Piracy vs. Theft

[fyo]

^^ yup almost the exact same machine we have, except our doesn't have an X-Y table for the part to move on.  The print head moves in 2 directions, and the platform goes up and down for Z.

When you said:

 "Because all the "empty space" inside the cup gets filled with material and removed later."

that doesn't fit with a 3D printer, unless I've completely misunderstood your argument.

As for material strength, price, usability etc., there are so many aspects of this that it's impossible to know what's going to be possible 10 years down the road. SLS machines use lasers to fuse particles / beads of material together and work with glass, ceramics, and metals (in addition to plastic). SLS is way too expensive and lacks precision, but I don't think it's inconceivable that it would provide a good fit at some point.

There were some photography rants in this thread and that might actually be a very good comparison, at least in terms of technology. Photographs were handled in big shops with big (expensive) machines not too many years ago. That could easily be the near future of 3D "printing". To take the previous example of the clock face, I could then just order my new clock face (or Dolphins cup) from the comfort of my home and pick it up at the local Walmart.

If the price of these objects were "right", I would be a constant customer. I can't count the number of times some little plastic thing has crapped out on me (possibly through every fault of my own). Sometimes I can glue it, sometimes I can fashion a makeshift replacement, but I'd certainly be willing to pay to get replacement if I were able to send Walmart a model of my component. Just looking at my desk right now... I have a cell phone I love that has a broken piece of plastic (from falling onto the pavement and skidding 10 yards) that cannot be replaced for less than the price of a complete replacement. Then there are the two bits of plastic that enable my keyboard to tilt (broke when accidentally applying too much pressure to the face of the keyboard *cough*). Then there's the crappy volume button on my tablet that's just not sized correctly and thus rattles a bit when using the touchscreen. And one of the ear buds of my nice earphones that has a cracked plastic thing.

Expand that to all the other crap I keep breaking and I could practically pay for a $10k machine myself

[Pappy13]

Be careful not to underestimate technology's ability to wipe out your current kind of thinking.  There are things that have changed in just the last 10 years that have totally flipped the way I look at things.  I can't imagine going into a store and buying a road-map, for example.

There's also a lot of things that haven't fundamentally changed in years. 40 years ago they were thinking we would all have personal hovercrafts and be flying around the skies and wars would be decided by men in armored suits with ray guns. I remember reading about this stuff when I was a kid and thinking holy cow it's going to be amazing living in that world before I die. Well it hasn't happened and it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Not even close really. If you told me back in the 60's when I was watching Star Trek that the biggest feature of that show that would come to pass in the next 40 years would be the communicator device that Kirk used to talk with the Enterprise, I'd be REALLY disappointed. What no warp engines? No traveling through the galaxy? Not even our own solar system? No beaming up? No phasers? No Tricorder? No photon torpedoes? Not even elevators that move both up and down and sideways? C'MON MAN!

You can't imagine going into a store and buying a road map? That's a huge technological achievement? Compared with the invention of the light bulb, the combustion engine, the transistor, the integrated circuit, jet propulsion, putting someone on the moon, etc? In the last 40 years most of the achievements have been in scale, making things smaller, lighter, faster etc, but not fundamentally changing the technology behind it. Ipods and tablets are pretty cool and all, but but they aren't what many people were expecting 40 years ago to be the biggest technological advances. We were thinking MUCH bigger.

[Pappy13]

Pappy13 was talking about the prevalence of Walmart photo-printing as "proof" that there's no market for home 3D printing.

No, I didn't. I said that even if there's a home version that is affordable, people won't necessarily flock to it. It's just as likely that the market will change to Walmart or someone else providing the service rather than a home version of it. That's happened many times in the past.

My counterpoint was that there will always be a market for cheaper, less "fully featured" products

Of course there is, but that doesn't mean it will be provided to us within our own homes or that we'll want it. The services that have really made it into the home are all software related. TV Programming. Phones. Video. Music. Internet. What hardware manufacturing have we moved into the home? Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen. I don't know.

[Dave Gray]

I was using the road map example as a way to show how fast an entire culture can ditch something they grew up with in a heartbeat.  Not to show an incredible increase in technology.

But, smartphones are amazing.  That's a pretty huge deal, from where my Dad came from in a schoolhouse in Mississippi without A/C and you had to bring your own plate to eat lunch.  The Internet?  Huge.

You can't really predict what technology will be, but you can predict that it will advance.  I don't think you're giving humanity enough credit for advances in technology.  Look at computer graphics.  Crappy commercials use effects that rival the best films of just 20 years ago.  Things move quickly.

-----

One side point.  You keep pointing to software, saying "what about hardware?"  Where are the advances in hardware?  It's because better software is killing hardware.  (More accurately, reducing the need for "traditional" software.)  I don't need to have a printing press in my house, because I have a Nook.  I don't need a machine that prints records or tapes, because all of that hardware has been eclipsed by software.

How long does it take to mail a book across the country?  For the longest time, your answer was limited to how fast the boat was that carried it there...then how fast the plane was.  Then, the paradigm shifted and BAM...the book wasn't a physical product anymore.  The info was transmitted over the Internet, instantly.  That's what happens with technology.  There will be a shift in thinking that can change everything.  3D printing might evolve to be that....it might not.

[Spider-Dan]

There's also a lot of things that haven't fundamentally changed in years. 40 years ago they were thinking we would all have personal hovercrafts and be flying around the skies and wars would be decided by men in armored suits with ray guns.

There's a huge difference between "in The Future, someone will probably invent an anti-gravity belt" and "this currently existing technology will become cheaper and better."

Science fiction is not a realistic bellwether for what technology is in the pipeline, if only because science fiction entertainment generally only predicts things that are interesting.  Hybrid gasoline vehicles that are mostly indistinguishable from normal cars (except that they get slightly better mileage) are not a sexy science fiction story.

No, I didn't. I said that even if there's a home version that is affordable, people won't necessarily flock to it. It's just as likely that the market will change to Walmart or someone else providing the service rather than a home version of it. That's happened many times in the past.

Speaking to the point of this thread, the people who don't flock to the official channels seem to be of great concern to the powers that be.

The services that have really made it into the home are all software related. TV Programming. Phones. Video. Music. Internet.

High-definition (and 3D) hardware is not a software innovation.
Touchscreen phones are not a software innovation.
Optical disc movie format (compared to film or tape) is not a software innovation.
Digital music players (compared to tape or optical disc) are not a software innovation.
Internet infrastructure is not a software innovation.

What hardware manufacturing have we moved into the home?

I'd say CD and DVD burning meet that qualification, in the same sense and to the extent that a 3D printer would.  And again, CD/DVD burning speak directly to the point of this thread.

I'm still waiting for someone to address Dave's original question: what will/should be the moral, ethical, and legal implications of "unauthorized" 3D printing?

[Spider-Dan]

One side point.  You keep pointing to software, saying "what about hardware?"  Where are the advances in hardware?  It's because better software is killing hardware.

Dave, every single example he used is built on hardware advancement.  If you loaded up a super-laptop with all the software and schematics you pleased and traveled back to 1982, you would not be able to do a damn thing with it.

Digital music?  You'd need a supercomputer to decode an MP3 file in real time.
Digital video?  Don't even bother.
Digital TV programming?  Ditto.
Touchscreen phones?  A processor fast enough to run iOS wouldn't even exist, and even if it did, you wouldn't be able to fit 8MB of RAM in anything you could actually lift.
Internet infrastructure would be too slow to support anything more than text; a modem that's simply capable of processing today's broadband speeds would, again, be a DARPA-level supercomputer.

The advances of today are built upon decades of hardware achievement.

[Dave Gray]

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/smithsonian-3-d-printer-please-give-me-friendship-7-call-my-own?cmpid=tw

Found this while browsing today.

[Pappy13]

I don't think you're giving humanity enough credit for advances in technology.

No, it's not that at all, I think humanity has made incredible strides, I just think you're giving too much credit to technological strides lately. There were HUGE technological strides made in the last century, but many of them were made 40, 50, 60 years ago and are only now really reaching the potential that those people that were working on them thought they would reach at the time they were thinking them up. Think of your biggest technological devices in your home today. Your TV. Your PC. Your phone. Yes we have made huge improvements to them lately, but the basic fundemental concepts were there 40, 50, 60 years ago. We need to give a little more credit to the guys that were working on this stuff all those years ago too and realize that it's taken all that time from then until now to really make them what they are. It didn't all happen in the last 20 years, we just have started seeing the results of their work in the last 20 years.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

[Pappy13]

Dave, every single example he used is built on hardware advancement.

You're absolutely right, I never said there hasn't been hardware advancements as well. What I said was just because we've had a software revolution where we're able to download software straight to the home that it's logical to assume we'll do the same with hardware in the future. That's a silly notion. Hardware and software are fundamentally different. I'll be happy to come on here and say I was wrong if that happens within my lifetime.

[Dave Gray]

I (along with just about everyone I know) carry a device in my pocket at all times that allows me access to almost all of the world's information.

That is incredible and was completely unheard of and unpredictable 20 years ago.

[Pappy13]

I (along with just about everyone I know) carry a device in my pocket at all times that allows me access to almost all of the world's information.

That is incredible and was completely unheard of and unpredictable 20 years ago.

Actually that's not that different from what Star Trek envisioned 50 years ago when Kirk opened his communicator and said "Computer.....".

[Spider-Dan]

Pappy13, if I understand your position correctly, if (at any point in the future) humans develop faster-than-light travel technology, Star Trek (or something else) gets credit for envisioning it... even if it has absolutely nothing to do with warp fields or dilithium crystals or antimatter injectors or anything of the sort?

Star Trek's knowledge system was built on a centralized computer, not a decentralized network.  The interface (and the infrastructure) between the systems bears little in common besides "a computer tells you stuff".  People in the 1930s who imagined future superplanes with 20 propellers don't get credit for presaging jet airliners.

[Pappy13]

Pappy13, if I understand your position correctly, if (at any point in the future) humans develop faster-than-light travel technology, Star Trek (or something else) gets credit for envisioning it... even if it has absolutely nothing to do with warp fields or dilithium crystals or antimatter injectors or anything of the sort?

No, you don't understand my position correctly. In the 60's Warp drives were pure science fiction as they continue to be today, however a communicator device that you would use to "talk" to an on-board computer didn't seem that far fetched at all. We already had telephones. We already had computers. We already had networks. Sure they were wired, not wireless, but it was easy to invision a time when instead of a wired network we would replace it with a wireless network, everyone already knew what a radio was and how it worked. Sure you couldn't simply "talk" to computers and they would respond, but again it was easy to envision that was where the technology was headed. Distrubuted computing was around too as they had connected computers to each other to try to increase their power along with the internet, it was just extremely rudimentary, expensive and exclusive. Phones didn't fit easily into your hand they were in a large heavy box and they only transmitted voice signals, not video, but again people foresaw a time when the phone would be small enough to fit into your pocket. And all those things came about, but not in 10 or 20 years, it took more like 40 or 50 years. Even though much of the basic technology was already in place it would take many many more tiny technological advances to finally get to the point they had envisioned way back when they started.

That's my point Spider, that wireless cellphones and distributed computing DIDN'T just come along in the last 20 years. It's been being built little by little for the last 50 years.

Star Trek's knowledge system was built on a centralized computer, not a decentralized network.  The interface (and the infrastructure) between the systems bears little in common besides "a computer tells you stuff".  People in the 1930s who imagined future superplanes with 20 propellers don't get credit for presaging jet airliners.

Kirk only talked with the centralized computer on the Enterprise because it was the only thing in range of his communicator, but the centralized computer on the Enterprise was capable of communicating with Starfleet command and it's computers. Kirk was just talking with his local server.

[Dave Gray]

^ But what does that have to do with anything?

Wouldn't you expect similar, incremental advances in 3D printing?

[Pappy13]

^ But what does that have to do with anything?

Wouldn't you expect similar, incremental advances in 3D printing?

Yes, but it won't be "I think that this is a reality that is coming sooner than later". That's all that I was saying, that it takes longer than we think it will.

3D printing is rudimental, expensive and exclusive today. How long will it take before each of us has one of these things in our house? I don't know, I just don't think it will be that soon. Maybe not in my lifetime.