Well, once a slat or two breaks you're probably not going to want to use it as a pallet anymore, but the rest of the wood is still perfectly usable. If you can dismantle and de-nail a pallet in a few minutes as shown in those videos, then you're going to need an awfully high-paying job for it to be cheaper to buy new wood. To say nothing of the environmental costs: every reuse you get before chipping is that much less fresh lumber that must be harvested.

Trying to save the nails though... that probably doesn't make sense unless you're pretty impoverished. Nails are cheap and iron is easy to recycle.

Considering all the other toxic chemicals that a typical palette is treated with, I'm not sure the galvanized nails are the wort of your worries. I know welding is a BAD idea without a breather, but is a wood fire even hot enough to cause problems?

And? Who doesn't want a bunch of iron filings to play with? I remember "mining" my entire sandbox as a kid for them. Put the magnet in a bag or can first and it's easy enough to get the filings off.

No, you've got it backwards: Money is time. Specifically it's tokens representing time you've spent doing X for someone else, which you can then give to a third party in exchange for them spending their time to do Y. It's time that is the limited resource - you can get money lots of ways, but all the money in the world won't buy you a single day of additional time.

So I see how everyone else won, but what was in it for your father? Even if he sold the materials instead of giving them away he couldn't have paid himself much for his time.

Still, so long as they have their capsule to take shelter in, lions and tigers and bears (oh my) shouldn't be a problem. And as I understand it the ambient conditions in most of Russia are such that you're not really going to want to be wandering around without warmer clothing than there's any reason to include on a space launch.

Also plastic. Possibly not quite as recyclable as cardboard, but I suspect the service life would be much longer.

>If you broke the pallets down and remove the nails...

You're doing it wrong - break the pallets down by breaking them - a maul or sledgehammer will usually do the job nicely. Then burn them and drag a magnet through the ashes to collect the nails. Why go through all the effort of removing the nails when you're about to remove the wood?

Of course given the number or lazy, irresponsible assholes in the world who would just leave the nails to wreak havoc on the next people to use the area I can't say I'd be surprised if the law required pre-extraction.

No, they're quite right. Nobody ever said freedom of speech meant freedom from the consequences of that speech. You can say whatever you like, your government won't try to stop you, but sling vile insults at some guy at the bar and you're liable to get a fist to the face in response. This is much the same - sling insults at a dictator who needs a steady stream of excuses to maintain the international tensions that keep his position stable, and you've got to expect he's going to counterattack.

Besides which Freedom of Speech is an American/European thing, what makes you think it has the slightest relevance on the international stage? Most people in the world have no such freedom guaranteed by their government.

Right. They have a lens to focus the beam into as close to a parallel beam as feasible. jclaer is saying they should be required to have a considerably more divergent beam. How many people have a legitimate use for a laser that can maintain a pencil-sized beam at a couple of miles? There are applications for such a thing, but I doubt most people use the capability as anything other than a dangerous novelty, if at all.

Indeed, and for now they are mostly sufficient for the demand, and there will probably always be a market for mail-order jobs made on top-of-the-line printers. But mail-order introduces delays and expenses which aren't present for a local 3D print-shop, as well as lacking the opportunity to act as a social hub for the regulars. When someone can buy a quality metal-sintering printer for a few thousand bucks there will be plenty of profit opportunities for local entrepreneurs.

Sure, you could do that - but that's not printing the mold, that's making a mold from a printed object..

I'm saying print the mold itself. You know what the casting should look like, which means you also know what the mold should look like, so you could print the blocks of metal which make up the mold, slap them into the injection molder, and spit out 100,000 castings. Or if you want to cast metal, print the mold in ceramic or plaster or whatever.

Really? Are they expected to walk home, or does their abort not include the capsule? At any rate guns are really lousy weapons on a space station, unless suicide is part of the plan when a stray shot punches a hole in the skin and/or vital equipment.

Ah yes, the pen-type weapon... mightier than the sword-type weapon.

Seriously though, you can't print gunpowder (well, at least you'd need a "chemistry set" printer instead), which pretty much leaves you with blunt and bladed weapons. And I'm pretty sure there's already plenty of material at hand with which to make clubs and shivs with minimal effort.

Since when do 3D printers accept text? You generate the plans, and then send the vector-based file to the printer.