The trouble with aristocracies is that you have the same scum at the top; but their abuses aren't even theoretically illegal; and are sometimes outright celebrated and formally protected.
That's cold comfort when your rule of law is effectively nonfunctional among your society's most dangerous and influential people; but it is the case.
I'm obviously not surprised that a dreadful shitsack like Cameron would have an utterly awful and self-serving hypocritical sound bite; but I am always impressed at how the professionals manage to keep their facial expressions so...neutral...when delivering this sort of tripe.
I realize that this is "The Cloud" and all; but does releasing an SDK that makes it easier to build applications that depend on your proprietary cloud service really count as "opening" it?
They are obviously under no obligation to open anything, whether fully or partially; and this will presumably make their stuff more useful; it just seems really weird to use "open" to describe what is basically the same thing that platform vendors have always done to encourage people to write stuff that runs on their platform or works with it. A publicly visible platform or API is different than an internal-only one; but if this is 'amazon opens up Alexa', then the fact that you can write win32 applications would be 'Microsoft opens up Windows'.
"Messengers are the new browsers and bots are the new websites." Truly a chilling sentiment. On the plus side, until he and his ilk gain enough leverage that dealing with them is no longer optional, at least he is only building his own technological dystopia, not ours.
Did I, um, miss the grand opening of the GayCLU homosexual re-education center and abortionplex or something? You seem to be calling in from a parallel reality where the 'progressives' hold absolute power and only stop hunting christians for sport when it's time for an orgy.
I have to imagine that some politicians are doing a little nervous sweating about this, given that passing red-meat "values" legislation is supposed to be an easy, low-cost, way to score some points with Team Jesus; not something that might get the local chamber of commerce pissed off at you. Oh well. Time to see how much they value those values, I suppose.
Clearly having funds with Paypal demonstrates an acceptable degree of shared piety toward Mammon, so they'll only seize customer funds according to their usual opaque and arbitrary processes, no need to change anything there.
I wouldn't be too quick to applaud the principled stance of paypal, or corporations generally, as they typically will do business even in atrocious hellholes if the money is right(and/or go out of business at the hands of competitors who don't share their scruples); but it is worth remembering that they have options, and they aren't going to choose a location unless its overall combination of 'desirable' and 'cheap' beats out that of the alternatives. Some places make it on desirability(it's not like you go to any trendy part of silicon valley for the rent). Some places focus on being cheap. Most combine the two in varying proportions.
This being the case, making your location less desirable strongly suggests that you will have to make it more cheap in order to maintain the same level of interest. You have fun with that, NC.
I think I did a terrible job of explaining it: Shader programs are indeed designed to be parellelized across however many shader units a given GPU provides. However, SLI(presumably because the niche market doesn't justify a nicer interconnect, or because it may simply not be feasible to provide the same level of integration between multiple PCBs as it is between elements on the same die) doesn't provide particularly close integration of the participant GPUs.
SLI-ed GPUs can't even share VRAM(with some limited exceptions in DX12 if everything is aligned just right to support that), and the shaders on one die aren't visible to the scheduler on the other or vice-versa, so the decision about how to divide the workload has to be made at the level of the driver either chopping the frame into two, three, or four(depending on the number of GPUs) regions of roughly equal complexity, assigning each GPU one of them and then stitching the results together to get the finished frame(Split Frame Rendering) or by allocating alternate frames to each GPU(Alternate Frame Rendering).
In either case, each GPU is effectively working in isolation on the task of rendering the frame or partial frame it has been assigned; with the downsides that SFR is vulnerable to 'tearing' effects, since deciding what an 'even' split of the work involved in rendering a frame before you actually render it can be tricky; and when you judge incorrectly your partial frames will be finished at different times, either dragging down the effective framerate if the system always waits for a complete frame before updating, or causing visual artifacts when one part of the frame is updated before the other part is. AFR has the problem that it can't actually reduce the time needed to render a frame compared to a single GPU(since it is just a single GPU rendering each frame), so while under good conditions you can get nearly linear increases in FPS; any frames that render unacceptably slowly on the GPU in question will render no faster with two of them. Plus, anything that makes rendering frame N+1 require knowledge of frame N(or worse, the state involved in rendering frame N) completely breaks AFR, since each GPU has very little access to what the other is doing.
If SLI actually involved glue logic good enough that putting two cards in SLI essentially produced a single GPU with twice the resources and just slightly higher latency, it would indeed run like a bat out of hell, and make parallization mostly invisible to shader programs. It's just that it doesn't actually do that. Analogous to cluster systems vs. multisocket NUMA systems: SLI provides largely transparent support for collecting the output of each GPU and putting it together into a single video output; but is otherwise fairly loosely coupled, with the driver handing out work units to mostly isolated GPUs with their own VRAM and their own shaders and limited communication with one another.
I'm guessing that the mention of 'SLI' might be the key point here. Taking problems not explicitly designed to be parallelized and attempting to parellelize them at the driver level after the fact is...a bit of a mixed bag...in terms of actually working. It's not clear that Nvidia is holding out on us here; given that they sell fancy multi-GPU systems to high end customers I'm sure that they would be delighted to also offer tools that make using those expensive multi-GPU systems really easy; but that doesn't change the fact that, based on the application, 'SLI' can offer amusingly pitiful performance enhancements, exciting reliability issues, and similar fun even when drivers specifically tweaked to compensate for the application being run are available.
According to our wiki overlords, an M203 has a muzzle velocity of 76M/s, and ~ 30cm of barrel. What isn't included is the peak acceleration the projectile experiences. I'd assume that there is a sharp spike followed by a gradual decrease because the volume that the expanding propellant is filling becomes larger as the projectile moves down the barrel; rather than constant acceleration during the entire period spent in the barrel; but I'm not sure how one would infer the shape of the curve from that speculation, even if it is correct.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were doable: all the electronics and sensors are solid state(extra credit if you can find an explosive agent that is also a decent potting compound, rather than wasting space on inert epoxy underfill and encapsulants); batteries deal adequately with shock, so long as they aren't big open wet cells that can slosh around or anything; and it's not as though a little electrode damage that reduces the ability to recharge the battery is a problem in a device that will be exploding within minutes. The big trick would be the motor and rotor: I imagine you'd want to mount the motor parallel to the direction of acceleration, to avoid stress perpendicular to the bearings that might bend the shaft. The rotor could rest against the 'front' of the projectile to avoid snapping the blades; but would probably have to fold out somehow, since a 40mm propeller probably wouldn't be large enough to lift a 40mm 'helicopter'. Wouldn't be trivial; but probably possible.
Depending on what the unit cost ends up being, the drone could be indirect fire. More expensive than a grenade; but a grenade that can manage a couple hundred meters of acrobatic, guided, reasonably swift, flight and make up for in proximity what it lacks in payload strikes me as potentially being really damn scary.
This particulary RFP emphasizes sensors, endurance, and very light weight, so it probably isn't a request for such a gadget; but I would(admittedly naively) imagine that guided munitions based on drone/aircraft designs(rather than rockets or missiles) might well be a viable niche. It's hard to argue with solid fuel when it comes to a quick, but only modestly controllable, boost, so some little copter isn't going to replace an AT4 if you need to bring the building down or seriously imperil an armored vehicle; but such rockets are relatively heavy, not inexpensive, and can make you pretty visible as well as being dangerous to use in confined spaces because of the backblast. For $1,500 and ~15 lbs of carry weight(roughly AT4 equivalent), you could probably have several drone aircraft that can carry a grenade-sized payload(~200g of your choice of day-ruiner) quickly, quietly, and through a relatively complex trajectory while feeding you video so that you can nominate the most deserving location. Too slow to get past active defenses aimed at intercepting anti-tank munitions; but assuming that the copter is quiet and not garishly colored, a human would be hard pressed to notice it in time, much less shoot it as it zigzags its way toward them.
Well, I certainly hope that the price in the article($190,000/unit) reflects the fact that the purchase was some sort of small-scale R&D thing and likely included a lot of not-specifically-hardware services.
The lousiest of the toys are probably inadequate to the job, if nothing else most of them take a dreadfully naive approach to security on the camera and control signal link; but one would think that these things would be amenable to relatively low cost, in mass production. The cellphone market is already doing the work for you on small, cheap, surprisingly adequate cameras; consumer electronics generally are a pretty cutthroat competition for incrementally better Li-ion and similar batteries, and even if it ends up needing to be made of some classy fiber-filled engineering plastic rather than ABS or polyethylene; injection moulding can still stamp the parts out at a good clip.
This probably won't happen for the 2018 timeframe; but things will get more interesting if DARPA's bug-cyborg work gets mature enough to compete with conventional model aircraft. Integrating the electronics is currently pretty fiddly(last I checked they were investigating trying to stimulate larva/pupa-stage insects to grow around the electronics in order to avoid having to do lots and lots of beetle surgery, not sure how that is going); but insects are undeniably experts at this sort of flying. Even if the live bug proves too much of a hassle, it'd be pretty cool if they could 'grow' the entire chassis around the electronics just by bathing it in an insect cell culture and providing the appropriate signals to induce chitin formation in the desired places.
Oh, I'm not OK with it; I'd be delighted to have the scammers behind this sort of thing die in a fire. However, my assumption is that, since "being an awful shitweasel who really, really, has it coming" isn't actually a crime, the ability of the AG to prosecute will be more or less entirely confined to "What can we demonstrate you lied about; and how much did that hurt them and help you?"
The plague of markedly-worse-than-community-college-but-much-more-expensive 'schools' really ought to be extirpated good and hard; but unless there is a provision in MA law that I've never heard even mention of in reading about the issue, there aren't any legal remedies until you start lying about the product(which they tend to, some more carefully than others). This is one of those cases where keeping things nice and legal is definitely letting some awful people slip past; but the AG doesn't really have other options unless the law changes.
I imagine that the case will hinge on how much the AG is able to prove that ITT(or, just because this is how scam selling always goes, its marketing flacks verbally but not in writing) lied about the quality of their program, job prospects of graduates, and so on.
Mere shoddiness they can probably get away with, schools don't have any general duty to not suck; but if it can be demonstrated that they were falsely advertising the goods they were pushing, nail 'em to the wall.
Conceivably, if the software fit their needs closely enough. However, isn't that a small price to pay for the taxpayers who paid for the software being able to use it; as well as any benefits derived from cooperative governments and organizations that decide that mainstreaming is more efficient than forking(I'm assuming that the license will be something MIT-like, not that commie GPL, so cooperation will be optional; but maintaining your own fork isn't something that people who dislike thankless busy work do without good reason.)
Perhaps more broadly, isn't there something dangerously petty, unambitious, and ultimately self-defeating in approaching problems in the spirit of "Gotta keep the other guy from getting what's mine!" rather than "We are looking to produce nothing less than the best, if that happens to be of benefit to others, so be it."
This doesn't mean that we need to send Kim Jong Un a 'Nukes for Noobs' tutorial just to be nice; but a person, organization, or nation rarely achieves excellence or greatness if they focus more on making sure that the other guy isn't somehow free-riding than on making sure that their work is something that is worth emulating.
I suspect that you could squeeze enough energy into that volume to electrocute someone; but humans are reasonably resistive(even if you accidentally stabbed yourself with the fork, it looks like there is an electrical contact on the handle, so it has to pass at least one layer of skin), so unless some sort of insane enthusiasm for liability led them to design the thing to deliver fairly high voltage at at least moderately punchy current, it would still be harmless.
It doesn't actually take much energy, at all, to kick some unlucky sucker's heart into a life threatening abnormal state; but you have to deliver that very modest jolt to the correct place; and doing that is a matter of either nontrivial brute force or very bad luck.
Remember citizens, 'conspiracy theorists' are just nutjob losers who want to blame the reptilians or whatever for the fact that their lives suck and their tinfoil hats are too tight. The world is, in fact, basically decent and as-described. Carry on.
I imagine that some of it is purely for the feel-good: '3d printing!' probably isn't a bad marketing gimmick if you are trying to sell a techie-toy electric bike; but some of it may also come down to scale.
You need some pretty esoteric shapes before 3d printers, of any quality, can beat conventional methods for reasonable sized production runs; but the cost per unit tends to climb pretty steeply if you aren't ordering in decent quantities. Unless the manufacturer sells enough of these bikes that they can make a reasonable prediction of how many replacement part X, optional widget Y, etc. they'll need to produce and keep on the shelf, they run the risk of things going out of stock and annoying customers, things rotting on the shelf and typing up money until they eventually sell or have to be scrapped, and that sort of supply chain fun.
I'm not sure where their sale numbers are relative to the break-even point on mass production of spares and option parts; but the desirability of handling that aspect of support, and the economics of mass production vs. short-run techniques definitely change with the size of the user base. Something on the scale of a common car model may well support multiple, competing, vendors of mass produced spares and options(usually with the vendor trying to enforce a premium by one means or another). Something on a much smaller scale may make support an unfortunate necessity that you do only because your customers will be unhappy if they can't get the parts they need.
For the right retainer, you can find any number of lobbyists and think-tank parasites who will argue that America, Free Enterprise, and the very concept of private property itself cannot be upheld if people are allowed to control what code is executed on their computers.
Every mental gymnast has a price; and we have some very talented ones.
If AT&T doesn't bother with, or screws up, whatever firmware and bootloader lockdown is intended to keep the bloatware in place, they might accidentally end up with an attractive product.
If they don't, though, I don't even want to imagine how awful the result of this plan will be.
Isn't it a...baffling coincidence... how the phrase 'financial engineering' seems to go very well with either massive fraud or going bankrupt on a truly epic scale? I guess merely calling it 'engineering' doesn't actually give you any of the appreciation for evaluating and mitigating design risks that real engineers have.
(Yes, technically, the NSA doesn't handle the wet-ops stuff, that gets kicked over to the CIA/JSOC/USSOCOM/whoever has won the right to take out the cool toys today; but they do do hit lists. Also, odds are good that their hacker types could, if they so desired, make quite a mess of any but the best-designed spamming infrastructures. They may or may not have the legal authority to do so; but if an anonymous electronic attack were to happen, that wouldn't really matter.)
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with aristocracies is that you have the same scum at the top; but their abuses aren't even theoretically illegal; and are sometimes outright celebrated and formally protected.
That's cold comfort when your rule of law is effectively nonfunctional among your society's most dangerous and influential people; but it is the case.
I'm obviously not surprised that a dreadful shitsack like Cameron would have an utterly awful and self-serving hypocritical sound bite; but I am always impressed at how the professionals manage to keep their facial expressions so...neutral...when delivering this sort of tripe.
I realize that this is "The Cloud" and all; but does releasing an SDK that makes it easier to build applications that depend on your proprietary cloud service really count as "opening" it?
They are obviously under no obligation to open anything, whether fully or partially; and this will presumably make their stuff more useful; it just seems really weird to use "open" to describe what is basically the same thing that platform vendors have always done to encourage people to write stuff that runs on their platform or works with it. A publicly visible platform or API is different than an internal-only one; but if this is 'amazon opens up Alexa', then the fact that you can write win32 applications would be 'Microsoft opens up Windows'.
"Messengers are the new browsers and bots are the new websites." Truly a chilling sentiment. On the plus side, until he and his ilk gain enough leverage that dealing with them is no longer optional, at least he is only building his own technological dystopia, not ours.
Did I, um, miss the grand opening of the GayCLU homosexual re-education center and abortionplex or something? You seem to be calling in from a parallel reality where the 'progressives' hold absolute power and only stop hunting christians for sport when it's time for an orgy.
User, I think we both know that that is in flagrant violation of the AUP. And you like it. Don't try to deny your biology.
I have to imagine that some politicians are doing a little nervous sweating about this, given that passing red-meat "values" legislation is supposed to be an easy, low-cost, way to score some points with Team Jesus; not something that might get the local chamber of commerce pissed off at you. Oh well. Time to see how much they value those values, I suppose.
Clearly having funds with Paypal demonstrates an acceptable degree of shared piety toward Mammon, so they'll only seize customer funds according to their usual opaque and arbitrary processes, no need to change anything there.
I wouldn't be too quick to applaud the principled stance of paypal, or corporations generally, as they typically will do business even in atrocious hellholes if the money is right(and/or go out of business at the hands of competitors who don't share their scruples); but it is worth remembering that they have options, and they aren't going to choose a location unless its overall combination of 'desirable' and 'cheap' beats out that of the alternatives. Some places make it on desirability(it's not like you go to any trendy part of silicon valley for the rent). Some places focus on being cheap. Most combine the two in varying proportions.
This being the case, making your location less desirable strongly suggests that you will have to make it more cheap in order to maintain the same level of interest. You have fun with that, NC.
I think I did a terrible job of explaining it: Shader programs are indeed designed to be parellelized across however many shader units a given GPU provides. However, SLI(presumably because the niche market doesn't justify a nicer interconnect, or because it may simply not be feasible to provide the same level of integration between multiple PCBs as it is between elements on the same die) doesn't provide particularly close integration of the participant GPUs.
SLI-ed GPUs can't even share VRAM(with some limited exceptions in DX12 if everything is aligned just right to support that), and the shaders on one die aren't visible to the scheduler on the other or vice-versa, so the decision about how to divide the workload has to be made at the level of the driver either chopping the frame into two, three, or four(depending on the number of GPUs) regions of roughly equal complexity, assigning each GPU one of them and then stitching the results together to get the finished frame(Split Frame Rendering) or by allocating alternate frames to each GPU(Alternate Frame Rendering).
In either case, each GPU is effectively working in isolation on the task of rendering the frame or partial frame it has been assigned; with the downsides that SFR is vulnerable to 'tearing' effects, since deciding what an 'even' split of the work involved in rendering a frame before you actually render it can be tricky; and when you judge incorrectly your partial frames will be finished at different times, either dragging down the effective framerate if the system always waits for a complete frame before updating, or causing visual artifacts when one part of the frame is updated before the other part is. AFR has the problem that it can't actually reduce the time needed to render a frame compared to a single GPU(since it is just a single GPU rendering each frame), so while under good conditions you can get nearly linear increases in FPS; any frames that render unacceptably slowly on the GPU in question will render no faster with two of them. Plus, anything that makes rendering frame N+1 require knowledge of frame N(or worse, the state involved in rendering frame N) completely breaks AFR, since each GPU has very little access to what the other is doing.
If SLI actually involved glue logic good enough that putting two cards in SLI essentially produced a single GPU with twice the resources and just slightly higher latency, it would indeed run like a bat out of hell, and make parallization mostly invisible to shader programs. It's just that it doesn't actually do that. Analogous to cluster systems vs. multisocket NUMA systems: SLI provides largely transparent support for collecting the output of each GPU and putting it together into a single video output; but is otherwise fairly loosely coupled, with the driver handing out work units to mostly isolated GPUs with their own VRAM and their own shaders and limited communication with one another.
I'm guessing that the mention of 'SLI' might be the key point here. Taking problems not explicitly designed to be parallelized and attempting to parellelize them at the driver level after the fact is...a bit of a mixed bag...in terms of actually working. It's not clear that Nvidia is holding out on us here; given that they sell fancy multi-GPU systems to high end customers I'm sure that they would be delighted to also offer tools that make using those expensive multi-GPU systems really easy; but that doesn't change the fact that, based on the application, 'SLI' can offer amusingly pitiful performance enhancements, exciting reliability issues, and similar fun even when drivers specifically tweaked to compensate for the application being run are available.
According to our wiki overlords, an M203 has a muzzle velocity of 76M/s, and ~ 30cm of barrel. What isn't included is the peak acceleration the projectile experiences. I'd assume that there is a sharp spike followed by a gradual decrease because the volume that the expanding propellant is filling becomes larger as the projectile moves down the barrel; rather than constant acceleration during the entire period spent in the barrel; but I'm not sure how one would infer the shape of the curve from that speculation, even if it is correct.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were doable: all the electronics and sensors are solid state(extra credit if you can find an explosive agent that is also a decent potting compound, rather than wasting space on inert epoxy underfill and encapsulants); batteries deal adequately with shock, so long as they aren't big open wet cells that can slosh around or anything; and it's not as though a little electrode damage that reduces the ability to recharge the battery is a problem in a device that will be exploding within minutes. The big trick would be the motor and rotor: I imagine you'd want to mount the motor parallel to the direction of acceleration, to avoid stress perpendicular to the bearings that might bend the shaft. The rotor could rest against the 'front' of the projectile to avoid snapping the blades; but would probably have to fold out somehow, since a 40mm propeller probably wouldn't be large enough to lift a 40mm 'helicopter'. Wouldn't be trivial; but probably possible.
Depending on what the unit cost ends up being, the drone could be indirect fire. More expensive than a grenade; but a grenade that can manage a couple hundred meters of acrobatic, guided, reasonably swift, flight and make up for in proximity what it lacks in payload strikes me as potentially being really damn scary.
This particulary RFP emphasizes sensors, endurance, and very light weight, so it probably isn't a request for such a gadget; but I would(admittedly naively) imagine that guided munitions based on drone/aircraft designs(rather than rockets or missiles) might well be a viable niche. It's hard to argue with solid fuel when it comes to a quick, but only modestly controllable, boost, so some little copter isn't going to replace an AT4 if you need to bring the building down or seriously imperil an armored vehicle; but such rockets are relatively heavy, not inexpensive, and can make you pretty visible as well as being dangerous to use in confined spaces because of the backblast. For $1,500 and ~15 lbs of carry weight(roughly AT4 equivalent), you could probably have several drone aircraft that can carry a grenade-sized payload(~200g of your choice of day-ruiner) quickly, quietly, and through a relatively complex trajectory while feeding you video so that you can nominate the most deserving location. Too slow to get past active defenses aimed at intercepting anti-tank munitions; but assuming that the copter is quiet and not garishly colored, a human would be hard pressed to notice it in time, much less shoot it as it zigzags its way toward them.
"To get rich is glorious." remember?
Well, I certainly hope that the price in the article($190,000/unit) reflects the fact that the purchase was some sort of small-scale R&D thing and likely included a lot of not-specifically-hardware services.
The lousiest of the toys are probably inadequate to the job, if nothing else most of them take a dreadfully naive approach to security on the camera and control signal link; but one would think that these things would be amenable to relatively low cost, in mass production. The cellphone market is already doing the work for you on small, cheap, surprisingly adequate cameras; consumer electronics generally are a pretty cutthroat competition for incrementally better Li-ion and similar batteries, and even if it ends up needing to be made of some classy fiber-filled engineering plastic rather than ABS or polyethylene; injection moulding can still stamp the parts out at a good clip.
This probably won't happen for the 2018 timeframe; but things will get more interesting if DARPA's bug-cyborg work gets mature enough to compete with conventional model aircraft. Integrating the electronics is currently pretty fiddly(last I checked they were investigating trying to stimulate larva/pupa-stage insects to grow around the electronics in order to avoid having to do lots and lots of beetle surgery, not sure how that is going); but insects are undeniably experts at this sort of flying. Even if the live bug proves too much of a hassle, it'd be pretty cool if they could 'grow' the entire chassis around the electronics just by bathing it in an insect cell culture and providing the appropriate signals to induce chitin formation in the desired places.
Oh, I'm not OK with it; I'd be delighted to have the scammers behind this sort of thing die in a fire. However, my assumption is that, since "being an awful shitweasel who really, really, has it coming" isn't actually a crime, the ability of the AG to prosecute will be more or less entirely confined to "What can we demonstrate you lied about; and how much did that hurt them and help you?"
The plague of markedly-worse-than-community-college-but-much-more-expensive 'schools' really ought to be extirpated good and hard; but unless there is a provision in MA law that I've never heard even mention of in reading about the issue, there aren't any legal remedies until you start lying about the product(which they tend to, some more carefully than others). This is one of those cases where keeping things nice and legal is definitely letting some awful people slip past; but the AG doesn't really have other options unless the law changes.
I imagine that the case will hinge on how much the AG is able to prove that ITT(or, just because this is how scam selling always goes, its marketing flacks verbally but not in writing) lied about the quality of their program, job prospects of graduates, and so on.
Mere shoddiness they can probably get away with, schools don't have any general duty to not suck; but if it can be demonstrated that they were falsely advertising the goods they were pushing, nail 'em to the wall.
Conceivably, if the software fit their needs closely enough. However, isn't that a small price to pay for the taxpayers who paid for the software being able to use it; as well as any benefits derived from cooperative governments and organizations that decide that mainstreaming is more efficient than forking(I'm assuming that the license will be something MIT-like, not that commie GPL, so cooperation will be optional; but maintaining your own fork isn't something that people who dislike thankless busy work do without good reason.)
Perhaps more broadly, isn't there something dangerously petty, unambitious, and ultimately self-defeating in approaching problems in the spirit of "Gotta keep the other guy from getting what's mine!" rather than "We are looking to produce nothing less than the best, if that happens to be of benefit to others, so be it."
This doesn't mean that we need to send Kim Jong Un a 'Nukes for Noobs' tutorial just to be nice; but a person, organization, or nation rarely achieves excellence or greatness if they focus more on making sure that the other guy isn't somehow free-riding than on making sure that their work is something that is worth emulating.
I suspect that you could squeeze enough energy into that volume to electrocute someone; but humans are reasonably resistive(even if you accidentally stabbed yourself with the fork, it looks like there is an electrical contact on the handle, so it has to pass at least one layer of skin), so unless some sort of insane enthusiasm for liability led them to design the thing to deliver fairly high voltage at at least moderately punchy current, it would still be harmless.
It doesn't actually take much energy, at all, to kick some unlucky sucker's heart into a life threatening abnormal state; but you have to deliver that very modest jolt to the correct place; and doing that is a matter of either nontrivial brute force or very bad luck.
Remember citizens, 'conspiracy theorists' are just nutjob losers who want to blame the reptilians or whatever for the fact that their lives suck and their tinfoil hats are too tight. The world is, in fact, basically decent and as-described. Carry on.
I imagine that some of it is purely for the feel-good: '3d printing!' probably isn't a bad marketing gimmick if you are trying to sell a techie-toy electric bike; but some of it may also come down to scale.
You need some pretty esoteric shapes before 3d printers, of any quality, can beat conventional methods for reasonable sized production runs; but the cost per unit tends to climb pretty steeply if you aren't ordering in decent quantities. Unless the manufacturer sells enough of these bikes that they can make a reasonable prediction of how many replacement part X, optional widget Y, etc. they'll need to produce and keep on the shelf, they run the risk of things going out of stock and annoying customers, things rotting on the shelf and typing up money until they eventually sell or have to be scrapped, and that sort of supply chain fun.
I'm not sure where their sale numbers are relative to the break-even point on mass production of spares and option parts; but the desirability of handling that aspect of support, and the economics of mass production vs. short-run techniques definitely change with the size of the user base. Something on the scale of a common car model may well support multiple, competing, vendors of mass produced spares and options(usually with the vendor trying to enforce a premium by one means or another). Something on a much smaller scale may make support an unfortunate necessity that you do only because your customers will be unhappy if they can't get the parts they need.
For the right retainer, you can find any number of lobbyists and think-tank parasites who will argue that America, Free Enterprise, and the very concept of private property itself cannot be upheld if people are allowed to control what code is executed on their computers.
Every mental gymnast has a price; and we have some very talented ones.
If AT&T doesn't bother with, or screws up, whatever firmware and bootloader lockdown is intended to keep the bloatware in place, they might accidentally end up with an attractive product.
If they don't, though, I don't even want to imagine how awful the result of this plan will be.
Isn't it a...baffling coincidence... how the phrase 'financial engineering' seems to go very well with either massive fraud or going bankrupt on a truly epic scale? I guess merely calling it 'engineering' doesn't actually give you any of the appreciation for evaluating and mitigating design risks that real engineers have.
"We kill people based on metadata."
Gen. Michael Hayden
(Yes, technically, the NSA doesn't handle the wet-ops stuff, that gets kicked over to the CIA/JSOC/USSOCOM/whoever has won the right to take out the cool toys today; but they do do hit lists. Also, odds are good that their hacker types could, if they so desired, make quite a mess of any but the best-designed spamming infrastructures. They may or may not have the legal authority to do so; but if an anonymous electronic attack were to happen, that wouldn't really matter.)