Yes, the ruggedness is the main priority. Once a piece of hardware is certified and flight-tested, you have so much invested in the computer design that you don't want to just throw away the design because there are faster chips for sale.

And there's the question of whether the extra processing power is beneficial for the task at hand. Why pay more for extra processing power that isn't used anyway? There's likely a finer degree of control and timing now, but it's not like reentry physics has gotten more complicated in the past 12 years.

Sounds like someone spammed the system.

Airbus has many plants around the world building parts for them. Sometimes air is the best way to go. If it had to go by boat, you have a lot of money invested in airframes stuck on a boat for a month or two. Assuming you didn't need custom cargo ships, I don't think those fuselages can fit in a container.

Indeed, Comcast is trying to throttle people that use more than a third of a terabyte a month.

There are a lot of factors that affect fuel mileage, but it's been suggested that the ECM can detect whether they're on a standardized emissions or efficiency test and change the settings accordingly. I wish I remembered where I had seen that article.

Well, knowing that amount of information about the children extends well to the parents.

The organization response does appear to be tone-deaf. I wouldn't care if they had perfect security. I care about what they're going to do with the information.

Without the glamor of our own human transport though.

Yeah, there's been problems, and there is increasing budget pressure. It seems NASA is the only government organization that actually get consistently cut. I kind of agree with Ares I getting cut, it was a boondoggle and suffing some problems that weren't well-publicized.

How is that not disturbing?

I wonder if you're citing end of sales with OS X "died" dates, not end of support. End of support (updates, etc.) is different from no longer offering for sale.
For example, OS X 10.7 still seems to get security updates. Going by end of sales, Windows XP "died" June 2008.

Ars Technica just did an article suggesting that 10.6 isn't getting security updates anymore. The same article says 10.7 just got an update too.

So your figures for OS X might be exaggerated. That said, you're correct that XP has gotten unusually long support.

3D printing is a pretty poor name. It's all additive techniques, of which there are at least six major types, I think. And they go from inexpensive hobbyist machines to over a million dollars.

They're useful technologies, but I think people are getting ahead of themselves. The focus should be on doing things that couldn't be done as well before, not making existing things, but more poorly and more expensively and thinking that's going to change the world. There are some uses though, tor example, I think GE has an turbine engine injector design that's now one piece instead of 23 pieces when done with conventional machining. In the GE case, it's a benefit, less complexity, less weight. Making a plastic tape measure with plastic tape, that looks like a waste of material & time.

Yeah, metric drill bits are harder to find. I generally use number & letter gauge drills and just use the closest one. For my needs, the tiny difference is negligible. But I don't make aerospace & government parts, if so, then I'd use the specified size. A lot of cities seem to have a nearby machine tool supplier (there's two in my nearby mid-sized city), and they'll sell you just about any variation of metric tooling you want.

The Peachy won't make that, it is too small.

The consumer accessible UV printers don't do flexible items yet. I don't know what method the Connex uses, I guess it makes sense it's UV. So it may be a matter of waiting for the material technology to go down in price. The current cheapest I've seen is the material costs $50 a liter for a rigid material, and that material isn't very good that I've seen.

The technology is overhyped, A 3D printer makes you a product designer any more than a laser printer didn't made you a newsletter editor in the 80's.

One other reason I say that is when I see how fashion designers design their ridiculous stuff and "3D print" it. To suggest that people want to wear a fused plastic dress and call it high fashion is some serious encroachment on the story of the emperor's new clothing. Some of the items are a giant shoulder thing that might as well be an oversize tiara. Some of the works make the British Royal family look sane.

Outside of some niches, it's still mostly a rapid prototyping technology. That's what I use it for.

Yeah, after a certain point, the network effect takes over. That doesn't answer how Facebook got to be big enough for network effect to dominate. Or maybe network effect started at the beginning, because it was school-by-school.

In fact, MySpace is only about 6 months newer, and I think was dominant for a while. It seems like maybe Facebook grew from people becoming dissatisfied with MySpace. I don't think we have seen a similar service growing considerably from dissatisfied Facebook users.

We used to have social centralization, the difference now is that there are a lot more choices. Decades ago, it might have been "everyone watching the same channel", a bit before that, "listening to the same station".

Still, I'm not convinced that wireless will necessarily be a competitive solution to getting internet to the home, except as a second tier option.

Even if wireless can eventually get you 100x more data than current wireless, future fiber & cable will probably also be 100x that of current fiber and cable. Expectations & demands will probably scale up such that wireless might still not be good enough for home internet access except for a small segment of the population, or those that just simply don't have any choice. Already, I'm seeing comments from people saying that 6/1 Mbps is holding them back.