Some have voiced serious concerns that this is all snake-oil, primarily because the man hides behind "trade secrets" protection and doesn't really have to discuss how all this works(precisely the reason state regulators shut him down--they cannot really know if he is in compliance if they don't know what he is doing, and so far he hasn't told them). He has also failed to pay some of his employees yet claims he will be hiring up to 500 more employees even though the technical data suggests he only needs 5 people per shift, had the company's demonstration truck burn down, and according to the Seattle PI article, been evicted from his plant location.
The one curious thing is that the military tested his technology and actually published some hard numbers that to me seem rather impressive. Makes me wonder what sort of "garbage" went through his test plant.
At least the writer of the submitted article is up front--"Note: I have a relationship with GPI, so this report is not truly independent." says the caption accompanying the photo in the article.
"That or the HVAC might have been out. Our state legislature seems to decide completely on-the-fly that 'today is going to be the last day of session'. They typically suspend public hearings and pass 300 pieces of legislation that night. Why would you suspend public hearings and do 80% of your work on one coffee-fueled all-nighter? Well, the committee rooms don't have air conditioning, suits are really hot, and most of the legislature is a bit portly. Once the summer heat starts penetrating the marble walls, there's no stopping it until late October, so they 'go Nike' on democracy's ass and Just Do It."
Why not just say it like it is?
"They typically suspend public hearings and pass 300 pieces of legislation that night in order to preclude what they see as a meddling public influence."
"Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
Another use for my sharpie besides redacting "In God We Trust" from currency--blacking out Kinect sensors used for ad placement.
"The midterm grades were all tossed out for everyone."
"Ok, children. Time to clean up your blocks and you will each get a piece of candy."
"Very good, but it seems that some of you cheated and simply pushed your blocks into the piles of those children around you and didn't actually put them away. Now, normally, we take such children and grind them up in the kitchen and make sausages from them, but this time we will let those that cheated admit it and we won't grind them up."
"Umm, teacher? I wasn't one of those that cheated. Can I have my candy, please?"
"Of course not. You're probably just trying to avoid being ground up into sausage like the rest of these little vermin."
It is amazing the complete crap that some people try to foist off on our children. Anyone caught cheating should have been treated according to the standard rules set forth by the school and those that did NOT cheat should have been graded accordingly. This is nothing more then coddling students that cheated so that they wouldn't be booted from the school...and take their tuition with them.
"Unfortunately, the same corporate CEO's who make calls in their cars also buy congresspeople, so I think the odds are slim this kind of legislation would pass. "
I don't think that is all there is to it.
My cynicism runs much deeper then that. I think that nothing like this will ever pass into law simply because too many people make money from people using cellphones in cars--both the user and the cell provider, and once the car has crashed, the ambulance company, the ambulance drivers/paramedics, the hospital and all the staff involved including bookkeeping staff, all of the manufacturers of the medical products used during treatment, the tow-truck driver/s, the auto insurance adjuster, the BigPharma that sells you the meds you need as well as the pharmacist that sells them to you(see what they did there?), etc, etc, ad nauseum. I'm sure you get my point.
The same pretty much holds true for the rest of society's woes--they continue because somebody figured out how to monetize them, and until that chain of profitability is severed nothing will change. Nothing.
"The government wants to invade the privacy of every man, woman, and child."
The good news is that they haven't a fucking clue as how do so, thus the article.
To be honest, I already thought they HAD these capabilities. There is also the real possibility this is all a ploy to get us to THINK they don't know how (see sig).
Our family went back to a single land-line about six months ago.
Since then, I can think of exactly three instances where I wished I had a cellphone...and got by just fine without one anyways.
Compared to our previous Verizon service (which sucked ass, to say the least), we save about $600 a year.
It is also a liberating experience to be able to just tell people "Just leave a message..." when I give them my phone number. NOT having a cellphone relieves one of a certain amount of obligation that most people are not even aware they are subject to...until they are not.
Presenter: So, as you can see, this technology is leaps and bounds more sophisticated then the current technology. The advantages for amputees cannot be overstated, the device allows for the easy grasp of such items as food utensils, telephones in time of emergenc...
Investor: Excuse me. A question. Would an amputee be able to open a wallet?
Presenter: Well...I, ummm. I think that might be, well, a bit difficult as the tech stands, in it's current form...but..
Investor: What about a credit card? Could they swipe a credit card? Could they do that?
Presenter: *sigh* Yes...I suppose they could swipe a credit card. I think that would be possible...yes.
Investor: How about mortgage documents? Can they hold a pen?
"If you snatched someone's cookies over free WiFi at a coffeehouse, you probably HAVE the same IP address as they do, since all the server sees is the coffeehouse's gateway IP address."
"Even then, this won't help as the extension could be changed to sniff the hashed password (it's just send as plain text over HTTP), and send that hash itself."
All this talk of sniffing cookies and hash has got my stomach rumbling.
"They already try and get you in to long-term contracts (MobileMe to get FindMyiPhone and iDisk). That's where their monetization comes from, not from searching and selling ads. "
Bingo. Just as I said--a middleman between me and my data. Pay up or you lose access to whatever is stored. Sure, I could have a hard-copy(?) back-up on a drive just in case they do something like this, but what in the hell is the point of using them in the first place?
Monthly fees for a backup? Why not just purchase one-time-fee-and-you-own-the-fucking-thing hard drives? Long-term contracts? Didn't you people learn anything from the mobile providers?
In my past life as an automotive mechanic, occasionally I would hop in a customer's vehicle, turn the key into the run position...and watch the little, cheap, stick-on compass mounted on the dash slowly turn to face another direction.
My point is that there are a ton of magnetic fields present inside of an automobile.
Did the cyborg mechanics take into account such an environment?
Considering they had implants in this dude's head, simply closing an open circuit in close proximity to circuitry in the arms could induce a voltage sufficient to give the term "fucking with your head" a whole new meaning.
A leaking secondary ignition voltage would do the trick nicely, as well.
"...The data gets stored locally but mirrored to iDisk..."
Again, my first question.
At what point does this data become THEIRS? Is the "copy' on the cloud owned by someone other then YOU? I shouldn't have to point out the ramifications of your data belonging to anyone but you.
Does Apple claim any legal ownership, even in the form of license, of/to your data simply because it is stored on their hardware?
Did your lawyers examine the fine print? I am quite sure theirs did.
See my point? Why would the industry suddenly decide they would provide the infrastructure for data storage, at great cost to themselves? There HAS to be something in it for them to invest so deeply. The only thing I see them getting...is data. You have to control something to monetize it effectively.
Is it just me, or does the idea of storing data on the equipment(property) of other people bother anyone else?
One question about all of this keeps coming to mind. At what point does that data become theirs, and not mine?
Until someone answers that question to MY satisfaction, I'll stick with my clunky, old HDs. At present, cloud-computing appears to me to be nothing more then a move to further monetize our own data by inserting a middleman between us and said data.
"...And there is more to come unless the system is fixed. bit.ly/WdJQP..."
Most people that meet me end up with the impression that I am both overly cynical and entirely too pessimistic. That being said, I'll try to be a little more optimistic here.
Nothing short of armed revolution will fix that of which you speak. The corruption here in the good ole' US of A is far worse then anything the Iraqi's have come up with. It is far worse only in the sense that it has become acceptable...but the result is the same--107,000 dead.
It matters not, the bloody hands, the corrupted will of not a few that sets the hands in motion, but the guilt of all that stand idle, mute in their complicity.
If anyone in the industry is listening, hear this.
The last three video games I purchased were purchased after first torrenting them.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, will give me more incentive to buy something then a test drive--a test drive that ends with positive results.
You have nothing to fear if you create a worthy product.
And, in terms of reviews of a product, nothing speaks like seed/leech numbers...at least until someone starts gaming THAT as well.
Steve just reminds us that we all have a choice--you can keep paddling into that wave, or you can hop on your board and go for a ride. Either way, that wave is headed for the beach and it just might be the best one of the day.
"...Instead, ordinary silicon is shot with a femtosecond pulsed laser in the presence of a sulfur-containing gas..."
Why sulfur, specifically?
And that leads to another question. Has this same process been used with other combination of base materials and gasses? Is there something unique about silicon that makes the PROCESS possible?
One of my old automotive instructors used to own a Chrysler dealership in the San Francisco Bay area.
One day Chrysler invited him, along with a few other dealership owners, out to the Candlestick Park parking lot to test drive a new prototype--it ended up being the car described in the article.
The way he described it, the car was almost totally silent. It was also vibration free, or so it seemed. My instructor described it as sitting on the living-room couch--you felt linear and lateral acceleration, but that was about it. And that acceleration was smooth, all the way through the range of speeds.
He also stated that the dash had two large radial gauges--one for turbine exhaust temperature, and the other for turbine RPM. What use he found for these, he didn't say. I'm not sure what good this information was to the driver, in terms of applicability to actually operating the car properly.
He also never used the word "Jet" to describe the vehicle. On the contrary, everything about the car, as he described it, gave the exact opposite impression that a roaring jet engine would--a quiet, sedate family car...that went really fast.
"Are you kidding? This so-called "paper" was "co-written" by some Army chemists. If anything, it PROVES the conspiracy theories!"
Not too far from the truth. At the very least, they are in collusion, burning up your tax-dollars to fend off lawsuits on behalf of a private corporation, or so it appears.
"I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW."
Some of us went full circle. I'm back playing Ultima Online (privately owned-public server...and free, UOSecondAge) and it is like I never left. WoW is what made me realize that, by FAR, the most fun I had playing MMO-style games was the very first years I did so.
Go back to your roots. I honestly believe that the trailblazers in MMO history rode us right to the clearing at the end of the trail--everything else is simply derivative. Until someone takes some huge risks, it will remain so.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, the "military" involvement seems anything but--the link to the "military" results are just a PDF obviously assembled by the same company.
I see nothing from the military at all. I have no idea why he is claiming such a thing.
"The summary must be joking about the ocean gyres."
There are questions about the guy running this company, up here in Washington state.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_pasco_biomass.html
http://pesn.com/2009/08/07/9501560_CEO_appealing_GreenPowerInc_shut-down_order/
Some have voiced serious concerns that this is all snake-oil, primarily because the man hides behind "trade secrets" protection and doesn't really have to discuss how all this works(precisely the reason state regulators shut him down--they cannot really know if he is in compliance if they don't know what he is doing, and so far he hasn't told them). He has also failed to pay some of his employees yet claims he will be hiring up to 500 more employees even though the technical data suggests he only needs 5 people per shift, had the company's demonstration truck burn down, and according to the Seattle PI article, been evicted from his plant location.
The one curious thing is that the military tested his technology and actually published some hard numbers that to me seem rather impressive. Makes me wonder what sort of "garbage" went through his test plant.
http://pesn.com/2010/02/19/959019_GPI_3rd-party_test_results_trash-to-fuel/
This is the best time-line I was able to find in regards to this company (not surprisingly, from the same website as the submitted article).
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Green_Power_Inc's_NanoDiesel:Catalytic_Pressureless_Depolymerization_(Oiling)
At least the writer of the submitted article is up front--"Note: I have a relationship with GPI, so this report is not truly independent." says the caption accompanying the photo in the article.
Can you say "media blitz"?
"That or the HVAC might have been out. Our state legislature seems to decide completely on-the-fly that 'today is going to be the last day of session'. They typically suspend public hearings and pass 300 pieces of legislation that night. Why would you suspend public hearings and do 80% of your work on one coffee-fueled all-nighter? Well, the committee rooms don't have air conditioning, suits are really hot, and most of the legislature is a bit portly. Once the summer heat starts penetrating the marble walls, there's no stopping it until late October, so they 'go Nike' on democracy's ass and Just Do It."
Why not just say it like it is?
"They typically suspend public hearings and pass 300 pieces of legislation that night in order to preclude what they see as a meddling public influence."
Fat and sweaty have nothing to do with it.
"Dennis Durkin, who is both COO and CFO for Microsoft's Xbox group, told investors this week that Kinect can also be used by advertisers to see how many people are in a room when an ad is on screen, and to custom-tailor content based on the people it recognizes."
Another use for my sharpie besides redacting "In God We Trust" from currency--blacking out Kinect sensors used for ad placement.
"The midterm grades were all tossed out for everyone."
"Ok, children. Time to clean up your blocks and you will each get a piece of candy."
"Very good, but it seems that some of you cheated and simply pushed your blocks into the piles of those children around you and didn't actually put them away. Now, normally, we take such children and grind them up in the kitchen and make sausages from them, but this time we will let those that cheated admit it and we won't grind them up."
"Umm, teacher? I wasn't one of those that cheated. Can I have my candy, please?"
"Of course not. You're probably just trying to avoid being ground up into sausage like the rest of these little vermin."
It is amazing the complete crap that some people try to foist off on our children. Anyone caught cheating should have been treated according to the standard rules set forth by the school and those that did NOT cheat should have been graded accordingly. This is nothing more then coddling students that cheated so that they wouldn't be booted from the school...and take their tuition with them.
"Unfortunately, the same corporate CEO's who make calls in their cars also buy congresspeople, so I think the odds are slim this kind of legislation would pass. "
I don't think that is all there is to it.
My cynicism runs much deeper then that. I think that nothing like this will ever pass into law simply because too many people make money from people using cellphones in cars--both the user and the cell provider, and once the car has crashed, the ambulance company, the ambulance drivers/paramedics, the hospital and all the staff involved including bookkeeping staff, all of the manufacturers of the medical products used during treatment, the tow-truck driver/s, the auto insurance adjuster, the BigPharma that sells you the meds you need as well as the pharmacist that sells them to you(see what they did there?), etc, etc, ad nauseum. I'm sure you get my point.
The same pretty much holds true for the rest of society's woes--they continue because somebody figured out how to monetize them, and until that chain of profitability is severed nothing will change. Nothing.
This makes me wonder if the US military hold copyright to all of their internal files.
If so, Wikileaks is doomed as an internet entity if this passes through all the sanity filters.
"So what then is your suggestion?"
Stop giving the manufacturers of such locked-down devices your money?
Trust me on this one--they will stop making something that doesn't make them money.
"The government wants to invade the privacy of every man, woman, and child."
The good news is that they haven't a fucking clue as how do so, thus the article.
To be honest, I already thought they HAD these capabilities. There is also the real possibility this is all a ploy to get us to THINK they don't know how (see sig).
Our family went back to a single land-line about six months ago.
Since then, I can think of exactly three instances where I wished I had a cellphone...and got by just fine without one anyways.
Compared to our previous Verizon service (which sucked ass, to say the least), we save about $600 a year.
It is also a liberating experience to be able to just tell people "Just leave a message..." when I give them my phone number. NOT having a cellphone relieves one of a certain amount of obligation that most people are not even aware they are subject to...until they are not.
An excerpt from an Investors Presentation...
Presenter: So, as you can see, this technology is leaps and bounds more sophisticated then the current technology. The advantages for amputees cannot be overstated, the device allows for the easy grasp of such items as food utensils, telephones in time of emergenc...
Investor: Excuse me. A question. Would an amputee be able to open a wallet?
Presenter: Well...I, ummm. I think that might be, well, a bit difficult as the tech stands, in it's current form...but..
Investor: What about a credit card? Could they swipe a credit card? Could they do that?
Presenter: *sigh* Yes...I suppose they could swipe a credit card. I think that would be possible...yes.
Investor: How about mortgage documents? Can they hold a pen?
"If you snatched someone's cookies over free WiFi at a coffeehouse, you probably HAVE the same IP address as they do, since all the server sees is the coffeehouse's gateway IP address."
"Even then, this won't help as the extension could be changed to sniff the hashed password (it's just send as plain text over HTTP), and send that hash itself."
All this talk of sniffing cookies and hash has got my stomach rumbling.
Enough already.
"Medical devices must pass extremely rigorous tests of their susceptibility to electromagnetic radiation."
Then why all the signs telling pacemaker wearers to beware of the dude microwaving his breakfast burrito?
"They already try and get you in to long-term contracts (MobileMe to get FindMyiPhone and iDisk). That's where their monetization comes from, not from searching and selling ads. "
Bingo. Just as I said--a middleman between me and my data. Pay up or you lose access to whatever is stored. Sure, I could have a hard-copy(?) back-up on a drive just in case they do something like this, but what in the hell is the point of using them in the first place?
Monthly fees for a backup? Why not just purchase one-time-fee-and-you-own-the-fucking-thing hard drives? Long-term contracts? Didn't you people learn anything from the mobile providers?
"Any details on how the system works?"
I assume some electronics are involved.
In my past life as an automotive mechanic, occasionally I would hop in a customer's vehicle, turn the key into the run position...and watch the little, cheap, stick-on compass mounted on the dash slowly turn to face another direction.
My point is that there are a ton of magnetic fields present inside of an automobile.
Did the cyborg mechanics take into account such an environment?
Considering they had implants in this dude's head, simply closing an open circuit in close proximity to circuitry in the arms could induce a voltage sufficient to give the term "fucking with your head" a whole new meaning.
A leaking secondary ignition voltage would do the trick nicely, as well.
"...The data gets stored locally but mirrored to iDisk..."
Again, my first question.
At what point does this data become THEIRS? Is the "copy' on the cloud owned by someone other then YOU? I shouldn't have to point out the ramifications of your data belonging to anyone but you.
Does Apple claim any legal ownership, even in the form of license, of/to your data simply because it is stored on their hardware?
Did your lawyers examine the fine print? I am quite sure theirs did.
See my point? Why would the industry suddenly decide they would provide the infrastructure for data storage, at great cost to themselves? There HAS to be something in it for them to invest so deeply. The only thing I see them getting...is data. You have to control something to monetize it effectively.
Is it just me, or does the idea of storing data on the equipment(property) of other people bother anyone else?
One question about all of this keeps coming to mind. At what point does that data become theirs, and not mine?
Until someone answers that question to MY satisfaction, I'll stick with my clunky, old HDs. At present, cloud-computing appears to me to be nothing more then a move to further monetize our own data by inserting a middleman between us and said data.
"...And there is more to come unless the system is fixed. bit.ly/WdJQP..."
Most people that meet me end up with the impression that I am both overly cynical and entirely too pessimistic. That being said, I'll try to be a little more optimistic here.
Nothing short of armed revolution will fix that of which you speak. The corruption here in the good ole' US of A is far worse then anything the Iraqi's have come up with. It is far worse only in the sense that it has become acceptable...but the result is the same--107,000 dead.
It matters not, the bloody hands, the corrupted will of not a few that sets the hands in motion, but the guilt of all that stand idle, mute in their complicity.
If anyone in the industry is listening, hear this.
The last three video games I purchased were purchased after first torrenting them.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, will give me more incentive to buy something then a test drive--a test drive that ends with positive results.
You have nothing to fear if you create a worthy product.
And, in terms of reviews of a product, nothing speaks like seed/leech numbers...at least until someone starts gaming THAT as well.
Steve just reminds us that we all have a choice--you can keep paddling into that wave, or you can hop on your board and go for a ride. Either way, that wave is headed for the beach and it just might be the best one of the day.
"...Instead, ordinary silicon is shot with a femtosecond pulsed laser in the presence of a sulfur-containing gas..."
Why sulfur, specifically?
And that leads to another question. Has this same process been used with other combination of base materials and gasses? Is there something unique about silicon that makes the PROCESS possible?
"...Actually I am one of the engineers that run the DNS at Comcast..."
Until tomorrow morning, at which time you will be fired on the spot for actually providing useful information to Comcast customers.
One of my old automotive instructors used to own a Chrysler dealership in the San Francisco Bay area.
One day Chrysler invited him, along with a few other dealership owners, out to the Candlestick Park parking lot to test drive a new prototype--it ended up being the car described in the article.
The way he described it, the car was almost totally silent. It was also vibration free, or so it seemed. My instructor described it as sitting on the living-room couch--you felt linear and lateral acceleration, but that was about it. And that acceleration was smooth, all the way through the range of speeds.
He also stated that the dash had two large radial gauges--one for turbine exhaust temperature, and the other for turbine RPM. What use he found for these, he didn't say. I'm not sure what good this information was to the driver, in terms of applicability to actually operating the car properly.
He also never used the word "Jet" to describe the vehicle. On the contrary, everything about the car, as he described it, gave the exact opposite impression that a roaring jet engine would--a quiet, sedate family car...that went really fast.
"One mystery down, now let's tackle this one, this is while trying to get to the comments page of an account on /.:
HTTP...Port 80"
Same...
Verbatim.
"Are you kidding? This so-called "paper" was "co-written" by some Army chemists. If anything, it PROVES the conspiracy theories!"
Not too far from the truth. At the very least, they are in collusion, burning up your tax-dollars to fend off lawsuits on behalf of a private corporation, or so it appears.
And here is the rest of the story...
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10/bee_mystery_unsolved_lead_inve.html
"I still find it surprising when I hear so many people are still playing WoW."
Some of us went full circle. I'm back playing Ultima Online (privately owned-public server...and free, UOSecondAge) and it is like I never left. WoW is what made me realize that, by FAR, the most fun I had playing MMO-style games was the very first years I did so.
Go back to your roots. I honestly believe that the trailblazers in MMO history rode us right to the clearing at the end of the trail--everything else is simply derivative. Until someone takes some huge risks, it will remain so.