turns out these assualt rifles theyve been working on now fire several hundred round before breaking. oh also included is some sort of fail safe mechanism to when the receiver does finally go out, there is less danger to you, the person firing the weapon
tell me again why you would want one, when you could be making creative things that would make the world more enjoyable instead of more dangerous?
I heard on the radio the other day there are now 3D scanners and I did indeed find some for sale on E-bay.
they're not quite magical yet. they're also kind of slow. there are different kinds, but the ones most of us can afford have major limitations. just like the first personal computers did. as for 3d scanners, there are some new products in that category, but the technology itself has been around longer then 3d printers. other interesting new products in distantly related categories exist too. and affordable 3d printers are getting more powerful. they're still slooooooow. there are some REALLY interesting things going on beyond the affordable personal price range. like printing full size cars and houses.
How about printing yourself a bacon sandwich? http://www.3d-printing.net/content/3d-printing-future-bacon-sandwiches
i'm pretty sure you'd have to print that parts separately if you had something that wouldn't kill you to print them out of, and you could print the flavors right. but then you could have a robot arm assemble the parts.
we can print by controlling the application of some material onto a substrate; typically some material is deposited onto another. a regular printer may deposit toner or ink to a page to build up image of the page to be printed. the toner is simply plastic melted to the page in certain regions which should be dark. this works because when toner is heated it is fused to the page. the toner material has changed state, it has melted and resolidified on the page. Of course printing can be done in 3d as well, it just takes a material that is easy to work with so that the application of it can be controlled and applied in successive layers. if you applied more toner, on top of toner, microscopically the toner is getting ever thicker each time... in this way you can control the thickness. toner would probably not be good for forming 3d objects, so people have found substances that have good properties for 3d printing, also since we are dealing with 3d objects we must consider how to signal the substance to assume the permanent form it will take. heat, light, electric charge, magnetism could be used to control whether or not the substance will stick in one particular place or not and another mechanism to fix in place the structure that has been built. in a typical office laser printer, photoconductivity is exploited. the image is produced on an electrically charged rotating drum by a laser. the charged toner particles are attracted to the drum but don't stick in the places that were exposed to light. The drum transfers the toner to a sheet of paper and the fuser uses heat to fix it to the page. For printing objects, we need to be able to control the deposition of material which the object will be built out of. some objects may be more printable than others, depending on the intended use. for printing structures, we need a material that we can control the state of. an engineered material that was programmable would be ideal, something that could exist in a variety of different states, and could be commanded to acquire a particular state by passing signals to the material. there would probably need to be a means of regional addressing, so that the state of the material could be controlled at any specific addressable location.
There have been several news stories lately about young kids getting hands. http://7online.com/education/ues-students-use-3-d-printer-to-make-functional-prosthetic-hands-for-kids/414044/
actually i don't know of any that will do all three. i'm pretty sure i wouldn't want to do all three or four on the same one either. at least i don't think i'd want to eat something that came out of one used for making rocket parts. (smoke the number four, that came out of one for making rocket parts, at your own risk) i know of DIFFERENT ones that will do EACH of the first three. all of which aren't really future, but exist in production right now. they aren't in most retail outlets yet. but each can be ordered on line. the last two are a bit expensive. actually i don't know about steaks, other then survey stakes. but cake decorator ones exist. they have them at baskin robins. also embroidery machine ones have been around for at least a decade now too (sometimes set up as booths in shopping malls). speaking of rocket parts, there are giant ones that will print house parts, as in whole walls and plumbing and electrical sub assemblies. also whole car bodies. still more interested in the desktop kind the average joe can afford. to make our own little plastic fiddly bits, to our own design. (including of course, parts for model rockets, even working ones)
