Digital Trends
Check out Part I and Part II in our series about life in the year 2020.
Our cities are a mess. Based on grids of pavement for devices of transport that pump poisonous fumes into the atmosphere, they and their inhabitants are slowly but inexorably being choked into submission. Many of them are rotting from the core – their eroding downtowns often unattainable in heavy traffic from the distant, sprawling suburbs that surround them.
You might not hop in a car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and drive to work until decades from now, but you can charge up your gadgets based on a different type of fuel cell in just a few days. After a long line of prototypes, Toshiba has finally released the Dynario, its first methanol-powered gadget charger.
Fill the Dynario with methanol – the same stuff powering dragsters, monster trucks and Indy cars – and it reacts with ambient oxygen in the air to produce electricity. Enough electricity, according to Toshiba, to charge two typical mobile phones.
The Chinese government has announced it is postponing a requirement that all PC makers begin shipping new PCs with the Green Dam Internet filtering software by July 1. According to the official state news agency Xinhua, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will “delay the mandatory installation of the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software on new computers.” No new deadline was given for PC makers to comply with the order.
China is sticking to its guns and requiring PC makers to bundle the Internet filtering software Green Dam by July 1, despite concerns the software will expose users to security risks…and even allegations the software contains stolen code. Now, electronics giant Sony is apparently the first computer maker to include Green Dam in the default software included with its computers bound for China…although the company is apparently including a disclaimer warning that it is not responsible for any problems or damage users may incur from using the software.
There are two groups of people you don’t want to aggravate in this world: florists and environmentalists. We learned the first after making “disparaging remarks” (their words, not ours) about the longevity of flowers in this year’s Valentine’s Day gift guide, prompting a fiery letter from the Society of American Florists. The second piece of knowledge was gleaned after criticizing LG’s “environmentally friendly” Skycharger at CES this year.
It might be an idea whose time has come – shop and save the planet. In the UK, online shoppers can now build up credits to offset their annual carbon footprint. A new portal, Smartly Green, allows shoppers to click through to the web sites of major High Street retailers like John Lewis, Asda and Comet. When they make a purchase, Smartly Green receives a commission from the retailer. Of the commission, 50% isreturned to the shopper. But here’s where it differs from most loyalty schemes. 80% of the amount due to the shopper is given to PURE, a carbon-offsetting charity that’s compliant withthe Kyoto Treaty. The remaining 20% goes to the shopper in cash. Once a shopper has offset his annual carbon footprint (which you can calculate through Smartly Green, then the figures arereverse, with 80% returned to the shopper and 20% going to PURE. As a rough guide, Smartly Green estimates that a family of four living in a detachedhouse, owning two cars and taking one flight to Europe and one long-haul flight per year will emit about 16 tonnes of CO2. As an average, each $600 spent via Simply Green will generate enough incommission to offset 0.5 tonnes of carbon. That means spending over $19,000 a year via Smartly Green to offset the family’s emissions – and that’s quite a chunk of change, and meansthat most people won’t be seeing a lot of cash returned to their wallets. However, for ethical shoppers, it might represent a step in the right direction.
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