leastfixedpoint

Well, I would die of boredom not doing anything interesting for a whole hour.

In short, yes. Way more expensive. Also, 3D printers cannot print most of the useful stuff. Even if they were be able to print electronics - people just don't need new electronics that often.

Still, it's a great toy for all kinds of hackers and makers. :)

1) Why own cars at all? It's way more efficient to have a common pool of cars that you rent when you need them. I actually think that owning in general will eventually be replaced with loaning from shared pools. It's way better from planning, economy, ecology and maintenance perspectives.

2) Most of the breakthroughs were because of new levels of power or precision. Here we're facing a totally different kind problem, one of complexity. That's something we have no tools to deal with and no idea of even how those tools might look like. It's not like flight, or Internet, or artificial viruses.

3) Did you really just link me to a device from a sci-fi show? :-D The thing is that mass production can use optimizations, shortcuts and logistics that can never be used by custom production. Also, injection molding will always produce smoother shapes than 3D-printing, because the latter is discrete.

Also, ecologically speaking, it's better if people just own a set of mass-produced, high-quality goods than continuously print new stuff on their own. There's too much stuff in the world already.

How many years until we can send our cars out to go get food? - let's rather ask how many years until we stop owning cars and start using a ubiquitous autonomous taxi/delivery service.

How many years until we can upload all of wikipedia into our brains or an attachment that our brains can pull from / talk to? - we don't have a slightest idea of how to do that and if it's even possible or feasible.

How many years until we can throw trash into a 3D printer and have it materialize a complex item such as an orange or a phone? - home 3D printers are a fad. Homemade products will always be orders of magnitude more expensive than factory-produced.

It's wrong for Java. "final" is not what is usually called a constant there, "static final" is. Also, who ever uses special prefixes for statics?!

I smell comparison to Java in every point. How about comparing to Javascript, in whose domain Dart intrudes? Or, even better, CoffeeScript? ;)