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.

"Unsurprisingly, Monsanto, Roundup's manufacturer disagrees saying there is no evidence to support the findings and calls on WHO to hold a meeting to explain their conclusions."

Seems like a reasonable request to me. "Your data is different from ours, explain your results."

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.

Nonsense, "a friend" is role-neutral name for group member or dungeon master. We had all kinds of friends - mages, rogues, clerics...

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

Yep.

Not only that, but "ethical" is all too often is synonymous with "what won't ever lead us to getting sued" and has nothing to do with greater good or even doing the right things for a group of individuals.

You have to start somewhere, even if it is "blind hacking". If we keep waiting for perfect solution, it will never happen.

Natural evolution takes millions of years and doesn't select for traits we would find useful. It is time to take matter into our own hands. Start hacking genome. Sure, there will be numerous failed experiments and disasters along the way, but self-programming is the only way we can get better. Do-nothing alternative eventually leads to resource exhaustion and collapse of our civilization.

Ethics? Who cares about some rigid individualist standards that are based on logically bankrupt bearded-man-in-the-sky concepts, ones still subscribing to such dated notions will be left on the heap of history. There is no ethical problems with species struggling for improvement, but there is imperative to do so.

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.