I was waiting for someone to bring up the RAM alternative so I could ask my stupid question: If it's 8Gb, why didn't they just use DDRx instead of flash? I get that the OS will live on the flash part so that booting up is faster, but once you've buffered the data RAM will last 100 times longer than flash, and it's faster. How often do you reboot a desktop?

By the way, I have 16Gb on my machine and I do a lot of content creation. I *easily* fill it up to 14Gb+, and I'm guessing that it only stops there because the software isn't getting the green light from the OS to carve up even more. I'm just guessing but I'm pretty certain that if I had 64Gb of RAM I'd occasionally pass the 32Gb mark.

Sorry for double-posting but the phrase I was looking for while typing that comment was Economies of scale. I apologize for my senility.

This is an article that's deigned for SEO. Anyone with any inkling of how these things work and the quality of the products would call BS instantly. An iPhone case? You can get a beautiful, highly-detailed case for your phone for $2 on ebay, but you're going to opt for a rough, "pixelated", bad-fit 3D-printed one? This study would only apply if you looked for the stupidest possible way to buy things -- the equivalent of buying a soda in a movie theater.

Yep. At which point forget reprap, makerbot, and all other similar designs. They'll figure out how to manufacture these things the same way that inkjet printers are manufactured:
1) A handful of injection-molded parts that can be manufactured at 10 cents a part, and at a rate of tens of thousands per-day
2) Super-dedicated electronics with just a couple of significant ICs -- the logic chip (probably some MCU initially, and eventually an ASIC) and the motor-driving chip
3) Optimized motors which they buy in groups of 100,000 from another manufacturer in the same province
4) compact, light-weight designs so that they can pack countless units into a single shipping container

All this aristocratic "Look at me! I spent $2000 on a Makerbot!" bullshit will disappear. Oh, and just like printers -- the most expensive part will be the "ink".

It's comparatively tame this time. When I clicked on the link I expected much more flamboyant profanity. This isn't going into his top-ten vitriolic reactions, not even close (Google "linus torvalds hates" and see how many auto-completes you get).

That was what really bugged me in Speaker for the Dead -- they labeled him as the worst human being to ever live, the "Xenocide". Were people not told of the circumstances? Did they intentionally hide the context? If so, why would they do that? To save the skins of the people who orchestrated the events in the first book? It was left unexplained.

Daemon yes, but Freedom would be impossible to make. Whichever way they try to create the world portrayed in Freedom would look silly on-screen. Then again, peter jackson managed to create an immersive world out the LofR, so maybe I'm wrong...

Speaking of the plot, the part in the trailer when he says "now" is the climax of the book (though arguably the revelation that comes afterwords is the "punch line"). Why the hell did they put the finale of the book in the trailer?
(and no, this isn't a spoiler post, because if you haven't read the book then you won't know what you're seeing or what it means)

Yeah, let's not sugarcoat this: these things are nature's Kamikaze.

Touche.
Also, the link to your website doesn't work. Change the ".htm" to ".html".

ie - the Apple business model.

Those 11" Ultrabooks come with a copy of Windows, so you can actually do something useful.

He meant mecca books

I think the main reason this is important is the ultimate goal of this project: To be able to print an entire gun using a 3D printer.

There are plenty of things that can be made manually instead of using a 3D printer, but you need *some* expertise to do so, even if it's minimal. With a 3D printer, you just need to know how to operate the printer -- and they're becoming easier to use and cheaper every day.