"The lower receiver is the the 'body' of a gun, and its most regulated component. So 3D-printing that piece at home and attaching other parts ordered by mail might allow a lethal weapon to be obtained without any legal barriers or identification." This is true, but to print a receiver without a federal firearms manufacturing license is a felony. I can mill one out of aluminum without a 3d printer, it would last a lot longer, but that doesn't make it legal. In general, most "bad" things that people can do with a firearm, are already illegal.

Same here. Someday my 10 btc will make me rich beyond measure, you just wait.

I do this, and I thoroughly enjoy it. It will end pretty soon, though, once the cable conglomerates get any semblance of network neutrality off the table. Then they'll just make up some excuse to block or throttle Netflix, Hulu, and the rest. In fact, they don't even have to get involved in the whole NN debate; the data caps they impose will soon make it financially unfeasible to continue streaming any service other than their own, which will be overpriced and offer a poorer selection.

Ok, will do......Every time I've seen this topic come up though, someone with 5 digits will show up, then 4, then 3. I had a 5 digit one in the 80,000s and when I couldn't remember the login way back when, I let it slide and re-registered. Now I wish I had tried a little harder.

Don't be too sure about your Play store example. Unless something has changed in the most recent Play store version, the Play store will still bug you that an update is available even for apps you installed via another method. If the Play store app is pinging Google's servers checking for updates then Google definitely has the ability to know all of the apps you have installed on your phone, regardless of how they were installed.

You're mistaking the purpose of credit cards. They exist to make the issuing banks money. Why would seeing you close a high-interest card encourage me to offer you credit. You're not willing to be scammed by high interest rates, which means I won't be able to make money off of you.

Completely agreed. How did samzenpus decide this of all submissions should make the cut? The submitter is clearly quite uninformed and the question is far out of line with the thinking of the Slashdot community, even if it were reasonably formulated.

Next, please.

"You get what you pay for." This is absolutely correct, and is where much outsourcing goes wrong. I work for a company that does contract engineering or "outsourcing as a team". We are based in Indianapolis, speak English, answer phone calls, do our best to accurately estimate work, and are very up front about our areas of expertise. In almost all cases, I think we do an excellent job of representing ourselves, and what we are capable of. We have been in business for 15 years, are employee owned, and have almost no employee turnover. We currently have about 70 employees. We specialize in consumer electronics, medical, and industrial products, and do schematic design, mechanical design, ecad, mcad, prototyping, firmware development and testing. Many of our devices are Linux based, or on smaller parts run a custom OS developed in house. We are very strict in enforcing NDA agreements that we have in place with our customers. Being in this industry for so long, we receive lots of projects that have come out of failed business relationships with competitors. This highlights my main point, and that is that you must do business with someone you trust. If you are worried about "opening up core libraries", and hiding your IP from the software engineers you are paying, then you have the wrong partner. On the same token, we see a lot of trends in failed projects that come to us for repair after a failed relationship with a competitor. One of the biggest is that customers do not value or do not wish to pay for documentation. Without paying for a requirements document, and an architecture document, with review sign offs, there is nothing written down that says both sides agree on what is being produced. Many customers come to use thinking they have already done their architecture, and that they have all the details figured out. We find that in almost all cases, this is not correct. A 10 page document is not an architecture, and a 1 piece marketing blurb is not requirements. Another common failure is lack of communication. At a very minimum, an hour a week to meet and discuss progress is important. If either side has a problem with this, the relationship is in big trouble. I could go on and on, but it starts to sound like an advertising spiel. Virtually all of our projects end in success, and we work hard to hold up our side of the bargain. the counterpoint to that is that we are not "cheap". We are very talented, many of us have masters degrees in technical areas, and we generally do a lot more designs in a given time than most of our clients, so we grow experience faster with different vendors / libraries / platforms / parts / tools, what have you. We need to make a living, be able to pay our expenses, and be able to attract good talent, so we charge accordingly. Our project success rate, and the number of clients that return to us again and again justifies this. In almost all cases, I think that we end up saving our clients money, due to reducing their overhead of hiring and managing engineers, and our ability to get their projects done faster.

That's just not how the enterprise market works. As price goes up, generally complexity goes up, and therefore the need for support goes up. People don't generally pay $10k to solve simple problems.

The goal here is not to see any living organisms there as a portal to the past. It is to see any organisms who have manged to survive in an airless, water-filled lake buried under 3 miles of ice for millions of years. It is fairly likely that, if there are any living organisms there, they're going to have evolved in some pretty interesting ways.

I used it exclusively. For me it was the best place to find torrents that where properly categorized with many seeders and, most importantly, ratings and comments so that you could be confident in the files you were downloading. It was an aggregator of other sites so it had an extensive database. I had been using it since it's inception in 2005. I'll miss it dearly.

Even IF a company decides to ditch Windows, it may not be possible. Tons of web-based stuff, particularly in niche industries still only works with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. The Microsoft monoculture is so wide-spread that migrating away from it can make it difficult to do business.

and fetzer valves

"Never disbelieve the user" is right. One of my early tech support calls (many moons ago) was from a guy who claimed his computer rebooted every time he flushed his toilet.

Yeah. I figured he was yanking my chain, but you can't just hang up on people, so after humoring him for a few minutes we actually set up a tech visit.

We fixed him up, at least temporarily, by installing a UPS for his system.

He lived way out in the boonies and used well water and a septic tank. Turns out when he flushed, not only did his computer reboot, but his lights flickered for a moment, too. Flushing the toilet activated some power-hungry pump in his water system, and the draw was browning out his computer.