While fast food type eating might not be good for the body, one man decided it could be better for the environment. That line of thinking is what led to the Vegawatt. A machine that reuses, and recycles vegetable oil used in deep fryers.

The premise of the VegaWatt is very simple. It turns used vegetable oil into clean heat, and energy. This eliminates the process of having to dump the oil, and just create a new batch. Once the vegetable oil has been recycled, it can provide 10-25% of a restaurant’s energy usage.

The device is about the size of a standard refrigerator, and provides some other benefits besides environmental impact. If you empty up to 70 gallons per week into the VegaWatt, you could end up saving around $800/month for energy bills. On top of your energy saving, you’ll also be eligible for income tax credit.

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I can’t seem to get the song, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It by R.E.M out of my head today. The song was released in the late 80’s, and made famous during the early-mid 90’s. Most of it due to its’ association with Independence Day, a movie about aliens invading Earth. I now know of something else the famous apocalypse song can attach itself to, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC which is referred to as the “Big Bang Machine” was finally turned on today. Deep underground at a CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) facility, rests the largest particle collider ever constructed. Everyone, specifically the engineers working on the project held their breath today, as the machine that has been 14 years in the making powered up. As the beams of protons were sent around the LHC for the first time, the engineers cheered as all went smooth. The machine won’t reach its full potential for doing what it was made to until about a month after being turned on.
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I knew it was only a matter of time. Comcast has made the first move, and starting October 1st there will be a cap for customers on their data transfer limit. Comcast customers will now have a 250 GB cap for the amount of data they can transfer.

The decision isn’t a huge surprise as a lot of analysts were predicting this would eventually happen. What is kind of surprising is how quick Comcast was in implementing the new policy.

Here’s the official proof of the bad news. Comcast’s reformed user agreement:

It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time. Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May.

In January, we added new frequently asked questions about what we consider acceptable use of our service to our online Help site www.comcast.net/help and Security Channel page www.comcast.net/security.

We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we’re announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

• Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

This is the same system we have in place today. The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted. As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.

As stated above the new monthly data usage threshold will officially take effect starting October 1st. We are notifying customers in a number of ways. For example, we have posted a preview of the amended AUP as a PDF on this page. We are also running banner notices on our Comcast.net home page and on our Security Channel Web page to alert customers about this upcoming change. In addition, we have provided a number of FAQs that are available at http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-
Questions-about-Excessive-Use. Finally, we will also notify our customers directly by including an insert (also called a bill stuffer) in an upcoming monthly billing statement.

At first I took this as very dire news, because most Internet Service Providers (ISP) will probably jump on the band wagon. I will say that 250 GB is a generous cap, and you’d have to be doing a crap load of data transferring to come close to it. What really bothers me is that this might lead to a snow ball effect. Where the cap keeps shrinking, and to make sure the cap stays at a reasonable level you have to pay for a different service. This is the kind of policy I can see data transfer capping such as this leading to.

[via: DSL Reports]

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Jerry Seinfeld is easily one of the most recognizable comedians in the history of television. He’s still raking in money from his syndication of Seinfeld. So what could Microsoft offer the legend of comedy? $10 million to be exact. This is the amount that Seinfeld will receive to sell his soul to the Microsoft empire. What’s most odd is that the entire ad campaign is budgeted for $300 million. Most of this will be going to buy ad spots on TV, internet, and radio. Be prepared for an ad blitz when they arrive.

It’s also being reported that Bill Gates will be appearing alongside Seinfeld, which will definitely make for some laughs. Mostly because Bill Gates is a pretty dry personality, and Seinfeld is…well Seinfeld.

The campaign is being started as a means to brighten the cloudy perception people have of Windows Vista. What most people are wondering is if these Seinfeld/Microsoft commercials will be used as a retort to the infamous Mac vs. PC ads starring Justin Long.

So do you see the marriage of Seinfeld and Microsoft as a good fit? Will the presence of Seinfeld actually change people’s perceptions of Windows Vista. Most importantly, who’s the more annoying of the two, Justin Long or Jerry Seinfeld?

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