[ExI] Vinge finally cracks the NYT

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 28 August 2008, Daniel Grisinger wrote:
> You aren't the only one.  I know many of my friends irl have
> commented on it recently.  And I think you're right that the overall
> free culture movement is the biggest piece of that, but I think that
> it's specifically the rise of maker culture that is doing it.  I
> think reprap is probably going to be retroactively recognized as
> being as important as Gutenberg.

'Make' is a brand by Make Magazine and O'Reilly and friends. They've 
leeched on to these communities with an iron fist. Be careful with 
them .. while some of the content is good and interesting, it's just 
them being a giant filter with first mover advantage.

RepRap jumped the gun and lied to its community about universal 
self-replication, and even lied to the NY Times. While it's an awesome 
project, and I'm meeting an increasing number of people who are aware 
of the project, it's at heart a rapid prototyper that doesn't 
manufacture itself completely. Oh well. People will assume it's 
something else .. which is good, I guess, but it kind of makes them 
think that the real effort has already been done, i.e., to actually get 
self-replication, when it hasn't really.

BTW, don't you find it odd the lack of schematics for printing presses 
on the internet? I looked into this and it turns out that Gutenberg 
immediately went into commercial businesses. Huh. Guess the 'free 
literature' revolution bullshit my literature teachers taught me was 
totally, completely wrong. Still is .. it costs (a little) to get 
hardware and so on still, but we're working on elliminating that 
problem completely this time *if* we toughen up and do RepRap *right*. 
Such as not an ad hoc design.

- Bryan
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