What's even more heartwarming is the AC techs kind and gentle transplanting of live ants into the warm and cuddly confines of the electrical boxes.

My comment was pointing out that 3D printing has yet to change much of anything and starting down the road to seriously legislatively restrict the technology because of some ill founded fears isn't very useful (except perhaps to Government who wants yet another handle to control folks).

You can already obtain ceramic / plastic composite weapons. You can already make a zip gun out of heavy plastic tubing without the stupid 3D printer. It's really a straw man argument.

"I wonder what it would look like if it explodes"

Nope, it was most definitely "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes" and I found thinking it that way to be jarring in its own right. Ten minutes later I had the answer. Large numbers of people were watching and it caused a level of intensity of emotion and feeling among large numbers of people that the intensity was enough to function at a different and atypical energy level.

"Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics"

I'm too old to change career tracks, I have absolutely zero interest in working in the repressive hamster cage necessary to do research in those fields, living in an ivory tower or playing research paper games. Those fields require a lab, equipment and a lot of money. As soon as you hit string theory and multiverse we simply don't have any way to do experimental research because everything is at a level beyond our current ability to measure anything.

Probably the only ones doing viable research on the subject are Zen masters, though they may also be masters of self deception.

I'm just not opting in to the reductionism that thinks just because we have huge digital computers that they are the right tool to simulate biological intelligence. You might actually be able to fake some of the mechanics but its going to be wildly inefficient and contrived, and I think critical peices will be missing, probably the parts that we call "soul".

That's not really true. CS students program, and a lot of them are very good at it. But it's a means to and end, not an end in and of itself. You can do a lot of things on paper in CSâ"and you shouldâ"but there's a practical value to the actual hands on work. Every doctor of chemistry has physically done the lab work themselves at some point, even if most of the work they do as a researcher is simulated.

The programming that you do in the industry teaches you that good enough is sometimes the best. Algorithmic purity is secondary. And if you have to sit and contemplate algorithmic complexity, you've probably done it wrong (barring some highly mathematical work, like high-frequency trading; I'm just a video game programmer).

You could make one with a 3D printer.

OK. So we have a world where people can sneak around with .22 caliber one shot pistols that are not visible to metal detectors. I mean, everyone will want one, no? This changes the entire security dynamic, no?

Lions and tigers and bears. Oh. My.

Plastic gun printing changes absolutely nothing. The current stamping and seizing about this is simply panem et circenses.

Enjoy, citizen.

Where's the kaboom? You call that an earth shattering kaboom?

Oh. Wait.

I

It's relatively easy to get a small amount of highly radioactive material, say Cobalt-60, used in medical isotope generation. A little goes a long way if you're just trying to upset people by making a Geiger counter go nuts. Break into some decommissioned Russian hospital, some third world facility with poor security or steal it in NYC. A couple of sticks of dynamite, a timer and panic time.*

* For instructional and entertainment use only. Not to be taken as an endorsement or plan.

Yeah. Like Cessna 172s. I'm not sure why this is so different from flying around in a single engine prop plane - the kind you can rent for a couple of hundred per hour. Or buy for a small multiple of a drone cost. And it comes with a pilot so you don't have to worry (too much) about crashing.

"Yep, that guy! Over there! Jump him, he's a terrorist!"

"Who me? I just got my thyroid irradiated, give me a break."

Talk about adding insult to injury.

Instead of "using the content ID match system", how about they use the "DMCA notification" so that everyone has their fair claim and response under the law and, if needed, in a court rather than letting Google just turn it into both a heavy-handed big-guy-versus-little-guy squashing and "monetizing" opportunity?

"I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you."

Ya know you actually don't have a clue what it was but you do seem to have that special kind of arrogance that makes you think can just fill in the blanks about something for which you have no actual information and make it fit your world view.

It was 10 minutes before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded while watching the pre launch with no sound. The thought flashed through my head quite vividly, "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes". You could maybe explain it away that I'd deduced that conditions were ripe for it to explode but since I didn't really know anything about the O ring issues and cold at the time I had no basis for deducing that there was much of a chance it would explode beyond the fact that all launches have some chance of exploding.

It is a chronic characteristic of our species, especially the arrogant, intelligent ones like yourself that we think we have it all figured out and that everything falls to Occam's Razor. Time after time it turns out that we actually don't know it all, in fact we don't know much about a lot of things.

The people most likely to make the leaps of discovery are the ones who have no regard for "conventional wisdom". I wont be placing any bets on an AI, any time soon, to come up with an original insight on anything. You seem to have a lot in common with the brand of intelligence I would expect an AI to produce.

That's the entire point of all of this. They just want to be sure that the government is the only one Google is invading the privacy of citizens on behalf of.

That's all they can do. Put you up on a stand and make you answer silly questions. They can't shoot you. They can't even put you in jail (unless you don't show up, that's Contempt).

Besides, Washington is beautiful this time of year.

That's part of the reason why FEC (Florida East Coast Railroad) has never been actively *hostile* towards passenger trains, compared to railroads like CSX(*). FEC runs mile-long trains hauling limestone at 60mph on glass-smooth welded-rail tracks that are maintained to higher standards than some stretches of track in the NEC itself. FEC's one non-negotiable mandate for voluntary passenger service on their tracks has always been that someone else had to pay to lay down a second track, maintain it to FEC's no-compromise high standards, and equip every train that runs on them with in-cab signaling and the kind of automation rarely found outside of Japan(**).

Once Amtrak, Florida, and a federal funding act or two cleared the way for the feds to pay most of the bulk cost of double-tracking FEC from Jacksonville to Miami, FEC announced that Amtrak was welcome with open arms (Amtrak itself is still trying to scrape up funding for the trainsets themselves, or come up with a good way to split & join NY-Florida trains in Jacksonville so half can proceed straight down the east coast to Miami, and the other half can run to Orlando & Tampa (historically, Amtrak has always resisted splitting/joining trains anywhere besides an endpoint).

(*)About 15 years ago, FDOT approached CSX with a request to double-track it from Auburndale to Tampa for Tampa-Miami passenger rail. CSX refused. FDOT offered to TRIPLE-track it... and CSX still refused. Exasperated, FDOT offered to elevate a ~12 mile segment running through Lakeland, and CSX told them that the only way they'd voluntarily allow it is if FDOT agreed to let CSX refund the purchase price and demolish it at will if it later decided that the support columns or track structure were in the way of whatever they felt like doing. That was the turning point when FDOT decided that any future rail route between Orlando and Tampa simply *had* to run along I-4 instead of CSX... CSX was impossible to deal with in any sane way, and taking the corridor via eminent domain would have ended up costing more than building it down the middle of I-4 instead (I-4 was planned for complete reconstruction over the next 10-20 years anyway, and FDOT owned a fairly wide corridor that was straight and flat, so they just designed the empty space into the new road and bridges so it would be there when the day came to build the new tracks).

(**)FEC is a HUGE proponent of cross-training and automation, and because it operates entirely within a single state, it can get away with telling its union to go to hell over things that would get CSX crucified. For example, FEC requires all engineers and conductors to be cross-trained and capable of serving either role as needed (sensible and efficient, but *vehemently* opposed by railroad unions because it means the conductor can operate the train while the engineer takes a break, instead of having to staff a second engineer while the conductor twiddles his thumbs). I believe it also requires engineer-conductors to have college degrees.