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.

Amen, but Han was the ONLY one to shoot at all. Greedo never shot.

No, in films it was a picture of the time-waveform, not a picture of the spectrogram. The film image was is in the time-domain, and was equivalent to a phonograph record with the grooves unwound to be linear, and then shown as a long picture. The spectrogram is like somebody adjusting all of the levels on a 128-channel (or more, maybe) graphic equalizer 128 times (or more, maybe) per second, and keeping the data of all of those graphic-equalizer settings and turning that into a picture.

Any university student in their second year of signal processing studies would know it was possible to transform the spectrogram back into sound. Actually doing it with this spectrogram is kind of ballsy and insensitive. Posting the real high-quality spectrogram was irresponsible.

Little "d", democracy.

Big "D" is the Democrats, which I'm sorry to say is a bunch of mismatched train cars that can't agree what needs to move, nor get moving, nor stay moving. Meanwhile the Republicans are a train that is speeding along and smashing the Constitution as fast as the Orange One wants.

That should probably be phrased "the only SPONSOR with USAID". The tens or hundreds of million people who benefited directly from USAID we also participants.

Marshall Plan
USAID
UNESCO
WHO

There were clearly some benefits to the US with those, but the US had at least been a reliable and beneficial participant, and those had been a net positive for the world. (With the US being the only participant with USAID)