Seth Godin asks: Is a photo of a Magritte painting better than the original?

At right, one of my favorite pieces of art, Magritte's The Silent Captive.  Is this a painting of a painting?  A picture of a painting of a painting?  Or simply an idea, visualized?

Seth wraps up with "When the idea is famous enough, what is the original, anyway?"  Hehe...  BTW I must tell you Seth is one of my favorite new bloggers.  New to me, anyway.  Subscribed!

Kottke: the Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.  "Last year, Greenheart Games released a game called Game Dev Tycoon in which you run a company that makes video games. As an experiment, they secretly released a cracked version of the game for pirates to download...with one small difference: players in the cracked version would always go bankrupt because of piracy issues."  I love it.  Be sure to check out their message board posts :) 

Am I the only one who sees The Silent Captive idea in this scenario?

But of course: there is now a 3D printer in the International Space Station.  I wonder if it can print itself? 

This is quite interesting on several levels: the Desk App, a desktop app for blogging.  For OS X, and compatible with most blogging platforms.  Of course I blog on Windows and have a home-grown kludgy system which isn't compatible with anything, but ... that could change.  And in the meantime I'm fascinated by desktop apps! 

In the healthy spirit of dogfooding, I see the Desk App has a Desk App Blog.  Well of course.  Awesome!  (and ... subscribed!)