I have seen both 3D scanning and 3D printing for myself in the National Research Council labs - this was almost five years ago so they must be getting at least a little closer to commercial application. It's a bit of a leap from that to desktop manufacturing, though, as this would require either that we stock every element in our printer (in addition to smelting capacities) or acquire some sort of transmutation capacity, which would be much bigger news than desktop manufacturing. Most of the 3D we'll be looking at for anything like the short term will be virtual - good for the Wii, less good for Transmutation Industries Inc.
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