I guess many people have tried to mess with the scammers: one day when I had nothing much to do I got a scam call from 'Microsoft Tech Support'. Judging by accent and idiom alone (I know), I'd say south-east Asian. I strung him along for a few minutes figuring that time he was wasting with me (and my Mac) he wasn't using to scam vulnerable people.

The further I got into it, the angrier I got - he was convincing enough to fool older people in my life. I started to see this guy as a malicious threat.
Eventually he got to the bit where I download malware and I called a end to the game, pretty much exploded at the guy:
"You have parents, right? You are trying to steal money from old people: people like your parents. What would they think of what you do for a living?"
- surprisingly, it got through to him, and he became defensive, tried to explain himself:
"My parents are very proud of me. I have a job, I work in an office. I can take care of my family"
- we talked for a little while longer, and while he was still a crook in my mind, I got a little of his perspective. It's a white collar office job to him, he didn't have a range of opportunities. He's aware of the massive wealth disparities in the world and that the older people that he's scamming (even the poorer ones) have 100x (probably 1000x) the wealth that he and his family could ever have.
No moral, really, apart from crooks have lives too, but it is interesting to see the world in their eyes for a moment. I wish this article wasn't paywalled, I bet it's pretty good...

Weird. Look closely at your clothes. Literally every item you wear (excepting socks, I guess) will have a label saying clearly stating where it is made. It is a requirement of US customs and it will be visible in the store (even for socks, where it's on the packaging).
Genuinely surprised that you never noticed this.

You're missing the point. Why be so negative?
We *are* doing something now: providing help in a particular kind of way, and paying for some support, and law-enforcement and emergency health care.

This study is trying to establish if there is a more effective *systemic* way of using the same resources. They didn't simply toss money out into the street, they had designed a specific process for giving a specific amount of resources to specific people:

"In total, 115 participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups:

  Group 1 $7,500 + workshop & coaching, N=25
  Group 2 $7,500 + workshop (no coaching), N=25
  Group 3 no cash + workshop & coaching, N=19
  Group 4 no cash + no workshop / coaching, N=46" ...and then followed each group for 18months to measure the impact ....see? Science.

By the way, as far as I can see, this work was funded by a charity, Foundations for Social Change, so I don't think 'a bucket of grant money' was involved, just voluntary donations.

Indeed, thanks for providing this. You're right, it is a bad example as it muddies the water, although there was no finding of a monopoly, nor apparently much support from the judge for this claim. The plaintiffs referred to it is a 'monopoly class action' but apparently the judge was more supportive of the 'hacking' claim, since the plaintiffs complaint was that printers they bought in 2015 were automatically updated in 2016 with new firmware that threw a false error message when they used a third-party cartridge.

from your link: "The plaintiffs allege that HP’s action violates Section 502 of the California Computer Crime Law... Under the settlement, HP agreed not to reactivate Dynamic Security in *the affected printers*." - specially a subset of HP printers bought by these customers in 2015.

Still, agreed. Bad example.

This is exactly like HP creating a market for HP printer cartridges and locking out third-party ink cartridge providers. It's not consumer-friendly, but it's not by any definition a monopoly.
If you are upset, you can buy yourself an equivalent Android phone (who have 75%+ of the total phone market!) and avoid this. Ergo, not a monopoly.

"Whatever government does, is done very poorly and costs a lot more than it needs to."
I imagine that you've never worked for a very large American corporation?

Honestly, I think it's just a fact that it's very, very hard to get large amounts of people to do anything constructively together. Scale invites waste, inefficiency and creates opportunities for 'bad actors' to exploit any system. Sure, government is the most obvious example, but sometimes you HAVE to work together at scale - to get truly big things done: health, education, and, sure, landing on the moon.

Why do you think Churchill said 'Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others?'

Thanks for the clear overview of video compression, always wondered about this stuff. Really appreciated.

Without breaking confidentiality, I've been given a tour of a well-known 'high-quality' jigsaw manufacturer and can confirm that they use the same die (think insanely-complex cookie-cutter) for multiple images.

Each steel rule die is a complex thing to make (these are not huge, highly sophisticated manufacturing operations) and they run the same die stamping line continuously (while the factory is open!) while changing the printing image. Obviously, changing the image is ridiculously easy compared to changing the die, so they do that.

I think they had a number of lines each running a unique die (eg. pattern of puzzle pieces), so while different puzzles might well have different pieces, every image doesn't. Of course, you'd be hard pressed to notice, as the image completely changes the experience of solving the puzzle.

Not my words, those of a nurse who is caring for patients with COVID-19 today. She may be wrong about that - although she is an experienced professional in the field and I'm guessing that you are not - but the fact is that she doesn't have adequate protection and she's scared. I don't blame her.

I'm posting this because I think it's important but by all means use the skills that you have to help. If you're an engineer, see if you can solve the supply problems of ventilators, it can't hurt.

But I hope we're solving the right problems. I have a friend who is an ECMO nurse, right now providing life-support to people in respiratory collapse due to COVID-19. I asked her if lack of ventilators are the problem, she tells me that down the line she see two bigger problems, lack of beds and lack of staff:
"Covid already on my service and increasing daily. We are all so creeped out by this. Most of us clinicians assume we have been exposed, since....supplies are being rationed, and nobody gets a mask unless their patient had a fever, despite 70% of infected people being asymptomatic.... Other countries are gowning and gloving and masking (if not monkey suiting) their entire hospital staff."

So the lack of protective equipment is going to lead to the critical staff getting sick and there won't be the clinical capacity to provide the care.
I'm just hearing this now, I don't know the right answer: offer our protective gear to hospitals? I have 10 N95 masks in my garage I don't really need.

In any case, if you can support a nurse or a doctor somehow, please do, they are the frontline. You might not believe that this is going to be the all-out disaster many are predicting, but these people are overwhelmed already and will get sick.

Yeah, I got all outraged by that too, except that it doesn't make sense. Bill Gates is not a grade-A idiot - 'original manuscript' means the hand-written/typed original text done personally by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Whatever you think of Bill, he's not going to graffiti his name on that.

Go to the link:
"It’s really unique because it’s a manuscript book, so inside the pages are scans of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s actual handwriting and all of his notes when he was making this book.”
"Manuscript book" does not equal "Original manuscript"!

Still, it appears to be a limited edition and out of print - you have to pay over $1,000 for it on AbeBooks right now: https://www.abebooks.com/servl...

"But but I like phones that bend, "touch disease", really bad keyboards on laptops, and laptop screen cables that get broken by the hinges. Bring him back Crapple!!!!!!!! He was so great at designing garbage hardware!"

"Chargers that don't charge [cnbc.com], chargers that electrocute [ladbible.com] Only Apple can be this consistent."

Speaking as an (ex-)mechanical engineer who used to work with industrial designers, congratulations on both picking out things that are mechanical and electrical engineer fails. Especially since the bending was fixed without changing the industrial design. At the very worst, if the industrial design can't be realized in the ID envelope, it's a project management failure to not resolve the problem with a sensible compromise. It's totally wrong to blame an industrial designers for things being 'too thin' or 'too small.' They aren't responsible for packaging components.

Thanks for the tip:
Rabies vaccine: invented by *Louis Pasteur* for chrissakes!
https://www.the-scientist.com/...

oops. missed my citation for diphtheria:
https://www.historyofvaccines....

I'm curious - where is this "yay, yay America" list coming from? Picking one example - literally at random - I find that the first vaccine for tetanus was created by a Frenchman, Gaston Ramon, and perfected as tetanus toxoid by his student Pierre Descombey in 1924. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Ramon)

The second on your list that I looked up (honestly, at random) Dyptheria: the first vaccine was invented by Emil von Behring, a German, in Germany, in 1907.

I learned this a while ago: the simple version of history has it that one person 'invents' something at a moment of time: 'Eureka!' That's vanishingly rare, especially in science and medicine. In fact, an international community chips away at a problem for years. The problems get knocked off one by one: a theory, an effective antitoxin, production, delivery, etc, etc. You can pick and choose anyone in the list of Diptheria breakthroughs, but Germans, Brits, French and, yes, American scientists contributed.