Because those are utterly crap. They provide a long arm and that's what causing the connector to break off quite easy at the PCB side.

Try blind mating an DVI connector. You'll find that USB is a charm compared to that.

I mean, it works in the same way, as in, it does not really work for anything but a tech demo.

This is pretty much how the leap-motion works. Nothing really new to see here, move along.

So, that's perfect, password per site, and hard to fake.

I'm not, the code I maintain is to complex for that, and there are no real hotspots. 15% less runtime means a lot to me.

Go play KerbalSpaceProgram.

It's much easier to land on a moon then to get to an asteroid. Moons are quite large, have their own (significant amount) of gravity. Asteroids are small, have eccentric orbits.

We kinda do know how many planes there are flying.
http://www.flightradar24.com/

Right now there are 10365 planes flying over the world. They also perfectly tracked the last few plane crashes up to the moment they disappeared. So position is covered.

Print heads can be tiny:
http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20140...

The problem is not slinging the head around. You could even do that with much more speed then is done right now.

However, the real problem is cooling and bonding. If you print quicker you need to cool the material quicker. If you cool it quicker, it doesn't bond to the rest of the material really well.

We generally speak in mm^3 / second when we talk about printing speed these days. As that's what counts in the end. Volume per time. With the accuracy we want, naturally.

- Daid, Ultimaker R&D. The Cura guy.

Did some programming&debugging from inside a 3D printer:
http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG-20140...

Pretty much all lies from the start.

First off, almost nobody is missing steps in their cheap 3D printers. They simply do not move fast enough for that to happen. And if they are missing steps you have a bigger issue, usually lots of friction somewhere.

Secondly, 200 steps per rotation is normal for motors. However, the drivers everyone is using do 16x microstepping, good for 3200 steps per revolution. Accurate steps per revolution. That's better then 4096 +- 2 steps.

You also lose the close coupling between the 4 axis that you need (the feed stock of the material is also an axis that you need to control), which is a big deal in running accurate prints.

The cheap hobby servos will also have mechanical play, which will cause vibrations to be transferred to the head, which will result in a reduction of print quality.

I'm also willing to argue that it's more expensive. But I didn't do the math on that part yet.

(Who am I to say so? Just a guy who has been working at Ultimaker for 2 years. Kinda know what's needed for quality 3D printing at a low price and what's not)

I worked in this area 5 year ago. The switches have been replaced by a 2nd CPU which handles safety, and cannot be overridden from the main CPU.

So, all-green cannot happen. But the systems are far from safe. System I worked on was based on Linux, had pretty much an open-telnet server running. But is intended to run on a private network, not connected to the internet. However, connecting to this network you could own all the lights in seconds.

But, as you say, the value of this would be low. You could disrupt traffic flow for a while. But that's it.

http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20130...
Printed on a "crap extruder" printer, without problems.

You're generalizing. Just because it does not work for metal does not mean it does not work for plastics. Plastics have a very different thermal conductivity.

Heated chambers are not patented. A specific implementation of the heated chamber is patented.

(Do have to agree that they concentrate too much on the machine. The machine is hardly the problem)

I know a guy how consistently prints watertight cups.

PLA layers fuse very well. ABS is harder, which is why everyone is switching towards PLA.

More expensive is usually better. But, 20k machines from 3D systems are getting the same quality as 2k hobby machines.