Hardly. This guy comes up with something cool, and I'm wary of the claim that it will somehow overthrow the existing system, mostly because to informed observers, the current system isn't actually unreasonable (mostly, anyway). There are good reasons behind all of the seemingly-insane details, but they're not as obvious as "some kid is missing a hand".

In fact, I actually have to give quite a bit of credit to the designer of this particular device. On his website, he's not encouraging kids to try the thing or making any claims that it's something particularly special. Rather, he's asking for help from experts to refine the design and turn it into something that is fully-tested and documented. If he can do that and still keep it printable (by end users or even trained technicians... either would be a help), then we'll have a real boon to the state of the art.

I wish him the best of luck, but I also recognize that the obstacles he faces are a bit more realistic (and i daresay more difficult) than fighting a conspiracy theory.

And I can tell you that nerve damage (especially around the fingertips) is important to glove manufacturers, especially concerning sporting gloves, where the risk of such damage is high with or without gloves.

As for watchbands, I actually do know a few people who've had allergic reactions to watchbands of various kinds, starting with myself. I can't wear a gold watch, because after a few hours my wrist turns red, and after an evening of wearing it my lower arm is covered in small red bumps. I have a lesser reaction to my gold wedding ring, but I've never bothered finding out exactly which part of the alloy it is that I'm allergic to. In discussions with others, I've met folks allergic to plastic and cloth watchbands as well as metals, some of whose allergies didn't show up until after months of use.

That's what insurance is for. Sure, it's a slim chance that I'll ever need a $40,000 medical device, but that's why I pay into the pool. If I ever do need it and don't have the cash lying around, my insurance provider does. If I never do need it, then my premiums went mostly to somebody else in the pool who did.

No, I'm saying that the cheapest options present more risks that have not been mitigated. I have no problem informing people of the risks they face, and I sincerely hope that a doctor would inform his patients of the risk associated with any treatment, regardless of the cost.

For a cane, it's a different matter. Canes typically do not have prolonged contact with the wearer and their well-studied risks do not often cause long-term problems once the adjustments have been made.

...and what is the actual risk of that slippery slope? Certainly it's nowhere near probable enough that we'd need to regulate clothing as tightly as medical devices. If you're working with high-energy devices, however, the risk posed by clothing is far greater. I don't recall exactly which jurisdiction requires it, but I know that every piece of clothing worn at my local nuclear plant must be cotton. Cotton burns, while synthetic fibers usually melt. Though often cheaper, synthetic clothes increase the damage from accidents enough to warrant that small amount of regulation.

By that time, the damage may already be permanent. That's one of the things that research would study before handing it off to an unsuspecting patient.

"Functional" prostheses are available for far less than $40,000, and typically are used temporarily while a primary device is being built or repaired.

....until they're dead because the airbag was stripped for resale and the seat belts were worn out.

In other words, you have no idea what a risk analysis is, but you follow the hacker mentality in thinking that you can do anything if you have the raw material and a tool to work it, without the need for actual expertise. As long as the stated objective is met, that's good enough, right?

Medicine doesn't work that way. Medicine (ideally) isn't about just meeting the primary target, but about improving someone's health. Sometimes, that means doing nothing, and occasionally it even means letting people die rather than making the rest of their life miserable. Throughout the process, every decision is based on risk. Every drug has a risk of side effects, every test has a risk of being erroneous, and even if a doctor performs to the best standards available, there is always a risk that their patient will die.

That's why we have the FDA. That's why we run clinical trials. That's why medicine costs so damned much, because someone has to do the research and find out what the risks are, before asking patients to commit their well-being to a new device.

So can you tell me what the long-term effects of wearing this $45 printed device are?

Is it weighted such that it pulls muscles awkwardly, causing pain after a few months of continuous use? Does the constant contact with skin cause any nerve damage? If worn during physical activity, does it create an additional risk of shattering or otherwise injuring the wearer or others?

Can you show test results indicating otherwise, even when the user may not have it attached properly? What resources are available so the user can be certain they're properly fitting the device?

Approved medical devices are expensive because they meet all applicable regulations, and have documentation to prove it. They've been reviewed and tested by experts in the field, who understand exactly what subtle problems to look for that are likely to cause harmful effects in the future. One of the primary principles of medicine is to do no harm. Can you assure patients that this 3D-printed model will be harmless?

Yes, you can buy a beat-up used car for $500. It will still accomplish the obvious goal of transporting you from point A to point B, but it's not going to be as good in the long run as a more expensive one.

Enabling the video camera or microphone won't actually help. You'd need both to determine if the user was actually using their phone, and the processing cost needed to perform that kind of recognition on a large scale would be so ridiculously expensive that it would undermine any additional benefit from the research.

Statistically, a user waiting 60 seconds before searching is uninteresting. It's an outlier, so the developers really don't care what happened. Far more useful would be an observation that 75% of users use the center enter key to submit queries, 20% use the mouse, and 5% use the enter key on the numeric keypad, combined with an observation that 80% of mouse users move the cursor around after a period of inactivity before clicking. To a design team, that means that the users' attention has shifted to typing, and they've forgotten where the mouse is. Perhaps the mouse should highlight in some way when it first moves...

Similarly, the actual content of searches doesn't matter from a UI perspective. If you're having trouble searching for something, it doesn't matter if you're looking for instructions to knit a sweater for a kitten, or the mixture used in the Oklahoma City bombing. On the other hand, the exact search text is useful to the folks developing the search engine, so they can put the most relevant results at the top of the list. Of course, the search engine team doesn't care about how long it takes the user to find their mouse cursor.

This leads to one of the most entertaining aspects of the whole privacy debate. Gathering data is easy, but proper anonymizing is hard. Practically speaking, the analysis of the gathered data is often easier than ensuring that data is anonymous. For example, there are certain combinations of ZIP code and state that identify as few as 30 people within the continental United States, so any data set that includes both ZIP code and state is probably not sufficiently anonymous. It's far easier to simply collect only what's needed for a particular team, and make sure nothing else can be connected to that record. One database records that somebody searched for "geriatric german grandmas spanking spanish men", and another knows that user submitted a search with a mouse, and perhaps another knows that the user is located in western Iowa. With no way to connect the records, the business need is fulfilled and the user's privacy is effectively safe... but the legal disclosure will still simply say that the company collects all those things, stirring up a nice panic.

Back when BattleBots was the thing, I considered building one... but you hit on all the major problems, which were only slightly less intractable back then.

To have any chance of making it past preliminary trials, the robot would have to be somewhat successful. That ruled out most of my creative designs. Even making a boring spinner still would have cost a hefty portion of my paycheck, and the required workspace wouldn't have fit comfortably in my apartment. Transporting the thing would have presented more logistics challenges, and even if I'd solved those, the time and hassle to build something just to be torn apart was a pretty steep expense.

Fighting robots is not an everyman's sport. It's a more modern fox hunt.

Personally, that principle of having many swappable self-contained bits is one of the worst qualities on UNIX.

I've been using GNU/Linux for over a decade. I know my way around most distros, and I can usually figure out what I need to do to accomplish any task... usually. The biggest problem I face now is that distros have so many small components doing their small tasks that figuring out exactly which component is responsible for a given task is no small feat.

I understand and appreciate the programming simplicity that a small component brings, but from a user's (or admin's) perspective, the operating environment is now more cluttered. As distros pick and choose their preferred swappable components, the view gets worse. Sure, I know exactly what the "finger" command does, but it's not obvious that "pinky" is an alternative, because having a lightweight finger command is apparently an important thing. Some distros will even create symlinks or scripts to provide alternative common names for their chosen packages, but there's seldom a guarantee that the input or output will be the same. This is why the first step of many build processes is to examine the environment and figure out exactly what is available on the system, often using methods that uncomfortably remind me of browser-detecting JavaScript.

I'm not saying that systemd is the solution we need, or even that it is a solution. I've just dealt with far too many poorly-named packages to have excessive reverence for this archaic principle.

We should also keep in mind that Linux itself, as a monolithic kernel, defies the concept. By design, the kernel's one job is to interface with every piece of hardware on the machine. Is it really so far out of line to define systemd's one job as interfacing with every service provider in the OS?

On the other hand, why should there even be the concept of a "beast of burden"? The real question is "what does ethical interaction with animals look like?", and PETA seems to have taken the position that there is practically no such thing. To the PETA fanatics, any deviation from an animal's natural life is cruel. To an extent, they have a point - where mankind once relied on animals to provide capabilities humans do not possess, technology has now progressed to the point where there is little need for domesticated animals.

Like in so many cases, the madness is perfectly reasonable from a particular perspective.

The theory is that by saving network time receiving the smaller compressed header, the total time is still less.

Of course, this assumes that you're on a slow enough network that the compression savings are worth it. Since typically latency is a bigger problem than throughput, I don't see compression as being terribly important.

Similarly with the binary protocol: Parsing speed isn't the real problem. I'd rather have a plaintext protocol that I can test with PuTTY than save a few cycles parsing.

The last word is probably the most damning.

There's a very popular school of thought in security that keeping capabilities secret is a means to reduce risk*. Such a vague requirement to disclose capabilities is open to lawsuits arguing that the disclosure must include things like maximum range, speed, radar size, and so forth, effectively providing an instruction manual for criminals looking to evade such a drone, who now know that their escape plan must include driving so fast for so far.

* No, it's not security through obscurity. Security through obscurity is where the security of the system is compromised by knowledge, whereas keeping the capabilities of a secure system secret only increases the expense (and therefore lowers the chance) of an attack against an otherwise-secure system.

-Randall Munroe

...but we know it's not mapped. We've mapped a good chunk of sea floor, and figured out what to expect. Maybe we could find some new geologic features or something, and those biologists still have a lot of work to do naming everything, but we know more or less what's down there. For an oceanographer, saying "I have no idea what's there" is a sign that you haven't done your research, not that we've hit the limits of our instruments. That's still a valid justification for space exploration, though. We have no idea what other worlds are like, because we haven't sent enough probes and instruments to find out. We simply don't know what's under those clouds, or what that surface is made of, or why that moon is that particular color.

It's not about space. It's about not-Earth.

For most practical purposes, Earth has no more undiscovered continents, no more unexplored territory, and no more absolute wilderness. Sure, there's some areas that are generally undisturbed, but we know just about all there is to know about them. There are no more mysteries lying just beyond the horizon. There is only human civilization. There are cell phones, satellites, and rescue teams standing ready. Human exploration is at a standstill.

There are some places left to go to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We can cut deeper into the jungles, and dive deeper into the oceans, but we still know what we don't know.

The next horizon for humanity's exploration is space. That's where we'll next spread our human empire, and for those who care about such things, the enthusiasm for space is natural.

May we all die in novel circumstances.

Including the lawsuit phase, which is really the only chance the companies have to compete openly. Bids are usually keep secret from the competitors until a contract is awarded, so if they want to directly compete and argue their benefits over another's offer, the loser asks for a review.

This is business as usual.