There are actual pictures of the clock floating around the interwebs. You might consider acquiring access to the information superhighway so that you can view these pictures.
There was no "disassembled alarm clock with wires soldered to it." There was a home-made circuit board, connected by ribbon cables to a small battery and digital display. There was no taken-apart alarm clock with drama-department wires attached to road flares, or any such nonsense. There was no Wile. E. Coyote alarm clock contraption. There was no part of the device that looked like explosives.
The teacher who claims to have "thought" it looked like a bomb picked it up and walked off with it, and sent the student to the office... without evacuating anybody. If the teacher has an IQ above 65, then I'm gonna call bull-pucky on having thought it actually looked like a bomb. If the teacher is a former special-ed student living the dream, OK, I can believe the story, and maybe it is just a "training issue."
You say there is a "home-made circuit board" there, can you point it out to me? The clock he "invented" are just the innards of a production alarm clock mounted in a different case. If you look at the picture, there is a standard alarm clock cord, poorly spliced with electrical tape (presumably he had to cut the cord where it went through the case) connected to a small transformer. The transformer output is connected to a production PCB, which appears to be the logic board and LED display driver for the clock. That board is connected with 2 ribbon cables to another board, which is edge-on to the camera so it is difficult to see what is on it. It looks like this is probably an input board.
Here is what makes this appear to be just the innards of a mass-produced clock: -None of the solder joints appear to be hand-done, they all have the look of a factory solder job. Something that is done in a reflow oven, not on a workbench. -Production PCBs: He didn't make these PCBs, they were made in a factory. Yes, I know there are discrete LED display driver boards that you can buy, but that isn't what the main board appears to be, as the board appears to handle several different functions. -There doesn't appear to be any home-brew technology in the device, no perf boards, no wire wrap, etc. -The battery backup - this is something that is almost all production alarm clocks but would probably be implemented differently in a homebrew device (if implemented at all). If he designed this from scratch AND wanted to put a battery in it, he would have made the whole thing battery powered, there would be no reason to have an AC transformer. -Screw marks on the LED. There are four mounting holes for the LED display but only two of them have screws. The other two show marks where larger screws (or plastic pegs) used to be, like this display was taken out of an existing device. -The edge-on board appears to have the PCB traces that underlie membrane switches. The four grouped together are probably the clock/hour/minute/alarm switches with a single snooze? switch on the end where the power wires enter from the main board. - The way the ribbon cables and power connect the 2 boards together makes it hard to mount them in his case. If this was designed for this case those boards would either have longer cables between them to allow for their position in the case.
Yes, it's possible that the kid designed a pair of custom PCBs, had them screened and shipped, assembled them and soldered them in the reflow oven in his room (instead of the soldering iron shown in the press pictures) and then stuffed them into his pencil case, but all the evidence points to this being the contents of a simpl
Oh for Pete's sake this "thing" was in a metal box that started making noise when the kid plugged it in during class. Does that sound like it might be dangerous? It does to me.
Are you the biggest moron on the planet or do you just play that role on Slashdot? Why would you think that it was dangerous because it was making noise? News flash, bombs in the real world don't have big flashy lights and large LED countdowns and they don't go 'beep' every time a clock ticks off a second. Just like the school administrators and police in the incident, you've "educated" yourself by watching poorly written movies and for some reason you think that real life works the same way. People who make dangerous things generally don't want to call attention to the dangerous thing before they use it, so they don't include flashing lights and buzzers in the design. The way this incident was handled was a massive overreaction and then when called on their stupidity the "authorities" doubled down on the stupid. For you to defend them is just idiotic.
Imagine how the dating scene would change if men could get off (legally, cleanly and guilt free) whenever the had the urge,
They already can (well, not WHENEVER they have the urge, but they couldn't do that with a sexbot either). Males can easily masturbate, and most of them do. There are also things like fleshlights and real dolls if spanking the monkey just isn't doing the job. It hasn't yet made society collapse, probably because men DO often want something more than simple sex. The urge to procreate is strong in both sexes, as is the urge to form social connections.
They don't have this kind of obesity problem in Europe.
No, they just have a "Obesity crisis of enormous proportions". And like usual, you blame the government, because it can't possibly be the fault of the obese people themselves.
So nukes aside, let's explore the other option... how would one produce greenhouse gasses on mars? I can't stand the bullshit rhetoric argument that we're pretty damned good at it here on earth, so it must be easy on mars..... On earth we have millions of people, on earth we have COAL, on earth we have industry driven by the consumerism of those millions of people... none of those things exist on mars. There is no energy on mars AT ALL except the sun hitting the planet, and here on earth, using the power of the sun has been argued as the REMEDY for greenhouse gasses! So WTF? Where does the energy and chemistry come from that will produce billions of tons of greenhouse gasses on mars? Sounds like unicorn fart futures are way up!
Why put nukes aside? The polar icecaps hold a lot of CO2 and H2O, with enough energy we could melt them. We could use conventional explosives but nukes would be more efficient. Another option to melt them (and add heat to the system) by using a large reflector in space to direct extra sunlight to the planetary surface. Once you get to a certain point the process should start to feedback on itself, as the planetary temperature warms it would melt more ice which adds greenhouse gasses which warms the planet that melts more ice. There are also carbonaceous minerals on or near the martian surface but breaking those up would probably be harder. There is also the option of dropping comets or asteroids on the planet to add energy and water. Any terraforming plan would obviously need to use multiple methods to even get close to the temperature that we want and all the engineering tech needed probably doesn't exist yet but it's certainly not impossible.
How is what you are describing different than RADIUS, TACACS+ or any of the modern SAML implementations? Or even an Active Directory or generic LDAP server? Authentication servers have been around forever, the problem is that the beancounters question why the server isn't doing anything else. As well as identification and authentication, why isn't it also controlling authorization? It has a ton of spare cycles, we could run a DNS or HTTP server on there too! Might as well throw a mail server on there. Then instead of an authentication server you end up with Windows Server.
That is not what I wrote. I know it is less than port 1024. I wrote less than or equal to. It is sad this site is such shit that the people running it feel the need to corrupt what we post. I did not post that./. is trying to make us look like idiots by misquoting us.
/. comments allow HTML tags so it tries to interpret < and > as HTML. Your point is stupid in the first place, I wish./ would have just deleted it. Pretty much any service that needs to open a privileged port opens the port and then executes the server under a service user rather than root. Apache comes configured like this by default on any Linux platform I have ever seen, they would have had to manually change the config to make it run as root.
If that is the case, nothing is stopping you from posting the same thing when a Republican is being bashed.
Power corrupts, and the massive amount of money (and therefore power) that high-level politicians control is staggering. The partisan games are just a sideshow to distract you from the main corrupt attraction but even when this fact is pointed out you still feel the need to whinge about perceived partisanship.
Sure there are some executives that are technically skilled (Gates and Zuckerberg come to mind) but most of them are MBA types.
Gates and Zuckerberg aren't executives, they're founders. They aren't people who's life goal was to run a company and manage people. The professional executives that think that running a tech company is the same as running any other kind of company tend to diminish their companies, like John Sculley at Apple or Meg Whitman at HP.
Unfortunately, it is often impossible to tell what you are really buying in some of the discount stores or places that specialize in automotive batteries
The best way to determine if you are getting a "true" deep-cycle battery is to compare the weight. Batteries with solid lead plates will weigh significantly more than the fake deep cycles.
Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I got your contact from the International web site directory. I prayed over it and selected your name among other names due to it's esteeming nature and the recommendations given to me as a reputable and trust worthy person I can do business with and by the recommendations I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere business.
I am Wumi Abdul; the only Daughter of late Mr and Mrs George Abdul. My father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan,the economic capital of Ivory Coast before he was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their outing to discus on a business deal. When my mother died on the 21st October 1984, my father took me and my younger brother HASSAN special because we are motherless. Before the death of my father on 30th June 2002 in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he has a sum of $12.500.000 (Twelve Million, five hundred thousand dollars) left in a suspense account in a local Bank here in Abidjan, that he used my name as his first Daughter for the next of kin in deposit of the fund.
He also explained to me that it was because of this wealth and some huge amount of money his business associates supposed to balance his from the deal they had that he was poisoned by his business associates, that I should seek for a God fearing foreign partner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose, (such as real estate management). Sir, we are honourably seeking your assistance in the following ways.
1) To provide a Bank account where this money would be transferred to.
2) To serve as the guardian of this since I am a girl of 26 years.
Moreover Sir, we are willing to offer you 15% of the sum as compensation for effort input after the successful transfer of this fund to your designate account overseas. please feel free to contact,me via this email address wumi1000abdul@yahoo.com
Anticipating to hear from you soon. Thanks and God Bless. Best regards. Miss Wumi Abdul
PLEASE FOR PRIVATE AND SECURITY REASONS,REPLY ME VIA EMAIL: wumi1000abdul@yahoo.com
I have several of these type of cameras and I can certainly see a red glow coming from the IR LEDs, particularly in the dark (although they generally have a photodiode to turn the IR off during the day). It isn't a red "camera active" LED, pretty sure the only cameras that have those are the fake ones to scare potential criminals. The cameras I'm talking about (and the OP was talking about) look like this, with an array of LEDs in a ring around the camera lens.
Some people can see IR light depending on the exact wavelength. I am able to see faint red glow from some TV remotes and the IR light rings around night vision security cameras. Its not bight though. it is a very dim red glow that i can see
Pretty much everyone can see the red glow from the IR LEDs used for security cameras. This is because the IR they produce is very close or within the visible spectrum (they are in the short infrared region).
if the public ever figured out what is really going on there would be massive riots across the entire nation.
If only that were true. If widespread voter fraud was clearly identified, I expect the reaction of most Americans would be "Ho-hum, I wonder if anyone liked my Kardashian post on Facebook". Just like the debacle with the NSA spying, they got caught red-handed clearly circumventing the law and spying on US citizens and the collective response from the public was "Nobody cares!".
Hmmm, is that supposed to be 'ambles' or 'stumbles'? Shambles doesn't seem to make sense there. You're going to get in an endless post-correction loop if this keeps up;-)
Too often I see driving-by-satnav drivers frankly changing lanes while they stare at their groins
I see this all the time too. They aren't looking at their satnav, they are looking at their phone. They are sending texts or updating Facebook. I see it constantly on my commute, sometimes looking at their crotch, sometimes at the passenger seat but seldom looking at the road. The police don't do anything about it, it is a lot easier to look at a number on a radar gun than it is to notice when people are texting while driving.
Google set the precedent for preinstalled spyware. Microsoft, as always, just consolidated on the precedent set by another party. Apple is following along as well, of course.
WTF are you talking about? MS was pre-installing adware and spyware on computers before Google was even a company.
Even if you accept that a dam failure is somehow a mark against the hydro plant it happen to have installed, no-one is suggesting building more massive dams like that. On the other hand, people are trying to re-start reactors of not entirely dissimilar design to Fukushima.
No-one? What about the Three Gorges Dam? It's the biggest hydro project ever and it was just recently completed. Your assertion that nobody is building massive dams anymore is false.
Funny, you can't call it 'Christian' if it goes against the base principles of being Christian. I can call myself a 8 foot tall black man to, but it doesn't make it so...
No. The money you can get from a class-action is insignificant and not worth your time. The affected content creators should pull out the same bullshit numbers that the copyright trolls do when they talk about potentially lost income and handle it individually.
Yeah, class action suits almost never give a real benefit to members of the class. Most of the time the "compensation" is coupons to buy more merchandise from the same manufacturer that screwed you in the first place. No thanks, Iomega, your zip drive already made me lose my data -- why would I want to buy another one from you?
You apparently can't find the internet to check before making up numbers, but the US median income is $50,500. You're off by... a lot!
No, the US median household income is around $50k, the median personal income (which I specified in my post) is just what I said it is. From Wikipedia: "The overall median personal income for all individuals over the age of 18 was $24,062"
And yes, you can not only buy a new car for $8k
[citation needed]. And it's not 8k, it's 4k (you specified 2 months of income at the median income level).
With prime I can buy a single item that costs $4 and have it shipped
Not any more. Most things in that price range are now "add-on" items for Prime, you need to be buying something else in order to purchase them. Today I was looking to buy some spark plugs from Amazon and almost all of them that were Prime eligible were add-ons. Also, anything that is Prime eligible is always more expensive. It isn't really free shipping, they just add the shipping cost to the price. At best, Prime is a free upgrade to 2 day shipping.
What do you mean by "best"? Their weight on their labels don't match the actual weight, factual things like that I would consider a basic part of labeling.
Slashdot Mirror
There are actual pictures of the clock floating around the interwebs. You might consider acquiring access to the information superhighway so that you can view these pictures.
There was no "disassembled alarm clock with wires soldered to it." There was a home-made circuit board, connected by ribbon cables to a small battery and digital display. There was no taken-apart alarm clock with drama-department wires attached to road flares, or any such nonsense. There was no Wile. E. Coyote alarm clock contraption. There was no part of the device that looked like explosives.
The teacher who claims to have "thought" it looked like a bomb picked it up and walked off with it, and sent the student to the office... without evacuating anybody. If the teacher has an IQ above 65, then I'm gonna call bull-pucky on having thought it actually looked like a bomb. If the teacher is a former special-ed student living the dream, OK, I can believe the story, and maybe it is just a "training issue."
Here is a picture of the clock, just so we know what we are discussing:
http://www.24hmontreal.canoe.c...
You say there is a "home-made circuit board" there, can you point it out to me? The clock he "invented" are just the innards of a production alarm clock mounted in a different case. If you look at the picture, there is a standard alarm clock cord, poorly spliced with electrical tape (presumably he had to cut the cord where it went through the case) connected to a small transformer. The transformer output is connected to a production PCB, which appears to be the logic board and LED display driver for the clock. That board is connected with 2 ribbon cables to another board, which is edge-on to the camera so it is difficult to see what is on it. It looks like this is probably an input board.
Here is what makes this appear to be just the innards of a mass-produced clock:
-None of the solder joints appear to be hand-done, they all have the look of a factory solder job. Something that is done in a reflow oven, not on a workbench.
-Production PCBs: He didn't make these PCBs, they were made in a factory. Yes, I know there are discrete LED display driver boards that you can buy, but that isn't what the main board appears to be, as the board appears to handle several different functions.
-There doesn't appear to be any home-brew technology in the device, no perf boards, no wire wrap, etc.
-The battery backup - this is something that is almost all production alarm clocks but would probably be implemented differently in a homebrew device (if implemented at all). If he designed this from scratch AND wanted to put a battery in it, he would have made the whole thing battery powered, there would be no reason to have an AC transformer.
-Screw marks on the LED. There are four mounting holes for the LED display but only two of them have screws. The other two show marks where larger screws (or plastic pegs) used to be, like this display was taken out of an existing device.
-The edge-on board appears to have the PCB traces that underlie membrane switches. The four grouped together are probably the clock/hour/minute/alarm switches with a single snooze? switch on the end where the power wires enter from the main board.
- The way the ribbon cables and power connect the 2 boards together makes it hard to mount them in his case. If this was designed for this case those boards would either have longer cables between them to allow for their position in the case.
Yes, it's possible that the kid designed a pair of custom PCBs, had them screened and shipped, assembled them and soldered them in the reflow oven in his room (instead of the soldering iron shown in the press pictures) and then stuffed them into his pencil case, but all the evidence points to this being the contents of a simpl
Oh for Pete's sake this "thing" was in a metal box that started making noise when the kid plugged it in during class. Does that sound like it might be dangerous? It does to me.
Are you the biggest moron on the planet or do you just play that role on Slashdot? Why would you think that it was dangerous because it was making noise? News flash, bombs in the real world don't have big flashy lights and large LED countdowns and they don't go 'beep' every time a clock ticks off a second. Just like the school administrators and police in the incident, you've "educated" yourself by watching poorly written movies and for some reason you think that real life works the same way. People who make dangerous things generally don't want to call attention to the dangerous thing before they use it, so they don't include flashing lights and buzzers in the design. The way this incident was handled was a massive overreaction and then when called on their stupidity the "authorities" doubled down on the stupid. For you to defend them is just idiotic.
Imagine how the dating scene would change if men could get off (legally, cleanly and guilt free) whenever the had the urge,
They already can (well, not WHENEVER they have the urge, but they couldn't do that with a sexbot either). Males can easily masturbate, and most of them do. There are also things like fleshlights and real dolls if spanking the monkey just isn't doing the job. It hasn't yet made society collapse, probably because men DO often want something more than simple sex. The urge to procreate is strong in both sexes, as is the urge to form social connections.
They don't have this kind of obesity problem in Europe.
No, they just have a "Obesity crisis of enormous proportions". And like usual, you blame the government, because it can't possibly be the fault of the obese people themselves.
So nukes aside, let's explore the other option... how would one produce greenhouse gasses on mars? I can't stand the bullshit rhetoric argument that we're pretty damned good at it here on earth, so it must be easy on mars..... On earth we have millions of people, on earth we have COAL, on earth we have industry driven by the consumerism of those millions of people... none of those things exist on mars. There is no energy on mars AT ALL except the sun hitting the planet, and here on earth, using the power of the sun has been argued as the REMEDY for greenhouse gasses! So WTF? Where does the energy and chemistry come from that will produce billions of tons of greenhouse gasses on mars? Sounds like unicorn fart futures are way up!
Why put nukes aside? The polar icecaps hold a lot of CO2 and H2O, with enough energy we could melt them. We could use conventional explosives but nukes would be more efficient. Another option to melt them (and add heat to the system) by using a large reflector in space to direct extra sunlight to the planetary surface. Once you get to a certain point the process should start to feedback on itself, as the planetary temperature warms it would melt more ice which adds greenhouse gasses which warms the planet that melts more ice. There are also carbonaceous minerals on or near the martian surface but breaking those up would probably be harder. There is also the option of dropping comets or asteroids on the planet to add energy and water. Any terraforming plan would obviously need to use multiple methods to even get close to the temperature that we want and all the engineering tech needed probably doesn't exist yet but it's certainly not impossible.
How is what you are describing different than RADIUS, TACACS+ or any of the modern SAML implementations? Or even an Active Directory or generic LDAP server? Authentication servers have been around forever, the problem is that the beancounters question why the server isn't doing anything else. As well as identification and authentication, why isn't it also controlling authorization? It has a ton of spare cycles, we could run a DNS or HTTP server on there too! Might as well throw a mail server on there. Then instead of an authentication server you end up with Windows Server.
> connects to a port 1023,
That is not what I wrote. I know it is less than port 1024. I wrote less than or equal to. It is sad this site is such shit that the people running it feel the need to corrupt what we post. I did not post that. /. is trying to make us look like idiots by misquoting us.
/. comments allow HTML tags so it tries to interpret < and > as HTML. Your point is stupid in the first place, I wish ./ would have just deleted it. Pretty much any service that needs to open a privileged port opens the port and then executes the server under a service user rather than root. Apache comes configured like this by default on any Linux platform I have ever seen, they would have had to manually change the config to make it run as root.
If that is the case, nothing is stopping you from posting the same thing when a Republican is being bashed.
Power corrupts, and the massive amount of money (and therefore power) that high-level politicians control is staggering. The partisan games are just a sideshow to distract you from the main corrupt attraction but even when this fact is pointed out you still feel the need to whinge about perceived partisanship.
all human jobs will be replaced by robots
Nope, in Apple's case the human Jobs got replaced by the rotting human corpse Jobs.
Sure there are some executives that are technically skilled (Gates and Zuckerberg come to mind) but most of them are MBA types.
Gates and Zuckerberg aren't executives, they're founders. They aren't people who's life goal was to run a company and manage people. The professional executives that think that running a tech company is the same as running any other kind of company tend to diminish their companies, like John Sculley at Apple or Meg Whitman at HP.
Unfortunately, it is often impossible to tell what you are really buying in some of the discount stores or places that specialize in automotive batteries
The best way to determine if you are getting a "true" deep-cycle battery is to compare the weight. Batteries with solid lead plates will weigh significantly more than the fake deep cycles.
Dear Respected One,
GREETINGS,
Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I got your contact from the International web site directory. I prayed over it and selected your name among other names due to it's esteeming nature and the recommendations given to me as a reputable and trust worthy person I can do business with and by the recommendations I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere business.
I am Wumi Abdul; the only Daughter of late Mr and Mrs George Abdul. My father was a very wealthy cocoa merchant in Abidjan,the economic capital of Ivory Coast before he was poisoned to death by his business associates on one of their outing to discus on a business deal. When my mother died on the 21st October 1984, my father took me and my younger brother HASSAN special because we are motherless. Before the death of my father on 30th June 2002 in a private hospital here in Abidjan. He secretly called me on his bedside and told me that he has a sum of $12.500.000 (Twelve Million, five hundred thousand dollars) left in a suspense account in a local Bank here in Abidjan, that he used my name as his first Daughter for the next of kin in deposit of the fund.
He also explained to me that it was because of this wealth and some huge amount of money his business associates supposed to balance his from the deal they had that he was poisoned by his business associates, that I should seek for a God fearing foreign partner in a country of my choice where I will transfer this money and use it for investment purpose, (such as real estate management). Sir, we are honourably seeking your assistance in the following ways.
1) To provide a Bank account where this money would be transferred to.
2) To serve as the guardian of this since I am a girl of 26 years.
Moreover Sir, we are willing to offer you 15% of the sum as compensation for effort input after the successful transfer of this fund to your designate account overseas. please feel free to contact ,me via this email address
wumi1000abdul@yahoo.com
Anticipating to hear from you soon.
Thanks and God Bless.
Best regards.
Miss Wumi Abdul
PLEASE FOR PRIVATE AND SECURITY REASONS,REPLY ME VIA EMAIL:
wumi1000abdul@yahoo.com
I have several of these type of cameras and I can certainly see a red glow coming from the IR LEDs, particularly in the dark (although they generally have a photodiode to turn the IR off during the day). It isn't a red "camera active" LED, pretty sure the only cameras that have those are the fake ones to scare potential criminals. The cameras I'm talking about (and the OP was talking about) look like this, with an array of LEDs in a ring around the camera lens.
Some people can see IR light depending on the exact wavelength. I am able to see faint red glow from some TV remotes and the IR light rings around night vision security cameras. Its not bight though. it is a very dim red glow that i can see
Pretty much everyone can see the red glow from the IR LEDs used for security cameras. This is because the IR they produce is very close or within the visible spectrum (they are in the short infrared region).
My apologies, I hadn't seen it used in that manner. I did look it up before posting but obviously didn't read ALL the definitions. Mea Culpa.
if the public ever figured out what is really going on there would be massive riots across the entire nation.
If only that were true. If widespread voter fraud was clearly identified, I expect the reaction of most Americans would be "Ho-hum, I wonder if anyone liked my Kardashian post on Facebook". Just like the debacle with the NSA spying, they got caught red-handed clearly circumventing the law and spying on US citizens and the collective response from the public was "Nobody cares!".
*shambles off grumbling*
Hmmm, is that supposed to be 'ambles' or 'stumbles'? Shambles doesn't seem to make sense there. You're going to get in an endless post-correction loop if this keeps up ;-)
Too often I see driving-by-satnav drivers frankly changing lanes while they stare at their groins
I see this all the time too. They aren't looking at their satnav, they are looking at their phone. They are sending texts or updating Facebook. I see it constantly on my commute, sometimes looking at their crotch, sometimes at the passenger seat but seldom looking at the road. The police don't do anything about it, it is a lot easier to look at a number on a radar gun than it is to notice when people are texting while driving.
Google set the precedent for preinstalled spyware. Microsoft, as always, just consolidated on the precedent set by another party. Apple is following along as well, of course.
WTF are you talking about? MS was pre-installing adware and spyware on computers before Google was even a company.
Even if you accept that a dam failure is somehow a mark against the hydro plant it happen to have installed, no-one is suggesting building more massive dams like that. On the other hand, people are trying to re-start reactors of not entirely dissimilar design to Fukushima.
No-one? What about the Three Gorges Dam? It's the biggest hydro project ever and it was just recently completed. Your assertion that nobody is building massive dams anymore is false.
Funny, you can't call it 'Christian' if it goes against the base principles of being Christian. I can call myself a 8 foot tall black man to, but it doesn't make it so...
No true scotsman
No. The money you can get from a class-action is insignificant and not worth your time.
The affected content creators should pull out the same bullshit numbers that the copyright trolls do when they talk about potentially lost income and handle it individually.
Yeah, class action suits almost never give a real benefit to members of the class. Most of the time the "compensation" is coupons to buy more merchandise from the same manufacturer that screwed you in the first place. No thanks, Iomega, your zip drive already made me lose my data -- why would I want to buy another one from you?
You apparently can't find the internet to check before making up numbers, but the US median income is $50,500. You're off by... a lot!
No, the US median household income is around $50k, the median personal income (which I specified in my post) is just what I said it is. From Wikipedia: "The overall median personal income for all individuals over the age of 18 was $24,062"
And yes, you can not only buy a new car for $8k
[citation needed]. And it's not 8k, it's 4k (you specified 2 months of income at the median income level).
With prime I can buy a single item that costs $4 and have it shipped
Not any more. Most things in that price range are now "add-on" items for Prime, you need to be buying something else in order to purchase them. Today I was looking to buy some spark plugs from Amazon and almost all of them that were Prime eligible were add-ons. Also, anything that is Prime eligible is always more expensive. It isn't really free shipping, they just add the shipping cost to the price. At best, Prime is a free upgrade to 2 day shipping.
They have the best labeling anywhere.
What do you mean by "best"? Their weight on their labels don't match the actual weight, factual things like that I would consider a basic part of labeling.