You mean like this: http://thingiverse.com/ ?

Yes, i know it's not exhaustive. Contribute.

You have some pretty big hurdles ahead of you if you can't differentiate between 3d modelling and programming... Luckily 3d modelling in the 21st century is a bit easier than programming IF you just want to sculpt.

As deathguppie suggested, look at blender (or zbrush). You will need to learn some skills, but probably not as much as you'd think.

Unfortunately... the OP article is completely off the mark: The software is the easiest thing to fix. The printers themselves generally require A LOT of supervision and maintenance.

You mean like the reprap: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page ?

you might be late to the party.

1000-2000 hours?

Seriously?

What if i told you that the high school around the corner from my work has a 3d printing group that gets kids started on Google Sketchup and has them making their own 3d models within an hour? Sure Sketchup is much much simpler than Autocad or Solidworks, but the principles are the same and the techniques are additive; once the user knows the techniques, they can be transplanted from application to application, with the widely varied interfaces between different applications being the biggest hurdle. Some of these kids have produced functional multipart models in blender after as few as 10 hours of supervised play.

I agree that this is totally different from functional design, but engineering and 3d modelling are actually fundamentally different skills...

Also, blender (and 3dsmax, and maya and zbrush... but blender is free & open source) has supported native .stl export for a while now.

Well said sir. Pity too few will understand.

This.

I sense a car analogy coming on.

This.

Those conservatives are so nobly sacrificing themselves for the greater efficiency. Ayn Rand would not approve of their altruism.

Oh. My bad. Guess i'd better tell my pilot friend who told me about it that he's mistaken ;)

I vaguely know a guy who is a flight enthusiaist, but not an actual pilot... He's clocked thousands of hours in flight sims and sometimes does trial simulations of real passenger craft routes and the like.

I think he's crazy, but apparently actual pilots often call him for advice on landing at one specific airport in south east asia...

By the way... you are aware that negating the premise of an opposing argument is not the same thing as providing a proof for your own, right?

Please don't quote Plato at me. His stature does not prevent him from making logical errors that were not fomalized until over two thousand years after his death.

...but writing OSS software for education and academia and distributing it to other universities around the country and world has been my job for the last few years.

No sir, i'm referencing the inevitable ad absurdum that is at the end of your goalpost chain. What comes later when you can no longer blame 'Power' because the quest for power sometimes brings good things and 'Power' shouldn't be blamed for the actions of people who are after it?

It's obvious that the argument 'religion = bad' is invalid. It is a value judgement. My objections is that undermining a value judgement with another value judgement is no more logical than banging two rocks together, and that this whole argument is meaningless on both sides.

Please just pretend that instead of saying 'religion', i'm saying 'oranges' and try looking at the argument again.

Sorry sir, it was not about my opinion. Your argument was not valid, you were affirming a disjunct, and your assumptions about what i meant shows that you missed that my concern was with the form of your argument rather than the content.

Also, content does not affect logic. When content is involved, we call it rationalization.

Sorry for being a logic nazi, but logic is like math: immutable but prone to abuse.

On a personal note, i agree with you right up to the point where you approach blaming survival and instead note that the concept of blame requires a massive reduction in situational complexity and an increase in attribution to a single entity.

Occam's Razor: If religion has so little influence that cannot be otherwise attributed to human behaviour generally, is it necessary?

Also, the fact that some people who were evil were not religious has no bearing on the 'evilness' of religions, and ascribing a negative property to something is not the same thing as ascribing all possible negative properties to something.

Or if that's not clear enough, saying that something is bad is not the same as saying that it is responsible for all the bad things.