Humans are messy and carrying a bunch of biosphere from Earth to support them could potentially end up disrupting Europa's biosphere if it has one.

One can easily sterilize an unmanned space probe, but preventing even the slightest smallest leak of sewage, spacesuit leak, or the one little bit of plant waste that gets accidentally vented from a greenhouse is probably more challenging than actually sending humans to Europa.

Well, we still don't have a good theory of quantum gravity.

Someone has actually done this, sans switchable nozzles or gel. They were able to make centimeter high objects of decent resolution in minutes.

As this is a line scanning process, it will probably take just as scanning a laser to build up an object layer by layer.

Though the laser would probably be faster, even with resin recoat time, typical laser scan for stereolithography are around 4-25 meters per second.

I doubt there is any robot that can go that fast and maintain 0.1 mm accuracy.

Gravity is not the reason why supports are used in stereolithography type 3d printing, shrinkage is.

When a photopolymer solidifies it shrinks, and I'd imagine that this process would have many of the same shrinkage issues.

Clearly they have violated Standard NASA Ames Procedures for dealing with this sort of thing.

They failed to fill out a both the DARC-820AD -- 'Identifying a Barbarian Attack' and FF-1066AD -- 'Report of Viking Raid' forms.

It appears you are correct, Microsoft's new file 3d printing file format specification is explicitly designed to allow for "content protection."

I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft starts their own 3d printing "app-store."

Reminds me of the Russian's "expedient space exposure experiment with a flag." The Russians decided to put a flag, just a regular nylon plastic flag, out in space, because it looked cool or something.

Upon retrieval a year or so later, there really wasn't to retrieve, the thing was practically gone and was left was bleached white.

I hope they are able to do some cool science with it too. It'd be great if they could teach it to autonomously do zero angular-momentum maneuvers, IE reorientate itself the same way a cat does. Or see if they can get it to do
zero gravity jump "walking." Think Ender's Game.

The former should be easy to accomplish with what they are up-porting, while the latter could probably be done if they send up a motion capture set up.

At the very least, it should help cancel out the creepiness of Robonaut's new slenderman space legs. Robonaut is going to be 'walking' around the space station SOON.

It'd be F-Zero if it was superconducting.

Actually that would be more of a "Z" cell than a "D" cell.

It's only a matter of time now before someone mounts a stencil and a servo actuated sprayer on a quadcopter and starts putting graffiti in places that are difficult to reach!

physically impossible geometries or excitation methods.

then we'll finally have the answer to "what is the sound of one hand clapping"

Homomorphic encryption is scary stuff, one could use it to make malware or drm schemes that would be, for all practical intents and purposes, impossible to reverse engineer:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2010/12/15/151617/78/

FDM type 3d printers actually use around as much energy to construct things as an injection molding machine. Factoring in transport costs, they are probably a little bit better for the environment than injection molding. However, if you use a giant printer cartridge this probably changes, as they will get thrown away(seriously, who recycles cartridges anyway.