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Comment myus.com (Score 2) 206

Around $100/year has them receiving your US online purchases at your personal US address (their Florida warehouse). They scan shipment invoices -- you view the invoices in a web interface and tell them which shipments to 'consolidate' and ship, They stuff everything together and ship Fedex or UPS. An 12"x8"x6" box costs about $50-$60 -- you save money when you've consolidated multiple shipments.

In Australia, any import under $1000 is duty free.

Comment Re:Missing the Point about Printing Food by statin (Score 1) 88

Hmm... All those print-head nozzles, heating elements, food containers, refrigeration requirements, loading of raw materials.

And I dread the washing up :D At the very least, dishwashers will need to be totally reinvented. Or you'll have to print out a 'cleaning run' after printing food - which may not clean hygienically enough.

No, I think food printing will remain a niche technology; maybe, used in molecular gastronomy. Elements may be incorporated into modern cookery, but Star-Trek like food synthesisers certainly won't be able to print anything close to strawberries and cream, chicken wings, or even a serving of rice in the medium term.

Comment Good solution, overarching reach (Score 1) 122

I think we should put the knives away for now.

Someone else has pointed out LinkedIn's explain of their solution here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4379177&cid=45241665

I like the spirit behind this tutorial. Technically, its an excellent, creative solution to a real problem - having emails annotated with additional context of our liking. Their only mistake is the overarching reach of the solution (i.e. send all your mail to LinkedIn). That makes it basically DoA.The 'proper' solution for this would be for their app to run the IMAP proxy in the background on your *local* device (i.e. listening localhost:), under *your* control. The VPN profile would then direct mail retrieval traffic to localhost:. The app would also give you control over rules and webservices used to annotate your email. Additional points if the app was open source.

Comment Re:Missing the Point about Printing Food by statin (Score 1) 88

Interesting post. Yes, 3D Printing is very promising. But this need correction...

> What's more expensive, set up a kitchen, or a printer?

A kitchen is way cheaper to setup and run -- whether feeding a few, or a crowd. Its going to stay that way - kitchen technology is not going to stay static.

Think of kitchens as food printers that have been improved thousands of years :D If printers *will* be everywhere, kitchens *are* everywhere - they are way more important for us than printers.

Comment Re:Dangerous/ Forsee problems (Score 1) 178

A properly trained, licensed, operator is better than software. For instance, he can determine if the situation is unrecoverable, and decide its better to crash into a mustard field instead of a children's playground (both of which look identical to this drone's sensors sensors). Of course, any computer support that augments the pilot is something good, not bad.

Yes, air roads - in unpopulated areas - are probably a good idea for commercial drones.

Comment Dangerous/ Forsee problems (Score 2) 178

When a car engine fails, the default behavior is to coast to a halt -- unless driving downhill! Even so, a car has emergency brakes, gear/engine braking, a human driver, etc.

This scheme has no human in control (its "autonomous"), an externally provided destination ("connected to GPS on the users' mobile phone."), and no protection from a flying plastic bag or sheet fouling multiple propellors, turning it into a heavy unguided missile dropping onto the street below.

To the founders -- densely populated cities are the wrong place for a drone. How about delivering books or medical supplies in the Australian outback? (with a petrol engined drone)

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