Yes, exactly. The mfgr paid by the unit, on the assumption that Windows was installed on all of them. Oh, and if Windows *wasn't* installed on all of them, it was very hard to get your phone calls returned, and somehow your competitors found out about new things much sooner than you, and for various odd reasons they always got the releases before you.
Well, yes, at first glance that seems like a reasonable thing to do. Here are a few thoughts as to maybe why not.
1. Mission: A fighter is very fast and is intended for combat situations where speed matters. Current UAVs are optimized for loiter-time-over-target-area. They by and large are not fast. The missions on which a current UAV versus a current fighter can be successful do not overlap 100%
2. Export controls: I doubt if the USA is exporting UAVs in quantity yet, even to friends. I could be wrong, I don't follow that stuff, but I'm guessing that is not quite happening yet.
3. Support infrastructure: The USA has invested hugely in communications satellites and so forth so that you can feed huge quantities of video and sensor information from many UAVs simultaneously from anywhere in the world to control bunkers in Nevada or elsewhere, and get control inputs back to the aircraft in real time. Maybe India doesn't have quite that many military satellites flying.
Exactly. During the American Revolution, private citizens owned gun boats. Mostly a few converted smallish coastal cargo ships with a few cannon, but gun boats none the less. It was common in those days for the wealthier British navy officers to own a crew-served gun or two of their own that they took along with them. Privately owned field artillery is.... uncommon... today. And I've never seen the shells at WalMart, either.
Why have the drone carry the projectiles at all? The drone can identify targets from the air, and point the laser at them. The projectile can be fired from a protected position away from the action. Just lob one off in the general direction and let the laser do the rest.
Of course, that kind of kills the humor value in the line from Python's "Holy Grail": "I will fart in your general direction."
Acetone makes a reasonable cement for joining pieces. I suspect melting the whole works would degrade the material properties, and besides you need a mold so you might as well start with a molding process. 3D printing works by heating the feedstock until it is in its "plastic" phase and will stick to itself, allowing you to build up structures. They end up reasonably strong, but not as strong as an injection molded part where all of the melt is packed into the mold under pressure, and freezes at roughly the same time. Any casting process is going to require a mold, so you have to get the mold from some place. It is possible to make rubber molds with RTV silicones, and cast epoxy resin. This is a reasonable way to duplicate something if you have a master. I've done short-run injection molding using aluminum molds, which requires a significant amount of machining time in order to make a mold. Good way to get a few hundred parts, though.
I presume you mean manual mill, not CNC mill. Even so, I'm not sure it exists at $1500. Smithy makes some combo machines. I'm not sure I'd want a combo machine. I'd rather have a separate mill and lathe. For mills, IF (big if) you can find a well taken care of 50 year old Bridgeport or clone thereof, that is the way to go if you have room for it. But you need to know what you are buying, because if the spindle bearings are shot you are looking at an expensive repair. That largely depends on how well it was maintained and how hard it was run. Sometimes you can get a Bridgeport for "haul it away, it's yours." You need to hire a mover, but machine tool movers can easily plop a Bridgeport knee mill in your garage and they are well worth the price.
Many sellers import Chinese made bench-top mills. Harbor Freight, Grizzly, MicroMark to name a few. In most cases, they are metric machines with a wierdo conversion so that one turn of the hand wheel gives you 0.0625 inches. Umm... yeah. Carry that around in your head all day long. MicroMark does what they call "True Inch" conversion so that one turn of the hand wheel gives you 0.050 inches. I can live with that much more easily. Frankly, I'd be OK if they left it in a metric round number. But the wacko conversion is annoying. One of the MicroMark benchtop mills has an R8 spindle. That is a winner -- not that the motor has enough torque and the column enough stiffness to use all the R8 tools out there, but because Bridgeports and their clones have R8 spindles you can pick up mountains of used tooling cheaply.
Benchtop lathes are sort of limited in what they can do. Just not big enough. Every time I've looked at one, I've decided any machine I have room for is too small to do what I want. In any case, a CNC mill allows you to mill a lot of things that you might at first think of doing on a lathe. Maybe it isn't optimal, but at least a CNC mill can do a nice interpolated arc. On a manual mill, it's like trying to draw a circle with an Etch-a-Sketch. Except that it's harder to hold a Bridgeport over your head and shake it, and even if you do, it doesn't put any of the metal back.
Oh... also check out Little Machine Shop -- very good place for machine tools of interest to the hobbyist.
Target sells the Neato XV-12 robotic vacuum. The only differences between the XV-12 and the XV-11 that everyone else sells are: a) It is called XV-12, not XV-11 b) the case plastics are white.
*yawn*
I don't see how this helps anything. It is well known they they are identical in every way except the color of the plastic. How does Target expect to get any strategic advantage out of this?
Well, I see you have been modded +5 insightful. Yet, you don't seem to have any experience wither either mills or 3D printers, at least you don't claim to have any.
I own one of each, and have access to other CNC mills and 3D printers.
Guess what? They both have their place. They both have their limits. Use a machine tool within it's limits, and you will be happy. Try to push beyond its maximum work envelope, and you will be frustrated. I have done a lot of good stuff with both. My clunky Makerbot Cupcake has printed a lot of robot parts and other stuff. It is quick to draw something up and bang it out. And it lives in my living room. Guess what, my mill doesn't live in my living room. So I'm very happy with the clunky state of at-home 3D printing. Do I want more resolution and a bigger work envelope? Yup. But I've still done a lot of good stuff with it.
CNC mills are great, but it also is a whole heck of a lot more work to go from a drawing to a part. And more expensive, too, by a lot. I could buy several Cupcakes for what I have invested in cutters, collets, measuring tools, vises, clamps, etc, etc., not counting the mill itself. And there is no comparison between the learning curve. You will be a 3D printing expert long before you have mastered creating G-code for CNC milling.
As to your cost comparison, there is no $1500 CNC mill worth having. I've seen the output. I've talked with owners. I've done the math and understand the work envelope. $1500 spent on a RepRap style machine can do a lot of good stuff. $1500 spent on a CNC mill.... is a sloppy, weak columned, backlash-plagued wimp with a work envelope so small you can't produce parts as big as you can on a cupcake, and you *still* haven't bought any tools. The $1500 CNC mill can work in aluminum and free-machining brass. The RepRap can work in ABS and PLA. Well designed ABS or PLA parts can be pretty strong, and can be glued up into strong large parts.
Face it, all you have said is: "Grapes are awful, they don't taste like chicken."
PS. In case anyone is wondering "Well, what *is* the cheapest CNC mill worth owning?" I would say choose between a Tormach PCNC 1100 or a Mikini 1610L. This is what Sherline owners move up to after they have figured out that the Sherline can't do what they wanted to do. This is not because Sherline is bad, or that Sherline lies in their spec sheet. It is because beginners don't understand what the Sherline spec sheet is trying to tell them, and so they don't realize it can't come close to doing what they think it will. The other thing to remember is that when you go to buy a dial indicator or a carbide cutter or some other widget, it costs you exactly the same amount of money whether you are going to use it on a Sherline or an Akira-Sieki. CNC machining is a spendy hobby, that's just life.
Yes, the old "collective right" interpretation, on which the Supreme Court has spoken clearly. In every other instance where the Constitution mentions a right, it has *always* been interpreted by the Supreme Court as an individual right. Second amendment cases have in all but a couple of cases interpreted it as an individual right. Most recently, in the Heller case, which was decided 5-4 in favor of Heller, even the first paragraph of the dissenting opinion holds that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. That's right, it was a 9-0 decision on whether it is an individual right. It was 5-4 on whether D.C. law was constitutional, but 9-0 on whether the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right or a collective right.
And please, before anybody starts going off on me being some kind of right wing gun nut -- re-read the above. It is just facts. No opinion in there, except the Supreme Court's opinion. You won't find my opinion in there anywhere.
Smell creates powerful memories, and smell is also a potent memory recall mechanism. We often can't articulate why or articulate the memory exactly. That is because it uses a very primitive neural pathway. A brain structure called the amygdala plays a key roll in olfactory processing, and the output from the amygdala bypasses the lateral geniculate complex that is key to communicating sensory information between the two hemispheres. Sight and hearing go through the giant cross-over network so that the left and right sensory channels can be correlated -- this also gives your language centers a crack at them. Not so with smell -- it takes a very direct and low-level sensory path that bypasses your language centers and goes straight to other parts of the brain.
An odor can create a powerful emotional response by evoking a memory we can't articulate. This is why certain brands of perfume cause certain men to do very stupid things. So, yes, I can believe the absence of the strong stench of ammonia could have caused your students to not remember certain things.
A card punch launched from a trebuchet could do some serious damage. They are big and heavy.
Tell you what, though, the chad is an *outstanding* terrorist tool:) Going through the student keypunch room with a garbage bag, emptying all the chad bins, gets you enough annoying confetti to last a long time. Go through somebody's closet, and put chad in every pocket of everything he owns. Months later he will still be picking the stuff out. Sprinkle it liberally into the pages of various books. And 2 or 3 handfuls in the bed is always a winner.
My sister the artist still laments the passing of card punches. Back in the days of card punches she was into paper mache, and the chad makes excellent paper mache, and is zero labor. Just chuck a few handfuls into the paste and get to work.
The Volt functions down to -13 F / -25 C cold. That's the COLD SOAK temperature of the battery. If the battery pack is colder than that, then the gas engine will fire up to generate electricity to warm up the battery above that temperature threshold. Note that I didn't say ambient temperature; we're talking about the temperature deep inside the car, inside a 400 pound battery pack. It takes a long time at a given ambient temperature to get the battery pack itself down to that temperature. Does your weather stay at or below -13 F / -25 C for 24 hours at a time? If so then I agree the Volt isn't for you, but it's great for the rest of us.
I saw the weather do that when I lived in Minneapolis, so yes, I'm sure it does that in SK. In Minneapolis, it is common for there to be a week of weather in January where the daytime high never gets above -5F for the whole week. Minneapolis is the deep south compared to SK.
However, the ability of a politician to raise a huge amount of campaign funds with a couple of quick trips to Hollywood far outstrips the ability to raise campaign funds from a million flower mongers. You have to learn to measure the relevant data.
A nail cutting nipper is a high-leverage wire cutter beefy enough to cut off a framing or roofing nail. Or cut steel fence wire, or such. A junior size cable cutter -- (aircraft cable, not electrical cable). Googling "diamond n10 nail cutting nipper" turned up this Amazon link.
Not much current??? Ummm... better double check that. The US power line infrastructure is stretched to the breaking point. Most 21KV and up lines are running near their max rated current.
To the GP -- Aluminum is much more conductive than steel, and in power lines the cables are large enough that they have enough tensile strength to easily make the spans that power lines are designed for. Aluminum is lower loss than steel for 60 Hz. I've been making ham antennas out of CopperWeld since 1972, usually #12 solid, sometimes #10 solid. It is nassssty to cut. I use nail nippers these days, or a hack saw if I don't have a nail nipper handy. Small bolt cutters would be good. #12 soft-drawn copper doesn't stand up to icing all that well for larger antennas. CopperWeld is much stronger. (CopperWeld is the Cooper trademark, other vendors make copper-clad steel wire.) I think CopperWeld dates from around "The War", as my parents generation called it -- WW II.
Yes. I have a MakerBot Cupcake, and also do injection molding. Lego is extremely precise injection molding. Much more so than typical molded parts, and their molds are very expensive because of that. Super tight tolerance machining and hand polished. There is a reason Lego is expensive. It is the jewelry of injection molding. Now, the new machine MakerBot is talking about here has about 1/2 the layer height of a CupCake, so lets say 8 voxels to each 1 voxel in a CupCake. The resolution is much better -- the output could potentially look as good as what comes from something like a Dimensions BST. But it will still not have smooth surfaces. With well designed and well printed parts, it will be very strong. (Cupcake parts are very strong when done right.) But you are not going to be able to get the same smooth stud-and-tube mating with consistent "clutch power" (as Lego calls it) as does Lego from their sophisticated IM process.
All that said, as long as you set your expectations correctly and design within the machine's capability, you will be able to print supplemental parts, no problem. For Lego, I'd probably go with holes for mounting on Technic axles instead of trying to mate with the studs. I've often thought about printing a Geneva wheel mechanism that would mate with Lego Technic, for instance. That's doable. Or printing Lego train track parts -- the Lego track geometry is extremely limited.
Yes, Skeinforge is open source. The whole tool chain is open source. But really, the cost of the plastic is minimal. And it is easy to estimate by weight, anyway. Go find a pile of Lego or any other plastic stuff that is about the same volume of plastic as the widget you want to make. Weigh it on a postage scale. Look at the cost of a 5 pound spool of the plastic they sell you. Do the math, it is easy. Also, remember that on most prints there is only a solid shell, and the interior is about 10% fill honeycomb. So often, taking the volume of your thingy and dividing by 9 or 10 is a reasonable estimate of the volume of plastic consumed.
Yes, exactly. Even the ancient s/w I am running on my Makerbot Cupcake calculates the cc's of material that will be consumed by a print.
This looks pretty cool, but I see the build envelope is 225mm x 150mm x 150mm..... I really want 300mm x 150mm..... oh well......
These are outstandingly good humor -- my daughter draws up toys and doll house furniture and stuff in SolidWorks and prints them. I do robot parts. Great fun.
Steve Jobs created a huge reality distortion bubble large enough not only to enclose him but to engulf many who came near.
Eric Schmidt's reality distortion bubble is just barely large enough for him to live in alone. It's fairly robust, however, as no matter how many times it fails the giggle test he keeps bringing it back out.
It's not just math scores, but in every area. The school system concentrates on bringing everyone up to average in everything, instead of nurturing talents and enabling a child so soar in some specialized area. With one exception: sports. Sports talent is nurtured and allowed to soar. Other areas, not so much.
Everyone needs a certain minimal skill level in a broad range of topics. So make sure everyone gets the basics. But then allow accelerated concentration in a area of talent. Schools don't like to do that. Try arguing for allowing your child to be accelerated in math, literature, any non-sport. Won't happen. You'll argue until you are blue in the face and the school system will push back with all their might.
Try reversing the argument. Suppose the principal said: "Well, yes, your child shows exceptional talent in baseball. Easily enough that with the right coaching he could get a college scholarship, and perhaps even make the major leagues. But other kids will feel bad if we give him more attention. Two days of PE a week is what he gets." The town would hang the principal in effigy. Rightly so, IMHO. Everyone should get a chance to nurture their talent, whatever it is.
But what about a kid who could benefit from acceleration in math? That child will instead be given more busy-work homework that frustrates him or her to tears.
Sorry for the rant, but I take this personally. My daughter is 12, and has worked about half way through my calculus book from freshman engineering. Do you know any schools that will let a 12 year old take AP Calc?
The idea of "No child left behind" is fine. But how about "No talent wasted and no enthusiasm crushed."
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Yes, exactly. The mfgr paid by the unit, on the assumption that Windows was installed on all of them. Oh, and if Windows *wasn't* installed on all of them, it was very hard to get your phone calls returned, and somehow your competitors found out about new things much sooner than you, and for various odd reasons they always got the releases before you.
Of course. For imaginary and complex issues you don't want irrationals, you want transcendentals: e and pi.
Well, yes, at first glance that seems like a reasonable thing to do. Here are a few thoughts as to maybe why not.
1. Mission: A fighter is very fast and is intended for combat situations where speed matters. Current UAVs are optimized for loiter-time-over-target-area. They by and large are not fast. The missions on which a current UAV versus a current fighter can be successful do not overlap 100%
2. Export controls: I doubt if the USA is exporting UAVs in quantity yet, even to friends. I could be wrong, I don't follow that stuff, but I'm guessing that is not quite happening yet.
3. Support infrastructure: The USA has invested hugely in communications satellites and so forth so that you can feed huge quantities of video and sensor information from many UAVs simultaneously from anywhere in the world to control bunkers in Nevada or elsewhere, and get control inputs back to the aircraft in real time. Maybe India doesn't have quite that many military satellites flying.
Exactly. During the American Revolution, private citizens owned gun boats. Mostly a few converted smallish coastal cargo ships with a few cannon, but gun boats none the less. It was common in those days for the wealthier British navy officers to own a crew-served gun or two of their own that they took along with them. Privately owned field artillery is.... uncommon... today. And I've never seen the shells at WalMart, either.
Why have the drone carry the projectiles at all? The drone can identify targets from the air, and point the laser at them. The projectile can be fired from a protected position away from the action. Just lob one off in the general direction and let the laser do the rest.
Of course, that kind of kills the humor value in the line from Python's "Holy Grail": "I will fart in your general direction."
Well, if every feature fell on a 1/16 inch location, sure. But if features tend to fall on a 0.010 or 0.100 grid it gets annoying.
Acetone makes a reasonable cement for joining pieces. I suspect melting the whole works would degrade the material properties, and besides you need a mold so you might as well start with a molding process. 3D printing works by heating the feedstock until it is in its "plastic" phase and will stick to itself, allowing you to build up structures. They end up reasonably strong, but not as strong as an injection molded part where all of the melt is packed into the mold under pressure, and freezes at roughly the same time. Any casting process is going to require a mold, so you have to get the mold from some place. It is possible to make rubber molds with RTV silicones, and cast epoxy resin. This is a reasonable way to duplicate something if you have a master. I've done short-run injection molding using aluminum molds, which requires a significant amount of machining time in order to make a mold. Good way to get a few hundred parts, though.
I presume you mean manual mill, not CNC mill. Even so, I'm not sure it exists at $1500. Smithy makes some combo machines. I'm not sure I'd want a combo machine. I'd rather have a separate mill and lathe. For mills, IF (big if) you can find a well taken care of 50 year old Bridgeport or clone thereof, that is the way to go if you have room for it. But you need to know what you are buying, because if the spindle bearings are shot you are looking at an expensive repair. That largely depends on how well it was maintained and how hard it was run. Sometimes you can get a Bridgeport for "haul it away, it's yours." You need to hire a mover, but machine tool movers can easily plop a Bridgeport knee mill in your garage and they are well worth the price.
Many sellers import Chinese made bench-top mills. Harbor Freight, Grizzly, MicroMark to name a few. In most cases, they are metric machines with a wierdo conversion so that one turn of the hand wheel gives you 0.0625 inches. Umm... yeah. Carry that around in your head all day long. MicroMark does what they call "True Inch" conversion so that one turn of the hand wheel gives you 0.050 inches. I can live with that much more easily. Frankly, I'd be OK if they left it in a metric round number. But the wacko conversion is annoying. One of the MicroMark benchtop mills has an R8 spindle. That is a winner -- not that the motor has enough torque and the column enough stiffness to use all the R8 tools out there, but because Bridgeports and their clones have R8 spindles you can pick up mountains of used tooling cheaply.
Benchtop lathes are sort of limited in what they can do. Just not big enough. Every time I've looked at one, I've decided any machine I have room for is too small to do what I want. In any case, a CNC mill allows you to mill a lot of things that you might at first think of doing on a lathe. Maybe it isn't optimal, but at least a CNC mill can do a nice interpolated arc. On a manual mill, it's like trying to draw a circle with an Etch-a-Sketch. Except that it's harder to hold a Bridgeport over your head and shake it, and even if you do, it doesn't put any of the metal back.
Oh... also check out Little Machine Shop -- very good place for machine tools of interest to the hobbyist.
Target sells the Neato XV-12 robotic vacuum. The only differences between the XV-12 and the XV-11 that everyone else sells are:
a) It is called XV-12, not XV-11
b) the case plastics are white.
*yawn*
I don't see how this helps anything. It is well known they they are identical in every way except the color of the plastic. How does Target expect to get any strategic advantage out of this?
Well, I see you have been modded +5 insightful. Yet, you don't seem to have any experience wither either mills or 3D printers, at least you don't claim to have any.
I own one of each, and have access to other CNC mills and 3D printers.
Guess what? They both have their place. They both have their limits. Use a machine tool within it's limits, and you will be happy. Try to push beyond its maximum work envelope, and you will be frustrated. I have done a lot of good stuff with both. My clunky Makerbot Cupcake has printed a lot of robot parts and other stuff. It is quick to draw something up and bang it out. And it lives in my living room. Guess what, my mill doesn't live in my living room. So I'm very happy with the clunky state of at-home 3D printing. Do I want more resolution and a bigger work envelope? Yup. But I've still done a lot of good stuff with it.
CNC mills are great, but it also is a whole heck of a lot more work to go from a drawing to a part. And more expensive, too, by a lot. I could buy several Cupcakes for what I have invested in cutters, collets, measuring tools, vises, clamps, etc, etc., not counting the mill itself. And there is no comparison between the learning curve. You will be a 3D printing expert long before you have mastered creating G-code for CNC milling.
As to your cost comparison, there is no $1500 CNC mill worth having. I've seen the output. I've talked with owners. I've done the math and understand the work envelope. $1500 spent on a RepRap style machine can do a lot of good stuff. $1500 spent on a CNC mill.... is a sloppy, weak columned, backlash-plagued wimp with a work envelope so small you can't produce parts as big as you can on a cupcake, and you *still* haven't bought any tools. The $1500 CNC mill can work in aluminum and free-machining brass. The RepRap can work in ABS and PLA. Well designed ABS or PLA parts can be pretty strong, and can be glued up into strong large parts.
Face it, all you have said is: "Grapes are awful, they don't taste like chicken."
PS. In case anyone is wondering "Well, what *is* the cheapest CNC mill worth owning?" I would say choose between a Tormach PCNC 1100 or a Mikini 1610L. This is what Sherline owners move up to after they have figured out that the Sherline can't do what they wanted to do. This is not because Sherline is bad, or that Sherline lies in their spec sheet. It is because beginners don't understand what the Sherline spec sheet is trying to tell them, and so they don't realize it can't come close to doing what they think it will. The other thing to remember is that when you go to buy a dial indicator or a carbide cutter or some other widget, it costs you exactly the same amount of money whether you are going to use it on a Sherline or an Akira-Sieki. CNC machining is a spendy hobby, that's just life.
Yes, the old "collective right" interpretation, on which the Supreme Court has spoken clearly. In every other instance where the Constitution mentions a right, it has *always* been interpreted by the Supreme Court as an individual right. Second amendment cases have in all but a couple of cases interpreted it as an individual right. Most recently, in the Heller case, which was decided 5-4 in favor of Heller, even the first paragraph of the dissenting opinion holds that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. That's right, it was a 9-0 decision on whether it is an individual right. It was 5-4 on whether D.C. law was constitutional, but 9-0 on whether the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right or a collective right.
And please, before anybody starts going off on me being some kind of right wing gun nut -- re-read the above. It is just facts. No opinion in there, except the Supreme Court's opinion. You won't find my opinion in there anywhere.
Not every issue. The demo's are by and large hostile to the second amendment.
Smell creates powerful memories, and smell is also a potent memory recall mechanism. We often can't articulate why or articulate the memory exactly. That is because it uses a very primitive neural pathway. A brain structure called the amygdala plays a key roll in olfactory processing, and the output from the amygdala bypasses the lateral geniculate complex that is key to communicating sensory information between the two hemispheres. Sight and hearing go through the giant cross-over network so that the left and right sensory channels can be correlated -- this also gives your language centers a crack at them. Not so with smell -- it takes a very direct and low-level sensory path that bypasses your language centers and goes straight to other parts of the brain.
An odor can create a powerful emotional response by evoking a memory we can't articulate. This is why certain brands of perfume cause certain men to do very stupid things. So, yes, I can believe the absence of the strong stench of ammonia could have caused your students to not remember certain things.
A card punch launched from a trebuchet could do some serious damage. They are big and heavy.
Tell you what, though, the chad is an *outstanding* terrorist tool :) Going through the student keypunch room with a garbage bag, emptying all the chad bins, gets you enough annoying confetti to last a long time. Go through somebody's closet, and put chad in every pocket of everything he owns. Months later he will still be picking the stuff out. Sprinkle it liberally into the pages of various books. And 2 or 3 handfuls in the bed is always a winner.
My sister the artist still laments the passing of card punches. Back in the days of card punches she was into paper mache, and the chad makes excellent paper mache, and is zero labor. Just chuck a few handfuls into the paste and get to work.
Most slaughterhouses in the US pay no attention to federal humane slaughtering & biohazard laws,
Citation needed.
The Volt functions down to -13 F / -25 C cold. That's the COLD SOAK temperature of the battery. If the battery pack is colder than that, then the gas engine will fire up to generate electricity to warm up the battery above that temperature threshold. Note that I didn't say ambient temperature; we're talking about the temperature deep inside the car, inside a 400 pound battery pack. It takes a long time at a given ambient temperature to get the battery pack itself down to that temperature. Does your weather stay at or below -13 F / -25 C for 24 hours at a time? If so then I agree the Volt isn't for you, but it's great for the rest of us.
I saw the weather do that when I lived in Minneapolis, so yes, I'm sure it does that in SK. In Minneapolis, it is common for there to be a week of weather in January where the daytime high never gets above -5F for the whole week. Minneapolis is the deep south compared to SK.
However, the ability of a politician to raise a huge amount of campaign funds with a couple of quick trips to Hollywood far outstrips the ability to raise campaign funds from a million flower mongers. You have to learn to measure the relevant data.
A nail cutting nipper is a high-leverage wire cutter beefy enough to cut off a framing or roofing nail. Or cut steel fence wire, or such. A junior size cable cutter -- (aircraft cable, not electrical cable). Googling "diamond n10 nail cutting nipper" turned up this Amazon link.
http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-N10-10-Inch-Cutting-Nipper/dp/B00002N7PG
Not much current??? Ummm... better double check that. The US power line infrastructure is stretched to the breaking point. Most 21KV and up lines are running near their max rated current.
To the GP -- Aluminum is much more conductive than steel, and in power lines the cables are large enough that they have enough tensile strength to easily make the spans that power lines are designed for. Aluminum is lower loss than steel for 60 Hz. I've been making ham antennas out of CopperWeld since 1972, usually #12 solid, sometimes #10 solid. It is nassssty to cut. I use nail nippers these days, or a hack saw if I don't have a nail nipper handy. Small bolt cutters would be good. #12 soft-drawn copper doesn't stand up to icing all that well for larger antennas. CopperWeld is much stronger. (CopperWeld is the Cooper trademark, other vendors make copper-clad steel wire.) I think CopperWeld dates from around "The War", as my parents generation called it -- WW II.
as opposed to the the fully open hardware, open software 3D printers that have been out for years. And they aren't shipping. Sorry, not for me.
Yes. I have a MakerBot Cupcake, and also do injection molding. Lego is extremely precise injection molding. Much more so than typical molded parts, and their molds are very expensive because of that. Super tight tolerance machining and hand polished. There is a reason Lego is expensive. It is the jewelry of injection molding. Now, the new machine MakerBot is talking about here has about 1/2 the layer height of a CupCake, so lets say 8 voxels to each 1 voxel in a CupCake. The resolution is much better -- the output could potentially look as good as what comes from something like a Dimensions BST. But it will still not have smooth surfaces. With well designed and well printed parts, it will be very strong. (Cupcake parts are very strong when done right.) But you are not going to be able to get the same smooth stud-and-tube mating with consistent "clutch power" (as Lego calls it) as does Lego from their sophisticated IM process.
All that said, as long as you set your expectations correctly and design within the machine's capability, you will be able to print supplemental parts, no problem. For Lego, I'd probably go with holes for mounting on Technic axles instead of trying to mate with the studs. I've often thought about printing a Geneva wheel mechanism that would mate with Lego Technic, for instance. That's doable. Or printing Lego train track parts -- the Lego track geometry is extremely limited.
Yes, Skeinforge is open source. The whole tool chain is open source. But really, the cost of the plastic is minimal. And it is easy to estimate by weight, anyway. Go find a pile of Lego or any other plastic stuff that is about the same volume of plastic as the widget you want to make. Weigh it on a postage scale. Look at the cost of a 5 pound spool of the plastic they sell you. Do the math, it is easy. Also, remember that on most prints there is only a solid shell, and the interior is about 10% fill honeycomb. So often, taking the volume of your thingy and dividing by 9 or 10 is a reasonable estimate of the volume of plastic consumed.
Yes, exactly. Even the ancient s/w I am running on my Makerbot Cupcake calculates the cc's of material that will be consumed by a print.
This looks pretty cool, but I see the build envelope is 225mm x 150mm x 150mm ..... I really want 300mm x 150mm..... oh well......
These are outstandingly good humor -- my daughter draws up toys and doll house furniture and stuff in SolidWorks and prints them. I do robot parts. Great fun.
Steve Jobs created a huge reality distortion bubble large enough not only to enclose him but to engulf many who came near.
Eric Schmidt's reality distortion bubble is just barely large enough for him to live in alone. It's fairly robust, however, as no matter how many times it fails the giggle test he keeps bringing it back out.
It's not just math scores, but in every area. The school system concentrates on bringing everyone up to average in everything, instead of nurturing talents and enabling a child so soar in some specialized area. With one exception: sports. Sports talent is nurtured and allowed to soar. Other areas, not so much.
Everyone needs a certain minimal skill level in a broad range of topics. So make sure everyone gets the basics. But then allow accelerated concentration in a area of talent. Schools don't like to do that. Try arguing for allowing your child to be accelerated in math, literature, any non-sport. Won't happen. You'll argue until you are blue in the face and the school system will push back with all their might.
Try reversing the argument. Suppose the principal said: "Well, yes, your child shows exceptional talent in baseball. Easily enough that with the right coaching he could get a college scholarship, and perhaps even make the major leagues. But other kids will feel bad if we give him more attention. Two days of PE a week is what he gets." The town would hang the principal in effigy. Rightly so, IMHO. Everyone should get a chance to nurture their talent, whatever it is.
But what about a kid who could benefit from acceleration in math? That child will instead be given more busy-work homework that frustrates him or her to tears.
Sorry for the rant, but I take this personally. My daughter is 12, and has worked about half way through my calculus book from freshman engineering. Do you know any schools that will let a 12 year old take AP Calc?
The idea of "No child left behind" is fine. But how about "No talent wasted and no enthusiasm crushed."