$1M a shot seems like a lot until you look at what goes into each one, how much development costs, and the environment it is designed for. You don't need corruption to make these expensive. Also, the are based on 30 year old technology. Rather than being cheaper than new, they tend to be more expensive due to requiring miniature mechanisms which were cutting edge in 199x. And there are no other uses for them in their hardened configuration so you don't get economy of scale of something like a commercial ship or board. Plus there's a lot of paperwork and you can't sell a single piece unless the government approves it. This is so far from a consumer item there isn't even a way to compare costs.

FWIW, corruption would cost roughly the same price but you'd receive a missile with shoddy components and forged paperwork. Just look at Russia's army to see the difference in munition reliability.

As a modeler, 3D printers are a bit like AI art to an artist. It's fast, it can do some things that are nearly impossible to replicate, but it feels like a hack or a crutch at times. Part of the thrill of old-school modeling (for which I'm neither old enough nor patient enough) is taking very basic, simple shapes and making something realistic out of seemingly nothing. Adam is absolutely from that school. And - like AI art - to go from almost good to presentation quality is nearly as much work - or more - that just building from scratch. As a long time model rocket enthusiast, my printer is an amazing utility. But for some of the really intricate models, I have a lot less pride in the final product because I know I just pressed a button and it popped out.

Yeah, I made nearly that mistake. Twice, actually. First with a monoprice, then a creality. I probably have more money in upgrades on my CR10s than I have in the purchase, and I still haven't upgraded the board. I keep thinking I'll fix it but I've resolved to strip a couple of parts and throw it away. My Prusa XL preorder came last month. I made one update to it (for better TPU performance), and printed one QoL add-on (nozzle wipers). That's it. I'm done. It prints like a dream, multi-material supports are indistinguishable from magic, and even swapping nozzles is fairly quick and easy. Now I'm (almost) exclusively printing things for my other hobbies rather than worrying that something on my CR10s will fail or need re-tuning.

Don't care. I will watch every second of every build project Adam Savage does in his shop.

Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?

Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.

Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?

Reddit: Well, I'm still tuning it for all my filaments. I've been through about 40kg, and I've got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.

Only way to disable these Russian terminals would be to do it individually device by device.

Your offer is accepted. Certainly a 10 figure fine would help shake loose a small team at SpaceX to enable this.

Exactly. Not that I don’t appreciate the automation we have, but this is one of the domestic “last mile” problems - along with proper dusting and loading and folding laundry - that need to be solved.

Why do you even come here, Papaya. Nobody likes you.

Undercover Brother

I'm sure that Mr. Kalinin is devasted by the news and will work to reform his prison and bring Navalny back from the dead in order to restore his good name.

They’re not looking for the exceptional, out there exceptions - they’re looking for statistical pattern which have predicted current success. You may as well say that BMI is a useless metric for long term health complications. They both explicitly misestimate anomalous outliers because they are not designed to identify or classify anomalous outliers.

Say your pc torrents 2 TB of media

those people in engineering and comp sci who have massive files of projects

Neither of those people are using windows as an appliance.

because they already use backups to github

This is where everyone who loves Linux - and nearly everyone who works in IT/CompSci fails to understand the rest of the world. If you have to do anything from the command line - or if anything is easier from the command line - you've excluded roughly 90% of the population from calling it "easy". You may as well tell someone how to adjust the fuel mix in their carburetor or set up a bridgeport mill to make a quick replacement for the plastic buckle that broke on their backpack (and much stronger/durable to boot!). Not only does nobody today want to, they've probably only seen exist in a movie.