An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is cooking up the first major Wear OS release since 2018, and Samsung is abandoning Tizen for smartwatches and going all-in on Wear OS with the Galaxy Watch 4. Last night, Samsung took the wraps off the main SoC for the Galaxy Watch 4, and compared to what Wear OS usually gets, Samsung is shipping a beast of an SoC. The "Samsung Exynos W920" will be a multi-generational leap in performance for Wear OS. Samsung says this is a 5 nm chip with two ARM Cortex A55 cores and an ARM Mali-G68 GPU. For the always-on display mode, there's an additional Cortex M55 CPU, which can keep the watch face ticking along while using minimal power. There's also an integrated LTE modem for on-the-go connectivity.

Compared to Samsung's previous smartwatch chip, the Tizen-only Exynos 9110 (10 nm, 2x Cortex A53), the company is promising "around 20 percent" better CPU performance and "ten times better graphics performance." Remember that the Exynos 9110 is from 2018, so those comparative numbers are inflated, but at 5 nm, this is a more modern chip than Wear OS has ever seen. Wear OS has suffered for years at the hands of Qualcomm, which has been starving the ecosystem of quality SoCs for wearables. Most people's last experience with Wear OS is the Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100 SoCs, both of which were ancient Cortex A7 CPUs built on a 28 nm process. Qualcomm introduced a slightly more modern chip, the Wear 4100 in 2020 (a Cortex A53-based, 12 nm chip), but almost no manufacturers actually shipped that chip a year later, and we're still getting Wear 3100 launches today. Qualcomm's answer to Samsung's chip will be the Wear 5100, which isn't due until 2022. We should know more about Wear OS 3.0 tomorrow when Samsung holds its Aug. 11 "Unpacked" event. Not only are they expected to reveal the Galaxy Watch 4 and the big Wear OS revamp, but they're planning to launch at least two new foldable smartphones -- the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Shibu Philip admits he knows what it's like to "maybe waste a bit of time at work." Shibu is the founder of Transcend -- a small London-based firm that buys beauty products wholesale and re-sells them online. For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. With seven employees based in India, he says the software ensures "there is some level of accountability" and helps plug the time difference. "I know myself. [You can] take an extra 10-minute break here or there. It's good to have an automatic way of monitoring what [my employees] are up to," says Shibu. "By looking at screenshots and how much time everyone is taking on certain tasks, I know if they're following procedures. "And, if they're doing better than I expected, I also study the photos and ask them to share that knowledge with the rest of the team so we can all improve," he says.

US-based Hubstaff says its number of UK customers is up four times year-on-year since February. Another company called Sneek offers technology that takes photos of workers through their laptop and uploads them for colleagues to see. Photos can be taken as often as every minute, although it describes itself as a communication platform. Its co-founder, Del Currie, told the BBC that it had seen a five-fold increase in its number of users during lockdown, taking the firm to almost 20,000 in total.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're going to spend $1,000 on a phone, you might as well spend $2,000. And honestly, if you're going to spend $2,000, why not just go for it and spend $3,300? That seems to be a chief guiding principle behind the Samsung Galaxy Fold Z 2 Thom Browne edition -- a handset for those who want the priciest mobile device you can buy -- and then some. Samsung has been partnering with the high-end American fashion designer for a couple of devices now. The Z Fold 2 edition follows the release of the Thom Browne Galaxy Z Flip, which also cost an additional $1,100 over the price of the standard foldable. Further justifying the device's cost is the inclusion of a Galaxy Watch 3 and the Galaxy Buds Live -- neither of which ship with the standard Fold Z 2. And perhaps even more importantly, it's something you can lord over the heads of your slightly more frugal friends who only shelled out for the regular Fold.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Hydrogen is a very good carrier for this type of work," says Wei Wang, who is the chief scientist for stationary energy storage research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. It's an efficient energy carrier, and can be easily stored in pressurized tanks. When needed, the gas can then be converted back into electrical energy via a fuel cell and fed into the grid. But water electrolyzers are expensive. They work under acidic conditions which require corrosion-resistant metal plates and catalysts made from precious metals such as titanium, platinum, and iridium. "Also, the oxygen electrode isn't very efficient," says Kathy Ayers, vice-president of R&D at Nel Hydrogen, an Oslo-based company that specializes in hydrogen production and storage. "You lose about 0.3 volts just from the fact that you're trying to convert water to oxygen or vice versa," she says. Splitting a water molecule requires 1.23 V of energy.

In a bid to overcome this problem, Nel Hydrogen and Wang's team at Pacific Northwest joined forces in 2016, after receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The solution they've come up with is a fuel cell that acts as both a battery and hydrogen generator. "We call it a redox-flow cell because it's a hybrid between a redox-flow battery and a water electrolyzer," explains Wang. A redox-flow battery, in essence a reversible fuel cell, is typically made up of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs, and generates electricity at the battery's electrodes. Compared to normal flow batteries, the new redox-flow cell exhibited a charge capacity of up to one ampere per square centimeter, a ten-fold increase. "It was also able to withstand 'several hundred cycles' of charging, which has never been demonstrated before in hydrogen ion flow batteries," the report says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTuber JerryRigEverything regularly does destructive durability tests on phones, partly by attacking a device with a set of Mohs picks. These pointy metal tools that are calibrated to the Mohs scale of mineral hardness allow a user to determine the hardness of a surface by doing a scratch test. You start with the softest pick and work your way up the set until you find something that can scratch the surface you're testing. A modern smartphone with Corning's Gorilla Glass scratches at level 6 on the Mohs hardness scale. The Galaxy Z Flip features a first-of-its-kind flexible glass cover that Samsung calls "Ultra-Thin Glass." Until now, foldables have had to suffer through life with plastic display covers, which scratch easily, don't provide much protection, and just like a resistive touchscreen, feel bad to swipe around on, thanks to the squishy pliability of the display. With this new invention of flexible glass, the Z Flip promised a return to a hard, smooth, scratch-resistant display surface.

So how did the Z Flip fare against JerryRigEverything's Mohs picks? It scratches at level 2, the same level as the plastic-covered Galaxy Fold and Moto Razr. You can actually leave marks on the surface with a fingernail! This is not what Samsung was promising. Samsung sent The Verge a response to the video, reiterating that the display is actually "glass." "Galaxy Z Flip features an Infinity Flex Display with Samsung's Ultra Thin Glass (UTG) to deliver a sleek, premium look and offer an immersive viewing experience," Samsung told the site. "Samsung's first-of-its-kind UTG technology is different from other Galaxy flagship devices. While the display does bend, it should be handled with care. Also, Galaxy Z Flip has a protective layer on top of the UTG similar to Galaxy Fold." In Samsung's official Z Flip videos, the company shows a plastic "protective layer" going on top of the glass display. But as Ars Technica notes, this layer is not removable and JerryRigEverything's video shows that the underlying "glass" layer doesn't provide protection from punctures, either.

With that said, "One Twitter user cracked their Galaxy Z Flip on the first fold, possibly due to cold weather," reports Ars. "So we know it can shatter, at least."

Kim Lyons, writing for The Verge: Google added tiny favicon icons to its search results this week for some reason, creating more clutter in what used to be a clean interface, and seemingly without actually improving the results or the user experience. The company says it's part of a plan to make clearer where information is coming from, but how? In my Chrome desktop browser, it feels like an aggravating, unnecessary change that doesn't actually help the user determine how good, bad, or reputable an actual search result might be. Yes, ads are still clearly marked with the word "ad," which is a good thing. But do I need to see Best Buy's logo or AT&T's blue circle when I search for "Samsung Fold" to know they're trying to sell me something? Google says the favicon icons are "helping searchers better understand where information is coming from, more easily scan results & decide what to explore."

If you don't care for the new look, Google has instructions on how to change or add a favicon to search results. Lifehacker also has instructions on how to apply filters to undo the favicon nonsense.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, Samsung Electronic's President Young Sohn revealed the company has sold 1 million foldable Galaxy Fold smartphones. Estimates from October pegged sales at that time at 500,000 units. "And I think that the point is, we're selling [a] million of these products," Sohn said. "There's a million people that want to use this product at $2,000." Today's conversation at Disrupt Berlin focused around growth through innovation. Sohn commented on the sales number while explaining Samsung's process of releasing products to get feedback. He said, in part, if they kept devices like the Fold in labs, they wouldn't get the input they needed.

Motorola has sent out invitations to an event on Nov. 13, where the rumored foldable Razr phone could launch. CNET reports: Motorola said the evening event in downtown Los Angeles will feature the "highly anticipated unveiling of a reinvented icon." The save the date is a gif showing a device being folded and unfolded. "An original unlike any other," it reads, also displaying the numeric 11/13/19 date. According to the invitation, the event will feature special guests and musical performers, as well as "a journey through immersive experiences." "You're going to flip," Motorola's invite says. Motorola's Razr phone is rumored to have a foldable screen, but instead of opening out into a tablet, the phone could fold vertically to fit inside pockets. "It's also been reported that the phone will cost $1,500; measure 6.2 inches; run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor; come in white, black and gold; and have a 2,730mAh battery, 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GM or 128GB of storage," reports CNET.

Credit scores have a long history of prejudice. "Most changes in how credit scores are calculated over the years -- including the shift from human assessment to computer calculations, and most recently to artificial intelligence -- have come out of a desire to make the scores more equitable, but credit companies have failed to remove bias, on the basis of race or gender, for example, from their system," writes Rose Eveleth via Motherboard.

While credit companies have tried to reduce bias with machine learning and "alternative credit," which uses data like your sexual orientation or political beliefs that isn't normally included in a credit score to try and get a sense for how trustworthy someone might be, Eveleth says that "introducing this 'non-traditional' information to credit scores runs the risk of making them even more biased than they already are, eroding nearly 150 years of effort to eliminate unfairness in the system." From the report: Biases in AI can affect not just individuals with credit scores, but those without any credit at all as non-traditional data points are used to try and invite new creditors in. There is still a whole swath of people in the United States known as the "unbanked" or "credit invisibles." They have too little credit history to generate a traditional credit score, which makes it challenging for them to get loans, apartments, and sometimes even jobs. According to a 2015 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau study, 45 million Americans fall into the category of credit invisible or unscoreable -- that's almost 20 percent of the adult population. And here again we can see a racial divide: 27 percent of Black and Hispanic adults are credit invisible or unscoreable (PDF), compared to just 16 percent of white adults.

To bring these "invisible" consumers into the credit score fold, companies have proposed alternative credit. FICO recently released FICO XD, which includes payment data from TV or cable accounts, utilities, cell phones, and landlines. Other companies have proposed social media posts, job history, educational history, and even restaurant reviews or business check-ins. Lenders say that alternative data is a benefit to those who have been discriminated against and excluded from banking. No credit? Bad credit? That doesn't mean you're not trustworthy, they say, and we can mine your alternative data and give you a loan anyway. But critics say that alternative data looks a lot like old-school surveillance. Letting a company have access to everything from your phone records to your search history means giving up all kinds of sensitive data in the name of credit. Experts worry that the push to use alternative data might lead, once again, to a situation similar to the subprime mortgage crisis if marginalized communities are offered predatory loans that wind up tanking their credit scores and economic stability.

"Looking for some new sick burns to throw out at other players on Xbox Live? Microsoft's got you covered," reports Motherboard: In its new community standards, published this week, the company's got some examples of acceptable trash talk, including gems like:

- Get destroyed. Can't believe you thought you were on my level.

- That was some serious potato aim. Get wrecked.

- Only reason you went positive was you spent all game camping. Try again, kid.

- Cheap win. Come at me when you can actually drive without running cars off the road.

- That sucked. Get good and then come back when your k/d's over 1....

"We get it -- gaming can be competitive and interactions with other players can get heated," the community standards state. "A little trash talk is an expected part of compe titive multiplayer action, and that's not a bad thing. But hate has no place here, and what's not okay is when that trash talk turns into harassment." Microsoft defines acceptable trash talk as "light-hearted banter or bragging" that's focused directly on the game and "encourages healthy competition." Harassment is "negative behavior that's personalized, disruptive, or likely to make someone feel unwelcome or unsafe..."

For breaking the rules, players can expect consequences, but Microsoft is hesitant to call it a punishment "We're not out to punish, but rather to protect everyone's experience," the standards note. For every "corrective action" -- which the standards state could be a suspension, or a restriction on the ability to send messages or stream live -- Microsoft wants its players to learn from their mistakes; players will be welcomed back to the community to prove they've changed their ways, the company says. But that doesn't mean every abusive gamer will be welcomed back into the fold. Repeat offenders or particularly severe abuse will garner a permanent suspension, the standards state, which requires the profile owner to "forfeit all licenses for games and other content, Gold membership time, and Microsoft account balances."

If we're going to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need an energy revolution. But there's a big problem. Making that future a reality will, among other things, require a lot of batteries: batteries to charge our electric cars; batteries to store solar power collected while the sun's up and wind power harnessed when it's gusty out. And as a new report by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney warns, that's likely to drive demand for the metals used to build green batteries -- as well as wind turbines and solar panels -- through the roof.

From a report: In other words the clean tech boom is, at least in the short term, likely to fuel a mining boom. And that won['t come without cost. "We already know about the environmental, social, and human rights impacts extraction is posing to front line communities right now," Payal Sampat, mining program director at Earthworks, which commissioned the new report, told Earther. "It's kind of unimaginable to think about... how it would be considered sustainable to scale up those impacts that many fold and still be reaping benefits."

Much like our smartphones and computers, the high-tech energy infrastructure of tomorrow requires a host of metals and minerals from across the periodic table and the planet. The lithium-ion batteries used in EVs and energy storage require not just lithium, but often cobalt, manganese, and nickel. Electric vehicle engines rely on rare earths, as do the permanent magnet-based generators inside some wind turbines. Solar panels gobbles up a significant share of the world's supply of tellurium, and gallium, along with a sizable fraction of mined silver and indium. Most renewable technologies demand heaps of copper and aluminum.

eatmorekix shares a report from Motherboard: Glocom, a front company for the government of North Korea that sells sanctioned equipment, isn't giving up. In 2017, before YouTube quietly removed Glocom's channel, the company was advertising missile navigation and other military products on the video platform. But Glocom has returned. It setup a new channel, and also had a presence on Twitter, until Motherboard flagged Glocom's accounts to social media companies. The news not only signals the perseverance of parts of the North Korean's money-making enterprises, but also a slice of the content moderation issues that tech platforms constantly face. Glocom "is using them as platforms to market sanctions violating products," Shea Cotton, research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and who has a particular focus on North Korea, told Motherboard in an email. A United Nations report says that Glocom is run by North Korean intelligence agents, even though it pitches itself as a Malaysian company.

Cotton said "this company continues to operate openly. Most DPRK [Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea] fronts, when exposed, usually fold or at the very least shut down and move their operations to another country and re-open under a new name. This one hasn't done that. We've seen them try to create this spin off brand called 'FACOM' and sell a few of their products under it but as you've seen their main brand is still thriving apparently."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to Wired, glass-maker Corning is "working on ultrathin, bendable glass that's 0.1 millimeters thick and can bend to a 5 millimeter radius" that may be usable for smartphone displays within two years. Corning produces Gorilla Glass used in Apple's iPhones, as well as in phones made by other manufacturers like LG, Asus, OnePlus, Nokia, Samsung, and more. Developing Gorilla Glass that can bend or fold like the materials used for the Samsung Galaxy Fold display or other foldable phone concepts could address some shortcomings endemic to these early designs.

The folding phones you see in headlines and gadget blog galleries today rely on plastic polymers that may scratch easier or have other undesirable properties. Generally, smartphone-makers that have announced foldable phones have not allowed us to test-drive these phones, which is otherwise normal practice for traditional smartphone product unveilings. That may be primarily because the software is not there yet, but it could also be that the companies anticipate negative reactions to the plastic displays, which have not been standard in flagship phones for a decade. [...] John Bayne, Corning's head of Gorilla Glass, and another expert Wired spoke with believe that Corning (or a competitor like ACG) will have foldable glass ready for use in foldable smartphones within a couple of years. But it's a difficult journey. "We have glasses we've sampled to customers, and they're functional," Bayne told Wired. "But they're not quite meeting all the requirements. People either want better performance against a drop event or a tighter bend radius. We can give them one or the other; the key is to give them both."

In a wide-ranging interview with Mark Spoonauer from Tom's Guide, CTO and president of LG Electronics, IP Park, said his company is working on both rollable and foldable smartphones, regardless of whether there's demand for them or not. Here's an excerpt from the report: Are you looking into rollable and foldable phones as well? We are exploring many different form factors for phones, including foldable and rollable. Because display technology has grown so much that it can make it into very flexible form factors. And with 5G, if the market requires much bigger screens, we'll need to fold it or roll it. So we'll explore.

A lot of people are saying the whole smartphone market has stagnated and there are even some who argue that LG should exit the business altogether. What's your reaction to that? The smartphone business is very tough because of the competition. Also because of the penetration. Everyone has a phone now, right? Everybody has a big screen, and everybody has many features that others have. I think this year could be the year of the upgrade in the smartphone industry because of 5G. 5G is going to be available this year, and people will come out with 5G phones. And 5G is different from LTE, not only because of bandwidth, but also latency. You may want to have even bigger screens on 5G phones because of the more content you can get. That could trigger different killer applications that you run on phones.

One of the 2019 TV models LG outlined at its CES press conference today was the LG Signature OLED TV R (65R9), which has a display that can roll up and disappear into its base when you're not using it. "LG calls the TV 'a revolutionary innovation that helps address the very human need for an aesthetically pleasing environment' and says it is 'redefining space' to offer unprecedented levels of 'immersion' and 'a new level of space integration,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: LG says to expect picture quality on par with its just-announced 2019 4K OLED lineup. That means 120Hz and AI image processing using LG's new Alpha 9 Gen 2 CPU. The TV's base -- the same one it rolls into -- houses a 4.2-channel, 100-watt soundbar with Dolby Atmos support. Additionally, the TV doesn't have to scroll all the way in. As seen in one of the images at the start of this article, it can fold down to what LG calls "Line View." This has five modes: music, clock, frame, mood, and home dashboard. Music offers an interface for playing music from the base. Clock shows the time, date, and weather. Frame displays a scrolling line of photos streamed from your smartphone, which is the mode in the photo above. The mood mode is for aesthetics, and home dashboard will allow access to some of LG's usual TV software features. No price has been announced yet, but TechCrunch reports that it could cost more than the 8K TV LG announced last week, which will compete directly with Samsung's $15,000 8K offering. LG says the Signature OLED TV R will be available for purchase in the second half of the year.

How long is the U.S. coastline? It's a straightforward question, and one that's important for scientists and government agencies alike. From a report: The U.S. Geological Survey could give you an answer, too, but I'm going to tell you right now that it's wrong. In fact, no one could give you the right answer, and if you look around, you'll find a number of estimations that differ by seemingly improbable amounts. One government report lists the number as 12,383 miles. The same report admits that a different government agency says the figure is actually 88,612 miles. That's an almost eight-fold disparity for a fact that seems simple to obtain. We all know how to use a ruler, right?

Well, we all know how to measure a straight line, but what about a curve? And what if that curve has curves? The crux of the problem comes down to geometry, and the fundamentally uneven nature of coastlines. Though the border between land and sea may look fairly straight when seen from far away, they're anything but. Coastlines jut and dip, curve and cut, and each deviation from a straight line adds distance. Some of these features are massive, like bays, while others are miniscule.

Several news features rolling out to Chromebooks paint a picture of the future of Chrome OS as the rightful replacement for Android tablet software. Those include a new split-screen feature for multitasking while in tablet mode, and a screenshot feature borrowed from Android. The Verge reports: As it stands now, Chrome OS is very close to taking up the mantle there, and features like this push it ever closer to becoming the hybrid OS for all types of Google-powered screens. This has been in the works for quite a while as Google's Chrome and Android teams have coordinated closely to ensure the influx of low-cost, hybrid computing devices like 2-in-1 Chromebooks get the best of both worlds. There is, of course, Android app compatibility on Chrome OS, an initiative that first arrived somewhat half-baked last year and has taken months to fully jell as Google worked out the kinks. For instance, just last month Google added the ability for Android apps on Chromebooks run in the background. In July of last year, Google also began embarking on a touch-focused redesign of Chrome OS to make the software more functional in tablet mode. We're likely not getting the full-blown merging of the two divisions and their respective platforms anytime soon, or perhaps ever, as Google has played with the idea for years without ever seeming to decide that one platform should supersede the other. In essence, however, Android remains Google's dominant mobile OS, while Chrome OS has been taking on more responsibility as Chromebooks have steadily become more capable and tablet-like.

An anonymous reader quotes Stack Overflow Blog: In this post, we'll explore the extraordinary growth of the Python programming language in the last five years, as seen by Stack Overflow traffic within high-income countries. The term "fastest-growing" can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language... June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited [programming language] tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations. This included being the most visited tag within the US and the UK, and in the top 2 in almost all other high income nations (next to either Java or JavaScript). This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time. Part of this is because of the seasonal nature of traffic to Java. Since it's heavily taught in undergraduate courses, Java traffic tends to rise during the fall and spring and drop during the summer.

Does Python show a similar growth in the rest of the world, in countries like India, Brazil, Russia and China? Indeed it does. Outside of high-income countries Python is still the fastest growing major programming language; it simply started at a lower level and the growth began two years later (in 2014 rather than 2012). In fact, the year-over-year growth rate of Python in non-high-income countries is slightly higher than it is in high-income countries... We're not looking to contribute to any "language war." The number of users of a language doesn't imply anything about its quality, and certainly can't tell you which language is more appropriate for a particular situation. With that perspective in mind, however, we believe it's worth understanding what languages make up the developer ecosystem, and how that ecosystem might be changing. This post demonstrated that Python has shown a surprising growth in the last five years, especially within high-income countries.
The post was written by Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson, who notes that "I used to program primarily in Python, though I have since switched entirely to R."

Favicon -- or its lack thereof, to be precise -- has remained one of the longest running issues Safari users have complained about. For those of you who don't use Safari, just have a look at this mess I had earlier today when I was using Safari on a MacBook. There's no way I can just have a look at the tabs and make any sense of them. John Gruber, writing for DaringFireball: The gist of it is two-fold: (1) there are some people who strongly prefer to see favicons in tabs even when they don't have a ton of tabs open, simply because they prefer identifying tabs graphically rather than by the text of the page title; and (2) for people who do have a ton of tabs open, favicons are the only way to identify tabs. With many tabs open, there's really nothing subjective about it: Chrome's tabs are more usable because they show favicons. [...] Once Safari gets to a dozen or so tabs in a window, the left-most tabs are literally unidentifiable because they don't even show a single character of the tab title. They're just blank. I, as a decade-plus-long dedicated Safari user, am jealous of the usability and visual clarity of Chrome with a dozen or more tabs open. And I can see why dedicated Chrome users would consider Safari's tab design a non-starter to switching. I don't know what the argument is against showing favicons in Safari's tabs, but I can only presume that it's because some contingent within Apple thinks it would spoil the monochromatic aesthetic of Safari's toolbar area. [...] And it's highly debatable whether Safari's existing no-favicon tabs actually do look better. The feedback I've heard from Chrome users who won't even try Safari because it doesn't show favicons isn't just from developers -- it's from designers too. To me, the argument that Safari's tab bar should remain text-only is like arguing that MacOS should change its Command-Tab switcher and Dock from showing icons to showing only the names of applications. The Mac has been famous ever since 1984 for placing more visual significance on icons than on names. The Mac attracts visual thinkers and its design encourages visual thinking. So I think Safari's text-only tab bar isn't just wrong in general, it's particularly wrong on the Mac.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plastic is durable -- very, very durable -- which is why we like it. Since it started being mass-produced in the 1950s, annual production has increased 300-fold. Because plastic is so durable, when our kids grow up and we purge our toy chests, or even just when we finish a bottle of laundry detergent or shampoo, it doesn't actually go away. While we're recycling increasing amounts of plastic, a lot of it still ends up in the oceans. Floating garbage patches have brought some attention to the issue of our contamination of the seas. But it's not just the waters themselves that have ended up cluttered with plastic. A recent survey shows that a staggering amount of our stuff is coming ashore on the extremely remote Henderson Island. Henderson Island is a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Pitcairn Group of Islands in the South Pacific, roughly half way between New Zealand and Peru. According to UNESCO, Henderson is one of the best examples we have of an elevated coral atoll ecosystem. It was colonized by Polynesians between the 12th and 15th centuries but has been uninhabited by humans since then. It is of interest to evolutionary biologists because it has 10 plant species and four bird species that are only found there. Despite its uninhabited status and its extremely remote location, a recent survey of beach plastic on Henderson Island revealed that the island has the highest density of debris reported anywhere in the world: an estimated minimum of 37.7 million items weighing 17.6 tons. This represents the total amount of plastic that is produced in the world every 1.98 seconds. Further reading: Here And Now