It could pretty well be illegal in Europe. Many EU countries have laws banning this sort of tactics as the abuse of the "market power". If you have more than a certain percentage of the market, you are treated as a quasi-monopoly and restrictions apply. These laws are mostly targeted at various retail chains that have abusive terms in their supplier contracts, but it is only a matter of time before this gets applied to Amazon, Google and similar.

The problem is that the industry is spending the money on wrong things - massive marketing, shiny graphics, motion capture for animation ... Unfortunately, most of that is extremely expensive and laborious. I really don't need my next stupid shooter game to have motion captured animations of every monster done by AAA Hollywood mocap specialists at several thousands of $/hour.

And as the "next gen" has to be bigger, better, shinier than the "last gen", the costs spiral out of control. Another consequence of this blockbuster mentality is that only few innovative "AAA" games get made, because nobody wants to take risks with such budgets - but how many times can you redo Doom?

It is possible to make and release games cheaper, even big titles (just look at the Witcher series). The companies and publishers need to start to work smarter, not just pour more money at the problem. However, when the most complex AI in games are finite state machines and motion capture is considered as "AI" (true quote from one major studio exec), every bit of content is hand modelled, textured and baked instead of some sort of automation or more clever game design, when the "next gen" game innovation stops with rendering more nose hair and dirty pores (or bigger boobs) of the main protagonist than the "last gen", then I am really sceptical ...

Oh and cut out the middle men and stop reinventing the wheel for the sake of greed (Origin by EA anyone?). You will cut your expenses by a factor of 2 right there.

Good luck trying to get these in Europe. They are pretty much unobtanium, because nobody stocks them or they sell these only to companies (Farnell), with a huge shipping and handling markup (Digikey, Mouser, Farnell) or they simply don't carry the DIP version at all (RadioSpares).

It is way easier to buy one of the QFP packages - they are both cheaper, more available and with more pins. And either get it pre-soldered on a breakout board or buy a simple QFP to DIP adapter on eBay (or make your own).

Which is happening routinely. Many older birds don't require any authentication nor anything - they simply retransmit whatever they hear on one frequency on another one: http://spectregroup.wordpress....

And those are US NAVY (!!!) satellites!

Doing that with Iridium or Inmarsat hardware is a bit more complex, because the protocols are mostly digital, but not impossible neither.

Wasn't it just yesterday that someone has posted a flamebait summary about the Heartbleed bug changing the "Open source is safer" discussion?

This is a great evidence of what happens when you rely on security by obscurity in proprietary software. Nobody is forced to fix things, sloppy coding is the norm and there are backdoors galore ...

Unfortunately, the bad guys laugh, the vendors play ostrich with the heads in sand and everyone else is suffering the consequences ...

Certainly, nobody argued the opposite. However, they are also a "weapon of choice" for the various conmen and scam artists on IndieGogo looking for quick cash, because there is no obligation to deliver anything ("Hey, it wasn't funded, not our fault!").

So, Indiegogo flexible funding campaign? I.e. they get money even if the campaign doesn't meet the goals? 4 years in development and nothing to show on the project page apart from a few renders that any kid can do in a day in 3DS Max or Blender? They throw big names like DASSAULT or Airbus around, ostensibly as being interested, but they need a few millions on Indiegogo? The perks are an obvious joke (40k euro for an old Renault Espace? You got to be kidding ...).

Mr. Chorostecki appears to be an economic consultant (nothing to do with aerospace whatsoever: http://www.figxy.com/ )
Mr. Buron is a design/creative consultant (with http://buron.phpnet.org/fre/ag... )
And the third founder Desauvage is, surprise, "creative director".

I wonder whether "inventor and designer" means "I have drawn something in Photoshop and now I only need someone to build it for me", because none of these guys has any relevant engineering qualifications whatsoever.

Oh and it seems they weren't very welcome in France for whatever reason in 2013 ( http://www.ladepeche.fr/articl... ), so that's why they want to go to Silicon Valley ... The article also mentions that the vehicle was to be all-electric (yeah right, pipe dreams ...).

The probability that any backers, who would put actually money into this, will see anything from this project, is pretty much zero, IMO.

That sounds as if the criminals actually cared about it being illegal. One of the guys has mugged someone to get the phone in the first place and the other one is dealing in them - both crimes with likely a lot stiffer sentence than a stupid IMEI change. C'mon ....

Don't be ridiculous - until there stops being demand for extremely cheap phones (so that one can show off in front of the peers) and the manufacturers and network operators actually start doing something about it (Why is IMEI changeable in the first place?), trade in stolen phones will continue. Unfortunately, it would have to stop being profitable for them. All those IMEI blocks and such by the operators are ineffective if the phone can have the IMEI changed and not even all of them are implementing those blocks.

The other issue is that when even BBC can easily find and film (!) fences dealing in stolen goods, then what is the police doing? Ah, right, that is UK, so they are likely busy detaining journalists as terrorists, there is no time to fight petty theft and muggers.

Databases don't scale for people who don't understand SQL, don't understand data normalization, indexing and want to use them as flat files. Unfortunately, a way too common anti-pattern :(

The second group are too-cool-to-learn kids using the latest development tool fad on the market to build yet another Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever clone ...

This sort of reaction is nice, but don't forget that it needs gobs and gobs of energy to build those hydrocarbons. Don't forget that the energy you use up by burning that fuel (and some, because of the poor engine efficiency, reaction losses, etc.) had to be "put in" first. No free lunch here ...

So yes, maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could be producing jet fuel for its planes, but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon. It would be extremely expensive.

This topic has been re-hashed here before several times (e.g. here)

Let's see what is actually innovative or different on this printer when compared to the existing ones:

- automatic leveling - ok, but they seem to use a sensor ("motion sensor chip"?!) in the printer head (?!) and not moving bed. I am not really sure how this could actually work ...
- non-heated bed - they claim it is not needed because of autoleveling, but that is BS. You need heated bed for ABS to stick to it, level or not level, otherwise the moving head will lift the print or it will warp. Nothing to do with the bed being level.
- tiny working volume
- autocalibration - again some magical "motion sensor chip" is mentioned, without any explanation what that autocalibration is nor how it works ...
- they are keen on the artistic look of the thing, but I have serious reservations about the rigidity and accuracy of the device - the claimed 15um is only the theoretical resolution of the steppers, not actual resolution of the printer (depends on the nozzle size which is 0.45mm by default!). The ABS body doesn't instill much confidence!
- reduced power consumption is somehow supposed to make things lighter and cheaper (?!) - that argument seems backwards to me ...
- startup, they don't have any other products - who knows when they will actually be able to deliver. The August date is completely unrealistic.
- their team doesn't instill much confidence - 1 electronics guy, 1 CNC guy, 4 CAD people, 2 sw people, but they have 8 artists, 2 PR agencies and 4 lawyers! Not a healthy balance, IMO ...

- incredibly cheap price ($300), but you get what you pay for IMO
- they have exceeded their funding target 10x already ...

Honestly, I don't see how this printer will make 3D printing somehow accessible to the unwashed masses - there are still all those issues of CAD, mechanical design, toy-like device with nebulous claims and nothing to back it up.

IANAL, but shouldn't this qualify as perjury? Sony needs to certify in their automated DMCA request that they, in fact, own the rights to the content in question, under the penalty of perjury. Someone really needs to take the big studios to court for this sort of abuse, otherwise it won't stop.

It rather shows that Microsoft *still* does not review security-sensitive code properly. How this could have passed any code review is beyond me.

Either they are so incredibly sloppy and incompetent (do you really want to entrust them your credit card then?!) or this was intentional. I am not sure which one is actually worse ...

Fortunately the 5 years olds are easily bribed by a few games and an ice cream before they try to hack something more dangerous.

This sort of issue really instills a lot of confidence in the quality of that system *facepalm*.