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Amazon actually takes your money and also has competitors (high street etc). I think that partly explains some of the differences in their approach to your point (c). I think that Amazon also delegates a lot of the pain you're talking about onto their employees rather than their bottom line. BTW I speak as a complete hypocrite who is a happy Amazon customer.

Depressing, isn't it? There are so many books that I probably should read about almost any number of topics that, in my work, I "touch on".

It's so annoying, one time it even asked me if I was enjoying using it and would I like to write a review.

thanks for the information

I don't really understand this too well but I suppose the question I'd have from what I've read is who was going to get the $360 million? Cui bono?

An odd thing that happened to me yesterday with the PostgreSQL ODBC driver (psqlODBC) v9.3.400. It wouldn't let me insert a string longer than 255 characters long into a character varying field into a local v9.4 database on windows using a recordset update. I didn't have a problem pasting it in via pgadmin. Altered the field to text and the problem went away. I've a suspicion that there is a limit on text in the tens of thousands of characters length too though despite both those fields being essentially the same thing and limitless.

Smallpox may have gone but I'm fairly sure that there was a vaccine for that a very long time ago. As regards extreme poverty, I don't know that the situation in sub-Saharan Africa has improved, it may even have become worse. But I'm not doubting that there have been massive improvements in a qualitative sense to such an extent that in some ways they are revolutionary.

The 50 or so years from about 1895 gave us powered flight, radio and television, the first antibiotics, nuclear energy, rockets capable of escaping earth orbit, the big bang understanding of the origins of the universe, motor cars and even car phones. They also gave us two world wars which may be significant. By comparison the last 50 years appears rather dull, from this layman's perspective.

I remember watching the Apollo 13 movie for the first time in 1995 and thinking at the time how modern they were in those far off days of 1970. Now the same length of time has passed since 1995 (in the blink of an eye) and it still hasn't dated. The internet is huge but it feels like the only thing we've done since 1970.

The article,though not the book, is by Simon Heffer who's always a bit controversial on matters Irish. In my view he'd be one of those British who still feel that, on maps the British Isles should in their entirety be coloured pink just as many Irish feel that the whole island of Ireland should be coloured green.

Coming from a farming background I spent a lot of time in close contact with grass etc. No one I know of ever came down with something like this but now it's becoming increasingly common though not among farmers. I have a suspicion that a lot of the people who would have formerly complained of Fibromyalgia, or mercury allergy, or ME are now getting this.

Nisan and Schocken's "The elements of computing systems" should be on this list. I'd have it at number 1

I was thinking globally since the discussion was about the global population.

So, my country which feels big to me couldn't do it. This reinforces my belief that there are way too many of our species on this planet. Given that 2.1 or so is the replacement rate, a "hard" limit of two child per woman would be decent compromise as this would equate to somewhere around 1.7 taking into account women who don't want to /can't have children. In one generation, if there were no unintended consequences this would drop the population by 15%.

Sometime in the 2100s it would be half what it is today and my country could easily fit everyone!

The way you put it makes it sound like he was still inside.