A recent article on bringing back the Saturn V J-1 engine mentions how 3D printing has enabled them to reduce the part count for some components from 5,600 parts to just 40; thus *vastly* simplifying (ie *MORE* simple, not 'now anyone can do it') the building of this engine.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/3/

TODAY it can be very [not nearly as easy]. Not impossible, but [not nearly as easy as it used to be]

FTFY

> since China was the last big pool of cheap human labor

Guessing there's a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa that would both disagree with you and welcome even the dirtiest of factories

> Droid Razr Maxx HD
I am waiting for this phone to come to Sprint; I replaced my Zio with an EVO with an extended battery but my wife doesn't want to trade her Zio for a phone as thick as mine even with the long battery life I get.

>Removable batteries mean a battery door. This makes the phone thicker.

Bollox. The Sanyo Zio had a batter door that was at best the width of three sheets of paper; and the battery lastest much less than the lifetime of the phone (my wife still uses her somewhat-less-than 3yr old Zio)

> frozen meal

That example is like taking a Roomba out of the box and putting batteries in it (i.e 'not building')
Taking frozen peas, a jar of curry sauce, a can of potatoes and a can of garbanzo beans, heating all w/o burning then pouring over a pile of minute rice *is* cooking.

> No, never ever claim that around EE graduates. We despise things like this being called "building"

Never, ever claim it's 'cooking' unless you graduated a French cooking school!

Never, ever claim you taught something unless you have an education degree.

Never, ever claim you improved cleaned a room unless you've gotten the dust levels down to some ridiculous clean-room PPM.

Never, ever claim its 'programming' unless you're doing it in binary.

Geez, anal much?

I'm thinking of a more educational use; Curiosity landed on Mars a few months ago and I think it would have been the awesome-est STEM-related outcome had hundreds of thousands of middle-school kids been able to take a break from their standardized test reprogramming, er, studying and instead they got a $200 kit to remotely 'explore' the alien landscape that is the dirt patch behind the school.

You could DIY it - http://www.indiegogo.com/pinoccio

And stock brokers often end their rosy historical returns with the statement "past performance is no guarantee of future results".

I live in a small college town (> 100k) with a daily commute that takes me nowhere near a freeway, thus 50mph is way more than I need going to/from work. Keeping my 5yr old Saturn to run and down the freeway would satisfy all my travel needs. Unfortunately, the sticker-shock on these exotic powerplant cars means it'd probably cost a multiple of what I paid for the Saturn which begs the question - what kind of crazy math do I have to do to get a decent ROI on the car's purchase?

I see the classroom of the future becoming something very much like the average grocery store over the last few years; a bunch of automated service 'stations' overseen by a central observer who comes over when there's a problem. Or like that 'spacebowl' that Spock was in during the Trek reboot, tho a little less bowl-y I think.

Once the majority of either governors or at least 25% of one of the congress-pools is 3rd party, they won't have a chance. I wish people would figure that out; a viable party isn't going to start in the White House.

That was just featured on one of those science/reality shows; a SmartCar hit a concrete pylon at about 70mph to test out the passenger safety cage; it indeed did not collapse but the narrator did point out that such an impact and rapid deceleration would destroy your organs and you'd be severely injured and/or dead.

>For sheer city deadness, it's hard to beat Cleveland at night.

Then you haven't been to downtown Los Angeles at 6:05pm.

And I mean downtown LA proper, not Hollywood.