Never did - here's the Wikipedia about the Indiana Pi Bill. The crackpot proposed a bill that would acknowledge his collection of R33lY k3wl mathematical discoveries and let Indiana schools teach them free (in return for royalties from other user, if I'm reading it right), it snuck past the Indiana House, and a Professor Waldo told the Indiana Senate how bogus it was. It was close to passing there anyway, but one senator pointed out that it's not the Senate's job to establish mathematical truth. And now you know Where Waldo Was.

Back in the 60s, my father-in-law ran a weekly paper in his small town. It eventually got shut down by the police on some bogus excuse; the actual reason was that he wasn't just writing that the mayor was taking bribes, but had the bad taste to say who they were from and what for. Corruption does also exist in the US, and so does censorship. (I didn't see much censorship when I lived in New Jersey, though - just corruption.)

The Iraqis got their chemical weapons from the US for use against Iran. The US still hasn't destroyed their own CBW program products (though they do occasionally retire old unstable chemical weapons, as they've done recently.)

And both the US and Russians still have their hoards of smallpox, pretending they need to keep them to develop vaccines in case the other side uses theirs to attack, even though cowpox ("vaccinia") is good enough for a vaccine and not good enough for a weapon.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons (and India has the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Bombs as well), but aside from their border conflicts around Kashmir (for which the nukes make war less likely but more risky), their big invasion problem is non-governmental forces like Taliban, for whom nukes are really no use at all.

And Israel, of course, has the bomb (probably also the hydrogen bomb), but you're not allowed to say that in discussions about whether Iran can make one also. Wouldn't be a total surprise if the Saudis had it too.

How do you say "Don't believe anything you read on Wikipedia without checking the citations " in Hindi?

FTFY

If you have a business use for what they can print today, you already have one, and are likely contemplating buying a better one. If you have a personal use for the parts they can print, you probably already own one. And even if you don't have a real use for them, you may have one as a cool toy. But not everyone is going to buy the same toys as you.

Once they get a lot more capable (maybe not Star Trek replicator capable, but substantially better than they are now) then they'll become ubiquitous. Until then, not everyone needs one. I'm thanking you now for being an early adopter, but don't expect me to join you yet.

The problem is they're too limited. They have to get more capable, not faster, in order to meet my needs. If they can insert circuitry, maybe I can print things that are somewhat more useful. As of right now, I have needed exactly one 3D printed thing (a battery holder for an electronic project, which a friend provided gratis.) But at no point in the last five years have my needs for small plastic things added up to the $300 price of a Simplebot, let alone a printer with better quality, resolution, size, or capabilities.

Maybe you have kids who need thousands of plastic army men. Maybe you are in a business where fabricating prototypes is valuable to you. Great for you, I'm glad you have a use for one. Hopefully you'll help drive volume so the costs come down even further. But as they stand today, they're too expensive for anything I need, and would take up more storage space than I want to waste on a toy.

It has nothing to do with thinking big or small. I'm sorry you can't imagine a scenario different from your own experience.

whereas cruise couldn't be used below 50mph.

What? I've owned or driven dozens and dozens of cars and I've never encountered a higher low end limit than 25mph for cruise control, many work at 15 or 20 mph.

None at all. Drivers aren't that stupid, and still maintain enough control over their car to react appropriately.

You, however, might be so stupid that you'd slam on your own brakes to 10 MPH just to make another idiotic point, at which point you get rear-ended by an 18-wheeler who is unlucky enough to be following you. Fortunately, there is only one you, so the gene pool will be thinned out to the point where this situation won't repeat.

I simply don't need a bunch of small plastic tchotschkies, no matter how fast I can print them.

There's a big difference between uranium and a working hydrogen bomb. The US won't use nukes unless someone else detonates one first.

Ford has had that for years now. It's called 'Adaptive Cruise Control', and uses radar to maintain a preset minimum following distance.

I have it on my 2011 Ford, and while it's nice, it can only be set to following distance, not time. I want to set it for a two second gap, but my choices are 22, 44, or 66 yards. It's too close for high speeds, but too long for low speeds.

(sorry, Dr. Ford, not Broad)

Devil's Advocate here, but maybe the reason is that all kinds of data is out in public, and some of it is likely flawed. Maybe there's a paper that theorized that you could set a Dewar's flask of liquid hydrogen next to an A-bomb to get an H-bomb. But Dr. Broad is a respected authority, and if he says "we did it this way" without mentioning the Dewar's flask idea, a rogue state would know what not to try.

Remember, these guys get about one shot to get their test explosion right, because in about an hour after a successful test of an H-bomb by anyone the US considers a threat the USAF is going to be raining actual working H-bombs on their entire nuclear program, with a few diverted to cover the presidential palace, the parliament, and essentially every researcher and civilian within a 20-km radius of the aforementioned targets. The US will not tolerate a new state of MAD with a new non-Western-approved government.

When I'm talking on the phone, the timer for the screen-lock should NOT be running. I frequently have calls that last more than 15 minutes, often set the phone down and use headphones during the call, and it's really annoying that after I hang up, the phone's locked. (If somebody else calls me when me phone's locked, locking when the call's done is fine, but not when I'm the one who made the call or the phone was unlocked when the call came in.)

I'm running 4.4.2 on a Samsung. The phone is provided by $DAYJOB, so they specify which locking options are available (face-unlock isn't), but otherwise it's pretty vanilla. The code used to require 8 digits, now it seems to be text-input instead; both require me to put on my reading glasses to unlock the phone, especially because the numerical unlocker was really bad at touch-screen control, so I had to look at every digit I pressed and count how many actually got detected. Keypress beeps help, unless you're trying to unlock the phone after silencing it, which I often do, but those have a non-zero time lag after the keypress before it notices it should beep, and you can't always tell 1 beep from N beeps. I can now use Swype, which I couldn't when the requirement was all-digits, but it's not much of an improvement since my password isn't a dictionary word, though I suppose I could set it to "qwertyuiop" or "asdfghjkl".