I just wanted to say: I've seen a few Thing-o-Matics and it's a really awesome way to get into 3D printing. It can print many small objects for you without needing much attention; a replicator in your home. Now, in the spirit of shameless plugs -- there's also the Ultimaker, which can build larger objects but is not much bigger itself, it's also a FLOSS RepRap-based derivative and will start selling februari next year.

http://ultimaker.com/

You're forgetting that PC's were pretty expensive and had to be assembled and soldered together, just like the open source 3D printers today. Also, 3D printers becoming dramatically cheaper though some assembly is required for most of the open source designs.

The RepRap community is a group of disperse individuals who have similar (3D printing) equipment and who are collaborating on making various designs, including the open source 3D printers themselves. You're right that it's not exactly common yet to download an (open source) object off Thingiverse.com and print it out. But right now thousands of RepRappers do this regularly. But the amount of people that operate RepRaps is doubling twice as fast as the transistors in Moore's Law (10 fold increases in 20 months). My research (did a big community survey with MIT) shows that there are modest differences between soft- and hardware sharing once you have the basic equipment (PC and personal fabricators, respectively). More will follow soon on my blog: http://www.erikdebruijn.nl/

It was of course possible all along to read the RAM, but in defense they could say that it's practically to hard.

But now, with virtualization becomming more and more common by the day, this might be easier than you think. Saving an instance of a VMs RAM is certainly possible. We use it to be able to suspend and resume virtualized boxes.