To be fair, it does make a lot of sense to do something like that if you're going to be getting a large number of small dollar amount donations. There are costs associated with processing a donation and it's a lot cheaper for the charity to process a single $2M donation than 1M $2 donations. A retailer collecting that along with a purchase will have most of those costs to make the sale anyway. Doing it this way also provides a way to do that charitable donation as something like an impulse purchase, probably resulting in a lot of people donating who might not have considered doing it otherwise.

Now, I'd also say no because I'm not a huge fan of * awareness charities and the dirty look is bad service, but I fail to see the problem with the rest of it.

I'm sure that's on the roadmap, right after proper Unicode support.

What I've read on the matter is that the astrologers agree with your assessment. Nobody changed signs. Still sucks for the newborns who will be unable to record a high score in Gradius.

The economic realities of the global coffee market are not as simple as you are making them out to be. Some historical perspective:

There was once a time when coffee was trading at high prices. Demand was increasing, supplies were not increasing as much, and there were countries capable of producing coffees that weren't. Getting people to plant coffee in these non-traditional producing areas was seen as a way to develop economies. This idea was not without precedent. Brazil was largely built on coffee money, after all. Now, it takes a few years from the time coffee is planted until it produces its first crop. Coffee isn't a crop where you plant it, harvest it a few months later, and know what you've got. It takes about 10 years before you really know what you have with coffee. All of the sudden you have a huge increase in global coffee production. Making the problem worse, these new coffee producers were exporting coffees of such poor quality that more established producers never allowed on the global market. Now, coffee does not really fit the definition of a commodity, but it was usually sold with contracts that specify a differential above or below the NYBOT C price with those differentials based on several factors such as the quality of the coffee (coffee better than exchange grade selling for more, worse coffee selling for less) and the producing country (a comparative advantage model doesn't really work because a specialty grade coffee from Panama isn't going to taste anything like a specialty grade coffee from Tanzania).

Up until this point, the NYBOT C was cyclical. Sometimes it would go bust, but it would recover. This time it was different. There had been a fundamental change in the market which kept prices depressed for a long period of time and the differentials weren't keeping up. Simply letting quality producers go out of business wasn't going to be good for the producers and it wasn't going to be good for buyers either because someone who wanted to buy a nice coffee from Mexico wasn't going to be interested in some garbage from Vietnam. By setting a floor price for some coffees, Fair Trade did a lot of good in keeping those producers in business. You might find it interesting to look into the details of some Fair Trade producers and see what they're doing with those premiums. In many cases they're using them to improve the quality of the coffee and diversify the local economy, both things which reduce long term reliance on the Fair Trade premium, which seems to be exactly what you're advocating (though you suggest doing that before getting the capital needed to undertake such projects).

Now we're back into a period of higher prices for coffee (NYBOT C is over 200 as I write this and the differentials aren't dropping quickly which is a big part of why many coffee firms either have or soon will be announcing price increases) and this is due to many factors. Looking at the fundamentals, this is cyclical and prices will drop again, but probably not substantially within the next 18 months. We also have a lot more diversity in price discovery mechanisms for coffee which is a positive development, particularly for producers of high quality coffees. Any Fair Trade cooperative ought to be looking into getting out of Fair Trade in the long term exactly because that's not a long term sustainable model. Some cooperatives have already made that jump, others will follow, but to argue that Fair Trade was not beneficial in the long term simply is not supported by fact.

I only need two keystrokes to get a division sign (option/) so I'm not really sure what you're going on about there. That said, I don't think it matters so much in terms of writing the code. As others have pointed out, we've been down that road with APL. Where this sort of idea really shines, however, is in reading the code. One of the comments on the article touched on this, so I'll quote the relevant bit:

Robert Melton | Mon, 01 Nov 2010 02:11:13 UTC
What an odd combination of criticisms... first and foremost, I think you already hit on the correct solution... custom syntax and creation mechanisms are best explored as layers on top of existing tools, not a fundamental part of a new tool. I believe to try to integrate your ideas would have crippled Go, and given it nearly no advantages, at the cost of a huge degree of developer mind share. Bootstrapping a language is hard enough without giving yourself new disadvantages. I have never seen Guido van Rossum claim anything other the "readability" and that it was the natural flow as foreseen by Knuth (1974)

The problem here, however, is a cultural one. I suspect that most of the people who write software have never read through a non-trivial program and come out of it with an understanding of the program (contrast this with novelists reading novels) and most software is written in such a way that reading the code for understanding is more like assembling a puzzle from diverse bits scattered all about.

We already have pretty much all of these presentation niceties with CWEB. I frequently write my programs in literate C++ and can use goofy characters with subscripts if I want. TeX markup in comments is very nice. Especially useful is having something a bit more visually distinctive separating assignment from equality testing, but the big gain here is that it makes it easier to write programs as code narratives which humans can read to gain an understanding of the program. Once you have someone reading the program, how the code is represented starts to matter. Granted, this is another example from the pile of ideas that never really caught on.