if they were brought to trial you would like it to be "fair"? Or, you think they *should* be brought to trial for their documented crimes, and that the trial should be fair?

Your repeated insistance that Snowden be kangaroo jury trialed has been repeatedly shown by your posts for the bunk that it is. Making half statements like this one that is just begging to be misread is misleading and dishonest.

Its okay, you can admit that you approve of the governments actions. It won't make people like you, but those who can appreciate honesty and abhor hypocracy won't see you in such a poor light as you are currently putting yourself in.

why does living in England exclude you from understanding tipping? Is this a serious question, or a troll?

According to that bastion of incontrovertible knowledge, 10% tipping is customary in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_%28gratuity%29)

Don't care for wikipedia? How about the arrogant Cecil? http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Yet another link claims the practiced started in English bars. http://www.billshrink.com/blog...

if you don't like any of the above explanations you can always google your own...

dang! where are my mod points! Gotta remember that one...

I prefer to use education. Such as how words can have more than one meaning. Its a feature of english that certainly complicates it, and does it make it harder for people to understand or use correctly. Ignorance can be cured, however. Education is key.

It isn't that the word "theory" means something different to him than the general population, its that he knows that the word "theory" has more than one meaning and one must select the correct meaning from context. He supplied some of this information in his post and emphasized the word "scientific" to help educate you that this is a clue that the general meaning for the word was not appropriate. This was apparently too subtle, however.

You might try reading a dictionary sometime. If you do, you will notice that many words have multiple meanings. Using a particular online resource (for convenience), we find five definitions listed for "theory" -- and they are all even related (something that is not always the case). http://dictionary.reference.co...

Not another woman, but...

Although some women will experience considerable difficulty breastfeeding a particular child it is not just an accident that humans survived as a species before formula. One thing I have noticed is that breastfeeding makes for a lot easier nights *if* you are doing co-sleeping. If someone has to drag themselves out of bed to get to the baby it makes the night a lot less restful -- preparing formula is more work in addition, but just having to get up will significantly impair restfulness. As you want to do breastfeeding do yourself a favor and reach out to the La Leche League before your baby is born. A support network that includes parents with children of about the same age helps a lot with dealing with age-related issues or activities and generally requires going outside of family.

I thought my wife was a little crazy wanting to do cloth diapers, but I'm so glad she did. It does require doing laundry frequently, but cloth diapers are multi-purpose cleaners around babies. The sprayer we got for the bathroom to help knock stool off really helped as well.

Finally, I think the notion that "maternal instinct" exists and will miraculously kick in when you become pregnant or have a kid is dangerous because it creates false expectations. Having a kid is easy, caring for kids is hard. It takes work, and you are not going to have the right answers or know what to do automatically. There'll be minutes, hours and days when you won't want kids. That's healthy, and its okay as long as there's another parent to take up the slack. Even the best mother (or father) will not be a model parent all the time.

That depends on the court and is not a general truth. A friend of mine got custody of the sole remaining minor. The mother complained loudly and as the court gave him custody she resorted to extra legal measures. It is true that some judges do think a child needs the mother more than the father, but that is not all courts.

There are certain criteria a court uses to establish the domicile for a child. And while a judge can play loose with the criteria it isn't just a matter of favoring women -- prejudice can fall the other way as well.

It isn't even that they need extraordinary evidence. Ordinary evidence would do just fine. But creating strawmen to demolish is not a rebuttal of actual science and that is the issue here. What is really sad is the part where the "bias" shows and is trotted out by deniers is true. He would've been remiss to omit it because it is a negative. All the referee did was acknowledge the political reality of the entire point behind the paper.

Its like being accused of bias when rejecting a paper that uses phrenology as proof that that whites are smarter than blacks due to greater cranial capacity because you point out that, in addition to being flawed and incorrect, it will just be used to support a racist agenda.

and the mods are nut. Guy has a right to his opinion, what do I care, but modding head-in-the-sand denial as insightful is ludicrous.

To be more specific -- in a way its kinda nice to see posts like this. No offense to Kohath intended. But the moderation is simply wrong.

so, your just fine with someone DOSing bitcoin ("Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations" is a sufficient example) and don't see that as a weakness? You also can't figure out any incentives for someone to do so?

If I could be arbitrarily prevented from using any of my credit cards or spending money in my bank account, I would consider that a serious concern.

replying to ac, but...

From your statement it sounds like you know absolutely nothing about the history of US currency and just made something up to support your baseless bitcoin fantasies.

When do you think the USG started issuing the dollar? (Hint, it was after the country was founded.) Do you know what was in use before the USG started issuing currency? Do you even know *what* the USG issued as currency? (Hint, it wasn't "worthless drabble that nobody wanted".)

a common misconception is that you need to use CAD software to use a 3d printer. I suspect that, at least in part, this comes from the relation of 3d printing to rapid prototyping.

I do all of my modeling in 3d modelling software -- no CAD. Ultimately, what your printer will need is a 3d mesh and with the CAD it then must be exported. Apparently all can export to STL (the standard for 3d printing), but I've seen CAD generated mesh that was not correct. If the mesh is of any complexity it may not be practical to fix by hand (CAD generated mesh is terrible) requiring use of another program to fix the mesh if it is broken in a way the printing software cannot handle.

Where CAD is good is mechanical design (which is, of course, why it is normal in rapid prototyping). If that is what you are after, then maybe it would be a good choice (though I do mechanical design just fine in a 3d modeler).

If you can, consider commercial software. Blender is not for all (it is where I started, but I much prefer other modeling applications). Many commercial software titles in this space provide trial versions so you can see what works for you.

As far as I can tell, the Shapeways plastic suffers from the same incredible fragility as stratasys' specially formulated ABS that is so brittle it will break if you look at it wrong. I have no idea what they do to the ABS to make it that brittle. PLA is a much better plastic (than the stratasys ABS), but if you are needing printed metal parts then obviously the typical 3d home printer (which prints in plastic) is not for you. That's great.

Shapeways has a nice finish on their parts. If you actually want to break Shapeways grip on your wallet (you could still sell through them) then you might want to consider a stereolithography printer. The results are weaker than FDM printed PLA, but have that finish you like. If you actually have much plastic printed through Shapeways one of the new "cheap" stereolithography printers would likely be a good investment.

You are also paying through the nose for not having a printer. If you aren't actually printing much or you have more money than sense, that's fine. But Shapeways only looks reasonable if you are trying to buy a stratasys. Accounting for all costs (such as failed prints, your time) it is cheaper to buy a replicator from makerbot and use the starter spool than pay shapeways for the same amount of final items.

Feel free to continue supporting Shapeways, though. I'm sure they are nice folks.

actually, it isn't even close. I actually checked once because its fun to the use the printer. But not *that* fun. Down to the store we went and purchased what we needed. Standard items are not a good use-case for 3d printing. Custom parts are.

I realize that you said you wanted a standard, but is USB enough of a standard or you want something more formalized? Because the bidirectional centronics wasn't the printer, it was the transport layer. Bidirectional for 3d printing to the same extent is already there.

More to the point, both printers I'm familiar with (stratasys and makerbot) provide feedback. You wanted:

1. rendering of current status -- that's just silly, you have the printer. More importantly, if you look at the printer you can see what it *really* looks like, not what it is supposed to look like. Some printers offer a camera so that you can monitor the print status (even remotely). Makerbot's software lets you see a visualize of the slicing *before* printing so you can see how it *should* look -- even better than your "render as it progesses" request.

2. information about consumables -- stratasys does this, but it is part of why you pay so much. To get that information from the printer it uses "smart" print spools. Makerbot is moving in that direction, but even with their older printers you get a "this print will use this much filament".

3. hours on the unit -- both stratasys and makerbot do this (shows percent complete/time elapsed).

4. stepping motor accuracy -- what? I'm not really sure what you are asking for here. In case you are confused, the stepping motors of serious printers are *very* accurate. But there's going to be some slop in the print due to the driving method and, inescapably, from printing with what is, essentially, a liquid. Are you wanting lasers to measure the accuracy of the print as it progresses? Sounds kinda cool, but what are you really wanting to measure? How will it be displayed? If it were a 2d color print you could have an image that visually displayed color accuracy, but for a 3d print I'm really not sure what you could do.

As for the "sealed unit" -- there are manufacturers that make that claim right now. As it happens, I don't believe them, but the claims still exist. Your statement about business and investment is a tautology. What a home user does is not an investment, but it is also basically irrelevant.

For what its worth, the reason I personally bought a printer is that it is the only viable option to producing some items. Despite some of the pie-in-the-sky beliefs about "3d printing" displacing traditional manufacturing that is not really even relevant. I can print a lego minifig, but I'd be the first to tell you to buy one rather than printing it (unless, like me, you wanted to print one "just because" -- but, really, if you want something like that just buy it). What I can't do is buy custom parts in a store. And using something like shapeways almost makes a stratasys printer look competitive. Unless you are very wealthy the 3d printing services are not feasible for any significant amount of printing. For work I did a write up comparing different options and, if you are going to do any amount of printing, it is cheaper to buy a 3d printer -- to include "eating" the cost of failures. Much, much cheaper.

3d printing then is viable for rapid prototyping (but you already knew that) and for custom printing needs where the print runs are still too small to justify setup costs for paying a production service, but not small enough for boutique printing like shapeways. That's a pretty narrow home market, but it exists. Whether or not it is actually large enough to support all the competing 3d printer manufacturers remains to be seen.