I had successfully suppressed the memory of getting id.me working until this post came up. It was not a pleasant memory. I'm pretty sure that I was "lucky" in that my wait was probably closer to 4 hours than 9. If I recall, the website made you confirm that you were indeed present every 15 or 20 minutes or you'd lose your spot waiting for the video agent. The worst part is that after I finally got it working, I couldn't get the information I wanted from the IRS website.

At least not until they got the bill.

Completely agree. A waste of energy; not only in the physical sense but also the intellectual sense.

I realize that SEC filings are supposed to be comprehensive, but any investor who doesn't realize that graphics cards are being used for cryptocurrency mining has their head in the sand... or plainly doesn't care.

Indeed. The Deja vu is real.

In a different world this would kick off a RICO investigation against the governor and the judge who signed the search warrant. At least at face value, this seems a lot like racketeering to me.

Agreed. Markets solve these problems.

Even in this simple example, it appears that the terrabyte to megabyte conversion is using base 10; many engineers would consider 1048576 MB to be a TB. Throw in some confusion between megabits and megabytes, and suddenly the calculation is off by a multiple of 8. What about bad block pools on the drive?

The point being: mathematically modeling even very simple problems can be surprisingly complicated, and requires a great deal of diligence.

...we just need some budding entrepreneurs to get into the generic drugs market. I'm actually surprised that walgreens and other pharmacies haven't gotten into that business.

I have countless coworkers that I have never met since they are on different continents, but I manage to accomplish quite a lot of work with them and recognize their voices. Face to face is usually not necessary. Even within the same site (a huge site), it is more efficient to use the phone than have half the participants make a 40 minute round trip walk to the other side of the plant.

Ditto on this opinion. Not every conference call is useful, but neither is every in-person interaction. I've had significant success in getting work done with people around the world via conference calls. I think the key is to keep the groups small (only have people on the call who have a vested interest in the topic under discussion), and to have some sort of tangible work product that comes out of the call -- whether that's code that was created via pair programming, a report, or even just an e-mail summarizing decisions that were made. Any conferencing software worth its salt will handle the issue of keeping voices straight. The real problems are traffic noise and the guy who doesn't know how to use the mute button.

we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries

I suspect this topic is more complicated than you realize. The Caribbean medical schools are oddly enough considered to be US medical schools, and US citizens who for whatever reason don't get accepted to a mainland medical school tend to go those schools. The supply of doctors is artificially lowered by a number of factors, not the least of which is congressional funding for residency spots. Roughly 10% of people who finish medical school and apply for residency don't match into a residency (See http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Main-Match-Result-and-Data-2018.pdf). I feel really sorry for the people who get all done, have piles of debt, don't match, and have to move to a different country if they want to practice medicine.

I was very surprised by just how little time my wife spent in physical buildings and how much time she spent watching video taped lectures at 1.5 speed. However, a lazy river might have been just the motivation she would have needed to actually go to the lectures in person.

This sounds a lot like the same sales pitch which was being made to explain the purpose of In Trail Procedures (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/pilot/itp/), which to my knowledge hasn't really gone very far just yet. Anybody know if there's been any progress in making ITP a real thing?

I'm sure Intel dabbles in plenty of government contracts, but processors are a consumer good, not a defense product.

If Intel had to choose between selling on the international consumer market and selling to the US government, I'm pretty sure they'd dump the government in about 5 seconds.

If the US government really wants a secure processor, they should get a secure processor... instead of using the same consumer-grade contraption that I use to surf the web.

...should notifications go out alphabetically?

Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, oh yes, and then the United States.

Not that there wouldn't be certain arguments for notifying the government where the company's headquarters is located, but how exactly would Intel (or any other company working on a global scale) be expected to comply with the myriad of governments that could pass laws requiring that they get notified first. It's a lot simpler and a lot more elegant if everyone finds out at the same time.