I think I may of replied to you before, but parts from my Solidoodle are very strong. The heat transfer from the extruder when printing at 0.3mm is more than enough to slightly melt the previous layer and fuse them. Printing at 0.1mm makes an almost seamless print. When printing with a heated bed, in an enclosed space the whole print is slightly tacky and soft. The prints do have a grain, and that is the weakest part, but you can design items with that in mind. If you are worried about printing something out of ABS/PLA that is going to fail due to stress, having it injection molded isn't going to increase the strength factor by enough margin to stop it breaking.

Well the SD itself has multiple 3d printed parts. I have printed gears and other parts I would happily use in robotics and other projects. The ABS plastics it builds are surprising strong and robust. I would not call the parts that much weaker than the equivalent injection moulded ABS part.

Although the base SD2 comes with no bed heater which makes it basically useless. The bed heater upgrade has "crept up" from $49 to $99. Although now some people are modifying theirs to not use the underpowered bed heater, but to use a large silicon heat mat instead. So if you want to go that option the base model is useful.

The writers of Repetier-Host are writing Repetier-Server that can be run on a RaspberryPi to remote your 3D printer of choice. See here for the plans https://github.com/repetier/Repetier-Host/issues/64

Oh yes, it's all the unions. Even though Germany has unions, pay's it auto works more, and their car industry is profitable, makes more cars, with large amounts of exports.

Unions done wrong fuck the system up. Builds adversarial us (the workers) vs them (the management) mentalities. Unions done right, can and does work very well. It is collaborative, where everyone works together to make the company better, struggle through the bad times etc. This collaboration works both ways, if the company is hitting hard times, the board, management should be taking paycuts themselves, stopping bonuses. They have failed to lead the company into a properous position. Before they have the cheek to ask the workers to cut their salaries, they should be severely cutting their own pay first. Put their hands up in the air, and claim "Yes, we fucked up", so how can we get through this? The CEO has taken a paycut of 80% sacrificing $25 million saving about 300 jobs, can you guys cut 15% until we get through this?

Both Germany and Japan after the second world war had written into their constitutions by Eisenhower, MacArthur and their aides various protections and rights for workers to bargain and act collectively. They both have become some of the biggest players in the automotive industry, and this is not by coinicendence, it is by design.

So going to oldapps.com, getting a nice older version of skype. And going Tools -> Advanced -> Automatic Updates (or similar depending on version) and disabling it doesn't work for you like it does for me?

As both Helium and Hydrogen are much lighter than air, the difference in buoyancy between the 2 is only about 8%

On a beach? Sounds like someone was flying a stunt kite or similar. They can make incredibly aggressive turns and manoeuvres, and are basically silent. Something like this odd youtube video? or this one?

Daw, same nightI am giving a presentation to IGDA Melbourne, would of loved to meet some fellow slashdotters.

Combustion engines typically have very poor efficiency at low rpms, so you'll spend far more Watt-hours worth of gasoline to generate a Watt-hour of kinetic energy until you get into the relatively narrow "optimal efficiency" power band.

What gave you that impression? I have been doing a lot of reading/research into this lately and there is no reason you can't make an engine efficient at low rpm. There are 2 terms related to engines/cars. Efficiency which is what you stated, measured in g/kWh (or lb/hph) and economy. An engine with good efficiency != a car with good economy.

How efficient an engine is, generally follows the torque curve (but not always). As the torque curve measures how good the engine is at being an air pump. If it manages to pump more air each revolution, it can make larger bangs for the same friction and other ancillary overheads. So an engine tuned to make a lot of torque in low rpm ranges, will be just as efficient (if not a little more, due to less heat causing more friction overheads, but I suspect that is actually quite minor).

The problem with designed engines to make a lot of torque down low, is to get any appreciable amount of power you need large capacities. This destroys the economy. The major contributing factor for this, is to maintain 60mph (100km/h) a car only needs around 6-10kW. For a big engine this is an issue, as you do not need to open the throttle very much to achieve this. Thus the engine spends most of it's engine sucking a vacuum against the nearly closed throttle plate, and your efficiency goes out of the window. With a smaller engine it will have the throttle at a wider more open position, so the engine is not fighting as hard to be able to breathe.

Putting a smaller motor on there would not increase battery life magically.

That was my point, a smaller motor was not going to increase battery life. The parent Gordonjcp seemed to be under the impression that you could shrink the motor, and make up for the loss of power by gearing. I was trying to state (in my saturday night drunken state), that gearing will make up for the loss in torque, but not the loss in power. 1) & 3) Electric Motor Basics Top Graph is for an ICE, torque is more or less flat over the rev range, they are torque constant devices. Electric motor, torque slides down, power goes up to a peak, stays there for a bit and drops off. They just work in fundamentally different ways. Power = torque * rotational speed. With an ICE, you form explosions that push a piston, connected to a conrod that provides leverage on a crank shaft that produces torque. The torque is equivalent to the size of the explosions produced. Power is how many explosions you produce a second (directly tied to crankshaft speed). The torque stays relatively constant throughout the rev range (although this changes quite a bit based on intake shape/resonance, cam lift, duration and overlap, exhaust resonance, head swirl dynamics), so therefore power increases with Revs. With an electric motor, power comes in, power goes out. Power = torque * rotational speed. So if a motor is drawing/given 300kW of power. Either rotational speed or torque (or a whole load of heat) has to go up to keep the equation balanced.

4) " I am talking in terms from the engine/motors perspective." So motors don't follow the rest of the laws of physics?

Of course they do, but you don't just look at the torque output from an engine (see my hand crank example), you need to look at work done (i.e power).

With battery tech improving (in term of cars), I don't think a lot of people grasp just how energy dense petrol/diesel/fossil fuels truly are, and how poor batteries really are. This chart on wiki really hits it home:
Energy Density chart
I find it quite amusing that fat metabolism is at the same density per litre as petrol, I guess that also shows how amazing evolution is at solving problems, and also why losing weight is so hard. Also the chart shows how energy poor hydrogen is per litre. The alternatives to fossil fuels, really are not that great.

I don't think you understand how electric motors work/forces accelerating a car work

Acceleration is a product of power, not torque. (At this point someone will shout F=MA, or A = F / M). I am talking in terms from the engine/motors perspective.

With the right gearing I could produce with a hand crank the same sort of torque at the wheels that any car engines does, but I would not be able to accelerate a car from 0-60 in 5.6 seconds. I simply don't have the power (torque * rotational speed). Using a less powerful electric motor, with different gearing won't make up for the loss of power. Electric motors are power constant devices, rather than torque constant like a traditional dinosaur burner, that is why electric cars don't have a gearbox, and just have a torque converter.

The 0-60 time is more to do with electric motors producing peak torque at 0 rpm. In top trim according to wiki the Signature performance version produces 310kW (416hp) and 600 Nm! (443 fb-lb) of torque. To put that back into petrol engines, a naturally aspirated engine getting 100 Nm per litre is quite a feat. So this motor is producing the same sort of torque as a well tuned 6 litre V8.
Electric motors compared to a normal engine has very little friction and other overheads. I can't really see how fitting it within an motor with half the power/torque would actually save much in battery, a powerful motor does not necessarily mean its inefficient at low power settings. Being lead footed in the Tesla S is going to do the same to your economy as being lead footed in a BMW 3 series or Cadillac CTS. At least the Tesla S can recover some of its spent energy with regenerative braking techniques. Bare in mind, this is an expensive luxury car, and it needs to compete with those other sports/luxury sedans in it's market.