
Technology: Print me a Stradivarius - oliverdamian
http://www.economist.com/node/18114327?story_id=18114327&fsrc=nwl
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nyellin
Here are some "open source" 3d printers that you can build at home for under
$1500:

* RepRap - A project with the lofty goal of printing circuit boards and becoming self-replicable (<http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page>)

* Fab@Home - a 3d printer that tries to optimize print quality, but not necessarily print itself (<http://www.fabathome.org/>)

* MakerBot - A company that makes several variants of the RepRap (<http://makerbot.com/>)

There is a community site of 3d models to print at
<http://www.thingiverse.com/tag:reprap>

~~~
nyellin
HNers and engineering majors: There is a $20,000 prize from HumanityPlus for
anyone to develop a RepRap that can print conductive material.

<http://humanityplus.org/gadaprize/>

<http://reprap.org/wiki/Gada_Prize>

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Qz
One of my favorite sci fi books on this subject is Neal Stephenson's The
Diamond Age. The awesome part is that the book is about the manufacturing
revolution that _follows_ the 3d printer. Always two++ steps ahead, that guy.

~~~
bergie
In Diamond Age it was interesting how the control of the printing material
("the source"), and designs was used for a new form of colonialism.

The former can easily be controlled in reality as well, but I wonder whether
the open source ethos will be able to keep designs free.

~~~
oliverdamian
I think the command & control aspect of the Industrial age happened because of
the need for and the benefits of economies of scale. There was a need to
marshal together huge pools of capital, equipment, management structures,
assembly lines, etc. With 3D printing and additive manufacturing, there is the
hope of bringing peer-to-peer production that has successfully been
implemented in software, information, culture & other intangibles, to the
tangible physical realm. This is the direction we should be heading to, not
the other way around of trying to apply Industrial age property laws and
scarcity paradigms to the abundant fractal scalability of peer-to-peer
production.

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sliverstorm
I suspect this will NOT undermine economies of scale (at least in _some_
areas), due to 'toner' costs, operational costs, and power consumption. It
will doubtless be less efficient to print a true-to-life oak 2x4 than it is to
harvest and mill one with proper economies of scale set up.

