I was able to do something similar by using gross approximations and conversions to/from metric. My coworker had just bought a surplus stainless steel water tank for solar heating, and was wondering how much it would weigh when full. It was cylindrical, so I asked him for the diameter and the height. In my head I converted those measurements to inches, then to centimeters by multiplying by 2.5. I divided the diameter by 2, squared it, and multiplied by 3 (close enough to pi) to get the area. Then I converted the area and the height to their nearest power of 2 so I could take advantage of logarithms. Multiplying the area and height was as easy as adding the exponents, which gave me cubic centimeters. The weight of water is almost by definition 1 gram per 1 cc. Divide by 1000 to get kg by subtracting 10 from the exponent, then multiply by 2 to get approximate pounds by adding 1 to the exponent. By the time he was done telling me the dimensions, I had an answer for him. It definitely wasn't correct, but all he needed was a ballpark anyway.
We may get there eventually just as a consequence of being part of the world economy.
I noticed a couple of years back that my "U.S. Customary" wrenches weren't fitting my new plumbing fittings which were definitely not metric, but metric wrenches did. Probably made in China.
Then last summer I noticed something similar with lag bolts. The U.S. Customary socket fit the head, but it was nearly identical to a metric one that fit just a little better. The threads are designed to go into wood, not a nut, so if they were metric you'd never even know.
But not same-day. But even that's a bit iffy - I made a purchase from Amazon recently where they promised same-day delivery, on a Sunday no less! But it didn't actually arrive until Wednesday.
I didn't need it that same day - if I had, I would have driven 5 miles to the nearest retailer that carried it and Amazon wouldn't have even been considered.
I was seriously impressed that they made that promise, thought I had nothing to lose. And I re-learned a lesson, if something's too good to be true then it probably isn't. I certainly won't be putting any faith in same-day service in the future. They proved their "superior delivery service" is just an illusion.
You think it will only take 2 months to rotate through everything that is currently filled with fakes?
Although actually upon reflection, it doesn't say that they won't send out co-mingled products, this isn't a notice to customers that they won't send out fakes after that date. Just that they won't co-mingle anymore.
> They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.
Exactly. From the modern perspective, it's a function purpose-built to abet counterfeiters.
However, look at their origins as a used book seller. When my sister went off to college, I got most of her books off Amazon for a third the price of the university bookstore, and they were all from third-party sellers promising they had a particular edition and printing of a given book. All the same ISBN regardless of where they came from. It made sense in that context, to consider all sources of a given item to be the same item.
However, at that time (2005), all the books shipped from their individual sellers, there was no opportunity for stock commingling. If one had turned up counterfeit, blame would've been trivial.
So I don't think "3rd-party sellers" is necessarily the cutoff point. I don't think they should've allowed multiple suppliers for the same ASIN to all have their stock *in Amazon warehouses* until individual supplier tracking was in place.
Just on a related note for anyone in college in this thread. Forgo the book fees or technology fees or whatever bullshit they wrap up in your tuition and go to dealoz.com. Buy the books you want to keep and rent the ones you don't. Save yourself.
Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.
> This is a well known problem because early computers with monitors used to only be able to display characters.
It's not just monitors. My first exposure to ASCII art were posters that were printed on a Teletype, in the mid 1970's. The files had attributions to RTTY operators, which made me believe they were done by hand. Of course a Teletype had no concept of pixels.
Cray's design for Control Data before starting his own company was interesting. You were required to start each subroutine with a jump instruction, and the subroutine call instruction would modify the memory at that location to a jump back to the caller. To return from a subroutine you would just branch back to its beginning.
