Yeah QU-BD is fairly famous for low quality machining and low quality over all in the reprap world.

Makergear makes a nice one, makerstoolworks makes a nice one, a few other people.

Now you just can order a complete, assembled print head which includes a stepper, gearing, hob gear, etc.

Here is an example of a nicer one: http://www.makergear.com/products/plastruder

And there are others. Finish it! They are very damn interesting to play with.

Phones are still $700-$800 for a high end phone. I personally buy mine outright then just sell it and buy new one when I'd like, but for most people the thought of laying out $800 rather than $200 then paying the monthly fee they would anyways is abhorrent. It isn't like (at least in Canada) there is an extra "phone charge" when you're stuck in-contract. Their monthly bill is the same as it would be otherwise, they just don't have the option to pay it or not.

I find I save my money not being in a contract is by jumping from small carrier to small carrier when the really good deals come up, then just porting my number. Here I hop from Koodo, to virgin, then back etc whenever a better plan comes along. Now I'm on just about the best one I can get. $56 for unlimited everything but data, which is 2GB. Long distance, voice mins, sms, mms, etc. I rarely use my 2GB and overages are cheap enough ($10/GB) so basically I pay $56/month. I probably wont do better than that for quite some time.

So yeah there are definitely some advantages to no contract, but for the average schlub just wanting phone service and a nice phone, subsidies allow many to be able to afford much nicer phones than they could otherwise.

Then again my $300 Nexus 7 with 3G makes me wonder about the cost of phones in the first place.

If I wanted a phone only for a camera maybe. Me, like almost everyone else on earth, has no interest in windows phones considering the horrible things MS has done to their past customers.

Actually, assuming a fixed sensor size which is usually the case since your lens package determines this, the lower the pixel count, the larger the pixels are, and the more light you will get per pixel. This means, for a certain ISO, you will get a much brighter picture, the lower your megapixel count is. Esp on a phone, I'd take a 4MP with good low light over a 41MP with okay low light any day, any time.

Yeah. HTC one would be my #1 phone to go to right now if their battery was removable. Not because I want to swap batteries (I'm used to my iPhone and not having that ability) but because I'm sick of charging all the time and like the SIII, there will be kits for the S4 so vastly increase your battery at the cost of some thickness. If I had this option with the One, I'd be all over it like a fat kid on a cheeseburger.

Still might go that way since I like the design so much more than the S4. Have to weigh my options when I buy I guess.

Lost wax, like PLA, is generally just burned away out of the mold. You just blow the ashes out. Recycling in this case isn't the main concern.

Assuming the distances are given in normal miles not nautical miles, and the capacity, this would run though the 1.3 million liter tank in 93 days, giving a fuel consumption of 152.8 gallons per hour. OUCH.

Given the average US diesel price at $4 or so, this is $611 per hour or $14668 per day of travel. Total tank value around 5.2 million bucks.

Or to put it how most car drivers would want to see it, about 0.0903 miles per gallon. Also ouch! That would make me want a big sailboat instead! Then again if you're Google's CEO I guess this gets affordable, but even then $14k per day seems steep.

Lost PLA works just as well, but yes printers can extrude wax. There have been DIY versions, and there are commercial ones as well. Shapeways uses commercial wax printers to do lost wax casts of prints commercially. Just upload your file to em and they will give you a silver version of your file !

So your point is..because paper documents have gone out of fashion...all physical objects are also useless? Or do you think paper printers aren't cheap and ubiquitous ? I built a 3D printer, and I don't print toys/models.

I broke a wheel on my dishwasher? I just drew one up and printed it, good as new. I broke a handle on my fileting knife..I printed one nicer than the original which has a fish gut scooper on the handle. I've printed brackets for my truck, pieces for the printer itself, and if I got really enterprising, I could use the printed plastic to make a lost-plastic casting and cast myself metal versions of anything I wanted. (See here: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ )

My printer was under a thousand start to finish but that was self built so a lot more work than something you just unbox. (Mendelmax 2.0 from makerstoolworks.com if anyone cares(no affil))

Anyways, does it make pure financial sense? Maybe, maybe not. Does the ability to make any physical object that fits within my printers dimensions within a few minutes or hours make it worth it for me? Definitely. Some things take weeks when you need them now, sometimes you need to try 10 versions of something before it would make sense to pay for a final high quality one to be made. Sometimes its an object not important enough to spend the time and money on if you need to send away for it, but it would be neat to have. There are a million reasons I think 3D printers can work for the average Joe and see regular use.

Actually "canadian bacon" does not come from the belly. It comes from the loin on the back of the pig. Plain ole bacon is pork belly bacon, which is the same here in Canada or in the USA (Though if you go elsewhere in the world, just asking for bacon often gets you back bacon).

Actually while the 3GS didn't seem to bring much to the table, it was one of the more worthwhile upgrades in the iPhone line.

The 3G had the exact same specs other than 3G as the original iPhone. So it was really behind, especially on memory capacity. The 3GS was night and day, The keyboard was responsive, transitions very smooth, apps opened near instantly, etc. Far more difference than say the 4 and 4S.

I do 3D printing and talk a lot to the designers of the big printers. As mentioned above, you definitely don't want Blender, or any of those other surface modelling apps. They WILL work, but tend to suck for dimensional accuracy, and you can create weird crap that cant actually exist.

I think if money is no object, Solidworks is by far the easiest and most powerful thing you can jump into, with tons of resources on the net. If you can afford the price tag or are going to pirate it anyways, Solidworks is great.

The mendelmax series of printers is designed by maxbots. He personally uses Alibre. He says it does a lot of what solidworks does, and with some caveats, thinks that for the 99$ it is a great tool and all you'll ever need for basic 3D modelling. Depending on your patent stance, 3D systems owns a shit ton of patents on 3d printing in general and they don't hesitate to use them to close down infringing competitors. This may sour you.

If you want a fairly nice option that is getting nicer every day, FreeCAD is obviously free, open source, and is a fairly nice tool. Obviously no Solidworks, but the price is right!

And the last but certainly not least is OpenSCAD. You write your 3D models like programs, and it will render them. This allows some very cool time saving things, but it is obviously a bit less visual, so it depends on how you think, design, etc, and what your background is. Many of the things you will make in OpenSCAD will end up being parametric as well, making resizing and changing things somewhat easier. That being said any of the above tools can create parametric designs.

Anyways good luck, I love 3d printing, and would love to get a mill some day! Or maybe just start casting my prints using the lost PLA method: http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/

Have fun!