Recently Bansal and Sviridenko (Proc. of the 15th SODA'04, 189-196)
proved that for
2-dimensional Orthogonal Rectangle
Bin Packing without rotations allowed there is no asymptotic PTAS, unless P=NP. We show that similar
approximation hardness results hold for several rectangle packing and covering problems even if rotations by ninety
degrees around the axes are allowed. Moreover, for some of these problems we provide explicit lower
bounds on asymptotic approximation ratio of any polynomial time approximation algorithm.