The FCC made the right call in the US, they upheld the long established status-quo of the international market, but it's a hollow victory if you only have one ISP to choose from. The decision is kind of a surprise to me given the head of the FCC was an influential telco lobbyist prior to his appointment. In this case it seems to me the FCC are doing their job by telling telco's what to do, rather than the other way around (as one would expect with such blatantly insestious oversight).

WTF, read Dicken's, working conditions back then make today's Asian sweat shops look like day care centers.

I want Bagpipe Hero. Or Saxophone Hero.

I dunno, I haven't come up with a clear answer to that yet. But it's not going to happen now, absent a general recession to match, since video gaming is now a real thing.

Here's the story. It's free text online. tldr: The government paid for the research and development, took all the risks, an academic researcher did all the work, a private company came along, took advantage of a naive scientist, and sold the test back to the taxpayers for 50 times what it actually cost.

(The New York Times just had a series on health care by Elisabeth Rosenthal which gave a dozen examples like this. Asthma inhalers cost about 20 to 50 times as much in the US as they do anywhere else. There are people who go to Europe once a year to buy a year's supply of drugs.)

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Perspective
History of Medicine
Patenting the PKU Test — Federally Funded Research and Intellectual Property
Diane B. Paul, Ph.D., and Rachel A. Ankeny, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:792-794
August 29, 2013
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1306755

In 1961, the U.S. Children's Bureau (USCB) embarked on a field trial of the test, requiring rapid production of kits to screen more than 400,000 babies. Guthrie, who had a cognitively impaired son and a niece with PKU, was involved in a parents' group, the National Association for Retarded Children (NARC). In consultation with the NARC, he decided that commercial production of test kits would be most efficient.

Guthrie favored the Ames Company, a division of Indiana-based Miles Laboratories, which marketed the earlier PKU tests. Although Guthrie assumed that the government would enter a contract with Ames, the company said it would manufacture the kits only if a patent were issued. In 1962, Guthrie filed a patent application in his own name and signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Miles, under which he would receive no royalties but 5% of net proceeds would be divided among the NARC Research Fund, the Association for Aid of Crippled Children, and the University of Buffalo Foundation (affiliated with the Buffalo Children's Hospital, Guthrie's employer). There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted.2

Miles, however, couldn't quickly produce test kits in the required quantity. So with financial support from the USCB, Guthrie rented a house in which to produce and assemble kits containing the materials necessary to perform and interpret 500 tests, at a cost of about $6 each. But when Guthrie visited the Ames Company in June 1963, he discovered that it planned to charge $262 for what were essentially the same kits. He was appalled, and when appeals to the company proved futile, he alerted USCB officials. They recommended that Miles not be granted exclusive commercial rights, in light of the large public expenditure on the test, the potential effect on states that planned to manufacture their own materials, and the steep price Miles planned to charge. Although the test had been developed with support from various organizations, the majority of the funds had come from the Public Health Service (PHS), which provided $251,700, and the USCB, which contributed $492,000 plus $250,000 through the states, chiefly for the trial. Given this federal funding, the surgeon general of the PHS determined that the invention belonged to the United States and abrogated the exclusive licensing agreement.

If you set up a straw man, then it's very easy to kill it. The issue is not an OS providing something, it's that Microsoft, which had a near-monopoly in the desktop space, used the money from selling the OS to fund development in another market (browsers) and then bundled their version, undercutting the competition with cross subsidies. There was a thriving browser market before IE was introduced, but it's hard to compete when most of your customers are forced to pay to fund the development of your competitor.

The precision is actually pretty impressive, I've had a model I designed printed out in brass before, and some of the detail, I can't imagine milling achieving it. But yeah, no question that milling or sintering will get your stronger parts.

Microturbines are one of those few things where 3d printing might actually prove an economical means of production - the keys being small, intricate, and very expensive.

I wonder how effective it'd be to print out one of these, minus the windings. They've got crazy power output (up to 100kW sustained / 200kW peak) and efficiency (up to 98%) in a motor small enough (20kg; significantly less without the windings) to make a 3d printing service (or more realistically in this case, a custom CNC milling service) cost effective. Buying them commercially, they're something like $4k USD each. But there's a 3d model available, so....

All I can say is, I'd love an electric car with one of those driving each wheel....

Oh, I thought someone just took a shit on my Slashdot today.

Today? Opening threads in new tabs/windows has been broken for a while now - the comment area is clipped to half of screen size, with a huge useless margin on the right.

So... It's going to stay that way, huh?

My guess is it's going to get worse. Someone has decided Beta is a matter of principle/authority/whatever for them, and is slowly sabotaging the real Slashdot to smoke out the users before it'll go down.

I guess the lesson here is to never build community around a centralized resource, like a server, especially one owned by a company. I wonder if a forum or an imageboard could be implemented in a P2P fashion?

Laser sintering of titanium is a well established process and should produce excellent turbine blades. 3d printing plus thermal spraying (a new one I've seen uses a form of laser spraying) might actually be able to produce parts better than would be possibly by any other means (such as machining cast metal) because you're not only heating the grains to join them together, but compacting them at high velocity.

Even for the more "primitive" 3d printing metal techs, they're just lost wax casting where the original mold is 3d printed. So the results are no worse than any other lost wax cast metal.

And yes, I was hopeful that this was a fully finished, working product. And that I'd be able to download the model. There's little that I'd be willing to pay the premium of laser titanium sintering for, but a micro jet turbine is one of those things. ;)

The size of the brain is much less important than the brain to body mass ratio. Several animals have larger brains than humans (elephants being one), but they all have large bodies as well:

No, not really. What sets a human and elephant apart is not how smart an individual human is compared to an individual elephant, but the ability to communicate. Human language is Turing complete, art is basically communication for the sake of communication, and our perhaps most popular form of entertainment is making up stories and sharing them. That's the draw of this very website, and even now I'm using it to serialize a particular neural network - an idea - which you then can deserialize at your leisure.

Almost all human beings who have ever lived are part of a single millenia-old, planet-spanning superorganism we call "culture". It doesn't matter how much gray matter an elephant might be lugging around, it can't even begin to compare to the ~ 100 billion kg total for human species, even with all the issues with coordinating that mass.

And we're getting better at that coordination, too.

Leon puts his hand in freezing liquid without a problem.

Pris puts her hand in boiling water without a problem.

You can argue whether they are "robots" based upon YOUR definition of "robot". But those are not human hands.

If you watch the original with the understanding that Deckard is a replicant then the unicorn origami and the ending have specific, complex, implications.

Now if the sequel shows Deckard as a human then they piss off everyone who prefers those implications. So, in effect, the sequel ruins the story for some people.

If the sequel shows Deckard as an aged replicant ... robots get old? So replicant Deckard is either killed or kills or runs away again at the end. ALREADY BEEN DONE IN THE FIRST MOVIE!

I think he just wants someone to allow him to swap heads around on Monkey's to see what happens, I hope nobody encourages him.

What if you don't like your head? Ugly people could have their brains transplanted into pretty people. Think of the potential for sex changes too! Then just as there's a market for stealing kidneys, there will arise a market for stealing whole bodies. You don't have to steal a rich person's digital identity. You can steal their WHOLE LIFE. Mind you, you'd have to study up really hard on every detail of their life and even learn to imitate their accent and speach patterns exactly, so their friends don't catch on. And then, with everyone knowing about the potential for this kind of identity theft, imagine someone undergoes a personality change due to illness -- everyone will assume their brain was replaced by an imposter, because most people are fucking clueless about mental illness.