What I am saying is that I am not that impressed by countries who manage to generate near to all of their power needs from hydro, an energy source that has been economically competitive and easily adjusted to power demand for ages. The biggest impediment to building competitive hydro plants these days are environmental concerns

I'm more impressed by countries that generate a sizable amount of power from other renewables like solar and wind, like Denmark, Germany and Spain. Irregular overcapacity may be playing havoc with their wholesale electricity prices, while at the consumer level these sources are not yet competitive for consumers buying wind power or for grid operators buying surplus solar back at consumer rates... but even so they continue to research and improve.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do the R&D; on the contrary. And there's a business opportunity there as well; solar and wind are technologies that most countries can benefit from, unlike hydro.

I thought the US military uses "klicks" (which is a kilometer) rather than miles.

Nothing. And in the meantime, Russia flies unscheduled military missions along routes of their own choosing over Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, in planes that may or may not be actually armed. They routinely pulled this crap during the cold war, and it has started up again. Putin knows we're not going to take potshots at his aircraft.

It's easy being green... if you have loads of opportunities to use hydro power. Hydro is the only large scale green power source we currently have that is a buffer as well as a generator, and will continue to run regardless of environmental conditions until the buffer runs dry. You can even top up the buffer if you have a surplus of wind or solar power, which is what Norway does I believe. But in densely populated and more or less completely flat countries like my own, we need to look at other green sources that require a great deal of investment and R&D before they can be used on a large scale. For our situation, the technology simply isn't there yet.

Ah yes, there it is. Now I don't mind admitting that I admire the guy, but there's no need for tasteless remarks.

He's not just spending money, but using it to build businesses that are thus far rather successful in markets considered to be hard to break into, hard to make money in, and/or hard to beat the incumbents. And he's intent on not just making a buck in those markets by being a little bit better than everyone else, he wants to turn things on their heads, and he is succeeding at that as well.

It's not always clear where a student's strength lies. They don't always even know what they like themselves; some students get turned on to subjects they previously would never have considered. Lastly, there's value in learning a little bit of everything. The real question is how much time should be spent on building a broad education (as opposed to a narrow specialized one)?

I do agree that the education system is in need of an overhaul... But I don't think that the curriculum should be all that different; it's more about how and when we teach those subjects. For example, why determine a good deal of the pacing and content of one's education on *age* of all things?

Teaching high school students to code isn't going to result in disastrously bad coders any more than high school chemistry and physics lessons result in bad scientists. If people in this day and age are still hiring coders without actually verifying their skills and qualifications, then they deserve all the bad coders they get.

Simple: you create a second abomination to hunt down and kill the first one. So there's really nothing to worry about

I find it pretty easy to avoid Amazon for everything, including (e-)books. Perhaps it's an advantage of living in a small country, but many online shops, including very small ones, offer next-day delivery: order before 21:00 and your package will most likely (not guaranteed) arrive the next day by regular mail. In contrast, Amazon still ships to NL from the UK or DE I think, so it is not as fast. For fast delivery, I order from a local shop. For obscure stuff I can't get here or for great deals I order direct from the far east (China, HK, or preferably Japan as their mail service is unbelievably fast). I've ordered from Amazon perhaps twice in the last 3 years.

Indeed, and this started well before online shopping. For large purchases like appliances, people would go to a reputable store and get good advise on what to buy, then make their purchase at a cut rate outlet staffed by snotty kids.

I've seen worse artwork (or simply no artwork whatsoever) on e-books from reputable authors and publishers. Perhaps because they didn't have the rights to distribute the original artwork of the print version electronically, they just slapped on something they had lying around.

At least most of them have stopped charging more for electronic versions of a book... And they even sell them outside the US now.

Their customers (like me) are happy because the Apple stuff works well for them. There's annoyances like proprietay cables, and frustration over the reluctance of Apple to open up some of their APIs; we have custom keyboards and widgets at last, but still no Siri. But for me, those are minor. I've tried Android as well on a phone and tablets, and hated it. A friend of mine (who switched from Apple to Android) explained it well: "The advantage of Android is that you are free to tweak everything to your liking. The disadvantage is that you have to". For me, Apple's garden suits me well enough to not really even notice the wall that rings it. Complain about Apple's design choices, questionable business policies, their treatment of consumers, and the locked-down environment, and I'll agree. But my next phone will still be an iPhone because I want one that'll do what I want it to, right out of the box.

I did keep the Android tablet... the ability to just grab files from my local NAS, work with them, move them, that's something sorely missing on the iPad.

What is the purpose of introducing any new transaction system (other than being the owner of it and collecting transaction fees and BIG DATA):
- Is it faster? Most existing transaction systems are already fast (at least as fast as BTC transactions)
- Is it cheaper? This allows you to lower transaction fees, and makes microtransactions possible
- Does it have a lower barrier to entry for small time merchants? This is where existing systems often fall short. PayPal is not too bad (it's bad for other reasons), and there are other payment processors available accepting credit cards and whatnot, but registering to receive payments yourself remains a PITA.
- Is it easy to use? Existing systems (Paypal, iDeal) and payment processors are already getting quite good at integrating well into the sales process.
- Can it do offline transactions securely? I don't think BTC can do this... For a time, offline transactions were seen as important by our banks, and they added an electronic wallet to our bank cards for small transactions at market stalls, parking meters and the like. However that thinking has been overtaken by events; adding a payment terminal and internet connection to anything has become so cheap that most places just have mobile connected terminals instead of offline ones.

BTC was set up as anonymous and decentralized, but for the likes of IBM, I fail to see what the attraction of that would be. So indeed... why are they doing this?

They have been told that their business model is illegal by judges in several jurisdictions. Over here they are still operating and just pay the fines (I think it's €10.000 a pop, no pun intended). But legislators are looking at Uber with interest as well: some are already trying to figure out if and how Uberpop's model could be made legal. They think a few small changes in the law and perhaps a few additional requirements for Uberpop cabs is all it takes.

I think the popularity of the service and the eagerness with which some legislators want to legalize it, go to show how much the existing taxi services are hated.