The "B" in BI stands for "bullshit that drives away nerds". If we want business news, we'll go to WSJ or... hell I'm so uninterested in business news, I can't actually NAME another source for it. Your readers are nerds, they like robots and programming and Linux and video games and kinetic sculpture. We don't care about products and ROI and ... BULLSHIT. What the hell? Even goatse is better than this!

Anything that involves digging a finite resource out of the ground and burning it is not economically safe. While I have concerns about fracking (although they are only "gut" concerns, as opposed to the certainty over the evilness of, say, coal mining and burning, in all its forms), I'm much more concerned about the desperate way that Americans refuse to put their efforts toward modern renewable sources of energy and toward efficiency in the way that the energy is consumed.

I'm in Northern Virginia, and I love my solar photovoltaic system (installed awesomely by Solar Odyssey). And if the car companies ever make a decent plug-in hybrid car, it'll only take eight more panels to keep that fully charged - and the cost of eight solar panels would pay back in saved gas in less than two years.

Anyone who says "alternative energy isn't ready" is still living in the 20th century.

-brian

All of my movable possessions (including vehicles, appliances, library, and piano) fit in my house, but my house occupies about 1,100 cubic meters, and could not fit in a smaller space without disassembly.

Anyone who owns any amount of acreage probably has a larger challenge - to what depth do you possess your property? An acre is about 4,000 square meters, so if your home is ten meters tall and sits on an acre of land, you've got 40,000 cubic meters right there, assuming your land doesn't fold up neatly.

I'm okay with that. If you've got real experts and not marketroids, we welcome their participation. Any chance of getting Wil Wheaton (clevernickname) back?

More trains over land, more ship travel over sea, less personal automotive and passenger flight. That's the reality we're heading towards. Get over yourself.

I'd like to point out that passenger ships get about 37 miles per passenger per gallon at about 20 knots, while a Boeing 747 gets nearly 70 miles per passenger per gallon at over 500 knots. So unless you plan on sailing across the ocean, airplanes are still more efficient.

Sources

Ship

Airplane

I solve problems for a living. Rule #1 for problem solving is "Draw a Picture". Much easier to do that in my engineering notebook.

Any sort of mathematical derivation is easier to do on paper. Initial storyboarding is easier on paper (before you whiteboard it in front of a group). Diagramming data flow. The list goes on...

Sure, there are tools for putting together pretty presentation-worthy versions of these, but for rapid idea sorting throughout the day, pen and paper is the only way to go.

Fall starts at the end of September at the "Fall" equinox. Winter starts at the end of December at the "Winter" solstice. Spring starts at the end of March at the "Spring" equinox. Summer starts at the end of June at the "Summer" solstice. Amazing how that works out.

Buffalo's N150 ships from the factory with the open source DD-WRT firmware. Sure beats trying to jury-rig decent firmware over the crap the other manufacturers ship by default.

That only a third of you believe that sober coding is a virtue, would explain a great deal about the software I've been suffering through for most of my career. Save your beers for when your coding is done, and save me hours of pain and rewriting.

The actual FAQ from NASA was posted two weeks ago. Nice of someone to link to it.

How about those of us who have a consistent informed opinion that neither grows stronger nor weaker. Namely, software creators should be able to license their software however they like. Personally, I use only free software for anything I "have" to use. I'm happy to buy commercial software for entertainment. And while I use open source licenses for software I personally control, I certainly write a lot of software professionally that is not open source, because it isn't my decision to make in a corporate environment.

To be even more pedantic, it's Hydrogen Hydroxide, since the way it bonds is actually H-OH. This seems to make particularly sense when viewed from an acid-base reaction perspective where you neutralize an H-something acid with a something-Hydroxide base, you get a something-something salt in a Hydrogen Hydroxide solution.

My whole house is solar powered... how many devices is that?

Bottom line: You cannot "manufacture" durable goods using 3D printer technology. It's nice to dream, but dreams have their place.

No, but you can use the parts created by the 3D printer to make forms for injection molded plastic and dies for cast metal. And for something sophisticated with a lot of precision parts (like a car), printing the forms for the assembly line directly from the model, rather than trying to carve each one by hand will save you a LOT of time and money when trying to take something from model into production.