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Comment Don't we have this already? (Score 1) 113

"Green Power describes its process as a proprietary catalytic pressure-less depolymerization process (CDP) where municipal solid waste or a wide variety of organic wastes are 'cracked' at the molecular level and the long-chain polymers (plastic, organic material such as wood, etc.) are chemically altered to become short-chain hydrocarbons with no combustion. Combustion requires oxygen or a similar compound, but according to Green Power the CDP occurs in an anaerobic environment, exposed only to inert gases like nitrogen."

This sounds very similar to a heavy oil conversion unit, which takes long chains of hydrocarbons (organic materials) and breaks them into smaller molecules. Refineries have been doing this for decades! I'm not saying this isn't good to reduce overall waste or anything like that, but unless I'm missing something, this is hardly new technology...

As a couple examples of conversion units:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coker_unit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking

Comment Re:Actually you're the one who is mistaken (Score 1) 236

Actually, the parent is correct. Fractional reserve banking means that the banks keep a fraction of what they loan out as a reserve. A bank will have 10 dollars and loan out 100 or more dollars. This is OK as long as too many people don't want their money at once (a run on the bank); the bank simply cannot repay all of the people who deposited money with the bank because they only keep a small fraction of what is actually deposited.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Comment Re:Google Maps (Score 1) 1188

That's nothing - wait until Version 2.0 comes out and not only will it tell you when the nearby rich person lives, it will show you their personal schedule for when they will be out of town, display the best method of entry into their house, and send all the police out to the opposite side of town!
Education

Coping Strategies for Women in IT 648

Ian Lamont writes "Female workers are losing ground in the IT profession, reports Computerworld, citing statistics which show a sharp drop in the number of female CS grads since the 1980s, and a decline in the percentage of women in the IT profession since 2001. According to the article, causes include pervasive stereotypes and the locker-room atmosphere found in some IT shops — attitudes which some readers may recognize from the comments in a Slashdot thread last week. The IT professionals interviewed in the Computerworld article discuss a variety of strategies for coping. They range from trying to 'out-boy the boys' to watching what you say, as one Sun Microsystems executive describes:'It's not unusual to be the only woman at a meeting, she says, and because of that, there's often a tendency to remain silent unless you think you have something really remarkable to say. "As one member of a small group, you feel you have no right to be mediocre ... You're not just representing yourself; you're representing [females] with a capital F.'"
Patents

Submission + - Optimum Copyright period decided by maths!

An anonymous reader writes: So how long SHOULD a copyright be valid for? There are as many opinions here as there are humans. But a Cambridge student has stepped into the discussion with a dispassionately calculated estimate of the optimal period a copyright should be granted for. Here is ArsTechnica's take: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-rese arch-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html, and here is the original paper for all you maths dudes out there: http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optim al_copyright.pdf

Matrox's Extio Reviewed 204

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Matrox isn't as dead as some of us thought. This box of tricks lets you connect four displays up to a PC that's 250 meters away. All the graphic data is sent down a fiber optic cable to the Matrox box that then connects to the screens. To the end user it feels like they're working directly on the PC, but the PC can be locked away somewhere safe."

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