Such a quality level would require high-tech materials for the base (extremely low thermal conductivity, low thermal mass), some sort of air temperature control at all levels (flowing through the extruder, around the piece), and the ability to keep the piece hot enough for a good weld. That last one will get you nothing more than a puddle of goo; in mass manufacture we use injection molds to directly extrude a shape, so the whole piece cools as a unit and forms one solid mass.
You may be able to do something with high-powered lasers, if you can spot weld on a microscopic scale without melting the piece. The physics would be complex, and a machine that could move that rapidly could build current-quality pieces at thousands of times the current speed. Some sort of refraction mechanism might do it, if you can reflect a microscopic laser beam onto the surface milliseconds before contact and settling of the hot filament. That of course requires extremely tight (nanoscopic) tolerances due to the effects of beam travel at a distance from a point of reflection.
Have you noticed that all of the solutions involve industrial processes, high-power equipment, situations which are expensive to maintain, or tight tolerances represented in scientific notation?
BMW engines tend to last forever. They sludge up at about 80k-100k and then destroy themselves; but auto shops have learned to mix a little (half a quart or so) ATF-4 transmission fluid in around that time, run the oil for about 10 miles, and then flush it and put regular oil in. Volkswagens also sludge up randomly, but nobody is quite sure why or, more importantly, how to deal with it. Mazda 3 headlight replacement is expensive as living hell because it's 2 hours of labor... or you can tug at the headlight housing, flex it forward a little, and replace the bulb directly (normal replacement involves removing and uncabling the entire front bumper cover, which involves removing bolts from the wheel wells and the underside of the car, as well as disconnecting wiring for the fog HIDs, and then unbolting behind the bumper cover so you can slide the headlight module out...). Hell, speaking of the Mazda 3, it can throw its drive belt--the new tensioner uses an aluminum pulley, the original used ABS plastic which was prone to exploding violently well within its service interval.
Plenty of cars have minor maintenance issues or problems that seldom/often crop up which are unpredicted. Plenty of cars can encounter minor issues which should never happen, but which do happen occasionally, which then require immediate attention--or can be prevented by inexpensive means. Does the Tesla have a caliper flaw that requires an unforeseen adjustment at 25,000 miles or 40,000 miles or so, lest it start to rub the brakes oddly and cause eventual caliper piston failure? Should you upgrade the seals in the brake master cylinder because the original gaskets are square-cut foam elastomer and it turns out that a round-cut teflon-coated gasket mates better and significantly reduces wear (absorption of moisture) on brake fluid?
These are things Tesla maintenance centers will figure out first by coordinated collection of mass data. We experience many more brake system failures requiring early preventative maintenance than predicted... why? Failure appears to involve brake fluid absorbing too much water, where is leak? What is impact? Costly ($200) repair when there should be a cheap ($45) repair, 1/3 of the normal cycle of whence the costly repair should be required. Recall not warranted; determine reason for leak, identify simple fix and make preventative maintenance upgrade if possible. Oh, it's a seal... revise that part to use a better seal, replace seal on every Model S that comes through the service center.
It's standard practice in the auto industry. Less important because Tesla doesn't have an engine or transmission; but still important because Tesla has brakes, electrical systems, and air conditioning. GM had an issue on several models whereby a small 40V capacitor would fail--the one on the alternator--and then the alternator and possibly other parts of the electrical system would sustain damage, requiring hundreds of dollars of replacement for the fault of a $9 capacitor. On the Tesla, that's probably recall-worthy; on GMs, it usually didn't hurt anything aside from wearing the alternator out faster, but did occasionally fry the shit out of the car, and so the capacitor got replaced as standard procedure at the dealership.
In many states, it's illegal to own your own dealership. Tesla has sales and service centers with zero physical cars in them because they're not legally allowed to own a showroom.
Then it comes down to having to deal with dealerships. This is expensive, and of course Tesla isn't pushing enough stock to actually support independent dealerships. Chevy dealerships won't carry Teslas, etc. Even if the dealership is allowed to and does in fact carry Teslas, they gain a more lucrative position selling and maintaining other cars, and so steer people away from Teslas--this was (is?) actively happening with the Nissan Leaf, but there are a bazillion Leaf commercials.
All of these incidental barriers come down to a situation where you can get your car into the state, get it in a dealership, and a customer can come and buy it; but, in practice, that won't actually happen.
The courts--even the supreme court--have heard many cases on many subjects in which one side of the legal argument was, "We don't deny them the right or privilege to do what they are asserting we prohibit," and the opinion of the Court was, "You make it fucking impossible in real life, so yes you do, and you will cease this behavior or you will find yourself a long vacation in a tiny hotel room with iron bars and an in-room toilet." Such reasoning makes sense to me.
None of these mechanics know the quirks in the Tesla's maintenance schedule or have specialized training yet, and so you're better off going to a Tesla service shop once a year for the foreseeable future. When Tesla cars are as common as the Prius, this will change.
Most people don't understand what the executive branch does. Hell, most people think a company would run better if you removed all VPs and C-level employees. The Brendan Eich thing brought up a lot of people jawing about how a CEO's primary responsibility is to be the public face of the company--apparently they never head about marketing and PR.
You're wrong, actually. Congressional and/or constitutional law created the conditions warranting enforcement of some trade behavior. The Executive branch then executes the law by issuing an Executive Order to establish the FTC. The FTC is now the official executive arm of the Federal Government's rule over interstate commerce; until Congress passes a law to narrow the authority of the FTC, the FTC has every authority to make any rule falling under the purview of its charter.
Effectively, they can't sell it. Their business model is afflicted by conflict of interest in that way, or by onerous requirements. It's like if you said they could only sell by direct line to God to relay prayer for a Tesla.
The summary and the numbers say this: "OH NOES! ADMISSION RATES ARE DROPPING!" They give this evidence: "Ten times as many people applied, but we only admitted the same number of people!"... yeah, your demand for education in a field increased, but the supply of education opportunities didn't. This is okay as long as the supply of job opportunities also did not increase.
I still dislike the school-college-job career path we've created with this faulty ideal of universal vocational education. School-job-college would take a hell of a lot of risk off people and allow more upward mobility, giving the poor a chance to dig through society's ranks and get a higher position (at some marginal cost to the existing middle and upper class--poor people becoming better off will displace the better-off, but in theory an economic improvement will make more room for more better-off overall... two rise, one falls, you're one ahead). This is what tax-funded or government-loan-backed education gets us: a fragile society that chews up and spits out the lower classes and fattens up the wealthy.
Consumer 3D printers don't have good control for heat. For one thing, they print on a non-heated plate, without air temperature control, slowly. The material cools as it's printed, so you get cold joints everywhere.
Mass production uses rapid techniques such as injection molding, casting, or forging. For example: Good steel is refined, poured, hammered by a pile (cold or hot forge), then forged by slamming a metal mold down onto the steel (hot or cold, for a hot forge or cold forge). This is how good-quality knives are made--quickly and efficiently and to an extremely high degree of quality. Crap-quality knives use laser cut sheet metal that's been simply rolled, which is also quick and efficient; the best quality knives are hand-made by artisans who manually forge the metal, responding dynamically to changes in its appearance and response to pressure (hammer), producing marginally or even significantly better work than an automated cold forge. Artisan knives take forever to make and are possibly a significant improvement over mass-produced cold-forge knives, but not so substantially as to make much of a great practical difference as with laser cut crap.
3D printing is slower than dog shit being pumped through 1/4 ID fish tank tubing. Part of mass production is economy of scale--the ability to produce something in little time and, thus, with little energy. We assume that a facility of the same size using the same energy draw can either produce 10 shirts or 100 shirts by different methods. The method which produces 100 shirts draws the same energy for 1/10 the time per shirt--even if it takes the same amount of time, if you can make the shirts in a smaller apparatus that uses 1/10 as much energy, you can make 10 times as many shirts in the same time with the same manufacturing energy cost. Your marginal cost of turning raw fabric into shirts is 1/10 as great. 3D printing goes the opposite way compared to modern technique.
I recall 5kg filament costing $50. Considering the inferiority of quality control, you'll either reprint the same part repeatedly to get one, or you'll keep replacing broken ones. Probably both. 3D printers get a layered piece rather than solid, riddled with stress joints that can shear readily.
You could use a lost wax cast process if you could melt down aluminum or steel, but that's a way off. It's doable, but nobody does it and so there's no consistent, ready-made, consumer-friendly process.
Essentially for free, like how printing this 300 page textbook is essentially free. $8 for good Double-A 22 pound copy paper (not HP 20 pound poorly cut crap that jams your printer), 15 cents/page for ink. Only about $53.
This is, of course, why I own a color laser printer that can print for 2 cents/page or less. Plastic filament, however, is expensive.
Back in the day, my dad knew a guy in the military who thought Microsoft would be big. He said the guy was an idiot. Dude was like, "Look man, computers, pre-packaged software, nobody wants to write their own code!" Dad wrote a voice recognition system on the VIC-20, figured prepackaged software was a no-go industry but computers would be big and everyone would learn to program them.
You're going to see a lot of "My 3D printer is awesome because I can model things and print, and everyone in the world will want to print things they make!" idiocy going around here. 3D printers aren't universal constructors; they can't make high-quality plastic with injection molding or carving or shaping, much less metal and circuits. And even then, it takes specialized processes to make certain materials: you can etch ICs easy enough with a universal fabricator, but what happens when you want an electric-motor-driven ceramic burr coffee grinder? Glass, ceramic (what kind? What grade, what process?), steel (what type?), plastic, screws, basins, lids, hoppers, shafts, bearings. Just working with "metal" is an exercise in working with hundreds of different material--thousands when you start getting into anything like car parts or fountain pens.
Actually in this case it's fully redistributable--and in fact is hosted on Sourceforge under the Apache license these days--just not compatible with GPL.
GPL code is why we can't have nice things like ffmpeg/libav producing good-quality AAC. You see, there are open source libraries but we can't link them against ffmpeg and redistribute a binary that's capable of using the shared object, because GPL says so.
Reasonable Person test is fine in some contexts. We can still define boundaries around this. For example, a "reasonable person" test would be appropriate for criminal sexual behavior laws for example between a college professor and a student. As the student is 18, if a reasonable person would look at the evidence given on their relationship and determine that the student's grades were unaffected by this liaison and that there was no abuse of power dynamic, this should not be a crime. (I knew a girl who was screwing around with her teacher, but she already had A's in his class and he never put administrative pressure on her; they both figured it was fine, but this is a Category 3 sexual offense here even if the student is 35 or so, and a Cat 3 is what you get for screwing a 12 year old.)
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Such a quality level would require high-tech materials for the base (extremely low thermal conductivity, low thermal mass), some sort of air temperature control at all levels (flowing through the extruder, around the piece), and the ability to keep the piece hot enough for a good weld. That last one will get you nothing more than a puddle of goo; in mass manufacture we use injection molds to directly extrude a shape, so the whole piece cools as a unit and forms one solid mass.
You may be able to do something with high-powered lasers, if you can spot weld on a microscopic scale without melting the piece. The physics would be complex, and a machine that could move that rapidly could build current-quality pieces at thousands of times the current speed. Some sort of refraction mechanism might do it, if you can reflect a microscopic laser beam onto the surface milliseconds before contact and settling of the hot filament. That of course requires extremely tight (nanoscopic) tolerances due to the effects of beam travel at a distance from a point of reflection.
Have you noticed that all of the solutions involve industrial processes, high-power equipment, situations which are expensive to maintain, or tight tolerances represented in scientific notation?
You have never been in a court room, have you?
What quirks?
Exactly.
BMW engines tend to last forever. They sludge up at about 80k-100k and then destroy themselves; but auto shops have learned to mix a little (half a quart or so) ATF-4 transmission fluid in around that time, run the oil for about 10 miles, and then flush it and put regular oil in. Volkswagens also sludge up randomly, but nobody is quite sure why or, more importantly, how to deal with it. Mazda 3 headlight replacement is expensive as living hell because it's 2 hours of labor... or you can tug at the headlight housing, flex it forward a little, and replace the bulb directly (normal replacement involves removing and uncabling the entire front bumper cover, which involves removing bolts from the wheel wells and the underside of the car, as well as disconnecting wiring for the fog HIDs, and then unbolting behind the bumper cover so you can slide the headlight module out...). Hell, speaking of the Mazda 3, it can throw its drive belt--the new tensioner uses an aluminum pulley, the original used ABS plastic which was prone to exploding violently well within its service interval.
Plenty of cars have minor maintenance issues or problems that seldom/often crop up which are unpredicted. Plenty of cars can encounter minor issues which should never happen, but which do happen occasionally, which then require immediate attention--or can be prevented by inexpensive means. Does the Tesla have a caliper flaw that requires an unforeseen adjustment at 25,000 miles or 40,000 miles or so, lest it start to rub the brakes oddly and cause eventual caliper piston failure? Should you upgrade the seals in the brake master cylinder because the original gaskets are square-cut foam elastomer and it turns out that a round-cut teflon-coated gasket mates better and significantly reduces wear (absorption of moisture) on brake fluid?
These are things Tesla maintenance centers will figure out first by coordinated collection of mass data. We experience many more brake system failures requiring early preventative maintenance than predicted... why? Failure appears to involve brake fluid absorbing too much water, where is leak? What is impact? Costly ($200) repair when there should be a cheap ($45) repair, 1/3 of the normal cycle of whence the costly repair should be required. Recall not warranted; determine reason for leak, identify simple fix and make preventative maintenance upgrade if possible. Oh, it's a seal... revise that part to use a better seal, replace seal on every Model S that comes through the service center.
It's standard practice in the auto industry. Less important because Tesla doesn't have an engine or transmission; but still important because Tesla has brakes, electrical systems, and air conditioning. GM had an issue on several models whereby a small 40V capacitor would fail--the one on the alternator--and then the alternator and possibly other parts of the electrical system would sustain damage, requiring hundreds of dollars of replacement for the fault of a $9 capacitor. On the Tesla, that's probably recall-worthy; on GMs, it usually didn't hurt anything aside from wearing the alternator out faster, but did occasionally fry the shit out of the car, and so the capacitor got replaced as standard procedure at the dealership.
In many states, it's illegal to own your own dealership. Tesla has sales and service centers with zero physical cars in them because they're not legally allowed to own a showroom.
Then it comes down to having to deal with dealerships. This is expensive, and of course Tesla isn't pushing enough stock to actually support independent dealerships. Chevy dealerships won't carry Teslas, etc. Even if the dealership is allowed to and does in fact carry Teslas, they gain a more lucrative position selling and maintaining other cars, and so steer people away from Teslas--this was (is?) actively happening with the Nissan Leaf, but there are a bazillion Leaf commercials.
All of these incidental barriers come down to a situation where you can get your car into the state, get it in a dealership, and a customer can come and buy it; but, in practice, that won't actually happen.
The courts--even the supreme court--have heard many cases on many subjects in which one side of the legal argument was, "We don't deny them the right or privilege to do what they are asserting we prohibit," and the opinion of the Court was, "You make it fucking impossible in real life, so yes you do, and you will cease this behavior or you will find yourself a long vacation in a tiny hotel room with iron bars and an in-room toilet." Such reasoning makes sense to me.
Tesla can't own showrooms, so they have sales and service hubs.
Clutch-brake-gas was only standardized fairly recently. Some cars had five pedals for a gear shift and required a complicated dance to change over.
I like Ashley better. Mary Kate had that drug problem; it must be hard on her sister to watch her mummify herself.
The E will be cheaper, targeting $30k range. They had a $45k target S, which I believe became the E.
None of these mechanics know the quirks in the Tesla's maintenance schedule or have specialized training yet, and so you're better off going to a Tesla service shop once a year for the foreseeable future. When Tesla cars are as common as the Prius, this will change.
Most people don't understand what the executive branch does. Hell, most people think a company would run better if you removed all VPs and C-level employees. The Brendan Eich thing brought up a lot of people jawing about how a CEO's primary responsibility is to be the public face of the company--apparently they never head about marketing and PR.
Soviet America.
You're wrong, actually. Congressional and/or constitutional law created the conditions warranting enforcement of some trade behavior. The Executive branch then executes the law by issuing an Executive Order to establish the FTC. The FTC is now the official executive arm of the Federal Government's rule over interstate commerce; until Congress passes a law to narrow the authority of the FTC, the FTC has every authority to make any rule falling under the purview of its charter.
How is the Pledge unconstitutional?
That depends on if firearms are contraband in California or if you're simply not allowed to purchase out-of-state firearms.
Effectively, they can't sell it. Their business model is afflicted by conflict of interest in that way, or by onerous requirements. It's like if you said they could only sell by direct line to God to relay prayer for a Tesla.
The summary and the numbers say this: "OH NOES! ADMISSION RATES ARE DROPPING!" They give this evidence: "Ten times as many people applied, but we only admitted the same number of people!" ... yeah, your demand for education in a field increased, but the supply of education opportunities didn't. This is okay as long as the supply of job opportunities also did not increase.
I still dislike the school-college-job career path we've created with this faulty ideal of universal vocational education. School-job-college would take a hell of a lot of risk off people and allow more upward mobility, giving the poor a chance to dig through society's ranks and get a higher position (at some marginal cost to the existing middle and upper class--poor people becoming better off will displace the better-off, but in theory an economic improvement will make more room for more better-off overall... two rise, one falls, you're one ahead). This is what tax-funded or government-loan-backed education gets us: a fragile society that chews up and spits out the lower classes and fattens up the wealthy.
Consumer 3D printers don't have good control for heat. For one thing, they print on a non-heated plate, without air temperature control, slowly. The material cools as it's printed, so you get cold joints everywhere.
Mass production uses rapid techniques such as injection molding, casting, or forging. For example: Good steel is refined, poured, hammered by a pile (cold or hot forge), then forged by slamming a metal mold down onto the steel (hot or cold, for a hot forge or cold forge). This is how good-quality knives are made--quickly and efficiently and to an extremely high degree of quality. Crap-quality knives use laser cut sheet metal that's been simply rolled, which is also quick and efficient; the best quality knives are hand-made by artisans who manually forge the metal, responding dynamically to changes in its appearance and response to pressure (hammer), producing marginally or even significantly better work than an automated cold forge. Artisan knives take forever to make and are possibly a significant improvement over mass-produced cold-forge knives, but not so substantially as to make much of a great practical difference as with laser cut crap.
3D printing is slower than dog shit being pumped through 1/4 ID fish tank tubing. Part of mass production is economy of scale--the ability to produce something in little time and, thus, with little energy. We assume that a facility of the same size using the same energy draw can either produce 10 shirts or 100 shirts by different methods. The method which produces 100 shirts draws the same energy for 1/10 the time per shirt--even if it takes the same amount of time, if you can make the shirts in a smaller apparatus that uses 1/10 as much energy, you can make 10 times as many shirts in the same time with the same manufacturing energy cost. Your marginal cost of turning raw fabric into shirts is 1/10 as great. 3D printing goes the opposite way compared to modern technique.
I recall 5kg filament costing $50. Considering the inferiority of quality control, you'll either reprint the same part repeatedly to get one, or you'll keep replacing broken ones. Probably both. 3D printers get a layered piece rather than solid, riddled with stress joints that can shear readily.
You could use a lost wax cast process if you could melt down aluminum or steel, but that's a way off. It's doable, but nobody does it and so there's no consistent, ready-made, consumer-friendly process.
Essentially for free, like how printing this 300 page textbook is essentially free. $8 for good Double-A 22 pound copy paper (not HP 20 pound poorly cut crap that jams your printer), 15 cents/page for ink. Only about $53.
This is, of course, why I own a color laser printer that can print for 2 cents/page or less. Plastic filament, however, is expensive.
Back in the day, my dad knew a guy in the military who thought Microsoft would be big. He said the guy was an idiot. Dude was like, "Look man, computers, pre-packaged software, nobody wants to write their own code!" Dad wrote a voice recognition system on the VIC-20, figured prepackaged software was a no-go industry but computers would be big and everyone would learn to program them.
You're going to see a lot of "My 3D printer is awesome because I can model things and print, and everyone in the world will want to print things they make!" idiocy going around here. 3D printers aren't universal constructors; they can't make high-quality plastic with injection molding or carving or shaping, much less metal and circuits. And even then, it takes specialized processes to make certain materials: you can etch ICs easy enough with a universal fabricator, but what happens when you want an electric-motor-driven ceramic burr coffee grinder? Glass, ceramic (what kind? What grade, what process?), steel (what type?), plastic, screws, basins, lids, hoppers, shafts, bearings. Just working with "metal" is an exercise in working with hundreds of different material--thousands when you start getting into anything like car parts or fountain pens.
3D printing is a prototyping tool, not a serious production tool.
It's flying cars all over again, man.
Actually in this case it's fully redistributable--and in fact is hosted on Sourceforge under the Apache license these days--just not compatible with GPL.
The method looks like the method used to make a katana...
GPL code is why we can't have nice things like ffmpeg/libav producing good-quality AAC. You see, there are open source libraries but we can't link them against ffmpeg and redistribute a binary that's capable of using the shared object, because GPL says so.
Reasonable Person test is fine in some contexts. We can still define boundaries around this. For example, a "reasonable person" test would be appropriate for criminal sexual behavior laws for example between a college professor and a student. As the student is 18, if a reasonable person would look at the evidence given on their relationship and determine that the student's grades were unaffected by this liaison and that there was no abuse of power dynamic, this should not be a crime. (I knew a girl who was screwing around with her teacher, but she already had A's in his class and he never put administrative pressure on her; they both figured it was fine, but this is a Category 3 sexual offense here even if the student is 35 or so, and a Cat 3 is what you get for screwing a 12 year old.)