At the prices medical-grade titanium goes for, it is most certainly not wasted. The machined Ti is reclaimed (or at least it would be if I were in charge). Stating that there is 80% waste is marketing hyperbole. A fairer comparison would count the unsintered powder in the 3D build machine, and would end up being unfavorable to the 3D process.

But if you're in the business of making replacement body parts, you might well be starting with a generic titanium casting (or one of a series of different sizes) and machining it down to fit. Artificial hip joints are sometimes made that way.

Don't get me wrong, 3D printing makes a lot of sense for highly-custom items... although one needs to worry about the potential infection and reaction issues given the inherent porosity of sintered material that give purchase for pathogens, and lots of surface area for irritants that will slowly leech out.

The nice thing is all the waste powder can be reused without having to melt it down, so there's almost no waste.

How big of an advantage is that, though? Melting down metal to reuse it is really easy, much easier than with other materials like glass or plastics. Especially in the case where you control the environment and can be assured of its purity, vs. collecting scrap metal or something (but even collecting scrap metal is profitable).

Trusted by whom? I don't think there's any requirement that the purchaser of the device trust the "trusted" data extractor. IIUC it could become trusted before the customer ever received the device, or anytime it's in for service.

So this *probably* means that J. Random Hacker can't access the information. If the assertion is true. It doesn't say anything about Apple, their employees, or anyone they share information with...transitivly.

Unfortunately, no, I wouldn't "expect people to be more sensible than that, especially in the post-Snowden era", even though this actually isn't the post-Snowden era. He's still around, and still occasionally releasing new tid-bits.

I normally expect people to be short-sighted, and to have little memory of history. I regret that I'm rarely disappointed.

Not sure about that particular case, but there are some legal requirements that, I believe, entail controls that are not user controlable. Things like frequency, signal encoding, etc. Those seem liike reasonable constraints, so long as we aren't using spread spectrum, which, IIUC, is illegal.

Given that, modem isolation is probably the just and reasonable approach to take.

Has the problem been fixed? If not, then it's still reasonable information to share.

And nobody has claimed that the problem has been fixed.

The problem is that the laws that already exist aren't enforced. It's a secondary problem that they are so written that it's relatively easy to weasel around them, but even the existing laws aren't enforced, so adding new laws (that aren't enforced) wouldn't do any good.

One that keeps working when they change versions?

There actually are LOTS of components in a position to do that. You could even run a network monitoring app. But the browser is one highly visible one that most people already have installed.

ummmm.... Isn't that what I said? That society is a way to change what fittest means?