This isn't about personal responsibility, it's about safety and security. The people who want to ban 3D printed guns (and guns in general) are the people who don't use or want to use guns and want to even the playing field for themselves by getting rid of guns altogether.

Where does the personal responsibility come in? I don't expect the people who are 3D printing guns are all doing it for personal safety and security. I imagine some of them want to print guns so they don't have legal traceable guns and want to go kill people with them and I don't want one of those people killed to be me.

Should we really wait for someone to go on a killing spree with a 3D printed gun or any gun for that matter until they "prove" they can't handle a level of personal responsibility? No, we should probably be proactive about it and limit the ways people can have access to dangerous weaponry.

Why do you find it insulting? When you're given a weapon without training or practice it SHOULD be assumed you're not going to be responsible with it. We require licenses to drive because cars are dangerous without proper instruction, as are guns and most things that we need licenses to operate.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg wants everyone to become a plumber so he could lower his plumbing costs. That's the ticket.

My brother used to work for Bloomberg the financial company as a programmer and he was getting paid a shitload of money for it right out of school. If Bloomberg was speaking purely in his own self interest, he would be telling everybody to be a programmer so he could lower those costs.

Being a plumber is more secure than anything in IT. It's not a job that can be outsourced and it requires some training, so not anybody can do it right off the bat.

I work in a creative field (animation and film) and for me the smart phone inspires tons of creativity. Look at all of the amazing apps and games that creative people are doing in this new medium that wouldn't have happened if the developers weren't addicted to their smart phones.

People sitting alone in their living room and being bored doesn't inspire creativity. Creativity is inspired when people surround themselves with other creative ideas and people, and with smart phones, creative ideas and people are closer than ever, right at your fingertips..

Boring people will continue to be bored and uncreative, but creative people will find inspiration in everything, especially in new technologies like mobile devices.

Why does that matter? It means more US workers will have jobs, and foxconn will still have to pay US taxes for the work done here. Still a win all around.

They could just bottle it up and sell it as homeopathic medicine.

And what benefit is that? Apparently, I benefited from dozens of children being lost per year and I didn't even know about it! Thanks, lost children!

I'm sure their parents feel a little differently though and wish their kids had a GPS tracker on them.

Lots of my friends from the Mid-West and South have lots of stories like yours, about being in the woods, away from the rest of the world and being alone while camping or whatever. While that's all well and good, and you could go start a reality show where you survive the wilderness by snatching fish from the river using only your hands, most of society - me included - grew up or live most of their lives in larger urban areas where they need to depend on other people for their survival. There's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, humans have created everything we have today because we work better in groups and naturally rely on each other.

The only reason I'd say would benefit people from having their technology taken away and left in the woods to fend for themselves is that they'll learn how linked they are to each other and won't take all of the hard work that people have put into creating the technology and a functional society for granted.

I have self-control and confidence to do things on my own as well, and I didn't have to get lost in the woods to do so, but hey, different strokes...

I don't see a downside to GPS tracking your kids. We use GPS on our smart phones to find directions to places in our direct neighborhood. It's ubiquitous. The whole "Children need to find out how to get unlost by themselves" is complete luddite garbage. Children are entering a future where this kind of technology is intrinsically linked to their development. Keeping them inside of a tech-free bubble, just because the parents never grew up with the same technology around them ("And they turned out fine!") is just as bad as brainwashing them into religion at an early age, and yet it's something I often hear from my friends and co-workers who are in the technology industry. I also often see it here on Slashdot whenever someone poses a question on what technology they should introduce to their kids.

It sucks so much, you put 180+ hours into it... makes sense.

You and the rest of slashdot are people. These are corporations. They hire teams of people whose sole jobs are to limit the tax burden for the company. If other companies are creating tax havens with offshore shell companies and your accounting team isn't then they're not doing their job and should be fired and replaced with a better team. It's up to the government to close the loopholes on the tax code so that these games can't be played.

Digital won because it's cheaper and easier to manage. Footage goes directly from camera to the editing bay in the same day, as opposed to having to purchase hundreds of feet of film, go through a day or 2 of developing and then seeing your footage. It's just generally easier to produce. The footage, though, DOESN'T look as good, sorry. The most popular digital film camera - the RED - has horrible rolling shutter and noticeable compression issues as well as a way lower dynamic range. Sure, these problems are going to go away over time, but don't think that digital won because it LOOKS any better.

How is loser pays more fair? It still screws the little guy. If I have a legit case against a huge megacorporation and I decide to sue them and lose because they have the best lawyers money can buy, should I have to pay for their million dollar defense? Hell no. Whereas the big megacorporation will have zero problem paying out for my legal defense if I win. The corporations who have lots and lots of money always have the upper hand.

Here's the obligatory proportions post. How many people have been arrested for the housing market crash thus far? How much monetary damage did those people actually do in comparison to this guy?... yeah.

I'd almost rather see that than have them cut to the dude's face as they usually do.

How does

translate to

Yes, MySpace was a competitor but it was a much smaller market back then and Facebook did it better, so there wasn't too big of a barrier to switching. Now, if people switch completely, they have to take the hundreds of photos they've posted, and lose years of status updates, and wait for all their hundreds of friends to switch over as well - it's a big task just like reformatting your harddrive which is something that most people are also loathe to do even when it would end up being better for them.

Circles is a great concept, one that Facebook is already implementing in some fashion, and even if it's not better than Google's it's Good Enough For Now. Yes, it is too early to be saying G+ is a failed experiment and I didn't say that. I just said you can't compare the environment that Facebook thrived in back then to the environment that Google is facing today. It's a very different landscape and tossing out numbers of early adopters isn't a show of Google's success. I'm also an early adopter, and I still use G+ with Facebook, but I use Facebook a lot more.

Look, you can't really compare the timelines between Facebook and Google+. Facebook has been around for almost a decade, and when it came out it didn't have many competitors, the whole social networking concept was new and experimental. Now Facebook is the established brand in social networking - pretty much invented the market - and it's going to be incredibly difficult for Google to topple it, even if the numbers show it to be oh so much more successful in the short term than Facebook was when it started.