But those physical poles are in my physical backyard. If I have to grant utilities an easement, then I am perfectly fine with them having to grant an easement to other utilities.

I see them on sale in the UK and they are sold as smartphones in general, rather than cheap but respectable. I think sometimes people don't notice that this is a market that is growing a lot, has a lot of potential for more people to buy devices and apps and the market can still change radically from one year to the next.
Just because Nokia and Microsoft were late to launch something that compares well to iPhones does not mean that as of 2013 it's all hopeless for them. There's plenty of people in the whole world who are in the market their 1st or 2nd smartphone and/or are not deeply committed to iOS or Android.

Now if Apple decided to go loco and sell a truly low end device, similar to what they did with the 5c but for £200 unlocked, then it would turn the market upside down... again.

Big data monopolies like Google are the stuff of nightmare for privacy-minded individuals.

But there's a silver lining to that particular cloud: as the most important player in the field, they're the most visible target for abuse of all kinds. Which means that you have a better chance of dodging the abuse if you simply don't put yourself in the center of the target, by not using any Google product.

Kind of like when Windows had the lion's share of the OS market, and you could avoid most viruses by running another OS, not because the other OS was more secure, but because virus writers had a better return on investment writing viruses for Windows and left your fringe OS alone.

The assassination thing gets tried now and then, but assassinated leaders have a habit of being replaced by other leaders, who are not always better. Sometimes, instead, they're replaced by multiple would-be leaders and a civil war, also not necessarily better.

Sure, $2/day is relative and can mean anything. Our grandparents lived a healthy life on about the same amount but due to inflation the dollar became worthless.

I'm not sure what you're trying to demonstrate here. Your grandparents lived on $2 a day when $1000 bought you a car. Today's starving africans live on 2 of today's dollars, when $1000 buys a wing mirror. Your point is...?

That is basically the GP's point, a snow covered data centre is like an igloo, the heat generated by the servers/people inside can't escape so it becomes a lot warmer that the surrounding ice, but due to the large amount of ice it's thermal inertia ensures the walls don't melt. You need to get past the ice to dissipate the heat effectively. Old English pubs with 3 foot thick stone walls don't need heaters when full for exactly the same reason.

It doesn't matter what you call the system, if the gap between rich and poor is small (say a factor of 10) then people are generally happier. Obscene disparities in wealth do nothing but fuel revolutions. The "American dream" boils down to wanting to be mega-rich, they want the wealth gap because they believe they are "exceptional" and will one day leap across it in a single bound. The US would probably work a lot better for everyone if it simply stopped arguing with itself about money.

One of the major reasons why an American can pay up to 10X as much as an Australian for inferior health care, is that the American system is obsessed with finding and eliminating people who are "getting something for nothing". Not just the government but also the hospitals and private insurance companies. There's a veritable army of government and private accountants all spending $5 to save $0.50. Here in Oz the doctor bills the government directly. It's the doctors and hospital admins who are monitored for fraud by cheap automated statistical analysis.

The so-called "Internet of Things" has rapidly become a buzzword du jour

The "internet of things" was one of the old buzzwords of Sun Microsystems (R.I.P.), along with "the network is the computer" and "write once, run everywhere".

The convection currents around deep sea volcanic "vents" do the same job. Panspermia and abiogenesis are not mutually exclusive, despite the "either or" argument manufactured by the mass media.

I think panspermia is a long shot, but given the length of time and the size of the universe it's almost certainly happened somewhere at sometime. Volcanos could also be a mechanism for single celled life to leave a planet. It's said that rocks as large as a houses were blasted into obit by Krakatoa and some types of lichen have survived on the outside of the ISS for more than a year. The landing on such an interplanetary flight would be very difficult to survive since the rock is likely to vaporise on impact. Even if it survived and landed on a habitable planet, the locally evolved life forms would more than likely out-compete it by simply eating it.

But does that mean that the sintered parts were good, or that the originals are shit? You haven't given us enough information (make, model, caliber, and year of firearm to start with, not to mention the actual parts) to make this determination ourselves.

Well, I can't give you any specifics (make/model) or I'd reveal whom I worked for, and I'm under a non-disclosure agreement.

But here's an example of what I experienced with the sintered metal:

I took a test side-by-side 12 cal which had silver-brazed demi block barrels made of high-quality Bohler steel. I had a lock printed. All we did to the lock was polish it a bit to achieve perfect fit in the receiver, when we shot the gun repeatedly in double-shot with proofhouse loads (+30% powder). At some point, a rather massive 2-mm disjunction occured at the breech. We figured the lock's metal had given way. In fact it was the barrel's lugs that had flattened themselves onto the lock, and the lock itself was just fine. We were really amazed!

I'll be more impressed when it's capable of printing a vaccuum tube...

It's kind of funny that Americans with all their guns seems to have a more tyrannical government than countries with fewer guns but a lot more political engagement from the population.

That's because most Americans have added two boxes to the four boxes of liberty: the ice box and the idiot box. And they seem to have stopped using the four others.

One way that seems to work in tech is just to "do a startup". This can be basically any idea, no matter how stupid, and doesn't need funding to count.

Either the US government rapidly steps in to quash or severely-restrict this technology in the US or their plans to disarm the US population will die stillborn.

If you knew anything about guns, you'd know it only takes a few basic tools and materials to make a functional gun that goes bang without killing its user. You don't need a 3D printer. There's no way to disarm anybody in any circumstances.

I love the smell of dying government tyranny in the morning.

Wishful thinking... It's not the lack of guns that keeps your tyrannical government in place, it's the lack of courage in a population that has turned bovine, uneducated, and more interested in shopping and watching reality shows on TV than in fighting for liberty and moral principles.

http://makibox.com/
I've yet not tried it but not heard any major disasters.

Based on your very thorough review of this product, I'm seriously considering ordering one.