I don't mean to be flippant about how great technology is, but does anybody else think the illustration looks like a remote-controlled toilet?

If music and movie companies do not like consumers copying their music from one device to another, imagine the DRM that would be included in a coffemaker software/plans.

Will there be an open source coffemaker avaiable?

This article reminds me why Cory Doctorow's sci-fi is so compelling. He takes a scientific advance that everyone acknowledges is right around the corner (3D printing in Themepunks, the mind-machine interface in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and others) and shows how fully developing it could affect our society.

We will create remote-controlled toilets from our PCs and we will do it in our lifetime!

It seems as if the author has just read 'The Diamond Age' and decided to fit present technology to the story line.

The RP technology mentioned, Fused Deposition, works by depositing a bead of melted plastic from a nozzle and builds up a part. The machine creates a scaffolding to support overhanging material. Who will clean up this scaffolding? At present you cannot build a rapid protoype through any method without some sort of support.

What if I want a coffee grinder? Will the machine make hardened steel blades too? It could be done through depositing microbeads of metal then sintering the green part. But then that part would have to be removed from the rest of the parts or the other parts would burn up during the sintering process. Then it would need to be re-assembled somehow.

As a product design engineer, I use rapid prototypes all of the time. It's been an incredible enabling technology, but it is expensive and has a number of limitations. Believe me, I want a future like Mr. Pescovitz describes, but I don't see it coming until some time after we all have our own flying cars.

Isn't it bad enough I have to keep cleaning viruses off my hard disk? At least they can't do damage beyond what's on my drive (which is bad enough, thank you.) Now I download my new toaster, hit "Print" but because I forgot to scan the file, first, I get a REAL worm. Or I download my new toilet and the flush works in reverse...