Instead it simply stitched together a few quotes from the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collections and extracted a couple of lines from two Defra consultation documents that acknowledge the difficulty of assessing what happens to the 12 million tons of material that is exported each year for recycling overseas.
Seem too good to be true? Well, it may soon become a reality in a store near you thanks to four college students from Carnegie Mellon University.
Co-Founder Brian Groudan said the idea began with him and his three peers wanting to "consolidate all of the cards in your wallet."
"You carry around these slabs of plastic everyday," Groudan says. "The idea sort of evolved into 'hey, why do you need those cards at all?'" The foursome then built the prototype in 48 hours at a hackathon event and PayTango was born.
PayTango is a fingerprint-based identification and payment system. Signing up begins by scanning an index and middle finger, swiping your card through the reader to associate it with your fingerprint, and then punching in your phone number to finalize your account (the phone number is gathered in case you need to be contacted).
Once registered, wallets won't be needed. Shoppers can make any purchases with their fingerprints.
The team initially tested it in their CMU cafeteria with 100 students. Now, the service expanded to three dining locations on the campus. Groudan says their current focus in the next few months are college campuses but insists that's only the beginning, adding that the possibilities are "endless".
"I think the applications extend way beyond that," Groudan says. "Once you have the profile think about transportation not having to fumble with the coins, to pay for parking you just touch the meter, or when you're at the hospital and pull up your medical records."
The owner of the textile factory that produced them closed down and left Egypt soon after the country’s 2011 revolution. Assad Attiya, a clerk who has worked at the store for 13 years, said the former factory owner, like himself, is Christian.
“The owner is afraid to come back. It is harder here now and we want to leave,” explained Attiya, 48, from behind an almost barren counter he said once had been “lined with beautiful linens.”
By some estimates, tens of thousands of Christians have left post-revolution Egypt. Like the former textile maker, they have left due to concerns over rising Muslim conservatism and a general instability they say is emboldening attacks against them.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of sectarian tension yet occurred Sunday in central Cairo, where a crowd attacked Christian mourners after they emerged from a funeral in Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral. The funeral was for four men killed in a Cairo gunfight Friday, in which a Muslim man also was killed. Some of the mourners, joined by sympathetic Muslims, filed out of St. Mark’s Cathedral shouting exhortations against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his largely Islamic government.
The crowd responded to the demonstrators with rocks and gasoline bombs. Police eventually moved in, but numerous and independent news agencies reported police appeared to take the side of crowd, firing tear-gas canisters into the St. Mark’s courtyard and taking no action to stop the attacks on the Christians and their real time Location system.
Attiya, the fabric-story clerk, said he had applied the last two years for U.S. residency — a green card — through a lottery system that Washington sponsors, but wasn’t selected. A few months ago, he requested a tourist visa to visit his brother who works in an amusement park in New York, but was denied.
“All Egyptians, by nature, are kind (but) circumstances are now making everything bad, so I am afraid of you and you are afraid of me. And because of the fear within you, you become bad,” Attiya said.
“We all hoped for the best, but no one knows now what will happen,” he said, reflecting his disappointment over how the revolution, which united thousands of Muslims and Christians alike, has transpired.
Egyptians, including thousands of Muslims, now opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood government demonstrate and strike almost daily. The country’s military and other security forces have been at odds with the new government, and at times have withdrawn completely from different cities around the country.
The resulting state of instability, decaying economy and rise in crime have scared many Egyptians into leaving, or trying to — not least of all Egyptian Christians who say they are easy targets when trouble erupts and there is no system in place to protect them.
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