Sounds like they can make 24,000 carats per year, or about 8% of the current worldwide annual production capability. The original submission contained additional information.

One of my clients has 13 subsidized foreign (!) workers. In round numbers, he pays them $4/hr, you pay them $8/hr, but they only actually get $8/hr, because $4/hr goes to an NGO "acclimation and training" scam. I'll have to check to see if Greenstein is running it (and/or arranging their grossly overpriced 3-to-a-room housing).

For your $20M Lockheed Martin will discover and develop a VP-level revolving-door job opening for an experienced NASA contract liaison with a proven lack of ethics.

There are several ways to accept money safely, but a Certified Check has never, ever been one of them.

Seriously, how can everyone not know this?

In the Russian borrowed word "radio", the Cyrillic characters a and o look identical to the same English letters (the rest are completely different).

The Russian word "radio" should be in (the specific Russian Cyrillic subset of) Unicode/UTF, while the English word "radio" should be in Unicode/ASCII.

Mixing and matching character sets in URLs or email address typically indicates "intent to confuse". Within text, it usually just confuses translators and spell checkers.

So, you are not from the USA. While the US Congress directly accepts bribes, it usually doesn't directly disperse the associated thank you dollars back to the corporations.

In this case, thank-yous were paid by stuffing the FCC with lawyers working for Comcast and Verizon (currently on 'accrued salary, bonus and commission deferred until 2017' status).

It is these experts in Telecommunications Law (that could not explain the difference between RJ11 and an Internet Tube) who will determine that all schools and libraries should use Comcast, Verizon, or both, for installation and service.

Our house was built in 1995, and we lost exactly one recessed incandescent flood out of 24 in 18 years. In the last 18 months we've lost 5 of 20 CFLs. Four are still incandescent because those areas actually needed light, and, e.g., "equivalent to 100W" really means "almost equivalent to 50W" thanks to the usual practice of industry-written standards and regulations.

It's not costing us much directly because the bulbs are almost free after local electric company rebates at Costco (and those 0 lumen bulbs don't draw much wattage) but the $250 electric bill doesn't pay itself (nor does it ever seem to pay for added capacity). Thus, as invariably happens in the USA, mock-capitalists have purchased the rights to game the system and get rich off of what started out as a noble (or at least equitable) idea.

I built out the basement with real fluorescents (some commercial, some European (i.e., non-compact residential types)), and, despite being much older technology, their average life has been much better - far exceeding the advertised 20,000 hours for always-on fixtures, and at least equaling it for those turned on/off several times a day (roughly relative to the quality of the ballast).

Pointless anecdote: A frostless incandescent bulb in almost daily use near the basement coal chute in the house my father was born in outlived his 75 years by at least 5 on each end, and was still working when the house was sold.

Thanks for the memory jog.

I used to have at least one for my tube work in the 60s, 300V or so but I don't recall the specifics. In a quick run through eBay nothing clicked. But I did see where someone was selling filament supplies w/digital displays ... that's just wrong.

My entire 'B' bench is 70s gear that just keeps on working (HP 1742A scope, 5302A counter, a brace of Simpson 260s, Fluke 1910A, HP-19 calc, etc, all bought new, most still with the original manuals filed in the same cabinets as the few Photofacts I kept). Even more impressive is that nothing is worth anything because everyone else's gear is also still working fine.