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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."
As for destroying the environment that's just FUD.
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"
True - and with regular paper costing only $0.01/page, the existing solution comes pretty close to free. Even adding the $0.05/page of ink, it's tough to see why a company/university would make the investment in this sort of paper. Assuming it's costs $1.00/pg, you would need this to last at least 16 iterations, on average, to make it worth your investment.
Make photocopies.
thisnukes4u.net
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
In contrast to CDs, a DVD's dye layer is sandwiched between two plastic layers (for a single layer, single sided disk -- you do the math for different configurations). CDs place the die...excuse me, Freudian slip there, meant to say "dye"...layer above the substrate underneath the metal reflective layer, and that metal layers usually has very little above it but a tiny bit of lacquer. The lacquer, in this configuration, provides little meaningful protection for the fragile reflective and recording layers underneath. From the bottom CDs are well protected by a nice thick sturdy substrate, but from above they're very fragile. Due to this design, CDs get killed by being scratched from the top; scratches on top rip right through the data. Scratches on the bottom -- even severe scratches -- are often recoverable because the data aren't harmed.
The practical upshot of all this, as it relates to disposable DVDs, is that if those DVDs depend on a thin outer coating, it might be possible to just buff the coating off. The data are safely sandwitched in the middle of the disk, so you could perhaps carefully buff away the coating and even a little bit of the substrate to recover a readable disk. Now if, on the other hand, the color changing chemical was mixed in to the substrate itself this wouldn't work; you'd only, at best, buy yourself a couple more days, but a thin varnish might be removable.
Not that anyone should ever try this, lest Disney commandos in black jumpsuits, wielding Uzis, trans-dimensionally re-materialize in your living room to drag you off to the gulag for DMCA infringement... but it would be interesting to know you could.