Re:Plastic books are endlessly recycleable
on
Waterproof Books
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· Score: 0
And after I read your review, I immediately picked it up and digested its contents. Despite all the uses that people have pointed out (including pr0n) it seems that most others are missing the point of the recyclability that this technology will lead too.
IIRC, the Cradle to Cradle book is a prototype book that still uses petroleum based polymers to create the 'paper' stock. Within the book however, they speak to the development of intelligent bio-polymers which can be designed to last for specific periods of time. Need a book to last 20 yr, 100 yr, 1000yr? No reason it couldn't be 20 minutes, or 20 seconds for that matter. Add to this specific processing environmentally inert reagents to recycle that 1000yr book in just a few minutes.
When genetic engineering discussions appear on/. they generally center around the political/moral implications of animal cloning. Unfortunately, I haven't seen many discuss the possibilities of using genetically alterted plants for bio-fuel and bio-polymer development. Imagine hemp and bamboo that could produce 10x the normal amount of fiber and oils with the same nutrient requirements as unaltered plants. With this tech we could use the fiber for more important things and the oils could be used for making these bio-polymers which, of course, could be used to replace ALL petroleum based polymers.
One last thing, IIRC the book also put forward the notion that wood pulp, virgin or recycled is too valuable of a resource to EVER be used to make books. Perhaps this technology could lead to a day when our collective perspective on oil is the same....too precious to be used in such a wasteful application as internal combustion.
Ok, millions of tons was a bit premature. A quick search led me here. It appears that the Yucca mountain facility is designed to hold about 77,000 tons of waste. This is to hold the combined waste that is currently colocated with various power plants all over the US. There are no sane reasons to believe that "some hole in the ground somewhere" will be a permenant solution. All we are doing is postponing the responsibility of disposing of the waste safely. And there is plenty of evidence that suggests that there will be immediate environmental and economic impacts to Nevada as a whole. Look here.
Flying waste into space is such a economically and politically unfeasable solution that I must assume that you are joking. Technical considerations that you mentioned aside, we have enough fears of rouge groups throwing huge rocks back down at the earth, imagine what kind of damage intercepting and redirecting thousands of tons of radioactive material back at the earth would accomplish. Now in some distant future when terrorism and wars aren't a concern, disposing of nuclear waste by launching it into the Sun does sound like the only safe way of truely disposing of the stuff. Until that time though, we are stuck with a closed system that we still called Earth...
Thats funny, given costs for production and refinement, I'd put it at the bottom of a pile of reel-reel backups from the 60's in that old dusty storeroom in the basement.
So, your aestetic answer is to produce millions of tons of radioactive waste until we can harness the holy grail of fusion? Gee, I'd rather have a minor surface blight in the form of large solar facilities, than the major blight of an environmental timebomb ticking away underneath Nevada. Out of side, out of mind?
Besides, solar is very much in line with the hacker ethic of decentralization. Imagine some distant terrorist plot to knock out strategic fusion plants, destroying the power infrastructure or our country in seconds. I'd rather have tens of thousands of smaller installations operating independantly than monolithic installations whose destruction might very well spell destruction for our future nation.
Sure, fusion is still sexy. The grass is always greener. Solar thermal is here today.
Solar and wind are the cleanest, safest, scalable, decentralized future. Fusion, fission, and continued fossil fuel production are bastions of cold war thinking and power mongering (in a political and resource sense). There are always alternatives.
Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy, and we have not even begun to tap its potential.
Sooner or later we are gonna run out of oil, and solar is the future. this shows that we dont big ugly solar farms to get the same result
The main problem is the terrible efficiency at which the current collection methods operate. It turns out that once you add everything up, you come up with a power/pollution ratio for solar energy which is far above that of fossil fuels.
So...forget the solar panel approach! Solar Power Towers (harnessing solar thermal energy) are the mostly feasable technology to generate power output in the levels that our modern society requires.
IMHO, this technology could be that disrutptive technology (ala GNU/Linux) that could upset the current status quo in energy generation. If these systems were deployed equitorially around the entire globe, it would definitely be a good start to significantly reducing our dependence on non-renewable fuels.
As for solar panels power/pollution ration, I'd be interested in seeing some actual stats. I have heard it stated that there has been an enourmous amount of politics (go figure) surrounding various solar cell efficiency studies sponsered by the DOE since their initial rise to fame in the 70's. The Oil industry has a vested interest in keeping us hooked up to their pipelines.
As with any disruptive technology, there are likely large forces at work to supress it's wide spread deployment. The powers that be have no vested interest in producing non-polluting, cheap energy for the masses. It would shift the power of production away from large industry and back to common man. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I have been known to be wrong.
Also, people like to bitch a lot about the aesthetics of large scale solar installations (of any kind) but they never seem to talk about the blight of fossil-fuel based production plants and pipelines, nor the environmental impact that the latter have. I'd rather have millions of acres of large reflecting mirrors and photovoltaic systems producing renewable clean energy over environmentally damaging fossil fuel systems any day.
I'll have to disagree with using Flash. It's closed, it costs money, etc, etc. Use SVG instead. Being XML based it is simply a matter of constructing a text file and then running it through an viewer. If it turns out not to have the scope of primitives that you need you can try something else. However, I bet that you'll be able to do most of the animations that you have imagined with little difficulty.
On a related note, I've concentrated quite a bit over the past year in generating charts and graphs to multiple output formats simultaneously. Of interest here are some new versions of old standard apps, Gnuplot and Graphviz. Both applications contain SVG output capabilities in their latest builds. I've been using both to generate both PNG, but also PS and SVG. I will generally convert the PS to PDF via Ghostscript. To me this represents an incredible time savings by allowing me to generate PNG's to act as thumbnails for the SVG and PDF versions of the same graph. Consider also the ability to nest SVG objects within a larger SVG picture (or animation). To aid in technical illustration you could actually embed SVG chart animations with the other custom 2D animations that you seek to create to further clarify the idea you are trying to present.
Raster, vector and publication quality visualizations in one fell swoop without spending a dime. Schweet!
You could absolutely be right in this case. Point taken. But there has been an alarming rise in frequency of content from the Daypop Top40 being posted on/. 3-10 days after it hits. It's just a little lame.
I concur, it's absolutely a great idea for pet owners who might have to deal with occasionaly stinky offering from their loving pets. I particularly enjoyed the the details the author went into concerning the image analysis itself.
Several strikes against this story though.
First, if you'll note from one of the snapshots, the machine it's running on is on Winders. Doh! And second (and I've been resisting doing this for several weeks now), although not about the story itself, Slashdot has got stop recycling content from Daypop. It starting to show through guys. At least, if you're going to re-post what is old news to quite a few of us, make a serious effort of getting the attributions (i.e. give Daypop credit for making you aware of it) correct. And perhaps, try to add something new.
Here is the Computerworld article. From the second paragraph:
Microsoft said in its legal brief that the Appeals Court should have disqualified Jackson at the first instance he began meeting privately with news organizations to discuss the case. The meetings occurred before Jackson issued his first part of the decision in the case, his findings of fact in November 1999.
Well if that's the case, Bill Gates should have been incarcerated at the first instance of perjuring himself during the antitrust trial!!!
The authorized user develops an "electronic signature" by typing his ID and/or Password on the keyboard several times. When the user subsequently enters his ID and/or Password to access the computer, BioPassword compares the typing dynamics to the "electronic signature" on record. If the pattern matches, the user is accepted. If someone other than the authorized user attempts to access the computer using the authorized user's ID and password, he will be rejected, as his typing pattern does not match the "electronic signature" of the authorized user.
Although they do not delve into the intricacies of their recognition algorithm, I would bet you have to go through a more extensive traning to finely tune this system. If it is only to be trained with a 6 to 12 character password, can you imagine how many false positives this security scheme would create? If would almost have to be a pass phrase rather than password, because the timing of your average touch typist differs greatly from typing a random password, and "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree." Another issue, when I first change to a new randomly generated password, I can't type it worth shit, but after a few days, it rolls off my fingers as fast (or faster) than regular text. This simple truism would wreak havoc on this system.
As already mentioned, this system is crackable. Whether through X11 or BO sniffing, keystrokes and timing can be recorded, stored remotely and played back ad infinitum. They might have some fancy keystroke velocity juxtipostion ratio involved that allows them to deal with lag in the net traffic, but this will only insure that cracked keystroke files played back from various locations would still work.
While reading Cryptonomicon references are made to the "fist" attributed to a given morse code operator sending encrypted messages out. At one point in the book, this "fist" is accurately forged by a musician IIRC to send false messages to the Germans after the Allies had cracked Enigma.
More disconcerting to me is the investent that NetNanny has in this technology...
In 1989, NNS acquired all rights, patents, trademarks, and copyrights associated with BioPassword ® , an access system utilizing the biometrics of "keystroke dynamics" - the manner and rhythm in which each individual types. The technology was originally developed by SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) between 1979 and 1985 in an effort to create a computer-based security access and identification procedure that would present greater protection than keys, cards, passwords or codes. From 1985 through 1988, SRI and a privately funded company jointly continued development of a prototype utilizing the technology called BioPassword ® . An estimated $US 6 million had been invested through 1989 to develop this keystroke dynamics technology when NNS acquired it.
And the FUD they will spread attempting to ensure their system is adopted...
In recent years, media reports about data-wrecking viruses like SATAN have certainly raised the profile of computer security and data losses from both outside and within organizations. Sales of firewalls - combinations of hardware and software that act as a barrier between companies' internal network and the Internet - have increased. These can provide a measure of protection against outside intruders but not from within, by companies' employees for example.
I have been aware of this project for a while now, but have never seen any applications created from it. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to bitch, I have high hopes for members of the Demo Scene porting some classic demos or creating fresh ones directly on the PSX. A Cthugha port also seems logical, as does Geiss, etc.
At this point my PSX is mostly collecting dust. I would love to put it back to work diligently rendering fresh eye candy.
Does anyone know of any ISO images out there ready to burn?
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the Cradle to Cradle book is a prototype book that still uses petroleum based polymers to create the 'paper' stock. Within the book however, they speak to the development of intelligent bio-polymers which can be designed to last for specific periods of time. Need a book to last 20 yr, 100 yr, 1000yr? No reason it couldn't be 20 minutes, or 20 seconds for that matter. Add to this specific processing environmentally inert reagents to recycle that 1000yr book in just a few minutes.
When genetic engineering discussions appear on /. they generally center around the political/moral implications of animal cloning. Unfortunately, I haven't seen many discuss the possibilities of using genetically alterted plants for bio-fuel and bio-polymer development. Imagine hemp and bamboo that could produce 10x the normal amount of fiber and oils with the same nutrient requirements as unaltered plants. With this tech we could use the fiber for more important things and the oils could be used for making these bio-polymers which, of course, could be used to replace ALL petroleum based polymers.
One last thing, IIRC the book also put forward the notion that wood pulp, virgin or recycled is too valuable of a resource to EVER be used to make books. Perhaps this technology could lead to a day when our collective perspective on oil is the same....too precious to be used in such a wasteful application as internal combustion.
Flying waste into space is such a economically and politically unfeasable solution that I must assume that you are joking. Technical considerations that you mentioned aside, we have enough fears of rouge groups throwing huge rocks back down at the earth, imagine what kind of damage intercepting and redirecting thousands of tons of radioactive material back at the earth would accomplish. Now in some distant future when terrorism and wars aren't a concern, disposing of nuclear waste by launching it into the Sun does sound like the only safe way of truely disposing of the stuff. Until that time though, we are stuck with a closed system that we still called Earth...
Thats funny, given costs for production and refinement, I'd put it at the bottom of a pile of reel-reel backups from the 60's in that old dusty storeroom in the basement.
Besides, solar is very much in line with the hacker ethic of decentralization. Imagine some distant terrorist plot to knock out strategic fusion plants, destroying the power infrastructure or our country in seconds. I'd rather have tens of thousands of smaller installations operating independantly than monolithic installations whose destruction might very well spell destruction for our future nation.
Sure, fusion is still sexy. The grass is always greener. Solar thermal is here today.
Solar and wind are the cleanest, safest, scalable, decentralized future. Fusion, fission, and continued fossil fuel production are bastions of cold war thinking and power mongering (in a political and resource sense). There are always alternatives.
Sandia Labs Solar Thermal Facilities
DOE Whitepaper
Concentrating Solar Power
IMHO, this technology could be that disrutptive technology (ala GNU/Linux) that could upset the current status quo in energy generation. If these systems were deployed equitorially around the entire globe, it would definitely be a good start to significantly reducing our dependence on non-renewable fuels.
As for solar panels power/pollution ration, I'd be interested in seeing some actual stats. I have heard it stated that there has been an enourmous amount of politics (go figure) surrounding various solar cell efficiency studies sponsered by the DOE since their initial rise to fame in the 70's. The Oil industry has a vested interest in keeping us hooked up to their pipelines.
As with any disruptive technology, there are likely large forces at work to supress it's wide spread deployment. The powers that be have no vested interest in producing non-polluting, cheap energy for the masses. It would shift the power of production away from large industry and back to common man. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I have been known to be wrong.
Also, people like to bitch a lot about the aesthetics of large scale solar installations (of any kind) but they never seem to talk about the blight of fossil-fuel based production plants and pipelines, nor the environmental impact that the latter have. I'd rather have millions of acres of large reflecting mirrors and photovoltaic systems producing renewable clean energy over environmentally damaging fossil fuel systems any day.
EOM
On a related note, I've concentrated quite a bit over the past year in generating charts and graphs to multiple output formats simultaneously. Of interest here are some new versions of old standard apps, Gnuplot and Graphviz. Both applications contain SVG output capabilities in their latest builds. I've been using both to generate both PNG, but also PS and SVG. I will generally convert the PS to PDF via Ghostscript. To me this represents an incredible time savings by allowing me to generate PNG's to act as thumbnails for the SVG and PDF versions of the same graph. Consider also the ability to nest SVG objects within a larger SVG picture (or animation). To aid in technical illustration you could actually embed SVG chart animations with the other custom 2D animations that you seek to create to further clarify the idea you are trying to present.
Raster, vector and publication quality visualizations in one fell swoop without spending a dime. Schweet!
You could absolutely be right in this case. Point taken. But there has been an alarming rise in frequency of content from the Daypop Top40 being posted on /. 3-10 days after it hits. It's just a little lame.
Several strikes against this story though.
First, if you'll note from one of the snapshots, the machine it's running on is on Winders. Doh! And second (and I've been resisting doing this for several weeks now), although not about the story itself, Slashdot has got stop recycling content from Daypop. It starting to show through guys. At least, if you're going to re-post what is old news to quite a few of us, make a serious effort of getting the attributions (i.e. give Daypop credit for making you aware of it) correct. And perhaps, try to add something new.
Microsoft said in its legal brief that the Appeals Court should have disqualified Jackson at the first instance he began meeting privately with news organizations to discuss the case. The meetings occurred before Jackson issued his first part of the decision in the case, his findings of fact in November 1999.
Well if that's the case, Bill Gates should have been incarcerated at the first instance of perjuring himself during the antitrust trial!!!
For details of this "new" biometric savior check out the following:
http://www.netnanny.com/Downloa ds/PDF/BioPassword.pdf
The authorized user develops an "electronic signature" by typing his ID and/or Password on the keyboard several times. When the user subsequently enters his ID and/or Password to access the computer, BioPassword compares the typing dynamics to the "electronic signature" on record. If the pattern matches, the user is accepted. If someone other than the authorized user attempts to access the computer using the authorized user's ID and password, he will be rejected, as his typing pattern does not match the "electronic signature" of the authorized user.
Although they do not delve into the intricacies of their recognition algorithm, I would bet you have to go through a more extensive traning to finely tune this system. If it is only to be trained with a 6 to 12 character password, can you imagine how many false positives this security scheme would create? If would almost have to be a pass phrase rather than password, because the timing of your average touch typist differs greatly from typing a random password, and "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree." Another issue, when I first change to a new randomly generated password, I can't type it worth shit, but after a few days, it rolls off my fingers as fast (or faster) than regular text. This simple truism would wreak havoc on this system.
As already mentioned, this system is crackable. Whether through X11 or BO sniffing, keystrokes and timing can be recorded, stored remotely and played back ad infinitum. They might have some fancy keystroke velocity juxtipostion ratio involved that allows them to deal with lag in the net traffic, but this will only insure that cracked keystroke files played back from various locations would still work.
While reading Cryptonomicon references are made to the "fist" attributed to a given morse code operator sending encrypted messages out. At one point in the book, this "fist" is accurately forged by a musician IIRC to send false messages to the Germans after the Allies had cracked Enigma.
More disconcerting to me is the investent that NetNanny has in this technology...
In 1989, NNS acquired all rights, patents, trademarks, and copyrights associated with BioPassword ® , an access system utilizing the biometrics of "keystroke dynamics" - the manner and rhythm in which each individual types. The technology was originally developed by SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) between 1979 and 1985 in an effort to create a computer-based security access and identification procedure that would present greater protection than keys, cards, passwords or codes. From 1985 through 1988, SRI and a privately funded company jointly continued development of a prototype utilizing the technology called BioPassword ® . An estimated $US 6 million had been invested through 1989 to develop this keystroke dynamics technology when NNS acquired it.
And the FUD they will spread attempting to ensure their system is adopted...
In recent years, media reports about data-wrecking viruses like SATAN have certainly raised the profile of computer security and data losses from both outside and within organizations. Sales of firewalls - combinations of hardware and software that act as a barrier between companies' internal network and the Internet - have increased. These can provide a measure of protection against outside intruders but not from within, by companies' employees for example.
Sounds like business as usual to me.
At this point my PSX is mostly collecting dust. I would love to put it back to work diligently rendering fresh eye candy.
Does anyone know of any ISO images out there ready to burn?