lately... and not ONE return phone call or job offer!
Dryads, of course!
They made a copier that could lift the toner back off the paper. I remember it being featured in the NY Times and forwarding it to the college department I did work-study in at the time, a place that such an item would actually work out pretty well, since most paper stops being useful and stays in-house.
Didn't you ever read Dr. Seuss? The Lorax speaks for the trees. Geez...
Sigs are for the weak.
The Lorax?
Now when I forget about a paper, I can just print out some pages of Lorem Ipsum! Then when the prof goes to read my paper, he won't be able to find it, and in the meantime I'll have finished it. Then he'll have to ask me to print him another copy, bwhahaa.
Forget transient paper - someone needs to sort out that pesky 'last-line-of-the-email-disclaimer' that requires a whole new page when you print an email. Perhaps transient paper you can 'fix' somehow if you want to keep it. A spray of some kind?
So.... you've got some paper which the ink disappers after some time....
Im sure i just saw that in the joke shop for $2! and your charging me HOW much?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
how well do you keep the paper flat and staple hole free?
we can expect more paper jams
What's their plane for maintaining the soil?
I wasn't aware this involved aviation. Maintaining soil by plane does sound interesting though. It sorta happens when chutes don't open if only those pesky next of kin and their friends would stop removing the remains.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
????: the message destructs itself
That would be the Impossible Mission Force.
They're not quite the same.
:)
The DIVX stupidity was based on electronic DRM. It required (for those who don't know) a special DVD player that was authorized to play an triple-DES-encrypted disc for up to 48 hours for a fee. After that, additional 48 hours periods could be purchased electronically. The main key is that you bought the disc, which gave you 48 hours from the start, but after that you would pay and play for another 48 hours as often as you wanted.
Disney's abomination was a format called EZ-DVD. These were regular DVDs that were coated with a special chemical that darkened after approximately 24-48 hours once it was exposed to oxygen after breaking the seal of the disc case, rendering the disc unplayable. It would then have to be trashed or "recycled", but the customer had to pay for the recycling postage and I sincerely doubt that it would have been truly recyclable anyway. Because it was priced to be about half that of its "normal" DVD counterpart, it made little to no sense to pay 1/2 the cost of the real thing but get only two days of playability.
Both had their benefits and drawbacks, but the overall consensus is that both formats had far more negatives than positives, which is why both formats failed miserably; however, I'd love to get my hands on an unopened EZ-DVD, open it while submerged in clear polyeurethane, take it out, wait until it dries, then see if the coating still darkened.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
An even bigger consideration is the current massive increase in the amount of previously print only material being made available online (i.e. Google's scanning projects, Amazon promotion of PDF sales, publishers such as Pragmatic Programmers selling online versions prior to print publication etc). Converging with this 16hr technology, you could rotate the same 100 pages on a daily basis, printing out a few chapters at a time. This convergence could really boost online publishing.
An interesting side effect of the 16hr deadline is that, for the first time, printed material would gain the same immediacy as television, meaning that you'll be less inclined to print out reams of material and stashing it away to read "later".
several of you mentioned turning term papers with this special toner, but isn't that just a practical joke on yourself when you get an F?
HD Trailers
Too bad the guys at Enron didn't hold off on their scams...they could have really used stuff like this! If it does become widespread, and I can certainly see possible uses for it, what is the image quality like? The example in the article looks eerily like it was from one of those old mimeograph/Ditto machines that our homework was printed on in Elementary school.
:::::does little dance through the office:::::
Ken Lay: Hey, Jeffrey! We don't have to shred anything anymore! With this stuff, the paper trail just disappears----- and it won't be out fault!"
-----
Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
About the only thing I can think of that I ever print for "transient" use is driving directions, and usually by the time I'm done with them the paper wouldn't be usable even if the ink did disappear. I can't imagine, more generally, printing material for read-once purposes; if I print something, its not transient.
I expect Xerox has done some market research here, but it sounds to me a solution desperately searching for a problem.
I trust you're aware that the running gag in Inspector Gadget was a reference to a recurring element in Mission Impossible?
Sometimes, People are driven by pure ideas only without
too much experience in consumer market.
1. Inventor has to be the in the shoes of an actual user before releasing the new technology.
2. Invention has to be justified before being introduced to the market. Market research anyone?
3. I am not sure how much research xerox did on the need of the reprintable materials?
4. If the regular paper isn't obtion to be refed into the printer, which will cause the break down
of the pick-up rod on the poor printer...then some other materials would have to be invented.
5. there are 3 ways product can be introduced.
a. paper like thin layered palstic may be introduced which can be used instead of paper.
paper won't fold or creased...and materials will be protected from coffee, soda and water?
maybe it will be foldable and creasable...but the heating up the material will flatten out
the plastic paper..
b. maybe low cost storage bin will be introduced. Where paper can be stored before being used
again. Maybe, ink is heat sensitive...only losing the print when heated up artificially
while creases formed on the paper is being flattended out again in neat stack. Maybe with
combination of tech a + b together will form the usable solution.
c. maybe heating and flattening mechanism will be added onto new printer platforms heating and
pressing document flat befofe going into the actual printing process. Maybe, printer will
have two seperate bins. First bin will contain the brand new paper materials which will skip
the heat/press process when printing and there will be recycle print paper try which will go
through the full process of rejuvenating paper and actual printing process.
Hem...I think Xerox should hire people like me to the project. I have 7+ thinking cap on my head.
Oktokie
At least this sounds like it'll be a fair bit less painful than the old method.
Assuming you meant plan there. Even on tree farms, other shrubs tend to grow (trees taking more than one season to farm), so the soil composition will be like that of a normal forest, just with the trees in a more rectangular pattern.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
I work in a calibration lab and we print out test procedures all the time, we get updates monthly and have to make sure we always use the latest revision of each procedure. This typically means we print out each procedure every time we use it, then toss after 1-2 hours of use. If I could just throw that paper (typically 10 to 50 sheets) into a bin to be reused the next day...well we'd use about 5 reams of paper a year, vice the 10 reams a month we currently use. Some how I see that paper being $5 a page and the printers $50,000 so the savings is moot. At least we save some trees huh?
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
You're missing the point, Samir, the idea is to think about what you'd do if you didn't have to work, then that's supposed to be your...
PC Load Letter?! What the fuck does THAT mean?!
At the current price of paper, who is going to collect the pages and put them back into the printer? Just pulling a fresh load from the stack and inserting it is so much easier. Especially because used paper is not as easy to stack properly.
How much would you save on paper costs, vs how much would you pay to fix all the paper jams from wrinkled paper going back in the printer?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Just throw away the used paper and print on new paper.
Paper is a crop. It grows on trees that are specially planted by paper companies on paper-company land. They're chosen to grow quickly and produce good paper pulp. Cotton is also used in most papers. Cotton is also a crop that's specially planted for this purpose. Paper is also extremely inexpensive.
This technology reminds me of waterless urinals. There are places locally that have them. They don't work well. I live within 5 miles of the 5th largest river in the world. Water is not scarce.
There's no reason to invent expensive, new technologies to be inferior substitutes to the use of cheap abundant resources. Why not fix a real problem instead?
What a horrible link... Bite sized information spread over seven pages and it STILL needs scrolling.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Ah this brings back memory of the wonder you have as a kid discovering that writing on paper with lemon juice it disappears and dries until you iron it and the lemon trail browns. Of course you couldn't erase it afterwards and reuse the paper, so it's not the same. Then again I didn't have to spend millions on research.
The possibilities abound. Documents that honour privacy legislation and erase themselves in 7 years. Historians and investigators rejoice! Your work load is about to decrease dramatically. You see the key problem is that instead of treating the paper as disposable, you treat your information as disposable.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Maybe Diebold can use this technology to generate the paper trail for
electronic voting.
Speaking as part-owner of one 450 acre tree farm, and part-owner of another 778 acre tree farm, I can assure you that most paper does actually come from tree farms. The best and most obvious reason is that it's simply a lot easier to harvest wood from tree farms. Undergrowth is controlled, quality and yields are known, roads are available... the good reasons go on and on. In fact, in order to make paper, you only need trees that are about two years old. Three to five is better, but two works just fine. It's very, very easy to indefinitely sustain the production of paper.
Generally tree farming is most profitable when you can do it nearly year-round, so it is done more often in the southeast. Slash pine occurs naturally. About the only thing that is displaced by most tree farms in this area is a bit of uninteresting (and certainly not endagered) undergrowth of various types. So no "local trees" are destroyed for "special trees".
Finally, a great deal of effort goes into the care and maintenance of even small tree farms like mine. To some degree this is even regulated by various state and federal forestry groups.
Your entire post is speculation, and isn't even remotely close to accurate.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
White ink!
Print out your document like normal.. then when you are sick of those pesky letters, swap over to the white cartridge and print the exact same document!
It all depends on the type of machine. I've been working on these machines for 25 years. If it is a slow speed (under 20 cpm) you could probably get away with it for a while, as long as you feed it in landscape (8 1/2 x 11R) with the grain of the paper. On higher speed models, (seg 3,4,5) machines, the quality of the paper is the majority factor in producing a quality print. When the speed of the machine pushes above 60 cpm, the paper isn't spending much time over the drum/transfer section, not to mention the fuser section where the image is actually "saved" on the paper. Machines now handle "recycled" paper a lot better than they did 10 years ago, but the real problem you get in a dry process machine, is moisture content of the paper. A low quality paper, or a "DP" "dual purpose" paper doesn't work as well as a dedicated "xerographic" paper. Paper of the "DP" type is made to work in a large range of machines, dry AND wet process. Inkjet, offset machines obviously use liquids, and therefore the paper needs to be able to "absorbe" the ink. If that paper is exposed to a higher humidity, or stored improperly, it will inhibit the transfer process to some extent on a plain (dry) paper copier/printer. Also, a lot of recycled paper has LOTS of paper dust. This dust will get transfered to the photoconductor drum, and when the cleaning blade (works like a windshild wiper) cleans off the drum, sometimes this paper dust gets trapped between the blade and the drum and after a few thousand copies, can actually scratch the drum surface, causing blade lines on the copies. The drum is a VERY sensitive and easily scratched device. Paper is wood pulp, and very abrasive. I try to steer my customers away from recycled paper on high speed machines, since they will waste a lot of time clearing paper jams. It doesn't seem specific to any particular brand. I've seen it happen on Canon, Ricoh, Minolta, Konica, Sharp, Toshiba. If you want consistant output, use good quality paper. As for the "paperless" office, yeah right. I remember when the paperwork reduction act went through over a decade ago, and just laughed. ANYTIME the government is involved (or lawyers), the paperwork goes UP. A couple of years ago, the healthcare industry was forced into the HIPPA act (healthcare information privacy protection act), and you should have seen the increase in the volume of copies! One hospital I service, the output has increased at least by 1/3. As long as there is a government, or lawyers, paperwork will be a necessary evil. I have one account, a educational department that runs anywhere between 1.5 to 2.0 million copies per year! Even with a connected (networked) machine, where they can email the output to a mailbox instead of printing it for each department, they haven't cut their output by much, because when each department gets the email, they usually print the email. Everyone wants a "hard copy" to either file or have in their hands. The transition to a "paperless" office will probably take longer than accepting a "fax" as a real document was in the early 80's.
It doesn't matter if the pulp is from new trees or from recycled paper or card.
The fact is that a lot of (a) energy, (b) chemicals, and (c) clean water to produce and/or recycle paper, not to mention the energy required in distribution and recovery.
Paper is one of the things that we're consistently okay at recycling, but as PP implies, after a while the fibres just break down, and you can't recycle it any more.
Reduce and Reuse are the first two "R"s for a reason.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Xerox has an amazing history of inventing cool, new technology and not making it a business success. The book, Fumbling the Future, documents many of these technology fizzles, but the list is much, much longer. Xerox continues to have very bright inventors, but no way to sell anything other than printers and copiers. Transient paper sounds cool, but Xerox will not succeed in creating the business "eco-system" (like the things mentioned in above postings), and their sales force can meet their sales targets by selling something they already know, so why bother with something low margin and complicated like weird paper. And like someone said, paper is dying - especially in the office.
Put your bets and your dreams on something else.
Still, a good chunk of nutrients in a forest (the majority, actually) are held in standing biomass (trees). When you take out the trees, you take out a lot of nutrients that would go on to enrich the soil for more trees in the future. You get a net decrease in soil productivity. This is why a lot of tree farms inject your standard gassified NPK fertilizers. Ironically enough, these gasseous fertilizers easily and readily convert to nitric acids, which are not only detrimental to foliage, but are easily oxidized to produce NOx and Ozone. Ozone is also very detrimental to foliage, and NOx is again oxidized to yield...guess what...more ozone and more NOx. What you end up with is a weakened, stressed stand of trees that's highly susceptible to disease and pests, along with soil that's sub-par. You basically get an economic loss to tree farmers and a huge fire hazard.
And i didn't mention the impact of soil perturbation as a result of mechanized tree harvesting (the way it's mostly done now-a-days). Soil takes decades to centuries to form and be productive. If you disrupt it on a large scale, as is done in mechanized tree harvesting, you basically get a retarded growing environment, as well as allow a small fraction of the worlds largest CO2 sink to let loose some scruptious heat-trapping gas. Basically, what this all boils down to is tree farms are bad news for disposable goods (paper products). It is extremely costly to run a tree farm that can sustain itself for more than a few decades, and they're usually run at a loss. Economically, you get your tax dollars used to aid tree farmers because paper pulp is seen as a neccessary good in our economy (and it is). A much better solution, economically and environmentally, is hemp. Hemp will grow in just about any soil condition, use markedly less water and fertilizer, and can be used to produce just about any disposable paper good you can think of.
And if you don't believe me about the tree farm stuff, do a little googling. This is all standard, undergrad level environmental chemistry. Or, just look at your original statement and try and remember the first law of thermo: energy/matter can not be created nor can it be destroyed. If Nutrients in a system prduced a tree, then you take that tree out of the system, you've taken nutrients out of that system. That's a net loss, and in this case it's a net loss directly to the soil as that's where most of the nutrients would have ended up had that tree stayed in place. Thus, the soil composition would not be like that of a normal forest. It would be poorer.
I unpatent the idea of an ink pen that the ink will immediately disappear or show in red if the document is on transient paper.
meh
".. can I um.. borrow the sheet of paper tonite?"
"Ok, Son, just have it clean by my meeting at 9:30 am.""Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Killing trees, turning them into paper and lumber, and then wasting the aforementioned paper and lumber, is the only way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
A tree pulls carbon out of the air (i.e. photosynthesizes CO2 into O2 by removing C) insofar as it is growing. A matured tree removes no additional (net) carbon from the air because its leaves rot and give the carbon back up to their air via decay, ants, and termites. And when it falls over and rots away, all of its lifetime accumulation of carbon is re-released.
The only way to keep the tree's carbon from getting back into the air, is to bury it deeply, as occurs when it has been logged, turned to paper, and then wasted and sent to a landfill.
If forests or rainforests really removed net carbon from the air all by themselves, then they would quickly develop coalbeds of carbon underneath themselves. Guess what? They don't. The Lorax is a big fat liar. Well, a small fat liar, anyway.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The findings (as expressed by Penn and Teller and a governmet agency) in ?New York City? were that:
-A) Most regular garbage was manually sorted and recycled by fairly paid workers at a conveyer before being sent to the landfill.
-B) More pollution was created from mass recycling due to: the fuel burned by recycling trucks that would not normally be burned (not to mention the manufacturing of these trucks), the caustic materials produced/consumed/dumped in the recycling process, and the extra electricity required to run yet another set of sorting plants.
-C) Most people would not sort for recycling (as the processing facilities for NEARLY ALL garbage facilities US NATIONWIDE do anyway, for profit) and those that were willing would do so did it obsessively anyway--they offered a new system involving more than ten new containers and the avid recycler was more than willing to sort everything, including garbage items that are soiled from those that are wet.
FairTax baby!
The recycling of paper is bad for the environment. Paper represents carbon that a tree took from the air by converting CO2 to O2. If you bury that paper, the carbon remains sequestered, and then a new tree can take new carbon from the air to make new paper.
Recycling reduces the demand for this cycle, and therefore reduces the rate of atmospheric carbon removal rate.
Ditto for lumber.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
THe first thing that came to mind when I read this article is Inspector Gadget. Whats next self destructing paper? Although, exploding paper would not really perserve ink or paper very well. I'll get you next time GADGET!!!
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for paperless if it's possible, though it's hard to see it ever really happening. I was just responding to a bunch of utterly incorrect crap in the earlier post. If nothing else, we tree farm owners make a LOT more money selling much older trees for things like lumber and so on. My preference is to sell blocks of trees at about the 10 year mark.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
You also need to factor in the greatest expense of all: person-hours. How many sheets of paper would a human need to gather up, stack, straighten, and then reload, in order to offset the cost of the paper?
Person-hours get more expensive by the day, because they are a function of society's total productive output which is climbing continuously. I expect that this issue is like the issue with pens and paper plates: it's wasteful to take steps to avoid wasting them.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I like how you provided a link from a pulp and paper special interest group, clearly created with the express purpose of brainwashing elementary school children into believing that growing managed forests explicitly for wood pulp is good. It even has a word match at the end to make sure you've learned an important lesson: hippies are bad! Reminds me of a certain simpsons episode, "When i grow up, i'm going to bovine university!" Or, should i say, Paper University. Being someone who's been trained in environmental science and forestry resource management, i gotta say that this is a very dumbed down argument they're presenting that easily evades answering the really tough questions: air pollution from pulp plants, disease potential and fire danger associated with timber monocultures, nutrient depletion stress from overcrowding and net soil loss, urban pulltion stress (yeah, the pollution from pulp plants actually feeds back to timber stands and makes them weaker, more suscpetable to disease and catastrophic fire), and ecosystem marginalization from a decrease in biodiversity. These are all real threats, not FUD, as shown by the recent fires in California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, etc, that were all exacerbated by bad forestry practices perpetuated by the timber and pulp industries.
Now, i'm not saying that we should stop harvesting all together. That's stupid. The forests are so screwed up now that we NEED to thin them, but as an emergency precaution. Thinning should not be long-term policy. And the pulp industry needs to diversify into non-woodland sources like hemp and papyrus, which have a smaller ecological footprint than tree farming, and generally a larger, cheaper yield.
Bottom line: it's well accepted in the resource management community that tree farming DOES fuck up the environment. Selective thinning is really the best solution, but that can not satiate our hunger for wood products - something needs to take up the slack and start replacing timber in the pulp industry.
it's a very slow process. Have you ever been to a mature forest, what they call a climax forest? The humus layer is DEEP. Lot of carbon there.
Anyway, forests are a drop in the bucket, the ocean is where most extra carbon eventually gets to. Forests are good for moderating climate, acting as water sponges and air conditioners.
1) Its not environmentally friendly. The paper is going to have to be treated with a witches brew of chemicals, and most of it will not end up being "recycled" because paper rarely survives contact with the enemy (users). The energy cost to produce special paper at boutique sizes (regular paper gets produced on billion dollar machines at outputs you wouldn't believe if I told you, so you can average your costs, including energy, over the whole production run) is probably going to be worse than the energy cost of recycling regular "use it once and then pulp it" $3 a ream paper.
2) Its going to cost a heck of a lot more than basic paper products, which mean for the sort of transient documents that they're contemplating using it on, like the memo that won't mean anything in 24 hours, nobody will want to use it. People are willing to pay serious money for paper (I used to work for an office supply company -- $40 a ream for resume paper, anyone?), but thats *specifically* for paper that marks a very special occasion and has to either a) stick out from a stack of undifferentiated paper, like a resume or b) last for a good deal of time without wearing, like a diploma or library copy of a thesis. For daily use they will go somewhere else if you charge a premium of 10 cents a ream. (One ream is 500 sheets.)
3) Its not secure, and thats going to give people fits. When you shred/pulp a paper, people know that that data is (probably) not coming back to haunt them. Most companies are not going to trust that somebody won't be able to raise the previous version of the data with lemon juice or some other innovative chemical/physical inspection. For compliance-intensive industries (which seems to be all of them, nowadays), the whole "Hmm, that sheet of paper Bob is taking home with him to read on the bus could have customer data on it, we're just not sure..." is a nightmare. The government will expel building materials from their hindquarters before using this stuff.
This is a product which purports to solve a problem that does not exist. Regular office paper cheap, comparitively environmentally friendly, and secure. This product is 0 for 3.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
we should all know that anything that sticks to paper-like ink- even after changing chemically hours later is going to leave SOME chemical traces on the paper, making it possible at some point afterward to see at least that the ink was used on the paper if not be able to read parts of it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The nice thing about print is it leaves a paper trail.
I guess the denizens of Orwell's 1984 won't have to burn each day's newspapers, they'll just let the print "fade away."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
Marvin Acme... what a genius!
That assumes you either need no corrections, or you annotate using a UV pen. And, that you are able to carry a stack of papers around the subway without creasing and wrinkling them.
There are only two good reasons to print a document:
* you want to scribble on it.
* you want to carry it somewhere that its likely to get lost or damaged or where an electronic reader is inappropriate.
In either case, this paper is unlikely to be useful.
Personally, I'd much rather see the Xerox R&D folks working on light weight, high-contrast electronic readers with robust note-taking features.
I can just see some Records Managers jumping out of windows on this one...
...but there are always more where that came from.
Or better, pushing Xerox employees out of them...
who was reminded of Mission Impossible? ..."
"Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it,
"This tape will self destruct in five seconds."
Perhaps you're in a different situation, but if it becomes available reasonably cheaply, I could see this being useful in my workplace as part of the recycling initiative that's going on here. If land wasn't required for producing paper pulp and cotton, it might be used for something more useful.
Even if you're thinking about it in selfish economic terms, all it takes is for a piece of reusable paper to cost less than all the regular paper that might have been thrown away. If Xerox is researching it, it's presumably because they think they can eventually sell it.
This technology already exists, did anyone try to hold on to a receipt for a product with life time warranty.
The ink magically disappears as soon as you release that the product is toast.
That is intelligent erase for you.
Inks that were made from slowly sublimating crystals go back a very long way. The idea is that the colour is in the form of something like solid iodine in a medium that slows down the rate at which it turns to its gaseous state. The medium can't follow the writing, though, or the writing is still visible. So Xerox has discovered a better sublimation process. Sounds like basic chemistry, not rocket science.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not intending to be funny here, but this really sounds like Xerox had one of those didn't-work-but-we'll-sell-it-anyway accidents. Maybe they were just trying to make some nice cyan or magenta ink and suddenly, 'oh my... it faded! It wasn't supposed to do that. I wonder... maybe we could sell it?'
On the other hand, there have been people working on photochromism for UV-activated switches recently for light based memory systems (quite a buzz among some materials chemists). Maybe they picked up on the idea from that... perhaps they did it on purpose from the start.
The quantities of wasted computer paper are minute when compared to the amount of toilet paper used. The world really needs toilet paper with this technology. Either that, or underwear made of the same.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
That's ridiculous! Tom Cruise wasn't even born back then!
Indeed. Let's burn our paper and lumber instead of recycling them!
http://outcampaign.org/
I see this paper as the ideal medium for software requirements, the print lasts about as long as the validity of the requirements
I can't read!
wait.. are you telling me that tree farms clear out the land to plant.. gosh.. more TREES ?
You really haven't a clue about forestry management, have you?
Paper is made from fast-growing softwood. This is grown on privately-owned land. Since growing land that isn't actually growing anything is not making any money for its owner, there is an automatic financial incentive to replant every tree you cut down to make paper, accounting for "hit rate" (since not every sapling will grow into a good tree). Trees for paper are a cash crop. If you don't object to farmers pulling up carrots, you've no right to object to the way softwood is produced.
This is a (rare) instance of capitalism working well, because the monetary value (in pounds, shillings and pence) of the commodity being produced closely tracks the non-monetary value.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I've been so bored with computing and IT in recent years. It's all just more of the same, a bit bigger, a bit faster. P2P was cool and portable MP3 players too but apart from that, it's all incremental changes by and large.
I would therefor like to say thank you to Xerox for finally coming up with something truly new and radical.
On the downside, seeing as most paper comes from renewable resources i.e. managed tree farms, is it really an issue these days? What is the cost of paper production versus reusing as per this system? When you take in to account the cost of the printer/ink/paper, is it better for us overall? What about the chemicals involved, benign or nasty?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Just imagine :
The definitive proof of Govt. involvement in the JFK assassination,
the contract with MGM to fake the moon landings,
the proof about WMDs.
Maybe it's true, and it's just your copy that fades !
Yeah, and I invented real self destructing message tapes when I was about 8 years old. Took a few goes to get the prototype together, but they worked: one play was all you got. However, <adder="black">there was a tiny flaw in this plan</adder>.
If you can't see the flaw, apply for a job with the RIAA / MPAA now.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
- The dust will go everywhere and wreck your printer paper path
- Also clothes etc., and don't forget heating it makes it glue itself to things
- In its "active" unheated state it may be toxic
- No, it cannot be collected for reuse. Very stupid idea. It will get mixed up with paper dust and other dust. Toner is actually quite a high-tech product nowadays, and will not take kindly to major contamination
On the other hand, if the people suggesting trying it are actually printer salesmen - way to go, guys!Pining for the fjords
The problem is with balancing the books at the end of the month. Most stores accept coupons, but they send them to a central clearing house working on behalf of the company issuing the coupon. If these coupons fade away, then the store will be out the amount of the coupon because the clearing house won't be able to accept a blank piece of paper.
Many stores save up their coupons and send them in weeks or even months later, depending on how many they receive.
I can't quite decide whether to laugh or cry. I really hope you're joking.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Tree farming takes decades.. You're telling me that the nutrient levels in the ground don't recover after such a long period of time..?
MABASPLOOM!
I am pritty sure this paper will only work with some types of printers.
Ink Jet is a possibility. But Laser or Solid Ink? They both work by melting stuff on top of the paper. I dont think that Solid Ink Printers will goaway that easially the best you can make those papers is so you can rub off the ink/toner.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But you could plant hemp!
You know, all the stoners are saying that, 4 times the yield of trees, yearly harvests, is there something fundamentally wrong on those numbers, or are people who make paper just stupid?
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
This new xerox thing probably isn't all that useful for ordinary stuff. Most people have greasy fingers, bend/rumple the pages, spill ketchup and who knows what else on pages-- etc. I don't think stuffing that paper back in the printer is going to turn out to be a good idea for anybody-- except maybe the printer repair people (does xerox have a stake in any printer companies??).
However, I think the "killer app" for this type of paper is going to turn out to be the security / intelligence communities where what's written-down can be real liabilities. (Okay, also for Enron, President Bush, the Republicans in general, and all of the other greedy, nasty, up-to-no-goodniks out there). The idea of being able to print out a classified report, read it and then know it will fade away has got to have the intelligence communities very interested. Sure they'll probably shred and burn the stuff anyway-- but it will be much harder to dumpster-dive and reconstruct anything useful from the shredded wads.
Of course the most effective use of this new technology will be to use it to print lottery tickets. That way the states can rake in BILLIONS on lotteries they know they'll never have to pay out on! Now that's ingenious!
But will it have that wonderful mimeograph smell?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
There's also the disppearing link (tm) product. which I'm proud to present to you here:
Yeah, but as a slogan, "Save a tree!" has more emotional appeal to it than "Help the county landfill last longer!"
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
As I can't handle a single sheet of paper for more than about 5 seconds without rendering it to wrinkly and/or coffee stained to use in the printer again. Now if they made some sort of permanent press paper that did this, THEN I'd be excited.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I see serious problems with the idea that the information on this paper is "lost" after 16 hours. We all know how hard it is to "lose" data on a hard drive. It seems to me that if a printer has printed on this paper, then some kind of indelible information is now stored on this paper. How long will it be until this paper is thrown away and that data is then stolen?
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Still, there are great savings to be had by recycling paper instead of producing virgin paper:
And I see in a lower post that you'd rather be selling 10year wood for timber, so maybe it doesn't matter to you if there's more paper recycling
The article said something about the print looking purplish, despite having up to 1200dpi resolution. So if you do print photos on it by mistake, it's going to be immediately obvious.
A few years ago the e-paper was big news...a set of miniature black-n-white plastic spheres enclosed in a thin sheet of plastic and managed electromagnetically where enough to use as a gray-scale alternative to real paper. What happened to that?
That was quite a screed against the "American Way of Doing Things".
May I ask a simple question? Since 8x11in paper standard long predates these JCL standards, why didn't they simply adopt 8x11 as the standard?
Put another way, why should we reward obstinacy with anything but obstinacy?
Finally! A point for privacy. Print personal information on a page and not worry about it getting stolen or used against you.
This would be a welcomed advance.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
The privacy and security concerns of this technology are troubling. I deal with a lot of privileged and confidential information, and I cannot imagine resuing a piece of paper that previous may have had privileged and/or confidential information printed on it. If that paper fell into the wrong hands, the faded information it contains could likely be recovered, even if it was printed over.
As it is, you hear enough stories involving the release of privileged and/or confidential information using digital documents that are "redacted", or where the metadata has not be cleansed properly. Dead tree has been the only secure way of ensuring that what you see is what you get. With this disappearing ink, even paper is no longer secure.
Why go through the embarrasment of violating yet another cease-fire agreement, only hours after you've signed it? With Xerox's new "Transient Document" technology, your commitments on paper vanish just as fast as they do in real life!
Also perfect for:
-Disaster relief promises
-Nuclear non-proliferation treaties
-Campaign position press releases
-Celebrity Marriage Certificates
-Much, much more!
Xerox: Bring the concept of "Not worth the paper it's written on", into the 21st Century.
Yeah, the poster totally should have linked to a site that disagreed with his position.
Asshat.
Exactly. If after growing trees and removing them the nutrients were restored, than after growing trees and not removing them (as in a natural forest) there would be an "overflow" (sorry, not my first language) of nutrients. Thus, it follows that each iteration decreases by a certain amount the amount of nutrients.
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
um... how old are you?
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
As you pointed out, a plant's mass comes from CO2 rather than nutrients in the ground, which goes against what most people seem to intuitively believe. However, what's fascinating is that the excess O2 that plants produce comes from *water*, not the CO2. So, both concepts are counter-intuitive. =)
From wikipedia's article on photosynthesis:
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
With printers and fax machines. Anybody remember full page thermal printers?
They had the extra bonus that they stored easily rolled up, whether you wanted them that way or not.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Only if the landfill is dry and sealed. If the wood or paper gets wet, it rots, releasing methane (CH4) into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times stronger than CO2.
Besides, recycling reduces the demand for fossil fuels burned to process the raw trees.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Will a Ream of this paper come with an Iron to remove the wrinkles and creases before reuse? -Eric
-Eric
If you bury that paper, the carbon remains sequestered, and then a new tree can take new carbon from the air to make new paper.
This argument is ridiculous. Why bother making paper? Just take the trees themselves, bury them in such a manner that they will not decay, and allow new trees to grow where the old ones stood. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
Also, you are asserting without proof that trees can only grow where previous trees once stood, a premise easily refuted by the existence of a fine apple tree in my front lawn, planted last year, which takes the place of no previous tree.
That depends on how desperate you are to remove carbon from the air.
Right now, we aren't. Therefore, paper and lumber is the most profitable -- if indirect -- route for taking atmospheric carbon and re-burying it.
How am I asserting that? I just said that paper recycling reduces demand for new carbon that began life as a CO2-eating tree. Your apple tree is a carbon sink too, but not on the scale that paper- and lumber-production are.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I just said that paper recycling reduces demand for new carbon that began life as a CO2-eating tree.
What does demand for new carbon have to do with whether or not new trees grow? So grow the trees and DON'T make paper out of them -- hell, why not leave them standing? It's something called a "forest."Why? Because I prefer to sell trees at 10 years? I'm 37. It's pretty common for tree farmers to swap land around, particularly in cases like mine where you're surrounded by many thousands of acres owned by large corporations with very long-term interests. For instance, I recently swapped about 35 acres with Rayonier, about 30 of which was populated with 15 year trees. That gave them 20 cleared acres which they sold to a residential developer, and I came out with 15 extra acres and about $30K worth of trees that I can sell immediately.
:)
It isn't what I do as primary income, but once you hit a certain point, you can make pretty good side money at it. Or you can go big and make huge money, but there are risks, and it's actually a lot of work.
I prefer racing.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
This could be exploited to do all sorts of nasty things with.
1) Get your boss to sigh a memo.
2) Wait a couple of hours for meno to dissapear leaving a blank sheet with a signiture.
3) Print yourself a new contract on the signed page with permanant ink giving you a pay rise.
4) Proffit!