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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 am the Lorax. I speak for the trees!
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
The Lorax?
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.
Except that when doing that, the signature printed on the new contract isn't the original. It's not incredibly difficult to tell when a signature has been reprinted, especially on standard letter paper (generally the pen pushes the paper a bit on the other side, etc. etc.).
If history repeats itself, why can't we study the future?
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
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.