Apparently, they don't pay their waitresses enough to buy clothes. Bless their hearts.

How can you possibly remember all that? Are you maintaining some of these old industrial DOS systems? I can tell you from the top of my head what record label a rock song from 1970 was on, but I couldn't make an autoexec.bat or config.sys if you put a gun to my head without googling it. And I must have done it a thousand times back in the day.

Of course there are people using 4gig VRAM that aren't gamers or bitcoin miners. But they're probably not buying a 970gtx.

Redneck Heaven

Oh my. That's a real place.

You don't drive your Ferrari around at max speed all the time,

I do in Need for Speed Rivals, which brings us full circle back to VRAM and nVidia trying to get those people who just bought Geforce 970s to start bugging their parents (or wives) for a GeForce 980 because goddamit, they promised 4gig VRAM and now I may not be able to play Arkham Knight on Ultra and that makes me feel awful.

Yeah, but what if you got that really good looking waitress from the Tilted Kilt to finally go out with you and you told her your car could to 200 and you drive out the Bonneville Salt Flats and it turns out your expensive car runs out of horses at 175mph and you're looking like the world's biggest douche?

How are you supposed to recover from that, huh? DAMN YOU nVIDIA!

They just need to run himem.sys with the right parameters.....

You just gave me a little shiver when I read that.

. Probably 99.9% of users don't have applications or hardware to use more than half of that VRAM anyways

Sure they do. People who are buying the 970 are either gamers or dopey bitcoin miners, and the top tier (and most of the middle-tier) of new games will use 4gig VRAM. Who knows about the bitcoin mining because that's all nonsense anyway. But I'll bet their little programs that they run using $1 of electricity to get 50 cents in bitcoins use every bit of that 4gig VRAM. Because they've got nothing but time to deal with bitcoin mining and GPU performance since they dropped out of grad school and now dad keeps insisting that they be looking for work but how can they do that when they're mining bitcoins goddamnit, which is the future of money and then they'll never need a job because they'll be the ones with all the money and dad's Roth IRA is going to be worthless, watch and see. And if they could just get they're hands on another $1500 (you know dad probably has it), they could really get this bitcoin rig humming and then they'd be spending $1 of electricity to mine 75 cents worth of bitcoins.

Gamers on the other hand (like me) paid for 4gig of VRAM to get more p's and more frames-per-secondses, and by god, we deserve to get 4 gig of VRAM.

Indeed. 'Disruptive' would be Tesla coming out with a hatchback EV with a 300 mile range for under $20k (just to make it wildly disruptive).

Worst case this displaces some kit car builds, and the likely result is that the prototyping departments are already buying the printers for the major manufacturers to purchase themselves.

I'll add one more: The kit car. So long as it's assembled by the owner himself(though he can subsequently sell it intact, it's a bit like selling home-made firearms), it's not considered 'manufactured' and not subject to a lot of the rules.

If they can arrange it so the buyer is 'assembling' the car(even if that means the paperwork says he's renting the machine and buying only the feedstock/parts) as a legal fiction, they can dodge a lot of rules.

Yeah, but you can print an awful lot of things if you have that much power available...

Remember: Some 3d printers print in metal, concrete, tissue cultures, etc... Some of these require rather more power to run the 'print head'.

If the manufactured number is small enough, no crash safety testing needs to be done.

Depending on the number they're anticipating on selling and the amount of modification the individuals are doing, they could come under the line because they're just not selling enough of them or even, by legal trickery like 'renting' the machine to the customer who uses it to build his car(with help) and the amount of customization/design work the buyer does, every car each customer makes could be 'unique' enough to count separately and come under the limit.

Printed plastic isn't strong enough, but I wonder if this might find business applications? Vehicles with customized shells to accommodate specialized equipment? I'm thinking of everything from a slot for a generator on vans/trucks used on construction sites to a custom shell designed for a pizza oven to be inserted into a delivery vehicle for the ultimate in freshness.

'Street Legal' can mean many different things. In many cases this would effectively be a 'hobby car' - IE built by the owner, one-off, etc... In many states making one street legal is around a 10 item checklist - does it have brakes? Does it have functional brake lights? Can it turn? Functional turn signals? Windscreen, headlights?

Safety of the occupants of said vehicle is not really addressed, just that they aren't a rampant danger to the other people on the road.

Emissions can be tougher.

It ends up on the definition of 'manufactured', they may be utilizing a loophole which even auto makers exploit for things like their concept cars - one off cars are crafted, not manufactured. Ergo exempt from everything, but they have to actually be 'crafted', IE hand built in a one-off fashion.

With the 3D printer system they could be leasing the equipment and assistance to the buyer, who actually triggers the machine. Since his modifications make the vehicle one-off, built by him(technically), it's not 'manufactured' under the definitions.

Much like how you can buy a complete kit car that's also exempt. You just have to put it together.

...So much wrong with your statement.

1. Vaccines are technically not a drug.
2. The vaccine is, ideally, not present by the time you're exposed to a disease.
3. Vaccines are really 'training' for your immune system. It's like having soldiers shoot at silhouettes as part of their training, doing reaction drills, showing them example IEDs, etc... That way they'll be more effective in the field.
4. Viruses mutate quite naturally. By giving them fewer hosts you can actually slow the mutation rate.
5. Infection rate doesn't change much.

If all you have is the 'sniffles for a few days' I like to say you didn't have the flu, you had a cold.