Moving to open source, has been done. Even by profesionals http://www.davidrevoy.com/article170/the-choice-of-open-source

Gimp will have full 16 bit per channel support in the upcomming 3.0. If you can't wait for that and must have it Krita already supports 16 bits per channel.

Personally, I don't understand this. It does make sense for print ads, or high end photography, but for web, it does not even make a slight bit of difference."

I'm using CyanogenMod 10.1.. what mod do you recomend?

Ya, I recently designed a settop for my ungodly raspberry pi monsters.. I wanted it all contained and nice looking. I priced out having them printed by Shapeways, but it would have cost me over a $1000. I ended up making it out of stainless steel using my tig welder, and some starboard plasic parts that I machined. The plastic printer makes a lot more sense to me after pricing out things at Shapeways.

I've done both parametric and polygonal modelling. Solidworks is a lot harder to learn than Blender. On top of that it's about $5000 and takes twice as long to create anything in. Don't get me wrong, Solidworks creates accurate reliable objects to a degree Blender can only dream of. But in most cases for the purposes of 3d printing Blender should work fine, and you don't have to know tons of higher math to use it.

The "face normals" show which is the inside and which is the outside of your surface. I'd think that would be pretty important to a 3d printer

As to the rest.. I'd love to try. I just can't afford the machine right now. I have the feeling that it would be a lot of fun to try

Working with parametric or polygonal 3d modelling, is by it's very nature difficult to conceptualize, much less learn. I've been doing it for years, and there is still a lot I don't know, and the amount of things you can do keep growing, and growing.

But I digress, the reason I'm responding to you is that, if you're an artist, then you may not need to use a parametric modeller. If you can create your base mesh (cube, sphere, tube.. whatever), to your needed dimensions then you can just sculpt it. No need to learn tons 3d modelling stuff. And yes Blender can export for 3d printing. Check this video out, to get a good idea of the state of sculpting in Blender, and what you can do with it.

Filabot is one simple way around that. The problem as I see it is the initial price of the printer. The current iteration of the Reprap project is the Mendal Max. This is the best deal out there. For $1500US you get a kit that you can put together yourself. I want one so badly it hurts.. but I don't have the money. I'm assuming I'm not the only one.

Ubuntu for phones.. hrm. I'm on the mailing list. It's a very empty mailing list. I'd love to see it. Hell I'd buy one.. but so far nothing.

Perhaps you can explain how googles high speed internet service will strip you of your privacy any more than any other internet service. Personally I don't see it. Comcast/Time Warner et. al. are already monitoring what you do on the web for their own purposes. If you want unmonitored bandwidth try the Post Office. It's slow but no one reads you mail.. most of the time.

Really though, this is just two sides of one coin, and I don't see how this changes anything, except my bandwidth speed.

Different camcorders use different types of AVCHD. For a complete list of supported AVCHD formats look here

I love Kdenlive, and hate it sometimes too. It is by far the best editor on Linux as of now.. however the Lightworks beta is coming very soon. http://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=19&id=42353&Itemid=81#42353

This seems a strange question. Perhaps I don't understand. You can import clips and re-use the clips anywhere in the time line. You can import the same clip more than once. Or just use snippets in different places. Some modern compression schemas are not necessarily linear. That is why they cannot be concatenated. So the idea of clipping them into sections without re-encoding is unrealistic.

Yes but remember, politicians still control the IRS. Those are appointed positions. Don't think for a second that any politician is going to allow their funding sources to be harmed in any way.

Look.. the web is filled with dead projects. Most of which have never been forked. The fact that a project is forked is not statistically or empirically linked to failed projects. Whether or not a project survives or fails is mainly determined by the project lead's desire to make it happen. If anything has an influence on how a project get's on, I would say it is more about user base and the amount of people willing to help it/use it, that gives devs the drive to work on.