Initially, I read "a regular looking lorry marked TEPCO." The statement took a different meaning. :)

The American Association Against Abusively Applied Acronyms has a problem with the title of this submission.

Ack!! Have you actually USED any benchtop tools from Harbor Freight? Or any power tools at all? That place is terrible. Also, none of those mills are CNC, so comparing them to 3D printers is not particularly telling.

Apple isn't the only company building things in China, but somehow they've managed to be the most profitable about it. If "Made In China" was the only requisite for extreme profits, then I think there would be a lot more "99 cent" stores dominating the stock market.

The press release doesn't really mention much about iTunes sales. Mostly it's talking about the MASSIVE number of iPhones they sold, and huge increases in almost every other hardware product over this quarter last year (except for the iPod). 37 million iPhones is equivalent to quite a lot of mp3's....

I can't help that think with record breaking profits like this, there has to be some sort of bubble that's about to burst. Maybe it's paranoia brought about by the current economy, but goodness.. $13 billion in profit? More than 25% of their revenue is profit? Something is going on here..

Man. Dockwise has the right idea. I didn't realize they had a ship in the works that was that size. That's fantastic- and I can only imagine they're going to make bank on that investment.

I don't think Dockwise has anything close to big enough for the Concordia. According to Wikipedia (which I'm happy to be able to access today!) their biggest semi-submersible is the Blue Marlin, which only has 178m of deck space. The Concordia would need something more like 250m. I think they'd likely float it and tug it to one of the nearby shipyards...

If you look at CruiseJunkie you'll see a recent event on the Carnival Liberty that's being attributed to a computer glitch. I don't think that's "official" by any means, but I do believe that there are probably some computer safeguards on newer ships. I've been on a bunch of cruise ship bridges and engine offices, and there's plenty of automated systems.

I think they could salvage the ship without THAT much difficulty. They are about 400KM (in either direction) from a Fincantieri shipyard- there's one in Genoa and one in Naples. Fincantieri is the company that built the ship in the first place, so I imagine they'd be pretty accommodating. The ship could be floated by just patching a few holes and putting the gigantic balloon-like things they use to launch tankers under the submerged sections, and just inflating them and tugging the ship off the land. Pump out the water and get the ship upright, and it'd be little worse than the Carnival Splendour that had to be tugged to Mexico. The ship's own engines might still even work. I bet the cost of salvage and revitalization would be less than the cost of making a new ship, which would probably run about $800 million.

Now, it's another question whether anybody would want to take a cruise on this cursed ship once revitalization was complete, but it would get renamed and rebranded and most people probably wouldn't even realize.