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Comment Re:Maker "movement" is just that (Score 1) 50

Or, real life for kids who missed shop class.

The "Maker" movement labeling really annoys me (and I'm still annoyed 'bout when when stackexchange changed the name of the Digital Fabrication beta in mid launch to some new age maker bullshit).

I build stuff, both by hand and using tools, I share what I make and learn, including the files ( http://www.shapeoko.com/projec... ), I volunteer as best I can ( http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/i... ), and try to improve how we document and build machines (when the Shapeoko 2 was featured in Popular Mechanics less mechanically inclined people became aware of it and found traditional assembly diagrams hard to read, so we had to update the diagrams so as to make it obvious where "hidden" parts were located: http://docs.shapeoko.com/conte... ).

I'm not a "maker", I'm just a guy w/ a workbench at one end of the laundry room and a couple of CNC machines and 3D printers scattered around the rest of the house.

William

Comment Consider population density (was Re:Still sucks) (Score 1) 136

Land area of France: 640,679 sq km
Land area of U.S.A.: 9,826,675 sq km ---- even removing Alaska (1,717,854 sq km) one still has a much larger area to cover

Population density of France: 119.37
Population density of U.S.A.: 34.06

It's not surprising that a service which requires one to build infrastructure is more expensive in the U.S. than in less densely populated countries --- and that's w/ a significant portion of the country still not having service.

Comment Good enough for Knuth and TeX (Score 2) 492

The only software tools which I have found as reliable and pleasant to use as TeX (which is said to be so full of cutting edge techinique to have revealedbugs in every Pascal compiler used to compile it) were WriteNow (~100,000 lines of assembly) and Altsys Virtuoso (Objective-C w/ NeXTstep frameworks).

Comment Re:Why can't I buy an aftermarket chassis? (Score 1) 229

I was very sad when NeXT went under and I couldn't get a third (second upgrade) motherboard for my Cube.

Have you considered designing / machining the parts? There are replacement laptop hinges which are pretty affordable --- if you picked one from a recent model it'd probably still be available if you needed a replacement.

Comment We're supposed to be the good guys (Score 1) 181

We need to limit our actions to those which:

  - increase security
  - improve communications and transparency
  - improve access

Monitoring communications has to come after that --- the whole point to a society is to maintain and increase human dignity --- any action by a government which doesn't do this is an absolute travesty and should be prosecuted as a criminal act.

Comment It will empower the people who own/direct it (Score 1) 417

the people who are paying for the development and paying the power bills. Everyone else will be viewed as just a resource to be exploited.

Fictional take on this --- Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ --- available free on-line: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

The first half seems all-too-likely, the second, likely impossible.

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