I keep going back and forth on whether to buy one, but I'm tending toward "no" -- a makerspace opened up near me and they have half a dozen different 3d printers but it usually seems that at most, two are ever working at the same time. Despite that, I recently needed an object printed, paid $50 for the membership fee for a month, then spent 13 hours babysitting a print. On the first try, it jumped 2mm on the X axis about 15 minutes into the print. Stopped, restarted, and after spending all day watching it, it jumped 2mm on X axis again with about 30 minutes left on 12 hour print job. Then I had to pay $15 for my scrap plastic.

I was pretty non-plussed, so I tried one of the online printers -- the type which use the very expensive powdered plastic machines -- my piece cost $65 which is pretty pricey, but they came out exactly like I expected. About 20 of those prints would buy a printer, and it is hard to resist that logic, except when I think back to spending an entire freakin day to get garbage and the fact that most of the printers at the makerspace are usually offline because a needed part is on order.

I'm not really sure what my ultimate decision will be, but the promise of consumer 3d printing seems to be more than it delivers at present.

Doesn't a layoff imply that you still have a job to come back to when business improves? As another poster mentioned, the question is not firing, but whether it was for "cause" or more to the point, whether it was for misconduct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

I see, I'm old enough to remember the older version of "layoff" -- in modern times, it just means fired not for reasons of misconduct.

Not offended yet. I'm just a bit more curious because not only do I live far from the Bible Belt, I'm an atheist from a family where religion played little to no role, I've only rarely been in a synagogue or church, and those few visits were at minimum more than 25 years in the past. I, and those like me, are probably considered a source of the degradation.

Interesting -- I've lived in the Pacific NW almost all of my life. I wonder where I picked it up.

Maybe it is a regional idiomatic usage. I use it. It seems I hear it often -- I was initially puzzled about what the objection to the phrase was. Anyhow, there's nothing bad about using idioms -- it gives the language spice.

Don't forget the naked part and the chance for spectators to pawn over competitors.

I'm an audiobook addict. Snow Crash and Diamond Age are awesome books read by two of the very best narrators around. I've listened to both multiple times.

Anathem isn't half as good as either of those, and I was initially put off by the reader, but for some inexplicable reason, it is also the book I've listened to the most -- six or seven times through at least. There is something slow and comfortable about the way that Anathem develops that I find highly comforting during periods where my life is in high anxiety mode.

Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.

It is a difficult problem, but as a person who spends a significant amount of time reading medical records, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to try to figure out something as simple as the visit date in many printouts. Oddly, the "print date" is usually very prominent -- and irrelevant.

Seriously, WTF? The date should go right at the top, above everything else, or maybe right below name. There are some systems it's even hard to figure out the name of the patient (included as an endnote on page 2 or 3). When you are going through a 100 pages of this stuff, full of duplications and seemingly randomized formatting practices, you can only surmise the programmers were totally brain dead, which when applied to a difficult problem, compounds it exponentially.

Just a quibble, all libertarians are socially liberal. Socially liberal plus a bit of economic socialism is a Green. Socially liberal plus a laissez faire free-market capitalist is a Libertarian.

Google is a third party -- you just go ahead and see if they will actually delete your emails when you ask them. That's totally different than self-hosting and if you don't know that, you don't belong on /.

Secondly, if she wiped the server after she got the subpoena, that's a crime.

The most awesome thing in the world would be for her to be charged under the same law that took Ollie North down because part of the punishment is a permanent ban from all public office.

Yeah -- when GWB was being all neo-conny, Democrats pretended to be so liberal. Then Obama gets into power and is indistinguishable from GWB and Democrats are the epitome of silence.

No, we got what we got due to Obama. He was still touting the public option even after he made a back room deal with the insurance lobby to implement Nixon's health care plan:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Same party. Call the Democrats, call them Republicans -- just doesn't matter.

It's a trap or a diversion to silence the utter disgust liberals have when thinking of HRC.