It was a small room with a PDP 8/i attached to a KSR-33 running Edusystem BASIC, and a PDP 8/a hooked up to a DECWriter with 2 8" floppy drives running OS/8. I spent most of my high school years in there. I founded my school's computer club and wrote all sorts of programs, including one that printed banner messages on the paper tape punch and a biorhythm generator (hey, it was the late '70s) that ended up in the DECUS catalog.

One of my two high school yearbook pictures is me sitting in front of the DECWriter. By the time I was 17, I had outgrown the computer room, had my own TRS-80 and was dialing into MIT-AI.

That's not how 3D printed guns work in the real world. Yes, a gun with an FDM barrel is going to give up the ghost after one or two shots (might have better luck with .22s, but not anything I'd be very confident in.)

But no one 3D prints the uppers (slide and barrel on a pistol or BCG and barrel on a rifle.) Those are all non-regulated parts you can buy mail order. You print whatever the registered component is (typically the lower on a rifle, the frame on a pistol), buy the rest, and put it together. If you go to EveryGunPart.com, you can get a kit with everything but the registered part, like this Springfield XD set

One reason you don't tend to see 3D printed Sigs is that the registered part for a Sig pistol is a piece of formed sheet metal that you can't print easily. But Glocks, Springfields, S&W, AR15s, pretty much anything you can think of, the actual registered part you need a background check to buy is something that is easily printable and has relatively low amounts of stress applied to it during operating of the firearm. I've put thousands of round through my 3D printed pistols and my AR15 (admitted, printed in CF-Nylon) without a single issue.

As long as A) It is legal to build your own firearms for personal use, and B) most firearms components are not registered parts according to the ATF, it will be safe, relatively easy, and impossible to stop people from 3D printing guns. However, 3D printed guys are a distraction from the real issue, because they still do take a modicum of skill to put together. Even the easiest of handguns (a G17, for example) has lots of springy bits and tweaking you need to make when you put it together; let's not even get into something like an XD40 with a palm safety that took me a good two hours to put together the first time I tried.

Almost all of the high-profile 3D printed gun cases were about people who could have simply walked into a gun shop and purchased the gun legally if they wanted to. Your generic street hoodlum doesn't have an Ender 3 at home, they know a guy who knows a guy who has a case of Kel-Tecs.

And as to the last great bugaboo, traceability... There is this myth that if you recover a bullet at scene, there's some master database that lets you figure out what gun it came from, and that there's another database has who owns that gun. Here's the reality:

1) The only "master database" record that exists is who the manufacturer sold the original gun to (by serial number).
2) When the dealer sells the gun to an individual, they keep a record of the sale, but do not report it to the ATF.
3) If an individual sells a gun (to another individual or back to a dealer), they are supposed to keep a record of the sale.
4) The dealer can destroy the records of a gun sale after 20 years.
5) The only way to trace a gun is by the serial number on the registered part of a recovered gun, bullets only tell you that two bullets *may* have come from the same gun.

So the gun the police recover can in fact be traced back, assuming that the user didn't file off the serial numbers, all sales were properly recorded and the records retained, everyone in the chain of ownership is still alive or their records available, none of the sales are over 20 years old, etc.

In short, 3D printed guns are not some easy-mode way to gun ownership. They require gunsmithing skills, are typically about the same price as buying the gun used, and in general are not much less traceable than a normal gun.

I don't know what 3D printer you own, but I use PrusaSlicer with an Ankermake, and both will run perfectly fine on an air-gapped network.
Even if you could require printers/slicers to phone home (good luck!), all it takes is a few minutes with Fusion360 (free for personal use) to modify an existing STL file for an auto-seer or other "fun mode" modification in ways that don't effect it's functionality but would make it hard for scanning software to flag.

At the time I left 3 years ago, IBM was basically telling their employees "Whatever you think up, if you think it's patentable, submit it." I heard a horror story of someone on the team in charge of the program, where she came up with an idea on the spot during a webinar she was running on it, and submitted it to the program on the spot, as a demo.

One of my 2 IBM patents was a valid (if software) patent for something innovative I came up with and that ended up in a product. One was something I came up with in an hour, wrote up, and eventually got accepted by the USPTO. I had left by then, so I didn't get my $1,200 for it.

I was lucky (?) enough to spend a fair amount of time working with Chaosnet, That Which Came Before/Around The Same Time. It used 1/2" CATV cables and required you do make a vampire tap using specialized tools in specific locations on the cable if you wanted to add a port. Get the depth of the coring operation on the side of the cable wrong, and you just screwed up an entire cable run, which would need to be replaced. Ethernet cabling with RF connectors was SO much nicer to deal with!

This is a tremendous opportunity for some other country to enable lazy WoW players to trade cash for levels.

When Starliner started missing their dates and NASA realized they'd have to move up the Crew-2 dates to keep coverage, it required a contract change. SpaceX came back and said "we'll move up the dates, but in return we'll get to reuse hardware from now on." NASA agreed.

They are in fairly low orbits so there's more protecting them than stuff up at geostationary. The biggest problem would probably be that a big storm expands the height of the atmosphere temporarily, and can mess with orbits or make satellites use more stationkeeping fuel. I suspect that anything big enough to cause major problems for Starlink would also cause major problems on the ground (like knocking out major power grids), so we'd have bigger problems to worry about...

Our cat, Esmerelda, figured out that by hanging on the thumb latch of our bedroom door and flailing her body, she could open it when we were sleeping. This isn't a one-time thing, she does it so regularly that we had to put and hook and eye latch on the inside of the door to keep her out while we sleep.

Way before

I once had the privilege of interviewing the build team for an article I was writing for the Christian Science Monitor on reality TV. I was obviously more than a bit star struck, but managed to do my job. The high point of the interview for me is when I refered to Grant as the Chief Science Officer for the team, and he giggled uncontrollably.

It was always a sweet memory for me, but now it will be tinged bittersweet. I've gotten used to my idols that are older than me dying, but one who's 10 years younger just seems wrong...

Actually, chemical disinfection of the masks with steriwipes or bleach has been shown to disinfect them well enough for reuse. Check out the reports on the makethemasks.com website where they cultured a mask before and after cleaning after a day of use.

Well, given that I'm the National Coordinator and talk to the creators and their team on a regular basis, I think I know sometime about the subject. The masks have in fact been tested, you can see the results on the makethemasks.com website. One of the regional coordinators in bringing in certified KN95 filters in quantity and many of the coordinators have been buying from him at cost to distribute with the masks. The reality is that the masks WERE tested for CO2 exchange and seal quality, and when fitted properly with NPDM weatherstripping as a seal, met N95 standards. We don't claim they are to be used in place of an N95 because the FDA has not approved the design for that use yet and we're operating under the current "use what you can get your hands on" guidance. The disclaimer is there because none of us want to be sued. The one we give out with the masks is even more verbose. We *should* be covered under good samaritan laws, but it never hurts to CYA when medical things are involved.

The masks have also been evaluated independently by a number of hospitals' infection control departments and they are still asking for them. I'm currently providing them two 2 hospitals and 3 county nursing homes in NH. Skepticism is a good thing, but sometimes all the bases really have been covered.

An N-95 surgical mask wastes a lot of filter material on the sides of your face, which don't contribute to your breathing quality. This lets you take that otherwise useless material and make it go farther. And as to the disclaimer, you've evidently never had an encounter with the American legal system...

First off, they are intended for healthcare professionals, not people infected with Covid-19. Secondly, the folks in Montana actually did extensive testing for CO2 clearance and mask fit, and it works as well as a commercial N95 respirator when correctly fitted. Test results are available on the web site. I have to say, I wear mine whenever I go out, and have no difficulty breathing.