I went to a homebrew teaching event one time that was held behind a small brewery. A homebrewer was showing off his incredibly advanced brewing system he had built from scavenged parts. It was a thing of beauty; had its own electric and plumbing system, small outrigger-like feet to stabilize it on un-level ground, etc. It even had a timer and thermostat based system where you could start warming up the hot liquor tank before you even woke up so it would be ready by morning. As I was wishing that I'd charged the battery for my camera someone mentioned to someone who worked at the brewery "You guys must have some type of control system like this as well!". The reply was a bit surprising to me. "No, we just have the last guy who leaves the night before turn on the burners. It takes a long time to heat up that much water."

If batch scripts are what you know, then that's a fine solution. I'm not familiar with Arduino but it is actually quite easy to create a system with a pretty web interface with the Microchip microcontroller eval boards and libraries. For me personally I'd probably select a microcontroller for other things as well like watchdog timers so that if my control logic goes off in the weeds I can detect the issue and potentially invoke a safe shutdown routine to turn off pumps, heaters, etc. The other thing I like about microcontrollers is that it becomes very easy to add any sensor or actuator to your project that has a simple serial interface like I2C, SPI, etc.

For more advanced control systems an added advantage of microcontroller based designs is that you can get very tight control over the responsiveness of the system. Obviously for a home-beer making system you probably don't need sub-millisecond control but if you start with a microcontroller and decide to play with more demanding control systems in the future you already have a head start.

Or one of many microcontroller eval boards from Microchip. They have some great library support for doing simple web interfaces too.

Actually, I think it is brilliant to try to get the video pulled down. The fact that the ruling is absurd only brings more attention to the fact that he was wrongly accused.

The answer will likely have no single objective basis and will depend on our own emotional responses to such a machine. We already live in a world where different people feel that certain standards of treatment are right / wrong for anything from humans, to animals, plants, even objects (for instance, a cultural relic or idol). In the instance of humans alone, consider the vast array of attitudes over human history and across different cultures as to the standards of treatment of humans of differing races, genders, ability, nationalities, etc. I expect that attitudes towards human-like machines will vary by no less a degree.

When WE feel pain because the simulation feels pain then we will seek ways to eliminate or ease that pain, individually and as a society.

Not everyone opens it that way, myself included. I just click the "Control Panel" entry.

The Windows 7 Start Menu has a text field with the explanation "Search programs and files". The Windows 8 Start Screen has no apparent visual cue that you can do the same by just typing.

When Windows 95 came out, I hated the start menu. Shortly thereafter I got used to it and while it isn't something I make time to celebrate it-just-works. When I first saw the Windows 8 Start screen I was resistant but figured I'd just come around after I used it. Instead my initial hate has just mellowed out to a steady dislike.

Don't get me wrong, the idea is greats for tablets, smartphones, and all your other assorted have-to-have portable toys but on the desktop it is an attempt to solve a problem that never existed. If you have too many things on your Start menu, it scrolls... just like the Windows 8 Start screen when you have more than a dozen fist sized 'tiles' on it. If you don't group and organize your Start menu it can get ugly to find things... just like the Windows 8 Start screen if you let tiles just accumulate.

The biggest insult is that the start menu DID exist in Windows 8 during the developer preview. You had to fuss with the registry to get it but it was in there. It would seem that Microsoft had to specifically remove it for the actual release. Apparently it wasn't good enough to let people pick, we need to be shown The Way.

I'd wager that greater than 50% of my body mass was once Craft Mac & Cheese. Not sure if you'd count that as cooking though.

I never made any assumptions as to how effective a plastic gun is or will ever be. A gun that can fire a potentially lethal round one or more times is a weapon, "viable", "serious" or not. All I've stated is that 3D printing is a technique that permits a weapon to be more easily, cheaply, and discreetly obtained that is also difficult to detect by security screeners. The example of a iron pipe and a shotgun shell satisfies easy, cheap, and discreetly obtained. 3D printing adds the element of difficulty to detect.

Hopefully if people do this they will at least have the decency to flag the videos as private. If I find myself directed to a video that is clearly just a dummy video for conveying steganography I'll be among those hitting the "report" button.

No need to be sarcastic. I agree that leaving it on your person would potentially be detectable via pat-down or backscatter, but not necessarily so for carry on articles. Visually it would be easy to conceal on ones person with even moderately loose clothing. The shape of the thing is arbitrary so it wouldn't even look like a gun on x-ray. It would also likely make it past security checkpoints that only use metal detectors, which are typically set at a threshold so that things like belt-buckles don't set them off.

Metal is not itself a prohibited item on planes. Small metal objects are a lot easier to conceal from the scanners than large ones.

Let us all know when you finish coding it. You could call it: "Doorways: The Toaster Strudel is a Fallacy".

I think the bigger issue about the 3d printed gun is combining the fact that a nearly unskilled person could make it with the fact that security scanners will have a difficult time detecting it.

Ok, let me see if I have this right. Rather than apply the scientific method to test an assertion in an objective and repeatable way, the shortcut to knowledge is to just make a baseless assertion and wait. If it turns out to be wrong then you are no worse off, however if it turns out to be verifiable at some point in the future then the assertion is denoted 'knowledge' and we may then look to the originator as some sort of genius / prophet?