Their presentation for investors quotes a sale price of $1000, not $300. At that price they might be able to do it. How well they'll do it remains to be seen.

Their presentation is all about their XY positioning mechanism. But that's not the problem. The hard problem is dispensing solder paste reliably and precisely, sticking the component down, and using hot air to solder it into place. As with low-end 3D printers, most of the problems are where the weld/soldering action takes place. They don't say much about how that's done.

The important thing is doing a consistently good soldering job. Nobody needs a machine that produces lots of reject boards.

I'm behind Ad Limiter, which limits Google search ads to one per page, picking the best one based on SiteTruth ratings. You can set it for zero search ads if you like. It also puts SiteTruth ratings on Google search results. It's a demo for SiteTruth search spam filtering.

This Mozilla/Chrome add on has a general ad-blocking mechanism inside. Unlike most ad blockers, it's not based on regular expressions looking for specific HTML. It finds URLs known to lead to ads, works outward through the DOM to find the ad boundary, then deletes the ad. So it's relatively insensitive to changes in ad code, and doesn't require much maintenance. The same code processes search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Bleeko, DuckDuckGo, and Infoseek. (Coming soon, Yandex support, and better handling of Google ads within ads, where an ad has multiple links.)

So, if I wanted to do a better ad blocker, I could do so easily. Should I? Is another one really needed? Are the headaches of running one worth it?

The Tesla/Panasonic plan gets cell and battery production back into the same plant. The battery industry has, for a while, had a model where cells were made in one country (usually Japan, Taiwan or S. Korea, or at least with machinery from there) and assembled into device-specific battery packs near where the end device was produced (usually China or the US.) For the Chevy Volt, the cells come frm LG Chem in Korea, and the battery packs are assembled at the Brownstown, MI Battery Assembly plant.

There's no good reason to do it that way now that the era of cheap labor in China is over. As a rule of thumb, labor has to be 4x cheaper to justify offshoring. The coastal provinces in China have reached that level with respect to US/Japan wages.

Done right, this isn't labor-intensive. Brownstown has only 100 workers in a 400,000 square foot plant, and they're doing battery assembly, which is the more labor-intensive part of the operation. Tesla claims to need 6,500 employees for their 10 million square foot plant, but they're probably counting construction-phase employees.

We heard that when Staples did it.

Amazon's 3D printed product offerings are rather lame. They're not offering any of the more advanced 3D printing processes; for that you have to go to Shapeways. All you can get from Amazon is plastic junk.

All they're offering are some existing tools, ones you can get for free. The main ones are the Clang static analyzer and Cppcheck. They're not offering free access to some of the better, and expensive, commercial tools.

Cppcheck is basically a list of common errors, expressed as rules with regular expressions. Clang is a little more advanced, but it's still looking for a short list of local bugs. Neither will detect all, or even most, buffer overflows. They'll detect the use of "strcpy", but not a wrong size to "strncpy".

I buy spools of what we call tie wire from the hardware store, it appears to be steel wire P in O (pickled in oil) which is stored in oiled paper. A lot of people might call that baling wire, but I'm not baling anything.

Well, you're right, I was in full dick mode. I'm even sorry about it, albeit admittedly only slightly. I apologize for how, but not what I said. Yeah well, that's the best you're getting out of me this morning.

Nobody expects the piracy sites to be legit. But a lot of people think that there are so many of them that their activity can go unnoticed. Those people are about to get an awakening, if they even take the banners seriously.

bail: to clear of water by dipping (usually followed by out ): to bail out a boat
bale: to make (hay, etc) into a bale or bales

Try "baling". Also, try not using words you don't understand.

I know that this is slashdot, and that you therefore feel justified in being an ignorant idiot and spouting off without RTFAing, and you're in quite a bit of company: lots of other idiots are saying the same stupid shit you're saying. But the article makes it clear that "Neither the police or Project Sunblock are paying the website in question to display the police message". They're just suppressing the banner display, and displaying a police message instead.

Pathetic is deciding you know how the system works without R'ing TFA, and as a result, being a F'n I.

Said no one about you ever.

The argument is that it causes unforeseen health complications, not that it is dangerous. Since the great streetcar scandal, Americans have had literally two choices: own a car, or be left behind economically.

Which provide substantial benefit to others.

What? You are no longer in left field. You have left the ballpark.

There is no evidence that eating meat is bad for you, and in fact eating only meat and vegetables has been shown to have immense benefits for some people. Now you've gone from standing outside the ballpark to just being a fucking idiot.

Not all processed foods are evil, although that's the way to bet. But our government has told us to eat them, essentially, so they (we) are on the hook for that one. When it's had anything to say about it at all, the government has told us not to smoke.

Yeah, I got the same treatment. But all that means is that we "only" were at developmental risk due to smoking during the first, and most important phase of the pregnancy.

It is not and never has been a free country, the government was designed by a bunch of rich white men who wanted to retain control of it after all. That's why they left themselves various loopholes.

We know you're normal, you believe against all evidence that tobacco is not a drug.

This study is effectively about mass-produced cigarettes, not about tobacco.

That is not the "on the other hand" takeaway for me. The takeaway is that smoking or sucking second-hand smoke during pregnancy is child abuse. I got both; my mom smoked until she found out she was pregnant, while she was trying to get pregnant, and my father never stopped up until his fairly recent death, and supposedly regularly smoked around my pregnant mother (I wasn't there, and she lies to herself regularly, so I can't really trust what she says either.) In spite of there being no family history of it, I have fairly serious activity-induced bronchial asthma.

It doesn't matter what the users want. It matters what the advertisers want. They want a big screen with room for ads.

This is especially true of Android, since Google gets their revenue from ads, not phones or phone software.