So you're paying these developers some kind of contract rate "by the hour" but you then want to impose a fixed scope and hold them to it later? I mean if you're providing them with a complete (perfect) functional spec, then ask them to bid on it as a fixed price, make sure they include a 1 year warranty for any software defects, and then by contract they have to fix the bugs. Sounds like you just want the benefits of paying by the hour without any of the negatives.

This story isn't about 3D printing weapons at home, it's about people doing things that make all people with hobbyist 3D printers at home (myself included) look like gun-nut-freaks to the general public (before that it was just pretty nerdy). The first time I mentioned my printer to my mother, she told me about some cop show (CSI, Criminal Minds?) episode she'd seen the previous night where the killer had 3D printed his handgun to get it through security. This has now become the primary thing that the general public associates with 3D printers. It's sad.

You can only upgrade from one version to the next - you can't skip a version.

As someone who has a 3D printer, you glossed over the part on how to actually get it to work nicely for you, which is a pain in the butt and takes a long time, with lots and lots of frustrating trial and error. But since it's called "printing" it must just be as simple as clicking a mouse, right?

It takes more than the metadata being stripped - the content in question has to be removed from the author's site or all attributions of the media to the author have to be removed from across the internet. Just stripping the metadata isn't enough, clearly.

No, the work must be entirely anonymous - that is, no copy of it with attribution can exist within reasonable reach of the person looking for it. Just stripping metadata isn't enough if the work exists elsewhere with proper attribution. If you have made an awesome picture and have it on your blog - that's enough to protect it. If you make an awesome photo and upload it to some website anonymously with no contact information, then it's public domain. That seems fair enough to me.

How do you think they get the co-ordinates for the cell tower? Even if you don't personally use satellites, you undoubtedly rely on services that do, even if you are unaware of it.

Then complain about that future version in the future. Every single thing could be misuses if it evolves 5-10 years towards some nefarious end - if we all adopted your logic we'd have nothing.

Any "detector" can detect drugs in a high school, if it tells you to open enough lockers.

Yes - that you read a site which only has stories about guns saving lives, and not the stories in which they claim lives, giving you a biased opinion of how they affect society. Just as if someone spent their time reading OnlyReallyNiceThings.com they will probably thing everything's really cool. Guns are necessary to protect people from other people with guns. Remove the guns, and things get a lot nicer. If guns really made everything wonderful, the murder rate in the US would be the lowest in the developed world, not one of the worst.

Nope. You can't claim that with any sincerity. The action of slitting an artery with a knife is a lot more difficult, emotionally and physically, than simply pulling a trigger. You pretending otherwise for the sake of your argument paints you as either ignorant, or deceitful.

Most folks are not unwilling to provide for themselves, but simply incapable of doing so. You assuming they are all free-loaders speaks more of your view of humanity than of those you wish to degrade.

Anyone who thinks the PC is in any sense dying hasn't worked in an office that does business with other companies. There is a *huge* amount of work that consists of physically typing stuff into databases (purchase orders anyone?) and retrieving stuff from databases, and all of this work is done with a keyboard and mouse. Spreadsheets. Forms. Stuff still gets printed out and filed! Nobody wants a tablet to do this. I think there might be room for tablets out in the warehouse, but even those are likely to be Windows based. Mac? Sorry, businesses look at the price difference and can't stomach paying nearly twice as much for the hardware. I'm certain that home PC sales are diving, and that's probably a good thing, but in our office we're expanding the number of PCs because we want access to information everywhere, and more data entry everywhere, and they're cheap! PCs are the work-horse of enterprise data. So what if we're buying them with Windows 7 Pro on them instead of Windows 8? MS still makes money.

Because it's a service. The price doesn't matter.

Correlation does not imply causation. Get a grip.