When that actually happens and we see reliable printers it'll move from being a niche thing into the mainstream. The problem I see for Makerbot et al is if they don't pull their fingers out soon then someone like Canon, HP, Brother etc. will surely make such a machine and they'll probably have the brand recognition to dominate the market.
With greater quality and accuracy, yes, but not far less time. 40 large mold sets would take quite some time to produce and be massively more expensive. Once the molds are made, they would be faster, but the break even point in time would probably be a couple to a dozen cars, the break even point on cost would probably be in the thousands.
Most cars would be sold in the thousands and besides, nobody would buy a car if the finish was as bad as this. They only achieved the speed at all by rushing the printing, extruding from a wide nozzle. If they were to use high precision nozzles to achieve makerbot quality finish it'd take 100x the time and it still wouldn't look great. It's just not practical except for the crudest of prototypes.
As usual 3D printing is being used as an excuse for free publicity. Most of the parts could have been injection moulded with far greater quality & accuracy in far less time, assuming plastic was the best material to make them with in the first place.
I'm guessing that if Amazon had added it to Google Play Store, rentals would have had to use Google payments where Google gets 30% instead of Amazon. That or it'd work only with Prime, not rentals.
The requirement to use their payment system probably doesn't apply to Amazon. Their Play policy
has an exemption which says "where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g., buying songs that can be played on other music players)". As long as Amazon lets rentals play through other apps then they're probably perfectly okay.
A more likely reason it hasn't appeared until now have been Amazon's own ambitions to run an app store and tablets/phones that are tied to it. They're holding back the goodies to make their own platform more attractive by comparison. Google did it with YouTube to Microsoft, Blackberry did it with BBM and so on.
BTW I think it looks like a nice watch but looks should never be at the expense of doing watchy things like telling the time. A watch design that turns off to save battery is a fundamentally broken design.
All smart watches suck. They suck for being tied to a phone. They suck for being tied to specific phone OS and models. They suck for their battery life. They suck for their displays which turn off to save battery. Maybe if someone was upgrading from a fitbit or similar they'd be useful but I just don't see the mass market appeal in these things until they fix these issues.
Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..
gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.
Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.
Given that many dams (including the Three Gorges) have a boat lift and locks, perhaps the answer is to adapt these so that they also transport fish at the same time. Or adapt fish stairs so that they apply a principle similar to a lock where sections automatically raise and fall to give fish some respite and assistance to reach the top.
I'm not even sure why anyone thinks the resale market is any better either. Yeah you avoid paying a full lump sum but you're still whacked with fees and hidden charges and have to deal with shysters. What's the point?
All these timeshare deals involve a very large lump sum down up front and then resort management fees and other hidden charges. And I'm sure they'd be pushing to loan this lump sum for usurious rates. By the time it's all added up it's probably far more expensive than booking somewhere and that's before considering the lump sum is in the bank or there is no debt to furnish.
It's a scam pure and simple. Even "reputable" timeshare companies are pushing a bad value product. I don't quite understand why the rules governing it aren't stricter or the practice outright banned.
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait. -- Frank Tyger