GENeco, an “organic waste solutions” specialist (AKA sewage treatment) company in the UK is bringing something new to the green table: a human-powered car.  The Bio-Bug is a VW Beetle converted to run on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) which is a lot like Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) only, well, less compressed as it remains in a harder-to-contain gaseous form rather than the denser and more commonly used liquid form.  Presumably the choice was made because the hardware to convert natural gas into LNG requires a cooling phase and more expensive equipment.  In any event, the Bio-Bug is essentially run on methane gas.  And where does that gas come from?  In this case it’s from cleaned-up leftovers from the Avonmouth sewage treatment plant of Wessex Water.

You see the Avonmouth plant normally produces CNG from sewage waste, which powers its “digesters” through a combination of electrical power and heat generated from, you guessed it, burning off the CNG surplus from the sewage.  It’s a brilliant idea as methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so should not be released into the atmosphere.  Burning it, turning it into carbon gasses instead, is far less harmful to our environment.  So using it in any way is a big plus, and where can you get more methane than from organic waste?  It’s not a new concept and in fact it’s a new trend to convert livestock farms to methane power.  But it’s nice to see it in action wherever possible and a sewage treatment plant is certainly a good place to use the technology.  Especially when there’s enough produced to also generate electricity to sell back to the grid, as is the case in Avonmouth.

But the thing is, even with all of that, Avonmouth still has a surplus of methane biogas, which would normally just be burned off before releasing it into the atmosphere to break down the methane into less damaging carbon gasses.  And that’s where GENeco has stepped in with their Bio-Bug.  With a little cleaning up of the excess CO2 naturally found in the biogas, the methane is converted into a cleaner burning fuel fit for automotive use.  And the Volkswagon Beetle, converted to run on CNG, is just the kind of vehicle to use it.

GENeco Bio-Bug - a human-waste powered car

Which all sounds brilliant and green!  It’s a great way to convert waste into a renewable resource, right?

Well, with a few caveats.  The first being that this isn’t really a carbon-free system.  It’s a good use of carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, carbon-shifting I guess you could call it.  It is not however carbon free.

The second caveat, one could simply replace the CNG cleansing and distribution with more electricity production for recharging electric cars, or even used to generate hydrogen from hydrocarbons through steam reforming to power hydrogen cars.  There are green paths here that are more synergistic with the modern green automotive trends that can be done at a big facility where as the typical farm cannot.

And the third caveat, and perhaps one of significant note, is that this is a process that does not equate to one car per household.  No.  It takes approximately seventy households to produce the quantity of CNG needed for one Bio-Bug.  It won’t work for every household to run their daily automotive needs, but it could be used in the fleet vehicles needed in the running of any facility.

So clearly, this is not a magic pill that could solve all of the world’s problems.  It is however a very interesting and creative approach to better utilizing the resources available to us, even (if not especially) the ones that we consider to be useless waste.  The smarter that we can innovate with these under-utilized resources, the better off our planet will be.  And the more intriguing the solutions are now, the more advanced and opportunities to replicate or even improve upon them will be in our future.  Sometimes being green isn’t just about the perfect zero-sum product, but about more efficiency with what we have.  If there’s one thing that we have a lot of, it’s poo.  So brown is the new green, and innovatively trapping, collecting, and utilizing methane gas will make for a better tomorrow, no matter how silly it might seem to drive a poo-powered car.

The DMCA or Digital Millennium Copyright Act was a very broad stroke copyright law enacted in 1998.  It extended the reach of copyrights whilst simultaneously granting far broader power to the copyright holder, most specifically in making it illegal to circumvent “encryption” of copyrighted materials.  No matter how poor the encryption was.  And no matter how many legal rights under the US “Fair Use” laws were trampled.

Since then, the DMCA has become a veritable pendulum swung over everyone’s head, preventing a great many formerly legal uses of copyrighted material.  Agencies like the RIAA, MPAA, etc. were all too happy to jump upon the new powers against usage of any and all copyrighted works in any way they disagreed with, regardless of what the law used to allow and rights people had before the DMCA.

To say that it was a law that undermined people’s trust in government, as well as in law itself. by handing over an abusive amount of power to corporate America whilst trampling the rights of the individual is a grievous understatement.

So it comes as both no surprise and great surprise then that some amends are finally being made.

The Librarian of Congress has released exemptions to the DMCA that finally begin redressing the loss of legal rights under US Fair Use law.  The following exemptions now apply to the DMCA:

1. DVDs can now have their encryption circumvented so that short portions of motion pictures can be used for educational uses, for documentaries, and for noncommercial videos.
2. Jailbreaking your cell phone for the purposes of running legal software otherwise blocked or banned.
3. Unlocking your cell phone so that you can use any network carrier instead of the one your model of phone was locked into using.
4. Video games can be hacked for the purposes of testing, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities.
5. Computer software protected by dongles can be cracked if the dongle malfunctions or is obsolete, such as if the company producing the software/dongle is no longer selling dongles.  (Or even in business for that matter.)
6. The encryption of electronic books can be circumvented if the encryption in all existing editions of the ebook prevent text-to-speech and likewise technologies that impinge upon the rights of disabled people.

It’s certainly not the restoration of all lost rights that the DMCA trod upon, but it is definitely a good beginning.  Most of my concerns are the narrowness of scope of the written law of these exceptions.  Namely details like the specific use of the acronym “DVD”.  Besides the fact that Blu-Ray Disks are now quite common, making DVDs antiquated, we’re also in the Electronic Age, where many movies aren’t even on any type of a compact disk at all, but are still encrypted.  So you can crack a DVD to copy a segment of it for your documentary, but you cannot do the same with a movie downloaded from NetFlix for example, because of the narrowness of the wording of this exception.

Likewise “video games” can be legally cracked now for security purposes, but no other encrypted or otherwise protected computer software can.  Again, the legal wording sets a very narrow scope.

And while outdated software using dongles from a company that no longer exists might be nice to finally be allowed to circumvent, what about similar protections in software that requires some form of network authorization that “phones home” to a server that no longer exists?  Think Steam and what would happen if those servers went dead.  Same concept, just newer technology, but because of the limitations set in the written word…

You get the point.  It’s a very good start, but, sadly, very based in the last millennium, not this one.

And then there are all of those other rights, like backing up for protection in case of damage to the original media, which aren’t even remotely addressed in these exceptions.  Transference to a different type of media when the physical format becomes outdated the same as those old dongles.  (Does anyone even have a working floppy drive anymore?)  Will we ever see those kinds of rights restored?  Circumventing encryption is sometimes a necessity in using our legally granted rights, but not according to the DMCA.

And then there’s that elephant in the room:  What is the point of legally protecting a form of encryption when the means of breaking that encryption is common knowledge?  If I encoded my blog in Pig Latin, should I really have any expectations of protection?

And then there’s the obvious question of the value of the DMCA at all: When aren’t the simple laws against misuse of copyright enough to legally protect a copyright?  Stealing is still stealing, regardless of whether you broke through a door to do it or not.

Perhaps one day these are all issues that will be addressed.  But at least, today, the Librarian Of Congress is finally putting to bed some of the gross abuses of the broad powers granted in the DMCA.

Introduced to Pace University in New York a year ago by Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle DX was meant to be the ultimate tool for college students.  It’s very readable nearly 10-inch screen and large storage capacity were supposed to make it the ideal choice for replacing paper books with electronic ones.

But is it?

In a test program introduced to various college campuses around the US last fall, Amazon.com has been handing out the Kindle DX to students and asking for their feedback.  And so far, the answer is a resounding, “No.”

A whopping 80% of college students in the test program are saying that they would not recommend the Kindle DX  as a classroom study aid.

There are a number of complaints, but the largest of them fall thusly:

• You can’t scribble notes into the margins.
• You can’t easily highlight passages.
• You can’t view graphs and charts in the color they’re meant to be in.
• Flipping back and forth between pages is too slow.
• The bookmarking function to let you flip between important sections in a book is buggy.

Anyone who has studied in college can easily attest to these veritable necessities in using a book.  Studying from textbooks is not a simple linear read, from a page to the next page to the next.  Studying is a complex procedure in which one goes back and forth, highlights important passages, adds notes of their own, sticky-note-bookmarks important sections, and reads and re-reads and add more notes to the same important sections repeatedly.  Quickly.  Easily.

But not if you’re using an e-book reader.  And definitely not on the Amazon Kindle DX.

In theory, other e-book readers, or even updates to Amazon’s Kindle line, might eventually fix some of these problems.  Bookmarking could be done better.  Page turning could be made faster.  Notes, possibly, could even be scribbled into e-margins.  And color, well color is already available on e-book readers not using e-ink.  And on devices like Apple’s iPad.

But will this actually make these electronic devices as good as a real print book?  Can e-books ever be as good as paper for a college student?

And will Digital Rights Management (DRM), making it impossible to resell old books, be a benefit to the industry, as some propose, or a financially crippling hindrance to budget-minded students?

The usefulness of e-books at schools is very much in question.

And then there’s the price.  Maybe if Amazon’s Kindle DX didn’t have competing products that sold for less.  But even then, at almost five hundred dollars, one could buy Amazon’s Kindle DX that is basically only an e-book reader, or one could buy an Apple iPad that can run all sorts of Apps, including ones to read e-books.  Or heck, one could even buy various UMPCs and touchscreen laptops, capable of running actual software applications like MS Office for writing their papers on as well as e-book software and far more.

So given that choice why would any college student buy the Kindle DX then?

When it comes to American space shuttles, one tends to think NASA.  However, there are other people who like to leave our world behind, such as those flyboys, the US Air Force.  And so it comes as some surprise when we hear that the US Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office is about to test a robot shuttle, the X-37B.

“The X-37B has the requirement to be on-orbit up to 270 days. Actual length for the first mission will depend on the meeting the mission objectives, which consists of checkout and performance characteristics of the spacecraft systems.

Objectives of the OTV [Orbital Test Vehicle] program include space experimentation, risk reduction and concept of operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies.”

The X-37 was in fact initially a NASA project.  However it was passed on, and fell into the hands of the USAF.  And now we’ll get to see just how well the military can handle what NASA gave up, the chance to launch, operate, and land an unmanned space shuttle.

Sony is demoing a new wireless communications technology to replace the wiring inside of devices.  It’s being called “millimeter wave” because it operates in the 1-10mm wavelength, and it just may one day replace a lot of wires inside of your TV.  It has a very high data transfer rate (11 Gb/s so far), and can use incredibly tiny antennae.  The only real limitation is its range, a mere 14mm at present.  Sony recons though that with a directional antenna it can reach as far as 50mm.

The big questions though is why.  Why would you replace perfectly good wired communication with wireless communication inside of a device?

One answer, is money.  Wires cost money.  Where as a 1mm wireless antenna to reach across 50mm of distance, well that’s potentially a heck of a lot cheaper in materials.

There’s also another consideration as well, and that’s that not all parts in a device work well with wires.  Take laptops for example.  The monitor hinged to the base has a bunch of tiny wires connecting it for your video signal.  Which requires a lot of design consideration and parts testing so that the wires don’t accidentally break during the life of the product and you suddenly find your laptop has a dead black screen.  That’d suck.  Where as if that video signal were sent from the base to the monitor wirelessly, you’d never have to worry about routing those cables or testing that they won’t break, because there are no cables to route.  The more portable and changeable our electronic gadgetry becomes, the more a few wireless connections to replace wired ones makes sense.

Of course it’s rather a security nightmare of sorts to think that, just like your RFIDed passport, someone could snoop goodness knows what by walking by with a listening device while you use your shiny new Sony netbook at the airport.  But hopefully that will be addressed.

It should be interesting to see where this “millimeter wave” networking takes us.