> There is a saying about how us citizens trust companies but not their government, and how Europeans trust their governments but not their companies. Which obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but it's how you can view the EU.
I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
> I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
I think that is a healthy attitude.
I am British and do not trust my government or big tech (regardless of where it is based). IMO governments are easily lobbied to utimately tend to take the side of big business.
That was always such a silly argument, even more so with the rise of cheap and reliable 3D printing. I download, print, and use physical objects every week and don’t know or care what IP issues might exist as long as it works for its purpose. I can’t wait until the day comes when you can download and print a working car at home.
Then I'm surprised. It's much different to the usual situation when even mass made products are either banned or very limited, e.g. unicycles prohibited, e-scooters only up to 20 km/h, e-bikes only up to 25 km/h.
I agree, it's surprising. Even in California of all places, you can make a one-off vehicle at home and register it for legal road use, without even needing modern safety or emissions equipment:
Another even more common strategy is to "restore" a classic car using some extremely small number of parts from some really old pre-emissions and pre-safety equipment car. This is often done for hod rods, dune buggies, etc. where it will be, say a "1930 Ford" but contain only some minuscule amount of that original car it is titled and registered as. There's a sizable industry of homemade "kit cars" that require you to start with a legally registered VW Beetle, but ultimately they often retain nothing except parts of the thin sheet metal floor pan, and somehow that is apparently legal.
Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS.
But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.
So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.
Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory, but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in the parent comment.
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I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you just care about the print layers, use a filament that is solvable in acetone, and use it to smoothen the surface. Of course, if you absolutely need the resolution, you likely must use a resin printer.
As long as there is centralization, there is always an avenue for abuse with money. The DNS root itself is heavily influenced by a group of allied nations, through the ICANN if I'm right. That can be used to exert pressure on TLD registries, including ccTLD registries. Of course, that cannot be used for surgical control single domains like Anna's Archives'. But DNS blocking is an old technique by now. The copyright cartel needs to get it banned only in a few populous countries to destroy the value of a domain. We can keep finding workarounds. But at some point, they won't have to worry about people who can actually do that.
> Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
It is very well-known in the 3D printing community that the design of a lot of items that you see in your daily life are actually driven by the limitations of the production process that was used to produce them.
All in all, 3D printing allows a lot more flexibility in designs, but if you attempt to 3D-print many items of your daily life exactly as they are, the result will often be much worse than with the production process that the object was designed for, or sometimes it is possible to come near to the original object, but producing it using 3D printing takes a lot more effort.
It is rather a consensus in the 3D printing community that people should rather make use of the opportunity to use the insanely increased flexibility that 3D printing allows to reimagine how objects in daily life look like - and thus create better versions of such objects that are (by construction) also good 3D-printable.
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Addendum: Concerning "the transparent insert thing": as far as I am aware with resin printing, you can 3D-print transparent things very precisely, and even with FDM printing, a lot of progress has been made with respect to printing objects that are quite transparent:
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
In my opinion people simply stopped following the big visions of that time and got satisfied with the current state of 3D printers instead of continuing to iterate on highly experimental designs that could bring the world nearer to these visions.
Cory Doctorow waxed lyrical for many years about the ability to 3d-print clothes and other Maslow-hierarchy needs. Even the most experimental of designs haven't approached that yet... and I think we'd now be scared of increased PFAS levels even if we could.
3d printed shoes are… almost a thing(1). Clothes, not so much… some experimental high fashion fabrics, but nothing you’d wear under normal circumstances.
But to your point about PFAS, afaik no common 3d printing materials contain PFAS - at least not filament ones, i don’t know much about the resin printing world.
The only place PFAS is used in an FDM printer is the filament guide some printers have. That's a Teflon tube that the filament travels in towards the hotend.
Bowden style printers tend to have a long tube, direct drive printers sometimes have a short tube fully contained in the hotend assembly.
I don't see how PFAS can be used as a filament in FDM printer. It's not a thermoplastic, that's one of its advantages as a material.
I would rather say for quite a lot of people in Germany it's that they neither trust the Federal Government nor the EU government nor the US-American tech companies.
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