User:Stormyzim

Assignment 1

1. Useful: Earbud Case [1] I always hated how earbuds get so tangled, this is a simple, compact solution.

2. Artistic/Beautiful: Celtic Skull [2] I love the designs on this skull, detailed but not too crazy.

3. Pointless/Useless: The Most Useless iPhone Case Ever [3] What is this I don't even...this can't even fit in a pocket and all it does is flick a little lever around. Follow the YouTube link to see it in...action.

4. Funny: iSpork [4] For all of those times when you need to eat some chicken noodle soup while playing angry birds.

5. Weird: Bunny Dave with Kitty [5] I was looking for Michelangelo's David...found this instead. Pretty cool but mostly weird.

Assignment 2

1. I think Adrian Bowyer's goal of a ‘self-replicating universal constructor’ is feasible. The problem we face now is that we cannot print moving or electronic parts (motors, microcontrollers, etc.). If this can be accomplished, it would really be no problem to print, for example, a full-sized working vacuum cleaner. For this we need printers that can do more than just print a single material, they need to be able to modify it further.

2. "Wealth without money" simply means that one can obtain things you would usually buy for free (or very cheap). This implies that what companies now produce for a profit will be effectively mass-produced for pennies. Since a lot of jobs depend on this, I can see it resulting in an increase in unemployment. I remember reading a short essay a while ago predicting that, in the far future, machines can replace any job humans will ever do, resulting in an unemployment rate approaching 100%. Perhaps we are seeing that start of this with the rise of open source and 3D printers.

• Just looked it up, it's called Technological Unemployment [6]

3. I would love to see a printer that could solder, as well as extrude multiple different materials at the same time. For 3D printers to evolve further, they need to do more than just print a single material, layer by layer. They need to interact intelligently with the material to make it actually do things.