My work voice mail system is no different from the one I used 25 years ago. Even the menu trees only have one or two minor differences. Certainly no voice-to-text or anything like that.

"It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive" is an odd phrase indeed. Is this the first time it has ever been used?

The Soviet Union couldn't have gotten on the internet, there would have been too much free information floating around. To heck with the internet - the Soviets couldn't even sell Xerox machines to the general public, they would have been used by the people for anti-Communist activities. But don't trust me, listen to one of the Soviet leaders (and, by extension, one of the smartest people in their entire empire).

In a remarkable tete-a-tete with a US journalist and former arms control official, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, interpreted the real meaning of SDI:
"We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."

What were those reasons that everyone knew well? Ever heard of samizdat? No, eh?

Can't you ever see anything positive about the Obama administration? You're just dead-set on opposing them, no matter what they do. Your racism is showing. Go home and sleep it off, and do a better job of disguising it next time, because everyone in the world just saw through you. +5 Insightful my ass, more like +5 Racist.

Well, gosh, I guess that makes discrimination OK. I never thought of it that way before. You've really opened my eyes! Do you have a newsletter, and how do I subscribe?

You right-wing Islamophobic assholes will never stop, will you? You're just going to continue with the hate. Any possible reason you can cling to to hate the people with whom you disagree, you're going to take it. You fuckwits make me sick. You need to be eradicated from our scientific society. We have no place for bigots like you.

Well, there is the fact that the Chinese commies murdered 60,000,000 people in pursuit of their utopia. And dammit, didn't achieve it. I mean, if they HAD achieved socialism, it would have been worth it. 60,000,000 human beings dead, but the end-state would have justified the means. The best part would have been that they PROVED that it could work, and provided the rest of the world a template to get there. Of course, the road would have been paved with murdered humans, but that kind of thing gets glossed over when we're talking about the final victory of socialism.

Of course, this completely ignores the 100,000,000 people that the US government has murdered since 9/11, but hey. We can't all be perfect.

Of course, this completely ignores the 100,000,000 people that the US government has murdered since 9/11, but hey. We can't all be perfect.

You mention Putin but never once mention CIA, NSA, Microsoft, Google, Apple, IRS, or any American influences at all, sadly. Do you really think that the Russians can do their own thing without this influence? Blame the source, not the symptom!

I notice you didn't take notice of the elephant in the room, you Islamophobic piece of shit. You people won't stop until you stomp out the invading religion and replace it with your own. You sort of right-wing nutbags make me sick.

Yeah, going to Maker Faire makes you think the only thing anyone ever prints are tchotchkes from Thingverse.

One application is to reproduce plastic parts that are otherwise unobtainable. Example:

I have a turntable microwave oven that was built almost 25 years ago. There's a piece of plastic about the size of a pair of dice that 's effectively the turntable spindle. Somebody turned the thing by hand and snapped that piece of plastic. I have a part number for it but nobody sells it any more. A chunk of the part is missing, but its shape isn't too complicated, and enough of it is still there, that I can make an STL file for it.

That in itself is not enough to make buying a 3D printer worthwhile, but I can contract that out to someone on 3D Hubs to print it for me out of ABS.

That's what I like about my 2010 Fusion. It has acrtual buttons and knobs for all the important stuff, in addition to the GUI.

Of course usable 8K is a long way off. Even movie theater projectors are still 4K. That's why they're showing it at CES, not in the Best Buy.Black Friday doorbuster circular. CES is all about mine's-bigger-than-yours.

Personally, I'd rather see the frame rate go up rather than resolution. The standard for 4K movie theater projection is 250Mbps, which is only enough for 24fps. The standard also specifies compression limits so that picture quality won't suffer too much. At 1Gbps, you could compress it even less, and still project at 60fps. If you ever saw a Showscan movie back in the 80s, you know the difference in realism the higher frame rate makes. (BTW, the audio is up to 16 channels of uncompressed .wav at 24-bit, 48Khz or 96Khz sampling. I guess they decided that lossless compression for audio wouldn't save enough bandwidth to matter, compared with the video stream.)

Maybe someone should make that game. But that game won't be nethack. Just make a new game, stop trying to "reimagine" existing ideas! Be original!

In this "other America", they read loud and clear that the serious film and theater fucking hate them. No, really...ask any theater or film person what they think of the average American. Nothing but pure hatred. Then, ask what the average Muslim Arab thinks of the Jews, and compare and contrast those viewpoints.

BZZT wrong. A felony on one's record will result in the EU denying a visa. Of course, we know that visas are ridiculous and a relic of another age...but try entering the EU while swimming across the Atlantic Ocean...it's not nearly the same as the shallow, waist-deep Rio Grande.