Re: Hammers and guns and Jim and Michael

The links I provided in a way-too-long post show that there are both organized groups of individuals and individuals working hard to develop practical 3D printing capabilities bent towards this aim. Particularly, a lot of time on the idea of the lower receivers, which are what is the controlled part of an auto weapon in the US.

I'm kind of curious how all this is going to play out in countries where guns are much more restricted, though. Even a single shot capability before the weapon becomes useless could be enough to change local situations for law enforcement practices. In the US, probably not so much.

Since spending time actually building a 3D printer and now having the ability to produce not only very nice and rather complex project boxes (big boon for me) but also the ability to print out larger capacity magazines that actually work well... I am beginning to realize increasingly the potential impacts of 3D printing. It's not exactly the same situation as when the Altair 8800 and, later, the IMSAI 8080 appeared on the scene. (Creating one component to an acceptance of low cost computers into business -- the other component being Visicalc on the Apple II.) But there are similarities and perhaps a promise of some of the kinds of revolutionary social change, as well.

It will be interesting to see how the next few years play out.

Jon

More nonsense.

Say "baaaa".

Nonsense.

Very good point. Perhaps even more so. There weren't many companies that went into the service bureau business with Altairs or IMSAIs but I see that coming with 3-D printing. One of our layout engineers is thinking of getting into 3-D printing as a side business.

Sure will. CNC wood milling machines are commonplace now. I wonder if the cost of CNC metal milling machines will plummet, too.

Of course. It's been stated in this thread at least fifty times; self defense!

Speak for yourself. It's not only crazy people who break into homes or mug people on the street. Idiot, not all crimes are committed by people with guns. Most are not because there are *very* stiff penalties for possessing a firearm while committing a felony. However, being armed *is* a great equalizer. Something between 1 and two MILLION crimes PER YEAR are stopped with guns.

You simply want to disarm the population because you feel sorry for the criminals.

Ignorance is bliss. You're apparently the happiest person on the planet.

They *DIDN'T* have guns. They were CONFISCATED, moron!

Your facts aren't. Your head is so far...

That's because there was no packaged software market. Well, except for Microsoft's papertape basic. When BYTE Shop showed up, small businesses starting buying finished units but then suddenly discovered the lack of packaged application software. (By that time, CP/M and some additional BASIC interpreters existed.) An operating system and a language doesn't help a small business much and instead forces them to find a "custom" programmer. I made a lot of easy money at the time because of it. Getting work just required letting BYTE Shop know you existed so they could sell their hardware without getting it thrown back at them through their front window by disgruntled company buyers who couldn't use it.

The enabling application was Visicalc. Every single business could use it, immediately. However, it was written for the Apple II, at first (which was only being sold, prior toVisicalc, as a very expensive game machine -- lowsy resolution, only 40 characters per line using a standard TV set for display.) So Apple IIs suddenly started selling like hotcakes and the Altair and IMSAI soon disappeared from the market (as also did TRS-80, which provided BASIC but not Visicalc.) IBM's PC team (there were three internally competing PC development teams within IBM at the time) insisted on providing a ROM BASIC and a Visicalc application because of that success, I think.

Agreed. People still use copy centers despite the fact that home printing is also quite common. So even after some time goes by, I think I fully agree with you. Service companies will be able to afford higher quality, faster, and bigger machines as well as some software and support in creating realizable 3D objects that will print out well.

It's crossed my mind, as well.

I think this is going to impact more than a few things. The freely available software is actually pretty darned good, and getting better. Commercial software will be still better. But the main thing will be pre-packaged 3D files you can just download for a specific purpose.

But there will also be a lot of new copyright and patent law changes being pushed through Congress in the near future by large corporations looking to protect their markets and also protect themselves against other large companies. This is a frontier, of sorts, and there will be a lot of new gunslingers out there looking for a shoot-out.

This also happened in the late 1970's and early 1980's, when rental businesses opened up and rented out software that was then copied. Companies stood to lose a lot of money and changed their licensing. But it was new licensing that had never been tested in court before. Took years, but they completely changed existing law and transformed what was considered "normal" before.

Will happen here, too, I suspect. But I can't predict in what ways.

Jon

I just did. But it appears you Euro-peons can't read.

I've DESIGNED stuff for GOI-MOD(*)... they're intelligent people.

(*) Government Of Israel - Ministry Of Defense

Don't let your weenie politics get you in my sights >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Sure. If he wants to be a target >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Self defense.

According to the legend Cain murdered Able and this does predate guns by a few years.

'Someone' is rarely "prepared for any defensive move."

The fact is people do defend themselves with guns and blathering otherwise is nothing but lip exercise.

Try pulling a finger and see how far that gets you.

Putting yourself in a position to be ambushed in the dark is no more evidence that guns don't work than driving your car off a 10,000 ft cliff is proof that seatbelts don't work.

"The Netherlands was in shock Sunday after a gunman killed six people and wounded 11 in a packed shopping mall before committing suicide . . Witnesses said he opened fire with an automatic firearm on shoppers and merchants, striding around without haste. . . But disaster management professor Eelco Dykstra told the station: "This type of thing can happen anywhere."

If one counted the number of mass shootings proportional to country size, Europe "is more affected than America," he said.

Dykstra lamented The Netherlands' lack of expertise in profiling potential mass killers and detecting early warning signs."

Sleep tight.

The FBI should list private citizen justifiable homicide. There aren't many. Usually a few hundred per year. Documented DGU is quite rare. Most DGU consists of unverifiable bullshit stories.

It is EXACTLY what the 2011 FBI table lists.

Well, your a bloodthirsty sort, aren't you? It's only defense if you kill someone.

Keep telling the lies. Maybe one day even you will believe them.

Schuler, Hamilton and Schoen are nutcase leftists who only believe what's rattling around in their nutcase brains... never to be bothered by facts. And THEY are the dangerous ones... if THEY were to undergo a psycho evaluation they'd be denied the right to own a gun. ...Jim Thompson

Who is that asshat that does DGU phone surveys? Some s*****ad from Florida? This would qualify:

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Well I was watching Honey Boo Boo and I heard a noise outside. I got my Glock, opened the door, and shouted "I'm packing heat..get out of my yard." Nothing else was heard. Golly gee whiz, that was a most epic DGU.

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That vast majority of DGUs have no evidence that anyone was deterred. All you have is the testimony of a paranoid person.

Fabricating a stories isn't evidence of anything.

And just what 'evidence' do you have for your assertion?

As I said, your a bloodthirsty sort, aren't you? It's only defense if you kill someone.

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary, depending on the study's population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz cite between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year. Low end estimates by Hemenway cite approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year. Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics identified for 1992 82,500 case of reported firearm self defense with 30,600 having 'attacked' the offender and 51,900 threatening the offender.

The numbers don't 'go away' simply because they're inconvenient to your preconceived notions.

You don't understand that real, smart weapons are still fanatasy.

A rock is smarter than you will ever be.

Sounds like a death wish, unless you are a stunning blue eyed blonde babe.

His ignorance is stunning, anyway.

You know someone is firmly entrenched in lying when they have to snip all previous text in an attempt to obfuscate it.

The issue, at least what the President 'claims' to be the issue, is so called 'assault weapons' (a fabricated non term), aka 'scary looking' semi-automatic rifles, and 'large capacity magazines', not "firearms," and the post you keep claiming was a 'lie' explicitly, and 100% accurately, compared murders by rifle, at 323, to murders by "blunt objects" (including 'hammers') at 496 (both taken from the 2011 FBI crime statistics).

The 'point' was that if 323 murders, by rifle, are 'sufficient' to 'ban' that category of weapon (actually only a portion of them because the President swears he's not out to take away your hunting rifles, like the one used to kill President Kennedy) then why isn't 50% more murders 'sufficient' to ban 'blunt instruments'?

Or, even worse at 726 murders, over twice an many as by rifles, shouldn't we 'do something' about cutting down on the number of hands, fists, and feet?

The argument is that since, it is presumed, most people would consider 'bans' in the latter two categories 'absurd' then perhaps the same logic should apply to the first.