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Lime.
San Francisco on Tuesday became the first city in the nation to outlaw non-recyclable plastic bags from use in supermarkets, drugstores, and other large retailers. In a 10-1 vote, the city’s Board of Supervisors required the use of compostable or recyclable bags.
We've known for some time that energy saving bulbs contain mercury; it's essential to how they produce light. However, the manufacturers have previously explained that the energy saved results in less mercury output from power stations. This saving is more than enough to offset the problem, so it was a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, new research shows that the mercury released when an energy saving bulb is disposed of is in a form more able to enter the food chain than that released by power stations.
Techies at the University of Oslo have built an evolutionary computer that changes its design using genetic algorithms to improve performance:
What their hardware does is par up “genes” in the hardware to find the hardware design that is the most effective to accomplish the tasks at hand. Just like in the real world it can take 20 to 30 thousand generations before the system finds the perfect design to solve the problem, but this will happen in just a few seconds compared to the 8-900.000 years it took humans to go through the same number of generations.
Dvorak Calls for Apple to Ditch iPhone.
Mac followers can consider PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak a “contrarian indicator”. Often, the more frustrated and vitriolic Dvorak gets over a technology, the more likely it is to succeed. Dvorak is well-known for stirring up a hornet’s nest by slamming Apple and its users. That’s why it’s really no surprise that his latest rant calls for Apple to ditch the iPhone before it becomes what he expects will be a marketplace disaster.His reasoning?
1. Apple will face strong competition.
2. The lifespan of a “cool” phone is too short.
3. Good margins don’t exist in the phone business.
Even the FCC chairman appears to have iPhone fever.
Amazon spent a decade and a whopping $2 billion dollars to build the world class technology that powers their web sites. Today Amazon makes available their own infrastructure to the anyone, via Amazon Web Services.
Pain From Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts.
For decades, Alan S. Blinder -- Princeton University economist, former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and perennial adviser to Democratic presidential candidates -- argued, along with most economists, that free trade enriches the U.S. and its trading partners, despite the harm it does to some workers. "Like 99% of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free trader down to my toes," he wrote back in 2001. Politicians heeded this advice and, with occasional dissents, steadily dismantled barriers to trade. Yet today Mr. Blinder has changed his message -- helping lead a growing band of economists and policy makers who say the downsides of trade in today's economy are deeper than they once realized.
For the State, investing in energy efficiency programs and enforcing stringent building standards has proven a cost-effective way to help safeguard the reliability of energy resources. About 9,000 megawatts (MW) of energy have been saved over the past 25 years - the equivalent to the output of 18 500MW power plants. State programs and standards have also helped to make California businesses globally competitive, adding three percent to the rate of economic growth, for example, between 1977 and 1995. Energy efficiency creates jobs, new technologies and new industries, while helping to keep the lights on for California's more than 36 million residents.
The least toxic drug known to humans is now illegal. The most toxic is available at Safeway. None of this makes any sense at all. And yet we continue to imprison people for ingesting substances far less harmful than others freely available. One has to wonder what the prohibitionists are smoking. Maybe nutmeg.
Mr. Gonzales’s career has been laced with such narrow escapes for both him and Mr. Bush. As a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, Mr. Gonzales had worked for Enron until 1994. After Enron imploded in 2001, reporters wanted to know whether Ken Lay’s pals in the Bush hierarchy had received a heads up about the company’s pending demise before its unfortunate shareholders were left holding the bag. The White House said that Mr. Gonzales had been out of the Enron loop “to the best of his recollection.” This month Murray Waas of The National Journal uncovered a more recent close shave: Just as Justice Department investigators were about to examine “documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role” in the administration’s extralegal domestic wiretapping program last year, Mr. Bush shut down the investigation.
Gonzales Met With Advisers on Dismissals.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.
The previously undisclosed meeting appeared to contradict Mr. Gonzales’s previous statements about his knowledge of the dismissals. He said at a news conference on March 13 that he had not participated in any discussions about the removals, but knew in general that his aides were working on personnel changes involving United States attorneys.
