In Seattle's case taxpayers had just coughed up almost half a billion dollars to put up a new football and baseball stadium, in the process destroying the much-loved King Dome and flattening the south end of downtown, and then gave naming rights and enormous tax breaks to the teams' owners to boot. The Sonics declared that they needed a new stadium which was going to cost as much as the other two combined, even though they couldn't reliably fill their current location, **and** they wanted to site it in a rather historic part of the city, **and** they were going to demand all parking revenue for a decade or more even though they weren't paying to build the structure. Seattle appropriately told them to take a hike, and I wish they had told the Mariners and Seahawks the same thing a few years before.

So Ballmer wants to buy a sports team? All I can say is, "Who gives a flying fuck?"

Sure, but on the other hand municipal trash removal ceased for centuries at a time. No one living more than a block from the river is going to haul their trash any further than the abandoned lot down the street if they don't have to. And motor vehicles have only been around for a little more than a century, do you have any idea how much waste horses produce? In some cities of Europe there is a paved street, a meter or more of accumulation, another paved street, more accumulation, and the current modern street, the homes on the street have been altered (including being torn down and used for fill, as you correctly point out) to accommodate the changed street level.

The amount of it is surprising, as the Arctic (not Antarctic) ocean is fairly cut off from the rest of the oceanic circulation patterns. BTW, currents mostly stay in horizontal bands separated by different temperature and salinity gradients, there is very little vertical circulation (few exceptions, like the Humbolt Current, but that's the general rule). Plastic in the benthic depths would pretty much have to be carried there by the sinking of near-surface organisms.

Why do conservatives have such a difficult time understanding the difference between weather and climate? Oh, that's right, short-term limited-complexity thinking is endemic in that mindset, changes that take decades or centuries to develop are unfathomable, and local effects are somehow supposed to be able to be extrapolated to cover the entire planet. Locally, Mount Baker and Mount Rainier have been trading world record snowfall levels, and the cons think it disproves global warming. Climatologists and meteorologists are quite aware it's actually because the warmer ocean evaporates more water causing more precipitation.

My bad, I meant Pantheon in Rome. Brain burp.

When we were in Rome a few years ago there was a ruin undergoing excavation in the middle of the city. You could walk over to the edge of the excavation and look down about 7 or 8 meters to where the work was being done, since the subsequent 20 centuries of occupation had added that much elevation. There are places like the Parthenon which have been in continuous use and are in a slight dip in the terrain because trash was not allowed to accumulate there. IIRC they had to stop a planned subway expansion because the tunneling kept running into archeological sites.

Try moving your files between a Mac, an Android device, an iToy and a Linux box and tell me how readable it is at the end. Move it between 50 Windows machines of a half dozen different versions and it will still be the identical file with the same format.

Are you kidding? The international bankers make commissions laundering money than any other single source of revenue. Half of that money is from drug sales. Do you think the US banks are going to give up $50,000,000,000 in annual profit (we are the world's largest money laundry, after all) just to prevent a little terrorism?

they're surely not using MSOffice up there on the cherry picker

You'd be surprised, I've seen Visio, Project, and AutoCAD's mark-up tools used on top of ladders, and trying to do documentation and commissioning by matching photos from a camera that you took a hour ago to a line in a spreadsheet is miserable. If I could have taken that photo of the security camera mounting with the Surface camera, drop it in a cell on the commissioning document, then take the screen shot of the raw camera image and drop it in the next cell I would have been far more productive. Just because you don't have the imagination or experience to see a use case doesn't mean there isn't one out there.

Seriously, you think that people should have to buy their own ruggedized phones in order to be able to do their jobs? Should I also have to pay for the phone line on my desk? Forget that. Employers are already taking too much advantage of employees, your assumption that we need to pay more in order to be allowed to do our jobs is absurd.

Actually a Toughbook costs over twice what a Surface Pro does, and weighs three times as much as even a ruggedized Surface would. The Toughbook needs two hands to work, is difficult to mount, is too heavy to use a portable clamp-on type mount, and you can't just drop it in a pocket or put a hook on it and hang it from something when you're not using it. Don't get me wrong, they're incredible machines, I saw one fall out of a bucket from about 20 feet in the air and just bounce, but a bucket or ladder isn't somewhere you want something that big. Especially a ladder, a laptop on a ladder sucks big time.

No, they don't. There's the Panasonic Toughbook for the linemen, which is a multi-thousand dollar full laptop. The CameraMaster only works for analog cameras, which are a rapidly-diminishing portion of the market. The PDT/PDR/whatever devices currently in use in warehouses are dedicated single-use machines, again costing quite a lot. The forklift driver can't review the MSDS for the stuff he's moving on them, or check his email.

Yes, I've worked in all three industries, I'm quite aware of what is available and what is actually needed.

As CPU, storage and graphics capabilities improve in these devices I can easily foresee walking into work, dropping my tablet in the docking station, and having real screens and keyboards. At the end of the pop the tablet back out and I still have a fully functional and fairly powerful general-use computer. I don't care for that form factor for the tablet though, a 7" Nexus fits into my inside jacket pocket or the pockets of my slacks. This would still need something like a laptop bag.

Sure there is. Support, file format portability, networking, Group Policy and Active Directory.

Ruggedize these things and every lineman, every CCTV installer and every warehouse forklift driver will want them. No, I don't want to have to use a touch screen on my desk, but when I was out in the field I would have killed to have something as light and portable as this while standing on the top of a ladder.

MS really did two things right early on. They made their OS easy to program to, and they supported every mishmash configuration of hardware and software that you could get to install. My mom's co-worker had three computers on her desk to do billing with; a Wang word processor, a CP/M machine with (IIRC) Visi-Calc, and some IBM monster with a flat-file database for contact management. To bill she would pull up the customer info in the DB, the hours billed in the spreadsheet, and type it all into the Wang.

When she got a Windows 3.1 machine and could copy and paste info from one app to the other it utterly revolutionized her work flow. It changed the dynamics of her entire office as well, since the bosses could now buy just one less-expensive computer per desk even the receptionist ended up with a PC. The economics of scale involved in putting a PC on every desk brought the price down to the point where a PC in the home was actually affordable.