Considering that the same person is responsible for both, I think you'd have to ask him, but I suspect that the lessons learnt from one informed the other.

It looks like it's printed in parts and assembled, so presumably if you wanted to replace the worn parts you'd just print those. Or you could print them in some sort of hard-wearing ceramic separately, or something. There are many ways to skin that cat.

Economies of scale will apply *to the printer itself*. That's the interesting part.

I've never understood why kudzu isn't considered. It seems ideal.

When you're reasoning about WBC, you've got to take religion out of the equation. They protest *solely* to goad someone into assaulting them, or otherwise doing *something* that gives them someone to sue. They're only using religion because it's effectively non-contestable on factual grounds, so they can't be done for slander.

Shazam launched commercially in 1999. At best they were coincident.

Does it count if I sketched out *exactly this idea* in my college lab notebooks from 1999, *before* I'd heard of Shazam-the-service? Seriously, it's not a complicated idea.

Patent 6,990,453 was issued in 2001.

The problem with that thinking is that when you're wrong, you're wrong enough for it to more than wipe out your takings. That's basically Mandelbrot's message in The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets.

Oh, for crying out loud - this is absurd. Derivatives are *not* fraud. They can be used in fraud, but so can any other instrument.

Something you don't understand is not automatically bad; it's worthwhile reading up on options and why they are actually a rather good idea before dismissing derivatives as a dead loss.

"Buying land in Iceland" becomes a *better* idea as their economy worsens. It's not about a financial investment at that point; the fact that you can get more for your money is only a good thing.

As long as there is someone who needs a better vehicle *for themselves*, there is someone who has an incentive to pay for development. Development would continue, just under a different financial model.

Just the process of compressing the video for the client will add latency. You can't squish an HD frame instantly. You can't decode it instantly either. While analogue TV was still broadcast in my region, you could flick between digital and analogue and the digital always lagged behind - yes, it was buffered, but that's a necessary consequence of the technology.

A big part of what OnLive claim to have cracked is the video compression latency. They claim a ~1ms lag each for compression and decompression. They've traded off compression ratio to do it - from memory, it's something like 150%-200% more data on-the-wire than you'd expect for comparable quality traditional video compression.

It's really offensive from an engineering viewpoint as well. All the same components have to be there (game client computer with expensive GPU, game server, internet connection to carry multiplayer messages), but you have to add an extra computer (the "thin" client),

Except that instead of being used for gaming (say) 10% of the time, the game client machine can be used for its intended use *all* the time. It's actually a more efficient use of that part of the hardware, especially when you consider that these are going to be rack-mount machines where the power cost is a direct incentive on the owner to make them as energy-efficient as possible, rather than the traditional Alienware space heaters you usually see.

add extra messages across the network for the controller, and of course, pipe a video stream across the internet instead of a monitor cable. It's just not efficient. Even if the service is pitched at casual gamers who can't be bothered to install a game and want instant gratification, it will be equally damaging to all the other customers on that network because they have to share their bandwidth with people streaming HD video.

This part is entirely true. The flip-side is that if BT provision more bandwidth for their ADSL customers, they *have* to make it available to their LLU customers as well, so everyone might benefit.

It's not clear whether the Laser Weapon calculator assumes atmospheric losses for the full throw, just for the first 100km, or not at all.

Alternatively, if the first thing they learn is that they *will* have to learn new languages, and that they can't rely on a single skill-set to carry them through their career, that's got to be a good thing.