Peer To Peer Meets Manufacturing 523
Crashmarik writes "Small times has an article detailing UCB advances in desktop manufacturing. They raise the possibility for effectively downloading physical objects through the net. We have allready seen the reaction "Property Holders" over downloading music, what is the likely upshot of being able to copy physical objects. More importantly what are the implications for our society as we move out of an age of scarcity to an age of plenty ?" Great article - the author of it also won The Foresight Institute's prize in communications for 2002.
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Mechanics dream (Score:5, Interesting)
Article text.... it's on Cold Fusion! (Score:5, Informative)
July 25, 2003 - Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you're hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the "buy" button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors - literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.
Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.
University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny [berkeley.edu] and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.
Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine [berkeley.edu]. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive
functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap
from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic
electronics come into play.
Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic [plasticlogic.com] are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.
Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian [berkeley.edu], is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.
The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.
Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.
The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde
No it´s from bbspot!! (Score:3, Funny)
And it [bbspot.com] was intended as a joke...
Re:No it´s from bbspot!! (Score:2)
Man, that's just too fucking funny... Holy moses. I'm such a sucker.
Good catch!
Obligatory Book Reference : (Score:5, Informative)
They have those replicators (printers) connected to "feeds" (component reservoirs) and can get/create almost anything they want on the molecular level.
AND the society of this age is a thriving nanotech/Private Community mix.
AND diamond, coming from carbon (the most inexpensive stuff possible), is so common it's a natural construction base...
Go read it, its a good book
Obligatory Book Reference 2: HHGTTG (Score:3, Funny)
'...a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.'
Re:Yeah and if we do have cold fusion what happens (Score:2, Informative)
You know,
Cold fusion is a red herring anyway, but that's another matter entirely
Re:Yeah and if we do have cold fusion what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
Infinite free energy, along with infinite free labor, = socialism/communism, just like the P2P networks.
You say that like it's a bad thing. You are, of course, still free to be a dirt farmer, you just won't have to.
Its not a bad thing for me, I'm a Socialist. (Score:2, Interesting)
It is a bad thing however for a Capitalist. We'd end up having a civil war over this.
There are ALOT of people who would rather die than live in a Socialist world. Why do you think there was such witch-hunts to catch communists? Why do you think there was so much propaganda being spewed about how Communists are evil? We still have idiots today who post on slashdot saying Communism is evil and wrong.
Re:Its not a bad thing for me, I'm a Socialist. (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are concerned about was "totalitarianism", i.e. the philosophy that the state was all, and all citizens were subservient to it, existing only for the state. This is a separate concept from communism and socialism. The USSR, the Fascists under Mussolini, and the Nazis, were all good examples of totalitarian governments. "1984" was written as a warning against totalitarian policies.
Communism is a little different. It suggests that the means of production should be shared equally by all, and the fruits of the labor be equally divided as well. Communism as suggested by Marx was not evil at all. Modern-day china seems to be making a pretty good go of the idea; I think that aside from being a little overzealous in censorship (and their organ donor program, ha ha), they're doing fairly well.
Socialism (different yet again) suggests that a society's first duty is to its citizens, and that the purpose of government is to take care of the people (rather than, for instance, ensure the welfare of corporations, or wage ridiculous wars to help the oil industry). Canada, the most innocuous nation in the history of nations, is mostly socialist. Do you consider the canucks evil? Aside from the Kids in the Hall, I mean.
Let's be fair, kids.
Re:Its not a bad thing for me, I'm a Socialist. (Score:3, Informative)
As for systems, The US is a republic as is most of the 1st world, the rest being monarchies. The republics generally get their leaders via democratic means and always have. It's technically true that the US is not a Democracy but so what? Pure democracy su
Re:Communism is a political system (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah and if we do have cold fusion what happens (Score:3, Funny)
SO you've perfected a way to turn energy into food? I don't think these printers will make a nice juicy steak as well as they make blenders.
Yes actually its called GM foods. (Score:2)
With the proper tools, we can grow crops x10 the size of current crops.
Re:Yeah and if we do have cold fusion what happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Holding back technology just to keep enough menial jobs around for everyone is very short-sighted.
Remember Comedy Central... (Score:2)
Downloading physical objects through the net? Fishing net maybe, not the Internet.
Today's fact is tomorrow's fiction.
-
Re:Remember Comedy Central... (Score:2)
Whole new meaning to adult entertainment online (Score:5, Funny)
remember "All Tomorrow's Parties"? (Score:4, Funny)
* Dear God, no, not in that sense.
Re:remember "All Tomorrow's Parties"? (Score:5, Funny)
You can do that today at the corner of 7th and 11th.
Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:2)
Good luck getting me to stop.
And yes... you can find recipes that are imitations of most beers that are out there.
Re:Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:5, Funny)
Because it's the cheapest one to replicate? You just run some tap water over a can of Real Beer(TM) [carlsberg.com] and drink the resulting fluid. Make sure the can is clean first and remember to not open it, that will ruin the unique Bud flavor.
Re:Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot 20 years from now (Score:2)
Since you can't patent either a food manufacturing process OR a recipe, you're free to make a perfect clone of a beer recipe. The beer industry often helps out, giving recipes for their beer, because they know a few things about brewing: homebrewers buy more beer than most people
Universl constructor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Universl constructor (Score:2, Insightful)
Why need money? (Score:3, Insightful)
Intellectual Property will die out just the same, as once people learn that sharing is the better of the 2. Each item mapped gives inventors more power and leverage to work with, hence more goods. It'll turn this capitalistic country into a pure form of socialism, one where all needs are provided. Or at least, could be capitalistic with a socialism base floor.
Still, fabs would have to be made and sold, and only a large fab could make smaller fabs. You also have the problem with Energy consumption. Fusors may be the only realistic way of capturing large amounts of energy.
There will STILL be an economy, just the balance of power will be radically shifted.
Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2, Flamebait)
I've spoken to alot of people including some on Slashdot who would prefer to commit suicide than live in a socialist society.
Intellectual Property will die out just the same, as once people learn that sharing is the better of the 2. Each item mapped gives inventors more power and leverage to work with, hence more goods. It'll turn this capitalistic country into a pure form of socialism, one where all needs are provided. Or at least, could be capitalistic with a socialism base floor.
This will never be
Re:Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2, Interesting)
" in a world with no jobs and no work."
The concept that the ability to duplicate infinitely physical objects would result in "no jobs and no work" is a fallacy at best. The ability do duplicate these physical objects would result in a massive loss of jobs for those in the manufacturing industry, no doubt. However, there would be a nearly equal if not greater than equal increase (eventually) in the need for knowledge and service workers. Even if you could create a new computer every time a new technolo
Re:Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2)
The concept that the ability to duplicate infinitely physical objects would result in "no jobs and no work" is a fallacy at best. The ability do duplicate these physical objects would result in a massive loss of jobs for those in the manufacturing industry, no doubt. However, there would be a nearly equal if not greater than equal increase (eventually) in the need for knowledge and service workers.
Yeah from India where knowledge and service workers are cheaper than US workers at about the same quality d
No it wouldnt. (Score:2)
Thats a pipedream, the Capitalists will never allow this to happen. I mean its a nice dream but come on, do you think George Bush would allow this to happen?
If anything, I doubt that kind of future. In the future, common software will be given freely. The content AND contract jobs will be the money makers. And they still wont be able to control content then either.
Thats a very optimistic future but its going to take a
Re:Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2)
In an "abundance" society, that would be the NORM. Hobbies would likely take the place of employment, and that's also where your innovations come from. The basic commodities would remain the same: food, base materials, power, and information.
I dont know, why do we still use oil? (Score:2)
Why do people want tax cuts instead of going for this socialist society you mention? I mean we can have universal healthcare right now, Howard Dean is pushing for a society just like you mention, with universal healthcare and providing the basic commodities. Whats stopping him? Well about half the country believes that NOTHING free is good, they believe that they should EARN everything in life, that there should be NO safetynet, no free entitlements, nothing.
I'm a socialist, I think we should go for provi
Re:Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2)
When did I ever claim I myself was a capitalist? Why don't you actually read my post.
The fast that so many Americans think universal healthcare and public schools are bad should be all the proof you need that alot of people in society would sooner commit suicide than live in a world without jobs.
You dont know much about the issues. (Score:2)
But look why they are bad. There's funding to these schools, but funding isnt the issue. You dont need fancy-schmancy school building to teach better. The problem is 2 fold in education.
The main problem we have with highschool and below, teachers are forced to teach 30-50 kids a class, even a teacher who cares cannot teach 30-50 people with just chalkboard and 10 year old textbooks.
You need to use the technology to help teachers do their job, you need to give teachers the tools they demand to teach 30
You dont know the issues(read this version) (Score:2)
The main problem we have with highschool and below, teachers are forced to teach 30-50 kids a class, even a teacher who cares cannot teach 30-50 people with just chalkboard and 10 year old textbooks. You need to use the technology to help teachers do their job, you need to give teachers the tools they demand to teach 30-5
Re:Alot of Capitalists would rather commit suicide (Score:2)
This is completely naive. The best teachers are leaving to do other things because the pay is so abysmally low. Schools are having trouble finding ANY teachers right now.
Re:Brainwashing??? (Score:2)
Just a little note... (Score:2)
It is not capitalistic, but monopolistic, to controll resources (like information and invention) that are made a limited resource by the force of government and not by natural physical scarsity.
Both Marxisim and federally backed monopolistic behavior are very bad. But free-will sharing, planning, and use of resources according to real natural limits without handing o
Re:Why need money? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the main resource is carbon, it is widely available. The trick will be to have the assembler 'mine' it's raw materials from its environment (plant matter, atmosphere, ...). Also, wastage will be pretty well zero, so a bare minimum of material will be required. Thirdly, having full control of the material being fabricated allows very strong structures to be built, opening the possibility of strong low density 'foam' type materials, using even smaller amounts of raw materials.
one where all needs are provided
The trick would be to figure out how to get the universal assembler to provide all the basic needs. Food, shelter, sanitation, water, energy source. Biggest problem would be that the supply of real estate is limited. It would be interesting to see where people's greed will be directed once most things have no monetary value. I suspect people will start to hoard real estate. Will we see a war when the landless manufacture weapons and attempt to stop landowners from hoarding land surplus to building a shelter on?
Still, fabs would have to be made and sold, and only a large fab could make smaller fabs.
This is not necessarily the case. Any self respecting 'universal assembler' will be able to make a copy of itself.
There will STILL be an economy
It depends on what you mean by an economy. Surely the (forgotten) purpose of the economy is to satisfy our needs? Once needs can be satisfied without an economy, why have one? With any luck, the economy will be replaced by community. We will then live FOR those around us. It might take a bit of adjustment, but I'm sure most will cope.
Money will be the same (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd still have to buy raw materials, energy, designs, software, Repairs to your fabricator, newer versions of the fabricator that can make more elaborate products, etc...
Maybe economies will be more centralized around this method of production...
Maybe a lot of blender-assemblers will loose their jobs, but the overall system would still be the same... Think of when Automotive assembly lines went robotic... di
google cache (Score:2, Informative)
Patents will be dead (Score:5, Interesting)
As society is moving into the information age means unrealistic controlls over information (copyrights, and untangable patented things) half to go.
And as our society moves into the "replicator" age. It means unrealistic controlls over invention and creation (patents) will half to go.
IMHO.
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently people create things (for the most part) to make a profit. If there is nothing to protect those profits (copyrights, patents, etc), what motivation is there to create something?
Where will the money needed to fund the economy come from? Taxation on the purchase on materials needed to use the replicator?
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
Why would people bother to grow cotton without slaves? (get it)
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:5, Insightful)
For recognition perhaps, but probably for the same reasons that open source projects work. Because somebody needs the invention to solve a problem.
You're confusing capitalism with innovation. People don't create things to make a profit. People create things to solve problems. Companies sell things to make a profit.
If there were not companies and no profits, the need for new inventions would not go away. When there are no more problems to invent solutions to, human nature dictates that we'll make more problems to solve!
Why do people write Open Source software? (Score:2)
Lots of reasons: To scratch a personal itch, because it is cool, because someone else wanted it and paid them for their time, because they got a grant, because they could, just because...
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Becuase it will make life easier, duh.
Sheesh, it the patent system were to disappear tommorow, it's not as if people would suddenly stop inventing things.
Problems exist, people invent things to solve those problems. I invent things all the time without patenting them. I invent them because the are useful to me, that's the incentive. Besides, people also do it just for fun.
Where will the money needed to fund the economy come from? Taxation on the purchase on materials needed to use the replicator?
There's so much wrong with this statement I don't even know where to start. Fund the economy? WTF?! Where does the money to fund all the beta-tape manufacturers come from? It doesn't. Nor should it. If everyone can get hot, fresh waffles from their household replicator, we won't really need waffle manfacturers anymore. What crazy idea makes you think we should keep giving them money?
"The economy" would still exist, it would just be different. Different things would be traded. No funding necssary
There seems to be a really weird idea floating around these days that just because you were able to make money with a certain business model, it's the rest of society's responsibility to preserve that situation. It makes me want to scream. (Think Sam Kinison) Should you be forced to buy horse feed just because, once upon a time, people rode horses? If course not the idea is ridiculous. If your business is obsolete, move on with the rest of society.
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine how much faster development of ideas will happen. If someone is enthusiastic about an idea he's working on, he can prototype it twenty times before dinner until he gets it right.
We'll have all kinds of new twists to existing
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
Now I don't actually agree with the premis that we're moving to an era of plenty. Things might get less scarce in the affluent west, but there will still be grinding poverty
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
But the world of Microsoft type riDICKulous patents you are talking about doesn't serve to motivate innovation. It suffocates it.
Wrong word, bro (Score:2)
Re:Wrong word, bro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
Wow, I guess you must have missed that gigantic backlash against the dehumanizing qualities of industrialization, and the tendency to "wage slavery". Do the words Luddite, and Marxism mean anything to you?
Re:Patents will be dead (Score:2)
That doesn't make any sense. How did slavery control labor? Slavery was the aspect of labor that NEEDED to be controlled; and comparing that to copyright laws...yea.
Explain how slavery doesn't controll peoples labor. And please reread what I said. I don't recall saying that slavery had anything to do with copyrights.
Copyrights over created works will never go away. That would suck total ass if you were an artist, you created great music, and you got jack shit for doing it. And there is no way in he
Good for cheap quick junk. Everything else? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact remains though that you're not going to get the strength of cast aluminum or forged metal without very expensive equipment - that's not pessimism, that's physics.
Re: (Score:2)
Energy. (Score:2)
Unless we have free energy, the requirements fo
Re:Energy. (Score:2)
Didn't you read his post? He wants to run it all from solar power, which is free ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good for cheap quick junk. Everything else? (Score:2)
Steel is mostly made from carbon and iron, with a few other metals included to form different alloys, like chrome steel. The reason steel is hard is that the forging process hardens it. This forging process requires a FORGE. And, a large part of the process is physical, and requires a large amount of force, thus large, powerful machinery.
Basic physics.
What you *could* create is a hard, nonmetallic, strong material made out of a plastic or a carbon compound. But you're limited to what can be creat
Not only cheap quick junk (Score:2, Interesting)
Since electronics (though I doubt we're talking about the latest Intel CPU!) and display screens can be made with this technology, along with simple buttons and actuators... I think I could come up with a short list of some fairly nifty items that *I'd* want, anyway.
Throw the geeks of the world at the issue, and I'm pretty sure there WILL be a "Napster of Solid Objects" and a whole mess of trouble with governments and corporations trying to restrict the spread of certain types of plans.
On the other hand,
Re:Good for cheap quick junk. Everything else? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
The blender example in the the article is ludicrous -- you might be able to microfabricate a new plastic lid for the blender pretty easily, but there will NEVER come a time where your HP MaterialJet will be able to manufacture a sufficient blade for your blender, let alone a motor.
I've seen some of the cornstarch prototypes and
Energy. (Score:2)
One step better (Score:5, Funny)
Neat but overhyped (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, you can use these to make toys, mockups, and maybe most of the parts for certain items. But don't expect them to replace real manufacturing anytime soon.
Re:Neat but overhyped (Score:2, Interesting)
Near the end of the article, they talk about how to make complex machines from simple substrates. They've already got designs and concepts for printing electromechanical devices (motors, moving parts) as well as substrates that give off an electrical change when compressed, which can act as a button.
My thought is that the free software movement should act as proactively as possible to release plans for basic building blocks here, so the first company to design a printable motor can't get Int
Sharing manufacturing data... (Score:4, Interesting)
Future Advances (Score:2, Interesting)
But who am i kidding.. We all were told we would have flying cars in the year 2000 right?
Technology can never be produced as quick as ones imagination can manifest it....
Life imitates art (Score:2)
Let me be the first to announce... (Score:5, Funny)
WARNING (Score:3, Funny)
p2p Cadillac (Score:5, Funny)
Please god, not on windows. (Score:2, Funny)
C:\buildDeagle.exe
C:\buildAmmo.exe
Clippy: It looks like you're going on a shooting spree. Would you like me to help?
Prior (literary) art? (Score:2, Interesting)
The next privatized and deregulated monopoly... (Score:2)
someone wrote a story about this a long time ago, where the worst thing that could possibly happen to you was being cut off from the pipe that supplied raw materials. looks like its on the way.
No longer the thing of SF? (Score:2)
Although imaginary, the Omnifacture in my stories could possibly work in real life because it is based on current technologies. All
Re:No longer the thing of SF? (Score:2)
Even if I did do the rewrite I think I am OK...
Age of plenty? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would it be the age of plenty? Probably it will be the "age of more-power-to-the-DIYers", but you will still need the raw materials (which are scarce) and the design (which is scarce, too). Of course, it has the potential to cut down on costs, but there are lots of things that has cut the costs of manufacturing but we still live in the age of scarcity - and frankly, I don't see how it could change anytime with any technological advance: people will always find something that is scarce.
Wow - replicators ! (Score:2)
P2P? (Score:2)
Yes, IRTFA.
Age of Plenty (Score:2, Insightful)
Was it Iain M Banks that introduced this term? Anyway, it doesn't look bloody likely anymore if you ask me. We are running out of environment to fuck up and rapidly.
According to several articles recently in mags. like New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/) et al. things like fishstocks and other wild species are on the brink of plummeting and we are going to see species disappear in significant numbers in the near future. Go on, call me a tree hugger, but I think i
My prediction: blocked by manufacturers. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an enabling technology, which permits ordinary people to create their own design, fabrication, and manufacturing shops -- it reduces the barrier to entry so that anyone can play in the product design game. We've already seen from the open source movement what motivated individuals can do without corporate support. Corporations, with their long product cycles, their relatively low rate of innovation, and their habit of producing products that are "just good enough", would get STOMPED in the market if everyone could start selling their own designs. Also, product designers and engineers wouldn't desire corporate jobs anymore -- they'd strike out on their own, and the corps would have a hell of a time finding talent, even in the third world (in our wired world, *anyone* would be able to start fielding their designs via the internet, so why would a cash-poor engineer in, say, Southeast Asia work for a corp?). These facts are not lost on manufacturing companies, ok?
I think that one of two things are going to happen.
Possibility number 1: the technology and all patents related to it are bought outright by a group of manufacturers, who limit it strictly to their own internal R+D offices. Of course, patents only last 17 years, right? So one would think that eventually, the tech would get out. Perhaps... Unless they manage to legislate increased patent protection, using this specific issue as a wedge ("Senator, this will destroy the whole economy! We have to do something, blah blah"). Result: the public doesn't get their hands on this for decades, if at all, and big business wins.
2. A group of manufacturers act in collusion, purchasing the company that owns the patents, and they drive the price up so high that only industrial design firms can use the device. They use the patents to prevent cheap models from being made, and have the whole thing declared a trade secret to increase their protection beyond that offered by patents. Result: the device is never offered to the public, big business wins.
It's a shame, but it's the way of the world.
Re:My prediction: blocked by manufacturers. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is entirely an urban legend, like the 200 mpg carburetor. This did not happen: the grave is empty.
"Big Business will never let this go through, ever."
Not true either, since business can profit from such things if they actually exist
"Corporations
It does not work this way. Look at music: people still prefer to download (legal or not) the products of the major record labels, even though "Self-designed" stuff is all over the place, often legally free.
"Corporations, with their long product cycles, their relatively low rate of innovation,"
Low rate? What do you mean?
Re:My prediction: blocked by manufacturers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hydrogen combustion is a loss. You have to use energy to get the hydrogen in the first place, almost always by breaking water down by hydrolysis (high current through water - oxygen goes to one pole, hydrogen to the other). You're going to lose energy in the thermal inefficiencies of that process, you're going to lose some in leakage (H2 is a *very* small molecule), and then you still have the same inherent inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine that you have with any other fuel.
All hydrogen does is to displace the energy use (and pollution) to a different place, it doesn't give you any extra, or free, energy. A more logical approach would be to pursue biofuels that can be burned in existing vehicles (biodiesel, or more alcohol in gasoline blends)...uses existing infrastructure (gas stations, tankers, etc), works in existing vehicles, and doesn't need the world to change several expensive things all at once to work.
Hydrogen power might be appropriate for some things, but cars are not one of them. Too many things to change at once, to get it to be widely adopted.
Re:My prediction: blocked by manufacturers. (Score:3, Insightful)
makes no sense (Score:3, Insightful)
if this was true, and the egine was actually practical, what ever company who bought it would manufactures it. why? simple. money.
You announce and pruduce engine, use your political power to force the end of the gasoline engine for rnviromental reasons.
You own the Patent on anything to do with the only viable alernative. you would make a fortune. A petroleum company tat did this would have a huge increase in stock price, you would have no com
Will this change anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
When the printing press was born, together with gunpowder in weapons it brought about the distruction of fudal opression. It allowed new ideas to spread promoting revolution and eventually democracy, the availability of religeous texts lifted the oppressive and conservative warping of the bible propergated by the clergy of the day. The publishing of the classics in vast quantities allowed the commoners to become educated and eventually stand up for themselves.
It was centuries later that it was decided that things printed on these presses should be copied, before then everything was for accidemic uses or was timless like the bible or classical plays or histories. Then someone found out a way to make money from this, create new laws to force royaties. Machinery started to be patented and builders were forced to not use new technology.
Today we stand in a world where entire countries have incomes less than individuals, where the worlds most ecconomically prosperous country exports almost nothing phisical, except maybe old el-paso barito kits, coca-cola concentrate and the occasional calefornian orange. Where the holders of the "interlectual property" that they obtained though a little bit of tenacity or luck, or simply bought like an officer from victorian england buying his commision can dictate the price of the sale of their intangible chattles and the public must buy. Where streamlining, efficiency and outsourcing are the measure of good buisiness in an effort to have as few workers who will work for as little as possible so those who simply manage can take everything.
Today the measure of a physical object is not what it is, it is what it represents. Western "worksmanship" is simply a swoosh slapped onto a shirt made for nearly nothing in a third world country, rather like the way a five hundred dollar program is arranged in dints upon the surface of a worthless disk. If you live in a western country, you already live in a world where the construction is nothing and the concept, or interlectual property is everything. This new manufacturing won't change anything.
Realware (Score:3, Interesting)
SPOILER ALERT!
In the end, we all get allas, which can create anything (up to a certain size) by rearranging and transforming the atoms in the area, and depend on a big catalog of what to make. The allas can make others, so in a few weeks, everyone has one. The book shows what would happen with reasonable accuracy: intellectual property and real estate become the only valuable things. There are artists who sell cool T-shirt designs, and pirates who hang out by the door and make cheap imitations of them. All the manufacturing companies fail, but it doesn't really matter, because everyone has an alla.
The book didn't mention the manufacturing companies attemps to survive, and I think it underestimated them. If the allas had been less user-friendly and not everyone had them, I'm sure the manufacturing companies could have made them illegal, and the short-sighted government would have let them. Obviously this wouldn't work; it's difficult to kill someone who has an alla, so it would be similar to P2P today: illegal but mostly unenforcable.
SPOILER ALERT!
Eventually, the men realize they can hurl huge blocks of TNT at each other, and the aliens and their god take the allas away at the behest of a few humans. Allas are too dangerous for one-dimensional time.
In the slightly longer term (Score:3, Insightful)
Previous empires, like Rome and Byzantium, have tried to control everything from IP to the status of individuals, in an effort to protect the interests of the ruling classes. They all collapsed, but after hiccups progress continued.
IP and the threat of IP litigation is in the end an attempt to buck the free market. It gets represented as free-market economics (protecting property is the basis of rule of law etc.) but in reality ALL IP is shared to a greater or lesser degree. It's increasingly hard to point to any genuine "invention" because more and more shared, non-IP education is needed to get to the point of inventing anything (and music is the same - just about all music is now derivative of earlier work.) Once upon a time the calendar and writing were protected secrets. Once upon a time you needed to be a skilled plumber to connect a faucet, now you can get a couple of tools and some simple compression fittings and do it easily and safely yourself. People have not stopped writing, telling the time and plumbing because these are no longer secret. Far from it. The moral seems to be that extending knowledge and power to the people benefits everybody in the long run. It may cause painful readjustment to people who have got very rich by getting into positions of power, but ultimately the world owes nobody a free lunch.
"Flexonics" is useful, but it's not for big object (Score:5, Interesting)
The article misses the whole point. This isn't a efficient way to make things you can make now. It's a way to make things you can't make now. Things with detailed microstructure. Things with moving parts and electronics inside.
This is inherently a slow technology, because you have to build up thick objects layer by layer. But it produces objects that are more "organic", not in the hippie sense, but in the sense of having "internal organs." The first applications will probably be medical devices.
What else? Photonics parts such as switching mirror arrays. Peristaltic pumps. Cell sorters. Sensing devices. Once it's clear what you can do with this approach, there will be new, interesting things to be made that way. But they'll be small, high-detail objects. You're not going to make an I-beam that way, even if you could.
Almost all manufactured objects made in quantity (with the notable exception of wood products) are produced by some kind of "moulding" process. Casting, stamping, lithography, injection moulding, hydroforming, etc. are all "moulding" processes, where material is formed to match a master pattern. All these processes are fast and cheap. That's the great achievement of the first half of the twentieth century.
Machining, by contrast, is slow and expensive. Almost nothing you buy in a store is carved out of a solid block of metal. Many things could be, but that's only done for the prototype. Volume products are made by moulding-type processes. There may be a bit of finish machining, but it started with a moulded blank that looked almost like the finished part.
You can have a computer-controlled milling machine, and all the software to drive it, at home right now. I know two people who do. They don't use them for making routine household objects. It's too slow and too much trouble.
If you want a sense of what one-off manufacturing is like today, download eMachineshop. [emachineshop.com] It's a free CAD program with a difference. After you design the part, use the Job->Material menu to specify the material, and use the Job->Price menu to get an estimate. Then use Order->Place Order to have one made. An automated machine shop in New Jersey will make one and send it to you. Most parts cost $100-$300 for the first one, and a small fraction of that for each additional copy.
The Paradigm Shifts Keep On Comin' (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course the holders of certain government-granted rights (copyrights, patents) that are threatened by these new things will want to keep them inside the box. I think we are about to live through a Dark Age of legal repression and control that will make the DMCA look like a parking meter. But at some point it will become impossible to limit this technology to a small set of rights-restricted uses. At the other end of that tunnel is a world we can't even imagine.
Upshot (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting to think about, but in all likelihood, the fallout will not be as scary as the current RIAA witchhunt -- for two reasons.
One, it's a lot easier for a layperson to design, say, a chair than to write a good song. There will be plenty of designs floating around for freeware versions of most household objects.
Two, song swapping is easy because you can copy the original product very simply. Physical objects are far different in this regard -- there is no way in the foreseeable future to copy them, given the object itself. It's not like you can just snap a picture of your blender, feed it into your computer, and have it print one out for you. Designs will have to start from scratch, and as such, will typically end up rather different from the original.
What scares me is the idea of people trading designs that are a far cry from being UL listed...
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Plenty ? (Score:2)
Kintanon
Re:An Age of Plenty? (Score:4, Interesting)
The value of, say, drugs would only be the cost of the instructions to make them. There would still be a way to profit then. It would be an intellectual property based society.
One problem if such a concept was taken to it's extreme conclusion (the end of manufacturing) would be how anyone would make enough money to pay for the intellectual property needed to produce what they need. Not everyone is going to be an inventor themselves. You still need a way for people to convert their time into money. At the same time, however, once you had the instructions for your basic needs the effort needed to satisfy them would shrink to a trivial amount and most of your efforts would be focused on acquiring plans for luxuries.
You'd end up having a situation similar to the towns of Middle Ages Europe where they were basically self-sufficient and indistinguishable in their products (barring differences in crops). Until manufacturing started (such as the textile mills of Flanders) their biggest distinguishing factors were cultural ones mainly.
One side note, I hope recycling would be able to keep up with all of this home manufacturing. Judging from the amount of paper wasted on unnecessary and botched printouts I could imagine heaps of white test runs dumped in front of people's homes every trash day.