Regarding your first example, it is a machine that makes bread (I guess in various shapes) out of dough, but if you have the dough, a regular bread machine would be more efficient, and a regular oven would be even more efficient as long as you have a human available to kneed the dough. And many kinds of ovens work without electricity.

Regarding the second example, it is a machine that makes shaped chocolates, which will be poorly tempered compared to molded chocolates, and once again, you have to have the chocolate as an input. Setting aside for a moment the question of weather chocolate is an appropriate thing to spend disaster resources on; if you are in a disaster area, who cares if the chocolate candies are shaped like turtles? I know this is just an example, and your argument is intended to imply that the state of the art of 3D printed food is constantly advancing, it still faces the fundamental limitation that you have to have the food already, there is no forthcoming breakthrough that will synthesize food from constituent chemical elements. You know, other than regular old agriculture.

You know what a government is going to do if they have you and your phone? Take your finger, and press it to your phone, which legally they can compel (or physically force) you to do. All this talk about "Oh, what if the government has your fingerprint on file?" Please. That's overthinking it.

Too bad you can't designate one of your fingerprints as a duress fingerprint, which would cause the phone to wipe itself.

There should be a bounty for killing trollish patents. Usually, there are many targets who settle and sign royalty agreements with the patent troll before any target decides to fight them in court. First, all such agreements should be required to be public. Second, whenever a target successfully defeats a patent troll in court, all the future royalties that were previously agreed to should be cut in half, and paid to the party that defeated the patent troll. They should also be able to go after recovery of past royalties. If you are a patent troll, losing a case should be a financial death penalty.

Oh, I don't know, maybe with a hash function, like with every other passwork implimentation ever?

- But most importantly, HUMANOID SPECIES. Even Silicoids looked somewhat bipedal.
Which is very important if you're supposed to empathize with the species you're playing.
Among other things MOO3 managed to fuck up was the look of the game - most species now looked like bad modern art.
Practically all of them could be considered "repulsive".

I disagree. I bought MOO3 at launch, after following the development unfold for over a year before that. Existence of species that are not bi-pedal or humanoid was absolutely not the problem with MOO3, but rather it was one of the few actual improvements in the game. Unfortunately that was buried in a morass of unplayable drudgery, and the removal of the existing fan-favorite races was a bad decision.

One thing that would have helped, and I remember there being a big giant argument in the forums about this while the game was in development, was resolution independence. They made a decision to go with 800 by 600, and stuck with it. They rebuffed all the voices in the forums that were telling them that this was a stupid idea, and the result was a mess. The game might have been more playable (as complicated as it was) with a more thoughtful higher resolution interface. But they wasted development time on pie-in-the-sky grand ideas that were all eventually cut from the game.

If I was developing a game like this right now I would not have a public forum following the progress from the beginning. I think MOO3 was the first big game to take that approach, and the developers were constantly motivated to promise more and more features that never made the cut, and it took away from their ability to focus on the game itself in a more realistic manor. I think this can only work if the game is at a finished enough stage that the forum participants can actually play it during the process instead of just dream about it.

I have been addicted to Starbase Orion lately, which is currently the best Master of Orion inspired game on iOS. As soon as I have time to read the whole kickstarter page, I'll think about contributing, but I'd like to know how they plan on implimenting their multi-platform pass with iOS. I don't think that will work.

Care to elaborate?

Or are you just talking out of your ass?

Back in 1993, if you typed the URL http://apple/ into Mosaic anywhere on the University of Vermont network, you would get a page about apple orchards. Of course, this was just UVM's DNS.

You would need a much thicker cable than the ordinary cell phone charger cable, and the phone itself would have to be significantly thicker than an iPhone to accept the plug, unless you accept that you can only re-charge the battery (at that speed) when it is removed from the phone and put in some sort of fast charger. (Good luck getting Apple to adopt that idea.)

This.

The thing that will prevent tyranny is an educated populace, and the political faction most associated with the NRA is the same faction that is trying to gut education in this country.

They want everyone ignorant and afraid, so they can sell more guns.

That is one awesome robot dog he's got there!

I'm in the US and I just got a bunch of LED bulbs from Costco for $5 each. Not the color changing ones though.

Um, no.

The problem with the LEGO products for girls is that they are steriotypically feminized, and the themes of the sets reinforce the idea that girls and women can't do anything significant with their lives except shop and perform domestic chores. The Donkey Kong hack on the other hand, communicates the message that girls and women can perform the same feats as boys and men.

I see your 85mm f/1.2, and raise you a 600mm f/4. To get an idea of the scale, that SLR attached to the lens in the picture is a medium format camera and it is huge, about double the size of a 35mm SLR in every dimension.