I'm not praising the storyline, but it's ridiculous to shoot it down as "absolutely not something that can be used as a demo". The quality is unreal! (Again, look at the grass, or watch Sintel from 2010 and then look at how the characters' bones move in this film.)

Back to the storyline, in their defence, it's the first 10 mins of a full-length film. It's not a 10 minute short film that's suppose to make sense on its own.

Or another defence would be that they spent their money on animators and developers and skimped on writers.

Either way, I see a lot of good stuff in it and I'm impressed.

> Pretty fucking grim and absolutely not something that can be used as a demo

What? It's a sheep, and the branch breaks and falls on his head. If you think people will find that off-puttingly grim, then I think you've underestimated your audience (or you have a weird audience).

Or jump to whatever happy part you prefer.

In any case, the quality is amazing. The grass, for example.

We need unicode symbols for whatever people want to express. Otherwise sites will use clip-art or other proprietary things.

Oh. That's why bikers wear leather trousers with boots?!

I'm also unimpressed by the video. I think what they really proved is that molten glass is too thick for 3D printers, or that 3D printers are a long way off from working well with high melting point materials.

As for 3D printing in general, I think it's going to change the world and it needs its own Richard Stallman to inspire people to fight to make 3D printing useful for the general public (instead of the other possible future where a few big companies own mountains of patents on building things and all the copyrights on certain shapes which are important so that people's printed things can work with existing things or other printed things.)

This question didn't spring to mind at first. Seems a bit basic. But I wrote it because a lot of the comments so far indicate that people (myself included) don't know a hell of a lot about this project other than that it exists.

I've read there are other 3D-printed stethoscopes. Is yours (the Gila 3D stethoscope) attracting attention because it's better, or cheaper, or because it's actually getting used? Or is the Gila 3D stethoscope getting attention not for what it is but for it being an example from a domain where 3D seems set to bring radical change?

Most activities that can be performed commercially but which can also be performed non-commercially are either exempt from patents or never get prosecuted. Fixing other people's bicycles, writing a book, and performing music come to mind. (Software development is a grey area.) But 3D printing is taking an activity where efficient production on any reasonable scale was pretty much the exclusive domain of businesses, and making it accessible to DIY-ers and people who would do it while doing their job or performing some task at home, without any direct commercial aspect. Any idea what stage the debate is at regarding patent restrictions on printing or distributing designs for things more complicated or more modern than stethoscopes?

Yes, I think that's the important point: cheap and more convenient taxis reduce drink driving. Increasing the number of taxis is also a way to boost employment, and it specifically boosts employment for people without diplomas and with a good-but-not-perfect level of the local language, which is a group with a higher risk of becoming long term unemployed.

Uber, in its current form, is problematic, but it has at least proven something.

(I don't use Uber. It requires an app that isn't free software and has all the usual privacy problems that come with modern non-free software. But I would like to see drink driving reduced.)

You're making an "all-or-nothing" mistake, repeatedly.

Privacy can never be all-or-nothing. Leaving one's curtains drawn or leaving one's house increases the risk of being photographed, but I still recommend doing both. The trick is to get risks and violations down to acceptably low levels.

How low can you go? Depends on how much inconvenience/effort/cost you're willing to accept. In general, there's a law of diminishing returns, so it's best to make some effort to reduce risks somewhat in all aspects of life rather than putting a lot of effort into getting a small few problems down to zero.

No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a solution to all but the first occurence of the problem. If you open a browser a thousand times, but you click (x) the first time, then I've reduced the problem by 99.9%. If you can't see this then you don't understand privacy.

99.9% is acceptably low for most things. Do it, and move on to the next problem. Don't dwell on the 0.1% - this is time wasted that could be spent on reducing something else by 50, 90, or 99.9%.

Not much of a headline when you remove the funny name that was just invested for marketing:

New Filters Clean Dirty Drinking Water

Nothing misleading. The story says "requests", and DNS lookups are called "requests" in a lot of documentation. TCP connections are opened by sending "requests". SSL/TLS too probably.

Even if you personally think "requests" should only be used for HTTP requests (which the story didn't claim), Firefox is sending something to a third-party server, so the substance of the story is accurate. (The substance of the story is that third party servers get notified when you hover over a link.)

AFAIK, it's actually better still: only a *portion* of the hash is sent. Google then sends you its matching hashes and their corresponding classification (malware, not malware), and your computer compares the full has to the list received.

So Google doesn't even know if you accessed a blacklisted URL.

Hmmm, a nugget of sense in your second load of nonsense. Or is it just a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day...

If the only data it's sending is "I'm version 39.0.1 (GNU/Linux i686)", I wouldn't call that "phoning home". Most people probably want this behaviour.

Again, if all they know is that someone on your IP address has opened a browser while connected to the internet, it's barely a privacy issue.

I think most users want that behaviour. It's more useful than a blank page. It's no different to your file browser showing thumbnails and filenames of whatever's in the current working directory when it starts.

If there are pages you don't want showing up there, you can click the (x) on the thumbnail.

I do complain when I see a real issue, but I also have to say that Firefox gets it right 99.9% of the time.