I wondered when something like this would happen. Any bets on when the US Government will use political influence to shut this company down? My guess? A couple of months.

Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America

This article is about much more than personal fabrication technology. It is about how extremely advanced technology, when placed in the hands of non-technical people, can enlighten engineers.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html

The edge always has some amazing articles, although some of them could be edited a little better. The philosophical concepts in this article are a little buried under the technical explanations and academic writing style.

musicolab aims to use technology to put powerful tools in the hands of musicians. We can learn to predict the properties of the entire system that may emerge, without ever knowing the motivations of its constituent parts (the musicians). In fact, a major concept in the article is that a system that emerges may act in a very different manner than one we may predict if we view only the motivations of the individual peices.

It really throws a wrench into 'use case' modeling when considering large scale networking systems and technologies.

In your WWDC (2002) talk you explained the O'Reilly philosophy of watching the 'alpha geeks' to spot the next shift in thinking. In terms of art and technology - who and what should we be watching?

Well, I don't want to give too much advice to my competitors. But in general, I'd say that you want to watch the folks who are figuring out that applications are no longer local to a single machine. Whether it's p2p or web services or distributed computation, we're moving to a world captured by Dave Stutz's great phrase, "software above the level of a single device."