The problem with lost-wax and other molded metals is that the fatigue strength is much lower than forged or machined parts. Tolerances are also much looser because the tolerances from each step - wax positive, ceramic negative, poured positive, etc. add up. Fatigue life might not be an issue for a model airplane engine, but it is a safety issue for anything carrying humans.

Intelligent Creation

Robot Hell???

Sounds like 'ye old renaissance fair on a "truck" pulled by a team of coldbloods and accompanied by pipes and drums. Are pipes and drums patentable if they're 3D printed on a truck? This is so confusing...

3D printing on a truck using a computer that is connected over the internet to a one-click "virtual" electronic shopping cart.

When thinking about tech stocks, I like to use a "Boeing" rule as a measuring stick. The globe.com is valuing Uber at 40 Bn (1/3 of Boeing). Boeing had 90.8 Bn in revenue for 2014. Uber claims to be able to generate 10 Bn "soon" Business Insider, but conservative estimates are closer to 2 Bn. So revenue is somewhere between 1/45 and 1/9 of Boeing. I know the comparison is a bit apples (not the computer) to oranges, but Uber's overvalued IMHO. Especially considering that Uber has almost no physical assets and Uber is a privately held company with no public numbers.

Time for an empathy lesson. Imagine every time you went outside, you heard a lawn-mower sound. It came from a UAV operated via satellite feed from a foreign country on the other side of the earth. That foreign country claims their motivations are honourable, but you have your doubts. Sometimes that UAVs fire missiles or drop laser-guided bombs, usually targeting "terrorists". You don't like the "terrorists", and maybe they murdered your brother and are demanding protection money, so you are glad when they get killed, but every so often the UAV- operators make a mistake and target the wrong guy. You're out of a job because your shop got destroyed by accident and they killed your neighbours children while they were playing soccer behind an old shed. So you decide its safer to stay indoors and hope that it all goes away.

That's how the military-industrial economy works. Case in point, Iraq. We defeated the Iraqi army in 2003 and broke all their toys. We built a new Iraqi Army and supplied them with new weapons. ISIS came and looted most of those weapons. Now we're bombing the weapons we previously supplied. Then we'll sell whomever's left with some more weapons to replace the ones we bombed. Repeat over and over again...

I guess you'll lots of time to learn all the Irish folk dances.

I wish I had mod points. Chemical Rockets are probably almost as good as they're going to get in terms of efficiency, cost and reliability.

Russian speaking murikans?

Not much of a Linux expert, but enjoy playing with Slackware from time to time. It hasn't changed too much from an "usability" perspective and puts you in the drivers seat.

The time capsule should contain a magnetic anomaly that once unmooned reveals a black parallelepiped whose sides extend in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9 (1 : 2 : 3).

Maybe somebody here knows more about the system architecture of the "feathers" mechanism. From what I've read, the pilot only pulled the lever to unlock the surfaces, but we do not know what caused them to actually deploy. If they were computer controlled, it could be possible that a computer or sensor failure caused them to deploy early.

He was referring to space tourism, not the Space Shuttle. The interview was on CNN in 2012.