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Comment Re:Intensive properties (Score 1) 175

Even your justification falls far short as "purposes" and "properties" are very different things therefore "Intensive purposes" have nothing at all to do with "intensive properties".

Does this mean puns on "intensive" that allude to the malapropism are necessarily inappropriate?

Comment Re:Currently 3D printing my own 3D printer (Score 1) 175

so you can make a 3D printer for $200 or so of electronics, plus getting a friend to print a set of the printable parts.

That's a good thing, so long as you live near someone with a 3D printer. Otherwise, it sort of reminds me of homebrew for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable, which is complicated by the fact that a lot of the methods to get homebrew booting relied on the fact that you have to use an already homebrewed console to set a PSP's battery serial number to -1 or install FreeMcBoot on a PS2 8 MB memory card.

Comment Intensive properties (Score 0) 175

There are times when "for all intensive purposes" is correct, such as when you're discussing properties that don't vary with amount or size of material. These "intensive" properties may include density or melting point of the plastic in a 3D printer's output, or percentage of population that owns a 3D printer. They contrast with "extensive" properties, such as the total number of 3D printers in operation, or the maximum size or weight of a printed object. (Read More...)

Comment Re:Currently 3D printing my own 3D printer (Score 1) 175

Really - it prints everything needed to make a printer that can print itself?

Current RepRap still needs some "vitamins", or non-printed materials.

Or is it like these "robotic" vacuum cleaners, that can merely clean small parts of a household that are just floors, so long as they are all on the same level? - Conveniently forgetting about all the other surfaces (and curtains) such as shelf-tops, stairs, behind the TV cabinet or under the cooker that collect crud, too.

I think the idea is that you'd put a Roomba on the floor of one room while doing the tight spots with a handheld vacuum cleaner in another room, to cut person time in half.

Comment Time to explain Goatse (Score 1) 175

Let me explain it as safe-for-work as I can: Goatse (Guy Opens Anus To Scare Everyone) is a not-safe-for-work photo of a man bending over and stretching his solid waste exit to resemble the cover of the "America's Border" issue of Time magazine [SFW].

Ob3DPrinting: Yes, people have used 3D printing to make sculptures of Goatse and Tubgirl [SFW with links to NSFW original].

Comment What Native American is supposed to mean (Score 1) 307

I don't think they should be called native American at all. They immigrated from Asia, as did others, some from Europe, some from Africa etc. Who cares? IMO anyone actually born in a country is "native", anyone born in another country are immigrants.

Then what's a better term for "people descended from people who were natives of North and South America in AD 1491, who had their land forcibly taken from them in European invasions from 1600 through 1900?"

Comment Ripe for contraction (Score 1) 266

We've decided to exit the health care business because the requirements to manufacture drugs that are no longer profitable has left us an unprofitable company.

Then the market might be ripe for contraction. Sell your assets to another drug company that will benefit from economies of scale or synergy or whatever the marketroids are calling it today. Then start a video game company or something.

Comment It's about who's doing the coercion (Score 1) 266

If you left it to the courts (which is what all Libertarian types like to do), you'd be decrying judges finding against doctors who prescribed under-tested products because that's not "free market" either.

Libertarian philosophy as I understand it is about coercion. A doctor knowingly or recklessly prescribing a health product that isn't right for a patient is coercing the patient. But if a doctor prescribes a product after weighing the risks and benefits, and a judge punishes the doctor for doing that because the FDA pulled the product from the market, the judge is doing the coercing, as was the product's maker who defrauded the FDA into pulling it in favor of the maker's new product.

They don't they just set the standards. Or should theree be no standards?

Let's just say that there are some standards willful violation of which shouldn't be a felony.

Comment Loudness race (Score 3, Interesting) 433

CDs were mastered without too much level compression until roughly the advent of the Discman and other portable CD players. The cheap op amps used these players couldn't drive headphones at a volume that overcomes outdoor background noise. So labels started using level compression to master their albums hotter. Pushing everything up to full scale meant kick drums no longer had any punch to them. By the time of Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ricky Martin's debut album, levels had become so hot that they were audibly clipping.

Comment Open them in Adobe Reader (Score 1) 75

Adobe's PDF reader actually renders every document properly, unlike native browser PDF readers.

I can't speak to Java applets (what still uses those?) But you can still download PDFs and open them in Adobe Reader. This lets you take advantage of the memory barrier that the operating system already enforces between firefox.exe and acrord32.exe.

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