Oh the irony; open source hardware

Joshua Pearce at Michigan Technical University wrote an encouraging article about the progress in Open Source Hardware development. Unfortunately, it's published in Science, which is not an open-access publication, so probably all you can see is the summary.

At least his website lists several open access publications, though I can't tell if any would give the same information as his article is Science.

One item of interest: we are supposedly 50% of the way towards making a general purpose manufacturing machine that can produce its own components for hand-assembly.

Printing a gun at home?

While I don't expect 3-D printers to supplant mass-production, they could provide people with a lot of flexibility that is unavailable on the mass market. One aspect of this flexibility is the ability to circumvent various restrictions on the production and sale of assorted goods. Could guns be one such item? Slashdot discusses...