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I can find you some reports on the attempts to do this if you really want to see them

Please do. Because contraceptives have been rather successful on a cost basis in the developing world, even though they don't have the technology to make them.

Granted that does not solve the cultural/educational/stability factors, and those still need to be addressed, but the effect of simple contraceptive distribution is not "zero," does in fact work even though the countries do not have a local condom factory, and lack of contraceptive access is lamented by aid groups worldwide. Granted I'm not talking about just throwing condoms off the side of a passing truck here -- there is a certain amount of sex ed involved, but cost-wise that process is cheap.

Step Five: Get a real job, or loosen up the old purse strings and pony up a couple of dollars to buy a NEW computer? C'mon, minimal systems that will blow away the hardware you must have can be had for the $200 range...heck, I hear some of them at Wallyworld Mart come WITH linux pre-installed. For a few more dollars, I saw one at Dell for $349.

You fail miserably. There are places outside your world where people get $349 *a month* for a living. And they must maintain a complete family (in fact, the average income of people in Mexico is about 515 and $2000 a year.

There are lots of these people who can not buy a new computer, and are still happily using their 486 or even 386 with windows 95 and 98. And some of them using dial up internet connections!

With no due respect. On the issues of volcanos and CFC's - you are completely full of it and talking out of your ass.

For an informed history of this piece of misinformation, see:
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?di splay_article=vn504ozoneed

You seem to intelligent to be repeating such an obvious canard. In the future please double check EVERYTHING you hear a certain oxycontin addict tell you.

No, they do create aerosols, but not CFCs, and some of those aersols help speed up the interaction of CFCs with ozone. CFCs are man made.

http://earthbulletin.amnh.org/D/3/3/
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?di splay_article=vn504ozoneed

Patrik

Please provide references to the connection between the Ozone layer and volcanoes. Here are some to the contrary:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRe publish_496920.htm

http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?di splay_article=vn504ozoneed

Jennifer Government.

Read it. It will happen (or something like it). It IS happening. Futurama was NOT at all wrong when it depicted advertisers beaming their crap into people's brains while they dreamed. Every successful marketing/sales droid I know would have zero second thoughts about anything which can increase revenue. Among those people, there are no morals. I mean, Pepsi has already tried to pollute the night sky. Pizza Hut is slapping their logo on the side of spaceships. This has been going on for years. There's nowhere they won't try to go.

There are a ton of uses for it.

Note that people happily pay $30-50 for a little blinking light that tells them when they have voicemail. They'll pay a lot more than that for extra gauges on a car dash. And companies have paid millions for fancy "war room" conference rooms that continuously display important business data.

The basic prinicple is that people have to deal with a lot of invisible data, and if you can make it visible, it's easier for people to manage. Take a look, for example, at the many designs for in-house power meters. The idea is that if people have a better idea of how much electricity they're using, they'll waste less of it.

Personally, I would be tempted to hook it up so that it went slowly from green to red whenever I got behind on my email, a visible reminder of the people I'm ignoring when I get absorbed in a project. Or since I'm a freelancer, it'd be interesting to hook it up to a moving average of billable hours, so that I have a quick objective reference to check when I wonder whether a sunny day is better spent biking than coding.

Or at a company, I'd love to set it up so that it got redder and redder when people put in too much overtime on a project. Or you could hook it up so that it responded to an anonymous web poll on morale. And then perhaps another one tied to the number of open bugs. Or perhaps percentage of code covered by test suites.

I'd agree that $200 is too steep. But for $50, I could find a lot of uses for these!