If you can print a gun, you can print many other kinds of machinery. The day may not be very far off when you can start with half a ton of aluminum and stainless steel powder, and print yourself a Ferrari with a V-12 engine.
-jcr
Totally practical, you could do most of it now, (large parts are difficult) The trouble is it would cost a lot more than just going to a dealer and buying one.
I've been using various plastic part additive manufacturing methods (mainly SLS / SLA) for a few years now. It works great when you want one of something or ten of something: A gun sized object may cost you a couple of hundred dollars a part, so Its much cheaper than spending $10-20,000 on the tooling, but when you have that tooling the cost falls to pennies.
People (including some of my customers!) tend to look at a mass produced item and think that a comparable specialised piece of equipment should cost about the same. Its not so. Even a Ferrari is 'mass produced' from the manufacturing method point of view.
I You could start off with something that's the same density as gold (a cheaper metal alloy of the correct density), and then just coat it in a thin layer of actual gold. Sure there is going to be some real gold there, so it's not completely fake, but it has to be cheaper than making an entire gold brick. Sure they would find out if they every cut the brick in half, or melted it down, but you could be way out of town by the time that happened.
Density is easy to measure, nothing is the same density as gold, and the metals that are heavier are really tough to alloy (or even more expensive). so you end up with a sandwich structure - that again is pretty easy to detect, I've worked with ultrasound on this, but there are a number of material properties you can easily measure so most fakes are really easy to detect.
Most people who buy gold are well aware of the various tests - if not they would run out of money quick. They also tend not to buy from people who just walk in.
To make this more relevant to Slashdot. Consider this:
No one competent in an IT department which handles anything sensitive will be comfortable specifying US produced closed source software ever again.
The issue is not just spying on politicians. It seems the NSA has been involved in 'economic' espionage as well. The company i work for has US competitors, so do most others..It seems that pretty much everything has 'backdoors' - looks like the paranoid were right after all.
In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).
This makes no sense. In fact, it makes so little sense, that I don't believe it. I just did a Google search on European sales tax (VAT) policy, and several sites, including this one, contradict what you claim. If sales are below a threshold they are based on the shipping country, and if over the threshold they are based on the destination country. At no point are they based on where the company is incorporated, as you claimed.
I've got dozens of Amazon invoices that say different, although to be fair I think they have now stopped this, it was the case for many years.
The other scam that has now been clamped down on was using the minimum value allowance on taxes for incoming parcels. Used to be if you bought a DVD or CD from Amazon, they would be shipped individually from Jersey in the channel islands. This is nearby (so post is the same) but not in the EU. so no VAT was charged - so that's roughly £2 a package less tax paid. Now this allowance no longer exists - major pain if you want to buy something small from overseas.
To make this an argument that taxes are too high in the US or UK is nonsense - You want to live in a country with infrastructure it costs money. The problem is that a small country like Luxembourg or Ireland can act as a parasite on a larger economy. taking a small percentage of a large amount.
unless i'm wrong, (surely not), You still have free healthcare and higher education, once you start adding that into the 'effective tax rate' the US is not so cheap.
Standardize is American Standardize is British (correct)
Standardise is British (wrong). But also seems to be what most uk version spell checkers written by Americans insist on so it's become more and more dominant over the last thirty years. If you used -ise when I was at school forty years ago you were regarded as illiterate.
Agree totally, I'd sign up for it, practising anything helps, I fly a lot and if I get the chance I'll go for this, obviously I will try and guilt my employer into paying for it!
the reality of a normal job is that you're only entitled to a paycheck for as long as you work and you're only entitled to work for as long as you're needed.
No, that's the reality of a job in America, Most civilized parts of the world you have a lot more protection. "You're not needed" has to mean that the work isn't happening here anymore, not we found someone else to do it cheaper. If long-term work is going to be brought in house or transferred to another company you will often have to employ the guys who were doing it.
Americans often seem to think that because everything is so wonderful in America it must be the same or worse anywhere else.
...Work with a local partner, get them to do the hard work, then decide to keep the benefits for themselves, drop the local guy..
Then act surprised when its not considered acceptable (or even legal) in other parts of the world.
The American legal system is so completely skewed in favour of the big guys that even people who decry this in other areas accept it as 'just the way things are'.
The google guys obviously totally believe their own bullshit about what good people they are, and probably don't realise how much this sucks to people who devoted a big chunk of their lives to building up something. Legally they obviously owned nothing, and I'm sure the American reaction would be that they should have negotiated a better deal, Americans expect to be shafted and act accordingly. most of us (even the Chinese) are more trusting.
In which case it just goes up the chain until you reach the origin of the goods or one that is. assuming the business makes profit so is taxed on its margins it will work out.
Don't know about Poland, but in the UK its illegal for a company not to be be VAT registered if the annual turnover is above a certain amount. (roughly = $100,000). Even a one-man band reselling is likely to be above that unless its just a sideline.
So the only companies where it makes a difference are selling things that are mainly labour costs. and again, the income there is taxed.
A French person pays Polish VAT if they buy something in Poland (whether online from a Polish business, or in a shop in Poland).
That's only the case if the business is VAT registered. If it's not VAT registered business, then the person doesn't have to pay VAT.
True. But the non-VAT registered business (only legally possible if its very small) will have had to pay VAT on the stuff it buys, and unlike a VAT registered business, won't have been able to claim that back, and that will presumably be reflected in the price it charges, so It all works out pretty much the same in the end.
The thing that is different in the US is that people want to buy stuff free of sales tax, and then want to evade the equivalent use taxes. That is just plain wrong. If the state governments started throwing a few people in jail for buying stuff interstate and not declaring it It seems fair enough to me. I lived in the US 20 years ago and don't rememebr ever declaring anything, but at that time the amount bought by mail order was relatively trivial. With internet sales it isn't so.
Of course it suits everyone to argue that collecting sales taxes is too much like hard work. Tough. Its just part of running a business, If this was a serious requirement there are a lot of ways it could be done easily. Internet retailers already have many unfair advantages over 'bricks and mortar' companies - I can't see much justification for this one.
Anglican style religion outside the countries where the British Queen is head of state is the Episcopal church. Protestant is a much more general term.
The Catholic church has always regarded the Pope as the head of its law, and all other controls as secondary. Which is why the Chinese don't like it, why we in Britain wouldn't allow Catholics to hold any office until a couple of hundred years ago, and why there are a lot more serial-Child Rapists running around the world than there would be if the Catholic Church didn't threaten to excommunicate anyone who reported them to the police.
We may not have quite the population fraction of total dickheads that the USA manages, But don't worry, we have our share...
Re:Dang... (And a really bad commercial Move)
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
I would agree, But there's a difference between "It didn't work out we will be dropping this product in a managed way" and "I'm bored: Screw you guys I'm going home..." This product has not had time to realise its potential, and the promotion to the wider community has been almost non-existent.
My point is that Integrating something like this into the way we work is a relatively long job, with this short an attention span, no organization will take the risk of trying to build a way of working around a google product again. And without organizational buy-in this kind of collaborative product will get nowhere.
Re:Dang... (And a really bad commercial Move)
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
I just started to use it seriously a month or so ago- when enough people i worked with were aware of it. I'm a 50-something engineer cum technical marketing guy - Most of the people i work with aren't IT whiz kids, they are a bit more representative of 'normal' people, they are spread all over the world so this kind of thing could be ideal. But these guys are not early adopters, these things take time to propagate out into the wider world. For example I 'd heard of Facebook YEARS before I started using it - now its universal. I was using E-mail at university in the 70's. It was nearly 20 years until 'everyone' had it. A few months means nothing.
From a commercial point of view this early abandonment should (in a sane world) knock BILLIONS off Google's market value, what they are essentially saying is don't invest any effort in any technology we bring out since we may not stick with it. Or looking at it another way, If its 'free' its not worth having. Almost makes me wish I'd paid for it so I could bitch at them.
I'm in the US and I actually sent them money over the years, because they're the best news organization out there..
Interested to know how you do this, there's been some discussion about "overseas licences" for some time, But I wasn't aware anything had anything had ever been implemented.
As a BBC "shareholder" (I.e. a UK tax and license fee payer) I'm keen that they are as efficient as possible and get any revenue they can without impacting the service. I'm also keen that they don't pay quite so much in salaries (A recent article suggested that more than 100 BBC manager earn more than the prime minister, and thats not including the alleged 'talent') I actually don't see putting DRM on, or geographical access restriction onto content that they supply FREE OF CHARGE is too unreasonable. They make a lot of money selling programs to overseas markets.
That said, I travel a lot and I do find it a serious PITA when I can't see programs.
Anyway, As far as I know most of the news content is unrestricted.
IBM ThinkPad 755CV had a transparent LCD display (VGA resolution) around 1995. It could be detached from the laptop, and placed on an overhead projector, for making PowerlessPointless-style presentations. This was in the days before projectors were common.
several companies had these.
and there were a lot of external units for use on OHP's
"affordable" (The first one I bought was $5k+ ) projectors made them obsolete.
It's like the way everyone driving a BMW is a fucking dickwad. It's not that the car causes people to become dickwads,.
Not sure about this.
When I have load of crap to carry I sometimes swap my C-class for a colleagues 5 series. I am definitely aware that I tend to drive more like a dick when I'm in it. I would like to think that its everyone else on the road. They assume that the guy in the BMW is a dick and treat me accordingly (can't argue with that, I do the same myself) so obviously I react to that. Maybe its just aggression caused by trying to use iDrive. But I'm not sure , I think its the car doing it.
I work in that grey area between engineering and sales, and have spent a lot of the time on the road in the UK and Australia (Both have had this for years) We almost always meet up in McDonalds, so that we can check E-mails etc while waiting.
Inevitably there are a few other doing the same thing. I reckon this must get them at least an extra 20 or so meals per day per branch.
I'm amazed this is only just coming in in the US,I'd assumed they started it there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can print a gun, you can print many other kinds of machinery. The day may not be very far off when you can start with half a ton of aluminum and stainless steel powder, and print yourself a Ferrari with a V-12 engine.
-jcr
Totally practical, you could do most of it now, (large parts are difficult) The trouble is it would cost a lot more than just going to a dealer and buying one.
I've been using various plastic part additive manufacturing methods (mainly SLS / SLA) for a few years now. It works great when you want one of something or ten of something: A gun sized object may cost you a couple of hundred dollars a part, so Its much cheaper than spending $10-20,000 on the tooling, but when you have that tooling the cost falls to pennies.
People (including some of my customers!) tend to look at a mass produced item and think that a comparable specialised piece of equipment should cost about the same. Its not so. Even a Ferrari is 'mass produced' from the manufacturing method point of view.
I You could start off with something that's the same density as gold (a cheaper metal alloy of the correct density), and then just coat it in a thin layer of actual gold. Sure there is going to be some real gold there, so it's not completely fake, but it has to be cheaper than making an entire gold brick. Sure they would find out if they every cut the brick in half, or melted it down, but you could be way out of town by the time that happened.
Density is easy to measure, nothing is the same density as gold, and the metals that are heavier are really tough to alloy (or even more expensive). so you end up with a sandwich structure - that again is pretty easy to detect, I've worked with ultrasound on this, but there are a number of material properties you can easily measure so most fakes are really easy to detect.
Most people who buy gold are well aware of the various tests - if not they would run out of money quick. They also tend not to buy from people who just walk in.
To make this more relevant to Slashdot. Consider this:
No one competent in an IT department which handles anything sensitive will be comfortable specifying US produced closed source software ever again.
The issue is not just spying on politicians. It seems the NSA has been involved in 'economic' espionage as well. The company i work for has US competitors, so do most others..It seems that pretty much everything has 'backdoors' - looks like the paranoid were right after all.
Biggest part of Amazons competitive advantage seems to be Tax evasion.
Really hard for local businesses to compete with this.
In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).
This makes no sense. In fact, it makes so little sense, that I don't believe it. I just did a Google search on European sales tax (VAT) policy, and several sites, including this one, contradict what you claim. If sales are below a threshold they are based on the shipping country, and if over the threshold they are based on the destination country. At no point are they based on where the company is incorporated, as you claimed.
I've got dozens of Amazon invoices that say different, although to be fair I think they have now stopped this, it was the case for many years.
The other scam that has now been clamped down on was using the minimum value allowance on taxes for incoming parcels. Used to be if you bought a DVD or CD from Amazon, they would be shipped individually from Jersey in the channel islands. This is nearby (so post is the same) but not in the EU. so no VAT was charged - so that's roughly £2 a package less tax paid. Now this allowance no longer exists - major pain if you want to buy something small from overseas.
To make this an argument that taxes are too high in the US or UK is nonsense - You want to live in a country with infrastructure it costs money. The problem is that a small country like Luxembourg or Ireland can act as a parasite on a larger economy. taking a small percentage of a large amount.
unless i'm wrong, (surely not), You still have free healthcare and higher education, once you start adding that into the 'effective tax rate' the US is not so cheap.
Anyone with a few functioning brain cells can cope with different units of measurement.
You can buy inch size Allan keys or spammers pretty much anywhere in the world, and metric one in the USA without to much trouble.
But try finding a particular 6-32 replacement screw anywhere outside the us - pretty near impossible !
To estimate a distance to something.
Mostly they will still do it in meters 50 years later
When you want an artillery shell to land "where you're not at" these things sink in pretty well.
And getting back to the main point:
I've still got files on eight-inch floppies.
I still miss stuff I list some years ago when I had a laptop stolen and my backup disk crashed a few days later.
I recently lost a bunch of stuff on a brand new 32GB USB 3.0 highest quality memory stick. I Hope I had copies of most of it but its hard to be sure.
Electronic media are just too damn fragile for a lot of things
Being pedantic
Standardize is American
Standardize is British (correct)
Standardise is British (wrong). But also seems to be what most uk version spell checkers written by Americans insist on so it's become more and more dominant over the last thirty years. If you used -ise when I was at school forty years ago you were regarded as illiterate.
In the 80's someone once said.
No one will ever need more than 1GB of memory....
I think you will find that was 1 megabyte. - the original IBM PC could only address 640KB.
1GB would have been unthinkable until a few years ago. I can remember being massively impressed by a 64MB machine in the mid '90s.
Agree totally, I'd sign up for it, practising anything helps, I fly a lot and if I get the chance I'll go for this, obviously I will try and guilt my employer into paying for it!
the reality of a normal job is that you're only entitled to a paycheck for as long as you work and you're only entitled to work for as long as you're needed.
No, that's the reality of a job in America, Most civilized parts of the world you have a lot more protection. "You're not needed" has to mean that the work isn't happening here anymore, not we found someone else to do it cheaper. If long-term work is going to be brought in house or transferred to another company you will often have to employ the guys who were doing it.
Americans often seem to think that because everything is so wonderful in America it must be the same or worse anywhere else.
...Work with a local partner, get them to do the hard work, then decide to keep the benefits for themselves, drop the local guy..
Then act surprised when its not considered acceptable (or even legal) in other parts of the world.
The American legal system is so completely skewed in favour of the big guys that even people who decry this in other areas accept it as 'just the way things are'.
The google guys obviously totally believe their own bullshit about what good people they are, and probably don't realise how much this sucks to people who devoted a big chunk of their lives to building up something. Legally they obviously owned nothing, and I'm sure the American reaction would be that they should have negotiated a better deal, Americans expect to be shafted and act accordingly. most of us (even the Chinese) are more trusting.
Just looked up the EU rules for distance selling.
Below a certain threshold you charge the VAT rate of your home country. If you are selling above that threshol, which varies from country to country, ( http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/vat/traders/vat_community/vat_in_ec_annexi.pdf - again its typically of the order of $100k) then you need to register in the destination country.
Seems like something similar would work well in the US, smaller business just pay tax to their home state, Big ones get the paperwork.
In which case it just goes up the chain until you reach the origin of the goods or one that is. assuming the business makes profit so is taxed on its margins it will work out.
Don't know about Poland, but in the UK its illegal for a company not to be be VAT registered if the annual turnover is above a certain amount. (roughly = $100,000). Even a one-man band reselling is likely to be above that unless its just a sideline.
So the only companies where it makes a difference are selling things that are mainly labour costs. and again, the income there is taxed.
That's only the case if the business is VAT registered. If it's not VAT registered business, then the person doesn't have to pay VAT.
True. But the non-VAT registered business (only legally possible if its very small) will have had to pay VAT on the stuff it buys, and unlike a VAT registered business, won't have been able to claim that back, and that will presumably be reflected in the price it charges, so It all works out pretty much the same in the end.
The thing that is different in the US is that people want to buy stuff free of sales tax, and then want to evade the equivalent use taxes. That is just plain wrong. If the state governments started throwing a few people in jail for buying stuff interstate and not declaring it It seems fair enough to me. I lived in the US 20 years ago and don't rememebr ever declaring anything, but at that time the amount bought by mail order was relatively trivial. With internet sales it isn't so.
Of course it suits everyone to argue that collecting sales taxes is too much like hard work. Tough. Its just part of running a business, If this was a serious requirement there are a lot of ways it could be done easily. Internet retailers already have many unfair advantages over 'bricks and mortar' companies - I can't see much justification for this one.
Anglican style religion outside the countries where the British Queen is head of state is the Episcopal church. Protestant is a much more general term.
The Catholic church has always regarded the Pope as the head of its law, and all other controls as secondary. Which is why the Chinese don't like it, why we in Britain wouldn't allow Catholics to hold any office until a couple of hundred years ago, and why there are a lot more serial-Child Rapists running around the world than there would be if the Catholic Church didn't threaten to excommunicate anyone who reported them to the police.
I've read a certain British book recently:
We may not have quite the population fraction of total dickheads that the USA manages, But don't worry, we have our share...
I would agree, But there's a difference between "It didn't work out we will be dropping this product in a managed way" and "I'm bored: Screw you guys I'm going home..." This product has not had time to realise its potential, and the promotion to the wider community has been almost non-existent.
My point is that Integrating something like this into the way we work is a relatively long job, with this short an attention span, no organization will take the risk of trying to build a way of working around a google product again. And without organizational buy-in this kind of collaborative product will get nowhere.
I just started to use it seriously a month or so ago- when enough people i worked with were aware of it. I'm a 50-something engineer cum technical marketing guy - Most of the people i work with aren't IT whiz kids, they are a bit more representative of 'normal' people, they are spread all over the world so this kind of thing could be ideal. But these guys are not early adopters, these things take time to propagate out into the wider world. For example I 'd heard of Facebook YEARS before I started using it - now its universal. I was using E-mail at university in the 70's. It was nearly 20 years until 'everyone' had it. A few months means nothing.
From a commercial point of view this early abandonment should (in a sane world) knock BILLIONS off Google's market value, what they are essentially saying is don't invest any effort in any technology we bring out since we may not stick with it. Or looking at it another way, If its 'free' its not worth having. Almost makes me wish I'd paid for it so I could bitch at them.
I'm in the US and I actually sent them money over the years, because they're the best news organization out there. .
Interested to know how you do this, there's been some discussion about "overseas licences" for some time, But I wasn't aware anything had anything had ever been implemented.
As a BBC "shareholder" (I.e. a UK tax and license fee payer) I'm keen that they are as efficient as possible and get any revenue they can without impacting the service. I'm also keen that they don't pay quite so much in salaries (A recent article suggested that more than 100 BBC manager earn more than the prime minister, and thats not including the alleged 'talent') I actually don't see putting DRM on, or geographical access restriction onto content that they supply FREE OF CHARGE is too unreasonable. They make a lot of money selling programs to overseas markets.
That said, I travel a lot and I do find it a serious PITA when I can't see programs.
Anyway, As far as I know most of the news content is unrestricted.
IBM ThinkPad 755CV had a transparent LCD display (VGA resolution) around 1995. It could be detached from the laptop, and placed on an overhead projector, for making PowerlessPointless-style presentations. This was in the days before projectors were common.
several companies had these.
and there were a lot of external units for use on OHP's
"affordable" (The first one I bought was $5k+ ) projectors made them obsolete.
It's like the way everyone driving a BMW is a fucking dickwad. It's not that the car causes people to become dickwads,.
Not sure about this.
When I have load of crap to carry I sometimes swap my C-class for a colleagues 5 series. I am definitely aware that I tend to drive more like a dick when I'm in it. I would like to think that its everyone else on the road. They assume that the guy in the BMW is a dick and treat me accordingly (can't argue with that, I do the same myself) so obviously I react to that. Maybe its just aggression caused by trying to use iDrive. But I'm not sure , I think its the car doing it.
Are you kidding?
I work in that grey area between engineering and sales, and have spent a lot of the time on the road in the UK and Australia (Both have had this for years) We almost always meet up in McDonalds, so that we can check E-mails etc while waiting.
Inevitably there are a few other doing the same thing. I reckon this must get them at least an extra 20 or so meals per day per branch.
I'm amazed this is only just coming in in the US,I'd assumed they started it there.