It's a good thing you're not a script writer. You're no fun at all.

"Beam me up, Scotty'

We have a ways to go yet.

Murphy was an optimist.

And, these days, there are more USB charging ports than expresso stands. You can charge your cell phone from your car, your laptop, any handy wall outlet, the sun and likely from the extra calories in your Big Mac in a few years. The use case for easily replaceable batteries is pretty weak.

SD expansion is only an issue if you don't get enough memory in the first place. Sure, there are edge cases and folks around here are edgier than most - but for the vast majority of cell phone users, these simply aren't very important issues.

Now, decent keyboards - that's another story...

That's the very best kind of conspiracy theory.

As is true in real estate, the quality of life depends largely on your neighborhood.

Don't over think this one.

What good is a Doomsday device if nobody knows about?

There is limited evidence of combustion. You can have an explosion from rapidly expanding gases without any sort of ignition. Some reindeer herders supposedly saw 'flashes' but it is certainly unclear if these were due to a methane ignition, the aurora borealis or just too much fermented lichen.

But it's pretty amusing to the rest of us.

So, it's a Hamster Habitrail with magnets?

Why aren't you feeding the poor instead of posting on Slashdot? Isn't that the most important thing? You could have given some well deserved, undernourished child one of your twinkies. Oh wait, the child lives in some stinking desert without a functioning water well in five miles.

Or maybe we could use some of the earth sensing satellites (created by those self same hair-brains) to map out artesian flows and show people on the ground where an inexpensive well could be dug. Or we could give the kid a vaccine (developed by that same complex and expensive infrastructure created by those hair-brains) to keep him healthy so he can go to school and break out of the cycle of fear, anger and misuse that characterizes his world.

Or perhaps not - the world is a complex and often ugly place. Quite a bit more complex than your apparent world view, I won't comment on whether or not your view is particularly unattractive but I'm damned sure glad I don't feel that way.

Sure it is. That's how you concentrate things. Probably wasn't the first thing life did - replication has to happen first, but it was an early (and energetically favorable) change.

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but whips and chains excite me.

(I suppose fiber would be a pretty kinky whip, at least to AT&T, Time-Warner and the rest of those perverts.)

The limitations of the existing manufacturing technologies really aren't in the realm of designing new parts or putting them together. It's keeping them together after the thing has been spinning for a couple thousand hours. Computerized CNC is a well advanced, constantly improving technology that works pretty well. You just don't slap a new turbine spindle in an engine and blast down the runway - you have to test it for hundreds of hours before you even put it under the wing.

So 3D 'printing' (which isn't really what this technique is) won't get you out of design and test any faster. It probably won't even help you create a one off part for an older engine - if you have drawings detailed enough to print it, you have drawings detailed enough to mill it.

Next thing you know, we're going to be printing jet engines on the Internet.....