Didn't you hear? The future is going to be post-scarcity and stuff. So no-one will have to worry about where resources come from. We can all have our own Death Stars built by robots from unicorn farts.

Well, there's two reasons why 3D printing makes sense. One is prototyping. You might need to make a half dozen different prototypes that are pretty similar to each other before you find one that really works. The second is replacement. You may need to replace these things on a regular basis. Replacing them is just a matter of sending a file to a printer -- no craft skill needed at all.

Hand crafting something like this falls within the scope of my tinkering abilities. I've worked with fiberglass and epoxy and wood. But it's not for everyone and if someone had to *pay* me to make something like this it would probably cost a thousand dollars a pair.

Something like this would seem to fall into the sweet spot for 3D printing: something you need more than one of, but not *thousands* of identical copies.

That was a dozen years ago. He can't self-publish *now* because he has a contract with Springer.

I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

I honestly can't understand why it's so much harder to charge a phone and a watch every night than it is to charge a phone alone.

Would it be any easier to understand if I said that I don't generally ever take my watch off? Plus, half of the time, I will forget to charge my phone at night anyways... Although the battery will usually last long enough that I can recharge it when I get to work in the morning. Since I do not really need my cell phone to be portable while I am working at my desk, this is not an issue. It would be a royal pain in the ass to have to plug in my watch too, however.... because then I can't wear my watch during the day, when I actually *USE* it.... either that, or I have to spend the day being tethered by the wrist to a cable that is charging my phone.

If matters of a particular substance is important enough to a state that it wants to sue an adjacent one simply because it has looser restrictions on that substance, then it seems to me that the only alternative is to either tighten borders between those states, which would completely change what the United States actually is, as you pointed out, or else the substance needs to be regulated federally, and enforced against states that don't adhere to those regulations. As you said, however, that would remove a significant power of statehood. But threatening to sue an adjoining state simply because it has different practices which happen to spill over simply as a result of the people commuting or traveling between them is just as much of a threat against that same power of statehood as federal regulation would be.

Burning flags is free speech.

You'll find that there's a lot of people who don't think it is free speech or should be. And in places that don't put a value on freedom of speech, it isn't.

The Federal numbers are an average for cars that cost $500,000 to $25,000 my 2007 civic will lose less than $3.00 for the 3000 miles added to it, it's already at the bottom of the curve and even adding 10,000 miles will not change it's "resale value" that has no real meaning as I dont intend to sell it.

And "major repairs" don't come from miles, they come from abuse and lack of proper maintenance.

Now my Ferrari F40, that would have a much higher depreciation for those miles.