I do not see this topic brought up nearly as much, which worries me. I have worked on quite a few projects where the unwillingness to write functionality internally lead to excessive testing of external options and overuse of generic frameworks which not only increased the dependency/complexity of the project but often required just as many lines of code to use as just writing our own damn module would have.

It feels like this is worst in the Java (enterprise) community, but that could be my imagination. Sometimes I think those programmers need their 3rd party instantiation taken away from them....

And crap, looks like I have been moved over to slashdot-beta so I will probably never see if I get responses....

What does being in the computer industry for 20 years have to do with knowing the history of CS? Very few CS programs have any coursework on history, and it is not a topic that is highly covered in industry. Working in tech might give one a default knowledge of products and technologies developed during their time in industry, but even that is going to be limited to a person's specific subdomain unless they are actually independently interested in learning deeper history.

As another poster pointed out, it is about power rather than constancy. Baptizing dogs or trees is not worth it since there is no additional power to be gained over either in doing so. A strong AI on the other hand provides a significant incentive for some parties to assign it a soul since doing so opens up their ability to influence its thoughts and assumptions.

On the other hand, it is fun to overthink things. I also work in AI but find these discussions fascinating since they do not really have obvious answers and are a good way to explore the human condition separated from, well, humans.

Religion, in general though, is not just about 'who created who', but comprises an entire moral, philosophical, historical, and metaphysical structure.

Silicon Hell, along with all the photocopiers.

The only place I can really see this making sense would be rural or otherwise fairly remote/sparse areas, kinda like the old book-mobiles except mobile manufacturing. In those situations, a couple hours to print might be better than the days or weeks shipping might take, with the added bonus that you could move around and serve a wider area. However as a general rule regions like that have very poor economies (or at least very limited), and thus the economics of having a fleet of these things serving them probably would not make sense.

True, at the moment they are still somewhat disapointing, but that is to be expected when you are scaling machines that just a few years cost tens of thousands of dollars down to something consumers can play with.

Though one irony is that much of the tech that is going into them was developed for situations where CNC machines were not versatile as people hoped and they needed new tools.

*shrug* I have seen them at work and used in prototyping, have for years. The consumer ones are still VERY new and hardly a mass or stable market.

On the other hand, there are entities out there who's entire business is R&D who then license their work to companies that build actual products. It is important to keep these types of entities in mind since their specialization on IP is a net benefit and they depend on patent law to keep their customers honest.

I am not really understanding what the point of making the fabrication itself mobile, other than not having to pay rent on dedicated facilities. They would still have to have some kind of depot for the raw materials, so why have all the extra weight of driving around the equipment? Esp since you could not print while driving since that would really screw up the accuracy.

Yeah, but how many people on the street do you encounter that talk about making wood furniture at home? While the hype is a bit much, 3D printers are mostly exciting to the same types of people who in the past would have a woodshop in their garage or similar hobby setup.

Things get even murkier when talking about 'software engineers' since that can range anywhere from 'title I made up' through 'goes through 75+% of the same coursework as an EE but has no path to certification'

I have found that when companies start 'discovering' things 10 years later, it is because the earlier 'paper only' work would not actually work at the time and probably should never have been granted in the first place. You have plenty of 'choice', but sitting and waiting for someone to actually do the work and make a success out of something then springing your patents on them and trying to cash in... yeah.. you are not likely to get much sympathy for your forced hand.

If you are someone who represents patent holders as you claim, then you are also aware that most patent suits never make it to court because, while the cost of the suit is high, the cost of defense is significantly higher. Cases are only 'hard to win' when the defendant can actually defend themselves or when the patent (usually software) is shakey enough that it does not get pushed through quickly.