1) You can't get something CNC for that.

2) Harbor freight (1.5K mill linked to below) doesn't sell tools, they sell tool _kits_. If you're not prepared to disassemble, align, and otherwise fix all the stuff they busted, you're screwed. I'm a half-owner of one, I know.

3) Tool pathing is still expensive / highly skilled. At your price point, you can't just turn a 3D model into a path that a mill can make.

4) Design constraints are different for the two. You can't mill internal voids.

None of which is to say I think the current batch of filament deposition printers are adequate... I've got one of them too, at our Hackerspace in Gainesville. Once they get the plastic printers sufficiently precise that they can turn out e.g. kitchen appliance replacement parts, we'll have gotten somewhere serious.

But your combo requires a bunch of skill to operate, and skill-less object production is kind of the point.

Makerbot's got way worse resolution, and is a bloody bear to calibrate.

The newer version appears to be better than the one we bought and built, but so far all the depositional printers I've messed with seem good for building other printer parts and little toys.

This laser-based one has far better precision and resolution.

The author of the original article is presumedly no dummy, and I agree with his analysis as far as it goes. But he makes no attempt to discuss travel powered by something other than chemical rockets you bring along.

VASIMIR is one alternative, which will indeed gain efficiencies from Moore's law (extremely rapid adjustments to optmiize magnetic field?).

The juice to run that can come from nukes or solar...

Chemical fuels are a barrier to chemical propulsion, that's all.

A founding principle of Wikipedia is the specific rejection of established credentialing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Anti-elitism

Unless the wikipedians explicitly reject this principle, and somehow translate "real world" credentials into sway in the wiki, I don't see why any academic would bother.

I've been wondering, as we watch this problem evolve, why they didn't insert robotic remote hands ASAP. This is Japan, after all. What am I missing?

They were saying, in July 2009, http://gigaom.com/cleantech/the-solar-biofuel-hybrid-joule-biotechnologies-launches/ that they were going to build a pilot plant in 2010, and have the initial commercial-scale plant up in 2012.

All through 2010, their press releases talk about awards and management, funding and P.R. I would have expected "Pilot plant ground broken", "Pilot plant going online", "Pilot plant now giving free diesel to all plant employees, outside customers can pay $1.00 per gallon at plant filling station...".

What a work bennie that would be!

BIKE SHED.

http://bikeshed.com/

That's what you're remembering.

Since they demonstrate the tactical capacity to put a bunch of people in a place, at a time, without law enforcement getting a sniff of it beforehand.

Don't think of it as terrorism per se: think of it as a people-organizing toolset, and it ought to terrify any police state who's paying attention. To the extent the US behaves like a police state, this is a threat.

Take a look at Improv Everywhere's Cell Phone Symphony. Heck, much of what IE does is militarily relevant. It says, "We're a bunch of peaceful clowns. But if we'd wanted to get you, you'd have been got". It says "Your security theater is irrelevant".

You're conflating a 'customer-support' interaction with the criticism role. I won't dispute that lots of linuxy and open-sourcey communities are not safe for tenderfeet: you're absolutely right.

But it's a different topic.

From mailing lists and public bug trackers, my sense is that there are plenty of critics, and they are frequently able to find the right place to criticize.

I think that the extent of criticism within the system reduces the need for lobbying in the press to get your pet peeve addressed.

A non-compete in perpetuity is really really cheap for them; they pay you for ... how long? and you're taken out of the game permanently? No deal. Offer exclusive rights to your project-Q time, for as long as they pay you $whatever weekly, plus a six-month grace period.