I was thinking more along the lines of long-term un/underemployed "hackers" subsidized by the state.
A converse way of think about it would be a professor who is subsidized to design (through salary support and funding for consumables).
I think the distraction of a job or the necessity to make "a return on an investment" will stifle monumental innovation and promote incremental, albeit still important, refinements.
So perhaps we as a country should also invest in local inventors, the same way we issue arts grants? At least these physical hackers are learning valuable skills.
getting it down to that range, I am not going to say is a bad thing, but, it just means there will be more of them, sitting in boxes, collecting dust, and otherwise, in the posession of people who played with them for a week and then lost interest....
That would actually be great: you don't really see a lot of second-hand 3D printers on the market!
Of course they'd catch on better if they were cheaper. If you had 1 cent beers you'd have a lot of takers, too.:)
As far as hobbies go, there are far more expensive ones than 3d printing. But I can imagine it's hard to be convinced to take the plunge if no one around you already has.
I disagree, games were a lot more interesting with teams focused on small ball. Manufacturing runs out of singles, walks and stealing than hoping to get somebody on base and hit it out of the park.
Those games were always a blast because things were always happening and you weren't just waiting for the clean up hitter for something to happen.
It's called strategy, and if it didn't work to win games, nobody would do it. Also, that the optimal strategy decreases the fun of the sport means the game is broken.
I don't know how anyone can be a fan of [American] football, either, with the prevalence of broken mechanics.
I think you're setting the world up for Roid Ragers. Genetics, practice, combinations of motor control, physique, even yoga can make a difference. When you start adding in drugs, you won't get any ceilings, no responsible use. Once people start bulking up, they often don't stop.
The problem is that there never really was a level playing field. Without enhancing things chemically, genes dictate potential, effort dictates how much of that potential is realized, environment dictates how much effort can be invested, and luck determines if one gets discovered, not to mention not having a horrible accident happen to them that strips ability or potential.
People seem to have these sort of "superiority guilt complexes" where they want to make things equal and level when, in reality, that's not nature's way. This contradicts all athletics: we're already accepting that exceptional people perform exceptional physical feats, but at the same time we're rejecting the application of science that can make them even more exceptional. Which is even more curious because we already also accept science in many other ways, from the sportswear an athlete uses to the materials used in competition to nutrition specialists and physical training.
As a private organization, the Olympics is allowed to set whatever rules they want, but eventually they will be regarded as close-minded as the sports that didn't allow teams of mixed races.
Because third parties that gain power never get corrupted, right? Oh wait, they do (see Republican party).
The point is that it's cyclical. When a party becomes corrupt, they ought to be ousted. But the political party system in our mathematically flawed election process is built to prevent those in power from losing it to upstarts. This is how political parties become corrupt: because they become entrenched.
Electoral collect, first past the post, no alternative vote, these are concessions against fair voting in an era where it took weeks to get a message from one end of the country to the other. Today? Not so much.
I hate the stupid pop culture idea that marriage is supposed to be misery and pain. IT's a crock. I blame dumb ass shows like "Everyone loves Raymond", "Home improvement", etc...
Why do any of those men stay with the horribly screeching wives? And why do those women stay with horribly insensitive, and often abusive, men?
And woe to those that use popular media as a guide to how one should live their life.
I seem to recall reading a book that claimed a lot of depression and personal happiness issues stem from people comparing their lives to fiction. They watch movies with extraordinary people having extraordinary adventures and wish their lives weren't so boring. They watch exceptionally funny television shows and wish they can be so witty. They watch attractive people with perfect bodies in porn and wish they had perfect bodies and had such sex lives.
The reality is that things are just more dull, more ordinary, more simple. There's a difference between being motivated to leave your comfort zone, practicing improvisational skills, and going to the gym and being hammered in that entertainment shows you how you should be. It's the job of the limbic system that interprets the novelty and wishful thinking and translates that into motivation. In today's world, our limbic systems are over-stimulated in every which direction possible leading to eventual disappointment in one's lot in life.
Because if they don't, things may become much more difficult for them. They really don't want local police or FBI pulling Megaupload on them and grabbing all their servers as evidence next time some crime is investigated.
Ok, so why stop at pedophilia / ephebophilia? Why not report people openly admitting to smoking marijuana, or underage persons talking about drinking, or people with active lifestyle pictures when they're claiming disability?
Facebook is pulling the opposite direction and it's eventually going to cost them. If they get in the business of being pro-active in stopping crime, they're only going to wind up beholden to being pro-active in stopping all crime. They open themselves to liability, too.
I can see it now, "I had a date and I looked at their Facebook profile but there was no indication they were a rapist, yet during discovery we found a message send 6 years ago about how this guy 'hates women'. Facebook knew this was a dangerous person and made no attempt to warn others."
This is why any sensible online service explicitly disclaims responsibility for monitoring user communications.
I'm simply looking at this from the single perspective of "Could the ammo box be of use?
Nope. Collect enough ammo boxes and the ATF / FBI / other alphabet soup agencies will storm your location and preemptively kill you and your family. Because you're obviously a subversive domestic terrorist, and due process is for pussies.
Michigan Militia, Ruby Ridge, Rainbow Farm... the list grows and grows.
All individual parts are rarely made in the same place, so even if they plan to do drop shipping, chances are at some time at some location, something was shipped, and was counted as a cost of production.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
They can't do it because the content providers won't do it. Cable TV's promise in the early days, of which Satellite TV is a mere extension (the business of running a satellite TV provider is the same, it's the physical data that's delivered in a different way), was that there would be no commercials and that channels would be niche. You'd have your cooking channel and your shopping channel and your news channel and so on.
But now, cable channels are also dripping with commercials. Commercials have ad revenue for the content providers, and thus are more valuable based on the number of eyeballs that are currently watching and the number of eyeballs that could potentially watch. So the program with an 0.4 share on basic cable can earn more in ad revenue than a program with a same 0.4 share if the first channel is provided to more households. Knowing this, huge content conglomerates (Viacom, ABC/Disney, DCI) leverage getting additional channels shoveled in. You want to carry Discovery because your subscribers expect it? Well, unless you agree to also carry TLC, Animal Planet, Science, Investigation Discovery, Oprah Winfrey Network, Destination America, Military Channel, Discovery Fit & Health, Velocity at various subscription levels, you can't have it. There are different targets for each, which is why sometimes you'll have a subset in Basic cable lineups and the rest in Extended cable lineups. These are part of the negotiations in addition to raw cost per channel.
The result of this is that you can't give end customers a la carte because the contracts don't allow you to just get the good stuff, because they make money on having you being able to get the bad stuff, too. It would be a bit of an overreach for the FCC to step in and dictate what terms can and cannot be allowed in content provider contracts.
Interestingly, I remember about 20 years ago Nintendo got in trouble for trying to pull this off in stores. They would refuse to distribute high-demand Super Nintendo games to retailers unless they also stocked less popular Game Boy games. This helped Nintendo inflate their shipping numbers for weak brands not at the expense of the strong brands, but thanks TO the strong brands. This was back when Game Boy was facing stiff competition from Sega and Atari's alternatives. In addition to these tactics and flat-out price fixing, Nintendo eventually settled and gave out a bunch of coupons as a result. This was fixed because it was the FTC that got involved.
In interviews, Jesse Ventura compares politics, specifically Republicans vs Democrats, as a lot like his former pro wrestling days. On stage they pretend to hate each other and they fight, but it's all choreographed for maximum entertainment (or, for politics, to make people think they have a say) and at the end of the night, they change back into their civilian clothes and go out drinking together.
In the US, I'm coming to think that speech is "free speech" because it has no value, and that countries that squash speech do so because it's still powerful. After all, if voting could change anything, it'd be illegal.
Well, how much does it cost to ship such a large collection? What about insurance for $1.2M worth of irreplaceable goods? Can they even use a commodity courier service or do they have to spring for the same kind of shipping museums and the like use?
No need to ignore software emulation limitations anymore. There are many devices today that can run games loaded off commodity flash drives, on actual hardware. See: Everdrive, Powerpack, Acekard, and others.
If I never hear about Lipitor maybe I never bother getting a cholesterol screening and then die of heart disease at 37 instead of going to my doctor at 35 and saying, "Hey, I heard about this Lipitor thing and that men from age 35 should have cholesterol screenings."
One should go to the doctor yearly. This is a healthy habit, right up there with brushing your teeth and exercise and cooking food thoroughly.
The only point of marketing to the mass public is to make them think they want something. They want someone who's feeling a little down today see a commercial for an anti-depressant and say "hey, *I* am feeling down, maybe I'm clinically depressed, clearly I need this pill." They should only be marketing to doctors, and even then it shouldn't be by giving away swag and lunches to a doctor and their staff, it should be a just-the-facts operation. This medication treats xyz better than this other one, just look at these reduced side effects.
What I'm getting at is that you're doctor should already be running the blood work and should be bringing up your cholesterol levels up to you. That's why they're licensed: they are acting as your agents regarding health.
That's why sensible countries prohibit the drug industry from advertising.
I'll take: "Dumbass hardware engineers that think they know how to write software and didn't put any checks, verifications, safeties in place."
I'm betting it was even properly debugged by checking the edge cases. Engineers are notorious for writing code like that. All engineers think they can be programmers, very few do it well.
Maybe they were writing the software in imperial seconds instead of metric.
Well... considering that io6 will be including a layout manager makes this "marketing ploy" more than just a rumor. There's little reason to use a layout manager on the current hardware since everything scales by 2. Of course, that all changes when a different screen size enters the mix.
Not saying it isn't true, just saying that if there wasn't fear of the competition, they'd keep it quiet.
Well of course credible reports have emerged. The market needs some uncertainty injected into it since the Nexus 7 is soon to be released, and Apple certainly doesn't want anyone to buy that when they could have an iPad in a few short months.
Just a marketing ploy. It's a shame how complicit the media is when Apple wants to do it versus, well, any other technology company ever.
I commend their efforts to make self-driving cars, but I see a lot of problems that I don't see a practical solution for. If they've come up with solutions then I'd really, really like to know how they work.
Just because you can't think of the solution doesn't mean there is no solution. Humans manage to figure it out somehow, and because us meat popsicles have lots of accidents that means the bar for par is set pretty low, IMHO, for an automated solution.
Plus, this, like all other technologies, will evolve over time to become better suited for the problems at hand. Can't say as much for the human brain.
Don't forget that it is also manufactured in a country that still puts a little faith in Rule of Law: the workers aren't indentured servants and exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals with no right to know or MSDS disclosures, and that there are limits of chemical releases to the environment.
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I was thinking more along the lines of long-term un/underemployed "hackers" subsidized by the state.
A converse way of think about it would be a professor who is subsidized to design (through salary support and funding for consumables).
I think the distraction of a job or the necessity to make "a return on an investment" will stifle monumental innovation and promote incremental, albeit still important, refinements.
So perhaps we as a country should also invest in local inventors, the same way we issue arts grants? At least these physical hackers are learning valuable skills.
Maybe it's in base 36
getting it down to that range, I am not going to say is a bad thing, but, it just means there will be more of them, sitting in boxes, collecting dust, and otherwise, in the posession of people who played with them for a week and then lost interest....
That would actually be great: you don't really see a lot of second-hand 3D printers on the market!
Of course they'd catch on better if they were cheaper. If you had 1 cent beers you'd have a lot of takers, too. :)
As far as hobbies go, there are far more expensive ones than 3d printing. But I can imagine it's hard to be convinced to take the plunge if no one around you already has.
I disagree, games were a lot more interesting with teams focused on small ball. Manufacturing runs out of singles, walks and stealing than hoping to get somebody on base and hit it out of the park.
Those games were always a blast because things were always happening and you weren't just waiting for the clean up hitter for something to happen.
It's called strategy, and if it didn't work to win games, nobody would do it. Also, that the optimal strategy decreases the fun of the sport means the game is broken.
I don't know how anyone can be a fan of [American] football, either, with the prevalence of broken mechanics.
There's that tawdry "level playing field" thing.
. . .
I think you're setting the world up for Roid Ragers. Genetics, practice, combinations of motor control, physique, even yoga can make a difference. When you start adding in drugs, you won't get any ceilings, no responsible use. Once people start bulking up, they often don't stop.
The problem is that there never really was a level playing field. Without enhancing things chemically, genes dictate potential, effort dictates how much of that potential is realized, environment dictates how much effort can be invested, and luck determines if one gets discovered, not to mention not having a horrible accident happen to them that strips ability or potential.
People seem to have these sort of "superiority guilt complexes" where they want to make things equal and level when, in reality, that's not nature's way. This contradicts all athletics: we're already accepting that exceptional people perform exceptional physical feats, but at the same time we're rejecting the application of science that can make them even more exceptional. Which is even more curious because we already also accept science in many other ways, from the sportswear an athlete uses to the materials used in competition to nutrition specialists and physical training.
As a private organization, the Olympics is allowed to set whatever rules they want, but eventually they will be regarded as close-minded as the sports that didn't allow teams of mixed races.
I don't care...without being pestered with unskippable...warnings from foreign police organizations like the FBI...
You mean you don't take notice of FBI warnings? How dare you show such contempt for the global jurisdiction of the US Government!
If your country bends over and accepts extradition requests from the US, that's their fault.
Because third parties that gain power never get corrupted, right? Oh wait, they do (see Republican party).
The point is that it's cyclical. When a party becomes corrupt, they ought to be ousted. But the political party system in our mathematically flawed election process is built to prevent those in power from losing it to upstarts. This is how political parties become corrupt: because they become entrenched.
Electoral collect, first past the post, no alternative vote, these are concessions against fair voting in an era where it took weeks to get a message from one end of the country to the other. Today? Not so much.
I hate the stupid pop culture idea that marriage is supposed to be misery and pain. IT's a crock. I blame dumb ass shows like "Everyone loves Raymond", "Home improvement", etc...
Why do any of those men stay with the horribly screeching wives?
And why do those women stay with horribly insensitive, and often abusive, men?
And woe to those that use popular media as a guide to how one should live their life.
I seem to recall reading a book that claimed a lot of depression and personal happiness issues stem from people comparing their lives to fiction. They watch movies with extraordinary people having extraordinary adventures and wish their lives weren't so boring. They watch exceptionally funny television shows and wish they can be so witty. They watch attractive people with perfect bodies in porn and wish they had perfect bodies and had such sex lives.
The reality is that things are just more dull, more ordinary, more simple. There's a difference between being motivated to leave your comfort zone, practicing improvisational skills, and going to the gym and being hammered in that entertainment shows you how you should be. It's the job of the limbic system that interprets the novelty and wishful thinking and translates that into motivation. In today's world, our limbic systems are over-stimulated in every which direction possible leading to eventual disappointment in one's lot in life.
Because if they don't, things may become much more difficult for them. They really don't want local police or FBI pulling Megaupload on them and grabbing all their servers as evidence next time some crime is investigated.
Ok, so why stop at pedophilia / ephebophilia? Why not report people openly admitting to smoking marijuana, or underage persons talking about drinking, or people with active lifestyle pictures when they're claiming disability?
Facebook is pulling the opposite direction and it's eventually going to cost them. If they get in the business of being pro-active in stopping crime, they're only going to wind up beholden to being pro-active in stopping all crime. They open themselves to liability, too.
I can see it now, "I had a date and I looked at their Facebook profile but there was no indication they were a rapist, yet during discovery we found a message send 6 years ago about how this guy 'hates women'. Facebook knew this was a dangerous person and made no attempt to warn others."
This is why any sensible online service explicitly disclaims responsibility for monitoring user communications.
Because the government has no business dictating what you are and are not permitted to put into your own body.
Which drugs are more dangerous is irrelevant.
I'm simply looking at this from the single perspective of "Could the ammo box be of use?
Nope. Collect enough ammo boxes and the ATF / FBI / other alphabet soup agencies will storm your location and preemptively kill you and your family. Because you're obviously a subversive domestic terrorist, and due process is for pussies.
Michigan Militia, Ruby Ridge, Rainbow Farm... the list grows and grows.
All individual parts are rarely made in the same place, so even if they plan to do drop shipping, chances are at some time at some location, something was shipped, and was counted as a cost of production.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
They can't do it because the content providers won't do it. Cable TV's promise in the early days, of which Satellite TV is a mere extension (the business of running a satellite TV provider is the same, it's the physical data that's delivered in a different way), was that there would be no commercials and that channels would be niche. You'd have your cooking channel and your shopping channel and your news channel and so on.
But now, cable channels are also dripping with commercials. Commercials have ad revenue for the content providers, and thus are more valuable based on the number of eyeballs that are currently watching and the number of eyeballs that could potentially watch. So the program with an 0.4 share on basic cable can earn more in ad revenue than a program with a same 0.4 share if the first channel is provided to more households. Knowing this, huge content conglomerates (Viacom, ABC/Disney, DCI) leverage getting additional channels shoveled in. You want to carry Discovery because your subscribers expect it? Well, unless you agree to also carry TLC, Animal Planet, Science, Investigation Discovery, Oprah Winfrey Network, Destination America, Military Channel, Discovery Fit & Health, Velocity at various subscription levels, you can't have it. There are different targets for each, which is why sometimes you'll have a subset in Basic cable lineups and the rest in Extended cable lineups. These are part of the negotiations in addition to raw cost per channel.
The result of this is that you can't give end customers a la carte because the contracts don't allow you to just get the good stuff, because they make money on having you being able to get the bad stuff, too. It would be a bit of an overreach for the FCC to step in and dictate what terms can and cannot be allowed in content provider contracts.
Interestingly, I remember about 20 years ago Nintendo got in trouble for trying to pull this off in stores. They would refuse to distribute high-demand Super Nintendo games to retailers unless they also stocked less popular Game Boy games. This helped Nintendo inflate their shipping numbers for weak brands not at the expense of the strong brands, but thanks TO the strong brands. This was back when Game Boy was facing stiff competition from Sega and Atari's alternatives. In addition to these tactics and flat-out price fixing, Nintendo eventually settled and gave out a bunch of coupons as a result. This was fixed because it was the FTC that got involved.
Nothing more conservative than trying to enact new legislation...
In interviews, Jesse Ventura compares politics, specifically Republicans vs Democrats, as a lot like his former pro wrestling days. On stage they pretend to hate each other and they fight, but it's all choreographed for maximum entertainment (or, for politics, to make people think they have a say) and at the end of the night, they change back into their civilian clothes and go out drinking together.
In the US, I'm coming to think that speech is "free speech" because it has no value, and that countries that squash speech do so because it's still powerful. After all, if voting could change anything, it'd be illegal.
Well, how much does it cost to ship such a large collection? What about insurance for $1.2M worth of irreplaceable goods? Can they even use a commodity courier service or do they have to spring for the same kind of shipping museums and the like use?
No need to ignore software emulation limitations anymore. There are many devices today that can run games loaded off commodity flash drives, on actual hardware. See: Everdrive, Powerpack, Acekard, and others.
If I never hear about Lipitor maybe I never bother getting a cholesterol screening and then die of heart disease at 37 instead of going to my doctor at 35 and saying, "Hey, I heard about this Lipitor thing and that men from age 35 should have cholesterol screenings."
One should go to the doctor yearly. This is a healthy habit, right up there with brushing your teeth and exercise and cooking food thoroughly.
The only point of marketing to the mass public is to make them think they want something. They want someone who's feeling a little down today see a commercial for an anti-depressant and say "hey, *I* am feeling down, maybe I'm clinically depressed, clearly I need this pill." They should only be marketing to doctors, and even then it shouldn't be by giving away swag and lunches to a doctor and their staff, it should be a just-the-facts operation. This medication treats xyz better than this other one, just look at these reduced side effects.
What I'm getting at is that you're doctor should already be running the blood work and should be bringing up your cholesterol levels up to you. That's why they're licensed: they are acting as your agents regarding health.
That's why sensible countries prohibit the drug industry from advertising.
I'll take: "Dumbass hardware engineers that think they know how to write software and didn't put any checks, verifications, safeties in place."
I'm betting it was even properly debugged by checking the edge cases. Engineers are notorious for writing code like that. All engineers think they can be programmers, very few do it well.
Maybe they were writing the software in imperial seconds instead of metric.
Well ... considering that io6 will be including a layout manager makes this "marketing ploy" more than just a rumor. There's little reason to use a layout manager on the current hardware since everything scales by 2. Of course, that all changes when a different screen size enters the mix.
Not saying it isn't true, just saying that if there wasn't fear of the competition, they'd keep it quiet.
Well of course credible reports have emerged. The market needs some uncertainty injected into it since the Nexus 7 is soon to be released, and Apple certainly doesn't want anyone to buy that when they could have an iPad in a few short months.
Just a marketing ploy. It's a shame how complicit the media is when Apple wants to do it versus, well, any other technology company ever.
I commend their efforts to make self-driving cars, but I see a lot of problems that I don't see a practical solution for. If they've come up with solutions then I'd really, really like to know how they work.
Just because you can't think of the solution doesn't mean there is no solution. Humans manage to figure it out somehow, and because us meat popsicles have lots of accidents that means the bar for par is set pretty low, IMHO, for an automated solution.
Plus, this, like all other technologies, will evolve over time to become better suited for the problems at hand. Can't say as much for the human brain.
Don't forget that it is also manufactured in a country that still puts a little faith in Rule of Law: the workers aren't indentured servants and exposed to thousands of toxic chemicals with no right to know or MSDS disclosures, and that there are limits of chemical releases to the environment.
Congress can now force you to drive with punitive taxes, since not driving affects interstate commerce.