3D printed guns

TRX
October 26, 2013
83:
@34:
It's a post-scarcity technological paradise populated by inhumanly ethical (thanks to the High Theory of Education) human beings. And most of them are pretty happy.
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You could just as easily view that as "brainwashed proletariat."

One man's ordered society is another man's oppressive regime.

TRX
October 26, 2013
84:
@30:
The outrage isn't that the spooks are spying on foreign leaders, but that they're spying on friendly ones.
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Like Australia and South Africa caught running spies in England in the 1960s?

Like Israel caught running spies in Canada and the USA in the 1970s and 1980s?

Those were embarrassing for the perpetrators... but just because a country is "friendly" doesn't mean all of it is, or that it will always be.

Germany and the USSR were Best Friends Forever until June of 1941. Better Soviet intelligence about their ally's intentions might have resulted in an entirely different world today.

TRX
October 26, 2013
87:
@58:
and see only that home made guns might actually improve and be really dangerous
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You don't need a 3D printer to make a gun at home. It is a very large and active hobby. It has been done with everything from files and blocks of mystery metal to homemade CNC equipment.

Take a look at: homegunsmith.com, weaponsguild.com, and weaponeer.net for dedicated builder forums. Gunco.net, uzitalk.net, ar15.com, theakforum.net, akfiles.com, and other general gun forums have huge builder sections. Even non-gun forums like practicalmachinist.com, homeshopmachinist.com, and pirate4x4.com have active builder sections, just to get you started. There are many more.

It does require sipping from the internet firehose, a modest investment in tools, and learning a few manual skills.

I guess the idea of a 3D printer is that you just buy a printer, load it with magic feedstock, download "My dEth ASSault bUllet hoZe.dxf" from bittorrent, and sit there watching it grow on the worktable like some particularly boring reality television. Unfortunately, the holdup is the magic plastic, which, despite continual "Real Soon Now!" propaganda, isn't here yet. Personally, I'd just wait for the nanotech version; you wouldn't even need a machine then, and you wouldn't need to buy the magic feedstock either. There'd probably be a nanotech programmer for your smartphone, yeah...

The problem with 3D printing a real gun, as opposed to something like defcad's toy, is that you're not just waiting for one breakthrough, you're waiting for a bunch of breakthroughs. And those happen, if at all, in their own good time. We're still waiting for alkahest, and room-temperature superconductors, and cold fusion, and people have put a lot of time and money into those.

TRX
October 26, 2013
88:
@66:
TI stands for Technical Instructions and covered things like the exact amount of carpet and type of desk and chair each grade was entitled to.
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Another possibly apocrypal story: a Westerner consulting at a Japanese company. Office space is short, so they clear out a storage room and put him in there. The next day he comes in, and there's a partition in the storage room, halving the space. Because corporate directives specified how many square feet of office space were to be allocated for each grade of employee, and as the storage room was too large for his equivalent grade, it obviously had to be cut down to the proper size...

TRX
October 26, 2013
89:
@72:
The only crime the average movie-goer could commit with one of those things was suicide.
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A numchuk is like a stick, except you can't thrust with it.

A walking stick would be a much more effective weapon.

TRX
October 26, 2013
90:
@85:
IIRC and am not mistaken, Soviet intelligence was accurate enough, but Stalin refused to act on it, either because he didn't believe it or some other reason.
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Many historians share your view, their scenario being that Stalin had basically climbed up into his ivory tower and pulled the ladder up after him, and therefore ignored anything that didn't agree with reality-as-he-wanted-it- to-be. He had more real power than any Tsar, legions of yes-men he was fond of executing for the slightest fault, and a median blood alcohol level that would qualify him as "legless" to most Breathalyzers.

I imagine maintaining a practical and balanced viewpoint would be difficult under such conditions...

TRX
October 28, 2013
131:
@125:
It isn't just the secret polices aspect, it's outright incompetence at a system level,
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I don't know of a book on the specific subject, but after the Russians started selling access to selected bits of the files of the former KGB, two things became apparent:

A) at the operational level, they had agents threaded far more deeply into Britain and the USA than anyone had reasonably expected

and B) not much of that data ever got to anywhere where it would have been useful.

The KGB wasn't so much an organization as a loose association of fiefdoms under a common roof, and knowledge was their currency of power. Groups sat on potentially useful information because it was more important to save it for political infighting within the organization than passing it on to "outsiders" like the rest of the government.

The other problem is, if you control the flow of information to and from the decision makers, you become a decision maker yourself... which is why most countries have more than one intelligence organization; part of their function is to keep each other in check.

TRX
October 29, 2013
159:
@140:
*here I'm talking about things like gestures, facial mobility, and carriage,
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Add slang and phrases to that. I once had a sizeable business deal collapse when the other party indicated he had no further interest in negotiation, take it or leave it. What he meant was something like "don't bother me with the details, just let me know when it's done."

The phrase in question was "just deal with it", which means something rather different between hip-hop California and Dixie.

TRX
October 29, 2013
160:
> make it impossible for sociopaths in public office to
> hide what they are.

"Sociopath" being defined as "whoever I don't like at the moment."