This helps. Some months ago I noticed seventy $100 charges for Apple (about $7000 total), all done in 36 hours on my card. After freezing the card, the credit card company suggested it might help if I called Apple so I did. TApple's attitude was this kind of thing was common, and just a regular cost of doing business, instead of trying to fix the root of the problem. They indicated that their own fraud department had already detected the problem and was already in the process of refunding it (but it still took them a couple of weeks...), and further that the fraudulent charger had attempted a lot more but Apple had figured out that 1 charge every 30 minutes for $100 was probably suspicious, after they'd accepted several thousand dollars so they stopped accepting charges. And also, I had to spend 15 minutes convincing them that I have no Apple customer ID at all, as I have not been an Apple customer since the 1990s.

Next month, scientists will discover that smoking cigarettes will help you quit the magic mushroom habit.

I take taxis/Uber/whatever a few times a day, in a metro area I know well. Google gets it right about 80% of the time. Very occasionally it will produce a big mess, but for that other 20% it usually just does something stupid, like putting you on an expressway that doubles the mileage to save you a theoretical 2 minutes.

In many ways, the system has been messed with, as this list of "proprietary MIDI implementations" from just one company shows. https://yamaha.io/2W9qFwO One hopes that the new standard will address these implementations.

Wow. And maybe after this, they can finally figure out how to make a decent search function for Outlook.

The latest beta release of Skype Android uses your contact directory and separates those who have Skype and those who don't. You can add phone numbers directly into this. I don't beta test the Windows release, but it does seem that the only way to do this is to import your entire contact directory somehow. I agree this is very clumsy and I hope they add back the ability to create a separate directory inside Skype. Otherwise, worst case, you can always just dial manually inside Skype, but that is also kind of clumsy.

Goldman Sachs, the central bank of South Korea, the central bank of Japan and others are treating bitcoin as a commodity, not a currency. Except regular commodities such as gold have a lot more liquidity than bitcoin, so it's kind of a second-class commodity. Like tulips, for example.

There is a regular maglev that operates from Shanghai airport to Pudong that regularly reaches 431 km/h (I know because I took a picture of the speedometer when I took this train last month).

Long-term Singapore residents go in and out of the country at the airport by scanning their passports, and then pressing on the fingerprint panel. Takes about 20 seconds total, and there is never a line-up. However, facial recognition is much more difficult, and I have personally experienced failures at borders testing this (particularly, in 2014 in Israel, where I was redirected to a human). I assume the technology they talk about for Dubai isn't just vaporware, but I think facial recognition software has a way to go before something like they describe becomes a realistic plan.

I have a 55" 4K LG monitor that I use for my PC. I sit slightly more than one arm's length away from the screen. I think the curvature adds something to it, but I can't say for sure because I'm not about to test it by comparing it to a flat 55" 4K monitor. Mainly I think the curvature is a currently-fashionable design aesthetic for screens.

I work for a European multi-national. Some of my colleagues (sometimes the French ones too) are on all the time, and some colleagues are on-call during working hours only, and who take a month off every year (even some Americans!), during which time they are not available for anything. 1) I see no correlation between competence/getting things done and being on all the time. 2) Those who are on all the time tend to to be much more personally invested in work outcomes, so they are the ones who blow up every time some little thing doesn't go exactly their way. Overall, this makes these colleagues more difficult to accomplish things with, and I prefer the ones who have lives outside the company. This is basic time management. Of course, being asked (and paid) to be on call in case of an emergency is a different matter: I'm talking about normal work projects.

The term "layoff" is also a euphemism, originally suggesting a seasonal...uh...layoff, with a return planned. So the meaning has now morphed, the euphemism has lost its magic power among the marketing types, and they need to go on and find new ways to murder the English language.

...I checked, and I already have enough cheap-looking plastic smartphone cases.

"gives the impression of improved brain performance without really delivering it" Not too sure about that. I went off caffeine for six months once, then took a trip overseas (8 hours time difference) and had to drive 6 hours on arrival. At dusk, I noticed I was literally falling asleep at the wheel and drifting across lanes. So I pulled over to a coffee place, had my first coffee in six months, and it was like magic. No more drifting into opposing traffic.

Not really realistic, considering that a real monkey would get p-d off after a few minutes and start throwing feces at the page, and eating the pages of other monkeys. From what I saw, his virtual monkeys don't do that.