swuboo

Yep. Lab grown diamonds are generally flawless. Back in the day, the diamond industry tended to pound hard on the notion that flawless was the ideal, and that bit them on the ass when completely flawless diamonds became cheap to produce.

They fell back on saying that the lab-growns are just 'not the real thing.'

"This diamond was judged slightly too nice to be ground up and glued to a tooth on an industrial saw blade, so it was sold to us for several times its actual intrinsic value, so that we could sell it to you for an additional markup. This one next to it wasn't too nice to be ground up, so it was purely random chance whether it would be used to support the lower-end consumer market or the industrial market. It won the coin toss, so it gets to be a month's pay for you in a ring instead of half an hour's pay for you in a slurry.

"To be realistic, the number of diamonds produced far exceed actual consumer demand, so careful stockpiling and market segmentation are necessary to maintain the illusion of actual value. As retailers, we're almost as much at the mercy of De Beers as you consumers are. It's not like we can mine our own. We know better than to buy them back from you, though."

Brutal enough?

I think they said after the war there wasn't any sabotage that was done by Japanese Americans.

Not quite none. It's probable that a major factor in the decision to intern the Japanese was the Niihau incident. A Japanese fighter pilot crashed on a Hawaiian Island during the Pearl Harbor attack, and when he was taken prisoner by the islanders, three Japanese residents managed to get weapons to him and help him escape from captivity—although not from the island. The pilot then took a number of islanders hostage before being killed in a shootout.

The incident was extremely troubling to the authorities because two of the Japanese that aided the pilot were nisei, including the man most involved in the escape—attacking a guard, directly supplying the pilot with a pistol, and helping him burn down the house of one of the captors.

In the grand scheme of things, it was a minor incident—but the timing and location couldn't have been worse. Two American citizens knowingly gave aid to a captured enemy the very week the war broke out. It's always been unclear exactly how much weight was given to the Niihau incident, but all the major decisionmakers were well aware of it.

All in all, there was almost no sabotage at all in the US, by anyone. The Germans occasionally tried to get saboteurs into the country, but they didn't have much success. (The Japanese didn't even bother. Whether they would have without the internment, I don't know.)

Other than the Niihau incident, the only significant attempt at sabotage I can think of was German landings of sabotage teams in Canada, Long Island, and Florida, none of which went anywhere. Interestingly, in the Long Island case the leader of the Germans went straight to the FBI and tried to turn himself in, but was repeatedly laughed out of the office. He eventually got them to take him seriously by dumping a briefcase of cash on an agent's desk. (He was sentenced to thirty years for his trouble, but ended up being deported to West Germany a few years after the war.)

There were also a few spy rings composed of German-Americans, but they were generally more help than hindrance. Allied intelligence rang absolute rings around German military intelligence, and were able to feed them whatever information they wanted. (In Britain, every single German agent was identified and forced into becoming a double-agent.)

When I was an undergraduate, some friends and I had a favorite professor, with whom we had all taken several courses.

We also happened to know of a movie in which an excited child yells, "Professor [Professor's name] is the smartest man in the world!" A movie we also happened to know he liked, albeit for different reasons.

So, shortly before we were going to graduate... we found an excuse to swing by the departmental office when he wasn't there, waited until no one was looking, and stuffed a DVD into his mailbox without any explanation or card.

We figured it was the optimal way to show our appreciation without running any risk of impropriety. He knew, though. On the last day of class, he thanked us.

Doesn't that just beat off

Doesn't (or don't) that beat all is the expression. What you said is... something rather different.

Something I don't want to think about EA doing.