Slashdot Mirror
3D Printers For Peace Contest
First time accepted submitter Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest. Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure? Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost."
3D print kevlar body armor, or maybe a ceramic ballistic plate?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print?
Bread.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I want a giant printer so I can print a tank.
print oil or other kinds of fuel?
Nobody gets hurt, everybody stays safe
Despite all that talk and hype, despite guns being printed by 3D printers, it is not what the poorer nations need. Simple technology well designed cheap to make and maintain. That is what they need. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_hardware_projects
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How about a printer that can print a printer?
2 words: Dill dough
I think Mother Theresa would choose not to print anything.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor, and considered suffering to be a state of grace.
She was a rather nasty piece of work, who kept the poor in poverty, and prevented many dying people from getting access to medicine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60
2,000 years of history says they have the wrong idea.
however there's been a rash of plowshare murders lately.
I didn't realize that Ghandi was born before his Mother. I need to read up on this Hinduism stuff!
"3D printing is being condemned by idiots because of the potential for printing guns."
Sigh.
How about we put down the guns and 3D print a Peace Pipe.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
If Mother Theresa or[sic] Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print?
That's easy!
Mother Theresa would 3D print destitite people suffering from horrible diseases, so that she could lock them away in 'hospice' where they will be denied medical care, pain management, and be denied visitors -- even their 3D printed family.
Ghandi would print naked, pre-pubescent girls to sleep with, so that he can 'prove his piety'.
Come on Slashdot, what's with the softball questions?
are 3D printers that can print functional 3D printers.
In this country, the first gun control came about because blacks were firing at KKK lynch mobs. (It's surprisingly easy for a few defenders to fend off an angry mob with firearms. The defenders are already behind cover, whereas their attackers have to close ground. And the defenders have nowhere to go, whereas each attacker has the option of retreating.)
At the time, the KKK was basically the terrorist wing of the Democrat party, and the Democrat politicians passed the first gun control laws to enable the lynching. The NRA got their start as a civil rights organization fighting those laws.
An AC replying to the parent nailed it - Gandhi would have made salt.
Not really, of course, but the point is that Gandhi led the Salt Satyagraha, a major civil disobedience movement protesting the British colonial salt taxes, which made it illegal for individuals to produce and sell their own salt.
I'll leave the analogies to others...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
just google '3d printed hand boy' and bring the tissues
The NRA told me so. The more guns we have the safer we will be.
Oh, and chocolate rations are being increased again.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The two causes are not mutually exclusive, and I say this as a gun enthusiast who would not fire a 3D-printed gun with his own 2 hands.
Sigh.
Sigh.
Because the media and all their "analyst" guests are ignorant, myopic, ratings-chasing, fear-mongering drama queens. Their reaction to "the potential for 3d-printed guns" is just one more manifestation of this. The Liberator may have been downloaded 100k times, but I bet at least 80% of those people don't even have a 3d printer (and never will), and less than a dozen of them will actually get printed.
Those mouth to mouth guards used for CPR.
Sintered ceramic teeth -- dentures and bridges, faster and more accessible dentistry.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
food, clothes, water, or medicine.
So, what you're saying is... war is peace?
The NRA got their start as a civil rights organization fighting those laws.
LIES.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association#Origins
Origins
The National Rifle Association was first chartered in the state of New York on November 17, 1871[12] by Army and Navy Journal editor William Conant Church and General George Wood Wingate. Its first president was Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, who had worked as a Rhode Island gunsmith, and Wingate was the original secretary of the organization. Church succeeded Burnside as president in the following year.
Union Army records for the Civil War indicate that its troops fired about 1,000 rifle shots for each Confederate soldier hit, causing General Burnside to lament his recruits: "Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn."[13] The generals attributed this to the use of volley tactics, devised for earlier, less accurate smoothbore muskets.[14][15]
Recognizing a need for better training, Wingate traveled to Europe and observed European armies' marksmanship training programs. With plans provided by Wingate, the New York Legislature funded the construction of a modern range at Creedmore, Long Island, for long-range shooting competitions. Wingate then wrote a marksmanship manual.[13]
After winning the British Empire championship at Wimbledon, London, in 1874, the Irish Rifle Team issued a challenge through the New York Herald to riflemen of the United States to raise a team for a long-range match to determine an Anglo-American championship. The NRA organized a team through a subsidiary amateur rifle club. Remington Arms and Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company produced breech-loading weapons for the team. Although muzzle-loading rifles had long been considered more accurate, eight American riflemen won the match firing breech-loading rifles. Publicity of the event generated by the New York Herald helped to establish breech-loading firearms as suitable for military marksmanship training, and promoted the NRA to national prominence.[13]
Eight U.S. Presidents have been NRA members. They are Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.[16]
To secure peace is to prepare for war. So designing a better 3d gun should count.
Gandhi would have printed salt. Of course the machine would have required salt as an input, so he would have just taken the salt.
If Ghandi had been able to print guns, maybe the Indians would have been able to eject the British sooner, and with fewer innocent Indian deaths.
Mother Teresa would not have printed anything to help people. She spent most of the money she raised on building convents, not on the poor. Mother Teresa wanted the poor to suffer, because she thought it made her closer to Jesus.
I have a great suggestion for using 3D printers to promote peace: build guns, since the worst violence of the 20th century was from authoritarian governments against their own disarmed populations. Nazi, Commie, Fascist, etc. thugs are a lot more hesitant to go into a town, if they're not sure who in the town might have a gun, or worse, if they suspect everybody in the town has one.
[citation needed]
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Why do the engineers at Michigan equate guns with killing people? Why not self-defense or the defense of others?
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
- Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.
It's kind of sad that nobody can really think of anything to print that isn't a gun....
I was thinking sex toys.
Humans are pretty much obsessed with 2 things, well, actually, all lifeforms are: Killing and Sex.
Things eat other things to live, even trees try to poison the ground or overshadow undergrowth to kill the other plants so that they may survive... So, if we can't do the violence thing, then it's the other one.
DILDOS FOR ALL!
USAToday, May 22, 2013 - Researchers at the University of Michigan have used a 3-D printer to create a custom-made, life-saving implant for baby boy, they report in a letter in 'The New England Journal of Medicine.'
Researchers at the University of Michigan have used a 3-D printer to create a custom-made, life-saving implant for a baby boy, they report today in a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The baby, Kaiba Gionfriddo, suffered from a rare disorder in which one of the airways in his lungs collapsed when he exhaled. The problem caused him to stop breathing and turn blue when he was only 6 weeks old. Even with a mechanical ventilator, Kaiba stopped breathing virtually every day, requiring doctors to perform emergency resuscitations.
"We'd recently had a child in the hospital who died of this, and I said, 'there has got to be a solution that we can find for these kids,' " says co-author Glenn Green, Kaiba's doctor and an associate professor of otolaryngology.
So Green and his Michigan colleagues tried something new.
Using a 3-D printer, they custom-built a tiny, flexible splint that will grow with Kaiba. Researchers used a special material designed to be absorbed by Kaiba's body in about three years, says co-author Scott Hollister, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering.
Instead of making a cast of Kaiba's airway with plaster, they used a CT scanner, which gave them a 3-D blueprint.
Like a vacuum-cleaner hose, the C-shaped splint is flexible enough to move when Kaiba breathes. But it's also firm enough to prevent his air tube from flopping shut, says Green.
Kaiba was able to come off the ventilator three weeks after his surgery in February 2012. "Our prediction is that this will be a cure for him," Green says. "The splint will go away and the process will be done."
The porous splint is made from the same material as dissolvable stitches, Green says. Just as a wisteria vine grows through a trellis, Kaiba's body will create new cells to permeate the scaffold. By the time the splint is completely absorbed, doctors hope that Kaiba's own tissue will be sturdy enough to keep his airway open.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/22/3d-printer-implant-baby/2348091/
Guns aren't about "killing one another."
A credible threat of retaliatory violence is the single most effective deterrent to actual violence.
Guns are about stopping YOU from attacking ME. Having it can make that possible even if I never use it to kill anyone.
"Sigh.
Sigh."
*SIGH* [faux outrage amped to 11]
--
guns for tots!
It's more weariness than outrage.
What has GP contributed?
The gun debate at least as it plays out on slashdot is an endless rephrasing of the same arguments.
The pro gun side has about five different principles they can bring up so there is no winning.
Natural rights
Constitutional rights
Individual safety
Utility vis-a-vis hunting
Sport (target practice)
The other side is just concerned with public safety but if you don't accept seemingly self evident claim that more guns leads to more violence, then those arguments come down to statistics and so both sides always claim to win.
Honestly it seems pointless to argue. GP thinks that guns are peaceful. Why not say freedom is slavery? There seems little point in rehashing old arguments when that's all that will be uttered.
There's been a lot of progress with organic materials and it's almost at the point of printing organs. Livers are at the top of the list.
That's a typo (well, 2), but it is interesting that they picked these two, which shows that they understand basically nothing about the philosophy and work of either figure.
Here is a hint - Mother Theresa did not treat the dying, only comforted them, and Gandhi believed in rejecting technology and returning to a simpler era. So, the simplest answer for both is, nothing.
If you want peace, then prepare for war.
Guns are tools of the weak and afraid. They clutch them close to their chests to make them feel like they have some power in this crazy, cruel world.
But all we really want is love, approval, and security. Hence, teddy bears.
At least it's better than my first impulse to print a vagina.
Another 3d printer. Everybody knows that capitalism is peace. This way, the 3d printer is just another form of money that creates its own interest. Eventually we'll be up to our necks in printers. We'll be so rich and it'll spawn fabulous new businesses like 3d-printer landfill operations, 3d-printer recylcing, and 3d-printer central banks to slow or speed up the production of 3d-printers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why would they limit this to the US? That's only a small portion of the world's population. And not the most peaceful country in my mind, too, with all those guns around and wars they started and so.
And on top of that, both Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi are not Americans either.
Yeah, that's about it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think you'd want something better. They are now very old and wont' work.
If I were you, I would have posted:
[Toyota needed]
Those designs will be protected by IP laws. And what will they say when you can pirate the design for a new liver?
"Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!"
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I really, really want to be for this. Not because I have anything against 3D-printed guns, I'm all for those, but because some of the things on their list are good ideas and make sense. Some of the other stuff is pure nonsense, however.
"Low-cost medical devices." Excellent idea. "Tools to help people out of poverty." Also excellent. Lots of potential in both of these to improve, and in many cases save, people's lives.
But then we get to "Designs that can reduce racial conflict." Err, what? Someone is waaay overestimating how effective their "Coexist" bumper sticker is. It would be nice if 3D printers could produce some sort of object for people to brandish at racists like crucifixes at vampires, but it's not going to happen. "Tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure." Look, I'm for reducing conflict and increasing safety and security, too, but if an object to do that hasn't been created using more-mundane fabrication methods, a 3D printer won't be able to make it, either -- and there aren't any such objects, unless (like me and apparently unlike the folks sponsoring this) you think that being armed makes you more secure.
This is being run by Michigan Tech's Department of of Material Science and Engineering, but it looks like someone from one of the squishy majors snuck in and added items to the list. I hope there are a lot medical and tool ideas submitted (pity they don't have a way to donate money to increase the prize), but I really wish they hadn't included the silly, groan-inducing stuff.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
I mean, these liver designs will be protected by IP laws. So what will we hear when the pirates steal this work and you can print a new liver on your own home machine?
"Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!"
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:52538
Axes, buckets, shovels, saws, knives, cooking pots, tarps, harnesses, fishing poles, gardening tools to start with. Later they will need more complex tools, such as auto parts.
...seemingly self evident claim that more guns leads to more violence
I'm using that word in a way you may be unfamiliar with. Instead of implying that the claim is not true, I'm rather trying to get across that the claim seems self evident to me but others do not agree.
Do you understand now?
While it's true that most if not all of the gun control laws between the Civil War and World War I were part of the 'Jim Crow' system of creating separate systems of "justice" delineated on race, it is, as the AC who responded to you notes, false to say the NRA was a 'civil rights organization' and indeed it had little political function until after the NFA. You overreach into fiction degrades the value of your facts.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another.
Guns aren't for killing one another.
They are either for sport, or for keeping people from killing/harming you.
Guns have historically protected groups that might otherwise just have been removed altogether. Travel back in time, ask Martin Luther King and his followers how "bad" guns are.
It's nice that 3D printers can make our lives better in other ways too, but we should not exclude one of them through irrational fear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, reading through all of these responses I see that we have managed to prove that 3D printers are basically useless toys.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Peace through strength works every time. This is precisely why globalists detest it. Peace at any price leads to Soap, Pillow Fill and Lampshades®.
Damn Godwin!
Guns
i was going with el-cheapo printers but you went professional.... im guessing lots and lots of doctors are starting to use this stuff
Guns that shoot the person who is pulling the trigger.
You'll have to bear in mind that the democrats and republicans used to occupy very different areas of the map then they do now, and philosophically were opposite from where they are now with respect to each other. Somehow the worst of the KKK and its ill all stayed in the same general zone. Just look at any interactive electoral college map (this one works fine) and look back in time for 1956, 1960, and 1964 to watch the change. The southern democrat as they existed then, do not exist now, but the people who made up that population still do.
And now, somehow, republicans think everyone will believe that they're not the same as they were 4, 8, or 12 years ago, when really, demographically, they trace their roots to slavery, and their policies have long followed.
><));>
Journalists of today work for corporations that are driven primarily by a desire to make profits by selling advertising. Very few of them have enough spine to insist on the same amount of column space for stories about Predator Drone Killer Flying Robots as for stories about 3D Gun-Printing Devices. I am 50 years old, and I have lost faith in the press.
Maybe before we rush to adopt 3D printers we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.
In a bit of convenient timing, found this news story via Instapundit a few minutes ago, about medical use of a 3-D printer saving a baby suffering from a rare lung ailment.
With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba’s blocked airway.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
Here's hoping that the competition helps stuff like this.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
$20 or less at Home Depot will buy you everything you need to make a .410 or 12 ga. shotgun. No machining required, either.
a different type of CPAP mask. The current designs leak air and cause noise like crazy. (Wakes your spouse is is generally none too happy about being woken again.)
I can see that perhaps fewer firearms MIGHT correlate with fewer people shot, but probably it would work the other way. Someone contemplating potential use of a firearm, for whatever reason, surely can readily obtain a firearm, regardless of whether or not "printable guns" become an additional access method. And I notice that marijuana and cocaine have been illegal for longer than I have been alive, as has under-age drinking of alcohol, but I know of nothing besides chosing NOT TO that keeps anyone wanting alcohol, marijuana, or cocaine from getting some, and it seems that the number detered by law is quite possibly exceeded by the number spurred on by the concept of doing something prohibited.
Who said printing guns is for war? Guns in the hands of private citizens help keep the peace at the domestic level.
Even more humorous is that the modern NRA is currently trying to overturn many of the gun control laws it helped write before 1977.
Yes and no:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Fantastic points, highly insightful. It's funny how the dogma they feed you in the school systems talks about McCarthy's witch hunts, and then ignore the fact that much of what he claimed was actually correct (see Venona Project - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project).
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
They are already using 3D printers for printing useful things like non-perishable food, and organs from cells.
Close-minded people are giving 3D printers a bad rap.
Conception control.
AC
Why just guns?
3D-printers could just as easily be used to create keys of various kinds ... which could remove the manufacturing bottleneck that's part of the current lock-and-key potection model, as well as availability of key blanks. 'Universal' keys would be the first to go: wouldn't be surprised to find TSA/Travel Sentry baggage keys as 3D-printer masters, for example.
The world is much more peaceful because people are armed.
-- Jimtown Kelly
It's because the rich who own the means of production are absolutely terrified of teh disruptive power this tool gives the poor. They can see what's coming and they want it legislated such that the machines have to be registered because you know, people might print up a gun or knife... but they really want them tied up with loads of red tape to keep them out of the hands of the people.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I've got the perfect 3d-printed device that will stop wars, infighting, greed, jealousy, and so forth! It's a tall and wide-jawed set of calipers At its center point, there's a long and razor-sharp blade attached to a spring-loaded release mechanism. Simply press the calipers against whatever item is contested as belonging to two different people and depress the plunger. Behold! a precisely even split of a cupcake, pizza, or whatever else the kids or roommates are fighting over,
First World Problems, I hear you scoff?? Not so fast! Eliminate this sense of perceived injustice amongst middle-class brats, and they'll be less likely to grow into the folks wanting to invade other lands for their natural resources and exploitable citizens. Surely Gandhi would have approved of that! Still think this idea still only directly benefits self-entitled Westerners? Imagine how useful this device would have been for Solomon when he was dealing with those ladies fighting over a baby!
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my brother worked for mother theresa's hospice in india, 25 years ago. it wasn't what you'd think. they had a number of people come in from different outside organisations who tried to order people around: this being india they of course didn't listen, because why should they listen to foreigners?
so my brother stayed there and worked with them for six months before advising them to build a brick out-house for effluent, to change the sheets on the beds when somebody died, and to wash the needles in between injecting one patient and the next.
it also didn't help that as mother theresa got older, she began to lose her memory and would wander off, go to sleep, taking the key to the medicine cupboard with her so that nobody could get access to it for an entire day.
ghandi on the other hand is a far better choice for discussion, here. i love the story where he was asked by a mother to tell her son to stop eating sweets: he told her to come back in 2 weeks. when they came back, he said, "stop eating sweets!" and the son went "yes yes mr ghandi!!". the mother, perplexed, asked "why didn't you do that 2 weeks ago??" and he said "because i had to first give up sweets myself".
now *that's* inspiring, and it tells you something that we can learn from this fuss over 3D printing. there's no point asking "what would ghandi do with a 3D printer" because it's the principles that ghandi applied in his life *whenever he met someone* that are the key. it's never about the technology: it's about the people and what they face.
the point is: asking this question is silly. what you need is just to have the 3D printer, and go wander around the world, meeting people. you'll soon find problems that can be solved with it.
It's a telling sign of the state of the human species when 3D printers are finally invented and the first thing we make with them is weapons and armor. Anthropologists are probably having a field day, or certainly will 100 years from now.
This movement is a nice kick in the balls for home-grown terrorists like Cody Wilson. He and other mentally ill gun-nuts subverted 3D printing for their own bizarre purposes, so they could indulge deeper in their doomsday scenarios and crippling fear all gun-nuts suffer from.
I'm glad 3D printing advocates are looking for positive, peaceful ways to use this technology, which is how it was always intended to be used. Technology can be used by rational, intelligent people for good, or by deranged, fearful potheads like Cody Wilson for evil.
Cody Wilson may be a huge dickhead, but the rest of us law abiding citizens can prove 3D printing has real value and entirely peaceful and legitimate uses.
If the rest of the media is anything like slashdot, you would think that the ONLY thing you can do with 3D printers is print media. I see about 3 articles a week in slashdot about printing guns and zero articles a week about printing anything else. I am smart enough to know that there are 3D printers being used for thousands of other purposes, but if the only one being reported is printing guns, then what is the public to think other than that this tool's only purpose is to print gun? Shame on you, fearmongering media. Anything for clicks, huh? This is why we can't have nice things.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print?
I suppose Ghandi is a place, now? Nice editing.
If Mother Theresa had access to 3D printing she would use it to print money.
If Gandhi had access to 3D printing he might have used it to print farm implements. He certainly never fired a gun...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In every country, there is terrorism of some citizen. We've seen it all too often on the news media, but more so in high profile areas. Third World Countries (I hate that term) have a lot of terrorism of it's citizens, I thing specially fitted prosthetic limbs would be a good start.
Of course, someone may have already come up with this already.
Peace Out.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Mother Theresa : beds, sheets, shelter - to die in. Which all she could do in the beginning, for the masses of immig- er, untouchables being born, living, and dying in the alleys. Stuff to do maintenace and cleaning would probably be useful. Bandages, bedpans et.al. Scissors, ... infirmary items. As well as ways to collect and filter water. Maybe a vertical herbarium, for medicinal herbs. Some way to collect solar energy? Medicine would be nice. Food, would be revolutionary.
Ghandi? - Seawater to salt quick evaporators. Ditto for homespun. Purifiers. And everything from dentures to hydraulic dams, and electronic apparatus. Libraries. Schools. Physical, remote, travelling, correspondence, satellite. All.
Parts for simple, cheap, reliable water purification machines, IUDs, parts for machines to process local resources into raw materials for printers, and parts for printers.
“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
Mahatma Gandhi
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34791-among-the-many-misdeeds-of-british-rule-in-india-history
-CR
Please get this right.
Ater all, It has only been a few years since he has been famous /sarcasm.
The wiki is quite interesting, and I'm hoping to build some of the things from the site once I get my Shapeoko http://www.shapeoko.com/ up and running again.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
For these things to be worth a damn to the impoverished they must do at least three things:
1) They must be capable of producing most or all of their own replacement parts;
2) A complete unit (already powered) must be able to produce multiple, alternative forms of power generation, probably starting with a rudimentary solar unit but also including hand cranks, mule rings, shallow-creek generators, and so on; the assumption from the start should be that these devices will be most important where there is no power grid or the devices are banned from using it;
3) It must be capable of acquiring, using and modifying open-source designs with MINIMAL chance of interference. It is probably a [i]terrible[/i] idea to give them an always-on Internet connection (someone is sure to take it over and start printing Pikachu figurines instead of whatever the owner needs);
4) It should have some sort of a "telomere" that imposes reproductive limits on the device, because as John Von Neumann noted, once a machine can replicate itself, its numbers will expand geometrically. I have no idea if there is an even theoretically valid way to limit reproduction, but I can guarantee you that some dumbass farmer is going to turn a solar-powered printer loose finding raw materials and reproducing like mustangs on the free range--which they will do until the Earth is covered in them.
I'm pretty sure that some of the above is on the objective list of a lot of printer designers, but here's the thing that I think is most important: The Man is going to stop at nothing to put all of you down, because you threaten everything they already own and control, like production and governments and your future.
But The Man has never had to fight a hyperbolic curve like this, and at least in the U.S., certainly won't fight it in a thoughtful or correct way.
The Man is very likely to play right into your hands, by attempting to impose some bullshit legal restrictions on the ownership and use of the devices, which will ensure that THE MOST OPEN DESIGN--one probably among the first to be declared outright illegal--will be the one that receives the most interest, improvement and support from the design community. Within a few months or a couple of years, their numbers will overwhelm any attempt to control them, and the future shall be yours.
Please don't be a jerk when your machines take over, eh? You don't have to emulate our current keepers.
Open Source 3D Printed Hydroponics Grow Room w/ Carbon Filter to grow unimaginable amounts of weed.
This $20/gram deal is unnecessarily expensive. It's just weed. Stop freaking out about it....jees
Guns are constructive and pro-peace. People who think otherwise may not have the perspective of ever living in fear or under oppression.
Human nature exists; there are people that for, whatever reason, have poor impulse control, no ethics -- whatever. There are humans who are prone to preying on those whom they feel are weaker.
In the past, the law of nature was simple: the stronger prevailed over the weaker. The youth prevailed over the old. The men subjugated the women.
Ruthlessness, strength, youth, aggressiveness... these things decided the outcome of most human interactions, for most of human history.
The gun changed that.
Put a handgun (or preferably, a carbine) into the hands of both of them, and a 90 year old grandmother can now have a meaningful conflict with an 18 year old 300lb musclehead. The conclusion is no longer foregone. And the musclehead knows it.
Arm the common goodfolks in society, and total violence decreases. Data supports this conclusion.
(to say nothing of the _moral_ imperative that honest people not be denied the use of arms)
The bottom line is this: arming good people reduces the aggregate amount of evil in the world. It turns the history of victimization on its head. The number of bad people who are "more effective" at being evil because of _their_ use of firearms doesn't compare to the amount of good that results from arming the good guys and thereby preventing more victimization, both in better outcomes when victimization is attempted, and from "herd immunity" because thugs are less inclined to attack people who will be harder marks.
Finally, the article summary is especially ignorant for implicating that Ghandi wouldn't 3d print guns.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Chapter XXVII, Recruiting Campaign, Page 403, Dover paperback edition, 1983. This book was originally published by Public Affairs Press in 1948.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Hence, teddy bears.
At least it's better than my first impulse to print a vagina.
Someone out there shares your way of thinking.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Mother Theresa would no doubt have printed a medical tool for removing IUDs.
Which would have been totally useless since most of the countries and places she setup shop didn't have access to birth control to begin with.
India, with its huge population, had a large program making IUDs available at no cost to people in the poorer regions who wanted them.
Mother Theresa's work included providing medical treatment to the poor in many of these same regions. Her clinics were noted for removing the government-provided IUDs of women who were there for other procedures, without seeking permission or even informing the woman that it had been done.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Liver is Evil and Must be Destroyed!
first thing to do if your looking for peace,
Mother Theresa of Ghandi would not be allowed actually to enter this contest to communicate with each other, as you both need to be US citizens,
so if you want to promote world peace and not your own agenda, open it up to the world, that is a first step of peace
boker tov