You can't trust the encryption they're offering you for money, either. You're going to have to handle encryption on your end.

When workers become commodities, we call that slavery.

I got the email today, too. My Prime membership is staying at $79 for another year.

Here's the text:
"We are writing to provide you advance notice that the price of your Prime membership will be increasing in 2015. Your 2014 annual renewal will remain at the original price of $79. In March 2015, your membership will renew at $99/year."

I order about $2000 to $2500 worth of stuff per year from Amazon. Like somebody else said, I'd spend more than that per year on gasoline going to the various stores locally. And that's IF the product is even available locally. Most of what I buy online I can't find around here.

I still buy a ton of stuff from New Egg, too. They usually ship from Memphis to my home here in Birmingham, AL, so a lot of the time I get the stuff in a couple of days.

The snus I buy comes from Sweden. Nobody has it here in the U.S., so shipping is quite high, but I can order on Sunday and have it on Wednesday.

I'd say more but there's a drone landing in my front yard. I think my order has arrived!!

Once you can replace an 18 wheeler's diesel engine with an electric drive system, then you've changed the world and made a real impact on emissions.

Why bother? Just run the diesel engine you already have on biodiesel.

Besides, there are far more effective ways for the president to "Lead" us into a greener future. (Maybe cutting back on those vacations that are half a planet worth of jet fuel away for one.)

More like "vacations that are a full plane load worth of secret service agents and other assorted aides away" -- if the Prez flew commercial it wouldn't be such a big deal.

My city (Melbourne, Oz) is on the upper edge of the southern ocean's "roaring forties", there are a few windmills dotted around the state but for some reason we are still fully reliant on brown coal for electricity, a mine that feeds the coal plants recently caught fire and burnt for a month resulting in the town of Morwell being partially evacuated due to the toxic cloud from the fire. Looking at it from a purely logical POV, it's fucking insane!

The US is a paradox. From the very beginning of talks in the late 80's US foreign policy has sought to derail any coordinated global effort to curb GHG emissions, often being the sole roadblock to progress, yet at the same time they have (on a per capita basis) built more wind power capacity than anyone else?

No it is not a "major problem", can we drop please that bullshit meme, smaller (fast spinning) windmills and windmills built on migration paths do kill birds and this was a minor problem in the early days that closed down a few mills. Modern windmills sited with a bit of forethought are no more likely to kill birds than a stationary skyscraper.

Minor problem* - The number of birds killed by flying into windmills and other large buildings pales into insignificance when you consider the impact of domestic cats on birds.

Now we can see our education system experience a blue screen of death.

Why do we keep insisting on experimenting with the way we educate our children? It ain't rocket surgery - we've been doing it for thousands of years. Why not just teach the stuff they need to know and cut out the political correctness and zero-tolerance crap? Hold the students accountable and flunk them if they don't make the grades necessary.

During the 80's I worked at a large nylon factory (1200 employees), they had two large HV transformers side by side under a chicken wire cage to keep humans and animals out. Somehow a possum (about the size of a racoon) found itself on the inside of the cage and was electrocuted, the shock threw it from one transformer to the other shorting out both. Damage bill was $50K plus a couple of days lost production.

Which acid? How much? Where? In what concentration?

You can miss the point all you want. What matters is NOT the substance, or the nature of the substance, as much as the concentration and the effects at that concentration.

Acid in your eye? Try fusidic acid.

You had a good factual point, then you ruined it with the political crap - by that I mean when has Gore ever called anyone "evil" for using electricity?

If Bill Gates is involved, I suspect some devious plot, though not necessarily Microsoft based. Actually, history would suggest that it's also Microsoft based, but he hasn't been in charge for awhile now, so perhaps he's got something else to push.

Every time I've checked one of his "benevolent" actions, it's turned out to be control motivated (or wealth motivated) so I'm now suspicious whenever his name appears.

FWIW, axioms cannot be understood. They can only be postulated. If they are said to apply to reality, then they can also be observed to be invariably true. (Well, actually they can be observed to be true when you are noticing them, except in minor edge cases that can be explained away.)

What *can* be understood is how the axioms interact to describe an instance. (I'm being general here, so that I'm not *just* talking about math, but math is included.)

One useful way of talking about axioms is to use metaphors, some times historic. E.g., the equals sign is a symbol representing a balenced set of scales (as used in Babylon). In this system numbers are mapped to weights. So the scales remain balanced if you add or remove the same number from both pans of the scale. But this is an analogy, and there are places where it breaks down. (E.g., a square root has two valid answers...which doesn't fit the analogy, but does fit the axioms.)

Yet.

But automation is continuing at a rapid pace. Currently the designs are such that complex machines are often replaced rather than being repaired. (When is the last time you heard of a disk drive or a keyboard being repaired? Refridgerator?) And that's NOW, not when those currently in grade schoold have graduated from college/vocational school.

FWIW, I would have no idea what to recommend people learn...beyond certain basics: logic, critical thinking, how to evaluate reliability, etc.

A few decades ago I recommended that one should "be a garbage man", on the grounds that this would probably not be quickly automated. Well, automation hasn't advanced quite as quickly as I expected, but garbageman has remained a viable career path, if not a particularly attractive one. Part of the reason for this recommendation was that there aren't many openings in top management, and they are the ones who decide what jobs won't be automated, so that's the last job that will go. Today, though, I'm not so sure. Automated trucks are on the horizon, and that will eliminate huge swaths of jobs. And garbage collection has already been redesigned to increase the automation. (I'm not real inspired by the efficiency of the automation, but it has reduced the number of workers/truck and, perhaps, increased the speed of collection.) Further redesign is clearly needed, however...and by the time that happens, it's quite likely that the truct will drive itself.

Supermarket checkout clerk? RFID tags are already changing that. Currently there's no requirement that the cashier be more than very minimally literate. Self-checkout is spreading. How far will it spread?

Have you heard about the automated paralegal? It does searches through legal cases for useful references. This is work that used to be delegated to the entry lawyers of a firm. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's clearly something that is amenable to improvement.

Etc. I can't predict where automation will strike next, or how rapid will be its proliferation. But predicting what will be needed 20 years from now seems more than a bit risky. I might venture 5 years. At 10 years I'd be likely to overestimate the changes. At 20, however, I'd be likely to grossly underestimate the changes. That's enough time for something to be expected to come out of left field that will totally change things in unexpected ways. And education is supposed to prepare one for the long term.

The transparent, libertarian way is to have your money stolen in front of you.

So, the 700,000 bitcoins that disappeared under Mt Gox were stolen "in front of" the people who owned them?

Maybe we need to define "in front of".