If Palmer really wants to make a difference, rather than trying to copy an American company's product that is currently manufactured overseas for price reasons, he should try to copy the overseas manufacturing processes, capability, etc. I'm pretty certain CNC lathes, laser cutters, EUV lithography equipment, et cetera are all available in the US for anyone willing to spend the money. US-based flexible contract manufacturing capability, immune to tariffs and ITAR, could definitely be a thing.

Yes, this. UNESCO doesn't "do" science, it promotes international cooperation in science. About twenty years ago, when George W. Bush was President, I went to UNESCO headquarters in Paris for the "Third Global Conference on Oceans, Coasts and Islands," convened by something called the "Global Ocean Forum," led by the late Dr. Biliana Cicin-Sain. At that point in time, the Forum was hosted at the Gerard J. Mangone Center for Marine Policy at the University of Delaware.

That was an age when the US saw value in having a leadership role in global policy on things involving Education, Science and Culture, the ESC in UNESCO.

We now have a President and administration that sees Education, Science and Culture as things to be attacked. Times have changed.

I've bought a "modern laptop" for $299, for my mother-in-law who didn't use computers until she was about 60.
An "HP Stream 14" or some such. CPU was something Celeron-like, 4GB RAM, Windows in "S mode" (unlocked to run the real thing easily enough)
Took far longer to do anything than the C64 my parents got back in the 1980s.

Yeah, no one reads their product names before launch any more.

I'm not a CS type, but I work in STEM, and having tried numerous times to bring obscure scientific stuff over from Unix or Linux and get it to build on MacOS, I absolutely agree with what you just said above. That sort of stuff is better left to experienced developers who focus on MacOS. I do use Linux, Windows and MacOS every workday, but I don't use Windows on weekends. I'd pick a Mac laptop 10 times out of 10 for general use, presuming I had access to networked Linux systems.

"Seven Fingers of Death."

All hardware sucks.
All software sucks.
Some of it sucks different.

For at least five years now, I've seen scammers leaving fake customer service numbers for major brands all over the web. Q&A sites, open comments, wherever. The usual tip-off is that they list the SAME number as customer support for Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Or for CoinBase, PayPal, and whoever else. Obviously, call that number and you're getting scammed.

I had thought they were just trying to game search results -- put a number enough places and some non-zero number of people will find it. But in a world where AI bots are scraping the web, this approach is even more effective, because the AI bots aren't going to think critically about what they're sucking up.

Wonderful, just wonderful.

A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice.

Almost. Like, there's only one "real desktop operating system" that's not Windows, is Unix-based, focused on the desktop and userspace, and has about 15% of worldwide desktop OS market share, compared to 6% for Linux.

But pay no attention to that, this is clearly a binary choice between Windows and Linux. Carry on.

Enshittification

Apple hasn't made a laptop with a VGA port since 2012, it looks like... but Dell PowerEdge and Precision rackmounts intended for datacenter use still have 'em. Gotta connect your stuff to KVMs somehow.

Uh, back in the 80s, BITnet ran on IBM mainframes and VAXen.

...by having every frame of video relayed through Beijing?

Yeah, but it still feels kinda low-hanging fruit.
Might as well be the Brown Screen of Death.
Why not go beyond the 8-colors box of crayons?
Beige Screen of Death.
Burgundy Screen of Death.

Jets?

In early 1953, the government convened a meeting of researchers in Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of inertial navigation.
"Doc" Draper and his MIT team stuck their prototype INS unit in a B-29, but had no time to test it before flying non-stop from outside Boston.
After 2,500 miles of flying with no input from the pilots, it was only 10 miles off.
Draper went to the meeting and said that yeah, it was possible, since he'd just done it.
I feel sorry for whatever presentater followed him.