iDallas!There may be some hope for the future yet… Some scientists in Dublin have discovered a bacterial strain that can consume styrofoam waste and turn it into a useful biodegradable plastic. Win/win? They still need to do a lot of work to scale the process up to levels useable by industry, but it sounds pretty cool to me. It may look like exploitation of the bacteria to some poeple, but it seems ok to me.
The Freddy vs Jason movie apparently did MUCH better than any of the most recent just Freddy or Jason movies so they’ve decided to continue on with a sequel in typical Hollywood fashion and there are now talks about also including Ash from the Evil Dead movies in a 3-way mashup. I’m sure it would be cheesy as all get out, but sometimes cheese can be a good thing, right?
A group of major record labels has announced plans to begin releasing albums in a a ‘DualDisc’ format with CD on one side and DVD on the other. The DVD side may include a higher quality version of the album along with special video, photo and other multimedia (gotta love catchall identifiers) content. I’ve been saying for awhile (to myself mostly) that the record labels need to produce more compelling and diverse content to get people more interested in buying their product. You may be able to get the music itself for free, but the album as a whole may still be worth shelling out the cash. Hopefully they’re not going to be idiotic and charge more for the DualDisc versions.
Eating while pooping gives one an interesting holistic sort of feeling. When the fresh fuel in, spent fuel out cycle is happening all at once, you can more easily visualize it and in doing so feel a sense of inner peace and overall completeness. I thought this was a joke until I found myself doing it (by necessity, fresh bowl of cereal right when nature called) the other day. So yeah, words of wisdom.
Hmm.. eBay has invested money in Craigslist and has received a 25% stake in the company in exchange. Things like are rarely fully positive in the long run, but we shall see.
Office phones are filthier than toilet seats. Nice. I knew there was some reason I don’t like talking on the phone much.
Robert X. Cringley has some thoughts on Sveasoft‘s replacement firmware for Linksys routers (with lots of nifty features) and how they have chosen to get cash from their user base. Their software is released under the GPL and a lot of people claimed their pricing terms were in violation of it. Cringley sets things straight and includes some interesting tidbits about how the GPL works and how open source developers can make a living.
One of the two competing implementations of Ultra-Wide Band, the wireless technology that is expected to replace USB and possibly FireWire, has been approved by the FCC. The article is mostly some smack talking between the two competing camps, but it suggests some of the potential. In a few years, you may not need wires between your computer and the display and any external hard drives and other peripherals. Additionally, the wires between your DVD player and TV will go away, too. Neither of the implementations have yet been approved as a standard by the IEEE, but they seem to both intend to bring products to market anyway. It’s not certain which one will win out at this point so only really early adopters will join in on the fun right away.
Paranoids and Conspiracy Theorists, start your engines! The government has been increasingly turning to private companies for information that is either difficult or illegal for them to obtain in other ways. Many private companies share information freely with the government without any sort of subpoena or other legal requirement. In addition, data aggregation companies have been amassing tremendous databases of all available forms of information and provide data mining services for a fee. The government is one of their customers and is not restricted in any way from using the information it obtains. I’m generally not especially disturbed by the notion that there are ways to obtain highly detailed information about a person, but I do think it’s important to try to keep a mental picture of what information may be available and how it may be used.
There are laws in many cities around the country prohibiting heavy trucks (classified as having a gross weight over 6000 lbs) from driving on residential streets. They are designed to keep the trucks on larger roads where they are less of a danger and annoyance. It turns out that many SUVs are also illegal to drive in residential areas. Most large SUVs are designed intentionally to be over the 6000 lb line because that’s also the the point where they become a tax write-off commonly employed by the wealthy. Funny twist, eh?