Lost PLA works just as well, but yes printers can extrude wax. There have been DIY versions, and there are commercial ones as well. Shapeways uses commercial wax printers to do lost wax casts of prints commercially. Just upload your file to em and they will give you a silver version of your file !

So your point is..because paper documents have gone out of fashion...all physical objects are also useless? Or do you think paper printers aren't cheap and ubiquitous ? I built a 3D printer, and I don't print toys/models.

I broke a wheel on my dishwasher? I just drew one up and printed it, good as new. I broke a handle on my fileting knife..I printed one nicer than the original which has a fish gut scooper on the handle. I've printed brackets for my truck, pieces for the printer itself, and if I got really enterprising, I could use the printed plastic to make a lost-plastic casting and cast myself metal versions of anything I wanted. (See here: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ )

My printer was under a thousand start to finish but that was self built so a lot more work than something you just unbox. (Mendelmax 2.0 from makerstoolworks.com if anyone cares(no affil))

Anyways, does it make pure financial sense? Maybe, maybe not. Does the ability to make any physical object that fits within my printers dimensions within a few minutes or hours make it worth it for me? Definitely. Some things take weeks when you need them now, sometimes you need to try 10 versions of something before it would make sense to pay for a final high quality one to be made. Sometimes its an object not important enough to spend the time and money on if you need to send away for it, but it would be neat to have. There are a million reasons I think 3D printers can work for the average Joe and see regular use.

Actually "canadian bacon" does not come from the belly. It comes from the loin on the back of the pig. Plain ole bacon is pork belly bacon, which is the same here in Canada or in the USA (Though if you go elsewhere in the world, just asking for bacon often gets you back bacon).

Actually while the 3GS didn't seem to bring much to the table, it was one of the more worthwhile upgrades in the iPhone line.

The 3G had the exact same specs other than 3G as the original iPhone. So it was really behind, especially on memory capacity. The 3GS was night and day, The keyboard was responsive, transitions very smooth, apps opened near instantly, etc. Far more difference than say the 4 and 4S.

I do 3D printing and talk a lot to the designers of the big printers. As mentioned above, you definitely don't want Blender, or any of those other surface modelling apps. They WILL work, but tend to suck for dimensional accuracy, and you can create weird crap that cant actually exist.

I think if money is no object, Solidworks is by far the easiest and most powerful thing you can jump into, with tons of resources on the net. If you can afford the price tag or are going to pirate it anyways, Solidworks is great.

The mendelmax series of printers is designed by maxbots. He personally uses Alibre. He says it does a lot of what solidworks does, and with some caveats, thinks that for the 99$ it is a great tool and all you'll ever need for basic 3D modelling. Depending on your patent stance, 3D systems owns a shit ton of patents on 3d printing in general and they don't hesitate to use them to close down infringing competitors. This may sour you.

If you want a fairly nice option that is getting nicer every day, FreeCAD is obviously free, open source, and is a fairly nice tool. Obviously no Solidworks, but the price is right!

And the last but certainly not least is OpenSCAD. You write your 3D models like programs, and it will render them. This allows some very cool time saving things, but it is obviously a bit less visual, so it depends on how you think, design, etc, and what your background is. Many of the things you will make in OpenSCAD will end up being parametric as well, making resizing and changing things somewhat easier. That being said any of the above tools can create parametric designs.

Anyways good luck, I love 3d printing, and would love to get a mill some day! Or maybe just start casting my prints using the lost PLA method: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/

Have fun!

Yeah up north here working in the oil fields, your diesel needs to have a positive air shutoff, which will kill a diesel even if the fuel keeps getting supplied (because H2S in the air will make it keep going I guess). If I ever got my own diesel I'd probably have one installed.

Actually in Canada, "Glucose/Fructose" is just BS to hide the fact that it is also HFCS. No difference from USA sweetener.

Maybe. Almost any recyclable plastic explains what kind of plastic it is with a number referencing the type.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/recycling-symbols-plastics-460321#slide-1

Here is a page with pictures explaining some of them.

If you would have opened it you would have seen they tried both. Weed whacker line was the stuff they used as non-3d-printing nylon.

It has to be my favorite. It is too bad it doesn't get updated much anymore.

http://pbfcomics.com/

Crap I'm a dummy. Committed to writing no less.

I'm thinking of Farcry 3, not Crysis 3. They shared an engine (Though modified) and I mixed them in my brain.

I stand by the fact that I haven't played any of them though.

On private torrent sites at least. Can't find it on TPB.

Just download it yourself and see if you can run it.

IF I had pirated it and played about half the campaign already (which I haven't I'm too moral!), I would say it runs perfectly on my system. Quad core i5 2500k and Geforce 670, but that is fairly high end, no idea how it would run on a lower one. Or mine..since I haven't played it.

You get 100% of that from having a dog.

When I come home he SPRINTS for the door and I've never seen anyone happier to see me. When he was so sick he could barely lift his head and had to be put on an IV, he depended on us utterly and it was so sad to see.

The only thing missing from what you said is the 'brought someone into the world' stuff, which is just your biological animal side driving you to have children. But you're not an animal.

With the dog, he will never grow up and get hooked on heroin, or commit suicide, or keep me up all night wondering if he is out getting knocked up, etc etc.

I think if raising your child is the most important thing you will ever accomplish, you are just passing the buck on doing things of true importance yourself.

Imagine Tesla had married and had a child rather than fathered the electrical system we use today. Which would have been more important?

Or if Alan Turing had had children rather than fathering computer science as we know it ?

Heck Einstein had a son, but many reports show him getting ignored quite a bit along with the wife (They later divorced), and IMO Hans Einstein is hardly the most important thing Albert Einstein produced.

We can't all be Turings or Teslas, but it doesn't mean that raising a child is the most important thing anyone with children can do, there is a lot one can contribute on their own. IMO it mostly seem that those with children wanting to contribute important things often must ignore their children to do it, which in essence makes it so if you DO have children, you are stuck in making them the most important thing, rather than contributing greatly yourself.

Fine if it is your choice but it is certainly not mine, nor the choice of many if the story is accurate.

Maybe with less having children we will start having those few geniuses among us better able to exploit their brains towards science and mathematics and we could maybe see a few more large leaps in the state of the art which is so rare these days.

I owned the S3 from when it came out until last month, and I much prefer a 4S or 5 iPhone to it. Mostly a matter of preferring iOS though. I like having cloud sync for my stuff, Apple TV playing movies and music on my stereo system/TV with the touch of a button, etc. I'm probably just used to iOS, but I keep trying Android and it keeps annoying me and I end up back with iOS.

The S3 hardware is nice, but I don't see how it is six years ahead of an iPhone 5.