Can I ask how big is the city you live in (or near)? It seems like big cities have options, but small towns starve for medical help.

As with all things Google, it's a pain to get up to speed on, but then very fast.

There are sections of the code that are High Intellectual Property. Stuff that deals with spam fighting, for example. I once worked on tooling to help make that code less likely to be accidentally exposed.

Disclaimer: I used to work there, but that was a while back. They probably changed everything a few times since. The need to protect certain code will never go way, however.

What is weird is that they don't talk about this. There is a graphic on products that can do this that show the speaker behind the mic. That's it, no text at all. I think the moral of this story is that marketing is weirder than engineering...

I just finished a flooring project that made use of the table saw. My low end $350 saw was perfect for the rip cuts. There isn't another tool that would do it as well, but I might be tempted to try if a low end table saw starts at $500 (which is already way lower than the cheapest SawStop sold today). Do you have data on safety of alternate ways to solve a problem when the obvious solution has been priced out of reach?

As far as what manufacturers promise, I want to see the contract. We been promised "it will be so cheap you won't even notice" so many times that I just assume is marketing bluster from the get go. They will charge what the market will bear and they will exit if there isn't enough profit. Things they said in a committee room are meaningless. The only thing we know for sure is that what has worked so far is about to get banned.

Obviously I don't have time to do all the research you have done. I'm just a typical low end user who is looking at what it will cost me and what options are likely to disappear.

What will the manufactures try to extract is the better question? Answer: As much as they can.

The only other saw with similar technology (Bosch) to hit the US market cost 50% more than the similar SawStop product. They had to pull it due to patent issues (despite attempting a different approach), so we don't have good market data on how well it sold.

This just reeks of regulation forcing everything to be more expensive. I'd rather just see the patent go away and see what the market really does. I really can't image this technology being added to low end saws for less than $150 retail and then you have the per activation costs. It really kills the low end market, when a minimal saw is $500.

And the saw frame has to be much stronger to handle the force of stopping that blade. Throwing $50 of new parts on an existing frame just means you throw the whole saw away after it triggers.

Every time this triggers, you need a new cartridge and blade ($40+) and time to swap them in. If I was sure this was saving a finger (as the dramatic stories in the press state), then I wouldn't think twice. But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger. Show me the false rate data please.

However, a lot of the time is just figuring out how to glue together multiple systems. Being able to pull in various people to interface little bits is priceless. There is no flow here, only collaboration.

I also find them dazzling and have to avert my eyes. It's hard to imagine that looking away is helping with safety.

I had the same reaction, and had to go read the text of the law.

America already has an epidemic of loneliness. Chemical numbing is a symptom of this.

I take this to mean that story trumps all in television. You have to know what your core product is.