So in theory I could acquire a good number of anonymous bitcoin and have my shiny new drugs drop shipped to an ex, or maybe some poor politician I disagree with. Or, I could just ship it directly to me and claim I was being targeted. Just, you know, *theoretically*.

'They will become popular when we get away from the word insects and use something like mini-livestock (PDF).'

Hivestock.

The canaries in this coal mine just started dying. It's news because there's about the be a cave in.

Way to totally miss the point. 14,000 Olympic athletes and 500,000 spectators are at the games. If the competitions were the point of the games they'd be spread out (in location and time) so the whole thing would be less of a logistics nightmare. Now whether you think that the Olympics are about cultural exchange or economics is up to you, but it certainly isn't about handing out 2300 medalions. Broaden your perspective.

Creating unusual object structures:
I once played around with a state machine framework that was object oriented c. It had a virtual table at the top of one base class and at the bottom of a different one. Using the same layout in the virtual table allowed multiple inheritance without any special effort and without any wasted space. It's the only object structure I've ever played with that I couldn't implement with C++ classes and inheritance (I guess a *really* good C++ compiler might be able to optimize to that structure)

Virtual Static members and member functions:
There are occasionally times when I need polymorphic behavior, but the behavior itself isn't instance specific. As a contrived example, imagine needing to query an instance of an object for the total number of peer objects that are in existence (I'm probably managing a count during construction/destruction). I need to call some member that is class specific, but that member will only need to use static members to execute. As it is this ends up being declared virtual and the this pointer is (needlessly) passed in.

Those are the only two instances I've run across where I actually wrote code up to the point of noticing that I couldn't do that in C++ (I'm actually still shocked ten years later that there's no such thing as a pure virtual static function).

Yeah, but sometimes you just get tired of typing the same boilerplate into every single function. I program in C most of the time and have dealt with at least three different "object oriented c" implementations. Every single one ends up with a this pointer (this/self/me) as one of the function parameters and every single one uses some variant of GetObjectFromMember for virtual functions:

void ExitSensorArrivalTimer_v_MSecTimer_expiry( MSecTimer *timer_self )
{
      Sensor *self = GetObjectFromMember(Sensor,m_exitSensorArrivalTimer,timer_self); ...
}

Sometimes a little language hand-holding helps limit the carpal-tunnel issues. This macro is also quite error prone (since C provides almost no type safety when casting pointers to and fro).

The tech to do this exists today. Capturing 3D shapes from standard camera/video data: doable: there are Youtube videos of people doing this ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IquKgEyXo2g ). Generating the part files from the 3D model: difficult: there is a bit of art in turning 3D models into (efficiently) printable objects (hollowing out a bust to save material, or handling unsupported areas). Printing the part: moderate-easy: Depending on the type of printer you use (Fused Deposition Modeling is more challenging, Selective Laser Sintering is easier).

Now, it will probably be quite a while before anyone bothers to make it easy to go from one end to the other. I'm just saying that with a billion dollars you could go on your own personal crusade and make it happen this year.

This would be a better fit at a high end copy center like Kinkos. The people working there have some technical ability, they are used to dealing with consumables, and they are already in the reproduction business. Fee schedule would be some setup cost say, $20, and a per minute print cost (say $0.20). That's fairly expensive per part, but cheaper than buying your own, and much less hassle.

I'd guess a typical store would get a few customers a week printing for a few hours each. So somewhere around $5000 per year in business. Consumables are a question (color and type variety), but would probably be less than $500 per year (electricity, plastic and extruder nozzles). If labor there was $30/hour (way high) that should be less than a half hour of setup and cleanup time (so $1500/year). Break-even point is somewhere around 9 months. Then you are making money as long as the machine lasts. Move nearer a university or R&D business area and your usage rate probably rises fast.

Of course, if you are really going to offer this service these kinds of extrusion based printers aren't the best choice. They are just the cheapest. Higher end systems can print faster, higher tolerance parts with none of the part shape restrictions. Plus they are easier to operate and keep running.

I'm betting someone has run these kinds of numbers and it's a little to small-potatoes to risk it yet.

Every jurisdiction I've ever lived in had a legal out for rapid response. Most are worded to allow immediate access to any information or location required to counter an immediate threat of harm (to persons, property, or in some cases evidence of a crime). The clauses all require the approval of a warrant within a short time period (24-72 hours). The point is: requiring a warrant doesn't inhibit emergency responders from entering your house if they hear gunshots, searching a building for a fugitive, etc. The law already has a mechanism to deal with exigent circumstances.

It's the mini lovechild of Steve Jobs and Stanley Tucci. That's kinda creepy in itself I guess.

That's a really good question. I certainly haven't read all the background, but from the wikipedia summary I can see two possible distinctions: 1) that Cablevision had the right to publicly show the content to their subscribers (at some point), and 2) that the stored copies and transmission to the viewer were done entirely on Cablevision equipment.

Zediva has never claimed to have a public broadcast right to the content. While that's a significant difference I don't really see that as the issue here. If Zediva laid a dedicated cable to each subscriber's house would that change the ruling? I think so. In that case the problem isn't who they are showing it to but rather how they are delivering it. I think the significant difference lies in the use of a public transmission medium (the internet) between Zediva and their clients. Even if the content is encrypted the data must be there in some reconstructable form, ie, it's a copy. Because it's a copy, on display in a public forum, copyright law is at issue and the original owner has the right the control the creation of that copy.