I suspect that, at very least, 3d printing servics will be harassed (like youtube vs. the music labels) about this possibility, and some users will definitely try it.

The one thing that(as much as it surprises me) makes me a trifle skeptical of the lethality is that doing resin(or wood's metal or similar alloys if you want some extra weight and don't mind a little cadmium) castings from figurines isn't rocket surgery, especially for people with enough interest and fine motor skills to paint the things, and I've not heard anything about major disruption from that.

3d printing will lower the bar, since you don't actually need the master to create a mold from; but even if you exclude clandestine trade in cloned figurines, people could easily buy enough parts to copy an acceptably varied army for much less than they could buy the entire army.

The really nice stuff is still pretty expensive per unit volume, even aside from the purchase price, so Amazon probably isn't interested; but they are almost definitely using relatively nice plastic printers.

socialism stepped in as the american dream eroded.

And now fascism is coming up fast along the rail.

Is Madden still a good game year after year? I stopped playing them back in the '70s (I think), so I really don't know.

Is it like fantasy football, or is it more of a twitch controller game where you have to learn combinations and everything and there's quick time events?

I think EA and Microsoft should do their best to charge customers whatever their customers voluntarily agreed to

"Do their best"? That assumes any overcharges are accidental. You're giving those companies way too much credit.

What was the last time you heard of EA or Microsoft undercharging someone by accident?

Well, it's still your money going into EA coffers.

If you really see them as a company that sees its customers as the enemy, you won't want to be enriching them in any way.

Yes. I've set up alarms on all of my accounts, so that if it sees any payment to "EA", it knows that someone has hacked my accounts, because I will not knowingly give that company my money.

But we are at Dice, sir:

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Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

Amazon's offering is substantially less flexible than that of existing players (shapeways is the name that comes to mind; but there are others), who already accept basically any STL that isn't horribly munged in some way and spit the result out in a number of different materials.

You still have to model the part, or buy a (currently rather expensive) 3d scanner to do it; but if you are willing to put on your CAD hat, you could have the part by next week, just not from Amazon. I wonder if they are just moving slowly, or worried about the copy cops coming after them once people start knocking off action figures or something...

It lacks the sci-fi appeal of pure printing; but there are a variety of techniques that use the 3d printed part as the first step and then subject it to additional treatment steps in order to make up for those sorts of deficiencies.

As long as the subsequent processing steps don't change the dimensions(or change them in predictable ways that you can compensate for) you can get away with whatever tempering, annealing, and so on your application requires.

Depends on what you pay.

A poorly calibrated fused filament unit will produce stringy junk that delaminates if you look at it funny. A well calibrated one will achieve something reasonably close to what the plastic it is using is actually capable of. Outside the cheap seats, you can print all kinds of things(especially if you count parts that require one or more additional processing steps as '3d printed'. Printing wax, for example, is pretty undemanding, and allows you to do lost-wax casts of more or less any shape that will cast properly, without needing a printer that can sinter or melt metals. Some of the techniques for producing ceramics are in the same vein, the printer just needs to tack the ceramic material together long enough for firing, which takes care of the mechanical properties.)

The one thing that is (relatively) easy with injection molding that 3d printing (to my knowledge) isn't so hot for is overmolds. When injection molding you can use insert molding or multi-shot systems to achieve the (enormously common and fairly popular) combination of a rigid plastic structure with an elastomeric surface treatment for grip or aesthetic reasons. For prototyping purposes you can get paint-like coatings that emulate elastomeric overmolds that you can brush on to 3d printed parts; but the quality isn't as good and production takes longer.

In the ruling, the SC made it expressly clear this was not some corporate pseudo-person's right to speech, but rather the rights of the owners, who carry along the right of free speech whatever they do, like anyone.

As AK Marc already pointed out, those owners already have their right of free speech, as individuals. Citizens United has conferred a further right, that other individuals do not have.

This was an attempt by right-wing extremists on the court attempting to extend the power of the ruling elite just a little longer. It will absolutely be overturned, and in the future, Citizens United will be looked at as an artifact of a shameful period in our history, sort of like Brown v Board.

Citizens United is simply Freedom of Assembly + Freedom of Speech = Freedom of Speech for Assemblies of People.

Not quite. A corporation is not an assembly of people. By definition, it is an aggregation of capital. This is why you can have corporations that are entirely owned by another corporation, with the only human involved being the notary in another state who serves as the registered agent (at arm's length).

As you know from your thorough study of the writings of the Founders, especially the Federalist Papers, there was a strong belief that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. A corporation is designed very specifically to remove personal accountability from shareholders (who are the owners of the corporation).

How can a legal mechanism be used on the one hand to shield individuals from personal responsibility be used at the same time to confer greater rights?

We'll look back on Citizens United approximately the same way we now look back on Brown v Board of Education. As the product of a shameful period in our history.

Interesting, but let's look at another measure: the length of classification. The previous chart seems to indicate that the length of time these documents are being classified for is increasing.

Also, the declassification procedures are being fought by the administration at a very high level. Documents that should have become classified are becoming re-classified, which would not show up on your chart of "original classification activity".

Add in the level of whistleblower prosecutions and executive work product that is simple outside of the system via private emails, texts and "crashed hard drives", and you get a picture of a very secretive administration. What do you think?

Are you honestly equating process separation in multi-user OSes with rootkits?