Horses? Gone.
Barn door? Closed and locked!
I dunno, man. We have evidence lockers full of rape kits they can’t afford to process. I am not sure for most cases they are going to fire up they ol’ “X-ray crystallographer” for every case they find with illegible numbers.
Like I said the current NICS system we have in place isn’t as reliable and fool proof as it should be. I pragmaticall1!y don’t hold out high hopes for this idea. Guess we may see!
That has more to do with police departments not giving a shit about what happens to women.
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Most 3D printers are dirt stupid and can’t even think about the entire object you print. They literally just get a set of X/Y/Z positrons, motor set rates, and heater target temperatures, along with a very few things like “wait for H1 to hit 200ºC”. By and large they tend to be 8 or 16 bit CPUs with K bytes of RAM. Many of them the most complex thing they do is read a DOS FAT filesystem. Others are too dumb for even that and pretend to be an RS-232 on the far end of a USB port.
It is really cool actually how dumb they are, and how much they can do with such a tiny amount of “smarts”.
The rest of the tool chain runs on your own computer, and each stage is not only available as open source, but the best slicer is actually open source. While I think autoCAD is far more popular for controlling routers, I think the open source told for 3D printers are more popular.
…also even at the lowest level you can get open source G-Code execution engines, although you will have to tailor it to the hardware you build. Many of the commercial 3D printers use it, and the ones that I’ve run into that don’t…well I normally wish they did.
So in this case not only is it locking the barn after the horse has left…it is locking the dog house in the mistaken belief that the horse can actually fit in it, and might be hiding under the blanket in the back.
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In general I agree with your arguments, this one particular bit stands a reasonable chance of being incorrect.
The baseband has a unique ID that cell phone service providers do some tracking of, but they try to avoid looking too close or they would break the flow of cheap stolen phones.
If you have an iPhone the CPU has a unique ID that is closely associated with a history of all iOS boot images it has activated.
Either of these could be leveraged to a database of owners, but isn’t.
I don’t think you could do that with a gun though because nothing in the gun depends on an ID, nor is a gun dependent on talking to other devices and “proving” that a specific ID belongs to them.
Yeah @anon32019413 also mentioned how the trail that could be followed. And again, tracking components in complicated electronics makes sense because if you make a bad batch of GPUs or RAM you will need to recall them. So it makes sense that they would have that sort of system in place on a business end.
But I am curious, do you know of any instance where they took say a burner phone found in the trash and traced it back to the owner via the components? My point is theory and practice are two different things. CSI makes tracing and tracking and enhancing video footage seem like it’s easy.
Considering how many more phones are used to aid in crime, should we have a similar database where one could easily do this? What about the back doors the police and feds want installed on phones? Personally I don’t like that sort of capabilities in their hands.
Mmmm, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s true in some cases. But it’s also an issue with costs. And even when you do pay for stuff to get analyzed by the lab, you can end up with shit results. IIRC there was a guy who just logged results as positive for drug tests with out doing the work… Let me see…
OH shit - it happens all the time, it seems:
It’s only a moderate amount of footwork to determine if a burner phone was purchased from Target or 7-eleven based on the ESN alone. Not that it instantly leads to a suspect. But at least you know you won’t have to check hours of security footage at 7-eleven if the phone was bought at Target. But finding receipts in the trash of your suspect is far more telling.
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And we’re in the wrong trouser leg of time, too. This was not the future we were promised in like 1983 or whatever.
That’s why I only buy things with Marlboro Bucks!
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This is the one with the trickle-down, eww!
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There’s always more horses.
Statistics, how do they work?
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The harmful effect of Science Fiction on physics education:
First, I’m pretty sure that bamboo tube is going to blow up.
Second, those diamonds – “The hardest substance known”, thank you Mister Spock – aren’t the first choice for projectiles: hardness is very different from toughness. Diamonds (assuming they shoot at all) will probably hurt, but I suspect they will shatter on the Gorn’s tough hide, rather than penetrate. Me, I would use jade as my projectile of choice (or basalt in a pinch).
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They work like this:
A population is assayed, and numbers are calculated that are useful in characterizing the whole and portions thereof, without having any true predictive relationship to the reality experienced by any individual within the population, except in cases where the number resolves to one hundred percent.
They don’t work like this:
Some percentage of a population has some characteristic, therefore I can treat all members of that population as though they have such character.
The basic concept behind the above was explained over 3000 years ago by some greasy fellows who determined “the laws of thought” which are the basis of communication, language, reason and law.
Hey, you asked. 
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Ok, another one:
Statistically, if a person owns a gun, the chance that that person and the persons around him are hurt by a gun increases. Making everybody, including the gun owner, less safe.
So statistically, nobody should own a gun.
Problem is of course, that past a certain percentage of gun ownership, you get threatened so much by (the existence of) your neighbour’s guns, I can understand wanting one yourself.
As to the discussion at hand: I don’t really like the development of homemade guns. But what can you do, it is what it is. Trying to forbid people to 3d print certain shapes is never going to work anyway.
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Thanks for taking the time to clarify your earlier post! (I am much more interested in understanding how people come to these conclusions than I am in ascertaining whether such conclusions are warranted or objectively useful.)
Sounds like we have agreement there… zip guns have always been plentiful and dangerous, and every advance in home fabrication technologies has tended to make them easier to craft yet no less dangerous.
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You’re taking a statistical fact and then making the logical leap that “less safe” equals “unsafe”.
A house with no stairs is statistically safer from falls than a house with stairs.
So statistically, nobody should own a house with stairs.
A car with ABS breaks is statistically safer with a shorter breaking distance than with cars with out ABS breaks.
So statistically, nobody should own a car with out ABS breaks.
A person who owns a car is statistically more likely to kill or hurt themselves or others than someone who doesn’t own a car.
So statistically, nobody should own a car.
Statistically people who smoke are more likely to get sick and develop certain types of cancer.
So statistically nobody should be allowed to smoke.
Statistically people with prostates or more likely to get prostate cancer.
So statistically nobody should have a prostate.
(Some of these were just for fun, but still illustrates my point.)
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Why Jade? I thought it was fairly soft…
How about granite? I think they used to make early cannon balls out of that. Obsidian for flachette rounds!
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Jade (specifically nephrite jade) is soft (readily scratched) – but it is very tough (resistant to shattering), due to its microcrystalline interlocking fibrous matrix structure.
Granite would be acceptable, and more elegant than basalt, although I believe basalt is somewhat tougher.
Obsidian for flechette rounds: I like it.
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I don’t, but (a) iPhones are seldom burner phones (wrong price range, you want phones you can buy with cash for that), and (b) even inside Apple exactly what is done for/with law enforcement officials is not widely known (i.e. I knew the guy who processed search requests, but I don’t know what he did and did not do).
I brought it up because you had a lot of well reasoned points, but had strayed into untrueness on this one bit, and as it wasn’t needed to support the main thrust of your message I kind of wanted to worn you to maybe leave it out should you get into that line of discussion in the future…or adjust it in light of the actual facts.
I don’t think any of your actual points rely on it for reasons I outlined in my last message on the topic I think guns and phones have technical differences that make tracking one far simpler then the other.
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