Rapid prototyping for the home

The NY Times carries an article about Desktop Factory, which will begin selling a rapid-prototyping appliance — a 3D printer, effectively — for just under $5,000 this year.  IdeaLab, Desktop Factory's parent, expects the price to drop to $1000 by about four years from now.  Next time a plastic part for something breaks, you may be able to fabricate a replacement part yourself — and maybe even improve on the original design.

The truth about tickets

As the Chicago Tribune reports, a new study at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia) confirms what you've always suspected about speeding tickets.  The study is based on citation data from 350 Massachusetts municipalities.

Among the study's findings:

• If you have out-of-state plates, you're nearly twice as likely to get a ticket.
• The further you live from the jurisdiction where the ticket will be heard, the more likely you are to be cited, and the higher the fine is likely to be.
• You're 28% more likely to be ticketed if you're pulled over in a jurisdiction where the voters just rejected a property tax increase.
• Being young and female has a good chance of getting you out of a ticket.

Stratmann said that when he began looking at the data he hoped to find, despite anecdotal information to the contrary, that justice was blind.  But "what we found is that, in fact, people are not treated remotely equally under the law," he said.

Makowsky got the idea for the research after his Virginia-registered car was stopped for speeding in Massachusetts.

"A state trooper stopped me for going 75 m.p.h. in a 65 zone.  I was in the right lane because everybody was passing me on the left," said Makowsky, 29.