We tightened the bolts on the body in an attempt to subdue its violent oscillations, then downloaded the ReplicatorG software from MakerBot's site, installed it on our system and tethered the printer to our laptop with a USB cord.

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Whether Microsoft becomes the trusted guardian for baked-in apps, the way things like fonts and printer drivers became part of the Windows operating system is another matter.

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Dan Kehres, a screen printer at Serigraph, is a prime example of how the system we've developed can work.

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By the early 2000s, digital camera picture quality was getting very good, broadband Internet was coming on strong, and inexpensive photo quality printer meant there was now a high quality end-to-end system for digital photography.

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About a year later IBM began developing a small 3-D printer with an extrusion mechanism eerily similar to Crump's patented design but with a different feeding system.

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In another demonstration, a printer that was printing a tax document with social security numbers scanned the document and sent it to another system.

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The unknown system immediately disappeared. (Sorry, kids.) I reset the laptop and the wireless printer for the new secured network.

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