I see what you mean. If I was poor, I'd choose to sleep under a bridge or to starve rather than take handouts. Therefore, I shouldn't have to pay taxes.

The only job for government is to bomb people and throw potheads in jail for a few decades, and in that case I'm hugely in favor of big government. Maybe this includes building freeways, but I'm not sure about maintenance or inspections. Aside from that I can teach my own kids, inspect my own meat, and I can drive myself to the hospital if I fall down the stairs or have a heart attack.

Also, if my house catches fire, it's my job to extinguish it. If some poor bastard's house down the way catches fire, that's his problem.

I've had enough with these fucking commies who want to take all my guns and money away.

Gratuitous self link time! Oh boy!

Over at http://reprap.org/ we're up to version 2 (Mendel) on our diy matter duplicator-like things, and we've had Mendel make plastic parts for daughter Mendels. Not stepper machines or microcontrollers, dontchayaknow, but 'matter duplicator' is what we're aiming for.

3D printers require a little less expertise to operate than lathes or mills, which what Popular Mechanics readers used to use to make the things in the plans, back in the day.

True.

Most of this discussion ignores the fact that curators and archivists have fiercely discussed and analyzed this very subject. I get 1.5 M (apparent) results when I google 'digital curation' and that's without querying amazon, google schoolar, a university library, etc.

Google 'digital curation'. It's like googling Ron Paul, but about digital curation.

A patron or institution may be willing to pay money for a figurine, small or large, when they may be disinclined to spend money a recorded film. (Just as with Penny Arcade, Spider Man, or LOTR figurines.)

The buyer can use a figurine differently from media, displaying it on a shelf or in a case, perhaps next to the recorded media or a screen playing the same.

For extra points, take the sculpt to an art bronze foundry and have them cast the piece as a bronze. See "From Clay to Bronze: A Studio Guide to Figurative Sculpture" by Tuck Langland.

You can sculpt the piece by hand out of wax, oilclay, or sculpty if you don't have a 3D printer.

We would launch rockets whose end stages would have to match orbits and velocities with the ISS, and then a small team of astronauts would take hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of hours to assemble the spacecraft, doing spacewalks and controlling robot arms. And then, once it is assembled, you would have to boost it up out of that orbit. Launching it as one piece from the ground, you can time it and angle it right to catch favorable 'slingshot' trajectories to your planet/asteroid/etc. of interest, and you can have a much larger pool of non-spacesuited specialists assemble it. (This includes 'small' issues like a master welder not having to cross-train as an astronaut.) Assembly in space makes sense once we start mining the asteroid belt and maybe the moon. My question - is it feasible to boost the ISS to a more favorable orbit or one of the Lagrange points?