Education in the United States won't be fixed until people actually see and admit to the real problems that plague it.

First and foremost is the systematic looting of public education. Being from Michigan, I've seen first hand the policies that Secretary of Bribery... er I mean Education Betsey DeVos has gotten through and will now inflict upon the nation as a whole. She's manged to divert tons of money from public schools into private charter schools with absolutely ZERO transparency and ZERO account ability. All these schools need to do is throw money at one of the universities here in the state (some of which refuse to actually be a part of that corruption such as, IIRC, MSU and UMich) and they get a charter. In other words, she's turned education into a commodity and she does not care about the quality of the education these kids receive as long as those who support her efforts make their profits. Keep in mind, Betsey DeVos has ZERO education experience. She has never been a teacher, and administrator, or even a school secretary. Her only experience is creating an anti-education propaganda machine known as the Mackinac Center.

Dove-tailing with that is the demonization of teachers and attacks on the unions. Teachers today get treated like crap. They're not paid anywhere near what they're worth or the value of the job they have. As others have pointed out in other countries of the world teachers are highly paid. When you pay for the best, you get the best. But schools have to back them up too. But they're not so they're going elsewhere to make an actual living where they don't actually have to pay to do their job (e.g. buying classroom supplies and such) and not be thrown under the bus.

The final, and sadly the ultimate problem with education in the US is the fact that parents have become completely disconnected for the most part. How many of you remember your parents cracking the whip with you to do your homework? Or when you got a bad grade you got talked to because you didn't put forth the effort? Times have certainly changed. Now if their child doesn't do their homework and get a good grade, it's now the teacher's fault somehow. I've even heard college professors getting angry phone calls about giving students the bad grades they earned and getting even madder when the professor refuses to discuss the issue with them because of the Family Education Records Protection Act.

Big Data and throwing money at flavor-of-the-moment education practices won't fix any of those problems.

No, Amazon isn’t killing retail. Retail is slitting its own throat and has been for over a decade now. They pay their workers minimum wage for the most part and wonder why they don’t get quality people (in other words they’re getting what they’re paying for). They over work their good employees to the point of burnout or they cut hours on employees forcing them to get jobs elsewhere to make ends meet. And they wonder why they can’t get or keep anyone.

Look at their “marketing” too. It’s all about sale after sale after sale and coupon upon coupon upon coupon. On top of that is the attempt to chain you in with a high interest store charge card too (because they get a kickback from the bank). Nothing of course about how their stores are well stocked and constantly replenished. Nothing about the friendly, ever-present sales staff available to help you, etc.

But Amazon has just become a scapegoat for retail’s own failures. Sure Amazon has more inventory and a bigger network of shipping/warehousing than most stores, but that advantage is negated by the fact that in a more urgent cases Amazon simply cannot deliver. Fixing dinner and the appliance you need dies? Can’t run out to Amazon.Com and buy a new one but I can at a retail store. My Bluetooth headphones died the other day and I needed a pair for today so I went to Best Buy and got a pair because Amazon wouldn’t have been able to get a pair delivered to me before tomorrow.

You know what drives me to Amazon? When I walk into a store and they don’t have what I need. Oh sure they’ll order it for me but it’ll take a week to get there versus the two days Amazon can get it to me (and this was before Prime). A while back the video card on my computer died so I went to Best Buy’s site and all current generation GeForce cards were online only even though it was 6+ months after release. My local store did not have them nor any store within a 50 mile radius.

No, it's actually based on decency. And Europe isn't Socialist. It's Democratic Socialist which means certain things are sacrosanct (e.g. health care, education, etc.) and everything else is fair game as long as the rules are followed.

In Europe you generally don't see headlines about how some big corporation just reported its largest profit in its entire history and is also laying off thousands of workers.

I'm sure Facebook's change of heart has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that Matt Mullenweg announced on Thursday that WordPress was going to ditch React as a result of this BSD+Patents crap as he did not feel comfortable pushing that kind of a license onto about a third of all websites.

Amazon's competition nuked themselves with their inadequacy. All Amazon did was spot the weaknesses (which were pretty obvious) and exploit them.

I still doubt that. Most people are not too lazy/stupid to go get their own groceries.

Which has to be installed separately and then configured to run. So it's a moot point.

Replace cashiers with self-check outs? We already did that. The max number of lanes I've seen "replaced" has been 8 in a store and even then that was about 25% of the store's capacity. Kroger, the largest grocery store chain in the country, usually has 6 self checkout lanes and 1 or 2 workers keep an eye on them.

But if they're so great and wonderful, why hasn't Kroger or any other store replaced ALL of its checkout lanes with the "U-Scan"? They're more efficient, I can bag my groceries and such how I want, and I don't have someone else crowding me at the lane. They've also been in place for a decade now so the "trial run" is long over.

Maybe this whole automation pipe dream is just that... a pipe dream.

!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!

It won't drop prices. They'll just keep the profits.

Security is only as strong as its weakest link and that is the end user. It doesn't matter if they're running MacOS, iOS, Linux, Windows, or DOS. Period. If they're not running updates, the OS doesn't matter.

And if you want to get into the pissing contest, Linux has had a few major bugs with some of its components. Sendmail has had bugs that allowed someone to get root access by simply sending an e-mail to/through the server. Last year Google found a bug in glibc that would cause a buffer overflow and thus allow arbitrary execution. Oh, and let's not forget the privilege escalation vulnerability known as "Dirtycow" that apparently has been around for a decade in the Linux Kernel itself.

You can fault Microsoft on its processes for getting updates out there, but how many Linux boxes patched glibc or the kernel automatically?

Most packages I get are sent SmartPost so they end up being delivered via USPS anyways.

And take responsibility for the malicious crap that can come across their networks too. Forbes got nailed for this when a bunch of web security folks went there to read an article about a colleague, disabled adblockers per Forbes, and were promptly served up malware.

If your PC is an HDMI cable's length from your PC, that's fine. Mine is not.

The emulator comes as part of the package you'd install on the Pi. Probably the only time consuming part would be if you had to index a large number of ROMs.

I can built a Raspberry Pi unit that will not only be an NES/SNES Classic, but also a Sega Master System, Sega MegaDrive/Genesis system, Turbografix-16 system, and a whole slew of others all at the same time for $100.