http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/11/john-naughton-corporate-responsibility-jobs
“Evangelists for the twin doctrines of globalisation and maximising shareholder value simply shrug their shoulders at this point. The fact that manufacturing jobs have moved to China, they say, is just a fact of life, an economic version of Newton’s first law.”
“As was unfortunately expected, despite no evidence that this made any economic sense at all, the member states of the EU have agreed to retroactively extend copyright another 20 years, at which point you can expect it to be extended again […]”
This is such a bad idea…
RepRap has now surpassed the commercial Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printers in machine affordability, price for filament, speed, and print quality. See http://blog.reprap.org/2011/09/tipping-point-of-print-quality-open.html and the image below.
A EUR 400 piece of simple hardware+software (which you can build at home) beating EUR 12,000, through collective and fully open source innovation over a mere 6 1/2 years. This drastically lowers the cost of producing prototypes and custom (or just small run) plastic items. New design tools have also been developed, including the ability to describe an object using a language, which makes editing object designs much easier as well.
I’ve been following the RepRap’s progress for years, and co-funded the building of an earlier model in Brisbane. The disruptive potential of this technology is tremendous! Duplicating existing items is easy, but not very interesting – how about printing things that you would previously not consider. I’ve written about it before – we need to adjust our thinking to this new reality and make smart use of it.
It is, to quote Chris DiBona, like “China on your desktop”. But better and more flexible.
See also
Many economists are in love with the idea of a natural experiment. A natural experiment is a turn of events that enables a clean comparison between two different economic-policy alternatives.
I think this tech has potential and real practical use, but might be missing a disruptive angle.
Microsoft is aiming for business (high price too) and so far it’s not taking off.