Unless they’ve changed in the past few years, most parts are proprietary and will have to come from Snapmaker or their resellers. Swaps are usually at the module level. So the flexibility in parts sourcing is much lower than your Ender 3. On the plus side, they’re usually good about honouring warranties.

Nozzles with other aperture sizes are available from Snapmaker for the U1. It’s possible that the nozzles are a standard size (my older Snapmaker 2 uses the same nozzles as your Ender 3), but I can’t find a specification anywhere.

TL;DR: If your priority is varied parts sourcing for longevity, maybe look at a different manufacturer.

I do see that page referencing their app, so it could go either way, depending on whether their app is a mandatory part of the pathway.

It looks like you can control it with vanilla Orcaslicer. See the last post in this Snapmaker forum thread, for instance. It may or may not be willing to take gcode through the USB port—the specs indicate it has one.

It looks to me like they’re continuing in their usual direction of fairly open software on mostly proprietary hardware.

You’d have to indicate “I also support these optional bits” for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.

I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.

The first one that comes to mind is Qt (the widget toolkit). While I’m not sure the current owners still do this, Trolltech offered the earlier versions under both the GPL and a commercial license that I think included paid support. I assume any sales under the commercial license were to companies who wanted to include it in their closed-source software.

As the owner of a Snapmaker2 A150 (that is, one of their second-gen multifunction devices, fairly old now), I can say that my experience with it has been decent enough. It speaks a lightly modified Marlin dialect and can be run completely offline. New firmware requires user permission. They did release the source for the firmware and for their custom slicer (not worth it), and some of the more adventurous owners did manage to flash it with modified firmware. There were a few complaints at the time about the hardware not being as open as people had hoped, mostly because of custom connectors and the like.

Hardware-quality-wise, it was kneecapped by needing to be solid enough for CNC, so it’s slower and heavier than a purpose-built printer would need to be, but the prints are of decent enough quality for a device of its age and type.

In the general case, the person or persons who distributed the binary would then have done so illegally. In order to distribute, you have to follow the terms of the license. So them attempting to go after anyone downstream of them at that point is sort of like calling the police because someone stole your drug stash. And if there’s an upstream beyond the illegal distributors, they’re practically waving a “Sue me now!” placard in their direction.

The originator of the code, above whom there is no upstream, is allowed to offer it under more than one license (including a mixture of free and closed licenses), but the specific license in force has to be specified with each distributed copy.

City-destroying major disaster, probably, and I’m not even sure about that.

No surprises here. Well, at least the items it ordered this time were kinda-sorta-maybe-almost plausible to stock at a café, unlike the tungsten cubes in the vending machine.

Mean wealth isn’t actually a good predictor of quality of life (beyond a certain point—obviously if you’re starving in a gutter you have low QOL, but there’s a point at which studies have shown that you have enough and more doesn’t help), and anyone sensible should be more interested in the latter. No, we do not need more selfishness and greed in the rest of the country.

Reason #### not to allow random untrusted sites to run Javascript on your system. (I’m not actually sure how many reasons there are, but I am sure we must be into four digits by now.)

It’s early days yet, and they’re testing the waters. The solution is simple: don’t buy the expensive models, and they’ll reduce the number they bring in, because leaving unsold inventory sitting on dealership lots doesn’t benefit anyone.

Sure it can (most of the bits, anyway). You can go the opposite way around the world or around the edge of Africa, for instance. Latency will go up, and it’ll add to the congestion of other trunk cables, but rerouting is certainly possible for any location where the cables in the strait aren’t your only route out. The real damage will be to the middle-eastern countries served directly by these cables, and it may be a bit of a headache for people who maintain Internet infrastructure.

Although Iran might cut the cables regardless, since one of the countries they appear to serve is Iran itself. Easiest way to control the news is to limit the flow of information across the border.

I think you would be surprised. Look at the (admittedly short, since it’s a young institution) track record of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and where its graduates end up, for instance. Not every one of them becomes a GP serving in a rural or remote community, but a good percentage graduate with the intention of making that their career. I can’t see why similar efforts elsewhere wouldn’t work.

You staff it by making it easier for the local kids who are interested to get medical training. In remote areas, they’re the most likely to come back and stay. They don’t all have to be doctors, either. Midwives help. Nursing stations help.

Nobody ever likes that part, no matter how much they deserve it.

Your Internet obviously does not look like my Internet. I can’t remember ever seeing a site that didn’t belong to Google or Microsoft that required their login garbage (I see commercial sites that offer it as an option for lazy people who are unable to understand that using it is not in their best interests, yes, but every single one I’ve encountered thus far has also had a local username/password system).

As for the hyperscalers, that’s starting to break up a bit because of the number of countries the US has pissed off recently. People want to move their stuff back inside their own borders. It’s a drop in the bucket so far, admittedly, but every little bit helps.

Using hg-git everywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren’t needed.)

Definitely. The last time I checked, your only hosting options if you wanted to use Mercurial directly were Heptapod and ($DEITY help us) Sourceforge.

If I were talking just about devices I myself use, I would say yes, get rid of all forced updates, but unfortunately, smart TVs are not bought only by the technically adept. (You should see my mother trying to use hers, and given her age and general incomprehension of technology I doubt her understanding is going to improve.) Their devices still have to be patched to keep the botnets from going after the rest of us. I don’t particularly like forced updates, but for security updates on consumer devices they sometimes are the lesser of two evils.

That becomes a problem when we’re talking about the 1% of updates that are sent to prevent your smart TV from becoming part of a distributed botnet, though. Some people might even complain about the 9% of updates intended to keep up with churn in the APIs of 3rd-party services that are part of the functionality the device was purchased for.

What we need is something that restricts forced updates to those categories. That requires regulation, which likely means starting in the EU, since that’s the only major jurisdiction that’s (sometimes) pro-consumer. We also need regulations on labeling that force the manufacturer to indicate on the outside of the packaging in big letters exactly what advertised functionality of a device will break if it’s kept off the internet.