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Your geek powers are weak

http://starwars.lego.com/

Seems you can at least order via Lego site. Actually now I'm wanting to order that Lego Giant Box :)

LEGO® Giant Box
Item #: 5589
Sorry, item is not available in this country: Canada.

dammit

Seems you can at least order via Lego site. Actually now I'm wanting to order that Lego Giant Box :)

LEGO® Giant Box
Item #: 5589
Sorry, item is not available in this country: Canada.

dammit

Seems you can at least order via Lego site. Actually now I'm wanting to order that Lego Giant Box :)

They also have some Lego Digital Designer where you can build the design on computer and possibly order the needed pieces.

But I agree, I'd rather get some good set of basic pieces than some of those pre-designed packages. They most likely make good money for Lego tho.

Seems you can at least order via Lego site. Actually now I'm wanting to order that Lego Giant Box :)

They also have some Lego Digital Designer where you can build the design on computer and possibly order the needed pieces.

But I agree, I'd rather get some good set of basic pieces than some of those pre-designed packages. They most likely make good money for Lego tho.

Seems you can at least order via Lego site. Actually now I'm wanting to order that Lego Giant Box :)

They also have some Lego Digital Designer where you can build the design on computer and possibly order the needed pieces.

But I agree, I'd rather get some good set of basic pieces than some of those pre-designed packages. They most likely make good money for Lego tho.

Why should they? Lego got there first

Mega Bloks needs to counter by appealing to the Pastafarian market.

Or maybe with Cthulhu milieu sets. I'm sure the Lovecraft literary estate would negotiate a deal.

LEGO Digital Designer and it's free. You can build at least (with the option to order the pieces needed to build a real version)

Programming and robotics?

Mentos and a two liter of diet coke.

A box of baking soda and a bottle of vinegar.

A model rocket kit at any hobby store.

Just out of interest, is it possible to do this with train track and junctions? I.e. the kind of junction where if you come from the two-ended side it switches to that side. (See here for instance).

Yes, I'm being funny.

How dare you say "LEGOs"?!?

As per the company's web site... http://cache.lego.com/downloads/aboutus/LEGO_company_profile_UK.pdf

  The LEGO brand name should always be written in capital letters
  LEGO must never be used as a generic term or in the plural or as a possessive pronoun, e.g. “LEGO’s”.
  When the LEGO brand name is used as part of a noun, it must never appear on its own. It should always be accompanied by a noun. For example, LEGO set, LEGO products, LEGO Group, LEGO play materials,LEGO bricks, LEGO universe, etc.
  The first time the LEGO brand name appears it must be accompanied by the Registered symbol ®

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

The plural of Lego is Lego.

You don't have to go to bricklink for spare lego parts anymore, at least as far as I can tell. The official Lego site has a section where you can order individual parts, and they also appear to have a MSWin/Mac program to design your own Lego sets. I don't know. Does the Lego site have parts missing from their database? It looked to me as though they had everything I could think of.

Thinking about the "Legos are for kids" idea, it seems to me Lego sets are 3D puzzles if you follow the directions. Plenty of adults assemble 2D puzzles, so I don't see the difference. Legos are just more adaptable.

I have a dream: that my little children will one day live in a world where they will be able to buy kits online, not designed by marketer, but by the contents of their creative character.

Imagine designing a kit in a Lego CAD program and then automatically exporting the BOM to an order form that takes a screenshot of the finished item, a manual and contents list and produced a boxed, bagged set that is immediately shipped to you. Seriously Lego, where are you?

Actually, that already exists and is called LEGO Factory

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

That's nonsense.

Usually, once a month, my girlfriend and I go to the local Lego store and get a few things that interest us and build some cool, fun things. Hell, she even has built things to be used around the house in Lego (e.g. mail holders, spatula containers, the giant Lego cookie jar etc).

Someone else mentioned Mindstorms, and they are also a great deal of fun. I also love the larger Lego sets - Death Star, VW Bug or the Motorized Walking AT or even the Millenium Falcon.

It's fun, it's simple and it's not something that you usually get bored of. Besides, a Taj Mahal or an Eiffel Tower is a great show piece.

Now, LEGO needs to make the next step and allow people to build their own kits online. I think that would be even bigger than LEGO Star Wars.

Seriously Lego, where are you?

It's called Lego Degital Designer. If you've got a complaint, at least take a couple of minutes to figure out if it's valid.

That's a problem with retail, US retailers don't seem to try to get many of them. They only get so many kits, and Lego offers a lot more than what any retailer tries to offer.

But they are available, I counted something like 24 kits currently available:

http://technic.lego.com/en-us/Products/New/8258New.aspx

Here: http://ldd.lego.com/

You might try sooner with something that strucks me a bit as "Mindstorm Duplo" ;) (yes, I know those aren't Duplo bricks...)

http://www.ni.com/academic/wedo/
http://www.lego.com/education/news/default.asp?pagename=press_kit&l2id=17_1

You may. I buy lego. As I said, if the value to be protected multiplied by the risk is more than the cost then go for it. In this case it is.

If you look at the website:
http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=fairplay

Of course if its an adjective then "legos" is nonsense.

In common usage it is in fact a noun: the OED defines "Lego" as a noun. The plural of a noun has an 's', with the handful of well-established exceptions.

Who decided that LEGO was an exception? Not the LEGO Group who say its only an adjective. So I think its the fact that the LEGO Group never says "LEGOs" (since they always uses it as an adjective) caused misguided pedantic people (or otherwise any lover of arbitrary rules) to decide that its a plural noun.

So put me in the legos camp. :)

You wrong. "Lego" not plural. Lego not even noun. Lego is adjective that describe products made by Lego company. Me think if you want to "correct" people, you should read this. But me no really care. Me still call them "legos".

Let's hope that the router itself dosen't use Google's color scheme, or else it may look like this!

What does this legal judgement mean, as far as how things will be different? There've already been copycat brands like Mega Bloks, Best-Lock, and perhaps any number of others I'm forgetting or never heard of, and they've been around for years, even decades. Is this legal decision just putting a capper on the previous litigation? IANAL, naturally...

According to one interview I read somewhere, the most expensive Lego parts to manufacture are the mini-figs. I believe they cost something like a little over $1 US to manufacture.

I seriously doubt that. They'd be selling them at a loss otherwise.
http://shop.lego.com/

To work properly, Lego bricks must be made to a tolerance of one micron, otherwise models would fall apart or the bricks be too hard to separate.

Source? Sorry, no one in their right mind will believe this without more data than some random /.'er claiming it. I mean, sure, there's a tolerance, and according to LEGO company (Warning: PDF, see page 18) it's "as small as 2um" (twice a loose tolerance as your claim.) To me, the "as small as" bit means "no smaller than, and often larger than" so please share why you think it's always twice as accurate as LEGO claims it sometimes is.

It is exaggerated IMHO. 650 basic pieces including wheels and a base and windows and such for $30 in the US... that's not too bad, especially since you know the quality is going to be top-notch. If you don't want all the do-dads and just want a plain rectangular based block assortment, that's only $25 for 650 pieces.

"Only the best is good enough" was the motto of Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of the company and inventor of LEGO bricks, and today we still involve that spirit in every way we operate.

Apparently LEGO would prefer to rewrite history.

You can already get whatever you want.

I don't see any options for metal blocks there.

If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors.

I thought you could already do that.

Depends what you mean by inexpensive. The bulk blocks are about the same price from lego.com as they are in department stores. For example, the standard 2 by 4 brick costs SEK 1.17 at your link, which is about EUR0.20 or $0.25 each. That's not exactly cheap.

On a related note, we wanted to order some kits from lego.com, only to discover that they refused to sell them to us based on our country of residence. The kits we wanted were made in Denmark, and available in the UK, but apparently not for sale to Finland. So even the items on offer vary by country, which is both inexplicable and foolish.

http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=630

The new NXT generation of Lego Mindstorms is open source.
You may download the source code for the operating system of the "intelligent brick".
They released an "SDK" as well as binary format specs to be used for making your own programming environment; that is, you can make your own tools that generate programs for your robots
They even released specifications and plans for the hardware in use, as well as documentation for the interfaces between sensors and the NXT, among other things.
How much more of a warm, fuzzy feeling can you get?
Source for the above

The new NXT generation of Lego Mindstorms is open source.
You may download the source code for the operating system of the "intelligent brick".
They released an "SDK" as well as binary format specs to be used for making your own programming environment; that is, you can make your own tools that generate programs for your robots
They even released specifications and plans for the hardware in use, as well as documentation for the interfaces between sensors and the NXT, among other things.
How much more of a warm, fuzzy feeling can you get?
Source for the above

The new NXT generation of Lego Mindstorms is open source.
You may download the source code for the operating system of the "intelligent brick".
They released an "SDK" as well as binary format specs to be used for making your own programming environment; that is, you can make your own tools that generate programs for your robots
They even released specifications and plans for the hardware in use, as well as documentation for the interfaces between sensors and the NXT, among other things.
How much more of a warm, fuzzy feeling can you get?
Source for the above

If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors.

I thought you could already do that.

Worst interface imaginable, but still awesome!

Doesn't seem that valuable to me... So now I'll be able to buy massive boxes of red 2X4 blocks. Big deal, I want more than just red!

You can already get whatever you want.

If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors.

I thought you could already do that.

I love getting things from ThinkGeek.com They have "toys" and stuff for all ages.

Yeah, he already said that. Better answers include:

- Kids Electronics Lab
- Eyeclops Microscope
- Commodore 64
- Lego Mindstorms

Those are just a few toys that can be used educationally to learn about science, engineering, and math.

I'm guessing you don't have kids.

Maybe they should have consulted the Danish for their snap-together solution?

Pre-order now, will ship by 15 September 2008. http://shop.lego.com/ByTheme/Product.aspx?p=10189 $299.99 USD/399.99 CAD/199.99 GBP/299.99 EUR/399.99 AUD/2299.00 DKK/3199.00 SEK. Corrections: -Measures over 20" (51cm) wide and over 16" (41cm) tall (if it really was 3' x 2' it'd require up to 13,265 more bricks to build) -The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen. He coined the name 'LEGO', an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg godt" (meaning "play well") in 1934. -The LEGO brick in its present form was launched in 1958. -And it WILL be available in Switzerland for 489.00 CHF but 43% of the LEGO minifigs in Wangen bei Olten, Langenthal and Wil want to ban it ;)

I've looked a the lego sets these days and instead of selling them as tools to support imagination, they are trying to compete with the instant gratification/no thought required entertainment of movies video games.

Lego have this model building tool available, and I recently used it to make a "model" I built as a kid. Its the USS Enterprise (as created by a four year old). I kid you not, I had *fleets* of these badboys battling across my bedroom for weeks at a time :)

Looking on Lego's website, it actually looks like it would be easy to build. First I'd buy a Large Green Baseplate (10"x10") for $4.99 ( http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=626&cn=146&d=203 ). Then I would buy 2x2 flat tiles in various colors for $0.08 each and possibly some round 2x2 flat tiles for $0.11 each. (Sorry, no direct link. But you can search for "Flat Tile 2x2" on http://shop.lego.com/Product/Factory/PickABrick/PickABrick.aspx?cn=26 ) Assuming I buy 20 square flat tiles and 10 round flat tiles, I'm looking at $2.70. This brings me to $7.69 plus $4.95 shipping, or $12.64. Add in some more for clips and magnets to attach to the flat tiles as well as glue to bind the clips/magnets to the tiles. It should be under $20 for the whole thing. Now I'm tempted to try it.

Looking on Lego's website, it actually looks like it would be easy to build. First I'd buy a Large Green Baseplate (10"x10") for $4.99 ( http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=626&cn=146&d=203 ). Then I would buy 2x2 flat tiles in various colors for $0.08 each and possibly some round 2x2 flat tiles for $0.11 each. (Sorry, no direct link. But you can search for "Flat Tile 2x2" on http://shop.lego.com/Product/Factory/PickABrick/PickABrick.aspx?cn=26 ) Assuming I buy 20 square flat tiles and 10 round flat tiles, I'm looking at $2.70. This brings me to $7.69 plus $4.95 shipping, or $12.64. Add in some more for clips and magnets to attach to the flat tiles as well as glue to bind the clips/magnets to the tiles. It should be under $20 for the whole thing. Now I'm tempted to try it.

I went through a Lego kick last year, and their current Creator series is a bit of a mix between the old Technic and the model sets. Not nearly as many moving parts as old Technic (so sad...), but the primary models are definitely quality constructs good for building and leaving on display. But for the most part, they're all built out of a large set of stock pieces with boundless opportunity.

I'm definitely going to keep collecting them, and save them for when I have a kid.

You do know that the basic tiles are still offered, right?
But a lot of stores don't seem to want them.

Try Creative Building and Creator.
But yes, it does seem to be Indiana Jones, Batman, Star Wars, and the likes that give the greatest profit for stores.

It is sad that Lego City and Lego Castle are now specialized blocks with a lot less creative freedom, but I don't exactly think you can blame Lego for the loss of creativity.