I just wanted to say: I've seen a few Thing-o-Matics and it's a really awesome way to get into 3D printing. It can print many small objects for you without needing much attention; a replicator in your home. Now, in the spirit of shameless plugs -- there's also the Ultimaker, which can build larger objects but is not much bigger itself, it's also a FLOSS RepRap-based derivative and will start selling februari next year.
...But most of it needs expensive equipment, fab facilities, testing systems etc.
You're forgetting that PC's were pretty expensive and had to be assembled and soldered together, just like the open source 3D printers today. Also, 3D printers becoming dramatically cheaper though some assembly is required for most of the open source designs.
If you think a group of disperse individuals will each have the same equipment to collaborate you're dreaming.
The RepRap community is a group of disperse individuals who have similar (3D printing) equipment and who are collaborating on making various designs, including the open source 3D printers themselves.
You're right that it's not exactly common yet to download an (open source) object off Thingiverse.com and print it out. But right now thousands of RepRappers do this regularly. But the amount of people that operate RepRaps is doubling twice as fast as the transistors in Moore's Law (10 fold increases in 20 months). My research (did a big community survey with MIT) shows that there are modest differences between soft- and hardware sharing once you have the basic equipment (PC and personal fabricators, respectively). More will follow soon on my blog: http://www.erikdebruijn.nl/
It was of course possible all along to read the RAM, but in defense they could say that it's practically to hard.
But now, with virtualization becomming more and more common by the day, this might be easier than you think. Saving an instance of a VMs RAM is certainly possible. We use it to be able to suspend and resume virtualized boxes.
Once computers get intelligent (I argue that they aren't already, but I'm working on that:) ), if they obey Asimov's law [link] they should tell us if there is something we should know.
When the computers' thoughs in terms of RAM are no longer private, this really voids any encryption scheme currently used. But this is restricted to formalized / absolute processing. Once processing becomes more fuzzy, analog (yeah, may really happen), decentralized, uncoordinated/self-organizing then it will become a tedious work to reverse engineer what is 'thought', similar to the difficulties we are having now with reading thoughts in humans (or even simpler animals).
The common formalized, coordinated von Neumann type computing is totally compromized when the RAM footprint can be read (if you know what to do with it). There is no fundamental difference (you still have to look / interpret / reverse engineer), but it's a lot easier than with fuzzier systems such as Neural Nets.
I can also imagine that chip designs for encryption are not nessesarily using the RAM to store a key. They might have a specialized encryption/decryption unit with on die memory that can be regenerated or used, but not read. The interface of the chip could simply disable that. Would be a nice application for FPGAs (which is fascinating technology!)!
Slashdot Mirror
I just wanted to say: I've seen a few Thing-o-Matics and it's a really awesome way to get into 3D printing. It can print many small objects for you without needing much attention; a replicator in your home. Now, in the spirit of shameless plugs -- there's also the Ultimaker, which can build larger objects but is not much bigger itself, it's also a FLOSS RepRap-based derivative and will start selling februari next year.
http://ultimaker.com/
...But most of it needs expensive equipment, fab facilities, testing systems etc.
You're forgetting that PC's were pretty expensive and had to be assembled and soldered together, just like the open source 3D printers today. Also, 3D printers becoming dramatically cheaper though some assembly is required for most of the open source designs.
If you think a group of disperse individuals will each have the same equipment to collaborate you're dreaming.
The RepRap community is a group of disperse individuals who have similar (3D printing) equipment and who are collaborating on making various designs, including the open source 3D printers themselves. You're right that it's not exactly common yet to download an (open source) object off Thingiverse.com and print it out. But right now thousands of RepRappers do this regularly. But the amount of people that operate RepRaps is doubling twice as fast as the transistors in Moore's Law (10 fold increases in 20 months). My research (did a big community survey with MIT) shows that there are modest differences between soft- and hardware sharing once you have the basic equipment (PC and personal fabricators, respectively). More will follow soon on my blog: http://www.erikdebruijn.nl/
It was of course possible all along to read the RAM, but in defense they could say that it's practically to hard.
But now, with virtualization becomming more and more common by the day, this might be easier than you think. Saving an instance of a VMs RAM is certainly possible. We use it to be able to suspend and resume virtualized boxes.
Once computers get intelligent (I argue that they aren't already, but I'm working on that :) ), if they obey Asimov's law [link] they should tell us if there is something we should know.
When the computers' thoughs in terms of RAM are no longer private, this really voids any encryption scheme currently used. But this is restricted to formalized / absolute processing. Once processing becomes more fuzzy, analog (yeah, may really happen), decentralized, uncoordinated/self-organizing then it will become a tedious work to reverse engineer what is 'thought', similar to the difficulties we are having now with reading thoughts in humans (or even simpler animals).
The common formalized, coordinated von Neumann type computing is totally compromized when the RAM footprint can be read (if you know what to do with it). There is no fundamental difference (you still have to look / interpret / reverse engineer), but it's a lot easier than with fuzzier systems such as Neural Nets.
I can also imagine that chip designs for encryption are not nessesarily using the RAM to store a key. They might have a specialized encryption/decryption unit with on die memory that can be regenerated or used, but not read. The interface of the chip could simply disable that. Would be a nice application for FPGAs (which is fascinating technology!)!