Mindfully.org note: While it does have the bright side of getting rid of a lot of trash, burning the oil from the process is about the same as burning any oil. The combustion waste of burning the byproduct of this technology is definitely toxic and most likely causes global warming. If burning petroleum causes global warming, then so does this.
If it were used, it would prolong oil supplies. But then, we shouldn't be burning oil in the first place.
Beyond it being a get-rich-quick scheme, it is a cure for a symptom, not the problem(s). We need to combat the problems of this world. Rather than compounding the errors of the past, we need to see things for what they really are and deal with them. Adding technology does not solve anything in a sustainable manner.
They are almost completely wrong. Here was my response:
I have to disagree with your rating of Brian Appel's Changing World Technologies, as appended to the May 2003 Discover.com article about it. You give it a unanimous prolonged thumbs down. This shows a lack of knowledge about the petroleum products industry.
The oil produced by the process patented by CWT is invaluable as a source to produce plastic products, even though, Godwilling, we will move to more efficient and less environmentally impactive energy sources than burning hydrocarbons (produced from oil).
Plastic is an excellent material. The word plastics refers to an entire world, not limited to what most people think of as plastic. It may not be best stated as even a class of materials but a currently very developed system of manufacturing a particular class of materials. The problem it has is that it is not cheap to recycle, so it gets put back into the environment. While it is almost never toxic, it still causes problems because of its natural physical properties--its impermeability, and all the other properties that make it useful to us. All of those properties make it bad outside of its intended setting, and in some random place in the biological environment. It is usually very tailored to a precise function.
The other problem with plastics is that they are derived from petroleum--oil. This impacts the environment as it must be removed from the ground. They are also derived from various other chemicals, like, well, like the chemicals described resulting from CWT's processing of plastics and other various organic and mixed feedstocks. These chemicals are now procured from a wide variety of processes, some of them *extremely* deliterious to the environment.
CWT's system is the BEST way I have seen to recycle what society depends on. The replacements for current plastic products are often worse for the environment than plastics themselves, if you take the whole manufacturing system into account. We will always depend on these products. Now we can do so ad infinitum.
We will ween ourselves from consuming our precious oxygen and heating our environment to produce usable energy. This story isn't even tangential to that change in my mind though.
We will alway use plastics in one form or another. This is how we will do it without destroying anything. That's the good story about CWT.
Do you believe that forcing computer manufacturers
to exclude competing programs from the computers
they sell as a condition to receiving discounts on
Microsoft OS licenses is innovative or good for the
consumer? What about when
a majority of consumers are demanding
a particular program? (A computer manufacturer would only be serving their customer, doing their job, by providing the competing program pre-installed.) This is what Microsoft was
proven to have done as
described in the DOJ findings of fact for its action in 1998.
Do you believe that Microsoft is practicing its
right to innovate and serving the consumer when, as part of sizeable MS OS
license discounts (again), it requires computer
manufacturers not to offer Linux or other OS
software on the same model of computer that
the MS OS is offerred? This is current practice.
If such things are not innately good for the
consumer, what can Microsoft do instead to help the
consumer?
Sincerely,
Bryan Seigneur
Re:We should add "Go" to the start menus for newbi
on
Point and Click Linux
·
· Score: 1
novell has one too. very limited. just a desktop and some novell admin apps. java's been around long enough for more than a few ppl to have whipped up a wm and a taskbar/panel with it. (what i noticed that was a little cool was that it just used xfree, like you might expect it to)
We should add "Go" to the start menus for newbies!
on
Point and Click Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yah, the fact that the Start icon doesn't say it's
a start icon has always annoyed me, too. In my fvwm, I had a little running stick figure icon with the simple, and short, 2 letters "GO!" on it. In Gnome, before so many configuration options were thrown out, I made the Gnome foot be the "G" in "Go!" Distros, desktop environments, and software vendor desktops (eg novell's liitle java desktop on X) all have their little logo where the start menu. It wouldn't be too much intrusion to help the average user out and add a "Go" or the more playful "Go!" next to the logo!
If we ever were able to create machines that could
put even the merest notion of the smallest
possibility of the faintest glimmer of a dent in the
power contained in the winds of planet earth, it
would only maybe lower the temperature of
the atmosphere by a
corresponding merest notion of the smallest
possibility of the faintest glimmer of an amount.
You just don't understand how truely mind boggling
the power of all the winds on earth is. I've often imagined that a giant permanent hurricane, like Jupiter's
Red Spot, if it were to happen (just supposing it were to happent), would be able to counter some global warming by acting like a giant energy sink and
thus heat sink.
Also,
I'm not sure thermodynamics works nearly as neatly
as you think. All this is just the hunch of someone with an engrng BS and who studies the
3 laws (Thermodynamics) as if they are the cornerstone of our
physical existence that they are, so do feel
free to ask someone who'd know for sure.
There are mobile athlons that are compatible
with full-size desktop sockets, I believe.
You could have the best of both worlds, full
standard x86 distros, and low power. You should
be able to control the speed throttling with a
modern kernel and motherboard.
This makes one wonder why AMD and Intel don't
offer speed throttling on *all* their CPUs.
I'm sure it's just because it gives them a reason
to charge a premium. Someone should shame them
into offering it in all CPUs because of the
environmental impact. We're not talking about
a 10% decrease in power consumption. More
like 300%. In addition, in colos, server rooms,
and even my bedroom(!) power is not only consumed
uselessly by idle CPUs, but also by the air
conditioning for the room. Generate heat,
then get rid of it, for no reason.
What do you mean? Phone signals aren't carried by
wires in the air, but in the ground. And wireless phones don't work by connecting to directly from cell phone to cell phone, but, as the name implies, from phone to cell tower, over wires (in the ground) and from cell tower to phone. Wires are here to stay, I'm afraid. Actually, fiber is here to stay.;P There's a HUGE amount of it, thank goodness, making all our telecom goodness cheap. Long live wires!! or, um fiber!!!!
Consider the following:
Something like wifi, open frequencies, but
long range. Like everyone being able to have
a microwave relay with which they could contribute to
the bandwidth and routing capabilities of the
whole internet.
Could this cause something many have talked about
and foreseen,
an open, peer-style network like the internet, but
with even more and smaller players? With signals being routed shortest path over a network which is huge and more interconnected than anything before it? Will the
frequency range be open like wifi? The TCP/IP
is designed to be easily distributed like this,
right? Even if the answers are 'yes', will initial
large players try to lock something down that is
obviously (to semi-concious networking experts anyway) something that might be almost as free
and open as air?
Also, we've all seen discussions in projects where
many people propose solutions in the abstract but
to get real cred a solution has to be proposed as
working code. Nothing gets implemented quite as
fast as working code.
Anything OSS is a standard already implemented, sans standards body. Would we prefer a standard proposed
by bodies increasingly eaten up by cancerous
corporate interests? A patented standard even?
No, simple legible working code is just as good to me.
One day we will look back at something everyone
does the same and say, oh, that's because it was
impletmented first that way in OSS project Foo.
Actually, I'm sure we could find an example
of that day already being past.
from the article:
Yahoo's plan is to write
open-source software for popular e-mail server programs such as QMail and SendMail that would check all incoming messages to ensure they're coming from real Internet domains.
It should be mentioned that there are 2 distinct categories of nuclear power
for spacecraft. I don't know the exact
preferred words, but I shall call them in-mission
power and launch power. The main article
was clear
which it was talking about. You weren't.
It's an entire different thing designing a low-power, long-life power source for in-mission,
possibly not even propulsive
power for a probe (which
has been done not only in all the "old" space
probes but in current deep space probes (Cassini) as well) versus
designing a safe HIGH-power device that would give
you enough oomph to bring something heavy to escape
velocity.
is not a format war, per se, but that a strongly
DRM'ed format could win. Heck, even a weak one
would be bad, as it would be a new one, and would
have to be cracked, and someone would get crucified,
just to give us our fair use rights.
Also,
the DRM issue will probably make it take longer to
move the new disc format (if its *physically* new)
into use as a general open storage medium.
I am wholeheartedly rooting for the chinese format
as it won't have copy protection, and if it does,
it will be nominal. But otoh I think it's the
same physical disc as dvd, just with more modern
compression to enable higer resolution but the
same playing time.
Forgot to mention, laptop cpus are plenty fast, too.
It doesn't really matter, since you're only
comparing them to quiet/low power/small desktops.
I don't know what people use super powerful desktops
for nowadays anyway besides games, 3d,
munging huge quantities of video, and of course
the ages-old cpu hog, compiling. The only thing
I think you'd care about while doing paid
work remotely in the boonies is compiling,
which you can
do on a remote, *much faster* system if a
~1Ghz (or whatever) laptop just won't cut it in
time.
Mobile cpus allow a much wider range of
power consumption/speed modes than any cpu that the low power/quiet/little
desktop designs incorporate.
[digression]I don't know why.
I think rolling more such flexibility into
workstation cpus would allow huge power and
cooling savings in rack installations, among other
things. You may say that rack systems stay loaded,
but that's a crock. Loads are bursty. With good
automagic operating system support for
changing speeds quickly, you'd see huge changes
in the power/air conditioning equation of many
sites.[/digression]
2 conditions are among those which can trigger
power saving: inactivity/decreased load, and
AC disconnect. You could probably, on an open
source OS most likely, trigger low power modes
manually when you *want* to save power (damnit)
but are using an app which is intense (but doesn't
have to be as snappy for you as it would be at
full cpu speed), or any other reason. Point is,
you might hate the default power saving
algorithm you get with your OS because it
doesn't quite fit your predicament, but you can
hopefully force your own.
Also, as has been said, the builtin battery
of a laptop provides some added flexibility,
without the hassle of getting a UPS.
Finally, laptops are really cheap nowadays. The price
difference between them and quiet/low power/small
desktops is too small to give up being able to
take it around the cabin easily or using it
to explore your surroundings with a good gps
antenna and map cd, or whatever.
You still have to have the *right* letters between
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
I read this
'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat...
and thought it was talking about impotent things. You still have to
get the right letters between, even if not in the
right order, in order to make sense. So most/. editors
and contributors are NOT off the hook.
Sincerely, the Selplnig Nzai
Also, I thought copyright was a register-less thing,
since some law was passed at some point in the last
200 years anyway. So, most works aren't fully
defined until they are enforced. An
example would be this posting. I have copyright on it, but I don't have any legalese saying
so and how at the bottom of it. This proposal
forces people to define their works in order to
register them at the 50 year mark. For instance,
I could when I reach my 50th birthday register
everything I ever did just by saying so? See how
I'm confused here? Copyright is ephemeral.
Am I wrong? I think some copyrights are defined,
like when you put notices on books and such.
But how does this law effect the huge amount of
other stuff that has an inherent but undeclared
copyright.
Back to my first point, how does this proposal
work retroactively? In order to get some
benefit, it needs to be retroactive. We can't
(well, I don't want to, and I'm only 29) wait 50 years
to show people how strengthening the public domain
has sparked more creation.
We can't make it instantaneously retroactive,
however. People need a chance to register
their old works. So do we give the
copyright holders of >50 year old works 10 years
to register? Is ten too long. I certainly think
so. I think 5 is too long. Is one year right?
What do the authors of the proposal think?
I need these clarifications before I can spam
my address book with this petition. I want to
be able to totally explain and defend this
proposal.
are you for real? how long did black adder run?
i saw a book of the scripts in booksamillion once;
i'd get it just for that if you can recall the
outline of the plot or something better. that's
hilarious even if you are er..editing it.
Re:What about the boolean math legacy?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
err...
s/totally/true
You can't see the article youre replying to while youre writing if it's the top level article. So I didn't remember what superlative word was used. It was "true", not "totally".
What about the boolean math legacy?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
Or that whole dependence on this crappy 6000 year
old written mathematics!!! Stupid old technology.
It's old, it must be pathetic!!
Seriously, I never expected "Totally Legacy
Free PC" to be something serious. I thought the
article was going to be a joke. It's an idiotic
premise. One doesn't say "totally legacy free"
because it makes one look like an idiot.
"Legacy free" yes. But you can't put that
absolute "totally" on there, because its not
absolute, but relatively infinitesimal.
If this had a tuner in it, it would be a great
way to buy a hdtv thats cheaper, and *higher
real resolution* than most HDTVs, albeit in
most cases smaller. I wonder how huge monitor
prices compare to HDTVs at the same size and same res...
But, since this doesnt include a tuner, it
might be cheaper just to have a pc and a tuner.
I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
They are almost completely wrong. Here was my response:
Do you believe that Microsoft is practicing its right to innovate and serving the consumer when, as part of sizeable MS OS license discounts (again), it requires computer manufacturers not to offer Linux or other OS software on the same model of computer that the MS OS is offerred? This is current practice.
If such things are not innately good for the consumer, what can Microsoft do instead to help the consumer?
Sincerely,
Bryan Seigneur
novell has one too. very limited. just a desktop and some novell admin apps. java's been around long enough for more than a few ppl to have whipped up a wm and a taskbar/panel with it. (what i noticed that was a little cool was that it just used xfree, like you might expect it to)
Yah, the fact that the Start icon doesn't say it's a start icon has always annoyed me, too. In my fvwm, I had a little running stick figure icon with the simple, and short, 2 letters "GO!" on it. In Gnome, before so many configuration options were thrown out, I made the Gnome foot be the "G" in "Go!" Distros, desktop environments, and software vendor desktops (eg novell's liitle java desktop on X) all have their little logo where the start menu. It wouldn't be too much intrusion to help the average user out and add a "Go" or the more playful "Go!" next to the logo!
You just don't understand how truely mind boggling the power of all the winds on earth is. I've often imagined that a giant permanent hurricane, like Jupiter's Red Spot, if it were to happen (just supposing it were to happent), would be able to counter some global warming by acting like a giant energy sink and thus heat sink. Also, I'm not sure thermodynamics works nearly as neatly as you think. All this is just the hunch of someone with an engrng BS and who studies the 3 laws (Thermodynamics) as if they are the cornerstone of our physical existence that they are, so do feel free to ask someone who'd know for sure.
This makes one wonder why AMD and Intel don't offer speed throttling on *all* their CPUs. I'm sure it's just because it gives them a reason to charge a premium. Someone should shame them into offering it in all CPUs because of the environmental impact. We're not talking about a 10% decrease in power consumption. More like 300%. In addition, in colos, server rooms, and even my bedroom(!) power is not only consumed uselessly by idle CPUs, but also by the air conditioning for the room. Generate heat, then get rid of it, for no reason.
What do you mean? Phone signals aren't carried by wires in the air, but in the ground. And wireless phones don't work by connecting to directly from cell phone to cell phone, but, as the name implies, from phone to cell tower, over wires (in the ground) and from cell tower to phone. Wires are here to stay, I'm afraid. Actually, fiber is here to stay. ;P There's a HUGE amount of it, thank goodness, making all our telecom goodness cheap. Long live wires!! or, um fiber!!!!
I'm a little wary to ask, but what exactly does "getting through a playboy" real quick mean?
Consider the following:
Something like wifi, open frequencies, but long range. Like everyone being able to have a microwave relay with which they could contribute to the bandwidth and routing capabilities of the whole internet. Could this cause something many have talked about and foreseen, an open, peer-style network like the internet, but with even more and smaller players? With signals being routed shortest path over a network which is huge and more interconnected than anything before it? Will the frequency range be open like wifi? The TCP/IP is designed to be easily distributed like this, right? Even if the answers are 'yes', will initial large players try to lock something down that is obviously (to semi-concious networking experts anyway) something that might be almost as free and open as air?
Also, we've all seen discussions in projects where many people propose solutions in the abstract but to get real cred a solution has to be proposed as working code. Nothing gets implemented quite as fast as working code.
One day we will look back at something everyone does the same and say, oh, that's because it was impletmented first that way in OSS project Foo. Actually, I'm sure we could find an example of that day already being past.
from the article:
It should be mentioned that there are 2 distinct categories of nuclear power for spacecraft. I don't know the exact preferred words, but I shall call them in-mission power and launch power. The main article was clear which it was talking about. You weren't.
It's an entire different thing designing a low-power, long-life power source for in-mission, possibly not even propulsive power for a probe (which has been done not only in all the "old" space probes but in current deep space probes (Cassini) as well) versus designing a safe HIGH-power device that would give you enough oomph to bring something heavy to escape velocity.
Also, the DRM issue will probably make it take longer to move the new disc format (if its *physically* new) into use as a general open storage medium.
I am wholeheartedly rooting for the chinese format as it won't have copy protection, and if it does, it will be nominal. But otoh I think it's the same physical disc as dvd, just with more modern compression to enable higer resolution but the same playing time.
Forgot to mention, laptop cpus are plenty fast, too. It doesn't really matter, since you're only comparing them to quiet/low power/small desktops. I don't know what people use super powerful desktops for nowadays anyway besides games, 3d, munging huge quantities of video, and of course the ages-old cpu hog, compiling. The only thing I think you'd care about while doing paid work remotely in the boonies is compiling, which you can do on a remote, *much faster* system if a ~1Ghz (or whatever) laptop just won't cut it in time.
Mobile cpus allow a much wider range of power consumption/speed modes than any cpu that the low power/quiet/little desktop designs incorporate.
[digression]I don't know why. I think rolling more such flexibility into workstation cpus would allow huge power and cooling savings in rack installations, among other things. You may say that rack systems stay loaded, but that's a crock. Loads are bursty. With good automagic operating system support for changing speeds quickly, you'd see huge changes in the power/air conditioning equation of many sites.[/digression]
2 conditions are among those which can trigger power saving: inactivity/decreased load, and AC disconnect. You could probably, on an open source OS most likely, trigger low power modes manually when you *want* to save power (damnit) but are using an app which is intense (but doesn't have to be as snappy for you as it would be at full cpu speed), or any other reason. Point is, you might hate the default power saving algorithm you get with your OS because it doesn't quite fit your predicament, but you can hopefully force your own.
Also, as has been said, the builtin battery of a laptop provides some added flexibility, without the hassle of getting a UPS.
Finally, laptops are really cheap nowadays. The price difference between them and quiet/low power/small desktops is too small to give up being able to take it around the cabin easily or using it to explore your surroundings with a good gps antenna and map cd, or whatever.
I read this
and thought it was talking about impotent things. You still have to get the right letters between, even if not in the right order, in order to make sense. So mostAlso, I thought copyright was a register-less thing, since some law was passed at some point in the last 200 years anyway. So, most works aren't fully defined until they are enforced. An example would be this posting. I have copyright on it, but I don't have any legalese saying so and how at the bottom of it. This proposal forces people to define their works in order to register them at the 50 year mark. For instance, I could when I reach my 50th birthday register everything I ever did just by saying so? See how I'm confused here? Copyright is ephemeral. Am I wrong? I think some copyrights are defined, like when you put notices on books and such. But how does this law effect the huge amount of other stuff that has an inherent but undeclared copyright.
Back to my first point, how does this proposal work retroactively? In order to get some benefit, it needs to be retroactive. We can't (well, I don't want to, and I'm only 29) wait 50 years to show people how strengthening the public domain has sparked more creation.
We can't make it instantaneously retroactive, however. People need a chance to register their old works. So do we give the copyright holders of >50 year old works 10 years to register? Is ten too long. I certainly think so. I think 5 is too long. Is one year right? What do the authors of the proposal think?
I need these clarifications before I can spam my address book with this petition. I want to be able to totally explain and defend this proposal.
Because every good NT|foo Administrator is invariably always also a good Unix guru.
are you for real? how long did black adder run? i saw a book of the scripts in booksamillion once; i'd get it just for that if you can recall the outline of the plot or something better. that's hilarious even if you are er..editing it.
s/totally/true
You can't see the article youre replying to
while youre writing
if it's the top level article. So I didn't
remember what superlative word was used.
It was "true", not "totally".
Seriously, I never expected "Totally Legacy Free PC" to be something serious. I thought the article was going to be a joke. It's an idiotic premise. One doesn't say "totally legacy free" because it makes one look like an idiot. "Legacy free" yes. But you can't put that absolute "totally" on there, because its not absolute, but relatively infinitesimal.
ok, ic, nm, this is another gov site. I should have looked closer. Viva redundancy.
Has the US Code, the above important documents, and thomas.loc.gov has current and past legislation; all this was up in 94.
What's new here?
I thought OS X was getting an X86-64 port, dangit! =[
But, since this doesnt include a tuner, it might be cheaper just to have a pc and a tuner. I don't know.