The Modern Ease of 3D Printing 264
An anonymous reader writes "What will it mean when 3D fabricators become cheap and common? A NY Times article explores the ease of copying objects by scanning them with NextEngine scanner and sending them to 3d 'print shops'. The experiments were done with Legos because most of the things around his office were protected by copyright. What will happen to the economy for engineering when we can just download a pirated description of a machine and 'print' it out? 'The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of this relatively low-cost duplicating method, often called rapid prototyping. Hearing aid companies, for instance, are producing some custom-fitted ear pieces from scanned molds of patients. Custom car companies produce new parts for classic cars or modified parts for hot rods. Consumer product makers create fully functional designs before committing themselves to big production runs.'"
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Great, so now when I'm in the tech room doing blow and the boss walks in I'll have a reasonable excuse: I'm prototyping my nose for a prosthetic. Never mind that not even a disfigured maxillofacial surgery patient would want my nose, but hey, the boss doesn't know that.
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like your boss is already intimately familiar with it...
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Implications are obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
When you think about it, modern society is moving more and more to the production of "intellectual property" (i.e. an idea as something you can own) rather than the production of physical goods. A modern individual has the capability of mastering their own music and movies, post-processing and distributing their own photographs in both digital and physical form, creating their own PCB-based electronics, designing their own Microprocessors, building their own vehicles (airplanes are a big one!), and many other tasks that used to require massive resources and tens-to-hundreds of emlpoyees.
Each time a task went digital, society was temporarily disrupted while the new technology was integrated. Then life went on, except that society was now capable of greater production than before. The implications of 3D printing technology are the same. The value of goods themselves will be reduced to the cost of initial development. Once that development has been achieved, unlimited copies will be possible. So the average consumer will see a reduction in costs, and the average producer will see an increase in profits.
"Piracy" will continue to be a problem, but it will be just like today. If producers offer a good value for the price, the majority of consumers won't bother with piracy. If producers are dumb enough to resist the change (*cough*I'm looking at you music industry*cough*), then they can expect that piracy will run rampant until they do offer such services.
Then life will go on, but just a bit better than before.
Re:Implications are obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it has happened that way in the past is because creating and replicating audio and video are relatively easy once they are digitized. The sensory data (sound saves and light waves) lend themselves well for digital reproduction at close to perfect quality. Duplication can be done perfectly, with no loss in transmission.
That is not the case with physical reproduction, and I doubt will be for some time. These 3d scanners are good for only what their ads say: prototyping. There will not be a day when you will be able to scan copy and duplicate even a nut or a bolt in your garage anywhere near as cheaply as it can be done en masse at a production plant simply because the mould, tools and materials are too expensive on a small scale to be feasible. Now I know about the "never say never" line in technology, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that while the productive capacity of the home user will scale up, you will never get to the point where manufacturers of physical items will be squeezed out the way manufacturers of virtual goods (music, movies etc) have been. There's a fundamental difference between copying Britney Spears' latest warblings and copying a Ferrari.
Re:Implications are obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree and yet I disagree at the same time. I agree that scanning is an imperfect process that isn't likely to improve sufficiently in the next few decades. However, when a modern engineer is developing a part, does he still use a pen and paper to design the diagram? Of course not! The object is designed in detail in a CAD program. Those CAD drawings are then used in manufacturing a mold to spec.
Now consider for a moment, what happens when you take that 3D model and feed it into a 3D Printer? In theory, at least, the printer will be able to reproduce the object with perfect quality. In reality, the printer will be limited by its design (as most manufacturing methods are), possibly requiring the 3D model to be tweaked for the printer. However, most parts are created with similar limitations in mind (e.g. a plastic part is likely to be in two pieces with open ends that fit together) making the models very easy to transfer over to 3D printing.
Now I don't disagree that there will continue to be significant differences between what someone can manufacture in the home and what can be manufactured in an industrial environment, but the gap will close. It has always closed and will continue to close in every industry in existence. Today, we can develop high-quality prints of photos from digital negatives with an in-store machine. We can print and bind nearly any book with an in-store machine. We can press a CD or DVD with a color label with a simple machine. We can quickly produce a custom PCB board with a simple machine. These things have come down to the consumer scale, even if machines that can do even better exist.
The same will happen with 3D printers. You're going to have everything from a home machine capable of printing toys, widgets, and useful household items; you're going have large machines capable of printing houses and ship hulls; and you're going to have everything in-between. I for one can't wait for the day when I can print my own customized CD shelf or cup holder.
Re:Implications are obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Implications are obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you can create it in any material supported by the printer. As the 3D Printers evolve, they're beginning to print other materials besides plastic. For example, that 3D House Printing story a few weeks ago was not done out of plastics and resins. It was done out of concrete materials designed to work well with the printer. Unsurprisingly, there are also metal printers [bathsheba.com] available for many tasks. You only hear about plastic materials so much because they're easy to work with, cheap to produce, and are very versatile in creating different objects.
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That said, there are likely a lot of things you could do with room temperature epoxies and investment casting, and cheape
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Pour molten metal of composition required.
wait.
Brake apart mold,grind & polish part where necessary.
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I predict that, instead of scanning and printing, people will just design 3D objects in a CAD-like application, and then print them in a 3D printer. As far as copying existing items, human intelligence will do the difficult parts of 'scanning' and re-creating the design of, say, a Ferarri, as a 3D model.
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But what about a calculator. A simple calculator is more than just the outside shell, and screws but also the components. Those can't be replicated in such a fashion. The screen is built with different techniquies from the hard plastic case. The circuit boards will have to be built by a second machine, and chips a third.
Combini
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Fasteners are more than just physical objects with a particular shape -- they also depend on the intrinsic material properties. You know, stuff that's only imparted by forging, heat treating, etc. If you don't believe me, try this as an experiment:
Go out into your garage, remove a/the cylinder head cover from your car's engine, remove a cylinder head bolt, heat it cherry red with a blowtorch and put it back. Dollars to doug
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Are people going to be replicating Ferraris? Not anytime soon. Mainly, it's a question of "what can be made from (relatively) soft plastic"?
But there are a host of items I can see from where I sit that could be easily replicated, and a likewise host of industries that make these things that will be faced with the radical paradigm shift of consumer production.
- a pokemon psyduck action figure.
- a letter opener (plastic)
- a desk organizer thing (plastic)
- coffee cup
Re:Implications are obvious (steel link) (Score:2)
http://www.bathsheba.com/sculpt/process/ [bathsheba.com]
In part:
To start with, the design is laid down, one layer at a time, in stainless-steel powder held in place by a laser-activated binder. You can see the layering on the finished pieces, it is the source of the characteristic texture of my work. Each layer is
The steel granules are so fine that they feel like very heavy, cool flour. During the build the extra unbound powder supports the piece, so no extra structure is needed to
Re:Implications are obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm trying to say here is that if we were still blacksmithing and someone built a three-axis CNC, this is the equivalent of saying "but they won't be able to mill something that looks like my wrought-iron-and-wood wagon wheel!"
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It doesn't matter how advanced these fabrication technologies get a well assembled factory line (using these technologies as well) will always be able to make a product cheaper than a generalized fabrication machine. Especially as you will need someone or something to put the parts together anyways.. And yo
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You know, in Star Trek this lead to everything becoming "free," ushering in a utopia where the only "work" people did was stuff they enjoyed doing. Too bad that, instead, we'll just enact a bunch of draconian laws to artificially induce scarcity again...
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First Star-Trek isn't real. I'm sorry, but neither is the easter bunny. If anything can be duplicated cheaply people will only do the stuff they enjoy doing, but no work will be done. Society will stagnate, innovation will come to a halt, and the social consequences will be immense. Perhaps no one would go without, but I'd ha
Humans aren't wired to behave that way (Score:4, Insightful)
First Star-Trek isn't real. I'm sorry, but neither is the easter bunny. If anything can be duplicated cheaply people will only do the stuff they enjoy doing, but no work will be done. Society will stagnate, innovation will come to a halt, and the social consequences will be immense.
Yeah really! Why, it's just like if people could freely duplicate software. There would be no motivation at all to improve it, and innovation would come to a halt! Oh wait.. what about Open Source...
Humans are not wired to behave the way in which you describe. People get bored doing nothing. All you have to look at for am example of this is the number of people who are perfectly financially secure who return to work anyway, because they are bored with retirement.
People's brains needs stimulus. Even if you consider games and other entertainment - if no one makes new entertainment, then the current supply will be quickly exhausted, and the populace will become bored again. At that point, they will start doing creative things they enjoy.
And none of this would "stifle innovation". What about all the dreamers who want to explore space and beyond, or to understand how the physical universe works in more detail? These people will always continue research and innovation - the difference is they will be able to innovate HOW they want and WHEN they want, without being constrained to rules of artificial scarcity or need for essentials, since all their materials would be "free" to them via their replicator.
Really, replicator instantly solve a vast amount of global issues. You no longer have hunger. You no longer have theft since there is no value in stolen objects. You no longer have a "drug problem" since everyone who wants rugs can replicate themselves into a stupor without harming anyone else, and darwinian processes will quickly weed people with those addictive tenancies into oblivion. Likewise, there will be little need for war since there are no resources to argue over, and even if there were you would be assured of mutual destruction since anyone can replicate any weapons they can imagine.
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The problem I see is in human psychology. It would theoretically be possible to create a society in which virtually everyone achieves a certain level of material comfort; on average people are better off today in terms of food, shelter, life expectancy etc.
Price of Ink (Score:3, Insightful)
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Becare about using the word never. History has proved it wrong over and over.
i.e.
"We'll never fly..."
"We'll never go to the moon..."
etc.
At some point it is all about (re) aligning the frequencies of matter (since that all energy & matter are -- frequencies.) That is indeed possible, we just have to wait to develop our mental powers (again) and/or build a machine to help.
Non-Usable (Score:2)
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Re:Non-Usable (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been changing. Modern printers use much stronger materials based on resins similar to those used in Legos. So if you need a plastic part, you should be able to print one of reasonable strength. For example, I could see a huge market for toys on demand much in the way that books are slowly moving to print on demand.
It's fairly rare to be able to create a moveable part in a single mold. Usually, you create a variety of parts, then assemble them. When this starts to catch on with consumers, I imagine you'll first see products coming in many parts with "some assembly required". Later revisions of the technology might include robotic assemblers that construct devices in a manner similar to how PODs are now able to print and bind nearly any book. While the precise assembly options may not be comprehensive, model developers will know the limitations of the machines and attempt to modify their models so that they're more easily assembled by the robotics.
Also, there is an issue of scale that needs to be considered. There's nothing preventing a larger 3D printer from printing in concretes or metals. In fact, there was a story here a few weeks ago about a 3D printer that could construct a house in a few days. But why stop there? Ship hulls, car bodies, air foils, and many other items which are so large as to be difficult to mold could conceivably be printed instead. In many cases it may even be advantageous, as the part will be producable as a single object with no seams or rivets. This can potentially strengthen the object overall. Chemical agents can also be used to treat the object for better strength and endurance.
Obviously, the technology is just getting started. But it has been making great strides in the short time it's been available. Give it a decade or two more and the necessary material injection techniques and production methods will get most of the bugs worked out.
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I suspect that this will get easier, since it
Re:Non-Usable (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the other systems from companies like Dimension or Stratasys use stronger plastics but can't produce multicolored items.
Some can produce fully working items right from the printer . They deposit two types of material: one soluable and one insoluable. After the thing is printed, you wash away the soluable stuff and the gaps open up. It's amazing. I've played with fully adjustable crescent wrenches that are built with almost the same precision as the ones from Sears. The plastic isn't as durable as metal, but you can certainly build things with the wrench. I'm told one of the cooler demonstration items is a bicycle chain that's fully assembled after the wash.
In some sense, these pre-assembled machines are better than traditional manufacturing techniques because you can build working items inside of sealed shells. There's no ship-in-a-bottle paradox because everything is built from the bottom up.
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Re:Non-Usable (Score:4, Funny)
In most cases, from the examples I've seen, the rapid prototyping tools can't currently create a durable item
From my purchasing experiences in the past decade, it seems most items are not durable anyway. ;-)
-InnerWebRe: (Score:3, Insightful)
Current Experience (Score:3, Informative)
We are not even close to the sort of society described in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age , where everything is manufactured on the spot, rapidly and on-
Star Trek really was ahead of its time (Score:2)
As 3D printing becomes more common, there's going to be a lot of fighting between entrenched manufacturers and "pirates" (just as there is now fighting between entrenched media and "pirates") but in the end, the technology always wins out.
Perhaps this will pave the way to a new economic system...
Or perhaps it won't (Score:2)
Skin? complex enough? (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/
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Lego isn't copyrighted? (Score:3, Informative)
Um, the Lego folks might want to have a word with him...
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The trademarks on Lego and Lego bricks are still in force, however (annual renewal). However, "In October 2005, the Supreme Court [of Canada] ruled unanimoussly[sic] that 'Trademark law should not be used to perpetuate monopoly rights enjoyed under now-expired patents.'"[1] [wikipedia.org].
What this means is that if he copies Lego bricks exactly, he's fine, as long as he doesn't call his product "Lego".
Obvious usage (Score:2, Funny)
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It means IP conflicts move from media to 3D stuff (Score:2)
Scanner (Score:3, Funny)
The NextEngine scanner can only do 6" scans, so we Canadians will have to wait a few more years before desktop penis scanning is the norm.
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No worries - their web site says that a scanner capable of scanning objects as small as 2" will be available soon.
No danger yet... (Score:2)
Until the transporter is invented, I don't think we are in any danger of seeing things copied in the real world on the scale that we see them copied in the digital world. The fact is, there are still severe limitations on the mediums that rapid prototype items can be produced from, and they are still quite costly to have made. Even a small part, say the size of a disk drive, c
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Major new front in the war over IP (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not just the hated RIAA, MPAA, and the software behemoths, that will be complaining of copyright infringement. Designs of material things will become targets too.
Various fashion designers are already being hurt — once they design something nice, they have to compete with (high-quality) knock-offs. The knock-offs are not produced by 3D-printing machines, but rather by hard-working laborers abroad. They can make them cheap, because they don't need to pay the genius designers — simply steal her/his designs.
Get ready for passionate Socialists arguing, that it is "not the same as stealing" — as if that's relevant, as if being "not exactly stealing" makes it acceptable somehow.
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Welcome to the real world. Fiction (Mostly SF) has been saying "What if you could effortlessly duplicate anything?" for years now. It's time for real world ideas on how to deal with a world where almost nothing is scarce. Are we going to attempt to legislate artificial scarcity, or maximum abundance and a fair way to compen
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The communists don't have a monopoly on the "not the same as stealing" = acceptable philosophy. The Capitolists have been using it for years.
If we destroy the land for the future generations to make a quick buck, that's not exactly stealing, so it's acceptable. (Just about every country has done this at some time)
If we tax Peter
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Not that most folks on /. really know or care what happens to the poor pattern designers :)
IP is a privledege granted by the people (Score:2)
"genius designers"
that is laughable. Most things these "genius designers"
make are completly impractical in the real world. Sure, they look good one night on the red carpet, but that is it. How many of those desiugns do you see in stores where 99% of the population shop?
Realigning teeth (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's [invisalign.com] the company site. No, I'm not a shill.
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What looks cooler (and uses many of the same 3D modeling techniques) is a system that uses special wires; the tooth movements are modeled on screen and the wires are bent by robots with a precision that they can't get with hand tools. The upshot is supposedly 50% faster treatments due to the wires (stronger?) and the precision bending.
Craftsmanship (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't matter. (Score:2)
Seems like someone is shorting 3D printer stocks (Score:2)
3D Printers To Build Houses [slashdot.org]
A 3D Printer On Every Desktop? [slashdot.org]
What's up with that? When any of these products pass the vaporware state, then it is newsworthy. Until then, it seems like someone is really interested in free publicity for non-existent or non-affordable products.
Re:Seems like someone is shorting 3D printer stock (Score:4, Informative)
We're getting near affordability for the "prosumer" who might want a hobby. I can imagine that these devices might be very useful to model train hobbiests, artists, and others. One artist I know builds Joseph Cornell-like boxes filled with historical scenes. They're great, really.
Re:Seems like someone is shorting 3D printer stock (Score:2)
A little work (Score:2)
Paper jams (Score:5, Funny)
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good for car parts, still lousy for complex stuff (Score:2)
Re:good for car parts, still lousy for complex stu (Score:2)
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Ecological footprint? (Score:3, Insightful)
Widespread 3D printers will probably mean that we buy less pre-fabricated items from shops, which will reduce shipping. However I presume the energy efficiency (and whatever the equivalent of a toner cartridge for 3D) will be a lot worse per unit for a home printer than a mass production unit. What about waste products? Will this encourage the throwaway society even further?
It also reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuGvPhglGEc [youtube.com]
which might be a nice idea, but it's an enormous use of energy for something we can do perfectly well without a machine.
Peter
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Won't someone think of the IP?!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Rapid prototyping/3d fabrication is becoming cheaper. You know what that will allow, more than anything? It'll allow competition by the little guy, to produce their own items and test them without the expense of the full production process for a lot of different things. That will mean that skill at design and meeting the real needs of customers will become more attainable by more people, and overall costs will go down.
It's like the commoditization of computer hardware that happened in the late 80's for the consumer sector, and late 90's for the mid-range server sector, and what's happening to the software sector right now. Who's allowed to feasibly compete for customer's money will become a more level playing field, which will cut into the biggest producers profits somewhat, as more people compete, but the big players that adopt the technology will ultimately win out over the big players who don't, and the little guys will generally stay little, with either have a few breakthrough big boom companies, or the few big growers get squashed/eaten if enough of the big players catch a clue fast enough. The latter happened with the hardware market, the former is happening with the software market (google).
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It's been insane in the software world, I know of many OSS devs that use a pseudonym when they program and only release from foreign servers to avoid the patent bullshit that has been going on for years now.
Capitalist societies approaching Communism (Score:3, Insightful)
And I mean the Communist utopia, not the grim reality of the attempts to build Communism forcefully.
As some old-timers may know, Marx [wikipedia.org] was pointing out, that social order(s) are a product of the production capacity. As the humans' ability to produce things (food, clothing, vehicles, houses, anything...) evolved, so did the social orders. This is the part of his teachings, that no one really disagrees over.
He then argued, that Communism — which Soviet People were busily building, supposedly, while living under the less perfect Socialism — will become possible, when the means of production evolve even further, to the point where Communism's principle of distribution of goods: "From each by their ability, to each by their needs," — will come into being.
Ironically, it is the Capitalist societies, that are quickly approaching that benchmark. More and more things are given out free or for next to nothing to more and more people. Officially "poor" people have cars and TV-sets, and are entitled to substantial give-aways of food...
TFA discusses a major "harbinger" of yet another possible production increase, which promises to allow goods to be produced closer, to where they will be used (presumably, delivery of raw materials will be easier/cheaper). Hurray!
Big economic boom, but LOTS of violence (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest economic boom in the history of human kind.
After the information age society is going to move into the replication age and manufacturing is going to shift from the factory back into the home. But the factory infrastructure won't go away - instead it will retool and go big. Mile long ships, mile high buildings, air ships as big as cities that have cities in them are just some of the possibilities. Society will become an invention service society.
One other thing. When invention commoditizes, the patent system will die - Just like the information age forced the commoditisation of information and the death of copyrights, and the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of labor and the violent death of the plantation system. That is why it is so important THAT WE MUST KILL PATENTS!!!!! Think about it, you can't control information with physical force, but with invention you can. That is why the death of copyrights will involve lots of lawsuits but little physical violence. That won't be the case when killing the patent system. WE MUST KILL PATENTS NOW BECAUSE IF WE DONT THERE WILL BE AWFULL VIOLENCE.
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Obligitory Link.... (Score:4, Informative)
Ann Summers will worried. (Score:2)
Normal progression (Score:2)
2) Smaller manufacturer get cheaper copies of the printers and use those to create entire devices (piece by piece)
3) Robotic assembly takes over at large Mfgs and the entire process is automated at the top level, and then at smaller levels
4) Eventually an Ikea-like store is created where parts are created as needed, eliminating warehouses for kit-based home assembly
5) personal 3D printers reach the masses and people download couches from th
3D xerox machine? (Score:2)
RP Model Limitations Currently... (Score:2)
If you need higher strength and toughness like is commonly expected from Polyethylene to Polypropylene to Polycarbonates, and particularly when it is in thinner sections, current RP materials don't even come close to the physical properties of finish injection molded parts.
In terms of accuracy and surface finish RP models will not be able to match the smooth accurate even
stereolithography has a lot to tell (Score:2)
A wargamer's dream.... (Score:2)
DId you hear that? (Score:2)
Serves those bastard right, to.
eMachineShop (Score:2)
convex (Score:2)
Sales Person Fodder (Score:2)
What copyright issue? (Score:2)
because most of the things around his office were protected by copyright.
You can't copyright a functional mechanical part. That's why there's a third-party auto parts industry. The author of the original article (free link) [iht.com] apparently has a desk full of promotional items, some of which might be copyrighted designs. That's the only reason he has copyright problems.
The article is really just a product review of a low-end 3D scanner. Not a very good one. Sounds worse than the low-end Roland scanner [tonasgraphics.com]
Please stop comparing (Score:2)
You need materials, and assembly. SO there will be a significant cost to producing things. Probably more to make it your self then to buy it.
When someone invents a matter converters then run on trash, then you can draw the comparison.
Presentation at ETech (Score:2)
approximations (Score:2)
Really, the current state of things is more artificial. And every time technology helps factor out one of the artificial notions of value, we regai
Fab, by Neil Gershenfeld (Score:2)
A fascinating book on the subject [amazon.com], talking a little about the tech, but also making the point the eventually, the tech will enable you to acquire physical objects that are essentially "open source," or rather, "open design", and all you would need to buy in the future in order to have an endless stream of consumer products is a vat of plastic.
If you wanted to have a car, you probably couldn't print that out at home, you'd have to go to the 3D Kinkos. Imagine if you could just download a car off the inter
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I did consider using modeling clay, but I'
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Ye might find yerself treadin' in deep water fer spoutin' blasphemy like that.
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If a burgler gets hold of the key, why the HELL do they need to copy it? If for some reason you think the owner wuold miss it, just replace the house key with any similiar key. They won't know there has been a switch until they get home anyways.
Of course, I don't think any burglers actually uses a key.