I am working/in school, as/for mechanical Engineering. I have used Pro/Engineer and IronCad extensively they are polar opposites in the way that they operate. They also both have there advantages and disadvantages.

When I had to chose a 3d Cad Program for myself I chose IronCad mostly on price but after using it for two years I genuinely feel that It is the fastest to model and easiest to use (but coming from Pro/E offers at times hair pulling levels of frustration mostly due to differences in methodology) It has a 30 day free trial that you can use to see if you like it. http://www.ironcad.com/ That is what I would point someone on a budget towards (if money were no objective I would still go for Pro/E but would miss a lot of the features of IronCad)

As a lover of open source I often look towards FreeCad http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page longingly and have great hope for it. it may be worth a look

I would love to do that, but I think that, that is, or will be Illegal under the tpp and nafta. Also can you think of a faster way to get voted out of office than to be the person who caused all of our cheap consumer goods to double in price? Not saying I don't think it should happen; just it would be tricky.

In one of my manufacturing process classed, the prof claimed he had done a lot of work for major companies off-shoring production. He then went on to explain that they saved very little money on the cheap offshore labour. (cheap labour + long shipping = aprox same as labour here) The big savings were gained from having no or very poor environmental laws.
With that in mind I do not see this bringing much manufacturing back to North America or Europe. Plus if it was an advantage the cheap labour markets would just by the robots anyway.

The way to get manufacturing back here in my opinion, is to make a products store front cost true to what the real cost is. Ie sum of parts + labour + the cost of dealing with the waste.

I still want a baxter to play with though

Who cares about the whether the company is good or bad, That is a red herring. If the majority of citizens want something labeled, then label it. Most of us live in democracies, why can't we have democratic rights?

I agree with everything you said, and would love if some of the more glaring "professional" missing features were addressed. But as I can't code/or if I tried GIMP would be far worse off, and at this time I am not able to contribute financially I don't feel that I have any right to dictate what features need working on. (Not that I am implying you feel that you have a right ether.)

What I am saying is if people want to get away from Photoshop, they need to find a constructive way to help. Even if it is bug checking, writing tutorials, or any other simple job that helps out the cause.

Every time there is anything posted about GIMP the entire comments consist of nothing but people complaining that it is not photoshop. What does it contribute to the discussion? We have all heard it before, many times. If you irrationally hate some piece of software, don't use it. If not enjoy the progression and the new features.

I for one, am glad that GIMP exists and want to thank all the people involved for all their hard work. It is not perfect but gets better with every release. I happily use it for all my photo manipulation needs.

This sounds good on paper, but could it not lead to extreme abuse? Think of how badly the parties sway the little things to be in their favour. Now think of how much they would warp the civics test. I feel that it would not take long until the civics test became a way from keeping people with opposing views from voting rather than ensuring only allowing qualified vote.

Acording to Political compass the NDP are almost exactly in the centre the Liberals are to the right and the Conservitives are far right, According to that site everyone has moved substantial to the right, to the point that the NDP are nearly where the Libs were 10 years ago and the Libs are where the Cons were 10 years ago. Intrestingly, it actually puts the Liberals right of Barak Obama.

http://politicalcompass.org/canada2011

It is funny I have been attempting to do something very similar to this for my land. But have hit quite a few road blocks, first it was explained to me from the resource management people here in Alberta Canada that it is Illegal to store rain water that way. I can not take rain water that could potential go to someone else's land and keep it for myself. Which i begrudgingly admit is understandable. That is what it is considered if I were to make a water collection pit. Second they analyze the amount of surface area in any collection pit and calculate the evaporation, which is (surprisingly to me) very high. On that basis too they disallow the idea.

Water management comes down to, if you want more water available to use you need to have swamps, the natural way for the land to store (and clean) water without evaporative loses or unfairly keeping water from your neighbors. Ironically they are the very thing farmers have been doing their best to get rid of.

To sum up, land with swamps = good for the land, good for the water, good for the water table, bad for large mechanized efficient farming.

This has been my opinion on the matter taken from, talking with people employed by the environment ministry, research (google), talking with other farmers, and experience on my own farm.

I have no issue with that, just doing anything would be a step in the right direction and I will happily support any cordanated boycott (or other logical plan) with these goals. As an additional point for going after apple, they did just post record profits again. So everyone knows that they could easily do more to improve the lives of the workers.

Boycotting apple is a good idea, yes everyone is using the same factories but it is unrealistic to boycott everyone at the same time. So why not pick the bully in the group and lay him out? Apple is used by people who claim to care, so force apple to care. Then once they are forced into it, move the next company down the line. I bet it would not take long and no one would be using the appealing worker conditions.

just my thoughts on the situation - Vlad

My process is fairly simple What I do, is I pick a price point that I want to spend then I look at Lenovo, dell, hp, and a few of the big box stores and get the machine with the best specs I can at that price.

I used to be biased towards Thinkpads but I am not happy with the build quality or longevity of my most recent, a w500. The only thing they (in my opinion) still have going for them is they are easy to disassemble and repair or upgrade. Although parts from Lenovo are ghastly expensive.

What I find interesting, is when I read through the comments on Slashdot a year ago there was virtually no argument that global warming was happening and was man made. Even on sites like fark the majority of people were under the "human caused global warming" banner. Yet now there seams to be a resurgence in the "its not caused by us" camp. What has changed?

/don tinfoil hat

I have noticed a lot of marketing aimed at denying global warming. Is it possible that the marketing is working?

/remove tinfoil hat