I think the technology is interesting but what is the purpose of a VTOL rocket? VTOL aircraft make sense because you can use them for rescue and military operations were a track may not be available. But rockets are just for sending payloads in to orbit. For reusable space craft, unless I see numbers proving me wrong, I think vehicles that use "passive" methods to come back (gliding) like the space shuttle or the Virgin Galactic prototypes seem a lot more economical(dollars/payload weight/launch). Even if the objective is to use VTOL craft for landing on another planet/asteroid/moon and then use the same craft to come back you still need fuel and infrastructure.
Because, at least for me, it's hard to imagine a use, it's hard to get funding as well. I guess the reason SpaceX is spending time and money on these rockets is not because they are actively interested in VTOL vehicles either, but just because they want to benchmark the engines and sensors, so that they can use some of this tech on more useful products.

As a Russian who lives in Japan this really is pissing me off. If they aren't counting Imperial Russia Era then they shouldn't count Imperial Japan Era either. Democratic Constitutional Monarchy Japan is only about 63~64 years old.

Yeah. The deadly metal 3d printer thing is more like a joke than any real danger. Not only our company is installing in a well ventilated area but we also have a sensor that goes off on the entire building in case the O2 concentration goes bellow 18.5%(which is still safe). However according to the experts installing the printer, if by any chance Murphy's Law decide to work and you have simultaneously, ventilation power failure, sensor failure and uncontrolled Argon leakage and the O2 concentration goes bellow 16% you're as good as dead, because once you breathe the Argon in it seems you can't breathe it out. The chances of this happening are lower than me winning the lottery, but we all know printers attack when we expect the least.
As for the printer model, it's a EOSINT M (for metal, don't remember the exactly model number, but I have the feeling it's the same one you have. According to the sales company there are only two other places here in Japan that have this printer) and we are also getting the EOSINT FORMIGA (for polymer, also uses a CO2 laser but doesn't need Argon, BTW, based on the sample models they gave us this is by far the BEST plastic 3d printer I've seen in my life)

It's not just cheap 3D printers. My workplace has whole collection of professional 3D printers at our disposal: multiple Dimension ABS printer models, an Eden Acrylic printer(hate this one in particular), and a couple of Vantage poly-carbonate printers and we're getting ourselves ready for a million dollars DMLS metal 3D printer. The plastic ones have a malfunction at least once every 4~6 months. The metal one can literally kill you if the Argon gas, used to avoid metal oxidation at high laser temperatures, leaks(death by asphyxiation). 3D printers are just another type of printers after all. Anyone would be just fooling themselves if they think that Stratasys products are more human friendly than the usual HP/Xerox/Cannon/Brother products.

Now back on the original topic. I think the technology is ready for consumer level. But being a consumer product doesn't necessarily make it a mainstream product. 3D printing is useful for people that know how to intelligently use it and already have a specific set of objectives in mind. The average Joe has no business with 3d printing. Buying a 3d printer for an occasional toy/statue that you casually downloaded from the internet is just not worth it. 2D printers succeeded in the mainstream market because everybody NEEDS to print school reports, tax reports, CVs, invitations, tickets, pamphlets, etc.
On top of that 3D printing was(and still is) just immensely overhyped by the internet. Blogs/News websites/Comments and people who never even used a 3D printer before just treated the tech as if it was the ultimate home appliance: "buy a 3D printer and print everything else you need". For example another currently overhyped tech field that will suffer the same "disappointing" effect is VR: occulus/omni/hydra VR paraphernalia is useful for some applications but are far from the "holy grail" of gaming/computing for dozens of reasons. Eventually I believe all these techs will become essential parts of daily life but there are still many obstacles to overcome, from product features and services to user mentality and place in the society.

Someone please mod this guy up. For some reason I never have points when I want them.

Hopefully these guys are the next target. I LOVE their sashimi. Easily my favorite food ever. Eat at least once every week. Too bad according to some projections, they are supposed to go extinct in the next 10 years. Hopefully this tech also helps with the whaling problem as well. I don't like whale meat(and even living in Japan I'm yet to meet a single person who eats whale other than public school lunch) but for some reason Japan loves to kill them.

1) Software can't be patented argument is a lazy and misleading argument. I can describe any piece of hardware(electronics, mechanisms, chemical formulas, etc) as a set of numbers and formulas. Either we get rid of all patents or we make the system harder/more intelligent(no more slide to unlock crap). I don't care which we do as long it makes the lives of us engineers easier. But using misleading arguments do NOT help our cause.
2) Processor architecture is much more than the instruction set. The way interrupts are triggered, the way clock is distributed, the way the pipeline works, how many instructions per clock it can do, along many other factors that change how the actual instructions are arranged. So even if a certain instruction happens to have the same binary for different architectures, depending on the state the processor is it may not work because the internal implementation is different.
3) Processor architectures(and any chip) by themselves are not patented but instead copyrighted(the circuit pattern is basically a set of images). The circuit blocks that compose these chips and architectures may or may not be patented.

Unfortunately that is not how things work. Unless Sony decide to open-source, or at least, release the binary for someone to reverse engineer them, having the PS4 using BSD+AMD combo will have no impact on the open development scene at all. It's going contribute to the BSD driver library as much as OSX, which is also based of BSD, did, i.e. nothing.
Either that or someone jailbreaks the PS4, dumps all it's system files and starts reversing.

Another nice feature would be protecting only patents actually used in products made by the inventor or its partners, in order to take out those so called patent trolls that don't produce anything. If in the future the inventor actually decides to use the patent in an actual product and there is someone already using it there could be some sort of predetermined fee. Obviously I'm oversimplifying the huge problem, but something must be done about those parasites.

Mac is already based of BSD.

Sony is a group with hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of employees. In terms of structure/complexity they are bigger than Apple, MS and Nintendo together. Sony has lot of good and lot bad mixed together. To judge such cluster**** based on a handful of experiences(regardless of being bad or good) is just impossible. Also it's important to notice that Sony is under a new direction(Kaz Hirai, since 2012) and being completely restructured(One Sony plan). Judging the new administration based on the older is just unfair. Who knows Kaz may help Sony like Jobs helped Apple in the 90s.

While I agree with most of what you said I'm pretty sure this is false, at least for most part. During E3 they introduced the Japanese guy who designed the PS4 case. Also there is an interview with a Gearbox programmer(forgot his name) he says that they needed 8GB(instead of 4GB) or the PS4 would be dead. So they sent a guy to Japan headquarters in order to get a new devkit. Finally, the new controller was also designed by a Japanese team (there is an Engadget article about it with some AR demos). I don't think the PS4 was entirelly developed in Japan, but most of it's main features came from there. I have no idea about the exact date the PS4 will be released, but it makes sense releasing it first in the West because the holiday season. The Japanese release will follow in a few weeks max(as it's still supposed to come this year) so this fact is not really relevant.

He is talking about the opposite process, akin of the Hackintosh project, i.e., running the PS4 OS and games/apps on your standard PC.

I apologize for the cursing. Nothing personal, sorry. Optical media may suck for some mainstream applications, 480p movies from retail stores being one of them. But the way you wrote your post made me believe the only reason disks are good for movies. Also not all optical disks are created equal. Blu-ray disks are considerably more scratch resistant than CDs and DVDs. Even between DVDs themselves, depending on the materials and burning methods you can have different reliability.

Thanks bro, but I think you should also educated yourself about something called CONTEXT. I know very well that tapes are pretty good media for long term storage and back up for today demands. But compared to a optical disk capable of 1PB storage, they'll lose in pretty much all aspects.

Nice job isolating a single sentence out of my entire post just bring up completely offtopic information just to make a fool of yourself. Congratulations.

Now that they got the procedure I hope they do that with Einstein's brain and, after that, let it rest in peace with the rest of the body. That is assuming that the cellular structure is still intact after half a century inside a jar. Then delete IBM watson and instead install the observed model along side an appropriate bio-physic-chemical engine on the hardware and we can finally enjoy the new age of singularity and no need to think anymore.