That's hilarious. Generating a CAPTCHA using HTML tables. It's not like computers can't parse HTML (assuming you aren't using IE). Good thing they have (commented!) JavaScript to disable copy and paste. Must have been done by an intern as an inside joke or something.
So several billion people burning grass and trees to cook and stay warm isn't bad for the environment? I think so: deforestation and all the soot in the air.
But, still, my argument is valid. So long as Wall Street rewards short term behavior with cash, the long term environment just won't matter. Sure oil may be $500/barrel in 2050, but no one cares since they are rewarded for now.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the OP, but short sighted thinking is precisely what makes money on Wall Street. Poor people tend to live in the short term as well, as in "what am I going to eat TODAY?"
Until these problems are addressed, I don't think most people in the world are going to care much about the environment.
99.9% of the test subjects eventually just stopped working, talking, eating, and moving they were so completely pacified. The other.1% became insanely enraged and started slaughtering, eating, and/or raping the the musicians and producers. So the problem kinda worked itself out.
Houses can be built with steel joists instead of wood 2x4s. They are made from galvanized steel, however, its' relatively thin. I could see that messing up cordless phones and stuff, but not much else. Steel makes a relatively poor magnet since it can't hold much. That's why real magnets are rare earth because various elements help make better magnets. They are likely confusing RF interference and magnetic interference. They may have the former, but not the later. Plus, joists would be magnetized to to bottom, and I doubt you'd get much interference for a 8 foot long, thin gauge steel.
In addition to the moderation / meta-moderation issues noted (confirmation bias anyone?) Changes over the past year have made reading/. on a mobile device (e.g. iPhone) almost impossible. Page loads take forever and it must be trying to calculate pi to 1 billion places for each page load. Plus, clicking a collapsed story to show it will scroll to the top. That's stupid. The "More" links are lame, too. You can keep clicking "more" to get more stories (since it only displays like 5), but when you go into a story to read comments and then come out, all your extra stories are gone. A simple "next page" feature would be far more useful. AJAX is all fine, but/. abuses it to the point where it detracts from site functionality.
LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...
I wish MS Office for the Mac supported DOCX better. Granted I don't have the very latest, but it's horrendous on older versions. Of course, Mac MS Office can't really read any complex Word or Excel files from the PC properly and they are from the same company.
The Borders brick and mortar bookstore chain is dead, 10000s of people lost their jobs, and I am out of a favourite place to explore books. All this occurred because customers flock to Amazon like buzzards to a carcass so they can buy merchandise without having to pay tax (outside of WA).
Please. Amazon's prices for books were much less than those of Borders, even without taxes. In fact, you could purchase books on Amazon cheaper than the clearance prices at Borders. Why pay $25 for a book when Amazon has it for $18? Same with music. I could buy a CD at Target for $14 or get it from Amazon for $10. Tax just isn't that high that I care to shop to avoid taxes.
From TFA: "With it's intergalactic range of 85 miles, the S3 Krypton is the first and only handheld laser visible from outer space." Maybe it's different here but I'd hardly call 85 miles "intergalactic."
Maybe they meant intragalactic. Although a 1mW laser pointer would also qualify.
Indeed, he thinks if the CEO of a company no one cares about keeps saying reality-challenged things enough he can move the market to his lame plan. He should be learning where the market is going and strategize, but I'd bet he thinks strategy is the same as a Dilbert-esque mission statement.
In fact, it's doable right now, you just need to downsize the engine. For some reason, everyone now thinks they need 300hp and a 5-6 second 0-60 time to have "decent" acceleration, which 20 years ago was muscle car territory. If we went back to the power levels cars had around 1990, we could easily have very comfortable large cars with 40+ mpg. The other way to do it is to drop in a diesel engine; VW has several models, including the Jetta Sportwagen, which gets 43mpg IIRC. Of course, even though it has tons of torque, it "only" has about 140hp, so it doesn't accelerate to 80mph on freeway on-ramps like the 300hp family cars that are common now.
I wouldn't consider a mid-sided car with 140 HP anything I'd ever want. Full size with at least 200 HP. Adding more gears to the automatic transmission would help, as would diesel, but modern diesel engines are expensive and complex and many gas stations round me don't even carry diesel. I've rented several mid-sided, fuel efficient cars and I hated every one. Too small and powerless. Making cars lighter lets you accelerate with a smaller engine, but that's the tradeoff with safety.
Curves are frequently put in otherwise straight roads as a "traffic calming" measure. Without them, people drive faster, and of course faster speeds means more energy in a crash which means more deaths. Throwing in some random curves slows people down without having to annoy them with artificially-low speed limits, speed traps, etc.; they just automatically drive slower.
In a urban environment, sure. Not where I live. We get several deaths on a few roads each year because people will keep going 60 in a 35. The reason is that people think you can go faster since it's rather rural and there isn't much traffic, but there are so many blind curves, large humps that block the view of a driveway until you are 20 feet from it, etc. They do traffic calming here in the housing plans "think if the kids", but people (including me!) just get ticked off and run the stop signs since they are forcing us to slow down with silly shrubbery islands in the middle. On a semi-rural road, flattening, straightening and widening would help more. The one street near by was in the top 10 deadliest in the state a few years back (may still be) because of these problems. In California where I used to live, they actually did engineering and roads were fairly well done. Sure they had traffic calming things, too, but they were at least safe and not over the top.
Nope, straight, flat, wide roads lead to much higher speeds, which lead to more deaths. You'd save more lives by making all the roads single-lane and as windy as possible. There'd still be crashes, but they'd all be really low-speed crashes, so the death count would be much lower. Of course, everyone would be pissed about being forced to drive so slow and would be voting out all the politicians and voting for new ones who promised them wide, flat, straight roads. Then, they'd complain that there's too many deaths.
Please, that's just plain ignorant. Come to semi-rural Pennsylvania and see for your self. We don't see the people rolling their cars on the straight flat roads. Where I live, people drive 15 MPH over the limit everywhere, including around blind curves, blind hills, with 18" diameter trees 6" from the edge of the road. I'm not exaggerating. People die all the time. When it rains, we have rivers flowing down the roads because there are no berms and poor grading. Driveways hidden behind humps and curves and trees. On the straight, flat roads you can actually see what's ahead and plan accordingly.
Nice theory, and I'd bet it works in more urban places. Not here where no engineering goes into the roads. You are talking like someone is engineering traffic calming and such. Here there is no thought to road design. Pave it and go. When my brother's kids visit, they are always entertained when driving because it literally feels like a ro
Actually, you can get 40 mpg in such a car - gotta change the powerplant, and allow for a fuel that has more energy in a gallon. You can push 45 or even 50 if you get rid of the torque converter, and ideally shift it yourself, too. And, due to the low-end torque, the acceleration is surprisingly good.
(Large diesel family cars can easily get 40+ mpg. And that's US gallons, not UK gallons.)
Yea, but moving from gasoline in the US isn't going to happen any time soon. Diesel is fine, but more expensive for the engine and fuel, although you do get more energy out of it. It's also less available. I've rented a number of 30+ MPG cars, and they pretty much all suck. I want at least 200 HP out of an engine and large enough to hold 5 people comfortably with ample trunk space. Think the size of a Ford Tarus or BMW 5 series. You are talking maybe 30 highway.
Most cars now have locking torque converters, so there isn't much loss there. In fact, many automatic transmissions are almost as efficient as manual, and more so given how most people drive manual cars. The advent of 7, 8, 9 speed automatic transmissions will help more than anything.
Wow, a lesson in design tradeoffs. You can't have a large comfortable, safe car with several air bags, an enormous crumple zone with decent acceleration that gets 40 MPG. One of the best way to increase fuel economy is to move less car around, and, all things being equal, a heavier car is better. (That is assuming we are comparing well-designed cars.)
Around here, we could save tons of lives by having better ROADs. Most roads here have no space berm off to the side (just trees), tons of random curves, hills, blind spots, etc. They'd save tons of lives (at huge cost, no doubt) if they straightened and flattened the roads and made them a little wider. Not to mention some type of rumble strip to warn people when they cross the center line. (They have those in California, but the dots don't work when you have to plow the roads. They can make indents, but that appears to cost too much.) My theory is that Pennsylvania just paves over whatever deer path was there without regard to any sort of engineering principles (including drainage, where the lower roads carved in a hill serve as a river during storms.)
Heck, CFL bulbs flake out when hot. That's they most of them die, IMHO. I can't keep any going for more than a year. I suspect the bulb itself is OK, but the cheap made in China capacitors and such are just garbage. I hope that's not the case in these bulbs.
However, I don't really use any 60 W bulbs in my house. All either 100 W or 65 W recessed bulbs. I have some CFL 65 W recessed bulbs that advertise a "short warm up" that's more like 5 minutes to full brightness. Hardly short. (And at least 30 seconds to be able to really use the light.) LEDs should be better, I'd assume, since they can turn on in a few microseconds. We'll see...
Remember Palm? How they watched as the tech passed them by and never quite caught up. In their heyday, they had the market cornered for PIMs and saw the smartphone just kill them off. Their attempts to become relevant again were feeble at best.
Sort of. They were circling the drain well before smartphones became all the rage. I had a Palm Pilot while they were still made by 3Com and had several more up until 2006, including a Sony Clie. From 1999 to 2006 they did absolutely nothing with the OS. They added color, but not well, and support for phone functions. That's it. From the user's perspective, it was a 10-year old device. My wife got a Palm Treo in 2009 and absolutely hated it. I messed around with it, and it was just like a Palm circa 2000. Sure the worked to make calls, but they were useless as a smartphone. She then got a Win Mobile Palm, which was better, but still mind-bogglingly bad.
Basically, they stopped doing any development on their OS and that killed them. They completely failed to realize that software sells hardware, not the other way around.
I used to wear a watch all the time. When my then-current watch died, I got new one. It didn't last 6 months. I got a different brand, and it, too, died within 6 months. (My previous watches never broke, I just got tired of them after 5 years.) These were all digital watches from Timex (2) and Casio (1). All crap. I then tried a purely mechanical watch (that was more expensive, of course), but it was just too heavy and huge.
So, I stopped wearing one and I really don't miss it. I have my iphone with me almost all the time and it conveniently also keeps time.
Another case of everything being made in China do bare-minimum standards and designed to fail. The watches I bought that died within 6 months weren't the $10 ones, but $40-$50. I figure for that kind of money, they better last more than a year.
Either the band broke (which I'd replace, and it would break again) or I'd wear it out in the rain and it would get water inside despite being "100M water resistant".
And it would match Consumer Reports who rated usair the worst of any domestic carrier. I'd link, but they keep almost everything behind a paywall. Usair used to be really good, until they merges with America West. United is second to last and that's who I'm waiting for now at the airport. Only 75 min late currently.
Since united and continental are merging, I'll bet the combined airline will be far worse than either alone.
I love two monitors. I use the second one to run remote desktops (sometimes) and nearly always I run SQL Server Management Studio Express. Since my applications are largely database-driven, having a SQL window constantly open makes live much easier. I can jump over and do things while waiting for a compile or whatever, and can then reference query results as I'm doing other stuff on the main window. It's been very handy, and it can stay maximized. Sadly, almost all applications on Windows don't handle multiple monitors very well and SQL Server is no exception, doing odd things from time to time. (Like putting some windows in on the first monitor.) And using RDC to my computer with 2 monitors is a sure way to screw stuff up, like putting windows completely off of all screens. Windows is really stupid.
On my Mac, I have a single 30" monitor (2560x1600) which took some getting used to since it's just so large. But, once I did, I realized found that two monitors is better for me than a single huge one. (I ended up using virtual desktops on the Mac.)
While it makes me more productive, it really depends on what I'm doing. If I'm just writing C for a non-DB application, a single monitor is fine. So, while nice, it's not a 25% productivity boost. In fact, my co-worker has 4 monitors. He mostly uses RDC on them, but he seems to spend too much time switching between them to make a good case for multiple monitors.
That's what I was thinking. This actually places incentives to dump trash into the ocean, rewarding the behavior that caused the problem they are trying to clean up. I can see that when the economy turns bad, people will be encouraging everyone to dump more plastic to "create" jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's hilarious. Generating a CAPTCHA using HTML tables. It's not like computers can't parse HTML (assuming you aren't using IE). Good thing they have (commented!) JavaScript to disable copy and paste. Must have been done by an intern as an inside joke or something.
Everyone knows the iPhone is the phone for dumb people. Confirming Android as the phones for smart people leaves nothing for Windows.
You miss the brain dead and zombies. There's your Win Phone market.
No. TFA says she provided the DOB when she signed up for an IMDB Pro account, believing it would be kept confidential.
So she is willing to lie to a potential employer but is completely truthful on the internet? Sounds like a true moron to me.
So several billion people burning grass and trees to cook and stay warm isn't bad for the environment? I think so: deforestation and all the soot in the air.
But, still, my argument is valid. So long as Wall Street rewards short term behavior with cash, the long term environment just won't matter. Sure oil may be $500/barrel in 2050, but no one cares since they are rewarded for now.
That's shortsighted thinking.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the OP, but short sighted thinking is precisely what makes money on Wall Street. Poor people tend to live in the short term as well, as in "what am I going to eat TODAY?"
Until these problems are addressed, I don't think most people in the world are going to care much about the environment.
99.9% of the test subjects eventually just stopped working, talking, eating, and moving they were so completely pacified. The other .1% became insanely enraged and started slaughtering, eating, and/or raping the the musicians and producers. So the problem kinda worked itself out.
Sounds like the plot to _Serenity_.
Coldplay as "relaxing" music? WTF? Sure, it's not 80s hair-band "metal", but still...
Obviously, that was a control. On the other hand, I generally fall asleep to trance music while on airplanes.
Houses can be built with steel joists instead of wood 2x4s. They are made from galvanized steel, however, its' relatively thin. I could see that messing up cordless phones and stuff, but not much else. Steel makes a relatively poor magnet since it can't hold much. That's why real magnets are rare earth because various elements help make better magnets. They are likely confusing RF interference and magnetic interference. They may have the former, but not the later. Plus, joists would be magnetized to to bottom, and I doubt you'd get much interference for a 8 foot long, thin gauge steel.
In addition to the moderation / meta-moderation issues noted (confirmation bias anyone?) Changes over the past year have made reading /. on a mobile device (e.g. iPhone) almost impossible. Page loads take forever and it must be trying to calculate pi to 1 billion places for each page load. Plus, clicking a collapsed story to show it will scroll to the top. That's stupid. The "More" links are lame, too. You can keep clicking "more" to get more stories (since it only displays like 5), but when you go into a story to read comments and then come out, all your extra stories are gone. A simple "next page" feature would be far more useful. AJAX is all fine, but /. abuses it to the point where it detracts from site functionality.
Oh, and more stories about ponies.
LibreOffice has been pretty solid for me over this past year, though I wish it had better support for DOCX...
I wish MS Office for the Mac supported DOCX better. Granted I don't have the very latest, but it's horrendous on older versions. Of course, Mac MS Office can't really read any complex Word or Excel files from the PC properly and they are from the same company.
The Borders brick and mortar bookstore chain is dead, 10000s of people lost their jobs, and I am out of a favourite place to explore books. All this occurred because customers flock to Amazon like buzzards to a carcass so they can buy merchandise without having to pay tax (outside of WA).
Please. Amazon's prices for books were much less than those of Borders, even without taxes. In fact, you could purchase books on Amazon cheaper than the clearance prices at Borders. Why pay $25 for a book when Amazon has it for $18? Same with music. I could buy a CD at Target for $14 or get it from Amazon for $10. Tax just isn't that high that I care to shop to avoid taxes.
My guess is that they have a better plan up their sleeve.
Presumably they're thinking Congress will do something before the 1 year wait is over.
Yea, congress is going to effectively increase taxes in an election year. Sure thing.
From TFA: "With it's intergalactic range of 85 miles, the S3 Krypton is the first and only handheld laser visible from outer space." Maybe it's different here but I'd hardly call 85 miles "intergalactic."
Maybe they meant intragalactic. Although a 1mW laser pointer would also qualify.
Indeed, he thinks if the CEO of a company no one cares about keeps saying reality-challenged things enough he can move the market to his lame plan. He should be learning where the market is going and strategize, but I'd bet he thinks strategy is the same as a Dilbert-esque mission statement.
In fact, it's doable right now, you just need to downsize the engine. For some reason, everyone now thinks they need 300hp and a 5-6 second 0-60 time to have "decent" acceleration, which 20 years ago was muscle car territory. If we went back to the power levels cars had around 1990, we could easily have very comfortable large cars with 40+ mpg. The other way to do it is to drop in a diesel engine; VW has several models, including the Jetta Sportwagen, which gets 43mpg IIRC. Of course, even though it has tons of torque, it "only" has about 140hp, so it doesn't accelerate to 80mph on freeway on-ramps like the 300hp family cars that are common now.
I wouldn't consider a mid-sided car with 140 HP anything I'd ever want. Full size with at least 200 HP. Adding more gears to the automatic transmission would help, as would diesel, but modern diesel engines are expensive and complex and many gas stations round me don't even carry diesel. I've rented several mid-sided, fuel efficient cars and I hated every one. Too small and powerless. Making cars lighter lets you accelerate with a smaller engine, but that's the tradeoff with safety.
Curves are frequently put in otherwise straight roads as a "traffic calming" measure. Without them, people drive faster, and of course faster speeds means more energy in a crash which means more deaths. Throwing in some random curves slows people down without having to annoy them with artificially-low speed limits, speed traps, etc.; they just automatically drive slower.
In a urban environment, sure. Not where I live. We get several deaths on a few roads each year because people will keep going 60 in a 35. The reason is that people think you can go faster since it's rather rural and there isn't much traffic, but there are so many blind curves, large humps that block the view of a driveway until you are 20 feet from it, etc. They do traffic calming here in the housing plans "think if the kids", but people (including me!) just get ticked off and run the stop signs since they are forcing us to slow down with silly shrubbery islands in the middle. On a semi-rural road, flattening, straightening and widening would help more. The one street near by was in the top 10 deadliest in the state a few years back (may still be) because of these problems. In California where I used to live, they actually did engineering and roads were fairly well done. Sure they had traffic calming things, too, but they were at least safe and not over the top.
Nope, straight, flat, wide roads lead to much higher speeds, which lead to more deaths. You'd save more lives by making all the roads single-lane and as windy as possible. There'd still be crashes, but they'd all be really low-speed crashes, so the death count would be much lower. Of course, everyone would be pissed about being forced to drive so slow and would be voting out all the politicians and voting for new ones who promised them wide, flat, straight roads. Then, they'd complain that there's too many deaths.
Please, that's just plain ignorant. Come to semi-rural Pennsylvania and see for your self. We don't see the people rolling their cars on the straight flat roads. Where I live, people drive 15 MPH over the limit everywhere, including around blind curves, blind hills, with 18" diameter trees 6" from the edge of the road. I'm not exaggerating. People die all the time. When it rains, we have rivers flowing down the roads because there are no berms and poor grading. Driveways hidden behind humps and curves and trees. On the straight, flat roads you can actually see what's ahead and plan accordingly.
Nice theory, and I'd bet it works in more urban places. Not here where no engineering goes into the roads. You are talking like someone is engineering traffic calming and such. Here there is no thought to road design. Pave it and go. When my brother's kids visit, they are always entertained when driving because it literally feels like a ro
Actually, you can get 40 mpg in such a car - gotta change the powerplant, and allow for a fuel that has more energy in a gallon. You can push 45 or even 50 if you get rid of the torque converter, and ideally shift it yourself, too. And, due to the low-end torque, the acceleration is surprisingly good.
(Large diesel family cars can easily get 40+ mpg. And that's US gallons, not UK gallons.)
Yea, but moving from gasoline in the US isn't going to happen any time soon. Diesel is fine, but more expensive for the engine and fuel, although you do get more energy out of it. It's also less available. I've rented a number of 30+ MPG cars, and they pretty much all suck. I want at least 200 HP out of an engine and large enough to hold 5 people comfortably with ample trunk space. Think the size of a Ford Tarus or BMW 5 series. You are talking maybe 30 highway.
Most cars now have locking torque converters, so there isn't much loss there. In fact, many automatic transmissions are almost as efficient as manual, and more so given how most people drive manual cars. The advent of 7, 8, 9 speed automatic transmissions will help more than anything.
Wow, a lesson in design tradeoffs. You can't have a large comfortable, safe car with several air bags, an enormous crumple zone with decent acceleration that gets 40 MPG. One of the best way to increase fuel economy is to move less car around, and, all things being equal, a heavier car is better. (That is assuming we are comparing well-designed cars.)
Around here, we could save tons of lives by having better ROADs. Most roads here have no space berm off to the side (just trees), tons of random curves, hills, blind spots, etc. They'd save tons of lives (at huge cost, no doubt) if they straightened and flattened the roads and made them a little wider. Not to mention some type of rumble strip to warn people when they cross the center line. (They have those in California, but the dots don't work when you have to plow the roads. They can make indents, but that appears to cost too much.) My theory is that Pennsylvania just paves over whatever deer path was there without regard to any sort of engineering principles (including drainage, where the lower roads carved in a hill serve as a river during storms.)
Heck, CFL bulbs flake out when hot. That's they most of them die, IMHO. I can't keep any going for more than a year. I suspect the bulb itself is OK, but the cheap made in China capacitors and such are just garbage. I hope that's not the case in these bulbs.
However, I don't really use any 60 W bulbs in my house. All either 100 W or 65 W recessed bulbs. I have some CFL 65 W recessed bulbs that advertise a "short warm up" that's more like 5 minutes to full brightness. Hardly short. (And at least 30 seconds to be able to really use the light.) LEDs should be better, I'd assume, since they can turn on in a few microseconds. We'll see...
Remember Palm? How they watched as the tech passed them by and never quite caught up. In their heyday, they had the market cornered for PIMs and saw the smartphone just kill them off. Their attempts to become relevant again were feeble at best.
Sort of. They were circling the drain well before smartphones became all the rage. I had a Palm Pilot while they were still made by 3Com and had several more up until 2006, including a Sony Clie. From 1999 to 2006 they did absolutely nothing with the OS. They added color, but not well, and support for phone functions. That's it. From the user's perspective, it was a 10-year old device. My wife got a Palm Treo in 2009 and absolutely hated it. I messed around with it, and it was just like a Palm circa 2000. Sure the worked to make calls, but they were useless as a smartphone. She then got a Win Mobile Palm, which was better, but still mind-bogglingly bad.
Basically, they stopped doing any development on their OS and that killed them. They completely failed to realize that software sells hardware, not the other way around.
I used to wear a watch all the time. When my then-current watch died, I got new one. It didn't last 6 months. I got a different brand, and it, too, died within 6 months. (My previous watches never broke, I just got tired of them after 5 years.) These were all digital watches from Timex (2) and Casio (1). All crap. I then tried a purely mechanical watch (that was more expensive, of course), but it was just too heavy and huge.
So, I stopped wearing one and I really don't miss it. I have my iphone with me almost all the time and it conveniently also keeps time.
Another case of everything being made in China do bare-minimum standards and designed to fail. The watches I bought that died within 6 months weren't the $10 ones, but $40-$50. I figure for that kind of money, they better last more than a year.
Either the band broke (which I'd replace, and it would break again) or I'd wear it out in the rain and it would get water inside despite being "100M water resistant".
And it would match Consumer Reports who rated usair the worst of any domestic carrier. I'd link, but they keep almost everything behind a paywall. Usair used to be really good, until they merges with America West. United is second to last and that's who I'm waiting for now at the airport. Only 75 min late currently.
Since united and continental are merging, I'll bet the combined airline will be far worse than either alone.
One could just google for copies of the story. I found tons, e.g.here or a summary here.
Basically, he located the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".
Now why /. can auto-parse some URLs and not others is anyone's guess.
I love two monitors. I use the second one to run remote desktops (sometimes) and nearly always I run SQL Server Management Studio Express. Since my applications are largely database-driven, having a SQL window constantly open makes live much easier. I can jump over and do things while waiting for a compile or whatever, and can then reference query results as I'm doing other stuff on the main window. It's been very handy, and it can stay maximized. Sadly, almost all applications on Windows don't handle multiple monitors very well and SQL Server is no exception, doing odd things from time to time. (Like putting some windows in on the first monitor.) And using RDC to my computer with 2 monitors is a sure way to screw stuff up, like putting windows completely off of all screens. Windows is really stupid.
On my Mac, I have a single 30" monitor (2560x1600) which took some getting used to since it's just so large. But, once I did, I realized found that two monitors is better for me than a single huge one. (I ended up using virtual desktops on the Mac.)
While it makes me more productive, it really depends on what I'm doing. If I'm just writing C for a non-DB application, a single monitor is fine. So, while nice, it's not a 25% productivity boost. In fact, my co-worker has 4 monitors. He mostly uses RDC on them, but he seems to spend too much time switching between them to make a good case for multiple monitors.
That's what I was thinking. This actually places incentives to dump trash into the ocean, rewarding the behavior that caused the problem they are trying to clean up. I can see that when the economy turns bad, people will be encouraging everyone to dump more plastic to "create" jobs.
Just for comparison: £1.37/l is about $8.44/gal
Ah ha! That's our solution to high gas prices! Since people have no understanding of math, we'll price it in pints.