And they're doing all this in the name of idealistic generalities like "academic freedom" and "access to information?"
I would like to believe this, but my knowledge of administrators goes against it. I think it more likely that administrators don't want to wind up bearing the cost of anyone who is able to send a legalese filled letter complaining about students doing something they don't like.
The administrators simply want to stay out of the fight. Just like a stranger who happens upon a bar fight, if they enter the fray, they will get beat-up by both sides. I guess I would do the same as they if forced to make a choice.
"hey guys, this is your fight. Leave me out of it. I'm not fighting for either one of you. But if the police ask me questions, I will tell what I know."
We don't want to put a chill on companies sending us free stuff. Let DC complain all they want, the Cat is a give-away, and there's nothing they can do about it now. Let's make it seem like they won, so that other companies will follow their business model.
"Look honey, Mr. Case sent us one of those neato web pad to access AOL. What should we do with it?"
"No notice saying that it's not free. Where did I put that Mandrake/SUSE install CD?"
I wonder about this, because the suits try to convince us annually that anything we create belongs to the company. All the employment contracts I've seen try to tie down developers so that the company gets first shot at anything they come up with. I don't know what his contract states, but how many of you working engineers could get away with releasing something to the public and then proclaiming that you did it on your free time?
What is the resolution of that screen, 640x480? It just seems that there is just too much detail for a handheld.
Of course, if it is legitimate I can add wireless networking and use it as a remote X display. Heaven (or a mediocre simulation thereof) is at hand?
For the poster that busted my little bubble of sureality yesterday, please, please, please let me wallow in my self-delusion that a simple, wireless, remote, handheld X-display could be profitable.
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
They're not completely meaningless. For instance, in this poll we have learned that someone likes Windows enough to learn how to write a script so that they can boost its image. Take it for what you paid for it...
Bouncing around from job to job is great when you're young and have no responsibilities other than yourself. As you get older, marry, have kids, jumping jobs becomes much more difficult. I can't just throw my guitar into the back of my Vega and 'move' to the job three states away.
I'm not complaining here, just giving a different perspective. When I got out of school (doesn't everyone get their BS when they're 30 now 8*), I was offered a job 2000 miles away. The wife and kids cried for 2 weeks before I gave up and looked for a job 60 miles away. Even that was contentious. Changing jobs is just anything but easy once you build things up around you.
The/. crowd is young on average. There's a lot of college people who participate in these discussions. When I was younger, not so long ago, I always had the attitude that I was smart, adaptable, and could find a job anywhere. The same attitude that is exhibited by a lot of post I see here. While I still have the attitude that I can always find work, my exuberance has been tempered over the years. It's not that the work isn't there, it's that I have more criteria for defining 'good job'. Hours and location are much more important than before. Combine that with what most here are looking for, interesting subject matter, and jobs are really hard to find.
My unrequested advice to all here: Keep the future in mind. Try to build stability into your job whenever possible. Corporations have pushed the work ethic towards 'expendable employees', do whatever you can to push it back in the other direction.
If companies want to make money this way, they need to get people to sign a contract up front. Plain and simple. If you build a business on being able to trick people into paying you for nothing, then you deserve nothing when they wake up.
As for the EULA, it's as worthless as the original. Here is the babelfish translation:
"Now that we've concluded our contract, here are some extra terms that we'd like to add."
All EULA's say exactly the same thing. If a vendor wants to enforce a EULA, it must be presented before the sale so that I can read it, and the vendor must refuse the sale to transpire without me signing the agreement; otherwise, it's all bullsh**.
she doesn't have a case. She's just jumping the gun a little to quickly here. Universal has to actually be awarded damages before she can sue for her share. Hopefully, her grandkids will benefit.
It's like the cops who have to wait for the shoplifter to exit the building before stopping them. If you stop them inside, they're not guilty of anything. So you have to be patient.
You're picking bytes from the files. Unless the whole mark was in a single byte, there would have to be some relationship between the mark and the order of the bytes. Repetition could make it harder to scramble the byte ordering, but that can be intelligently handled.
The ticker is that any format has the constraint that the music must sound the same, or RIA et. al. loses the benefit of the mass market/ factory-line content they produce. A binary diff will tell you what bits/bytes/words don't match, which indicates the watermarking.
Modifying/scrambling/removing the parts that don't match up is left as an exercise the the haXors once they had a chance to see what pattern SDMI chooses to implement. But unless all watermarks are identical, count on a crack within hours of the release of any content.
No matter how you slice it, in order to add additional information to any file, you have some bits somewhere.
If all SDMI wanted to do was mark a piece as authentic, every piece would have the same mark and there wouldn't be much incentive to break it. "Heh, this POS is by Britney Spears. I know because it's watermarked." "Couldn't you tell that by tinny, teenage voice singing about her life ending because her teenage boyfriend dissed her." "Ummmm..."
But authenticity marking isn't what they're after. SDMI is looking for encryption and user identification. This means each unit would get a different watermark. Breaking it is then a simple matter of buying 5 copies and doing a binary diff of the output of "mpg123 -s britney.mp3 > tempfile". Build a bogus watermarked file by pulling the first byte from file one, the second from file two,...the sixth from file one,...etc, and run lame on the result to get 'unmarkedBritney.mp3'
$140 to do it yourself? And that's just for the circuit board that doesn't yet support the DRAM. You still have to provide a hard drive ($100) a power supply ($20) and the memory ($20). So the actual cost is $300 for a very fragile homemade unit.
Thanks, but no. For now, I keep converting MP3s to CDs and use my $50 Walkman.
Now, as a hobbyist demo, this is cool, but hobby projects aren't done on the basis of cost.
For a start, if you can provide the goods you can march straight into the "boardroom" and work right alongside the "CEO" on the kernel.
Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. The Ask Slashdot question I posted about concerned this VERY issue. The person had a problem that he had a fix for. He marched to the "boardroom", fix in hand, and was soundly ignored by the "CEO" and all his "VPs".
Secondly, with any GPL product, large or small, you have the right to take the whole thing, make your own modifications and push it as the way to go. Try doing that with the real-life component produced by the company of a real life CEO.
Of course, attracting support for your version, your vision, is something else. But if you have the talent and the product, it can be done.
Translation: If you don't like how the project is being managed, you can go start your own company and manage it yourself.
Note that this happens a LOT. Engineers left Palm and created the Handspring. Engineers left Intel and created Weitek (math co-processor for the 386). This doesn't change the fact in any way that large, successful OS projects have a rigid management heirarchy. Be they good a knowledgeable, or be they bad and uninformed, they are management and they are indeed rigid. You will comply with their decisions/edicts, or you will have to start your own company/project.
2) The recent Ask Slashdot I was speaking of concerned a gentleman who had coded up a fix and could not find the right 'manager' to submit it to. The point being that anyone can actually write the code and can solve the problem but it still requires approval of the 'OS manager' to get it in the code base.
3) The bazaar model hypes the idea that everyone gets to decide how to fix a problem and decide how to put it in, not just the blessed few. Few projects follow this methodology, the point of the article and mine.
4)I've dealt with a few OS projects, and from my POV it is easier to talk to upper-management than deal with OS manager/engineers. Engineers tend to have an emotional attachment to the code they've written, and they don't like criticism of their 'baby'. The path I've taken in the past is to fix my local copy of the code and then post my fix to a newsgroup, or even to Slashdot, rather than fight that what I've fixed is an actual bug. Uppermanagement tends to have a myopic view of the world. Convince them that a change saves/makes money and it's in there.
If a company follows the process you outline, it is headed nowhere. Most companies I've seen are much more flexible about the introduction of ideas. At IBM the process was:
submit idea to study group->study group ask customers->study group makes a decision.
At my current job the process is:
submit an idea->start implementing it (unless the idea is completely off-base, the chances rejection are very small)
There was an Ask Slashdot question a few days ago about how you make contributions to an OS project. Several of the answers went along the line of read the mailing list and send your bugfix to some of the lesser daemons. Let them take it to the great gods. This hints that an OS project (especially one as important as the kernal) can quickly have a structure identical to Figure 1 of the article.
If you have a problem at work, you talk to your manager, who will speak with the VP, who consults the CEO. How is this any different from emailing the 'less important people on the mailing list', who then contact the component owners, who might be able to get a response from Linus?
Granholm said: "Hacking is the dark side of high technology's power and progress. For every person using a computer or the Internet for research, commerce or communication, there may be another person using that technology to commit a crime. The Internet, unfortunately, has become one more tool to pick the locks of companies
across the country."
And long license agreements full of mumbo-jumbo legalese has become one more tool to pick the locks of the average computer user across the country.
If I install a program, say a graphics program, would this law cover behavior that sereptiously sends valuable personal information to the company that wrote the program? We know the info is valuable (the company plans to sell it), but they haven't paid me for it and I haven't given it to them. Isn't this crime analogous to workplace theft? ie, I gave you permission to work here, but I didn't give you permission to take what you wanted home with you.
How can digital graffiti be a felony, but digital theft is winked at?
Microsoft:
*manipulated the system every which way but loose in order to increase their advantage.
Rambus:
*is attempting to manipulate the system every which way but loose in order to increase their advantage.
Rambus isn't using the courts at all to get what they want.
Pay us for using a technique that
a) you told us about and then we patented
b) we tricked you into putting into the standard
c) we were applying for a patent on before you put it into the standard, we knew you were considering it (because, we suggest that you consider it), but we chose not to tell you about our application even though we agreed that we would tell you about the application
or
we'll sue you and get US courts to have US Customs agents confiscate everything you ship to the US, and generally have you locked out of one of the largest markets on this planet. How is this not using the court system again?
Being from the Orient, do I pay up, or take my chances in a foreign court?
My car has a truck engine in it (I have an '89 240SX, which has the KA24E motor. It's the same as the Nissan pickup from the same year) and it DOES get twice the mileage. Well, maybe not twice, but I pick up 30 mpg freeway. No joke.
Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. I owned an '85 Nissan Pickup up until just a few months ago. I got around 20mpg highway, even though the engine was so worn that it had gotten tight to the point that the starter wasn't strong enough to turn it over (had to assist the starter by popping the clutch on a downhill grade. A real bitch when it's raining.) So you get 50% more mpg from the same engine in a sleek, low-slung sports car than I get running it in a high-riding, blocky, 4x4 pickup. I'll give you that, but it doesn't negate my point that the same engine would have improve performance, wear longer an use less gas with harder/slicker bearings and rings. All you've said is that a small sports car requires less energy to push than a larger truck.
You'd get a better increase in performance at a cheaper cost by just using buckyballs as lubricant.
Bzzt. Wrong again. You have to periodically replace combustion engine oil, not because it is worn out as most people seem to think, but because it gets full of trash from the combustion process. Most modern oils would last for 20,000 miles in a contemporary engine, but since it's second calling is to carry soot and grit away from the rubbing parts , you have to replace it when it gets saturated. Synthetic oils are already very expensive. Who could afford to replace oil ever 3k to 7k miles with an exotic lubricant like buckyballs? You may get better performance, but you definitely won't get it cheaper unless you devise a manufacturing process less complicated than "1)pump crude out of the ground, 2)crack it, 3)put it in bottles."
Also, where do you think cars go when you get rid of them? Someone else buys them. If they're totalled, they get crushed, and recycled, and made into - Yep, you guessed it - cars, among other things.
I'm sure you have a point hidden in there somewhere. My point is that the car must eventually die. My wife's Volvo died two weeks ago (threw a rod). Yes, it'll be recycled, but the process of doing that is very energy intensive. Wouldn't it be better for the environment and her wallet if the car just worked for several more years.
If you're really worried about using this technology to improve your environment, figure out some way to use it to improve battery life, so we can all drive electrics. While you're at it, figure out a way to use it to make high-power photovoltaic cells...
How the hell would technology that improves the mechanical properties of sliding or rolling surfaces be used the improve the electrical characteristics of batteries or PV cells? Use the tech to coat the bearing of an electric car and it will get more miles on a charge, but that is about the only use and that would apply to any engine technology used. Coating the bearing in the power plants generator would drop the friction there, thus lowering emissions at the power plant.
Slashdot Mirror
I've not used the latest MS products for a while (their the only company I know that can add some graphics and call it an upgrade).
Anyway, in previous their products doc*set* would retrieve the first entitity that started with doc. Anything after the first * would be ignored.
And they're doing all this in the name of idealistic generalities like "academic freedom" and "access to information?"
I would like to believe this, but my knowledge of administrators goes against it. I think it more likely that administrators don't want to wind up bearing the cost of anyone who is able to send a legalese filled letter complaining about students doing something they don't like.
The administrators simply want to stay out of the fight. Just like a stranger who happens upon a bar fight, if they enter the fray, they will get beat-up by both sides. I guess I would do the same as they if forced to make a choice.
"hey guys, this is your fight. Leave me out of it. I'm not fighting for either one of you. But if the police ask me questions, I will tell what I know."
We don't want to put a chill on companies sending us free stuff. Let DC complain all they want, the Cat is a give-away, and there's nothing they can do about it now. Let's make it seem like they won, so that other companies will follow their business model.
"Look honey, Mr. Case sent us one of those neato web pad to access AOL. What should we do with it?"
"No notice saying that it's not free. Where did I put that Mandrake/SUSE install CD?"
what salary premium could be put on one of these certifications?
That is, I make X units/year. With certification C, I can expect to pull in X+Y. The premium on C is then Y.
Rate the certs according to Y and your talking my language.
Just like I've always said,
"This galaxy really does suck."
Yes, then we'll have a...BRAIN
Or, maybe not.
I can't see what right my employer has on _my_ code, written in _my_ free time, with _my_
The kicker is the "free time" part. Define "free time" when you're salaried. It was easy when I punched a clock. Now, it is really fuzzy...
I wonder about this, because the suits try to convince us annually that anything we create belongs to the company. All the employment contracts I've seen try to tie down developers so that the company gets first shot at anything they come up with. I don't know what his contract states, but how many of you working engineers could get away with releasing something to the public and then proclaiming that you did it on your free time?
What is 'free' time when your on salary?
What is the resolution of that screen, 640x480? It just seems that there is just too much detail for a handheld.
Of course, if it is legitimate I can add wireless networking and use it as a remote X display. Heaven (or a mediocre simulation thereof) is at hand?
For the poster that busted my little bubble of sureality yesterday, please, please, please let me wallow in my self-delusion that a simple, wireless, remote, handheld X-display could be profitable.
From my experience:
-When the cost of TFT screens drop (remember it is a $150 device).
-When batteries are able to hold more energy (more pixels == higher power requirements== increase battery drain).
-When people start demanding wireless X displays!!
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
They're not completely meaningless. For instance, in this poll we have learned that someone likes Windows enough to learn how to write a script so that they can boost its image. Take it for what you paid for it...
Bouncing around from job to job is great when you're young and have no responsibilities other than yourself. As you get older, marry, have kids, jumping jobs becomes much more difficult. I can't just throw my guitar into the back of my Vega and 'move' to the job three states away.
/. crowd is young on average. There's a lot of college people who participate in these discussions. When I was younger, not so long ago, I always had the attitude that I was smart, adaptable, and could find a job anywhere. The same attitude that is exhibited by a lot of post I see here. While I still have the attitude that I can always find work, my exuberance has been tempered over the years. It's not that the work isn't there, it's that I have more criteria for defining 'good job'. Hours and location are much more important than before. Combine that with what most here are looking for, interesting subject matter, and jobs are really hard to find.
I'm not complaining here, just giving a different perspective. When I got out of school (doesn't everyone get their BS when they're 30 now 8*), I was offered a job 2000 miles away. The wife and kids cried for 2 weeks before I gave up and looked for a job 60 miles away. Even that was contentious. Changing jobs is just anything but easy once you build things up around you.
The
My unrequested advice to all here: Keep the future in mind. Try to build stability into your job whenever possible. Corporations have pushed the work ethic towards 'expendable employees', do whatever you can to push it back in the other direction.
If companies want to make money this way, they need to get people to sign a contract up front. Plain and simple. If you build a business on being able to trick people into paying you for nothing, then you deserve nothing when they wake up.
As for the EULA, it's as worthless as the original. Here is the babelfish translation:
"Now that we've concluded our contract, here are some extra terms that we'd like to add."
All EULA's say exactly the same thing. If a vendor wants to enforce a EULA, it must be presented before the sale so that I can read it, and the vendor must refuse the sale to transpire without me signing the agreement; otherwise, it's all bullsh**.
she doesn't have a case. She's just jumping the gun a little to quickly here. Universal has to actually be awarded damages before she can sue for her share. Hopefully, her grandkids will benefit.
It's like the cops who have to wait for the shoplifter to exit the building before stopping them. If you stop them inside, they're not guilty of anything. So you have to be patient.
So take it shaken, not stirred 8*)
You're picking bytes from the files. Unless the whole mark was in a single byte, there would have to be some relationship between the mark and the order of the bytes. Repetition could make it harder to scramble the byte ordering, but that can be intelligently handled.
The ticker is that any format has the constraint that the music must sound the same, or RIA et. al. loses the benefit of the mass market/ factory-line content they produce. A binary diff will tell you what bits/bytes/words don't match, which indicates the watermarking.
Modifying/scrambling/removing the parts that don't match up is left as an exercise the the haXors once they had a chance to see what pattern SDMI chooses to implement. But unless all watermarks are identical, count on a crack within hours of the release of any content.
Man, that is rude.
Come in here, telling us about cool technology WITH an acceptable price, and then not giving a link. That means that I have to pull up Google.
Don't let it happen again.
No matter how you slice it, in order to add additional information to any file, you have some bits somewhere.
...the sixth from file one, ...etc, and run lame on the result to get 'unmarkedBritney.mp3'
If all SDMI wanted to do was mark a piece as authentic, every piece would have the same mark and there wouldn't be much incentive to break it. "Heh, this POS is by Britney Spears. I know because it's watermarked." "Couldn't you tell that by tinny, teenage voice singing about her life ending because her teenage boyfriend dissed her." "Ummmm..."
But authenticity marking isn't what they're after. SDMI is looking for encryption and user identification. This means each unit would get a different watermark. Breaking it is then a simple matter of buying 5 copies and doing a binary diff of the output of "mpg123 -s britney.mp3 > tempfile". Build a bogus watermarked file by pulling the first byte from file one, the second from file two,
Am I in trouble now?
$140 to do it yourself? And that's just for the circuit board that doesn't yet support the DRAM. You still have to provide a hard drive ($100) a power supply ($20) and the memory ($20). So the actual cost is $300 for a very fragile homemade unit.
Thanks, but no. For now, I keep converting MP3s to CDs and use my $50 Walkman.
Now, as a hobbyist demo, this is cool, but hobby projects aren't done on the basis of cost.
For a start, if you can provide the goods you can march straight into the "boardroom" and work right alongside the "CEO" on the kernel.
Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. The Ask Slashdot question I posted about concerned this VERY issue. The person had a problem that he had a fix for. He marched to the "boardroom", fix in hand, and was soundly ignored by the "CEO" and all his "VPs".
Secondly, with any GPL product, large or small, you have the right to take the whole thing, make your own modifications and push it as the way to go. Try doing that with the real-life component produced by the company of a real life CEO.
Of course, attracting support for your version, your vision, is something else. But if you have the talent and the product, it can be done.
Translation: If you don't like how the project is being managed, you can go start your own company and manage it yourself.
Note that this happens a LOT. Engineers left Palm and created the Handspring. Engineers left Intel and created Weitek (math co-processor for the 386). This doesn't change the fact in any way that large, successful OS projects have a rigid management heirarchy. Be they good a knowledgeable, or be they bad and uninformed, they are management and they are indeed rigid. You will comply with their decisions/edicts, or you will have to start your own company/project.
1) Not all managers are inept paper pushers.
2) The recent Ask Slashdot I was speaking of concerned a gentleman who had coded up a fix and could not find the right 'manager' to submit it to. The point being that anyone can actually write the code and can solve the problem but it still requires approval of the 'OS manager' to get it in the code base.
3) The bazaar model hypes the idea that everyone gets to decide how to fix a problem and decide how to put it in, not just the blessed few. Few projects follow this methodology, the point of the article and mine.
4)I've dealt with a few OS projects, and from my POV it is easier to talk to upper-management than deal with OS manager/engineers. Engineers tend to have an emotional attachment to the code they've written, and they don't like criticism of their 'baby'. The path I've taken in the past is to fix my local copy of the code and then post my fix to a newsgroup, or even to Slashdot, rather than fight that what I've fixed is an actual bug. Uppermanagement tends to have a myopic view of the world. Convince them that a change saves/makes money and it's in there.
If a company follows the process you outline, it is headed nowhere. Most companies I've seen are much more flexible about the introduction of ideas. At IBM the process was:
submit idea to study group->study group ask customers->study group makes a decision.
At my current job the process is:
submit an idea->start implementing it (unless the idea is completely off-base, the chances rejection are very small)
There was an Ask Slashdot question a few days ago about how you make contributions to an OS project. Several of the answers went along the line of read the mailing list and send your bugfix to some of the lesser daemons. Let them take it to the great gods. This hints that an OS project (especially one as important as the kernal) can quickly have a structure identical to Figure 1 of the article.
If you have a problem at work, you talk to your manager, who will speak with the VP, who consults the CEO. How is this any different from emailing the 'less important people on the mailing list', who then contact the component owners, who might be able to get a response from Linus?
Granholm said: "Hacking is the dark side of high technology's power and progress. For every person using a computer or the Internet for research, commerce or communication, there may be another person using that technology to commit a crime. The Internet, unfortunately, has become one more tool to pick the locks of companies
across the country."
And long license agreements full of mumbo-jumbo legalese has become one more tool to pick the locks of the average computer user across the country.
If I install a program, say a graphics program, would this law cover behavior that sereptiously sends valuable personal information to the company that wrote the program? We know the info is valuable (the company plans to sell it), but they haven't paid me for it and I haven't given it to them. Isn't this crime analogous to workplace theft? ie, I gave you permission to work here, but I didn't give you permission to take what you wanted home with you.
How can digital graffiti be a felony, but digital theft is winked at?
Microsoft:
*manipulated the system every which way but loose in order to increase their advantage.
Rambus:
*is attempting to manipulate the system every which way but loose in order to increase their advantage.
Rambus isn't using the courts at all to get what they want.
Pay us for using a technique that
a) you told us about and then we patented
b) we tricked you into putting into the standard
c) we were applying for a patent on before you put it into the standard, we knew you were considering it (because, we suggest that you consider it), but we chose not to tell you about our application even though we agreed that we would tell you about the application
or
we'll sue you and get US courts to have US Customs agents confiscate everything you ship to the US, and generally have you locked out of one of the largest markets on this planet. How is this not using the court system again?
Being from the Orient, do I pay up, or take my chances in a foreign court?
My car has a truck engine in it (I have an '89 240SX, which has the KA24E motor. It's the same as the Nissan pickup from the same year) and it DOES get twice the mileage. Well, maybe not twice, but I pick up 30 mpg freeway. No joke.
Bzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing. I owned an '85 Nissan Pickup up until just a few months ago. I got around 20mpg highway, even though the engine was so worn that it had gotten tight to the point that the starter wasn't strong enough to turn it over (had to assist the starter by popping the clutch on a downhill grade. A real bitch when it's raining.) So you get 50% more mpg from the same engine in a sleek, low-slung sports car than I get running it in a high-riding, blocky, 4x4 pickup. I'll give you that, but it doesn't negate my point that the same engine would have improve performance, wear longer an use less gas with harder/slicker bearings and rings. All you've said is that a small sports car requires less energy to push than a larger truck.
You'd get a better increase in performance at a cheaper cost by just using buckyballs as lubricant.
Bzzt. Wrong again. You have to periodically replace combustion engine oil, not because it is worn out as most people seem to think, but because it gets full of trash from the combustion process. Most modern oils would last for 20,000 miles in a contemporary engine, but since it's second calling is to carry soot and grit away from the rubbing parts , you have to replace it when it gets saturated. Synthetic oils are already very expensive. Who could afford to replace oil ever 3k to 7k miles with an exotic lubricant like buckyballs? You may get better performance, but you definitely won't get it cheaper unless you devise a manufacturing process less complicated than "1)pump crude out of the ground, 2)crack it, 3)put it in bottles."
Also, where do you think cars go when you get rid of them? Someone else buys them. If they're totalled, they get crushed, and recycled, and made into - Yep, you guessed it - cars, among other things.
I'm sure you have a point hidden in there somewhere. My point is that the car must eventually die. My wife's Volvo died two weeks ago (threw a rod). Yes, it'll be recycled, but the process of doing that is very energy intensive. Wouldn't it be better for the environment and her wallet if the car just worked for several more years.
If you're really worried about using this technology to improve your environment, figure out some way to use it to improve battery life, so we can all drive electrics. While you're at it, figure out a way to use it to make high-power photovoltaic cells...
How the hell would technology that improves the mechanical properties of sliding or rolling surfaces be used the improve the electrical characteristics of batteries or PV cells? Use the tech to coat the bearing of an electric car and it will get more miles on a charge, but that is about the only use and that would apply to any engine technology used. Coating the bearing in the power plants generator would drop the friction there, thus lowering emissions at the power plant.