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Worthless: 3D printing is nothing but a nerd fad that won't leave hobbyist workshops.

6 (3%)

Unimportant: 3D printing will become common but won't be useful for much other than tiny full plastic objects.

8 (4%)

Minor Importance: 3D printing will function as a light industry that will coexist with existing manufacturing methodologies.

43 (21.4%)

Moderate Importance: 3D printing will challenge and slowly replace a large number of existing manufacturing businesses.

104 (51.7%)

Major Importance: 3D printing will completely flip the table on conventional manufacturing and quickly destroy existing business for anything you can make with them.

20 (10%)

Critical: 3D printing will disrupt conventional ideals of work and money so much that they collapse and are replaced in a paradigm shift.

20 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 199

[Scelly9]

Agreed.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I can't find any information on lathe restrictions either, and I'd think the government would be more focused on making sure no one gets their hands on weapons-grade material.

[LordBucket]

You still need stuff to make stuff with.

Hence, #4 from my list:

"Deposit materials for disassembly into base components"

Need materials? Go to your back yard with a shovel. Rummage through your garbage. Toss in rocks and bushes. Whatever. A random assortment of these things would give you most of the materials you'd want.

Have you got any way at all to confirm this, apart from what your uncle told you?  edit: google hasn't given me any information on this at all. I'm still calling shenanigans.
I'm just not seeing how those would be any different than a 5 axis CNC machine, and those aren't GPS tracked from what i know. Maybe i'm just underestimating the sort of accuracy that a nuclear weapon requires, or something.

I think the main reason they're regulated is their size. These are big and strong enough to build a bomb like what was dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in less than an hour, or they could build something more advanced like I've already stated.

Well, you do need the materials. Which, I think would be the main problem.

The entire "make nukes" thing is a conspiracy of silliness. You can purchase uranium online. $30,000 is enough to build a bomb. The physical housings are trivial to make. Remember that aluminum tubes were one of the ingredients used as an excuse to suspect Saddam Hussein of developing weapons of mass destruction. Nothing special about them. Just aluminum tubes.

I'm pretty sure these lathes could carve out the machinery necessary
to refine uranium, too, actually. They're pretty impressive.

All you really need is a centrifuge and a heating element. Refining commercial grade uranium to weapons grade is simply a matter of heating it to liquid, then spinning it. The heavier atoms move to the outside of the centrifuge, where they can be collected.

$30,000, a centrifuge, a heating element, and some minions you don't care about to refine the uranium. Shape the uranium into plates, put them on sliding rails in a simple housing and all you need is some conventional explosives like dynamite to smash the two plates into each other. Viola, nuclear weapon.  Anyone who wants to could build one.

Well, if you have uranium, the government already has a big enough problem. A nuculear bomb may be able to destroy a city, but a dirty bomb can certainly contaminate one enough to leave it deserted.

Allow me to rob you of your current delusion.

http://www.amazon.com/Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM

"Price:   $49.95
In stock.
Processing takes an additional 4 to 5 days for orders from this seller."

[TheBronzePickle]

I sort of remember the main gist of the conversation, actually. He was talking about layoffs and jobs being sent overseas, and he said the only reason he still had his job was because the particular model of machine wasn't allowed to leave the country. His boss was the one that told him about the nuclear weapons thing. It might be true, it might not. All I know is that he's still working because they can't move the lathes out of the country.

[Scelly9]

Well, if you have uranium, the government already has a big enough problem. A nuculear bomb may be able to destroy a city, but a dirty bomb can certainly contaminate one enough to leave it deserted.

Allow me to rob you of your current delusion.

http://www.amazon.com/Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM

"Price:   $49.95
In stock.
Processing takes an additional 4 to 5 days for orders from this seller."

Nicely done. Which leads to the question: If terrorism is so prevalent: why the fuck has new york not been dirty bombed yet?

[Bdthemag]

Soon I'll be able to print Games Workshops miniatures, and not spend a shitload of money to get ten miniatures that cost ten cents to make. Very soon (10 or so years.)

[mainiac]

Remember that aluminum tubes were one of the ingredients used as an excuse to suspect Saddam Hussein of developing weapons of mass destruction. Nothing special about them. Just aluminum tubes.

Uh yeah there is something special about them.  The aluminium tubes used in centrifugal uranium refining are one of the highest performance applications aluminium is used in.  There's not a lot of outfits that can do aluminium work that high grade.  That was one of the reasons that it was obvious that Bush was grasping at straws before the war, the technical analysts said that the aluminium tubes weren't nearly strong enough for refining and were for a much less stressful application like being used in ICBMs.  And you need tens of thousands of centrifuges running round the clock just to produce enough for a small bomb or two a year.  It's not a small project.

[Hubris Incalculable]

I rather think a nuclear bomb would be a better terror weapon, though, if you were willing to invest the time into it. A dirty bomb might fuck up some stuff, but it wouldn't be nearly as terrifying.

Um, no. I'd fear more for a slow death of radiation poisoning than for a quick death by extreme heat.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Soon I'll be able to print Games Workshops miniatures, and not spend a shitload of money to get ten miniatures that cost ten cents to make. Very soon (10 or so years.)

Relevant.

[Eagleon]

I voted critical. Far from being sunshine and flowers critical, though - people don't really grasp how cheap the materials for their moderately fancy toys are compared to the markup they're given. It has the potential to provoke a radical shift in what the first world will buy, and at what price. You're not going to see 3D printers being used in things like construction for a long time, but don't underestimate people's desire to get things cheaper and with more convenience. Unfortunately, that means a lot of jobs shifting around, which means instability. I do think this will make things better, though, in the long run - fewer factories in the second world making us plastic baubles means more of their money being funneled into critical infrastructure, and it wouldn't dry up immediately, so they'd at least have the opportunity to adjust.

It also means less money being spent in retail for us - places like the Home Depot have a head start. If raw materials are what we're buying, the average is going to drop somewhere between freight and raw material and retail markup on the finished goods, more for processed materials. That could be bad news for companies that are making things that can't easily be made by printing - they'll have to buy at the same prices, or set up their own extraction, which means things like cars, etc. will temporarily become more expensive. Far off prediction, large-scale printing becomes forced to innovate to make people these things, and all in all we end up wasting a lot of electricity on complicated and inefficient construction methods. Progress!

[Aklyon]

That title just seems like you want someone to barge in and complain about piracy, or copyright, or the effects of this on both, which probably won't get anywhere.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That title just seems like you want someone to barge in and complain about piracy, or copyright, or the effects of this on both, which probably won't get anywhere.

It's just a reference to the "Would you steal an X?" commercials. You can complain about piracy and copyright in regards to 3D printing, doesn't bother me.

[Sensei]

That title just seems like you want someone to barge in and complain about piracy, or copyright, or the effects of this on both, which probably won't get anywhere.

It's just a reference to the "Would you steal an X?" commercials. You can complain about piracy and copyright in regards to 3D printing, doesn't bother me.

I have to say I'm very curious about these commercials now.

Anyway, does anyone have some good wholesale and retail quotes on various 3D printer compounds and their properties?

[10ebbor10]

In order to come back on 3D printing organs, since the thread seems to have advanced by 5 pages overnight. The printer uses cells cloned from your own body or it just uses stem cells. It then layers these cells into the organ you want. For now there seems to be a problem with minor blood vessicles not being correctly aligned, and keeping the organ alive while printing. The advantages are that this thing can print things like cartilage and bone, and quite fast. Cloning a heart using stem cells is hard, but using stem cells to create the different cells required to make a heart then printing them into the correct order will net you a custom designed heart, ready to be implanted and unlikely to be rejected.

Also, people are working on 3d printing food too, but it doesn't have much interest yet. It would allow you to create all kinds of impossible foodstuffs though.

[kaijyuu]

Quick question: Can you print a floppy disk? All sorts of meta if so.