That was the first attempt with a very cheap home-built plastic printer. Commercial 3D printers already make strong metal parts and cost less than the first laser printers; in a few years, their price will drop below $1000.
I certainly couldn't manufacture a working gun and ammunition in my home now. Even if I had all the metalworking tools, raw materials and a detailed set of plans I doubt I could produce something that wouldn't blow my hand off the first time I fired it.
Detailed set of plans? Raw materials? Do you have any idea what a gun even is?
Anyway, it's missing the whole point of having such easy availability of guns as you do in the US. You don't need to be rich, clever, skilled or desperate to lay your hands on one easily.
I also don't need to be rich, clever, skilled or desperate to lay my hands on a chocolate souffle. So what? Looking at data from the US, UK and Germany, for example, there is no evidence at all that gun control results in significantly lower murder rates.
Therefore, what possible reason would you have to want to want to implement it? Should we keep implementing ineffective and costly laws that wreck people's lives just because it makes scientifically illiterate voters feel better?
No, it's not going to stop there. We can look at the war on drugs as precedent: it started out with making narcotics illegal, but that has now extended to restrictions on glassware, many kinds of chemicals, plants, even cold medicine. Gun control will lead to further controls and restrictions custom manufacturing, metalworking, and 3D printing (various safety and environmental laws have already severely restricted access to this in practice).
It's quite workable: you can make it impossible for people to buy or carry guns legally. But it just doesn't make anybody any safer, it's security theater that just imposes useless extra work and costs on our justice system.
1. "Are we going to outlaw everything that person A can use to kill person B?" - no, very few places if any have tried that
My question was rhetorical. In fact, we are disturbingly far down that road. When I grew up, it was easy to get chemicals, knives, and guns with few restrictions, both in the US and in Europe. Many kids had chemistry sets with dangerous and poisonous chemicals. You could buy lab glassware at local glassblowers and there were plenty of shops that would manufacture equipment and devices for you. All of that has gotten restricted or become subject to reporting in various ways and, in practice, most people have become completely dependent on the stuff corporations sell them, subject to governmental restrictions and regulations. Nobody knows what the consequences for our societies will be since these restrictions are fairly recent, but there are historical precedents for some of these things, and they don't look great.
It's always amazing how some people come up with questions like yours, usually alluding to some kind of slippery slope argument, as if their home/town/state/country were the only one in the world and nobody anywhere else had taken a different approach.
It's always amazing how people who obviously know nothing about how things actually work elsewhere in the world try to justify their favorite US policies by talking about the supposed success of those policies elsewhere.
(You're wrong on health care too, but that's really OT.)
Your response is as vapid and unscientific as that of most of the AGW activists. Fortunately, one climate change conference after another fails to produce results, so your opinion and fear mongering simply don't matter.
I don't really care about guns. I don't ever want to own one, but it doesn't bother me if other people own one either because I don't assume that people around me are all potential mass murderers.
What worries me about gun control is the idea that the government wants to control ownership of a piece of metal that anybody can fabricate in a day in their home and to which there are lots of lethal alternatives. I wonder what the principle there is supposed to be. Are we going to outlaw everything that person A can use to kill person B? Where are we going to stop? Are we going to make files and drills illegal because they could be used to manufacture guns? What's going to happen with 3D printers? And if government can throw people in jail for something as silly as merely carrying a piece of metal that's shaped a particular way, what are the arguments against government controlling how we have sex or whether women can have abortions? Control of what we see, record, eat and get high on already seems to be considered normal by everybody.
Let's try and turn this back. Liberals live up to their name and give in on gun control and taxation, and conservatives realize the small non-intrusive government they keep talking about and give in on abortion and restrictive marriage, and both agree to loosen up drugs and copyrights.
In contrast, an actual skeptic would look at the actual evidence.
I started out as a proponent of strong and immediate action on climate change a few years ago and then looked at the data and evidence. What did I find? There is good evidence that temperatures have been increasing due to human carbon emissions: multiple measurements support that statement. Everything else that AGW activists talk about, the doomsday scenarios, the positive feedback, the flooding, the mass extinction, are either conjecture with no hard evidence, or actually contradict scientific fact. That is what I found when reading a couple of hundred scientific papers on the subject over the last few years. What have you read?
They would not insist that those thousands of scientists that agree that AGW is real are all cheating, lying, and part of some huge conspiracy.
Most of those thousands of scientists agree with scientific theories that they have not themselves worked on, so if they are mistaken in their beliefs, it doesn't require cheating, lying, or a conspiracy. Even people working on a specific subject often lack the expertise; for example, the people who came out with the original hockey stick curve were incompetent as statisticians, and their result only became accepted as fact once people with sufficient statistical expertise verified the result.
Having said that, if you look at other areas of science (where it's easier to check), you do find that scientific errors, statistical biases, and deliberate cheating are extremely widespread and probably affect the majority of scientific publications and results. The history of science also shows that it does not require a conspiracy for groups of scientists to collectively agree on erroneous conclusions.
In the end, there is strong scientific evidence "for AGW", but that is a narrow and technical result that does not support in any way the political and economic actions that AGW activists say we must take.
The Metre Convention was a treaty about how to define the meter and how to coordinate measurement. Individual nations adopted the metric system both before and after the Metre Convention.
I know European jingoists like the idea of a sensible and rational transition of Europe to the metric system, but that's just now what happened. Continental Europe in the 19th century was in disarray, and the adoption of the metric system just happened piecemeal as each nation transitioned into something resembling its modern form.
Belgium and the Netherlands adopted the metric system in 1820, under the influence of France. Many German states did the same thing and prepared the way for metrication in 1872, a year after the founding of the German Empire. Italy adopted the metric system in the 1860's, again in political turmoil and under French influence. Go check the Wikipedia page on metrication to see the wide range of dates.
Many European nations adopted the metric system under French occupation, or when they tried to unify their messy regional systems. Two world wars and many smaller wars also helped, destroying much of the old machinery and buildings.
The US didn't have the benefit of French occupation or destructive wars. It just adopted the standard of the primary superpower and its primary trading partner in the 19th century, the British empire, standardized on it nationally, and then stuck with it. Imagine, the arrogance of it!
Later in the 20th century, most of the government and scientific community in the US switched to metric, and drug and food labels are in metric too. But Americans are so ignorant and resistant to change that, oh my god, they are still buying some of their food in non-metric units. The horror!
The US has had such labels longer than Europe; US labels are metric and mandatory. I believe the European labeling law is based on the US law. Next idea?
(Also, the US adopted its national system of measures decades before most European nations. Many European nations ended up with the metric system simply because their domestic systems were a total mess and they might as well switch to metric.)
The federal government can't just "require" these things; the US isn't a dictatorship, it's a federation with strong states rights. Prices, road signs, traffic laws, etc. are state matters. And TV and radio stations can report in whatever units they damned well want to. And you still haven't answered the question: how do you "require" this when people don't want to comply? Do you thrown them in jail?
What do they actually want? The US government is already using metric in most areas. I suppose printing kilometers on road signs would be possible. But what more is the US government supposed to do? Whipping with a wet noodle for people who don't use the metric system? Fines? Hard labor?
Science careers are extremely tough. Physics is even worse than other fields, with its obsession with youth and large number of graduates. Most physics graduates end up switching fields or working in engineering jobs in research labs. There is a shortage of scientists, but not a shortage of academic research scientists. Who do you think "lied" to you about it? Didn't you bother to look around you in grad school? Count the number of staff vs graduating students?
Trouble is, by switching out of the computer field, you also give the appearance of having burned out on computers. You have skills and experience, but it seems a little much to expect for people to just hand you a career after you made a bunch of unusual career moves.
What's wrong with your current job, though? A DoD and NASA program manager seems like a respectable job for a physics Ph.D.
Only one person can read them at a time. They are nearly impossible to copy. They impose a constant and significant cost in terms of space and maintenance. They will deteriorate and self-destruct over time.
In fact, even disregarding the (probably illegal) digital ways of removing DRM, simply optically copying an E-book is simpler than copying a physical book. Furthermore, most books published after the middle of the last century just don't seem to be worth keeping around anyway. I have trashed plenty of paper books.
If you buy a tablet with a keyboard (like the ASUS transformer), she'll have great hardware that's good for almost all the things people do with tablets.
The big problem with all the tablets out there is that their browsers aren't full desktop browsers. There are some that you can tell to run in "desktop mode", and that helps, but some sites will still not work. Most annoyingly, there is still no good "desktop-like" solution for Google Docs itself.
Chromebooks are another alternative, but they don't have that many apps for them, and they only give you a choice of a single browser.
Your best solution may still be a laptop running Ubuntu: it's pretty easy to use (easier than Windows 8) and fairly straightforward to maintain. There are lots of built-in apps, and web apps work as well as on a Chromebook.
You don't "need" to work so much. If you want a 1960's lifestyle, you can do that on a part time job. However, a 1960's lifestyle would be considered below the poverty line today.
Speaking from a humanities viewpoint, a majority of the phds we produce will never land a job as a professor
"We" don't "produce" them. These are adults that make a particular career choice. And they can see their job prospects all around them, in addition to having plenty of counseling and online resources in most cases.
I agree: there are problems with GMO foods, mostly related to farming methods, patents, liability, etc. But we never got to talk about them because people like Lynas hijacked the debate with their vilification of foods and their proponents. As a result, we're now worse off than if people like him had just shut up. And he's doing the same with AGW again.
Climate change is happening and has been verified even by studies commisioned by groups seeking to disprove it. Anyone still denying it is either an industry shill or someone with an agenda.
Who are you kidding? "Climate change deniers" is just a straw man: people like Lynas and you label anybody who disagrees with their political agenda or policy proposals a "climate change denier" and caricature their position as anti-science.
And Lynas, in particular, is nohting more than an author intent on selling books using a mix of science, fear, and sensationalism. Saying that he was wrong on GMO isn't much of an apology, it just gives him even more coverage to sell even more books.
But it is not the policy of the individual U.S. states to allow suppliers to carte blanche escape liability merely because they are upstream vendors.
The legislation is not about a "carte blance escape from liability". It is about extremely knowledgeable and rich clients and companies that provide an extremely expensive and risky service to have the option to make certain kinds of contracts, and it still doesn't exempt companies from liability for gross negligence. Furthermore, other states already have this exemption, as do numerous other kinds of activities. You probably agreed to such conditions for something you did yourself.
Typical Slashdotter indeed: you didn't bother to RTFA and jump to conclusions.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the first attempt with a very cheap home-built plastic printer. Commercial 3D printers already make strong metal parts and cost less than the first laser printers; in a few years, their price will drop below $1000.
Detailed set of plans? Raw materials? Do you have any idea what a gun even is?
I also don't need to be rich, clever, skilled or desperate to lay my hands on a chocolate souffle. So what? Looking at data from the US, UK and Germany, for example, there is no evidence at all that gun control results in significantly lower murder rates.
Therefore, what possible reason would you have to want to want to implement it? Should we keep implementing ineffective and costly laws that wreck people's lives just because it makes scientifically illiterate voters feel better?
No, it's not going to stop there. We can look at the war on drugs as precedent: it started out with making narcotics illegal, but that has now extended to restrictions on glassware, many kinds of chemicals, plants, even cold medicine. Gun control will lead to further controls and restrictions custom manufacturing, metalworking, and 3D printing (various safety and environmental laws have already severely restricted access to this in practice).
It's quite workable: you can make it impossible for people to buy or carry guns legally. But it just doesn't make anybody any safer, it's security theater that just imposes useless extra work and costs on our justice system.
My question was rhetorical. In fact, we are disturbingly far down that road. When I grew up, it was easy to get chemicals, knives, and guns with few restrictions, both in the US and in Europe. Many kids had chemistry sets with dangerous and poisonous chemicals. You could buy lab glassware at local glassblowers and there were plenty of shops that would manufacture equipment and devices for you. All of that has gotten restricted or become subject to reporting in various ways and, in practice, most people have become completely dependent on the stuff corporations sell them, subject to governmental restrictions and regulations. Nobody knows what the consequences for our societies will be since these restrictions are fairly recent, but there are historical precedents for some of these things, and they don't look great.
It's always amazing how people who obviously know nothing about how things actually work elsewhere in the world try to justify their favorite US policies by talking about the supposed success of those policies elsewhere.
(You're wrong on health care too, but that's really OT.)
Your response is as vapid and unscientific as that of most of the AGW activists. Fortunately, one climate change conference after another fails to produce results, so your opinion and fear mongering simply don't matter.
I don't really care about guns. I don't ever want to own one, but it doesn't bother me if other people own one either because I don't assume that people around me are all potential mass murderers.
What worries me about gun control is the idea that the government wants to control ownership of a piece of metal that anybody can fabricate in a day in their home and to which there are lots of lethal alternatives. I wonder what the principle there is supposed to be. Are we going to outlaw everything that person A can use to kill person B? Where are we going to stop? Are we going to make files and drills illegal because they could be used to manufacture guns? What's going to happen with 3D printers? And if government can throw people in jail for something as silly as merely carrying a piece of metal that's shaped a particular way, what are the arguments against government controlling how we have sex or whether women can have abortions? Control of what we see, record, eat and get high on already seems to be considered normal by everybody.
Let's try and turn this back. Liberals live up to their name and give in on gun control and taxation, and conservatives realize the small non-intrusive government they keep talking about and give in on abortion and restrictive marriage, and both agree to loosen up drugs and copyrights.
I started out as a proponent of strong and immediate action on climate change a few years ago and then looked at the data and evidence. What did I find? There is good evidence that temperatures have been increasing due to human carbon emissions: multiple measurements support that statement. Everything else that AGW activists talk about, the doomsday scenarios, the positive feedback, the flooding, the mass extinction, are either conjecture with no hard evidence, or actually contradict scientific fact. That is what I found when reading a couple of hundred scientific papers on the subject over the last few years. What have you read?
Most of those thousands of scientists agree with scientific theories that they have not themselves worked on, so if they are mistaken in their beliefs, it doesn't require cheating, lying, or a conspiracy. Even people working on a specific subject often lack the expertise; for example, the people who came out with the original hockey stick curve were incompetent as statisticians, and their result only became accepted as fact once people with sufficient statistical expertise verified the result.
Having said that, if you look at other areas of science (where it's easier to check), you do find that scientific errors, statistical biases, and deliberate cheating are extremely widespread and probably affect the majority of scientific publications and results. The history of science also shows that it does not require a conspiracy for groups of scientists to collectively agree on erroneous conclusions.
In the end, there is strong scientific evidence "for AGW", but that is a narrow and technical result that does not support in any way the political and economic actions that AGW activists say we must take.
The Metre Convention was a treaty about how to define the meter and how to coordinate measurement. Individual nations adopted the metric system both before and after the Metre Convention.
I know European jingoists like the idea of a sensible and rational transition of Europe to the metric system, but that's just now what happened. Continental Europe in the 19th century was in disarray, and the adoption of the metric system just happened piecemeal as each nation transitioned into something resembling its modern form.
Belgium and the Netherlands adopted the metric system in 1820, under the influence of France. Many German states did the same thing and prepared the way for metrication in 1872, a year after the founding of the German Empire. Italy adopted the metric system in the 1860's, again in political turmoil and under French influence. Go check the Wikipedia page on metrication to see the wide range of dates.
Many European nations adopted the metric system under French occupation, or when they tried to unify their messy regional systems. Two world wars and many smaller wars also helped, destroying much of the old machinery and buildings.
The US didn't have the benefit of French occupation or destructive wars. It just adopted the standard of the primary superpower and its primary trading partner in the 19th century, the British empire, standardized on it nationally, and then stuck with it. Imagine, the arrogance of it!
Later in the 20th century, most of the government and scientific community in the US switched to metric, and drug and food labels are in metric too. But Americans are so ignorant and resistant to change that, oh my god, they are still buying some of their food in non-metric units. The horror!
The US has had such labels longer than Europe; US labels are metric and mandatory. I believe the European labeling law is based on the US law. Next idea?
(Also, the US adopted its national system of measures decades before most European nations. Many European nations ended up with the metric system simply because their domestic systems were a total mess and they might as well switch to metric.)
The federal government can't just "require" these things; the US isn't a dictatorship, it's a federation with strong states rights. Prices, road signs, traffic laws, etc. are state matters. And TV and radio stations can report in whatever units they damned well want to. And you still haven't answered the question: how do you "require" this when people don't want to comply? Do you thrown them in jail?
What do they actually want? The US government is already using metric in most areas. I suppose printing kilometers on road signs would be possible. But what more is the US government supposed to do? Whipping with a wet noodle for people who don't use the metric system? Fines? Hard labor?
Science careers are extremely tough. Physics is even worse than other fields, with its obsession with youth and large number of graduates. Most physics graduates end up switching fields or working in engineering jobs in research labs. There is a shortage of scientists, but not a shortage of academic research scientists. Who do you think "lied" to you about it? Didn't you bother to look around you in grad school? Count the number of staff vs graduating students?
Trouble is, by switching out of the computer field, you also give the appearance of having burned out on computers. You have skills and experience, but it seems a little much to expect for people to just hand you a career after you made a bunch of unusual career moves.
What's wrong with your current job, though? A DoD and NASA program manager seems like a respectable job for a physics Ph.D.
As far as AGW is concerned, methane is a strong greenhouse gas, but its half-life is short, so it isn't such a big problem.
Paper books come with their own "DRM":
Only one person can read them at a time.
They are nearly impossible to copy.
They impose a constant and significant cost in terms of space and maintenance.
They will deteriorate and self-destruct over time.
In fact, even disregarding the (probably illegal) digital ways of removing DRM, simply optically copying an E-book is simpler than copying a physical book. Furthermore, most books published after the middle of the last century just don't seem to be worth keeping around anyway. I have trashed plenty of paper books.
If you buy a tablet with a keyboard (like the ASUS transformer), she'll have great hardware that's good for almost all the things people do with tablets.
The big problem with all the tablets out there is that their browsers aren't full desktop browsers. There are some that you can tell to run in "desktop mode", and that helps, but some sites will still not work. Most annoyingly, there is still no good "desktop-like" solution for Google Docs itself.
Chromebooks are another alternative, but they don't have that many apps for them, and they only give you a choice of a single browser.
Your best solution may still be a laptop running Ubuntu: it's pretty easy to use (easier than Windows 8) and fairly straightforward to maintain. There are lots of built-in apps, and web apps work as well as on a Chromebook.
You don't "need" to work so much. If you want a 1960's lifestyle, you can do that on a part time job. However, a 1960's lifestyle would be considered below the poverty line today.
"We" don't "produce" them. These are adults that make a particular career choice. And they can see their job prospects all around them, in addition to having plenty of counseling and online resources in most cases.
I don't believe he was ever charged with murder. They wanted him for questioning, which is not extraditable by itself.
And McAfee wonders why the Belize government is out to get him? This kind of crime easily would carry a very long prison sentence in most countries.
This video shows how the military deals with Microsoft products:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz4EKv9HmsM
At least it keeps him out of trouble.
I agree: there are problems with GMO foods, mostly related to farming methods, patents, liability, etc. But we never got to talk about them because people like Lynas hijacked the debate with their vilification of foods and their proponents. As a result, we're now worse off than if people like him had just shut up. And he's doing the same with AGW again.
Who are you kidding? "Climate change deniers" is just a straw man: people like Lynas and you label anybody who disagrees with their political agenda or policy proposals a "climate change denier" and caricature their position as anti-science.
And Lynas, in particular, is nohting more than an author intent on selling books using a mix of science, fear, and sensationalism. Saying that he was wrong on GMO isn't much of an apology, it just gives him even more coverage to sell even more books.
The legislation is not about a "carte blance escape from liability". It is about extremely knowledgeable and rich clients and companies that provide an extremely expensive and risky service to have the option to make certain kinds of contracts, and it still doesn't exempt companies from liability for gross negligence. Furthermore, other states already have this exemption, as do numerous other kinds of activities. You probably agreed to such conditions for something you did yourself.
Typical Slashdotter indeed: you didn't bother to RTFA and jump to conclusions.