I used to cover my router lights with a black dish towel to prevent them from lighting up the room at night. Then a friend of mine said "hey, do you know there's a switch on the back of that router to turn off the flashy lights?" Wait, what?

Now, not only do I sleep fine, but I also have an extra dish towel.

Yah, apparently with electrons streaming off their needles, while suffering from horrible ozone-induced headaches.

...would have produced the same results, assuming the code functionality was really replicated.

I loved it when the QA people would come back to me and say the results weren't the same, only to discover the original program had an undiscovered error.

To me, that implies the QA people were running a new test that had not been run on the original code. If it had been run on the original code, they would have produced the same results.

The question to ALWAYS ask the QA people in this circumstance is, "what was the result when you previously ran this test on the prior product?" This question could have several outcomes (e.g. "it's a new test that we didn't run before"), but it is the basis for the required discussion with the QA people about the problem. This question helps you benefit from the condition that you had "prior art" to compare to.

If Ellison wants to flee to a 3rd world country with zero labor protections - Good riddance.

AKA "Texas"?

This reminds me of some of the things I've read about $cientology motivational practices, where the mid-level executives had to take turns standing in a garbage can and being screamed at by the other mid-level executives. (As told by the late Mike Rinder, who left the cult.)

Plus, it's easy in China for them to copy any designs any time and replicate them for domestic sale. Protective laws and enforcement are notoriously weak.

Yeah, I heard the vanguard of this effort was an Olympic canoeist. Incredible, the kinds of people they can subvert to sabotaging Trump!

Could be a new use for a Boring Machine.

NIH? What call for help? (Not saying it didn't happen, just that I can't find it.)

Liz Truss: the Dirac delta function of Prime Ministers.

Scores of Italian coffee makers are rolling in their graves right now...

They were all slain by reading the news about an ultrasonic cold brew espresso. That's rough, being killed by the news AND STILL finding no relief.

Hopefully "something" does not include imparting the latent taste of body oils and saliva from the ultrasonic bath into the coffee.

"may be privy to proprietary Amazon corporate information. Whether they realize it or not."

You are correct, they almost certainly are. Therefore, two things apply about that: (1) They need to be careful their statements, to make sure they do not reveal nonpublic or proprietary information. (2) Their ACTUAL statements must be evaluated to determine if they revealed any such information. They either did, or did not, reveal nonpublic or proprietary information, and it's fairly easy to determine that from public records.

There's one more thing: They can get in trouble and be fired if they acted as if they were speaking on behalf of Amazon. Even giving the appearance of speaking for Amazon could get them fired. That's got nothing to do with proprietary information, that's just them getting fired for overreaching their jobs.

"The precedent upholding this bs is you can sell services/goods with licenses, then have another company buy you, keep all the profits from that and not honor the contracts. One can do this perpetually and grift customers and completely undermine all contracts."

Someting like this has happened in the U.S. with unscrupulous solar panel + loan companies. You sign a contract to get the company to install solar panels on your house, and you pay for it with a lien. Usually the company has to maintain the installation. But there have been cases where the original company goes bankrupt, and another company buys all of the loans. The new company demands the client to continue to pay them monthly, but refuses to maintain the system any more, claiming they bought the loans, not the service agreements.

Did not (and won't) happen to me, but it's been in the news in the U.S.