A New Visa Card For Spending Green

Posted May 4th 2007 11:01AM by Deidre Woollard Filed under: Services

Your Centurion card comes with a lot of perks but saving the planet isn't one of them. The first card that purports to do that is the ReDirect Guide Visa , a credit card that promises to help fight climate change with every purchase and offers customers discounts from green businesses. A percentage of each purchase goes to carbon offset programs to fund renewable energy and sustainable development programs through Sustainable Travel International. The card is offered through ShoreBank Pacific which is the first FDIC-insured commercial bank in the U.S. committed to sustainable community development.

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copyclaim.com - Proof of Authorship?

Augustine: uuuuhhhh... getting a timestamp and hash of a piece of digital content you have on your computer does not prove you own it or created it ("ownership or authorship")... am I missing something here? (and their java app crashed my Firefox! damn!) from KillerStartups.com - published startups by Alexstl

Have you ever felt that someone is stealing your ideas, or plagiarizing your work? CopyClaim can help put a stop to that. CopyClaim is an internet tool that allows you to take a time stamp of your creative work, such as audio and video files, or pictures, enabling you to prove possession of the digital content at a certain time and certain date. With the time stamp you can then register your work and have the ability to prove the time of creation. There is no need to upload your files to the site, only hash values are registered, like MD5 and SHA. It is a safe and convenient way to protect your work. In their own words: "A free timestamp service without the need of additional software. You even don't need to create a user account." Why it might be a killer: Musicians, artists, and writers are increasingly posting songs, stories, pictures, and many other forms of creative work on the internet. No one wants their work to be stolen, or credited by someone else. CopyClaim can simplify the process of having your work copyrighted, and it soon could become a necessity for all creative works to be protected with a copyright. Some questions: Will people trust the site with their information that they want kept secret or protected? » original news

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Researchers utilize electricity to move magnetically-stored data

Posted May 14th 2007 3:31AM by Darren Murph Filed under: Storage

While Fujitsu works overtime in order to boost hard drive capacity by 500-percent in just two years, researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany are devising a method to move magnetically-stored data around a HDD "a hundred times faster than currently possible." Guido Meier and colleagues are purportedly using "nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire at 110-meters per second," which easily trumps today's method of using comparatively slow spinning discs to access data. Additionally, their vision of the next-generation hard drive will sport fewer mechanical parts in order to lessen the "wear and tear" that existing units face. Notably, the idea behind the creation was actually conjured up by an IBM employee in 2004, but if the Germans crafting the current prototype have anything to say about it, said idea could turn into reality sooner than later. read more

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LG Philips announces A4 color e-paper

Posted May 14th 2007 5:50AM by Darren Murph Filed under: Displays

While this doesn't mark the first time that we've caught wind of colorized electronic paper, South Korea's LG Philips has announced that an A4-sized rendition of the vivid bendable display has successfully been developed in its labs. The panel reportedly measures just 35.9-centimeters diagonally, is 0.3-millimeter thick, and can display up to 4,096 colors while maintaining the energy efficient qualities that inevitably come with using energy only when the image changes. Unsurprisingly, the company plans on marketing the device as one of convenience and doesn't hesitate to tout its greenness in the process, but unfortunately, it failed to mention when this would find its way out into the general public. [Via Physorg]

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Dubai Burj al-Taqa skyscraper to generate all its own energy

Posted May 14th 2007 8:16AM by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Filed under: Household

A skyscraper in Dubai is being designed so that it generates all of its energy through renewable means such as wind turbines and solar panels. On top of the tower will be a 200 foot turbine that harnesses the power of the wind, and an array of solar panels on the roof and a series of islands that stretches over 161,459 square feet. The tower will also feature a massive solar shield to protect it from the sun, and vacuum glazed glass that will reduce the amount of heat absorbed from the extreme temperatures (up to 50 degrees C / 122 degrees F), presumably meaning less reliance on traditional air conditioning. Talking of air conditioning, the main system for cooling the air inside the tower uses a convection system which pulls in cold air at the ground level, and sucks it up out of the top of the tower. The air conditioning will use seawater, and underground cooling units lower the temperature inside to 18 degrees C / 64.4 degrees F. This building may be a technological beacon for environmentally friendly skyscrapers, but as a commenter on metaefficient points out, new building designs don't do much to solve the inefficiency of older buildings in cities. Although that doesn't mean we can't imagine what it'd be like to work and live in a sea of glass and metal without feeling slightly bad about it. [Via Metaefficient]

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