More an ideological statement than a political one, but yes, the guy who started this current "3D printed gun" craze the media is in by releasing working 3D printed gun blueprints on the Internet for free about a year? back - it was an ideological move for him.
On the other hand, weapons tend to push technological capabilities pretty quickly, they're fun, and a natural target for the engineering-oriented (and often male) mind. "How fast/hard/strong/etc. can we make it?"
I highly doubt a replicator is anywhere in our lifetimes. We're struggling with laying down layers of plastic at a slow rate and making it cost effective. I highly doubt we'll be anywhere near a cup and Earl Grey, hot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when using this device, a bullet, from a loaded cartridge, gets propelled down a barrel by action of the explosive powders in the cartridge.
What criteria does it not meet for being a firearm?
(3) The term “firearm” means (A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; (B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon; (C) any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; or (D) any destructive device. Such term does not include an antique firearm.
That's from USC 921. There are many similar definitions in US law; some are even so as restrictive to be inclusive of propelled air or mechanically propelled weapons (eg. BB guns and slingshots).
"3D printed guns" is just a bunch of media gathering hype and bullshit.
With the most rudimentary tools, people have been able to produce firearms much more serviceable than these dangerous plastic devices. People have been making AKs using not much more than a hot fire and a couple smooth stones for almost 50 years. Simple blowback operated machine guns similar to the WWII Sten can be made in a garage with scrap metal, a dremel, and a piece of rusty pipe, or 'bangsticks'.
It's not difficult and requires very little skill or resources; blueprints are easily found online for those who can't figure it out on their own. This arguably easier than the 13-shots-before-blowing-up 3D printed guns which cost thousands in resources and require a great deal of knowledge.
If people are scared of 3D printed guns, it's because they either don't understand the limited implications, or they're just reactionary idiots. 3D printed plastic guns were never meant as anything more than a political statement.
Lest anyone forget, or for lack of never knowing, that this reason is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
It's not to discount it as a significant factor, but anyone who's quit from a position knows it's not just one thing, usually, there are several - lack of pay/low pay, poor work structure, poor work environment, demeaning personalities, etc.
Getting endless gripes and complaints about lack of support for something as popular and 'open' as the Nexus 7 when they've got no ability to fix the situation - but should, by Google's own marketing claims - has got to be pretty disheartening on its own, but I'm certain it's not the only thing.
Except neither copper nor zinc have the properties necessary to replace lead in this application. Bullets would have to be 150% as large, and due to the change in their ballistic coefficient, would be unsuitable.
Neither are as soft as lead, either - the other half of why lead is used.
Keep in mind that modern bullets are shaped and balanced with composites already to maintain accurate flight (amongst other reasons); most, except bird shot, are copper coated or even just 'lead core'. We're not talking about lead shot; it's not 1862.
Understanding the mechanics of how something works, and why, is important to making a recommendation on how to replace it.
No? Then you're going to have to figure out a way to adjust for cultural, economic, social, and population density differences. Because all of those things are significantly more important to determining crime rates than whether someone's pipes are made of lead or how many guns they have...
Except for the fact that you're in a different country, you would have a point.
Violence is a cultural phenomenon so you would need to isolate it within the culture it exists to measure it. The best you can do is similar cultures if you want a side/side comparison instead of a meaningful input -> output analysis, and even that's dicey due to the impact things like population density and distribution have on crime rates.
On the contrary, I see healthy animal fats as inherently healthy - just not ones established by eating corn, soy, etc. in feed lots. History as well as modern health information does agree with me.
I can understand your stance. When you rely upon the FDA to make your food choice decisions instead of listening to centuries of built-up wisdom of centuries and relying on traditional foods determined to establish and extend health, it's easy to make such foolish mistakes.
As far as your ethics claim? That's laudable but also extremely laughable, since I can almost guarantee you do not believe in a moral authority higher than yourself. Good luck with that!
They're fed corn and antibiotics -- I dunno where you raise your cows but California between Bakersfield and Salinas is one big concentrated feedlot. We only recently convinced people to stop feeding cows with other dead cows. Let alone grass.
Yep, and as a partial result, you've got a lot of vegetarians who think meat is gross - for good reason. California raised beef is probably close to the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten.
You'll find best practices employed out here in "flyover country" where effective land use is valued. (You know, those people the Coasts disparagingly tend to refer to as ignorant and earth destroying hicks...)
As for these supposed slaughterhouses you're referring to: please explain to me how ranchers, who get paid by weight and often have their meats taste graded and rated, would benefit from having a squirming, living adrenaline-pumping animal processed? No, it doesn't work that way, not in this country. Even someone cursorily familiar with the cattle industry would be able to tell you that you're relying on inaccurate propaganda.
This wouldn't be a problem for the otterbox cased I've had. Once, several years ago while going through my divorce, I threw my (HTC HD2) phone down a flight of cement steps, impacting first at the very bottom fairly hard. The phone survived without nary a scratch, dent, or defect; I was actually still on the call when I picked it up several moments later. The case did get a bit scratched up, though.
While that phone is sadly no longer with us (best one I've ever had - the hardware buttons have stopped working, still might be fixable with a little investigation...), I have no doubt that a similarly equipped phone with an otterbox would survive simlarly. I'd definately run this app on it, and, in fact, might be tempted to rig the game a little bit.
The only other phone I've had to survive stuff like that was one of the pre-polyphonic Nokia flip phones that pretty much everyone had, right before cell service became a 'mass consumer' thing.
This thread reminds me of the 'iPhone throwing competitions' I heard of happening up in one of the Nordic countries. Related, maybe?
The problem Microsoft has is that they stopped being a company that has innovative products a long time ago - arguably they never started, because their 'traditional' linear products (OS, Office) had too much momentum.
Look at Microsoft Research, for instance. The one notable product to come out of that is the Kinect and related technologies. We've seen MS ads now for years for something similar to SketchInsight, which looks incredible - but no working POC for anyone to ogle or demo. This would be a Killer App in a heartbeat for pretty much everyone I know - and the missing link that MS has so much needed for Windows 'tablets' for the past decade.
Then you've got things like their AI and machine learning research, as well as OS research projects. Those show promise, but don't see much light in marketable products. Imagine what MS could've done with "Windows Mobile/Phone" had they not focused on changing UI paradigms against peoples' will?
The biggest thing MS has going for them at this point is their vendor lock-in, and it's much worse than we feared it could be back in the 1990s. "Cloud services" were so far in the future they weren't really conceived. Today, we've got everything in the MS stack integrating tightly with Office 365 - and Exchange is most certainly the worst offender in this regard, with much of the traditional functionality available in 2003 and 2008, and fixed greatly in 2008, gone again for O365 integration. If you're a MS shop, you're more or less stuck, and options for migrating that data off their platforms diminishes as time goes on simply by the motion of the machine - regardless of any actual, needed features present in the upgraded products. (When was the last time you've heard of someone upgrading MS products for anything other than 'compatibility with everyone else, and bug/security fixes'?
1) There is no metal suitable for bullets other than lead - unless we want to shoot some other heavy metal. Pick. 2) If you're going to claim higher crime rates are related to lead poisoning, you should also consider that lower crime rates are related to high per capita firearm ownership (and in turn, shooting). There is no association here, this is a strawman argument.
Yep. In light of these windows nodes getting exploited, I decided last night that I'm going to set up a tor node VM, with limited bandwidth, just for the purposes of providing an additional hop.
Tor use is likely to increase significantly due to all the domestic spying everyone has become aware of here in the West. This is both an opportunity for Tor as well as a challenge: there will be more users, and more people who were iffy about running high bandwidth nodes will likely do so, but there will also be more clueless users and more governmental targeting of this 'darknet' to try to monitor everyone.
It poses another opportunity for Tor: improve the design and architecture, or even just the distribution, to make it easier for non-savvy users to be secure. Pre-packaged installers that jail up a minimal Linux install from which to run Tor? Who knows.
It's trivial to use Tor in a secure fashion. In fact, if you need the security provided by Tor, chances are you're better off doing it this way instead:
1) Download Tails 2) Burn to CD 3) Boot disk 4) Use Tor
How hard was that?
(Personally, I use IE5 and Windows 2000 for Tor. Nobody's going to try to exploit that... and yes, I'm kidding.)
10kg of grain for 1kg of meat? Try about half that, and that's at the final stretch for only a very small amount of weight. Keep in mind that grain will not provide the nutrients a human needs (regardless of which grain we're talking about), while that 1kg of meat will.
Most cows are not fed a steady diet of corn/grain. They graze for most of their lives. They do this on sub-optimal land, harvested land, and various other locations where crops are not or can not be grown.
So many of the anti-meat crowd are completely oblivious to how cattle ranching is primarily done these days. Managed intensive rotational grazing isn't the sought after ideal, it's reality for pretty much everyone I know who ranches and is holding on or doing well, and it's been that way for probably a decade or more now.
These idiots think cows are grown in vats and fed a steady diet of bubble gum and corn syrup in a 1920s style slaughterhouse.
Forgive me for asking this, because it seems like wires have been crossed to result in this question... but what exactly does meat have to do with dairy? IE, it doesn't have anything to do with dairy.
I would argue that if it's possible to grow meat that's just as wholesome as grass-fed beef (arguably more so because it won't have any environmental contaminants at all) and at the same price, the practice of raising and killing of animals is no longer justified in the slightest. It's a morally tough call today as it is.
So what are you proposing? Are you in the least bit familiar with how cattle are raised, either the 'farmed' variety or the ranged variety?
What exactly the alternative to killing and eating the cattle?
I see three options, in light : 1) Kill them all / exterminate them to the point of extinction 2) Let 800-1500lb cows range free as 'wild animals', allowing them to die to extinction within a human generation due to how stupid and human dependent they are (but not before people are trampled and gored by the thousands due to cattle having no fear of men). 3) put them all in zoos for the silly urban people
I don't suppose anyone has even bothered to note the environmental cost or the scalability of this test tube beef process, either. If you think mass produced ethanol from biomass is tenuous, try this on for size... (And if you don't, you're not paying attention or thinking.)
This "don't eat the moos" plan has a lot of holes, this being not the least of them. What're you going to do with all the otherwise-unusable land used for grazing - let it lay fallow? (We're talking about most of the states of NE, SD, WY, MT, etc. where farming is markedly more environmentally destructive and has little return, even with the most advanced intensive methods currently known.)
You fake it until you make it, or can corner the guy in a dark alley and beat it out of him.
In all seriousness, I've been there probably more than most. I've worked most of my career for managed service providers (of varying quality) where there is no environmental documentation to speak of, in most cases, and almost invariably things are a complete goddamn mess because they're going from in-house to outsourced for a reason. More often than not, you're expected to replace 3-5 as many people as you are - all while handling many other customers at the same time, in similar scenarios.
I was blessed several years ago by replacing 6 in-house IT staff in an academic environment by myself; I took over their full role, to the exception of a guy who came to do desktop stuff several times a week. Almost exclusively Linux systems, many with fairly exceptional setups, and lots of stupid interdependency: the previous 'administrators' were more developers than they were admins (and yes, that is an insult for a competent admin).
There were fewer than 80 physical servers and a couple hundred additional workstations (Windows/Mac/Linux). Half a dozen different distros, no virtualization. Half a dozen subnets, most carved up poorly with little forethought (or brought over from 'very legacy' environments and not migrated using best practices). Lots of one-off solutions were difficult to support and had few tenable options for migrating away from - situations where you just pray that hardware gets good enough, fast enough, to make what you need to do tenable to the users.
It took me a full year to get everything to the point where I was comfortable with the environment enough to know what was happening without needing the monitoring systems I'd put in place to tell me. This seems about right in my experience, at least for me. It's taken roughly a year, consistently, to get comfortable with the full scope of tasks and requirements of an environment from the users up through the ranks.
FreeBSD plays games "as well or better" than Linux? On what criteria, the Phoronix benchmark which gave the FBSD and Ubuntu beta box different hardware?
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More an ideological statement than a political one, but yes, the guy who started this current "3D printed gun" craze the media is in by releasing working 3D printed gun blueprints on the Internet for free about a year? back - it was an ideological move for him.
On the other hand, weapons tend to push technological capabilities pretty quickly, they're fun, and a natural target for the engineering-oriented (and often male) mind. "How fast/hard/strong/etc. can we make it?"
I highly doubt a replicator is anywhere in our lifetimes. We're struggling with laying down layers of plastic at a slow rate and making it cost effective. I highly doubt we'll be anywhere near a cup and Earl Grey, hot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when using this device, a bullet, from a loaded cartridge, gets propelled down a barrel by action of the explosive powders in the cartridge.
That's an incredibly silly claim.
So what, China and the US, or the US and Pakistan, are very similar because we're bickering all the time?
You're talking about traditions and customs, I'm talking about values and moors.
What criteria does it not meet for being a firearm?
(3) The term “firearm” means
(A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive;
(B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon;
(C) any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; or
(D) any destructive device. Such term does not include an antique firearm.
That's from USC 921. There are many similar definitions in US law; some are even so as restrictive to be inclusive of propelled air or mechanically propelled weapons (eg. BB guns and slingshots).
"3D printed guns" is just a bunch of media gathering hype and bullshit.
With the most rudimentary tools, people have been able to produce firearms much more serviceable than these dangerous plastic devices. People have been making AKs using not much more than a hot fire and a couple smooth stones for almost 50 years. Simple blowback operated machine guns similar to the WWII Sten can be made in a garage with scrap metal, a dremel, and a piece of rusty pipe, or 'bangsticks'.
It's not difficult and requires very little skill or resources; blueprints are easily found online for those who can't figure it out on their own. This arguably easier than the 13-shots-before-blowing-up 3D printed guns which cost thousands in resources and require a great deal of knowledge.
If people are scared of 3D printed guns, it's because they either don't understand the limited implications, or they're just reactionary idiots. 3D printed plastic guns were never meant as anything more than a political statement.
Lest anyone forget, or for lack of never knowing, that this reason is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
It's not to discount it as a significant factor, but anyone who's quit from a position knows it's not just one thing, usually, there are several - lack of pay/low pay, poor work structure, poor work environment, demeaning personalities, etc.
Getting endless gripes and complaints about lack of support for something as popular and 'open' as the Nexus 7 when they've got no ability to fix the situation - but should, by Google's own marketing claims - has got to be pretty disheartening on its own, but I'm certain it's not the only thing.
Aside from year on year record firearm purchases, how do you figure this?
Except neither copper nor zinc have the properties necessary to replace lead in this application. Bullets would have to be 150% as large, and due to the change in their ballistic coefficient, would be unsuitable.
Neither are as soft as lead, either - the other half of why lead is used.
Keep in mind that modern bullets are shaped and balanced with composites already to maintain accurate flight (amongst other reasons); most, except bird shot, are copper coated or even just 'lead core'. We're not talking about lead shot; it's not 1862.
Understanding the mechanics of how something works, and why, is important to making a recommendation on how to replace it.
Why, is Bakaara Market in the US?
No? Then you're going to have to figure out a way to adjust for cultural, economic, social, and population density differences. Because all of those things are significantly more important to determining crime rates than whether someone's pipes are made of lead or how many guns they have...
France does not have a lower crime rate than the US, unless you're speaking of official racial-sensitivity-adjusted statistics...
Except for the fact that you're in a different country, you would have a point.
Violence is a cultural phenomenon so you would need to isolate it within the culture it exists to measure it. The best you can do is similar cultures if you want a side/side comparison instead of a meaningful input -> output analysis, and even that's dicey due to the impact things like population density and distribution have on crime rates.
On the contrary, I see healthy animal fats as inherently healthy - just not ones established by eating corn, soy, etc. in feed lots. History as well as modern health information does agree with me.
I can understand your stance. When you rely upon the FDA to make your food choice decisions instead of listening to centuries of built-up wisdom of centuries and relying on traditional foods determined to establish and extend health, it's easy to make such foolish mistakes.
As far as your ethics claim? That's laudable but also extremely laughable, since I can almost guarantee you do not believe in a moral authority higher than yourself. Good luck with that!
They're fed corn and antibiotics -- I dunno where you raise your cows but California between Bakersfield and Salinas is one big concentrated feedlot. We only recently convinced people to stop feeding cows with other dead cows. Let alone grass.
Yep, and as a partial result, you've got a lot of vegetarians who think meat is gross - for good reason. California raised beef is probably close to the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten.
You'll find best practices employed out here in "flyover country" where effective land use is valued. (You know, those people the Coasts disparagingly tend to refer to as ignorant and earth destroying hicks...)
As for these supposed slaughterhouses you're referring to: please explain to me how ranchers, who get paid by weight and often have their meats taste graded and rated, would benefit from having a squirming, living adrenaline-pumping animal processed? No, it doesn't work that way, not in this country. Even someone cursorily familiar with the cattle industry would be able to tell you that you're relying on inaccurate propaganda.
This wouldn't be a problem for the otterbox cased I've had. Once, several years ago while going through my divorce, I threw my (HTC HD2) phone down a flight of cement steps, impacting first at the very bottom fairly hard. The phone survived without nary a scratch, dent, or defect; I was actually still on the call when I picked it up several moments later. The case did get a bit scratched up, though.
While that phone is sadly no longer with us (best one I've ever had - the hardware buttons have stopped working, still might be fixable with a little investigation...), I have no doubt that a similarly equipped phone with an otterbox would survive simlarly. I'd definately run this app on it, and, in fact, might be tempted to rig the game a little bit.
The only other phone I've had to survive stuff like that was one of the pre-polyphonic Nokia flip phones that pretty much everyone had, right before cell service became a 'mass consumer' thing.
This thread reminds me of the 'iPhone throwing competitions' I heard of happening up in one of the Nordic countries. Related, maybe?
The problem Microsoft has is that they stopped being a company that has innovative products a long time ago - arguably they never started, because their 'traditional' linear products (OS, Office) had too much momentum.
Look at Microsoft Research, for instance. The one notable product to come out of that is the Kinect and related technologies. We've seen MS ads now for years for something similar to SketchInsight, which looks incredible - but no working POC for anyone to ogle or demo. This would be a Killer App in a heartbeat for pretty much everyone I know - and the missing link that MS has so much needed for Windows 'tablets' for the past decade.
Then you've got things like their AI and machine learning research, as well as OS research projects. Those show promise, but don't see much light in marketable products. Imagine what MS could've done with "Windows Mobile/Phone" had they not focused on changing UI paradigms against peoples' will?
The biggest thing MS has going for them at this point is their vendor lock-in, and it's much worse than we feared it could be back in the 1990s. "Cloud services" were so far in the future they weren't really conceived. Today, we've got everything in the MS stack integrating tightly with Office 365 - and Exchange is most certainly the worst offender in this regard, with much of the traditional functionality available in 2003 and 2008, and fixed greatly in 2008, gone again for O365 integration. If you're a MS shop, you're more or less stuck, and options for migrating that data off their platforms diminishes as time goes on simply by the motion of the machine - regardless of any actual, needed features present in the upgraded products. (When was the last time you've heard of someone upgrading MS products for anything other than 'compatibility with everyone else, and bug/security fixes'?
A couple things stand out here.
1) There is no metal suitable for bullets other than lead - unless we want to shoot some other heavy metal. Pick.
2) If you're going to claim higher crime rates are related to lead poisoning, you should also consider that lower crime rates are related to high per capita firearm ownership (and in turn, shooting). There is no association here, this is a strawman argument.
Yep. In light of these windows nodes getting exploited, I decided last night that I'm going to set up a tor node VM, with limited bandwidth, just for the purposes of providing an additional hop.
Tor use is likely to increase significantly due to all the domestic spying everyone has become aware of here in the West. This is both an opportunity for Tor as well as a challenge: there will be more users, and more people who were iffy about running high bandwidth nodes will likely do so, but there will also be more clueless users and more governmental targeting of this 'darknet' to try to monitor everyone.
It poses another opportunity for Tor: improve the design and architecture, or even just the distribution, to make it easier for non-savvy users to be secure. Pre-packaged installers that jail up a minimal Linux install from which to run Tor? Who knows.
It's trivial to use Tor in a secure fashion. In fact, if you need the security provided by Tor, chances are you're better off doing it this way instead:
1) Download Tails
2) Burn to CD
3) Boot disk
4) Use Tor
How hard was that?
(Personally, I use IE5 and Windows 2000 for Tor. Nobody's going to try to exploit that... and yes, I'm kidding.)
10kg of grain for 1kg of meat? Try about half that, and that's at the final stretch for only a very small amount of weight. Keep in mind that grain will not provide the nutrients a human needs (regardless of which grain we're talking about), while that 1kg of meat will.
Most cows are not fed a steady diet of corn/grain. They graze for most of their lives. They do this on sub-optimal land, harvested land, and various other locations where crops are not or can not be grown.
I'd mod you up if I could.
So many of the anti-meat crowd are completely oblivious to how cattle ranching is primarily done these days. Managed intensive rotational grazing isn't the sought after ideal, it's reality for pretty much everyone I know who ranches and is holding on or doing well, and it's been that way for probably a decade or more now.
These idiots think cows are grown in vats and fed a steady diet of bubble gum and corn syrup in a 1920s style slaughterhouse.
Forgive me for asking this, because it seems like wires have been crossed to result in this question... but what exactly does meat have to do with dairy? IE, it doesn't have anything to do with dairy.
I would argue that if it's possible to grow meat that's just as wholesome as grass-fed beef (arguably more so because it won't have any environmental contaminants at all) and at the same price, the practice of raising and killing of animals is no longer justified in the slightest. It's a morally tough call today as it is.
So what are you proposing? Are you in the least bit familiar with how cattle are raised, either the 'farmed' variety or the ranged variety?
What exactly the alternative to killing and eating the cattle?
I see three options, in light :
1) Kill them all / exterminate them to the point of extinction
2) Let 800-1500lb cows range free as 'wild animals', allowing them to die to extinction within a human generation due to how stupid and human dependent they are (but not before people are trampled and gored by the thousands due to cattle having no fear of men).
3) put them all in zoos for the silly urban people
I don't suppose anyone has even bothered to note the environmental cost or the scalability of this test tube beef process, either. If you think mass produced ethanol from biomass is tenuous, try this on for size... (And if you don't, you're not paying attention or thinking.)
This "don't eat the moos" plan has a lot of holes, this being not the least of them. What're you going to do with all the otherwise-unusable land used for grazing - let it lay fallow? (We're talking about most of the states of NE, SD, WY, MT, etc. where farming is markedly more environmentally destructive and has little return, even with the most advanced intensive methods currently known.)
The short answer is: you don't.
You fake it until you make it, or can corner the guy in a dark alley and beat it out of him.
In all seriousness, I've been there probably more than most. I've worked most of my career for managed service providers (of varying quality) where there is no environmental documentation to speak of, in most cases, and almost invariably things are a complete goddamn mess because they're going from in-house to outsourced for a reason. More often than not, you're expected to replace 3-5 as many people as you are - all while handling many other customers at the same time, in similar scenarios.
I was blessed several years ago by replacing 6 in-house IT staff in an academic environment by myself; I took over their full role, to the exception of a guy who came to do desktop stuff several times a week. Almost exclusively Linux systems, many with fairly exceptional setups, and lots of stupid interdependency: the previous 'administrators' were more developers than they were admins (and yes, that is an insult for a competent admin).
There were fewer than 80 physical servers and a couple hundred additional workstations (Windows/Mac/Linux). Half a dozen different distros, no virtualization. Half a dozen subnets, most carved up poorly with little forethought (or brought over from 'very legacy' environments and not migrated using best practices). Lots of one-off solutions were difficult to support and had few tenable options for migrating away from - situations where you just pray that hardware gets good enough, fast enough, to make what you need to do tenable to the users.
It took me a full year to get everything to the point where I was comfortable with the environment enough to know what was happening without needing the monitoring systems I'd put in place to tell me. This seems about right in my experience, at least for me. It's taken roughly a year, consistently, to get comfortable with the full scope of tasks and requirements of an environment from the users up through the ranks.
Until then, you fake it until you make it.
Isn't the PS4 shipping with ATI graphics/an AMD CPU?
FreeBSD plays games "as well or better" than Linux? On what criteria, the Phoronix benchmark which gave the FBSD and Ubuntu beta box different hardware?