The problem with this justification, even if it is true, is that it assumes that we can trust our government with ever increasing amounts of power and surveilance over lives despite the fact that we know that more power = more corruption, that government will inherently misuse the power and tools it has access to, and that polarization/decline in morality in our culture is resulting in our leaders feeling the have more leeway to push the boundaries of what is permissable. And, just timing wise....this leak coming right after we've found out that the president has been using the IRS to punish his political enemies and ensure his opponents power was reduced during the recent election....

Basically, what you are saying might make sense if the culture and ethics of Americans and our leaders was beyond reproof, with the government we have --- it is more likely to be used to supress domestic dissent (to maintain internal power) rather than to stop our external enemies.

In my experience:
- For business and critical home office connections, reliability is the single most important aspect when evaluating internet connectivity options
- Due to the telecom deregulation bill in the 90's, the major phone companies have essentially killed off all competition for DSL and relegated DSL as a consumer technology where the emphasis is high bandwidth, low cost....reliability has plummeted, phone company can arbitrarily take down DSL for 24-48hrs to do upgrades/maintenance and there is nothing you can do about it other than get a pittance level SLA refunds later. Promised repair times are meaningless for DSL.
- Cable Internet Connections are even worse, they are shared and latency can vary by time of day....if you are lucky, you can upgrade to a business cable connection...but you are unlilkey to get a high uplink speed and cable companies were really not designed to provide good customer service. Some cable companies also offer fiber or gigE services which are not shared and provide real advantages...but this is hit or miss based on your location. And, until recently -- too expensive. We've just reached the point where they are a better deal than cheap bonded t-1.
- Bonded T-1 historically been the best solution for those needing 4.5Mbps or less, 2-3 seperate dedicated lines and the routers automatically adjust if one or several lines go up/down...packets fragments are reordered and checksummed on each end, there are good built in diagnostics, and phone companies are usually exceptionally diligent about fixing most T-1 issues within 4hrs. Bonded T-1's are one of the few areas where you can find reasonable SLA's ....e.g. get much of a months bill refunded if service is down for an extended period. Unfortunately, bonded t-1's are becoming somewhat less reliable as customer centric t-1 companies like speakeasy are being purchased by the telecoms and then sucked into crappy business practices that companies like megapath offer.

So, bonded t1 is OK for the time being, but I expect most customers are in process or planning a switch to fiber/gigE once they can get the SLA's and availability at the locations of interest.

Back when electronics or anything new/important came with massive well written documentation...
2nd or 3rd grade, Ti-99/4a, Basic Programming Book that came with the computer
Litterally the first non-childrens book I ever read
It took me 2 years to get through the entire book
By 4th-5th grade, I was programming my own clones of whatever was the popular game of the day on a timex sinclair w/ 16K ram extender
Compute and similar magazines were a great help
My dad was disappointed that I had stayed with basic rather than learning assembly language....
Later got a PC and learned C

There are a bunch of trade offs when producing a 3d printable model:
- artistic versus engineering versus programmable ui
- how much resolution is in the final print
- how many vertexes/etc do you want for complex objects
- how important exact dimensions/etc are for you
- how much time do you have to create the design

In general:
- If you must be able to let anyone without experience quickly produce a design, tinkercad is by far the best software to use. It's also good for quick modifications to designs made in other software.
- If you want really fine resolution/high number of vertexes and have a long time to test out design changes and willing to use a programmer based ui, openscad is where it is at.
- If you want the best open source ui for artists, use blender
- If exact dimensions and engineering ui is what you need, use a cad program....I haven't come up with what is the best...there doesn't seem to be a clear winner here.
- If you need to quickly fix problems in designs produced by other software, use netfabb.

If by feature size, one is referring to the nozzle width, than 0.4mm is just the default nozzle supplied by makerbot...I've heard that one can install smaller nozzles if needed...however, it usually doesn't make enough of a difference to be worth the longer print times.

As far as layer height goes, the most common printing resolution for a makerbot replicator 1 is 0.15-0.2mm and I've heard of a few users getting down to 0.05mm - however it usually isn't worthwhile, and 0.1mm is the lowest frequently used - and even 0.1mm is painful printing time wise. Honestly, I'm not sure there is much point in wanting better than 0.1mm as that is already an amazingly good detail level -- even 0.15mm produces great prints and I never see a point to want better.

My understanding about the advantage of the form1 is that printing time is significantly reduced for high resolution prints....whereas with traditional makerbots, the better the resolution the longer the print. Also, the formlabs allows printing of more complex models that a makerbot might have creating reliably. Still, it hardly seems worth the hassle in most cases.

I still see FDM printing as the way to go, the trick is just getting it more reliable with durable printers and at reasonable price while not going proprietery or overcharging for materials. Current makerbots are not really consumer market ready....they require lots of tweaking and maintenance.

Desktop processors sometimes do die abruptly.....replacing a cpu and remounting the fan is much easier than yanking out the motherboard as things currently stand. We had this happen on an older workstation with high quality motherboard...after a few years, the cpu starting giving errors..replaced the cpu, all was fine. Replacement CPU was easy to find and cheap....if we had to replace the motherboard, it would have been much more work and also required replacing ram.

It's nice and all that Lego might be releasing an official design of rover, but models of the curiousity rover for 3d printing have been available for roughly a week now already and are begining to enter 2nd/3rd gen revisions...we just gave one away this morning that we printed last night for a childs birthday party.
Lego these days is about robotics and First Lego League Competitions....for models, we can print or create our own....same for legos pieces themselves.
If you can afford to buy your child the occasional lego model and various sets which are very expensive, then you can probably afford a 3d printer which opens up many more possibilities.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27908

Type 2 generally means that the body has developed higher levels of resistance of insulin and that the resistance has over time caused the pancreas to work so hard that not enough insulin is being produced at the time of diagnoses that body blood glucose levels are no longer kept within healthy parameters which causes the body to begin to experience accelerated aging. Type 2 patients usually also have a pancreas that is no longer capable of producing close to the normal amount insulin (the system has essentially given up and can't rebuild). So, two problems that feed on each other in a negative feedback loop...and only one is fixed by lowering weight.

In lucky cases, where diabetes is caught early and the pancreas has not yet been irreversibly damaged...reducing weight on its own cause a resulting reduction in insulin resistance and effectively 'cure' type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately in most cases, and especially because diabetes is diagnosed in the USA via blood fasting glucose levels, those that are diagnoesed with t2 diabetes already have incurable damage to the pancreas. There is currently no known way to cure this...unless science/medicine can find a way to fix insulin production levels of the pancreas without constant stimulation from oral meds/etc (metformin is the most commonly prescribed). A better form of diagnoses is regular hba1c tests which may detect diabetes before the irreversible damage to the pancreas has happened. Also, not all increases to insulin resistance are a result of weight,....drinking excessive soda which has carmel flavoring which increases insulin resistance, not getting enough exercise on its own mean the body doesn't get lowered insulin resistance, and other things that might be associated with those that are overweight have a huge role that are completely seperate from the weight itself.

Yep, this is all about rising chinese/pakistan tensions with india.

Pakistan has signaled that it is breaking off attempts to work with the USA because a good portion of the pakistan population wants the western world to go away and the rest of the population is hoping that if pakistan doesn't cooperate americans will give up on afghanistan sooner w/o any negative impact which means that pakistani's can have a larger influence on afghan politics.

Meanwhile, the chinese have come in and offered to be pakistan's new best friend. Mostly because China wants to increase its influence in the region and the greatest local competitor to chinese influence is india, of which there have been several border wars/skirmishes in the not so distant past. Pakistan and china are logical allies now -- it's a double win, lessen american influence -- encircle and limit indian power.

China is rapidly bumping up its military and adding to its forces on the india border -- pakistan will be able to free up troops if afghanistan falls under its sway and therefore have more troops to put towards india. Naturally, india is alarmed and wants new weapons NOW...france can deliver quicker. That's all there is to it.

Both parties attract those who are power hungry to their elected ranks:
- Republicans unfortunately have a tendency to allow politicians who are being paid by big business who want to gut all regulatory oversight and put in place laws that protect them. These guys certainly are as you describe.
- Democrats have the equal and opposite problem - politicians who are eager to give away other peoples money for projects and programs that don't work, as long as it gets them elected and in the elite so they can become the new "ruling class". When challenged about the fact that they are bankrupting the country, they respond with fake data/arguments or simply imply that some magic fairy will pay for it all ("the rich"), etc.

I find both very bad, but I don't blame the parties per say for the problem as much as the american voter for letting them get away with it. I also still think most voters intend to put someone who follows the party ideals I stated above into office, they just don't research enough or vote party line rather than review each candidate individually.