Disclaimer: I own a MakerBot Replicator 1, and haven't used any of the models published in the article. These printers look promising and have attractive price points, but here are my two big complaints about home 3D printing that none of them address yet, AFAIK.

1. printing with ABS plastic literally stinks. If your printer's in the garage or shop it's probably not so bad, but woe to the user that keeps one of these printers in a home office. Good ventilation is a must, but breezes and drafts can significantly mess with your print quality. I prefer to print with PLA (corn-based) plastic, because it smells like Mrs. Butterworth's imitation maple syrup. Makerbot's already doing this with its Replicator 2-- as I understand it they've given up on ABS for their first version and only print with PLA.

2. Overhangs. I doubt any of these printers can yet print an overhang that's more than 2mm without post-processing support. Gravity tends to pull overhangs down during the printing process, meaning the object's designer has to take the orientation of the printed object into account when designing it. As amazing as home 3D printing is, this is a pretty severe limitation once one gets past printing cubes and scans of heads.

The first company to produce a 3D printer that can handle big overhangs has my upgrade cash.

Or she will unleash the bees.

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/7044/oprahbees.gif

The combination of the headline and TFS might be construed as "Nate Silver says that Obama's got a 97.7% chance of winning the election," which isn't quite true.

I think it's more accurate to say that Nate Silver predicts an 86.3% chance of Obama winning 270 electoral votes.

It's a matter of personal taste, of course, but I'd keep the TV out of the dining room and spend the money on something else. You need a place to get away from information overload.

We've declared our dining room to be a screen-free zone-- no TV's, laptops, iPads, smartphones, whatever. It's the one room in the house where we sit, eat, and converse as a family.

I find the half hour or so when people aren't checking Facebook, tweeting, playing minecraft, checking their calendar, etc to be pretty refreshing. It's amazing what you can find out when you ask a kid how their day was.

About a month ago there was a kerfuffle on Thingiverse coinciding with MakerBot's announcement of the Replicator 2 and a perceived change to the Thingiverse Terms of Service. It resulted in an "Occupy Thingiverse" movement where users uploaded protest models to the site.

It seems to have died down, but since then a few folks started their own free-as-in-freedom alternatives to Thingiverse-- it'll be interesting to see if MediaGoblin can gain more traction than they did.

Doctors and government health officials should set limits, as they do for alcohol on the amount of time children spend watching screens

I agree totally. Three-year-olds get really belligerent after a beer or two.

I bought a Roomba years ago to take care of some light-colored carpeting in the living room. I'm not buying another until they come with an under-the-couch dog poop sensor, standard.

Poodle skidmarks, man. Poodle skidmarks.

...camera watches camera!

In the United States, it's the other way around.

I was recently asked by a client to 3D print some replacement parts for his pet duck.

But he balked when I gave him the bill.

And a loss for all mankind.

Godspeed, Mr. Armstrong.

Wow, what a downer.

I'm a lot more hopeful. I think the challenges brought on by climate change are going to unleash a wave of human creativity and problem-solving the likes of which we have never seen before. We're going to adapt and thrive, and our grandkids are going to wonder why we dilly-dallied for so long in the first place.

But then I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy.

I'm really looking forward to the ethical discussion surrounding the consumption of lab-grown or 3D-printed human flesh.

If you can clone your own muscle tissue and grow it in your basement under heat lamps, is there any reason why you shouldn't put it on the grill with a little gorgonzola?

From TFA:

I wouldn't use the Wedge Touch Mouse for extended, serious work because of its small size, but it seemed to work well for basic tablet navigation.

Isn't one of the selling points of a tablet that one doesn't need to use a mouse with it? Who is this targeting?

When I hit that video the first time, the first couple of comments on that video aren't "cool!" "nice job!" or anything resembling constructive criticism. It's all "this is the wrong tech for the job" "seems like a hell of a lot of effort just to read what's already on the top of the card," etc.

Haters gonna hate, I guess. But what ever happened to just enjoying a hack for a hack's sake?

I think it's clever. Who cares how much time the guy spent, what technology he chose, as long as he enjoyed doing it.

If 3D printing progresses as fast in the next five years as it has in the last five, people will just skip over the "learn to weld" step and just do everything in software.

I'm waiting for high-end 3D printing to show up at Home Depot, so I can finally print my life-size Game of Thrones toilet.