While there is some truth to what you write, said truth would be conveyed in a much stronger way by refraining from referring to copulation every third word. Capice?
Apart from that you don't manage to explain why health care in the USA is so much more expensive than it is in the rest of the world. I assume you do know the reasons? Doctors in France or Sweden or the Netherlands or Finland are just as much into their jobs as their North American counterparts, yet they manage to do their jobs within a much smaller budget. Ask yourself why if needed.
Corn is not a good stock for producing fuel ethanol, that much is true. Not that there is something wrong with the ethanol itself, it is just a rather inefficient way to get there.
'pure' gas and 'good stuff' is just what you'd expect to hear from someone who read a flyer written by a stakeholder to incite the masses. The product coming from the refinery is neither 'pure' - and a good thing that is as your engine would not run that well on 'pure' petrol - nor 'good stuff'.
Ethanol can be a good fuel for internal combustion engines. It burns clean, tolerates high compression ratios without problems and - in contrast to what many sources state - stores well. Its energy content per litre is lower than that of petrol, which in turn has a lower energy content per litre than diesel. This in itself is not a problem but it does lead to higher specific fuel consumption rates and with that more fuel for the petrol lobby.
Modern cars - at least those from Europe and Japan - have no problems with higher ethanol ratios. The real limit is often the maximum capacity for the fuel injection system: as ethanol has a lower energy content per litre, more fuel is needed for the same load. Injection systems in engines tuned for petrol simply can not supply enough fuel per combustion stroke for higher ethanol ratios. This can be adjusted though, eg. by raising the injection pressure. The often-heard problem with ethanol dissolving seals and gaskets might apply to old vehicles but it is unlikely to be a problem when talking about more recent (say, made in the last 20 years) engines. If the car has been running on petrol for many years the ethanol will dissolve the crud left behind so you'll want to change the fuel filter more often in the beginning.
As to my personal experience with this I can state that, other than the ethanol dissolving some coating from the inside of the fuel tank on my soviet-era Ural motorbike - which runs on E85 (85% ethanol) - I have yet to see a single problem caused by ethanol while we use it in various ratios - from 45% to 85%, depending on the application - in many engines, from a '92 B&S lawn mower to a 2003 Skoda. I've used it in 2-strokes as well but this has been less of a success as it is hard to keep the fuel and oil mixed. As soon as I find a good (and inexpensive) lubricant which stays mixed I'll use in the chain saws as the exhaust gases are less noxious than those from petrol.
Great, I thought, a lightweight, compact OS complete with GUI that strives to be fast, secure and robust. I know just the application for something like that: mobile terminals! Just port it and...
[pop]
Ahw shucks, it is written in x86 assembly. Porting it essentially comes down to rewriting the thing. Yes, you could machine-port the thing, ending up with code constructions which work great on x86, not so much on arm. A compiler would produce better assembly from C source than that.
You distrust a programming language? Why? The source is available so instead of loathing and distrusting you could download and check. If it turns out there are no small Googoloompas hiding in there you could use it, just like you might use products related to other companies who have behaved in less desirable manners.
The real Swedish way to do this would be to make a political issue out of the fact that there are way more men in prison than there are women. Anything related to 'jÃmstÃlldhet' (equality) is sure to become a political issue here, to be met with swift and decisive action. They could start crime classes for women, this would be a good start. As equality in general is a one-way process it would not do to raise sentences for women as that would be seen as misogynistic. Lowering sentences for men would also be interpreted wrongly so that is out as well. No, something should be done to get more girls to be interested in a career in crime.
While interesting in many ways, small-scale steam turbines are rather inefficient. A more efficient way to use that wood to produce power and heat would be to use a gasifier to produce wood gas (a mixture of CO and H2 and N), run a modified diesel engine (with long-nosed spark plugs where the injectors used to be) on this gas and use it to power a generator, use the waste heat either directly for heating purposes or - at least partly - to dry the wood supply. Store the rest of the heat in a large insulated water tank and use a heat pump to pull energy from that tank when needed. The storage tank can be fed with solar heat as well as other 'waste' heat sources (washing machine, dishwasher, shower, etc).
This has the added advantage of the system being less likely to blow up, always a risk with pressurized steam. The wood gas is dangerous so the whole installation has to be somewhere outside but I guess your steam turbine lives outside as well...
Someone should pass the output of that script to whois and see how many combinations are already registered. For instance, pinklizard? CHECK! airfish? CHECK! brownwhale? CHECK! (oh wait, brownwhale.net hasn't been registered! better hurry!)
I fed it a list of ~1400 adjectives, with 'interesting' results...
SnivelingHound, UntidyMoose, PaltryGator, FumblingMonkey, DampWhale - and it only took 15 runs of the script to produce these. Maybe I should rename the script to 'IP Enforcement company name generator script' as the output seems to fit the target.
Feed it a real list of adjectives and critters and you'll be in hog heaven - ehh, sorry, HogHeaven - for years, sprouting startups left and right. Maybe I should post this on HN instead...
Evidence? No, I don't have evidence. Neither do I suspect that the US government is a monolithic institute which plots to disappear (in its verbal sense) troublemakers. That troublemakers sometimes are harassed - from not being allowed to fly to being subjected to unreasonable search and seizure - has been documented often enough.
Before Snowden started the ball rolling, people talking about ECHELON and using M-x spook on Emacs to insert 'rebellious' phrases in their mail were all seen as the tin foil brigade. Now, not so much. Deluded, maybe - M-x spook is not going to overload any surveillance system after all.
oil nitrate White Water Maple CDC Rand Corporation broadside Project Monarch SP4 Lon Horiuchi North Korea Iran emc CESID bootleg
While the HDTV might be an option, forget about that '7" HDMI touch' display unless you think a native resolution of 800x480 is enough for all your computing needs. Yes, it says nice things like '1080p' but all that means is it can accept signals close to that resolution and rate. It down-converts them to be displayed on a WVGA screen. The ad you linked to does not mention this, but then it is a 'US seller'. Better link to the source which is not the US but China:
For that price you might as well buy two cheap Android tablets which sport the same display and touch screen, no computer needed. No, they are not as open as the RPi but they are hackable.
I do agree that it sounds silly to make a 'Raspberry Pi' monitor. Just make a cheap HD monitor and market it as such to the RPi public and all others.
"... pick up the phone and call the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and say I have some information,' Feinstein told CBS' Face The Nation."
...to either silently disappear and a bit later show up 'dead after a car crash, obsiously drugs were involved, probably had been molesting children and puppies' or be arrested on whatever charges, painted blacker than black by the 'media' and hurried off to a federal labour facility for the next umpteen years.
Strange. I would have written something like this about, say, Sacharov, before the Wall fell. It did not take all that long for the tables to be turned, did it?
Well, yes, and no... learning from experienced people is fine but care should be taken that the 'apprenticeship' does not turn into 'indentured service' as it does so often - have a look at other fields where this system is used to see what I mean. Often the 'apprentice' is just used as cheap labour to do most of the work for only a fraction of the pay while the 'master' takes home the profit. It also opens the doors for protectionist systems comparable to the medieval guilds where your ability to work in a given field depends on getting yourself accepted by the guild. If you go down this route you'll be up to your knees in ITIL (et al) without an escape route.
Good for you, Perl fits that kind of job just fine.
Look a bit deeper and you'll notice that most of the knocking is done by those who never wrote anything more complicated than a few lines of Perl. Their lack of experience with the language, combined with their need to feel 'ahead of the pack' leads them to dismiss it in favour of whatever is fashionable at the moment. This says more about the knockers than the knocked.
Did you maybe mean to say 'And then they code those regular expressions in Perl. Now I have a problem'? I have no problems with Perl, especially when it concerns regular expressions. There is a reason why libpcre is as popular as it is after all...
Not money entirely as the stuff does have its uses. More important is what you use it for. Use money to become independent - of money and other power factors. Buy property which can support a self-reliant life style. Don't rent or lease things you can or do not want to live without. Don't borrow money whenever possible. If you can not avoid borrowing money (eg. to buy said property) pay of the loan as soon as possible, even if others call you silly because you loose out on tax benefits from deductible loans etc. Steer away from anything which requires recurring payments where one-time acquisitions can perform the same function. Become an active member of a freecycle group, donate what you don't need anymore and try to get what you do need. Don't follow fashion, no matter in which field. Don't make yourself dependent on commercial interests, eg. avoid lock-in and planned obsolescence, choose free/open whenever possible and consider going without if the only alternative is to chain yourself to some companies business strategy. Ditch that TV if you still have one of those.
In other words throw a spanner into the works of consumerism. You are not a consumer. You are an individual. You are not there to keep the economy growing. You have no fiduciary duty towards anyone but your family and friends.
No, you won't be toting the latest gadgets the day they arrive on the market. Good for you. Neither will you wear the latest fashion in clothes. Even better for you.
Funny that, I just built a new distribution for my phone. I did not notice any interference from Telenor - the carrier I currently use. They neither know nor care what my phone runs as long as the baseband code is not modified. Since that code is closed, buggy, probably full of evil bits and generally a nuisance I'd love to modify it but that is another story.
It's not that I don't know how an engine works or haven't stripped down and rebuilt one before - it's that modern ones are orders of magnitude more complicated, higher precision, lower tolerance, and shoehorned in so tight that it looks like if you don't have exactly the right tool at exactly the right angle you are going to have no arms left after about three bolts.
Not really. Modern engines are not that much more complicated, they've just had loads of sensors and actuators added in odd locations. In some cases you do need special tools but those can either be made or acquired on the 'net. You'll need something to read, program and reset all those controllers which hook up to the sensors and actuators - preferably something more capable than a simple ODB-II reader. While this does add some complications it also makes working with modern cars easier in some ways - the car will often tell you enough about its condition to figure out what, if anything, is wrong with it.
And what does it matter that the kernel - all drivers included - has several millions of lines of code? If you plan to cut a tree in the forest, do you get distracted by the presence of several millions of other, similarly-looking trees? Of course not, let them be and they won't bother you. Same with the kernel, who cares about all those other drivers when you want to fiddle with that one specific driver? Their presence merely serves to give you a source of example code.
So no, cars with glued hoods are unwelcome here - and I don' t even have a car since I prefer 2 and sometimes 3 wheels over 4 - and neither is similarly-crippled software.
Let me guess: you have an iPhone. Just an assumption, but your actions seem to fit the pattern.
'Renting' a bike for $200 is... not exactly cost effective. Why did you not buy a bike for that price instead? Donate it to charity if you don't need it afterwards. Why line some unscrupulous bike shark's pockets?
Well to be fair, Apple is trying to make *more* money while also possibly, maybe, once, preventing someone from dying.
Are you sure they're not thinking of the children as well?
The first objective in your statement is true. The second is bollocks. How many people have died from using 'unauthorised' cables on non-Apple devices? I have never heard of this happening. The whole 'authorised' business has one purpose: tighten the thumb screws a bit more, extracting more profit from the captive audience. Profit, not care. Profit, not protection. Profit and nothing else...
Yes, why not? Most bumpers are made of some synthetic material (not 'plastic') nowadays, as are many fenders. You won't print them on the current generation of printers but that'll change. My first 2D printer (A Panasonic KX-P1080i turned into a 1081 by copying the EPROM from one of those at the local computer shop...) had 9 metal pins hammering through a textile ribbon onto a paper sheet pressed against a hard rubber cylinder. It made an enormous racket, was slow, only printed continuously when fed with chain forms and produced output which at best could be called 'legible'. My current printer - which is quite old (HP Laserjet 2200dtn) - produces output which is as good as print, does so at about 12 pages per minute and happily feeds itself separate sheets from multiple drawers. If 3D printers follow the same development trajectory they'll be printing out shiny car parts before you know it.
Uhhh, printing can be dirt cheap if you know enough to avoid those 'cheap' printers. Get an older business-type laser printer for which higher-capacity (5000 pages or more) toner cartridges are available from many sources. You initial costs will be higher than when you buy the saturday night special inkjet - now with color LCD and blue blinking lights - but you'll be printing 'till the cows come home while that inkjet will either be relegated to a dusty closet, donated to charity or - if the owner really has no sense - cost the owner way more in ink cartridges than you paid for your laser.
Get a second hand laser and even the initial cost will be low.
Get a broken laser for free, fix it and you'll be printing for next to nothing.
I'm waiting for the broken 3D printers to show up on the market...
Design consistency, 'memorize what a standard button happens to do in this particular app', 'the same single press on a button might do one of 3 different things'. And?
There are (at least) two ways of looking at this. Either you concentrate on 'design consistency' and all that goes with it. Given the constraints of the device you'll end up with limited functionality because there are only a few buttons to be had. Yes, you can work around this by creating 'standard' ways of achieving things - click, double-click, triple-click, click and swipe, click-swipe-hold, etc. Before you know it your 'design consistency' ends up being more complicated and convoluted than a naturally evolved - and with that somewhat inconsistent - approach.
You can also use common sense and allow the designers some leeway in the way the user interface is designed. The design will not be 'consistent' but - given sane developers - it will probably end up being more comfortable. Instead of having to use a roundabout way to achieve a given result it might just be possible to click that 'back' button to get there.
I can even give a transport metaphor, the closest I can come to a car metaphor. Some cities have public transit systems which on the first view appear to be rather haphazardly designed. To get from A to B you can sometimes take a single bus/tram/subway, other times you'll end up changing transport at some random stop. Usually the most travelled routes are served by direct connections. Other cities use the 'hub and spoke' system where just about every connection involves a trip up to a 'hub' followed by a trip down a spoke to the destination. This is a very consistent system but it usually takes more time.
On a set like that, it would not surprise me if those monitors show fancy 3D-animations of the 'interior' of machines they are about to break-and-enter, airlock-type doors with blinking red 'NO ACCESS' writing on them accompanied by clanging noises, integrated circuits visualised as city landscapes and more of that stuff which we've always laughed about in the movies about hacking and hackers...
To paraphrase an often used construction, 'if they do that, the terrorists have won'. You have a constitution, use it. Even though it is not really for me to worry about your future, being European and all, I'd think it a waste of a good idea if the USA were to give in so easily.
Google should keep their infrastructure right where it is. If anything needs moving it is the politicos who allow it to come this far. They could start enforcing that constitution they swore to uphold.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is some truth to what you write, said truth would be conveyed in a much stronger way by refraining from referring to copulation every third word. Capice?
Apart from that you don't manage to explain why health care in the USA is so much more expensive than it is in the rest of the world. I assume you do know the reasons? Doctors in France or Sweden or the Netherlands or Finland are just as much into their jobs as their North American counterparts, yet they manage to do their jobs within a much smaller budget. Ask yourself why if needed.
'pure' gas... 'corn crap'... 'good stuff'...
Humbug.
Corn is not a good stock for producing fuel ethanol, that much is true. Not that there is something wrong with the ethanol itself, it is just a rather inefficient way to get there.
'pure' gas and 'good stuff' is just what you'd expect to hear from someone who read a flyer written by a stakeholder to incite the masses. The product coming from the refinery is neither 'pure' - and a good thing that is as your engine would not run that well on 'pure' petrol - nor 'good stuff'.
Ethanol can be a good fuel for internal combustion engines. It burns clean, tolerates high compression ratios without problems and - in contrast to what many sources state - stores well. Its energy content per litre is lower than that of petrol, which in turn has a lower energy content per litre than diesel. This in itself is not a problem but it does lead to higher specific fuel consumption rates and with that more fuel for the petrol lobby.
Modern cars - at least those from Europe and Japan - have no problems with higher ethanol ratios. The real limit is often the maximum capacity for the fuel injection system: as ethanol has a lower energy content per litre, more fuel is needed for the same load. Injection systems in engines tuned for petrol simply can not supply enough fuel per combustion stroke for higher ethanol ratios. This can be adjusted though, eg. by raising the injection pressure. The often-heard problem with ethanol dissolving seals and gaskets might apply to old vehicles but it is unlikely to be a problem when talking about more recent (say, made in the last 20 years) engines. If the car has been running on petrol for many years the ethanol will dissolve the crud left behind so you'll want to change the fuel filter more often in the beginning.
As to my personal experience with this I can state that, other than the ethanol dissolving some coating from the inside of the fuel tank on my soviet-era Ural motorbike - which runs on E85 (85% ethanol) - I have yet to see a single problem caused by ethanol while we use it in various ratios - from 45% to 85%, depending on the application - in many engines, from a '92 B&S lawn mower to a 2003 Skoda. I've used it in 2-strokes as well but this has been less of a success as it is hard to keep the fuel and oil mixed. As soon as I find a good (and inexpensive) lubricant which stays mixed I'll use in the chain saws as the exhaust gases are less noxious than those from petrol.
Great, I thought, a lightweight, compact OS complete with GUI that strives to be fast, secure and robust. I know just the application for something like that: mobile terminals! Just port it and...
[pop]
Ahw shucks, it is written in x86 assembly. Porting it essentially comes down to rewriting the thing. Yes, you could machine-port the thing, ending up with code constructions which work great on x86, not so much on arm. A compiler would produce better assembly from C source than that.
You distrust a programming language? Why? The source is available so instead of loathing and distrusting you could download and check. If it turns out there are no small Googoloompas hiding in there you could use it, just like you might use products related to other companies who have behaved in less desirable manners.
The real Swedish way to do this would be to make a political issue out of the fact that there are way more men in prison than there are women. Anything related to 'jÃmstÃlldhet' (equality) is sure to become a political issue here, to be met with swift and decisive action. They could start crime classes for women, this would be a good start. As equality in general is a one-way process it would not do to raise sentences for women as that would be seen as misogynistic. Lowering sentences for men would also be interpreted wrongly so that is out as well. No, something should be done to get more girls to be interested in a career in crime.
While interesting in many ways, small-scale steam turbines are rather inefficient. A more efficient way to use that wood to produce power and heat would be to use a gasifier to produce wood gas (a mixture of CO and H2 and N), run a modified diesel engine (with long-nosed spark plugs where the injectors used to be) on this gas and use it to power a generator, use the waste heat either directly for heating purposes or - at least partly - to dry the wood supply. Store the rest of the heat in a large insulated water tank and use a heat pump to pull energy from that tank when needed. The storage tank can be fed with solar heat as well as other 'waste' heat sources (washing machine, dishwasher, shower, etc).
This has the added advantage of the system being less likely to blow up, always a risk with pressurized steam. The wood gas is dangerous so the whole installation has to be somewhere outside but I guess your steam turbine lives outside as well...
I fed it a list of ~1400 adjectives, with 'interesting' results...
SnivelingHound, UntidyMoose, PaltryGator, FumblingMonkey, DampWhale - and it only took 15 runs of the script to produce these. Maybe I should rename the script to 'IP Enforcement company name generator script' as the output seems to fit the target.
Glassfish, that name must have been generated using a startup product name generator:
Feed it a real list of adjectives and critters and you'll be in hog heaven - ehh, sorry, HogHeaven - for years, sprouting startups left and right. Maybe I should post this on HN instead...
Evidence? No, I don't have evidence. Neither do I suspect that the US government is a monolithic institute which plots to disappear (in its verbal sense) troublemakers. That troublemakers sometimes are harassed - from not being allowed to fly to being subjected to unreasonable search and seizure - has been documented often enough.
Before Snowden started the ball rolling, people talking about ECHELON and using M-x spook on Emacs to insert 'rebellious' phrases in their mail were all seen as the tin foil brigade. Now, not so much. Deluded, maybe - M-x spook is not going to overload any surveillance system after all.
While the HDTV might be an option, forget about that '7" HDMI touch' display unless you think a native resolution of 800x480 is enough for all your computing needs. Yes, it says nice things like '1080p' but all that means is it can accept signals close to that resolution and rate. It down-converts them to be displayed on a WVGA screen. The ad you linked to does not mention this, but then it is a 'US seller'. Better link to the source which is not the US but China:
7-Touch-Screen-Display-HDMI-1080p-RCA-AV-VGA-TFT-LCD-Monitor-For-PC-POS-Car-DVD (just one of the many ads for these things)
For that price you might as well buy two cheap Android tablets which sport the same display and touch screen, no computer needed. No, they are not as open as the RPi but they are hackable.
I do agree that it sounds silly to make a 'Raspberry Pi' monitor. Just make a cheap HD monitor and market it as such to the RPi public and all others.
Strange. I would have written something like this about, say, Sacharov, before the Wall fell. It did not take all that long for the tables to be turned, did it?
Well, yes, and no... learning from experienced people is fine but care should be taken that the 'apprenticeship' does not turn into 'indentured service' as it does so often - have a look at other fields where this system is used to see what I mean. Often the 'apprentice' is just used as cheap labour to do most of the work for only a fraction of the pay while the 'master' takes home the profit. It also opens the doors for protectionist systems comparable to the medieval guilds where your ability to work in a given field depends on getting yourself accepted by the guild. If you go down this route you'll be up to your knees in ITIL (et al) without an escape route.
Good for you, Perl fits that kind of job just fine.
Look a bit deeper and you'll notice that most of the knocking is done by those who never wrote anything more complicated than a few lines of Perl. Their lack of experience with the language, combined with their need to feel 'ahead of the pack' leads them to dismiss it in favour of whatever is fashionable at the moment. This says more about the knockers than the knocked.
Did you maybe mean to say 'And then they code those regular expressions in Perl. Now I have a problem'? I have no problems with Perl, especially when it concerns regular expressions. There is a reason why libpcre is as popular as it is after all...
Not money entirely as the stuff does have its uses. More important is what you use it for. Use money to become independent - of money and other power factors. Buy property which can support a self-reliant life style. Don't rent or lease things you can or do not want to live without. Don't borrow money whenever possible. If you can not avoid borrowing money (eg. to buy said property) pay of the loan as soon as possible, even if others call you silly because you loose out on tax benefits from deductible loans etc. Steer away from anything which requires recurring payments where one-time acquisitions can perform the same function. Become an active member of a freecycle group, donate what you don't need anymore and try to get what you do need. Don't follow fashion, no matter in which field. Don't make yourself dependent on commercial interests, eg. avoid lock-in and planned obsolescence, choose free/open whenever possible and consider going without if the only alternative is to chain yourself to some companies business strategy. Ditch that TV if you still have one of those.
In other words throw a spanner into the works of consumerism. You are not a consumer. You are an individual. You are not there to keep the economy growing. You have no fiduciary duty towards anyone but your family and friends.
No, you won't be toting the latest gadgets the day they arrive on the market. Good for you. Neither will you wear the latest fashion in clothes. Even better for you.
Funny that, I just built a new distribution for my phone. I did not notice any interference from Telenor - the carrier I currently use. They neither know nor care what my phone runs as long as the baseband code is not modified. Since that code is closed, buggy, probably full of evil bits and generally a nuisance I'd love to modify it but that is another story.
Not really. Modern engines are not that much more complicated, they've just had loads of sensors and actuators added in odd locations. In some cases you do need special tools but those can either be made or acquired on the 'net. You'll need something to read, program and reset all those controllers which hook up to the sensors and actuators - preferably something more capable than a simple ODB-II reader. While this does add some complications it also makes working with modern cars easier in some ways - the car will often tell you enough about its condition to figure out what, if anything, is wrong with it.
And what does it matter that the kernel - all drivers included - has several millions of lines of code? If you plan to cut a tree in the forest, do you get distracted by the presence of several millions of other, similarly-looking trees? Of course not, let them be and they won't bother you. Same with the kernel, who cares about all those other drivers when you want to fiddle with that one specific driver? Their presence merely serves to give you a source of example code.
So no, cars with glued hoods are unwelcome here - and I don' t even have a car since I prefer 2 and sometimes 3 wheels over 4 - and neither is similarly-crippled software.
Elephant bollocks. I guess you meant juggernaut? No nuts there but more to the point.
Let me guess: you have an iPhone. Just an assumption, but your actions seem to fit the pattern.
'Renting' a bike for $200 is... not exactly cost effective. Why did you not buy a bike for that price instead? Donate it to charity if you don't need it afterwards. Why line some unscrupulous bike shark's pockets?
Are you sure they're not thinking of the children as well?
The first objective in your statement is true. The second is bollocks. How many people have died from using 'unauthorised' cables on non-Apple devices? I have never heard of this happening. The whole 'authorised' business has one purpose: tighten the thumb screws a bit more, extracting more profit from the captive audience. Profit, not care. Profit, not protection. Profit and nothing else...
Yes, why not? Most bumpers are made of some synthetic material (not 'plastic') nowadays, as are many fenders. You won't print them on the current generation of printers but that'll change. My first 2D printer (A Panasonic KX-P1080i turned into a 1081 by copying the EPROM from one of those at the local computer shop...) had 9 metal pins hammering through a textile ribbon onto a paper sheet pressed against a hard rubber cylinder. It made an enormous racket, was slow, only printed continuously when fed with chain forms and produced output which at best could be called 'legible'. My current printer - which is quite old (HP Laserjet 2200dtn) - produces output which is as good as print, does so at about 12 pages per minute and happily feeds itself separate sheets from multiple drawers. If 3D printers follow the same development trajectory they'll be printing out shiny car parts before you know it.
Uhhh, printing can be dirt cheap if you know enough to avoid those 'cheap' printers. Get an older business-type laser printer for which higher-capacity (5000 pages or more) toner cartridges are available from many sources. You initial costs will be higher than when you buy the saturday night special inkjet - now with color LCD and blue blinking lights - but you'll be printing 'till the cows come home while that inkjet will either be relegated to a dusty closet, donated to charity or - if the owner really has no sense - cost the owner way more in ink cartridges than you paid for your laser.
Get a second hand laser and even the initial cost will be low.
Get a broken laser for free, fix it and you'll be printing for next to nothing.
I'm waiting for the broken 3D printers to show up on the market...
Design consistency, 'memorize what a standard button happens to do in this particular app', 'the same single press on a button might do one of 3 different things'. And?
There are (at least) two ways of looking at this. Either you concentrate on 'design consistency' and all that goes with it. Given the constraints of the device you'll end up with limited functionality because there are only a few buttons to be had. Yes, you can work around this by creating 'standard' ways of achieving things - click, double-click, triple-click, click and swipe, click-swipe-hold, etc. Before you know it your 'design consistency' ends up being more complicated and convoluted than a naturally evolved - and with that somewhat inconsistent - approach.
You can also use common sense and allow the designers some leeway in the way the user interface is designed. The design will not be 'consistent' but - given sane developers - it will probably end up being more comfortable. Instead of having to use a roundabout way to achieve a given result it might just be possible to click that 'back' button to get there.
I can even give a transport metaphor, the closest I can come to a car metaphor. Some cities have public transit systems which on the first view appear to be rather haphazardly designed. To get from A to B you can sometimes take a single bus/tram/subway, other times you'll end up changing transport at some random stop. Usually the most travelled routes are served by direct connections. Other cities use the 'hub and spoke' system where just about every connection involves a trip up to a 'hub' followed by a trip down a spoke to the destination. This is a very consistent system but it usually takes more time.
On a set like that, it would not surprise me if those monitors show fancy 3D-animations of the 'interior' of machines they are about to break-and-enter, airlock-type doors with blinking red 'NO ACCESS' writing on them accompanied by clanging noises, integrated circuits visualised as city landscapes and more of that stuff which we've always laughed about in the movies about hacking and hackers...
To paraphrase an often used construction, 'if they do that, the terrorists have won'. You have a constitution, use it. Even though it is not really for me to worry about your future, being European and all, I'd think it a waste of a good idea if the USA were to give in so easily.
Google should keep their infrastructure right where it is. If anything needs moving it is the politicos who allow it to come this far. They could start enforcing that constitution they swore to uphold.