If the code-writing industry is going to rely on civil court judges and federal patent clerks to make the decisions, the firms with 2 lawyers per coder will win out. If the code-writing industry goes to no-patents, it will be from each coder according to his ability, to each according to his need. The only solution is for some industry gurus to come up with some rules which everyone agrees to abide by, and then to submit the concensus in friend-of-court decisions. I have no idea whether anyone in the industry is prepared to even define the 80/20 rule, but if they can agree on the WORST patent decisions (either way) and get some concensus on them, and then try to find commonalities in what made those "bad", it could be a start.

The Bible tells us that: Adam lived 930 years. (Genesis 5:5) ... Seth lived 912 years.(Genesis 5:8) ... Methuselah lived 969 years.(Genesis 5:27) ... And Noah lived 950 years. (Genesis 9:29) ... And that Fruit Flies lived 120 days (Lost Scroll) ...

1. Guiyu is a used semiconductor / chip harvesting and reuse center. The acid baths stuff (for biproduct after chip reuse) stopped years ago, the material is now shipped to Dowa in Japan. There's an ongoing issue with incineration of the boards to concentrate the metals ash for Dowa - that is the focus of the improvements in the article.

2. Guiyu's main industry is textile dying. The river pollution blamed on "e-waste" is almost identical to Louhajang River in Bangladesh - a textile industry pollution site.

3. Abogbloshie in Ghana is mostly an automobile junkyard. Very little of the "e-waste" there is recently imported. African cities have had TV and recycling for a long time. World Bank statistics show Nigeria had 6.9M households with TV in 2006, for example. India has NO used imports, plenty of informal sector processes.

4. Three separate peer reviewed studies show 85%-91% reuse of used electronics imports in South America and Africa.

5. According to TFA, the material currently processed in Guiyu is mostly generated in China.

6. USA has never been a significant exporter to Africa.

Emerging markets pay $$ for all the shipping. They pay for stuff they want, which is usually reuse value. They also generate "e-waste" and have their own dumps. China and India and Africa generate more electronic junk than USA or Europe. For some decent academic study on the Hoax, here are links to research at Memorial University, MIT, ASU, and UN at this /. story from last December. http://news.slashdot.org/story.... Innocent tinkerers and fixers are getting a firehose of bullshit #FreeHurricaneBenson. It is true that China (and TCL, the largest TV manufacturer in China) have invested in a clean up of Guiyu, and it's true Guiyu was nasty, but there was fortunately not all that much "ewaste" to clean up (worst is incineration of boards to concentrate ash, after chip harvest, prior to export to Dowa). Unfortunately they are not taking on cleanup of the textile industry, so the arsenic in the water samples will remain. Finding arsenic in the Guiyu river should have tipped people off in the first place, it has nothing to do with e-waste and everything to do with textile factories and copper mining.

I don't doubt GM and others can make this work. But we'll never know how many of the "sudden acceleration" Toyota accidents were actually user errors blamed via "Oh yeah, me too. That's the ticket!" excuse. Toyota eventually just settled with everyone rather than go through the cases all trial-by-trial. In other words, even if it works perfectly, how many drivers will blame the technology irregardless? And if it doesn't work perfectly, how many juries will err on the side of the victim?

Have mod points, but no one says anything interesting? Contribute here to the Mod Point Bucket [MPB] When your mod points expire, we'll owe you.

#2, Silver Mining. It turns out mountains don't come labelled as "gold" and "silver-only". As world affluence increases, demand for gold and silver increases. Today, affluent trapped from filters at gold mines produces more mercury than mercury mines. But the only mines "trapping" any mercury are in regulated western economies... most gold mining is in unregulated forests.

Lamps, by the way, have jackshit mercury, less than a fraction of what they had when lamp recycling got started. Billions of dollars are being spent "recycling" lamps which have barely any mercury in them.

At least the recycled mercury saves the environment, right? Oh. Nope. Read the great journalist John Fialka on WSJ 2006. Most of the mercury recovered from the recycling went to alluvial gold mining in Amazon and Congo river basins. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

I'm an environmentalist, but environmentalists 3.0 need to recognize past mistakes, and correct them, the same as engineers and software coders are expected to do.

That's what we all said in 1982 when Reagan was blamed for cutting the Pell Grant Program (which was replaced by loans). It turns out Reagan may have been right after all. The cost of tuition increases, when all other cost factors (energy, interest rates, salaries, etc.) were controlled for?... Federal Pell grants. The more the feds slopped into students, the higher the college tuition draw. (cue sucking sound).

I suspect that in nations where tax aid for tuition is working, the universities are government owned, and there are too many private colleges in the USA. And to give USA credit, our colleges are admired overseas in part for the competition between private and public enterprise (even if some was for the athletic facilities arms race). I was out protesting Reagan's cuts as a freshman and sophomore, but by the time I was a junior, I realized why Eisenhower included universities in his "military industrial complex" speech. We were patsies. The more our "need" was met, the higher the tuition went. It correlated to aid.

Competition and expense at elite colleges is really tough for my kids. Today, I don't think I would have gotten into the colleges I attended 30 years ago. And I hear most of the parents of my generation griping about competition from incoming foreign students.

No, I say this is good. The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees. Students are paying for the lavishness. MOOC (massive online open courses) have been proposed as the solution, providing the education without the cost of the colleges' overhead.

As this would trend, the smaller and middle reputation colleges would fold and get privatized (which has not worked well at all). Colleges like, say Hendrix in Arkansas or St. Mike's in VT, are fine schools with good professors, and they'd be the victim if it weren't for an increase in students who can afford to pay the full tuition. If the country club and reputations of US colleges didn't attract foreign full-tuition paying students, the only solution would be more college debt, which is already unsustainable. So if my kid (with better grades, scores, and languages than I had) didn't get into the "A-List" college I attended, I'm satisfied she'll find more people as smart as she is at the less prestigious school, and that all the foreign tuition coming into this program will float all boats.

The only two things most people remember about college are 1) the interesting people they met (friends, faculty, etc) and 2) the debt they leave with. MOOC's only address the latter. More wealthy foreign students paying full tuition addresses both.

Could we require them to run on proprietary fuel tank cartridges (like ink cartridgeware), with anti piracy chips?

Most people don't understand the compliance. There's good and bad, but there's no going back once your industry (candle makers, software writers, barbers, whoever) adapts a standard it invariably becomes a tool of an authority.

Good: What I like about it is that our certifications increase accountability by encouraging recording mistakes. The "routine" of flagging mistakes and finding root causes and formalizing "corrective and preventative action" has been good and improved our company.

Bad: These standards are adapted by many companies in order to reduce competition, take away via consensus unique individual methods for doing things. They become almost like a "union", punishing individual innovation via auditors that view the world inside a "box". Uniqueness and innovation are an increased cost and risk to the third party auditor, and the auditor is ready to adapt the majority interpretation - which is usually to increase barrier of entry into the field of competiton.

As Morris Kleiner, the AFL-CIO chair in labor policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, put it "Occupational licensing has either no impact or even a negative impact on the quality of services provided to customers by members of the regulated occupation."

There are two types of "nuclear waste", actual spent fuel rods which are a real problem, and a lot of "definitional" nuclear waste, like contaminated hard hats, which may or may not be dangerous but may just be landfilled in other nations. TFA implies

Saw on CNN Fareed Zakaria 2 weeks ago that for the former nuclear waste there's a USA technology to use it as fuel. Similar to "breeder reactor" use, but evidently cheaper and safer. http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn....

Train transport would have to be modular by the way, using containers that go on trucks before the truck puts it on a train. That's the way most of the containers you see on trains get there. The trains don't actually, like, go up to loading docks. Or even go to most cities at all. See photos here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If they are actually talking about actual train cars, they better first do a study of how many nuke plants have rail spurs!

Tsunamis and volcano-caused-climate-change events are historically significant.