By July the rumors had turned into a full-speed prerelease hype machine complete with a goofy spokes-model appearing in videos on Tapwave's Web site.

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Some of these are then fed into a prototyping machine, made by Objet of Israel, that can produce a 3-D model in lightweight plastic in minutes.

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Luminex has a razor blade business model, just like 3-D, where it sells the machine and once you buy the machine you have to buy the consumables, or the razors, that run through it.

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"In the 1970s it became respectable to model the economy as if it was a perfectly functioning, self-regulating machine, " says Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York.

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Still, in this model, a poor-quality piece of content that comes out of one bit of the machine can damage other outlets.

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