Actually, for pretty much any sort of concrete construction you're going to have to finish the walls anyway - and the ridges seen here should hold a good layer of plaster far more firmly than a smooth(ish) wall would. And if it really bothers you there are also other concrete printers out there that include a troweling mechanism to deliver a much smoother wall - this technology is still in it's infancy after all, let the folks working on practical usage and cost-effectiveness focus on that aspect for now.

You're also assuming expensive labor for finishing - while most places in the world moderately skilled labor is still pretty cheap.

I agree that this construction is almost shamefully negligent of the strengths of 3D printing, but I suspect that for some time 3D printed houses will mostly look like what people are accustomed to - if for no other reason than to gain "acceptability". Centuries of refining the technology to expedite standardized, rectilinear construction has established how things "should" look. Lots of novel architecture gets praised for it's beauty and/or functionality, but very few people want to own a house whose novelty stands to drastically reduce the pool of interested buyers.

As 3D printing improves though, and domed and biomorphic structures become cheaper than rectilinear construction (better surface-to-volume ratios, plus strength advantages) I think we'll see an increasing number of architects embracing it. It would be nice to see at least a few such designs featured in these early projects though - The "goopy lines" look might even be made to work with a more biomorphic structure.

A baseball is made of a variety of different materials - a concrete or cob house, not so much. You can realistically print an entire house frame out of just concrete - walls, roof, and conduit. You still need to hang windows, blow in insulation, install plumbing, and pull wiring to make it into a house most Westerners would want to live in - but the structure itself, and hence a majority of labor, can be all one material, printed on site.

Certainly being able to print in multiple materials will open up new possibilities, but that's nothing fundamentally new - once you can print in plastic, metal, concrete, etc (which we can already do), you're just talking about putting multiple dissimilar extruders in the same printer - hell, as I recall the RepRap mk1 was able to print in both plastic and frosting years ago - the frosting was used to provide a support structure for otherwise impossible overhangs. Seems like I've heard of them working with low temperature metal as well.

There's very little new in the world - almost every advance is an incremental improvement on the things that came before. Where things become interesting is when a new technology matures to the point where it starts actually being *useful*. For 3D printing that has so far been mostly limited to rapid prototyping and a few specialty applications like rocket components and custom-fitted medical prosthetics. And now it seems we're at the point where printing buildings is beginning to become both feasible and very cost-effective. A timely technology considering that the global population is expected to increase by around 3billion people in the next 35 years, not to mention the opportunities it will see in the US, which is now faced with retiring vast numbers of buildings erected during the post-war construction boom 60+ years ago.

Pretty big, but not ridiculous. You bring in the printer components on the back of a flatbed truck, assemble it over the construction plot, and then just keep the cement pumping until you're done. Lot's of designs out there, and a few implementations.
https://www.google.com/search?...

Why do you assume buildings will always have straight edges? Recto-linearity seems to largely be a feature incorporated for ease of construction. Consider:

* The only shape tree trunks come in reliably is "straight" - any curvature will be extremely difficult to match.
* Any sort of stacked-block construction (stone, adobe, etc) needs to be capable of tesselating consistently so that subsequent tiers follow the same line: rectangles are by far the easiest shape to create consistently, and they only lay properly in a straight line.
* for large-scale construction straight lines are by far the easiest to survey - just stretch a rope taut and mark along it's length
* Modern mass produced construction components are all flat and rectilinear - again it's the easiest shape to produce consistently.

As a counterpoint, consider cultures that had ready access to non-rectilinear building components: stacked flagstone construction for example will be comparably "gappy" regardless of the shape of the wall, and such ancient construction tends to far more commonly follow curves and ovals rather than straight lines. Likewise when using mub/cob, thatched pole, or tent-based construction you generally see circles as the dominant shape, and curves are more common that straight lines. (though this applies less to cultures that moved into such regions after already having a rectilinear tradition)

Going forward: when using a medium with no shape constraints except for overhang limits, curves have many benefits:
* Curves offer a much better area-to-perimeter ratio: 100' of wall will bound a 796 sqft circle or only a 625 sqft square. That's a 27% increase in living area with the same wall construction cost (and the same amount of thermal loss through the walls)
* Curves are much stronger than straight lines - there's a reason large dams are all arched.
* If you're printing the roof as well (and why wouldn't you?), the added strength of curves becomes even more important. You can build an extremely strong dome out of tiers of un-mortared stacked flagstone or tile, without any sort of support rigging during construction - good luck doing that with other shape. Considering that concrete is typically far stronger in compression than tension or bending, domed roofs will almost certainly become the norm, and any transition from dome to straight-line walls is going to create stress points.

Contrast that with the downsides of curved-wall construction:
* The dominant cultures on Earth are all acclimated to straight-line construction
* long, straight furniture wastes a little space against a tightly curved wall
* You won't be able to build anything that fits snugly against the curvature of more than one wall, unless some standard curvatures are established. ... that's all I can think of.

So basically it's faster, cheaper, stronger, versus cultural inertia. I know which one I'd bet on in the long term.

Perhaps this would be a reason to encourage more women to enter our field? Whether by nature or nurture women seem to generally be at least a bit better at interpersonal stuff than their comparably competent male counterparts. I suspect that having even 20-30% of the team be significantly better communicators than the current norm would dramatically improve the outcome.

Of course the counterpoint would be that to be effective the new members would have to be welcomed and integrated into the team - something our profession is notoriously bad at when it comes to women. Maybe though, if faced with an accumulation of solid evidence that their contributions would notably improve our output, we could manage to start shifting attitudes.

Hell, we might even get into a situation where you could choose between traditionally managed male-heavy teams and Agile gender-balanced teams with a comparably reliable output. Having to choose between working with either management or women, now wouldn't *that* present a quandary for some...

...in Bread and Circuses.

Well, lets see, if we've got a couple thousand of satellites, and we've got 510 million square miles of land area on Earth, that's an average of less than 250,000 square miles per satellites, or a 282 mile radius each. And of course there will be fair amount of overlap between satellites, since you're 750 miles up and you're going to have at least that ground radius with excellent line-of-sight and only moderate signal falloff. That will also mean most overseas satellites will have LOS with the coast, giving maximum effective overlap to the most densely-populated regions.

Granted, you're still talking maybe dozens of times the average coverage area as a typical cell tower, and about 10x the transmission distance, so receiving antennas would naively have to receive 10x the signals at 100x lower power levels. A challenge to be sure. But perhaps doable. You are after all almost 30x closer than a geosynchronous communications satellite, so you're dealing with almost 900x less signal attenuation than those have to deal with. Besides, they'd only be one provider, it's not like cell towers would suddenly disappear, there would just be another option with radically better coverage for those who want it.

And as long as you've got the satellites up there, there's no reason you couldn't use them to provide practically free coverage to the remotest areas of the world - after all they'd just be sitting idle in that part of each orbit otherwise. Same principle as selling movies/music/pharmaceuticals at radically reduced prices in the developing world - the sunk costs were already sunk for the primary market, and incremental costs are almost nonexistent, so you may as well make a little extra money. And if you can position that market as a humanitarian offering to boost your corporate image - so much the better.

You're not even lying. Hell, Africa is 3x larger than the US and far, far poorer. All the very real difficulties in providing good coverage and service that the cellular companies like to oversell here are far, far worse there. If you can instead completely bypass the need to build dedicated infrastructure by piggybacking on idle "first-world" infrastructure instead - well that's a game everyone can win at. Africa, India, China, the vast tracks of Russian, South-American and Canadian wilderness - lots of places in the world that it isn't worth building infrastructure - and the people who live there could benefit immensely from ultra-cheap internet - even at dial-up speeds. Why should the rich, densely-populated regions be the only ones whose populace can educate and organize without centralized control? We've already got the centralized systems in place - we're the ones who stand to benefit *least* from the decentralization so powerfully enabled by the internet.

Or perhaps mental health counseling for the parents. I would suggest it is likely needed if you would allow your own irrational fears to cripple the emotional development of your children by subjecting them to constant surveillance during their most formative years in order to imagine that you are warding off threats that are objectively far, far lower than the threats you willingly subject them to on a regular basis.

You want to ward off threats? Start by never, ever talking on the cell phone while driving them someplace. That alone should lower their risk of serious injury more than any tracking device or body guard at a fraction of the price. You could improve things even further by never eating or drinking while driving, nor taking your eyes off the road to look at your children.

Or hey, how about diet? You'd never allow them to get into the habit of drinking sodas or eating junk food, right? After all diabetes is a much larger threat to their long-term wellbeing than abduction. Probably want to stay away from GMOs and non-organic food as well - it will be decades before we have enough data to know for certain what sort of risks are actually associated with those.

2 x 0 is still 0.

Nonsense - most of the history of politics has been a study in the art of refining selfishness and corruption into a finely honed tool to keep ever more power flowing into the hands of the powerful.

It's not just people happy to talk. the interrogators are trained to catch certain signs that the interviewee is telling the truth. But if the cops miss those signs or choose to ignore them, the interrogation can go on for hours and hours, plenty long enough for people to be "brainwashed" into remembering crimes they never committed in great detail. It's kinda scary how far they can take someone with stress, sleep deprivation and hunger, in only a relatively few hours.

Later Reid courses actually show a tape of an interrogation where someone rewrote their own memories.

But then hasn't the legend firmly established that death is really only a temporary inconvenience for him?

No, the point is to make it all the way back to the launch site using as little fuel as possible because every pound of extra fuel is a pound of wasted payload. Not just yet, granted, but that's the long term goal.

Well, yes, the "top" of the rocket will always be pointing "forward" to some degree, but I suspect the angle is considerably higher on the return flight when the point is not to travel up as fast as possible, but horizontally as efficiently as possible (though I may well be wrong) - and pressure falls off fairly rapidly with angle. Meanwhile you probably couldn't even get away with putting a scoop on the higher lip where it would face directly into the wind, because I really doubt the control systems are designed to maintain a particular axial orientation - in fact it almost certainly needs the flexibility to NOT do so in order to handle engine failures, and you don't want an engine failure forcing a pneumatic system failure as well.

I also thought I was quite clear that I wasn't discussing failure during the first flight - this thing is planned for many reuses, and ozone is considerably more corrosive than water. After dozens of flights you start to have to worry about what sorts of problems might have slipped through your rapid-turnaround refit - this isn't like a nail gun where a bit of stickiness at the wrong moment means you have to pull a wonky nail - we've got a multi-million dollar rocket on the line, not to mention the damage that could be done to the spaceport or whatever else happens to be underneath it when the fins jam in place. And what if you should fly through a cloud? That's a LOT of extra water suddenly running through a system that's designed for air, how much are you willing to bet that the control responsiveness changes in response? And heaven help you should you get a bird lodged in the intake.

Plus the final and probably most important point, which you completely ignored - you're adding an awful lot of complexity for relatively minimal gains.

I hope governments heard me condemning the attacks to my dog so I don't get raided.

I'm sorry, but condemning the attacks to your dog is not considered sufficiently patriotic. You must find at least three people who practice Islam and condemn the attacks to them. For example, "Hey, Muslim guy, apparently you don't know this; terrorism is wrong." Then just ask him if he is planning any terrorist attacks, take down the details if he is, and have him sign your patriotism verification form.