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Joseph Picone: Sometimes it takes decades for ideas to become reality:

www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/story/2012-07-10/digital-manufacturing/56135298/1?loc=interstitialskip

I have personally been exposed to 3D printing for about 20 years... always in discussions that this will reinvent manufacturing. In fact, Alvin Toffler, in the Future Shock trilogy written a long time ago, talks about this.

But the reality is that it the process is messy, fraught with problems, and is not yet cost-effective enough for even heavy academic use (e.g., senior design projects).

It will happen eventually, and it is a technology that offers great hope, but it is probably 20 years away from being cost-effective.

-Joseph Picone (11-07-2012)