Fantasizing about new ways to charge customers more money for the same crap is just CEO fap material and not much more. If his dream ever does come to pass you can bet one thing. I'll be downloading the biggest, most expensive version from somewhere other than where that bastards cash register is located and so will plenty of other people. On the other hand if he'd figure out the price point necessary to get more people to want to buy it he might see more customers and more dollars.

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?

Without making any kind of statement about which "side" might be right or wrong this is exactly how the homosexual community will react the moment that someone, somewhere figures out what exactly makes a person homosexual vs. heterosexual and then announces that they can change them from one to the other. The first gay person, for whatever reason who gets "treated" will be attacked mercilessly for It by people who feel that he's betrayed their culture. Now whether that's ever possible I don't know and really don't care. Gay people surround me at work and at home and it doesn't affect me in the least bit. The only thing I want them to be able to do is be happy and enjoy their lives. I don't think it's a sin or a problem at all but someone will and if they find a gene that can be changed or a spot in someone's brain that can be modified in some way to "fix" them they will and then all hell will break loose. I think it's just human nature.

We all did. Each and every one of us. It's impossible to resist and at the same time it doesn't work nearly as well if you don't do it.

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.

I can't figure out why that isn't obvious to everyone. I've even seen it rendered into an "easy to forward to all your paranoid friends on facebook" picture captioned "When a boot is on your throat it doesn't matter if it's the left one or the right one" and still there are people so wrapped up in their side being the correct one that they can't see past "Obama" or "Fox News". This is bigger than both parties.

I could have written this post nearly word for word it's so close to what I think about Path of Exile. Awesome game that becomes tiresome as you get further into it. Normal was a blast, Cruel was less fun but I made it through still enjoying myself. Merciless was like I hit a wall and didn't want to go on. I made it to level 74 and just lost interest in it because..... "Fuck grinding"?

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.

And the United States is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the USSR....err "Russia" into radioactive ash. For crying out loud are we really going to do all of this again? Why?

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".