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Comment Re:Only one problem with this (Score 3, Insightful) 100

This, yes.

If you print a gun (or gun parts, depending on the part), it has to be traceable to an individual (not sure how you'd want to handle that), and have a serial number that gets registered to your gun license, complete with rifling pattern (randomly generated for each print)... of course, the file would have to be secured against being modified (maybe SHA or something).

Maybe... the registered gun license (which should be tied to an actual gun) has to be entered on a thing to generate the files for the gun (or parts) which has to have it's serial number entered also, and limit each serial/license linked combo to like one or two uses that are permanently tied to the license/serial linked combo.

Of course, one might ask... why would you need a gun (or gun parts) without a serial/identifying characteristics unless you're planning a 'big thing' that you don't want traced to you.

Why? Literally none of this is required for a gun machined from metal, injection molded plastic, or made through any other process.
If a 3D printed gun meets the legal standards required of every other type of firearm, what is the problem?
No other guns have rifling patterns logged, or to be registered in a central database, or require any licenses to own most places, so what is your justification for requiring it of -only- these?
   

Comment Re:Only one problem with this (Score 1) 100

Law is not the only thing that constrains people's actions. There are also moral and ethical considerations.
You may be aware that "virtually the entire United States" as you put it, has a serious problem with gun violence?

How is this relevant?
First, it is a District Attorneys job to deal with criminal law, nothing more. It is not a DA's place to use his offices power enforce his personal moral considerations upon anyone, not in his district and certainly not the world at large. To do that is an abuse of office and both corrupt and arguably a criminal act itself.
Secondly, I do not disagree we have a problem with gun violence. We have tools to deal with that, and we should be using them. Censorship is not a valid, or legal, solution to any problem.
We have many problems in our society. What other topics do you advocate solving through censorship?
By extension, do you believe eliminating the First Amendment would solve all societies problems then?

Comment Only one problem with this (Score 5, Insightful) 100

In virtually the entire United States, making firearms for personal use is 100% legal.
Printing (or machining) your own firearms, like purchasing alcohol, is regulated but not inherently illegal.
So why is a DA pressing to censor the entire planets access to something that is only illegal in his city?
We have been down this "community standards" test before, where the DA from the most restrictive village anywhere gets to censor everything for everyone everywhere, and it never turns out well.

Comment Bitcoin as a currency (Score 1) 19

Hey, don't dunk on Bitcoin as a currency. Its given the world so many benefits: The teenager in the article cost the equivalent of $500,000.
But thanks to Bitcoin, at todays market rates you can buy several teenagers for half a million dollars now, and get free shipping. That is progress, right?

Comment Re:So many other things.... (Score 3, Interesting) 52

True, but the writing on those tablets isn't measured in microns, or packed into densities measured in GB/cm2
The limiting factor in both durability and age stability are still any electronic controllers and physical hardware to read and process that data into a human readable form

Comment Re:Repairable? (Score 1) 163

Go outside and look in any decent sized parking lot. By definition any Saturn you see there is at least 15 years old.
You know, the type of cars Slate is modeling their body panels after?
I live in a college town, so I consistently see kids in 25 year old Saturns looking no worse for wear.
Bodies failing is simply not what is sending those old cars to the crusher

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 163

This is an urban/suburban utility wagon. Its use case is not long range travel.
My wife puts maybe 40 miles a day on her EV, plugs in at night, its full the next day. That's its job, it suits the majority of commuters needs.
If you use something for cross country travel, simply use a different vehicle.
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My parents have an EV even though they do sometimes road trip.
In 3 years they have rented a car twice to go cross country, and a truck to move things once, at a cost savings of thousands over insuring and maintaining a fueled vehicle for their few worst-case exception uses, not their average use of a hundred local miles per week.

Comment Re: Finally (Score 2) 163

Look up road deaths. The 70s were the worse in history, both in total numbers and in deaths per population.

You mean in the days before disc brakes, radial tires, safety glass, collapsible steering columns, crumple zones, standard height bumpers, energy absorbing bumpers, three point belts, auto retracting belts, and about a dozen more safety features they didn't mandate until the mid-70s or later?
Also most of the highways were still not divided, the Interstate wasn't fully finished yet most places. Don't forget airbags and ABS and everything else that is mandatory now.
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So yes, chicken little, I suppose all those were completely irrelevant to safety. One could posit that all those 1970's traffic deaths were all down to not having AWD.
If one were an idiot.
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So perhaps we will see streets awash in blood because someone sells a vehicle without AWD, of a type that objectively does not really benefit from AWD. Or not.

Comment Re:Finally (Score 0, Troll) 163

Many generations of people learned to drive vehicles safely without ABS/Traction Control/AWD/Lane Change Assist/etc. Many countries still do.
One option would be to pass on a vehicle that doesn't babysit you.
The other would be to take off the training wheels, go to driving school, and learn to drive like the rest of the world does.

Comment 4chan, the sphincter of the internet (Score 4, Interesting) 69

Historically, if 4chan had an outage for any length of time, the rest of the internet would suffer what was released upon it.
Reasonable forums would be overrun with trolling and shitposting.
No idea if that still holds true, or if 4chan is even still relevant. But it used to do the job of holding in all the excrement and keeping it away from the rest of us.
I am betting that they still don't just stop posting just because 4chan is down. Reddit mods are probably having a very bad day

Comment Re:Interesting waste of money (Score 2) 172

That's a feature, not a bug.
Like K9 drug dogs that have been trained to "detect drugs" whenever their handler signals them to, the point is not detection but plausible deniability for the human.
Of course this AI will precisely reflect the unfair biases of police officers, that is likely the entire point.
Now when officers racially profile and generally act the same bigoted way they always have, they have a defense against ever being accused of such because "the program picked out the suspects, I was just doing what I was told by the computer"

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