I live in a Midwest state and it's plenty civilized. We have a few military bases (literally, a few) which is true of the coastal states as well. Minimal defense industry, relatively large tech industry and huge medical industry (again, both true of most coastal states). We also sit equal at federal aid vs. taxes paid.

There are plenty of states that this does not hold true for, but the blanket "fly over states" bit is really rather droll at this point.

WTF, slashdot ate the top paragraph, sorry, let me try that again.

If a program can be sufficiently complex so as to create the program for the 3d printer to print the key with less than 5 dollars of effort, they could just as easily create tool paths for a CNC mill.

If you have to create the 3d printer program, well that's not any easier than creating the CAD drawing for the CNC machine. I can build a CNC mini-mill for 1500 dollars, so they are cost competitive (in relation to this topic) with the 3d printers also. Side bonus: steel key is much more resilient than plastic.

If programs can be sufficiently complex so as to create the program for the 3d printer to print the key with
If you have to create the 3d printer program, well that's not any easier than creating the CAD drawing for the CNC machine. I can build a CNC mini-mill for 1500 dollars, so they are cost competitive (in relation to this topic) with the 3d printers also. Side bonus: steel key is much more resilient than plastic.

Not as convenient, but it's not as if this is new. I have easy access to a CNC mill. Pretty sure I can make any key that a key cutter can create, given the original (or very good pictures with something for size reference) and a small chunk of billet.

As if. I assure you, they are all monitoring the ever loving crap out of each other for dirty laundry also. That's been going on even longer than they've been spying on all of us (though they certainly have always WANTED to spy on all of us).

I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I find it highly unlikely that the insurance companies will not immediately twist this to their benefit using Congress (and I firmly expect both parties to screw us over). It may work briefly, but they will find ways to force this to their benefit and our harm, while our government gladly helps them.

Perhaps that's a jaded view, but I cannot think of a singular example of government involvement, no matter how noble in intent, that has not ended this way. Can you?

I agree. The summary has some serious slant. This wasn't a class project, this was somebody screwing around building a "bomb" of sorts, on school grounds. That's pretty poor judgement. That said, this is a kid, and this level of punishment for something like this is way out of line.

Some good points, but do realize that a very large portion of those car fires are caused by oil, not gasoline. Make sure you include all your flammable petroleum byproducts in your damnation.

That was the "Coppermine". I believe they clocked as low as 500 (5x100) or 533 (4x133), actually. They did steal the Celeron (which already had onboard cache, albeit half as much) socket 370, though most required new chipsets (there were some mainboard manufacturers who setup older chipset equipped boards to run the newer chips; they were generally better also, the early Coppermine chipsets had some production and then other issues.

That's a great theory as long as WWIII happens before someone builds something better than the F22, at which point you are stuck with 5000 planes that suck.

You need to keep pushing technology and keep building enough cutting edge equipment to make it worthwhile for the industry to design/build it, but no more. Then the tech and designs exists in the case you need to spin up production. Otherwise, you're just gambling.

In fairness, the French complain about... pretty much everything.

Interesting, my company purchased ~400 1TB Seagate drives about 6 months ago for data storage arrays (RAID 6). We've had 3-4 failures so far. We must have better than average luck I guess. We replaced ~400 750Gb drives that were in place for a couple years in the same arrays, FWIW. Also Seagates.

Pretzel breading or just a simple flour breading?

Interesting. I know a couple guys that run their trucks on recycled transmission fluid (they buy used fluid and filter it, basically). It's bright red like heating oil. Lucky for them I guess, that they don't do checks like that up here.

Those look just like the buckets that I get transmission fluid in (from the tractor store). Transmission fluid is a petroleum product, and, in fact, will run a diesel engine just fine. I'd have no issues using those buckets to store/transfer diesel fluid.