I'm inclined to wonder whether the roboticists will manage to crack their problem before team "you grew the leg once, now grow it again" manages to get their pet stem cells from turning into hideous doom cancer all the time...
I'm also inclined to wonder what the outcome will be if we manage to crack the (highly complex; but comparatively simple) mechanical problem of replacing the function of limbs; but still have a load of people running around with neural problems, whether inborn or caused by concussive damage and the like. Robotics is hard; but it appears to be very nearly a toy problem compared to neurology.
Unfortunately, whether this practice is 'legal' or 'illegal' is only going to be of limited interest for anybody who doesn't have sufficient skills, and the right kind, to make it a seller's market for their services. There are occasional exceptions, when somebody screws up and is a bit too overt about what they think of cripples, or where they like their women, or what they think of uppity darkies at work; but the overwhelming majority of the time, when somebody doesn't shove their foot in their mouth and start chewing like a moron on the record, it isn't exactly hard to apply whatever hiring criteria you want and then provide a perfectly legal justification.
Assuming that this is in fact illegal(or at least against Facebook ToS and in Facebook's interest to get their lawsuit on), only an idiot would persist in having a demand for Facebook credentials as part of their on-the-record hiring practices. However, there are ever. so. many. voluntary. ways. of determining whether or not somebody is the sort of 'team player who is a good fit with our company culture'. I'm sure that hiring minions will reliably employ them(not, of course, because management pressured them in any way, should somebody discover this, oh no, of course not.)
So long as it's a buyer's market for you(and the numbers aren't getting any rosier) state protection isn't 100% useless; but it is far less helpful than one would like.
HR presumably just assumes that you are either telling the truth, and must be a radical isolationist living in a mountain cabin amidst heaps of antigovernment screeds and bomb-making apparatus, or lying because your real facebook profile is nothing but pictures of you doing things that would Reflect Poorly On the Reputation Of The Company. Circular file.
Anybody who feels comfortable demanding extremely intrusive access to personal information will likely not even think twice about assuming that anybody who isn't as transparent as the norm probably has something to hide.
Have you listened to anything a state Attorney General with his eye on re-election(or better things) says about the internet when some 'cyber-bullying' case is in the media or somebody is shocked, shocked to discover that there may be prostitution on craigslist?
Never mind, of course, the actual fundamentalist dingbats, not just the cynical politicians.
If governments can produce such powerful systems, as they claim, why cannot they do something as simple as stopping spam, which, by the way, really hurts economies.
My guess is that these systems suffer from the usual contracts' weaknesses: kickbacks, wow-presentations, bugs, etc.
It is almost certainly the case that the vendors are exaggerating at best, lying at worst; but there is one crucial difference:
Anti-spam, for the vast majority of us, is purely defensive. Spammers send X million messages, I receive zero points for each one I block, -1 points for each one that gets through.
Anti-dissident surveillance systems are both offensive and defensive, when considered as part of the system they work with: Parts are basically anti-spam(eg. China's "Something bad happened near Foo, start blocking messages with 'foo' in them to keep the news from spreading too quickly"); but the real meat is offensive: catching your malcontents and then sending in the goons.
The defensive case simply isn't winnable. We've gotten pretty good, algorithmic spam filters do eat most of the chaff before humans see it(if not before networks carry it); but the jurisdictional issues generally mean that the only hope is the longterm "maybe we can block enough to make spamming uneconomic", which doesn't seem to have panned out.
The offensive case, on the other hand, is winnable: the whole point is identifying people within your jurisdiction and then silencing them by other means. You can miss 99% of what they do, as long as you catch enough incriminating intercepts to justify disappearing some people.
Your Pacific rim drop-shipper of choice has a fair number of offerings (these ones are reasonably representative); from ~$70 to ~$170 depending on the phase of the moon, number of ports and media readers, and chipset.
Many, if not all, allegedly support at least some sort of '1080p' decode, though exactly what hides in the details may or may not be a pleasant surprise.
To the best of my knowledge, though, development interest in these remains somewhat mired in their variety. It is highly unlikely that the firmware developers on those things spent any time or effort actively hindering 3rd party developers or replacement firmwares; but it isn't a whole lot more likely that they wasted a whole lot of time on 'quality' or 'compatibility' either. Apple, by contrast, actively hates you; but they don't have 30-odd different aTV variants, each broken in a different way.
It is almost certainly the case that there would be some good candidates, if somebody could pick through them and then establish a reliable supply of purchasable units guaranteed to be the same hardware, rather than a totally different board in the same case(purchasers of wireless cards and routers will be familiar with the fact that model numbers are merely suggestions...); but that is at the level of forum anecdote at present...
Oh, it was a hell of a weirdo, and would have done a great deal better with more recent display connection standards. The price, also, was undeniably an issue.
It's just sad that, unlike many of the other technologies that were a bit hacky and/or excessively expensive in the 2000-2005 range, the T220 just sort of died rather than improving. That specific product had the issues you get when you push a little too hard against the envelope. It's just frustrating that 6+ years since its introduction didn't result in there being a "T420" with the weirdness ironed out and the cost reduced.
Because 1280x1024 is a 17 or 19 inch 4:3 display, still pretty common on top of beige corporateboxen of the world; but not exactly setting the world on fire at retail or in consumer focused offerings. 1280x800 is almost certainly a cheap 'HD' widescreen in one of the smaller sizes(somewhere between 17 and 20) or a similarly nasty and similarly marketed as "HD" laptop panel.
In most cases, those extra vertical pixels don't physically exist. The combination of cost-cutting and the marketing convergence of broadcast TV and computer monitors have done terrible things to display resolution.
How little attention the Spanish civil war(and Franco) get. Once the foreign involvement kicked up, the place was practically a beta test for WWII, and Franco was far longer-lasting than some of his more dramatic colleagues in fascism. And yet, crickets...
Honestly, I don't doubt that this will turn out to have 'security' uses, it just seems like dicking around with aircraft isn't going to be one of them...
Magnetometers of substantial sophistication have been in use since at least WWII for naval detection and fuzing applications. Surely somebody is already writing up the proposal for a submarine and/or torpedo with a superconductor layer that can be cooled on demand to provide full magnetic field stealth...
Do they make liquid nitrogen storage dewars of less than three ounces?
If so, I don't think that there is anything about cryogens(so long as they aren't compressed, compressed gas cylinders not Specifically Approved have been on the list for at least a decade before the security theatre opened in earnest).
If that dewar contains more than three ounces of liquid, though, you'd better touch your toes and think of Freedom while I get the exam glove.
In an unfortunate twist, the sorts of reactions that our favorite diminutive head of state proposes are exactly the sort of thing that seems like an attractive tactical move; but makes a unbelieveably dreadful strategic one against your assorted religious nutjobs and fundamentalist reactionaries...
It is certainly true that some people Simply Aren't Interested in ye olde western enlightenment values, no matter how good a job you do of actually upholding them. Those you pretty much have to put up with, with the proviso that if they cross the line, you'll have to kill them.
For everybody else, though, the lousier and more hypocritical your execution of your supposed ideals, the worse you look, and the better the chap down the road who has shit ideals, but is at least real sincere about them, starts to look.
If your sales pitch ends up being "Welcome to the Free World(tm): We offer the finest in postmodern cynicism and brutality cloaked in the noblest sounding invocations of highflown principle than money can buy. Please look directly into the retinal scanner and have an nice day." You can't very well expect to stem fundamentalist recruitment very effectively...
Unfortunately for Nokia, your post suggests(at least in the American market) their other big problem:
" I know people who pay an extra $30 a month for an iPhone, just so they can have a descent camera on their phone." Indeed. And it'll be a cold day in hell before Verizon or AT&T give the slightest support to a company who would deprive them of that $30/month. Basic phones aren't crap because manufacturers are fundamentally incompetent(though that certainly helps); but because a basic phone is your punishment for not buying a data plan, loser. There isn't any incentive for the carrier to spend a penny more than whatever is necessary to receive voice calls and enough text messages to incur extra fees.
In a market where people buy handsets freely, and then choose carriers, there is a clear niche for 'basic phone, well executed'. In a market where phones are used to move contracts, such a handset is a veritable leper, an enemy of the data plans that actually make the money.
If there is a lesson of the various socialist surveillance dystopias, it is that unaided state surveillance is too expensive to survive(y hello thar, East Germany) and tends to stifle out of fear the new technologies that would ultimately help it prosper(rather like the MPAA...)
In good old free world, on the other hand, technological development and the enthusiastic forces of private enterprise produce all the groundwork needed for surveillance and control of the sort that the Evil Empire could only dream of, just waiting to be subpeonaed when needed...
The trouble is that 'basic' phones are a sufficiently solved problem(in fairness, substantial amounts of that solving was done by Nokia...) that heading in that direction is an invitation to have a margins knife-fight with every random clone-shop on the pacific rim...
This is why even the people who can't do software for shit(looking at you, 'motoblur') are desperately dumping crap into their Android builds to 'diffirentiate' them, and the more ambitious ones are hitting the crack pipe and dreaming about all their future 'app store' and content provider money...
The margins on basic smartphones probably aren't that hot, though some of the flagship ones might be OK; but in the low end Nokia would essentially be competing against ultra-cheap clones of their iconic greatest hits dumbphones. Not a fun business to be in, especially if you still want overhead items like "a management team in Finland"...
Back in the day, Sony had some hideously expensive dye sublimation printers that were only slightly larger than the 4x6s they were capable of printing.
More recently, the sad, pitiful Ghost of Polaroid Future has been flogging a few products based on the 'zink'('zero ink' because we built the proprietary ink right into the proprietary paper!) based products of similarly miniature persuasion.
In the black-and-white world, Zebra and friends have had ruggedized and portable thermal label printers with varying levels of built-in logic(anywhere from a keypad and the ability to accept short strings up to a wireless WinCE PDA that plugs right into your warehouse logistics database thing and prints labels based on a combination of what the warehouse guy just scanned and what the database says about where that box should be going. Not terribly general purpose, the sort of thing that would come with an integration contract; but pretty cute).
Interesting... I've had the, er, 'pleasure' of dealing with a bunch of Laserjet P1102w units which, if sent output from UPD, will not only fail to print; but will actually lock up and drop off the network entirely(the WAP system doesn't even see their MAC as active) until they are rebooted... Only the model-specific driver seems to work.
It'd be bad enough to have a networked printer that can be DoSed with correctly crafted malicious input; but a networked printer that can be DoSed with input from its own manufacturer's 'Universal' driver?
And let's not talk about UPD in a AD-assigned-on-login printer scenario before about version 5.3...
It's too bad. My old 4L, after over a decade of solid use, still had the build quality that suggests small-arms fire resistance and Just Worked on the software side; but things have been largely downhill since...
Unfortunately, the printer division presumably has access to the guys who write the printer firmware(unbelievable shit; but at least it fits in the constraints of an embedded device) and the guys who write the printer drivers(unbelieveable shit, and larger than all but the most recent operating systems), while the PC division has the people who write the shovelware that crufts up HP PC factory images(unbelievable shit that somehow manages to bring even contemporary computers to a crawl, while providing ugly, confusing, and largely useless functions). There Is No Hope.
Honestly, they should probably shoot the lot of them and let the beleagured WebOS guys take over. If HP shovelware is going to look like absolutely nothing else on the desktops they are selling, it might as well at least be completely alien in a friendly, competent, and well-designed way...
Prematurely revealing the secret ACTA designation of intellectual property as a 'national security asset granted the protection of the US strategic air command's full deterrent and offensive capabilities' would definitely have national security implications! Just think of how awkward it could get if we told the world about our plan to launch thermonuclear first strikes against suspected piracy-abetting datacenters...
If HP hadn't more or less gutted itself(between spinning off the good stuff as 'Agilent' and the Carly era), there might have been one thing to hope for:
Purely for the pointless nerd-value, who among us would not smile to see a line of x86 PCs that, instead of a BIOS or EFI, had a firmware based on the unholy fusion of the design principles of Open Firmware; but with an extended PJL command set, rather than Forth, as the underlying language?
It'd be magnificently pointless(as would the postscript and PCL RIPs implemented entirely in SMM); but the world would be a better place for it having existed...
That is actually a part of their corporate philanthropy policy: By setting the price of their printers at approximately what they are worth, rather than their cost of production, and the price of their ink as though it were FDA-approved for human surgical applications, HP has contributed more free steppers and sensors to the hobbyist robotics community than just about anybody else...
Did you know that using Genuine HP DuraBit(tm) RAM makes your bits sharper, brighter, and 50% less likely to be corrupted? Also, our motherboards cryptographically verify all DIMMs during post, so its mandatory; but we won't spare you the fullsome marketing even so...
Maybe they'll go dangerously 90's and try combining a minaturized printer with a laptop. The kids will dig that.
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I'm inclined to wonder whether the roboticists will manage to crack their problem before team "you grew the leg once, now grow it again" manages to get their pet stem cells from turning into hideous doom cancer all the time...
I'm also inclined to wonder what the outcome will be if we manage to crack the (highly complex; but comparatively simple) mechanical problem of replacing the function of limbs; but still have a load of people running around with neural problems, whether inborn or caused by concussive damage and the like. Robotics is hard; but it appears to be very nearly a toy problem compared to neurology.
Unfortunately, whether this practice is 'legal' or 'illegal' is only going to be of limited interest for anybody who doesn't have sufficient skills, and the right kind, to make it a seller's market for their services. There are occasional exceptions, when somebody screws up and is a bit too overt about what they think of cripples, or where they like their women, or what they think of uppity darkies at work; but the overwhelming majority of the time, when somebody doesn't shove their foot in their mouth and start chewing like a moron on the record, it isn't exactly hard to apply whatever hiring criteria you want and then provide a perfectly legal justification.
Assuming that this is in fact illegal(or at least against Facebook ToS and in Facebook's interest to get their lawsuit on), only an idiot would persist in having a demand for Facebook credentials as part of their on-the-record hiring practices. However, there are ever. so. many. voluntary. ways. of determining whether or not somebody is the sort of 'team player who is a good fit with our company culture'. I'm sure that hiring minions will reliably employ them(not, of course, because management pressured them in any way, should somebody discover this, oh no, of course not.)
So long as it's a buyer's market for you(and the numbers aren't getting any rosier) state protection isn't 100% useless; but it is far less helpful than one would like.
HR presumably just assumes that you are either telling the truth, and must be a radical isolationist living in a mountain cabin amidst heaps of antigovernment screeds and bomb-making apparatus, or lying because your real facebook profile is nothing but pictures of you doing things that would Reflect Poorly On the Reputation Of The Company. Circular file.
Anybody who feels comfortable demanding extremely intrusive access to personal information will likely not even think twice about assuming that anybody who isn't as transparent as the norm probably has something to hide.
Anonymous Coward is an unusually apt username today...
Have you listened to anything a state Attorney General with his eye on re-election(or better things) says about the internet when some 'cyber-bullying' case is in the media or somebody is shocked, shocked to discover that there may be prostitution on craigslist?
Never mind, of course, the actual fundamentalist dingbats, not just the cynical politicians.
If governments can produce such powerful systems, as they claim, why cannot they do something as simple as stopping spam, which, by the way, really hurts economies. My guess is that these systems suffer from the usual contracts' weaknesses: kickbacks, wow-presentations, bugs, etc.
It is almost certainly the case that the vendors are exaggerating at best, lying at worst; but there is one crucial difference:
Anti-spam, for the vast majority of us, is purely defensive. Spammers send X million messages, I receive zero points for each one I block, -1 points for each one that gets through.
Anti-dissident surveillance systems are both offensive and defensive, when considered as part of the system they work with: Parts are basically anti-spam(eg. China's "Something bad happened near Foo, start blocking messages with 'foo' in them to keep the news from spreading too quickly"); but the real meat is offensive: catching your malcontents and then sending in the goons.
The defensive case simply isn't winnable. We've gotten pretty good, algorithmic spam filters do eat most of the chaff before humans see it(if not before networks carry it); but the jurisdictional issues generally mean that the only hope is the longterm "maybe we can block enough to make spamming uneconomic", which doesn't seem to have panned out.
The offensive case, on the other hand, is winnable: the whole point is identifying people within your jurisdiction and then silencing them by other means. You can miss 99% of what they do, as long as you catch enough incriminating intercepts to justify disappearing some people.
Your Pacific rim drop-shipper of choice has a fair number of offerings (these ones are reasonably representative); from ~$70 to ~$170 depending on the phase of the moon, number of ports and media readers, and chipset.
Many, if not all, allegedly support at least some sort of '1080p' decode, though exactly what hides in the details may or may not be a pleasant surprise.
To the best of my knowledge, though, development interest in these remains somewhat mired in their variety. It is highly unlikely that the firmware developers on those things spent any time or effort actively hindering 3rd party developers or replacement firmwares; but it isn't a whole lot more likely that they wasted a whole lot of time on 'quality' or 'compatibility' either. Apple, by contrast, actively hates you; but they don't have 30-odd different aTV variants, each broken in a different way.
It is almost certainly the case that there would be some good candidates, if somebody could pick through them and then establish a reliable supply of purchasable units guaranteed to be the same hardware, rather than a totally different board in the same case(purchasers of wireless cards and routers will be familiar with the fact that model numbers are merely suggestions...); but that is at the level of forum anecdote at present...
Oh, it was a hell of a weirdo, and would have done a great deal better with more recent display connection standards. The price, also, was undeniably an issue.
It's just sad that, unlike many of the other technologies that were a bit hacky and/or excessively expensive in the 2000-2005 range, the T220 just sort of died rather than improving. That specific product had the issues you get when you push a little too hard against the envelope. It's just frustrating that 6+ years since its introduction didn't result in there being a "T420" with the weirdness ironed out and the cost reduced.
Speaking of how things were better in the old days, shed a tear for the IBM T220:
3840×2400 pixels on a 22.2 inch widescreen. Discontinued c.2005
Because 1280x1024 is a 17 or 19 inch 4:3 display, still pretty common on top of beige corporateboxen of the world; but not exactly setting the world on fire at retail or in consumer focused offerings. 1280x800 is almost certainly a cheap 'HD' widescreen in one of the smaller sizes(somewhere between 17 and 20) or a similarly nasty and similarly marketed as "HD" laptop panel.
In most cases, those extra vertical pixels don't physically exist. The combination of cost-cutting and the marketing convergence of broadcast TV and computer monitors have done terrible things to display resolution.
How little attention the Spanish civil war(and Franco) get. Once the foreign involvement kicked up, the place was practically a beta test for WWII, and Franco was far longer-lasting than some of his more dramatic colleagues in fascism. And yet, crickets...
Honestly, I don't doubt that this will turn out to have 'security' uses, it just seems like dicking around with aircraft isn't going to be one of them...
Magnetometers of substantial sophistication have been in use since at least WWII for naval detection and fuzing applications. Surely somebody is already writing up the proposal for a submarine and/or torpedo with a superconductor layer that can be cooled on demand to provide full magnetic field stealth...
Do they make liquid nitrogen storage dewars of less than three ounces?
If so, I don't think that there is anything about cryogens(so long as they aren't compressed, compressed gas cylinders not Specifically Approved have been on the list for at least a decade before the security theatre opened in earnest).
If that dewar contains more than three ounces of liquid, though, you'd better touch your toes and think of Freedom while I get the exam glove.
In an unfortunate twist, the sorts of reactions that our favorite diminutive head of state proposes are exactly the sort of thing that seems like an attractive tactical move; but makes a unbelieveably dreadful strategic one against your assorted religious nutjobs and fundamentalist reactionaries...
It is certainly true that some people Simply Aren't Interested in ye olde western enlightenment values, no matter how good a job you do of actually upholding them. Those you pretty much have to put up with, with the proviso that if they cross the line, you'll have to kill them.
For everybody else, though, the lousier and more hypocritical your execution of your supposed ideals, the worse you look, and the better the chap down the road who has shit ideals, but is at least real sincere about them, starts to look.
If your sales pitch ends up being "Welcome to the Free World(tm): We offer the finest in postmodern cynicism and brutality cloaked in the noblest sounding invocations of highflown principle than money can buy. Please look directly into the retinal scanner and have an nice day." You can't very well expect to stem fundamentalist recruitment very effectively...
Unfortunately for Nokia, your post suggests(at least in the American market) their other big problem:
" I know people who pay an extra $30 a month for an iPhone, just so they can have a descent camera on their phone." Indeed. And it'll be a cold day in hell before Verizon or AT&T give the slightest support to a company who would deprive them of that $30/month. Basic phones aren't crap because manufacturers are fundamentally incompetent(though that certainly helps); but because a basic phone is your punishment for not buying a data plan, loser. There isn't any incentive for the carrier to spend a penny more than whatever is necessary to receive voice calls and enough text messages to incur extra fees. In a market where people buy handsets freely, and then choose carriers, there is a clear niche for 'basic phone, well executed'. In a market where phones are used to move contracts, such a handset is a veritable leper, an enemy of the data plans that actually make the money.
Easy; but actually deeply misleading...
If there is a lesson of the various socialist surveillance dystopias, it is that unaided state surveillance is too expensive to survive(y hello thar, East Germany) and tends to stifle out of fear the new technologies that would ultimately help it prosper(rather like the MPAA...)
In good old free world, on the other hand, technological development and the enthusiastic forces of private enterprise produce all the groundwork needed for surveillance and control of the sort that the Evil Empire could only dream of, just waiting to be subpeonaed when needed...
The trouble is that 'basic' phones are a sufficiently solved problem(in fairness, substantial amounts of that solving was done by Nokia...) that heading in that direction is an invitation to have a margins knife-fight with every random clone-shop on the pacific rim...
This is why even the people who can't do software for shit(looking at you, 'motoblur') are desperately dumping crap into their Android builds to 'diffirentiate' them, and the more ambitious ones are hitting the crack pipe and dreaming about all their future 'app store' and content provider money...
The margins on basic smartphones probably aren't that hot, though some of the flagship ones might be OK; but in the low end Nokia would essentially be competing against ultra-cheap clones of their iconic greatest hits dumbphones. Not a fun business to be in, especially if you still want overhead items like "a management team in Finland"...
Luckily the NSA would never lie to us, or to congress, so I'm pretty sure that we can trust him on this one.
Back in the day, Sony had some hideously expensive dye sublimation printers that were only slightly larger than the 4x6s they were capable of printing.
More recently, the sad, pitiful Ghost of Polaroid Future has been flogging a few products based on the 'zink'('zero ink' because we built the proprietary ink right into the proprietary paper!) based products of similarly miniature persuasion.
In the black-and-white world, Zebra and friends have had ruggedized and portable thermal label printers with varying levels of built-in logic(anywhere from a keypad and the ability to accept short strings up to a wireless WinCE PDA that plugs right into your warehouse logistics database thing and prints labels based on a combination of what the warehouse guy just scanned and what the database says about where that box should be going. Not terribly general purpose, the sort of thing that would come with an integration contract; but pretty cute).
Interesting... I've had the, er, 'pleasure' of dealing with a bunch of Laserjet P1102w units which, if sent output from UPD, will not only fail to print; but will actually lock up and drop off the network entirely(the WAP system doesn't even see their MAC as active) until they are rebooted... Only the model-specific driver seems to work.
It'd be bad enough to have a networked printer that can be DoSed with correctly crafted malicious input; but a networked printer that can be DoSed with input from its own manufacturer's 'Universal' driver?
And let's not talk about UPD in a AD-assigned-on-login printer scenario before about version 5.3...
It's too bad. My old 4L, after over a decade of solid use, still had the build quality that suggests small-arms fire resistance and Just Worked on the software side; but things have been largely downhill since...
Unfortunately, the printer division presumably has access to the guys who write the printer firmware(unbelievable shit; but at least it fits in the constraints of an embedded device) and the guys who write the printer drivers(unbelieveable shit, and larger than all but the most recent operating systems), while the PC division has the people who write the shovelware that crufts up HP PC factory images(unbelievable shit that somehow manages to bring even contemporary computers to a crawl, while providing ugly, confusing, and largely useless functions). There Is No Hope.
Honestly, they should probably shoot the lot of them and let the beleagured WebOS guys take over. If HP shovelware is going to look like absolutely nothing else on the desktops they are selling, it might as well at least be completely alien in a friendly, competent, and well-designed way...
Prematurely revealing the secret ACTA designation of intellectual property as a 'national security asset granted the protection of the US strategic air command's full deterrent and offensive capabilities' would definitely have national security implications! Just think of how awkward it could get if we told the world about our plan to launch thermonuclear first strikes against suspected piracy-abetting datacenters...
If HP hadn't more or less gutted itself(between spinning off the good stuff as 'Agilent' and the Carly era), there might have been one thing to hope for:
Purely for the pointless nerd-value, who among us would not smile to see a line of x86 PCs that, instead of a BIOS or EFI, had a firmware based on the unholy fusion of the design principles of Open Firmware; but with an extended PJL command set, rather than Forth, as the underlying language?
It'd be magnificently pointless(as would the postscript and PCL RIPs implemented entirely in SMM); but the world would be a better place for it having existed...
That is actually a part of their corporate philanthropy policy: By setting the price of their printers at approximately what they are worth, rather than their cost of production, and the price of their ink as though it were FDA-approved for human surgical applications, HP has contributed more free steppers and sensors to the hobbyist robotics community than just about anybody else...
Did you know that using Genuine HP DuraBit(tm) RAM makes your bits sharper, brighter, and 50% less likely to be corrupted? Also, our motherboards cryptographically verify all DIMMs during post, so its mandatory; but we won't spare you the fullsome marketing even so...
Maybe they'll go dangerously 90's and try combining a minaturized printer with a laptop. The kids will dig that.