Looks like we've hit peak 3d printer, at least as far as the near-term is concerned.

I'm wondering if this will be analagous to the daisy-wheel printer. For certain applications it's the best choice, but those are very few and far between, and are entirely based on fixed fonts and software made to do a standard set of rows and columns with fixed-width characters. They work great for printing multi-part forms and for where one wants text that's more readable than dot-matrix, but that's about it.

These first generation consumer-grade 3d printers are like that, but worse, because there's not much in the way of a business market compared to those paper printers. They were bought by businesses that specifically needed rapid prototyping, or they were bought by hobbyists that got into it as the latest craze. There's only so much of either, so once that small market is saturated there's less need for companies supplying whole printers.

I've actually made a similar argument before. When boys are socially ostracized they've tended to turn to technology. Turning to technology gives them peers, and as a group they tend to delve deeper into the nuts and bolts at a young age. When those kids become adults they tend to gravitate toward technical subjects, especially computers, because they've developed a ken with the machines from such a young age.

It makes me wonder, if all of the people that came into tech in this fashion were discounted from the numbers, would those numbers be closer to parity?

The causes of the gender divide begin in childhood, and become integral with society to where genders are expected to be certain ways. I suspect that this girls' school will probably drain girls from other schools that were already interested before it establishes new interest.

What do you mean by, "don't see a future for themselves."?

As in, they've looked to the future, and what they see bodes ill, so they don't see a reason to participate, or they haven't really even considered the future too much, and are screwing around in the same way as the parable about the grasshopper with winter approaching?

Because I can tell you, it's probably more of the latter than the former.

Based on my experiences at work, there are lots of 'boys' that really don't give a damn and would have been happier in other careers anyway.

I'm actually in favor of gender-segregated junior high schools, mainly because of the showboating that goes on due to the hormones. It's been demonstrated that it's significantly curtailed when the other gender isn't present to display toward.

Well, I dislike it because it makes it much harder to administer a box as a UNIX-type machine with a simple text editor. Now it seems like I'm stuck with meta-scripts invoking meta-scripts invoked by other scripts to do something as simple as changing my DNS servers. A whole lot of stuff just got a lot harder because of an abstraction layer.

People are not smart.

There are panhandlers at the freeway offramp lights around here, usually because they can stand on the left side of traffic near the driver's side. If you consider that your average light takes about 90 seconds to cycle, there are about forty times an hour when cars are sitting there. If one driver, every other light gives $2, then the panhandler can make $40/hr while sitting at the light. The advantage the panhandler has is that since the potential givers completely flush and replace every 90 seconds, there are new marks constantly, and it's unlikely that any would see anyone else giving money, so they may feel obligated to be the one to do so.

I figured out it was a borderline scam when I saw the bicycle that the panhandler had sitting off in the bushes. It cost more than the car I was driving.

What do you want to name the fork? I vote for flock.

I don't think that there ever was supposed to be a Duke Nukem Forever. It was supposed to be a joke, as in, no game development would ever happen, so we would be waiting forever. Unfortunately someone else ended up with the rights to the franchise and didn't realize this.

S'okay. I've been in local Fandom for almost 25 years. Shouldn't be worse than eighty clones of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons...

Writing drivers is hard mmmkay...

If systemd comes to dominate Linux, we could see something more like 2020: the year of the GNU Hurd Linux replacement...

I had not really considered using Hurd until the systemd explosion. Maybe I'll load it on a spare box to see what I get.

I think I'll wait for the computer with the nontouch 'mouse' that determines what I want to do without using another device.

...now we either have to come up with another excuse or else tell the person something along the lines of, "sorry, not interested"?

No one is under any obligation to buy from or to give money to someone panhandling. Given that there are enough actors out there to make one question if any given pandhandler is actually hard-up or not, I don't tend to give out money like that.

Damn that was close. Kind of makes me wonder if using the barge as such a small target is contributing to the hard landings, simply because it's such a tiny target relative to the area that the rocket has to come down on. It's about the length of a football field; makes me wonder if they could set-down on an area ten times that large if most of these control problems simply wouldn't matter.

Heh. There was an episode of House where as an aside, the topic of the over/under age on attempting significant risky medical procedures on children was brought up. House asserted that the age was seven.

Nazi Germany fell in April of 1945. Any true German-Government Nazis that had reached the age of majority before this fall would be 88 years old now. It doesn't matter if they're not dead yet, they're so close to it that true original Nazis are done.

Neo-Nazis are another matter, but no one will ever take them seriously enough that they could become a political force. They'd have to organize as something else with a name that isn't poisoned from the outset.