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Comment Re:Consumers are right (Score 1) 302

That's just it. It's a niche tool for certain industries, specially design and engineering firms, who spend a day doing the CAD specs and can let something print over night to see if the latest revision of a design will work in a prototype. For those industries it's a godsend. I can see some garage inventor wanting one to tinker around with. For those purposes it's exactly the right tool for the job.

But for stuff that I often need around the house, it's easier and quicker to run up to the store for me than to print it myself.

Comment Re:Oh why not? (Score 3, Insightful) 313

I've said this before, the US Military does obliterating an opposing force quite well. Which serves well when the objective is the liberation of a territory from hostile occupation, where the US can go in, win, and then the local populace can quickly get things back the way it was. It does not do occupation very well nor really has outside of the Wester Hemisphere.

The exception being post World War II with the Marshal Plan. Which planning for that began in 1943 and by 1945 the government had managed to twist the arms of a lot of academics, economists, finance, and high ranking industry officials to spend two years post war to help rebuild western Europe.

Comment Re:This is one thing I love about it (Score 4, Interesting) 544

A friend of mine just bought a Tesla. As far as I know it maybe the only one in the St. Louis area. I recently bought a Chevy Volt. We were at an event and the topic came up. One of the people there asked me why I went with the volt. And the answer was fairly simple:

My wife's commute is 15 miles round trip a day. Maybe 20 if she does some afterwork shopping. So the vast majority of the time it's running on electric. But my Dad lives ~ 70 mile round trip from us. He's older and I'm usually out there once a week to check up on him or help him clean out gutters or whatever needs to be done around his house. I have farms that are 300 mile round trip that need seen after. That is certainly a problem with a Tesla.

Also my budget for a new car was between $25,000 - $30,000. With lower base price for 2014, tax credits, and GM card earnings the Volt fit in the price range and was a little bit smaller of a car than the Malibu Eco, which meant it fit in the garage better. (I really wish we had a 3 car garage, but...)

Finally, there are a dozen Chevy and GM dealers around the city. I'm not even sure there is somewhere here that can do work on a Tesla.

Comment Re:Without her permission? (Score 1) 367

It would be interesting because if this were to go onto an actual court battle I'm not sure the kid would win. There is a legal concept in common law called: In loco parentis. In a nutshell it gives institutions such a schools quite a bit of leeway as long as it doesn't "Infringe Civil Liberties" and in the United States we've ended up with the Tinker Doctrine. But that covers more of the limitation of Freedom of Speech in a school than other items.

But In loco parentis has longed been used to allow justification of locker searches. The argument being a parent is allowed to search the room of their child, therefore the school is allowed to the right to search the locker of a student. None of those cases have actually reached the Supreme court to really have a final ruling on where the lines are actually are as far as schools are concerned with In loco parentis. I don't think any schools want this court to make a ruling and set precedence about the limits of In loco parentis because Clarence Thomas has been a critic of the Tinker Doctrine in the past and school may lose a lot of their legal power over students if it ended up there.

Comment Re:The Big Data Crash (Score 1) 43

I think we've seen the shift away from Time Share 2.0 (What I call "Cloud Computing) back to applications hosted in house similarly to what happened with the adoption of the microcomputer (PC). I figured the shift would start occurring around 2015 - 2020 after a some major disaster or if companies and people suddenly realized they no longer controlled their data. Well it was the later with the NSA that is probably the catalyst.

And that's not saying that the "cloud" is all bad. I use services like iCloud to store my pictures and to sync calendars across computers, etc.. My wife and I use Evernote to share grocery lists etc.. But we don't keep things like financial information etc. in the cloud.

Comment Re:changed my view of it for the better (Score 2) 192

This. Back in Janurary a client of mine and I had a few meetings. He wanted their company phones to get a push notification every time someone filled out a form on his website. But during our conversation he talked about some friends of his who were into bit coin mining and said we should go into a venture. And I said no. I think I mined 4 bit coins through a pool once many years ago, mainly because I've always been fascinated by various distributed computing things over the past decade and was interested in seeing what they had done. But it was clear to me it was going no where, especially when I read about the ASICS and then all the shenanigans about those a couple years go.

Well when I delivered the solution to the push notification thing two weeks ago I asked him what he though about bit coins now. Apparently his buddies lost nearly everything, something like over a year's worth of coins, when Mt. Gox closed down. Not sure if he ever went in on a new rig with his buddies or not, but he knows I've done fairly well for myself owning and selling a couple of businesses in my young life. He's the the type where he's looking for the next billion dollar idea and will never get there. I look for ideas and projects that have a solid idea with realistic expectations.

Comment Re:Still worth it (Score 1) 276

We ended up Amazon Prime after me or the wife forgot to uncheck the box and were billed for it during the christmas holidays. We were ordering a lot during that period and it wasn't until a month later when we got the credit card statement that we realized it. Well we looked and quickly found Amazon Prime had everything we were watching on Netflix plus a few shows no longer available on netflix. So we cancelled Netflix and kept prime.

The biggest reason why we've kept it now is because my wife and I are both busy professionals now with young kids. We don't have a lot of time to shop and the two day shipping makes it convenient for a lot of things.

So for $99 a year we'll take the expedited shipping and as far as I'm concerned the streaming is just a nice bonus.

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