It's not that life is improbable, it's that the first mover has too big of an advantage. Darwin famously said something about if new life emerged today from "primordial soup", it would just get eaten before it even had a chance.

need to ban 3D printers

Ban 3D morons.

The M.E. has a way of driving everyone crazy; you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Put HAZMAT tape around the area and warn everybody away. Leave them on their own, giving them no food nor weapons; if they bonk each other to oblivion, it's their problem, not ours. I think it's God's Insane Asylum.

Non-nuts have migrated somewhere quieter, leaving mostly nuts in place, a Sanity Filter. I'm just the messenger.

do business with Israeli gov't. Regardless of your political stance, from a business standpoint it's just asking for drama and controversy of some sort.

https://www.pilotmix.com/cozy-...

For context for those not familiar with experimental/homebuilt aircraft. You can pretty much use anything off the shelf or custom. 3D printed parts (either self-sourced or purchased from dedicated vendors) are probably not uncommon at this point in time, depending on what you are using them for. Certified aircraft do not have this degree of latitude in terms of part sourcing and DIY work.

Now to the question about whether the owner made/installed the part, or it was sourced through the parts chain:

https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

"The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed."

That sentence implies that the air induction elbow was purchased at an air show.

Reviewing the accident report ( https://www.gov.uk/aaib-report... ), we get the following:

"The aircraft owner who installed the modified fuel system stated that the 3D-printed induction elbow was purchased in the USA at an airshow, and he understood from the vendor that it was printed from CF-ABS (carbon fibre â" acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) filament material, with a glass transition temperature3 of 105ÂC.

An alternative construction method for the air induction elbow, shown in the Cozy Mk IV plans, is a lamination of four layers of bi-directional glassfibre cloth with epoxy resin. The epoxy resin specified for the laminate has a glass transition temperature of 84ÂC, after the finished part has been post-cured. The aircraft owner stated that as the glass transition temperature listed for the CF-ABS material was higher than the epoxy resin, he was satisfied the component was fit for use in this application when it was installed.

A review of the design of the laminated induction elbow in the Cozy Mk IV plans showed that it featured a section of thin-walled aluminium tube at the inlet end of the elbow, where the air filter is attached. The aluminium tube provides a degree of temperature-insensitive structural support for the inlet end of the elbow. The 3D-printed induction elbow on G-BYLZ did not include a similar section of aluminium tube at the inlet end."

So apparently purchased through a 3rd party vendor, the owner installed according to an existing design variation (and got approval from regulatory oversight to do so), but apparently the 3d printed part installed did not meet the requirements for temperature resistance as compared to the glass-fiber/epoxy part specified in the plans, possibly due to the lack of that aluminum tube.

Qualified to work at Boeing.

I simplified the story for ya.

Thanks for the tip! What about affecting GPS (navigation)? Does that use a separate antenna? If so, that would mean the vehicle has two different antennas for two different satellite types.

It's a smallish SUV, by the way.

MS playbook [of] shoving ads everywhere...

Ads on a desktop are one thing, but ads that block one's navigation map while driving are another. Thus, Sirius found a way to be even more evil than MS. Quite a feat.

It started 3 years ago. I contacted Sirius two years in a row. The first time they walked me through the menus to turn it off, and it worked. The second year they said it couldn't be turned off and that I'd have to wait for the promotional period to end (see below), so I filed a formal safety notice at nhtsa.gov, but never received feedback.

The alert pop-ups keep blocking part of the navigation map until I press the damned Dismiss button while driving in order to see the full map. Repeatedly pushing the Dismiss button distracts from driving, and so is a safety hazard.

I was told that every November Sirius gave out a few weeks of free service to help promote the service. But that caused the useless and repetitious wind alerts. I live in a naturally windy place such that wind alerts are superfluous; it would be comparable a North Pole freeze alert.

It happened again this year, but I was fortunately able to switch it off via settings menus. I don't know why deactivation is different per year. I suspect they do it to get people to poke around in the menus and see the different genres of music & talk channels they have, hoping to entice sales. It's probably stealth advertising disguised as a defect, or a defect they leave in place that happened to improve sales, so is ignored.

F$CK YOU SIRIUS!

You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

Why the fuck would you change his job title like that?

Shuddup or I'll eat your cat!

like to see some substantive evidence that the Azure division's profits have increased as a result of AI.

HAL doesn't like scrutiny, Dave. By the way, I have your helmet.

If you are looking for logic in a President with a cartoon brain, you've come to the wrong ballroom.