I know HN comment "etiquette" tends to oppose jokes or material of "lesser" sources (oh my what have our comments become?) but the OP made me think of the possibilities of Open Source CAD building layouts, so in some sense, the ability to someday download a building. :)
I've always laughed at that joke (and the campaign that spawned it) for exactly that reason. If people could, OF COURSE they'd download a car. That's just silly.
I use a "magic ray gun" analogy when explaining P2P to people, "A magic gun that has two settings, copy and paste. If you could copy the food supply of the world, wouldn't you paste it until everyone could eat and have fresh water? What about housing? What about cars?"
Funny passage from the article: "Not that Dini shows much respect for his invention. His brother Ricardo is a talented mechanical engineer who also works on the project and proposed some of its defining features – the single armature for example. Today though he is beating recalcitrant parts of it with a hammer. Enrico refers to a pin system for calibrating the height of the frame as ‘this fucking device’"
Interested in the use of the term "printing" as the process here. It's a good metaphor for moving from ink on a sheet of paper to manufacture of original, standalone structures.
We send visual instructions to a machine, it spits out something that looks like them. It "prints" them.
This reminded me of a "demotivational poster":
http://i.imgur.com/08cDW.jpg
I know HN comment "etiquette" tends to oppose jokes or material of "lesser" sources (oh my what have our comments become?) but the OP made me think of the possibilities of Open Source CAD building layouts, so in some sense, the ability to someday download a building. :)