In the US they've even banned selling new old stock. I believe that was a recent change within the last few years.

Back in the 1970's I tried to come up with a metric time system by breaking a day into powers of 10. A centiDay was 14.4 minutes.

I realized it would never catch on, because a 30 minute TV show would have to fit into 28.8 minutes, and the only way to do that was to lose a couple of commercials. Never gonna happen.

Back in the 1790s some Frenchmen did the similar thing but, despite not having TV and commercials it still did not catch up even in France.

Grace Hopper used to hand out pieces of wire to represent nanoseconds. She used pepper to represent picoseconds.

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.

I love the way 360 (degrees) divides evenly by so many small integers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15.

I created 360 shares in a small business I set up many years ago incase we ever needed to a few more share holders

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.

You’re saying that you still use Amazon because it offers a superior delivery service?

Then aren’t you glad that option exists when you need it?

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.

But it sounds like their superior delivery service is a lie too. Promise next day or 2 day service but delivery in 3-4 days.

It wasn't even next day, it was same day! But yes, it was a complete lie.

Maybe that's why it will take 2 months, they need to clear out the old inventory so they don't have a de-mingling problem.

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.

It's about time! They never should have allowed 3rd-party sellers on the platform until this was in place.

I've been saying for years, Sandisk makes the best Flash cards but never buy them from Amazon, just for this reason. Too many counterfeits out there.

> 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.

Even then you’d buy the correct ISBN and receive an identical copy but clearly marked FOR SALE IN INDIA ONLY.

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.

I started buying my flash cards direct from the Sandisk web store. They are more expensive but at least they are genuine products.

> 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.