We require a full set of fingerprints in California for anyone who wants a driver's license as well as a picture. If you think this picture is just taken and then tossed away, think again. It goes right into a biometric database with your fingerprints.
It is only a small step before they require iris scans and a DNS sample as well. Once this sort of thing becomes "acceptable", it becomes easier and easier to move the line.
With this sort of information you could build one hell of a massive identification system. Start collecting images from all public webcams and government cameras and with the simple facial recognition technology alone you could start categorizing every citizen's movements, friends, activities, etc.
What really worries me is how easy it seems to be to frame someone for a crime. I mean, if you can be convicted on just a little bit of DNA then it is stupidly easy to set someone up for murder, rape, etc.
Ok, this may be going overboard, but I mean technically a private company can do this right now with just webcams. How fun would that be? Sure it'll be hard to tie the unique "person" you identify to a name, but slowly and with enough pictures collected on the internet you could probably make a fairly decent guess of a significant portion of the US.
All the serious cooks I've ever met (I've been cooking professionally for several years, by the way) tamper with recipes every day. That's what serious cooks DO. Who wants to have a "perfect" chocolate mousse if it's indistinguishable from the one they're serving across the street? (Although chefs HAVE been known to get offended if I mess with their old family recipies.)
I think the article is referring to *how* the food is prepared, not the recipe itself. For instance, the show talks about the traditional French preparation of mushrooms and debunks the myth that water will actually cause any kind of serious damage. In fact, Alton seems to have something against a lot of traditional French methods.
I don't really want to run MySQL. I don't really want to maintain it. It is just not something I want to deal with. MT lets me use a little local database.
I really really don't want dynamic pages. I just don't need it. I have had zdnet link to my blog which caused a trillion avantgo clients to hit it. I just don't need queries to MySQL and PHP being run all the time. Actually PHP by itself wouldn't be so bad if it cached everything in a local file the first time the page required it as long as it supported if-modified-since and ranges correctly.
I actually kind of like the idea of TypeKey. Of course nothing prevents you from implementing TypeKey support in WordPress.
I simply don't care about silly licensing issues. I mean, for a single non-commercial blog, nothing has changed.
I have an upgrade path. Sooner or later WordPress will probably integrate a local databse and real caching. When that happens if it is better than MT, I'll migrate. I just don't see the point in migrating right now.
So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
Boy I was going to stay out of this but meh.
You don't have to have a binary representation of trust. You have a weighting metric. You also make every client look like two (or more) clients and connect to two separate segments of the network and ensure that messages are routed from one connection to the other correctly and without modification. If they are not routed correctly, the peer weight drops. If routed correctly, the peer weight increases. This really requires an anonymous network (onion-routed is nice, but the many alternatives will work) so that you can't tell that your two connections are from the same computer (obviously you can't connect to the same peer twice).
What do you associate the weight with? Well... both tokens (client-generated and obviously forgeable) *as well as* IPs. Sure some users on dynamic IPs get screwed, but no one ever said this was a perfect system.
Distributed trust gets complex. All of a sudden you have to deal with trusting the trust relationships of someone else and weighting those and combining them with scores you already have. There was a decent paper on it that you can find on the ACM somewhere.
Well then you get the issue of a malicious user connecting to a lot of peers and causing the peers they are connected to to lower their rating by altering messages. This is really where distributed trust helps, but even without it there is a good reason you use a weight and a reason why you do increase it.
This is not nearly impossible. It is hard and it sure as hell isn't efficient, but certainly much easier than nearly impossible. I've glossed over a lot of the heavy details, but this is slashdot and no one reads these things anyway.:P
I did it in elementary school as well in the US. I imagine there must have been more prep work or something in the UMich version though. Or maybe it was just for fun.
1. It's not diverting resources from other, more useful research -- the people doing research on toilet paper would probably not be doing research on any of the applications I mentioned if they weren't working on TP instead.
Are you implying that Scotts Co., who is in the grass business, would have otherwise done research on trying to solve world hunger? Or maybe that every genetic research scientist in the world should dedicate themselves to only important task regardless of their own ambitions?
When over 95% of "C++ programmers" that I interview can't even answer this: straightforward question about virtual methods, I see no hope for the language. It seems most people who claim to be C++ programmers just say that because they use a C++ compiler and stick their functions in objects.
I'd like to point out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing "C with Classes." It makes a whole lot more sense than trying to fake it with structs and function pointers with only a minimal loss of efficiency. Certainly replacing all char pointers with strings would make up for the inefficiency with the huge amount of time saved debugging. Just because operator overloading, templates, references, etc. exist doesn't mean you have to use them. I mean, no one puts a gun to your head and forces you to use Swing in Java just because it is standard.
Second, that question should have been rather simple to answer for anyone who was aware that the std::complex template has a copy constructor with an implicit conversion. Not everyone knows that simply because complex isn't exactly the most widely used thing in the world. If you are going to ask that quesiton, I'd recommend defining a template in the code to make it obvious.
The language features in C++ can be abused, but a huge number of errors I see are from misusing APIs and none of the high level languages like Java are going to make sure you are paying attention to what you are doing.
I have to second this one. In an age where we can't even get an accurate prediction of the local weather 1 *day* in advance, we are trying to claim we know what will happen on a global scale years in advance.
There are a huge number of variables when you are talking about the climate and we only know the smallest bit about it. We know Earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles before without our help and for all we know, trying to prevent it might end up making it worse.
You do what you can. I don't go as far as some people and put those evil "made for xx" browsers on my webpage or anything since I don't think people pay attention to them.
I did however modify my 404 page to say that they should upgrade their web browser to FireFox if they are using IE. Sure, it might not fix the 404, but at least it is a full paragraph dedicated that someone might read if they happen to come across some broken link.
A while back a buddy and I were talking about taking this to the extreme. If you could have the GPS coordinates, the focal length, distance to subject, time, the direction the camera was facing, pitch and roll, you could actually throw together different images from multiple sources into a weird sort of virtual tour of an area over time and do a walkthrough (not smoothly, but well enough).
You can always require a challenge resposne from only people who fail to pass your existing spam filter and then turn your existing spam filter all the way up.
That way you end up with the best of both worlds. Most people will have their messages go through without any problems. The select few that happened to word their emails really really poorly will have to click on a link/reply to a challenge.
He wrote a program in VB that was what it was because he couldn't implement anything more complex.
The Napster client was written using C++ using win32 calls. It was never written in VB. Ever. Granted it was more C with classes than C++, but it certainly wasn't VB.
You have to pretty naive to think that without Napster the RIAA would have simply ignored other systems that enable copyright infringement. Especially a system like bittorrent that with a central server component. Remember that Scour (which predated Napster) was sued, Aimster was sued, etc. It is just Napster received far more press than anyone else.
BR-ROM (the format for prepackaged media) is the same size and thickness as HD-DVD. Both groups have stated that it is possible to build players that can read DVD/CDs with the inclusion of a red laser.
BR-R/RW (the format you can burn) on the other hand is packaged in a cartridge because the media is too easily scratched and dusty. They are trying to resolve that issue however. Worst case scenario is you have to place your BR-ROM inside of a cartriage to use it in computers that want to burn BR for a whlie.
Blu-Ray discs will use plain old MPEG-2 (advanced profile most likely). This allows manufacturers to buy a single chip to decode the stream as opposed to the MPEG-4 format HD-DVD appears to require.
Blu-Ray discs store quite a bit more than HD-DVD (nearly double the density) and seems to enjoy better support from the electronics and PC industries.
For the life of me I don't know why HD-DVD was chosen by the DVD Forum over Blu-Ray.
Fahrenheit is well suited to the human condition on earth. 0 F is roughly the coldest temperature people most people experience in and 100 F the hottest (obviously there are greater extremes, but we're talking about the bulk of the population). 0 F is basically really cold and 100 F is really hot. Ovens also happen to work very well on the fahrenheit scale (200 F - 500 F).
Celsius is just plain silly. Basing temperature on a random molecule's states at a specific atmospheric pressure is fairly arbitrary and has little to do with the human condition.
(And often when people say "American", the Canadians get a bit annoyed because they don't like the US co-opting the name of the whole continent, but in this case it really is appropriate becuase so much of US television and Canadian television are intertwined. Many American "icon" actors are Canadian, and a lot of American TV shows are actually filmed in Vancouver and Toronto. So, in this case, "American" really is an appropriate term.)
You forget that there are two American continents and Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Belize are all in North America right along with the US.:)
The US really does co-opt the name "America" though. I usually see it more in foreign countries than in the US itself. They always refer to us as "Americans" living in "America."
Sorry, I should have placed the caveat: "if MD5 doesn't have any flaws."
Yeah, it's about 1 in 2^128. There aren't even enough electrons in the universe to write down all the possible MD5 hashes, not to mention the strings that might hash to them.
You don't have to write down the entire string to generate its hash. You can simply keep feeding numbers into the algorithm until the end of time (assuming there is one).
Further, the estimates I've heard is that there is 10^80 to 10^88 electrons in the universe. 2^128 is roughly 10^38 giving you about 50 orders of magnitude in difference.
This brings us to our new Laptop bags. These bags are much more complex to build, and require substantially more labor, and a variety of very expensive machines we don't have here in our factory.
Well screw that. If they had outsourced it to Canada, Italy, the UK or anywhere else that had real labor laws so I knew my bag wasn't made by an 8 year old who works for $1.50 an hour and works 16 hour days I would say no problem, but let's be honest with ourselves here, China couldn't enforce labor laws even if they wanted to.
My WestField bag came with a hand written (as in, there was an ink smudge after I set a glass of water on it) thanking me for my purchase. My friend called them up and asked if his brand new mini-toshiba would fit and they were honest. They said they made it to the specifications given, but they had never tried it and offered to allow him to try it in their place beforehand.
I want attention to detail, not crap churned out by some underpaid worker who drifts from building bags to shirts to widgets. I want the person that made my bag to be in an environment where if they find a problem, they have the good sense to comment about it and someone has the sense to do something about it.
Frankly, if it requires some fancy hardware to make, I probably don't want it. I mean seriously, if it is that complex then there are far more things that could go wrong. (This applies to textiles mostly... obviously I don't want my CPU to be made by hand:)
That's my rant. Now if I could only get some decent made clothing. Grumble.
I never quite understood the facination people had with hemp. There are better alternatives to nearly every major thing hemp gives you without that nasty problem of farmers hiding marijuana crops in their hemp fields.
For paper, kenaf is better than hemp. It produces more fiber per year with little effort.
Cotton is certainly better for most clothing (we are far too used to the texture) and rayon is quite nice for high end stuff. Nylon and polyester can both be derived from corn oil if we really wanted to and nylon is certainly tougher. Several types of spider silk are much, much stronger and plain old silk is, well, silkier.
Hemp does have the benefit of being the best natural waterproof substance, but now with our nifty nano-textiles we have materials that really really repel water.
Soap from hemp is ok, but the exotic blends we have now are far better.
Further, the process to industrializing hemp isn't exactly cheap. We have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in processing petro, cotton, silk, trees, etc. It would take decades before you saw any major shift (which is the prime reason why kenaf isn't the prime source of paper right now).
Hemp is sort of like the peanut. Sure, we've proven there are 10,001 uses, but few are any better than what we have already.
Maybe it would be taken more seriously if its most vocal supporters were also for the legalization of marijuana. I mean the money it costs to patrol farms for hidden crops of marijuana right now is extreme... with the added problem of having to find them inside a crop of hemp would be down right impossible.
I'd recommend another SF company WaterField over Timbuk2. Maybe that's because I see Timbuk2 bags all over SF and they just aren't special.
Both companies custom make their bags in San Francisco and the build quality is excellent. I mean strong, durable with no shortcuts. I think the fabric of the WaterField bags is a bit nicer than the Timbuk2's. Plus, they have a really nifty airline buckle thing that always gets commented on by the security screeners at the airport.
They both have a multitude of colors. Timbuk2 is a bit more configurable since they allow you to have 3 colors on your bag. I have the taxi colored WaterField and it is very neat.
The WaterField bag has a neat little sleeve for your laptop to slip into that perfectly fits my iBook (they come in different sizes). So instead of putting your laptop directly into your case, you can put it into a sleeve first that protects it against other objects in your bag. Very handy. Plus it can double as a bag itself.
I have to say that both bags are very roomy for their size. I have the smallest one and it still can fit my iBook, an IBM ThinkPad T30, my umbrella, my wallet, my iPod, my earphones, a cell phone, far too much change, my notepad and whatever other garbage drifts into my bag. Of course, with all this stuff in there, the bag is entirely too heavy (ThinkPad's aren't light!), but that's another problem.:)
With either company you get the satisfaction that you're getting a good quality product made in the US. Of course they are made in San Francisco where the price of labor isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for.
And no, I don't work for either company. I just happen to live within walking distance to them and have gotten sick of the poor build quality of textiles (explain to me why a $80 kenneth cole shirt should have lose threading?)
But then again, I want to be an elitist bastard, so maybe you shouldn't buy stuff from them.:)
Slashdot Mirror
We require a full set of fingerprints in California for anyone who wants a driver's license as well as a picture. If you think this picture is just taken and then tossed away, think again. It goes right into a biometric database with your fingerprints.
It is only a small step before they require iris scans and a DNS sample as well. Once this sort of thing becomes "acceptable", it becomes easier and easier to move the line.
With this sort of information you could build one hell of a massive identification system. Start collecting images from all public webcams and government cameras and with the simple facial recognition technology alone you could start categorizing every citizen's movements, friends, activities, etc.
What really worries me is how easy it seems to be to frame someone for a crime. I mean, if you can be convicted on just a little bit of DNA then it is stupidly easy to set someone up for murder, rape, etc.
Ok, this may be going overboard, but I mean technically a private company can do this right now with just webcams. How fun would that be? Sure it'll be hard to tie the unique "person" you identify to a name, but slowly and with enough pictures collected on the internet you could probably make a fairly decent guess of a significant portion of the US.
All the serious cooks I've ever met (I've been cooking professionally for several years, by the way) tamper with recipes every day. That's what serious cooks DO. Who wants to have a "perfect" chocolate mousse if it's indistinguishable from the one they're serving across the street? (Although chefs HAVE been known to get offended if I mess with their old family recipies.)
I think the article is referring to *how* the food is prepared, not the recipe itself. For instance, the show talks about the traditional French preparation of mushrooms and debunks the myth that water will actually cause any kind of serious damage. In fact, Alton seems to have something against a lot of traditional French methods.
I'm sticking with MT myself.
I don't really want to run MySQL. I don't really want to maintain it. It is just not something I want to deal with. MT lets me use a little local database.
I really really don't want dynamic pages. I just don't need it. I have had zdnet link to my blog which caused a trillion avantgo clients to hit it. I just don't need queries to MySQL and PHP being run all the time. Actually PHP by itself wouldn't be so bad if it cached everything in a local file the first time the page required it as long as it supported if-modified-since and ranges correctly.
I actually kind of like the idea of TypeKey. Of course nothing prevents you from implementing TypeKey support in WordPress.
I simply don't care about silly licensing issues. I mean, for a single non-commercial blog, nothing has changed.
I have an upgrade path. Sooner or later WordPress will probably integrate a local databse and real caching. When that happens if it is better than MT, I'll migrate. I just don't see the point in migrating right now.
So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
:P
Boy I was going to stay out of this but meh.
You don't have to have a binary representation of trust. You have a weighting metric. You also make every client look like two (or more) clients and connect to two separate segments of the network and ensure that messages are routed from one connection to the other correctly and without modification. If they are not routed correctly, the peer weight drops. If routed correctly, the peer weight increases. This really requires an anonymous network (onion-routed is nice, but the many alternatives will work) so that you can't tell that your two connections are from the same computer (obviously you can't connect to the same peer twice).
What do you associate the weight with? Well... both tokens (client-generated and obviously forgeable) *as well as* IPs. Sure some users on dynamic IPs get screwed, but no one ever said this was a perfect system.
Distributed trust gets complex. All of a sudden you have to deal with trusting the trust relationships of someone else and weighting those and combining them with scores you already have. There was a decent paper on it that you can find on the ACM somewhere.
Well then you get the issue of a malicious user connecting to a lot of peers and causing the peers they are connected to to lower their rating by altering messages. This is really where distributed trust helps, but even without it there is a good reason you use a weight and a reason why you do increase it.
This is not nearly impossible. It is hard and it sure as hell isn't efficient, but certainly much easier than nearly impossible. I've glossed over a lot of the heavy details, but this is slashdot and no one reads these things anyway.
You do of course realize that shareholders in Google own a significant percentage of the company as it is right?
Just because a company is private doesn't mean it doesn't have shareholders to answer to.
I did it in elementary school as well in the US. I imagine there must have been more prep work or something in the UMich version though. Or maybe it was just for fun.
1. It's not diverting resources from other, more useful research -- the people doing research on toilet paper would probably not be doing research on any of the applications I mentioned if they weren't working on TP instead.
Are you implying that Scotts Co., who is in the grass business, would have otherwise done research on trying to solve world hunger? Or maybe that every genetic research scientist in the world should dedicate themselves to only important task regardless of their own ambitions?
When over 95% of "C++ programmers" that I interview can't even answer this: straightforward question about virtual methods, I see no hope for the language. It seems most people who claim to be C++ programmers just say that because they use a C++ compiler and stick their functions in objects.
I'd like to point out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing "C with Classes." It makes a whole lot more sense than trying to fake it with structs and function pointers with only a minimal loss of efficiency. Certainly replacing all char pointers with strings would make up for the inefficiency with the huge amount of time saved debugging. Just because operator overloading, templates, references, etc. exist doesn't mean you have to use them. I mean, no one puts a gun to your head and forces you to use Swing in Java just because it is standard.
Second, that question should have been rather simple to answer for anyone who was aware that the std::complex template has a copy constructor with an implicit conversion. Not everyone knows that simply because complex isn't exactly the most widely used thing in the world. If you are going to ask that quesiton, I'd recommend defining a template in the code to make it obvious.
The language features in C++ can be abused, but a huge number of errors I see are from misusing APIs and none of the high level languages like Java are going to make sure you are paying attention to what you are doing.
I have to second this one. In an age where we can't even get an accurate prediction of the local weather 1 *day* in advance, we are trying to claim we know what will happen on a global scale years in advance.
There are a huge number of variables when you are talking about the climate and we only know the smallest bit about it. We know Earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles before without our help and for all we know, trying to prevent it might end up making it worse.
Luckily, we are rather adaptive creatures.
You do what you can. I don't go as far as some people and put those evil "made for xx" browsers on my webpage or anything since I don't think people pay attention to them.
I did however modify my 404 page to say that they should upgrade their web browser to FireFox if they are using IE. Sure, it might not fix the 404, but at least it is a full paragraph dedicated that someone might read if they happen to come across some broken link.
A while back a buddy and I were talking about taking this to the extreme. If you could have the GPS coordinates, the focal length, distance to subject, time, the direction the camera was facing, pitch and roll, you could actually throw together different images from multiple sources into a weird sort of virtual tour of an area over time and do a walkthrough (not smoothly, but well enough).
Now that would be spiffy. Useless, but spiffy.
You can always require a challenge resposne from only people who fail to pass your existing spam filter and then turn your existing spam filter all the way up.
That way you end up with the best of both worlds. Most people will have their messages go through without any problems. The select few that happened to word their emails really really poorly will have to click on a link/reply to a challenge.
Space flight now has a color photo of the area which has a red tint to it and a decent article about how the surface looks like talcum powder.
Very interesting stuff. I think we should launch another 6 or 10 of these things all over mars after fixing the problem spirit has.
For the 600th time, the client wasn't written in VB. It was written in C++ (really C with classes) using win32 calls.
Where in heck did this written in VB thing start?
He wrote a program in VB that was what it was because he couldn't implement anything more complex.
The Napster client was written using C++ using win32 calls. It was never written in VB. Ever. Granted it was more C with classes than C++, but it certainly wasn't VB.
You have to pretty naive to think that without Napster the RIAA would have simply ignored other systems that enable copyright infringement. Especially a system like bittorrent that with a central server component. Remember that Scour (which predated Napster) was sued, Aimster was sued, etc. It is just Napster received far more press than anyone else.
BR-ROM (the format for prepackaged media) is the same size and thickness as HD-DVD. Both groups have stated that it is possible to build players that can read DVD/CDs with the inclusion of a red laser.
BR-R/RW (the format you can burn) on the other hand is packaged in a cartridge because the media is too easily scratched and dusty. They are trying to resolve that issue however. Worst case scenario is you have to place your BR-ROM inside of a cartriage to use it in computers that want to burn BR for a whlie.
Blu-Ray discs will use plain old MPEG-2 (advanced profile most likely). This allows manufacturers to buy a single chip to decode the stream as opposed to the MPEG-4 format HD-DVD appears to require.
Blu-Ray discs store quite a bit more than HD-DVD (nearly double the density) and seems to enjoy better support from the electronics and PC industries.
For the life of me I don't know why HD-DVD was chosen by the DVD Forum over Blu-Ray.
Those are usually sent to video rental store owners as a method of getting them to order the video in quantity when it is released.
My old roommate owned a couple video stores on the east coast and got them all the time.
Fahrenheit is well suited to the human condition on earth. 0 F is roughly the coldest temperature people most people experience in and 100 F the hottest (obviously there are greater extremes, but we're talking about the bulk of the population). 0 F is basically really cold and 100 F is really hot. Ovens also happen to work very well on the fahrenheit scale (200 F - 500 F).
Celsius is just plain silly. Basing temperature on a random molecule's states at a specific atmospheric pressure is fairly arbitrary and has little to do with the human condition.
Kelvin makes sense for science, but little else.
(And often when people say "American", the Canadians get a bit annoyed because they don't like the US co-opting the name of the whole continent, but in this case it really is appropriate becuase so much of US television and Canadian television are intertwined. Many American "icon" actors are Canadian, and a lot of American TV shows are actually filmed in Vancouver and Toronto. So, in this case, "American" really is an appropriate term.)
:)
You forget that there are two American continents and Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Belize are all in North America right along with the US.
The US really does co-opt the name "America" though. I usually see it more in foreign countries than in the US itself. They always refer to us as "Americans" living in "America."
That's probably, but not necessarily, true.
Sorry, I should have placed the caveat: "if MD5 doesn't have any flaws."
Yeah, it's about 1 in 2^128. There aren't even enough electrons in the universe to write down all the possible MD5 hashes, not to mention the strings that might hash to them.
You don't have to write down the entire string to generate its hash. You can simply keep feeding numbers into the algorithm until the end of time (assuming there is one).
Further, the estimates I've heard is that there is 10^80 to 10^88 electrons in the universe. 2^128 is roughly 10^38 giving you about 50 orders of magnitude in difference.
Considering there are an infinite number of strings that will map to a single MD5, I'd say there is a chance we'll find one sooner or later.
In the US the midwest accent (most common) pronunciation of "dial" is dye-al.
"Dale" (a first name) is pronounced "deh-il."
This brings us to our new Laptop bags. These bags are much more complex to build, and require substantially more labor, and a variety of very expensive machines we don't have here in our factory.
:)
Well screw that. If they had outsourced it to Canada, Italy, the UK or anywhere else that had real labor laws so I knew my bag wasn't made by an 8 year old who works for $1.50 an hour and works 16 hour days I would say no problem, but let's be honest with ourselves here, China couldn't enforce labor laws even if they wanted to.
My WestField bag came with a hand written (as in, there was an ink smudge after I set a glass of water on it) thanking me for my purchase. My friend called them up and asked if his brand new mini-toshiba would fit and they were honest. They said they made it to the specifications given, but they had never tried it and offered to allow him to try it in their place beforehand.
I want attention to detail, not crap churned out by some underpaid worker who drifts from building bags to shirts to widgets. I want the person that made my bag to be in an environment where if they find a problem, they have the good sense to comment about it and someone has the sense to do something about it.
Frankly, if it requires some fancy hardware to make, I probably don't want it. I mean seriously, if it is that complex then there are far more things that could go wrong. (This applies to textiles mostly... obviously I don't want my CPU to be made by hand
That's my rant. Now if I could only get some decent made clothing. Grumble.
I never quite understood the facination people had with hemp. There are better alternatives to nearly every major thing hemp gives you without that nasty problem of farmers hiding marijuana crops in their hemp fields.
For paper, kenaf is better than hemp. It produces more fiber per year with little effort.
Cotton is certainly better for most clothing (we are far too used to the texture) and rayon is quite nice for high end stuff. Nylon and polyester can both be derived from corn oil if we really wanted to and nylon is certainly tougher. Several types of spider silk are much, much stronger and plain old silk is, well, silkier.
Hemp does have the benefit of being the best natural waterproof substance, but now with our nifty nano-textiles we have materials that really really repel water.
Soap from hemp is ok, but the exotic blends we have now are far better.
Further, the process to industrializing hemp isn't exactly cheap. We have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in processing petro, cotton, silk, trees, etc. It would take decades before you saw any major shift (which is the prime reason why kenaf isn't the prime source of paper right now).
Hemp is sort of like the peanut. Sure, we've proven there are 10,001 uses, but few are any better than what we have already.
Maybe it would be taken more seriously if its most vocal supporters were also for the legalization of marijuana. I mean the money it costs to patrol farms for hidden crops of marijuana right now is extreme... with the added problem of having to find them inside a crop of hemp would be down right impossible.
I'd recommend another SF company WaterField over Timbuk2. Maybe that's because I see Timbuk2 bags all over SF and they just aren't special.
:)
:)
Both companies custom make their bags in San Francisco and the build quality is excellent. I mean strong, durable with no shortcuts. I think the fabric of the WaterField bags is a bit nicer than the Timbuk2's. Plus, they have a really nifty airline buckle thing that always gets commented on by the security screeners at the airport.
They both have a multitude of colors. Timbuk2 is a bit more configurable since they allow you to have 3 colors on your bag. I have the taxi colored WaterField and it is very neat.
The WaterField bag has a neat little sleeve for your laptop to slip into that perfectly fits my iBook (they come in different sizes). So instead of putting your laptop directly into your case, you can put it into a sleeve first that protects it against other objects in your bag. Very handy. Plus it can double as a bag itself.
I have to say that both bags are very roomy for their size. I have the smallest one and it still can fit my iBook, an IBM ThinkPad T30, my umbrella, my wallet, my iPod, my earphones, a cell phone, far too much change, my notepad and whatever other garbage drifts into my bag. Of course, with all this stuff in there, the bag is entirely too heavy (ThinkPad's aren't light!), but that's another problem.
With either company you get the satisfaction that you're getting a good quality product made in the US. Of course they are made in San Francisco where the price of labor isn't cheap, but you get what you pay for.
And no, I don't work for either company. I just happen to live within walking distance to them and have gotten sick of the poor build quality of textiles (explain to me why a $80 kenneth cole shirt should have lose threading?)
But then again, I want to be an elitist bastard, so maybe you shouldn't buy stuff from them.