"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.

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.

"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.

and fetzer valves

My Yamaha VStar 1300 speedometer reads 10% fast through it's entire range. I have been told that the size of the rear tire was changed right before production, and never corrected in the speedometer.

Scrap steel is purportedly going for $800 US per/ US ton according to http://www.scrapmonster.com/PricesCharts/Metals/Steel.aspx I think this is for bare clean steel. I know locally in the US midwest the junk yards are buying scrap steel + iron for $200 US per US ton. Based on this, the 10,000 british ton ship at $200 / ton is worth $2.2 million USD to a dealer who will put a lot of labor into tearing it down. Torn down into just scrap, I would say the ship is worth about $8.8 million. I don't think $2.2 million is completely out of line for a data center facility, but it would need a lot more capital to make it usable, and since a data center needs connection to the outside world, building one on a ship has little benefit, as there is no data cables in the middle of the ocean. On the upside, there is plenty of sea water to use for cooling.

Diesel fuel standards in the U.S. have improved starting in 2006 with the introduction of ULSD (ultra low sulfur diesel). ULSD will become mandatory in 2010. It is common now to see at large gas stations "truck" diesel for sale at the semi pumps and "car" diesel for sale at the car pumps. I believe the difference is the sulfur content. The US standards for emissions on diesel passenger cars are a bit more stringent than Europe (probably due to lobbyists). This makes many of the cars sold in Europe not eligible for import. Its also a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that most people know of diesel either from semi trucks or early 80's Mercedes that had poor acceleration, and took forever to warm up. In the late 70's GM made a line of diesel engines based on the famous Chevy 350 gas engine, and they were notoriously bad. Recently, Chrysler sold their "Common Rail Diesel" in Jeep Liberty's here. It had about the same horsepower, significantly more torque, and better fuel consumption compared with their V6, but it sold poorly and was discontinued. VW cars are becoming pretty popular here with younger, more affluent, environmentally aware people, so I think they have a chance with their new Jetta TDI. Unfortunately, people resist change, even in the face of logic.

That doesn't stop a number of people.

I work for / partially own InDesign, LLC (http://indesign-llc.com) that does exactly this type of contract product design. Located in Indianapolis, we have in house approximately 60 employees. Most are engineers, with many years of electrical, firmware, PCB layout, PCB assembly, test, and mechanical experience. We have done several camera related products, and a large number of our product designs include USB in some capacity. We can do just hardware and mechanical if you have firmware resources available. We can do quick low volume prototypes, or design for and work with an outside third party manufacturer for high volumes. Feel free to respond to my email address above, or contact one of our account managers from the InDesign website to learn more about our capabilities.