Vertical Farming with Seawater

gismag.com

"The vertical farm features a soaring spire with pod-like ‘sky-gardens’ branching off to give it an organic feel in keeping with designers aims to create a clean, green, sustainable source of food for a more self-sufficient Dubai. The concept makes use of the Seawater Greenhouse process, which uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distill fresh water from seawater to enable the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions such as Dubai. This is in stark contrast to costly and energy intensive desalination plants that rely on boiling and pumping to produce fresh water."

Only at concept stage right now, so in other words, the details of how the thing would actually work have yet to be thought through. I wonder if it also rotates?

Click the above link to read the whole article and see 7 drawings.

Sustainability. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Meh - get the solar power farms working first.

Skype access to return to the UAE?

It might be according to Arabian Business - but don't hold your breath, read the whole article.

Quote of the decade from Mohamed Al Ghanim, director general of the TRA:

Customers and even those (VoIP) companies think that we are blocking them, but we are not blocking them – we are putting a process together for those companies to be licenced and this will take some time. There are challenges associated with it.

Wait a minute - an online company with no physical presence in the U.A.E has to be licensed in the U.A.E.? Is this true with other companies such as Ebay?

Another gem:

When we licence a company in the UAE, we make sure they have a presence, so if you pay your bill and the company does not provide you with a service, there is a way to recover your money. Customers need to be protected.

Yah - tell that to the people who have lost their money to U.A.E. licensed companies such as property developers who have over-hyped and under-delivered, or to telecom companies who charge people for a fast internet speed but deliver such a slow speed that a snail would be ashamed of it.

Why can't the TRA just come out and say, "We're banning Skype because it would cut into our already humungous profits."?

We could live with that!