Come to think of it, this has to be a godsend for Hollywood. They've got the budgets, and you can use the same model for both CG special effects and printing for camera work (whether we're talking about printing for miniatures, animatronics, prosthetics, molds for prosthetics, gadgets or other small objects, etc). No need to have both your 3d artist and a physical artist create the same thing.

I found the trick with anything Android is to re-ROM it, preferably get CyanogenMOD (and optionally Gapps) on the device. This deals with most of the issues with bloatware. Even though I use a HTC One M8, my HTC One X+ still is quite usable with CM on it (last CM 11 build was last week.)

There are also development options that can be enabled to limit the tasks in the background, even down to killing anything that isn't in the foreground as well.

I've been using the camera with no issues without the HTC software. If it is a concern, Zoe is downloadable from the Play Store.

All Android phones have their quirks, but I've found that HTC's are the least painful to work with in general. Next to the Nexus line, they are easy to unlock, S/Off is fairly easy to obtain, and there are usually a good selection of ROMs for the devices.

See, the reason she denies being a sci-fi writer is she writes the good kind of sci-fi. The kind that asks what effects abstract changes would have on how people live and think. The kind that uses contrivances to raise interesting philosophical, ethical, and sociological questions. This sharply contrasts with most sci-fi that doesn't bother to go beyond "narrative fiction, except in space."

I mean, "We're building a [cool thing] and [cool related activity] might happen there" isn't really meaningful outside of a PR office.

I'm not an expert in the field but what I saw of the comments were very specific about reuse of figures and data without citation. They did not appear to be ad hominem at all but evidence based with image comparisons of figures from different papers. I expect that this is why he got into trouble - a relevant expert from the hiring university would be able to easily evaluate the merits of the comments.

No, I'm pretty sure that is dictionary-definition nihilism.

Alternatively, it was already true in Eisenhower's day. Like I don't need to be prophetic to say people need to be concerned about corporations data mining them, and using marketing so targeted and manipulative that they start to lose personal agency. It'll probably be more true in 30 years, but it's also true now.

For this to be more than just a gimmick, UPS needs to offer a 3D scanning service as well.

Which is why I really hope to see Project Tango in the future connect direct with 3d printing.

Scan your scene with your phone, click to print, pick the article in question out of the scene (with simple cutting tools and smart select), assign a material to it (with the app doing its best to choose defaults), possibly apply some filters (welding broken pieces together, for example) or stretch it a bit in different directions to meet your needs if you choose, pick your printing service, pick any other details such as surface treatments and the like, and it gets uploaded, you get billed, and your print arrives in the mail when it's ready.

iMaterialize has a material called "Rubber-like", which is a plastic called TPU 92A-1.

While I agree with you, I think it's important not to overgeneralize today's methods of 3d printing with being the only methods possible.

  For example, I've often speculated a lot about the prospect of using thermal spraying as a printing method. That is, you have any sort of powder or other fine material, fed into a chamber with the Venturi effect. Therein a custom mix of air and fuel is injected at specifically chosen partial pressures. Consequently, depending on what material you're using, you can choose the impact speed and temperature of the particles, anywhere from "cold" to thousands of degrees and anywhere from less than 1 meter per second up to a thousand or more. The size of the nozzle determines flow rate, so you could swap between different print heads for bulk vs. fine detail. You're essentially unlimited in what materials you can use. You could, for example, print isotropic fiberglass composites by alternately spraying fine chopped fibers and a resin. You could even do so by spraying simple quartz sand at high enough temperatures, fast moving molten sand in the air forms fiberglass. Your resin could be a thermoset powder heated during travel, an epoxy that reacts after being mixed on impact, or a wide variety of other possibilities. High velocity spraying of metal powders produces metal structures stronger than simple casting. You could spray at low velocity chemicals for the filling of things like capacitors or resistors. Thermal spraying is often as it stands used to apply durable clear coatings to materials to protect them, so clearly transparency is no problem. And any printer built around the principle of launching varied small particles at high speeds could polish, sandblast, coat, engrave, paint, or do whatever other surface treatments you wanted. It could build scaffoldings and then obliterate them afterwards. And on and on down the line.

It still wouldn't let you do fine detail, though (if anything you'd struggle to get as high detail as with conventional 3d printers). For detail work you'd have to add in a lithography setup. Some types of feed inputs would require refrigeration to remain as dusts. And of course some things would still be easiest assembled with literal assembly, aka, a robotic arm or two would be quite useful. So we're getting more and more complicated here.

Do I think such a thing is right around the corner? Of course not. Could my conception turn out to not work well at all as a 3d printer? Quite possibly - as far as I know, nobody's ever tried. But I'm just pointing out, when talking about future tech, you shouldn't evaluate it based on how today's tech works.

Problem will be printing small things, atomic scale assembly, not just squirting some plastic parts

And yet you want to 3d print a fuel cell for a car? How do you plan to 3d print a PEM?

At least 3d printing a battery might be plausible if you have a 3d printer that can take an extremely wide range of materials (not a li-ion battery, though, you run into the same sort of membrane problems.. I really doubt there's any technology that will allow you to just jet down a membrane material and have it allow through your specific desired ions, at a sufficient flow rate, without leaks)

And where on earth are you getting that printed titanium parts are cheaper than non-printed? Have you ever priced titanium printing? iMaterialise, for example, offers it. A 2x2x4 cm bounding box with a mere 1 gram of titanium (picture how little that is that is compared to a plane) costs a staggering $124. Titanium laser sintering printers are slow energy hogs that cost a king's ransom and even titanium powder itself is absurdly priced compared to bulk titanium. And no, the stats aren't better, they're slightly worse for the exact same shaped part. Maybe you can make a more optimally shaped part and that'll allow you to get better performance, but in terms of raw material properties, it's unimpressive.

The question becomes, how to get manufacturer buy in?

For starters, I think we need a certification mark for products, at the very least, to indicate that their parts are 3d printable (see above). But beyond that, I'm not really sure how to get manufacturer buy-in.

At least you could get the spare part. I have an electrolux refrigerator in Iceland which I bought used; one of the food compartment lids broke a week ago. Electrolux doesn't have a service center in Iceland and none of the other ones overseas will export to me, they said "just find someone local who sells electrolux refrigerators and order through them", except that none of the local retailers have been willing to.

And at least it's an Electrolux. What if it was a company that had gone out of business?

I want to see a certification label that manufacturers can put on their goods that certifies that replacement parts are printable and their models are in a free open database. Perhaps with multiple levels of certification - "Bronze" certifies that at least some parts are printable, "Silver" certifies that at least 60% of all parts are printable, "Gold" certifies that at least 90% of all parts are printable, and platinum certifies that 100% of parts are printable. That doesn't mean "printable cheaply" or "that a particular printing service will be able to do it" or that it's "no assembly required". Just simply that "it's conceivable that you could print it and make use of it, you have the necessary models available to you".

It's not just places like the Canadian arctic. Here in Iceland, if I want to import anything, after shipping and import taxes, I have to wait several weeks and pay usually over double the purchase price. 3d printing most definitely has its uses, if it can get mainstreamed.