I didn't imply that we needed to eliminate the threat at all, only that it gives them more time to think about it after a completely benign situation. Consider this alternative scenario: a psychopath murders a bunch of children with a rifle modified with a huge, 3D-printed ammo clip before lawmakers realized that could even happen. Situations like that are how far more restrictive laws get put into place, regardless of how poorly they work, how invasive they are to our privacy, etc.

You and the previous response (and many other responses) say the same thing, but it is not really a given that a law won't work, and that is not the only way to address it. I am personally not smart enough to think of a great way for the law to work, but that's not to say there isn't one. In fact, the "answer" may be far milder than you and many other people fear, like just making it illegal to manufacture parts for assault rifles, just like it's illegal to make drugs or bombs. Of course it doesn't and it won't stop a sufficiently motivated person from doing it, but that is true of any unlawful activity. Just because most drivers drive too fast doesn't mean we shouldn't have speed limits.

Agreed, and neither is, "Anything Goes." We may not agree where it is, but there is a reasonable meeting point in the center. Admittedly, lawmakers will probably go too draconian at first. I'm cynical enough to imagine a situation where they demand 3D printers have an NSA backdoor or something. Still, I'm also optimistic enough to claim we'll eventually end up with something better.

Orbital mechanics is fun. Pretend you're in a spacecraft in the exact same orbit as the ISS, except offset such that it is always 100 meters in front of you. What happens when you apply an instantaneous delta-v directly toward it? Answer: you will now be orbiting slower than the ISS, and after you get a little closer, the ISS will pull away from you.

What we're probably looking at here (I don't know, I haven't checked) is more like a slow gravity assist maneuver. The Earth's gravity is changing the angular momentum of the asteroid's orbit relative to the Sun ever so slightly that it will eventually pull away from Earth.

He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws. Objectively, though, he's pointing out pretty valuable information regarding future illegal weapons manufacturing. Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons. He's the gray hat hacker of gun control.

Let me emphasize the relevant portion of the summary:

The question was not how fast will we do it, he's answering how fast could we do it. We could put people on Mars in four years if we had the political will to do it. We don't, so we won't do it until China either threatens to do it or actually goes through with it first. As for launching a hundred thousand missions, that is impossible as long as we can't reuse spacecraft, which is mostly addressed by the last point (assuming the reusability problem is solved very thoroughly, e.g. only easily-replaceable fuel made of very common elements is not reused, and the used components are very easily refurbished).

The trouble with that claim is it takes a bunch of launches to measure reliability. Orbital Sciences' Taurus XL had five successful missions right out of the gate before it dropped a billion dollars worth of satellites in the ocean when it failed three of the next four. Every successful launch is something to be celebrated, to be sure, but it'll take many more successes before they can claim their launch system is reliable.

Engineering, materials, and high tech parts = paying people to do or create these things. The vast majority of space and military programs go to people all up and down the supply chain. A $200,000 rad-hardened flight computer (i.e. the RAD750 on the Curiosity rover) doesn't cost $200,000 in parts: they're paying that company for the development and testing that went into it.

Just to give some numbers, here is where we (the U.S.) got our oil in 2013:

U.S.: 2,720 million barrels
Canada: 1,147 million barrels
Saudi Arabia: 485 million barrels (OPEC)
Mexico: 335 million barrels
Venezuela: 294 million barrels (OPEC)
Russia: 168 million barrels
Columbia: 142 million barrels
Iraq: 124 million barrels (OPEC)
Kuwait: 119 million barrels (OPEC)
Nigeria: 103 million barrels (OPEC)
Ecuador: 86 million barrels (OPEC)
Angola: 79 million barrels (OPEC)
Brazil: 55 million barrels
U.K.: 54 million barrels
Other OPEC: 67 million barrels
Other non-OPEC: 338 million barrels

Ignoring the type of oil (pretty sure we're exporting natural gas like a fiend right now due to fracking), we need to cut 21% to get away from OPEC altogether, or 12% just to get away from the Middle East. In the U.S., 47% of oil goes to gasoline, 20% to diesel and other fuel oil, 13% to liquefied petroleum gases like propane and such, and 8% for jet fuel. All this info is from eia.gov, by the way.

So it while it is still an enormous problem, it's not insurmountable. In fact, it's inevitable. We won't go cold turkey, but we will almost certainly keep chipping away at that deficit with continued efficiency improvements on cars and other vehicles, growing emphasis placed on fuel efficiency, and continued improvements in domestic oil production and refining. Ideally the cleaner improvements will come fast enough that we don't have to rely on the latter, but it'll happen sooner or later.

Not that it matters anyway. Everyone I know that has a recent phone has a big fat case to protect it.

If the flare was pretty much a direct hit, are we still going to be in the way if it takes 2-3 days for the CME particles to reach us? With a radial velocity of 30 km/s, the Earth will have moved several million kilometers away from the point where the flare struck. I know the Sun rotates in the same direction (~24 day period) as the Earth orbits (~365 day period), though, so maybe that imparts just the right amount of radial velocity.

You're going to have to explain to slow people like myself. Where is the following logic wrong?

Tesla is going to produce, on average, enough energy to run the gigafactory without getting any externally-created electricity. In reality, sometimes Tesla will not create enough energy, so it will draw from the grid. On the other hand, sometimes it will produce too much, and that goes back to the grid, where it is used elsewhere. The energy used elsewhere is used instead of fossil fuel-produced energy. Therefore, effectively, carbon emissions from energy production will be zero (though, as you say, their equipment will produce produce greenhouse gases).

Anyway, I don't get why this should be disappointing to anybody. It sounds like awesome news to me; if everybody did this, we would be a lot better off.

Lastly, I found it quite interesting that 85 windmills in Reno could produce more than twice the energy of 850,000 square meters of fixed solar panels...and it would be more if wind speeds were slightly higher. That seems crazy to me.

He claims they were making $1.5 million a year, actually. I could see why it might be tough to sell out if that's true.

I used to read on a Droid Eris (2009 phone with a 3.2" screen), and it was perfectly fine for my purposes. Well, not for the Kindle app. That worked very slowly at first, then they "upgraded" it and it was unusable. Aldiko worked and looked great, though. In fact, that was pretty much all that phone was used for after a while, since it wasn't connected to any cell phone service. With it on airplane mode, the wifi off, and the brightness at minimum, the battery would last several days. I've since graduated to an old Droid Incredible with a 3.7" screen, which felt huge at first. Put the latest Cyanogenmod on there with the same settings, install Aldiko, and you're golden.

Granted, I couldn't imagine using a 3.2" screen if I needed a larger font, and my Nook Touch is a whole lot more pleasant, but the phone is easier to carry around, so I ended up reading on it more often than the e-reader. The only bad part is losing your place; it's difficult to control the little slider to get back to where you were even on large screens...on the tiny screens it's painful.

This is definitely true of their modeling UI, but I found the video editor quite intuitive, and my last video editing experience before that was several years prior, Adobe Premiere 2.0 or so. With only the tooltips, I quickly figured out various helpful keyboard shortcuts without referring to a tutorial or cheatsheet or anything. The only thing that tripped me up a bit was how to change the output settings (you have to go back to the Scene view/window/whatever it's called in Blender parlance).

Actually, that's more like schadenfreude. It does not take a personality disorder to dislike a famous person. It might not be a reasonable dislike, if it's due to jealousy of their wealth or looks or what have you, but it's not sociopathy. And given the reasonable expectation that these celebrities' exposure will almost certainly garner sympathy for them and improve their careers, their temporary anger and mortification doesn't even seem like that high a price, when the one feeling the schadenfreude is struggling to make ends meet, or has had people making fun of their looks since middle school.

Not saying I agree, but I can understand the point of view.

At any rate, the damage has been done, and trying to stop people from looking is an exercise in futility and madness. Appealing to people's sense of morality or social justice might work for a few people, but it's not going to make any of the victims feel better, or make people check their security settings. It's not going to give NSA an "in" on spying, either. It makes far more sense to raise awareness for the sharing/security settings on phones and other devices, and push handset makers and backup solution vendors for sensible defaults, including encryption. Between social engineering, physical theft, and spurned ex's we probably won't stop this sort of thing from happening entirely, but we can make it a whole lot more difficult.

Two words: cloud city.

Sounds preposterous, I know, but it's almost certainly easier than colonizing the first completely habitable earth-like exoplanet (and the article actually makes it sound more plausible than the name implies). That's not to say we should stop looking for them, of course...far from it. Those are the best chance we have to find extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise.