Their presentation for investors quotes a sale price of $1000, not $300. At that price they might be able to do it. How well they'll do it remains to be seen.

Their presentation is all about their XY positioning mechanism. But that's not the problem. The hard problem is dispensing solder paste reliably and precisely, sticking the component down, and using hot air to solder it into place. As with low-end 3D printers, most of the problems are where the weld/soldering action takes place. They don't say much about how that's done.

The important thing is doing a consistently good soldering job. Nobody needs a machine that produces lots of reject boards.

Medical issues aside, being fat tends to be about consuming more energy than you burn.
In a remarkably similar manner, being in debt is about spending more than you earn.
It's cute that you people can take relatively simple problems with overarching patterns and obfuscate them with condescension on loan from Rachel Maddow.

I'm hoping that http://conventionofstates.com/ provides a serious review of all these matters.

Did you really just say that?
I mean, as the Enlightened Being here, I should think it hardly necessary to explain that the theological understanding that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" is orthogonal to the legal notion of innocence until guilt is proven.
I hasten to add that the notion that people are imperfect, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Acton) is BY NO MEANS an argument that the U.S. Constitution is in a divinely "inspired" document. The document is simply informed by common sense, yo.

You're such an idiot. Bugs Bunny is God, and Earth is shaped like a carrot. Obviously you require a closer study of the Illuminatus Trilogy.

I'm behind Ad Limiter, which limits Google search ads to one per page, picking the best one based on SiteTruth ratings. You can set it for zero search ads if you like. It also puts SiteTruth ratings on Google search results. It's a demo for SiteTruth search spam filtering.

This Mozilla/Chrome add on has a general ad-blocking mechanism inside. Unlike most ad blockers, it's not based on regular expressions looking for specific HTML. It finds URLs known to lead to ads, works outward through the DOM to find the ad boundary, then deletes the ad. So it's relatively insensitive to changes in ad code, and doesn't require much maintenance. The same code processes search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Bleeko, DuckDuckGo, and Infoseek. (Coming soon, Yandex support, and better handling of Google ads within ads, where an ad has multiple links.)

So, if I wanted to do a better ad blocker, I could do so easily. Should I? Is another one really needed? Are the headaches of running one worth it?

You trolled, and I called you on it. Like the time you accused me of plagiarism, on a piece that had no by-line. You just have zero (0) credibility with me. Sorry if that hurts your pride.

What's to know about Communism? Marx preached "the Kingdom of God, hold the God", and Soviet Communism was essentially Naziism without such an overt anti-Semitic streak. Any centralized, planned economy is a policy of failure.
And no, I'm not going to read every brain-dead reference you proffer, lest I join you. Go read Jonah Goldberg.

Great troll, and I'll buy off on the GOP, but the Tea Party is more accurately attacked for naiveté than anything else.

Indeed, one detects a certain contempt for the lumpenproletariat in the Left's actions.

http://www.headblade.com/

But we are at Dice, sir:

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Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

The Tesla/Panasonic plan gets cell and battery production back into the same plant. The battery industry has, for a while, had a model where cells were made in one country (usually Japan, Taiwan or S. Korea, or at least with machinery from there) and assembled into device-specific battery packs near where the end device was produced (usually China or the US.) For the Chevy Volt, the cells come frm LG Chem in Korea, and the battery packs are assembled at the Brownstown, MI Battery Assembly plant.

There's no good reason to do it that way now that the era of cheap labor in China is over. As a rule of thumb, labor has to be 4x cheaper to justify offshoring. The coastal provinces in China have reached that level with respect to US/Japan wages.

Done right, this isn't labor-intensive. Brownstown has only 100 workers in a 400,000 square foot plant, and they're doing battery assembly, which is the more labor-intensive part of the operation. Tesla claims to need 6,500 employees for their 10 million square foot plant, but they're probably counting construction-phase employees.

We heard that when Staples did it.

Amazon's 3D printed product offerings are rather lame. They're not offering any of the more advanced 3D printing processes; for that you have to go to Shapeways. All you can get from Amazon is plastic junk.

All they're offering are some existing tools, ones you can get for free. The main ones are the Clang static analyzer and Cppcheck. They're not offering free access to some of the better, and expensive, commercial tools.

Cppcheck is basically a list of common errors, expressed as rules with regular expressions. Clang is a little more advanced, but it's still looking for a short list of local bugs. Neither will detect all, or even most, buffer overflows. They'll detect the use of "strcpy", but not a wrong size to "strncpy".

Er, why? Facebook presumably wants users to feel happy when they visit their website - exploring how to do that doesn't seem substantially different to OKCupid wanting to make lots of successful relationships.