First let me state my position on gun control has shifted dramatically. I now favor Australia's approach to gun control, namely to control guns, as they proved it is effective. Digery doo.
However, technology may render ALL gun control laws impotent, forever. If people can freely "print" handguns, then gun control laws become toothless. Think about it. Copyright laws are powerless to stop piracy because anyone can do it, untraced, from inside their own homes. This is different than in the "before times" when you had to go outside to set up a bootleg "shop", which makes you instantly visible and shut down-able.
By the same token, I have recently become convinced that gun control laws in the CURRENT system ARE effective and SHOULD be implemented in America, but if 3D printing takes off, NO amount of law will EVER be able to prevent someone from just downloading the model and printing out their own handgun. You can make the model file illegal, and it won't matter at all, because it is the internet and it will still be available to everyone forever. You can make printing a home handgun illegal, and THAT won't matter, because there will be no purchase, no store, nothing but the inside of your own home, and thus NO way to EVER detect that someone has BROKEN the law, UNTIL they shoot someone, and at that point it's too late. Even that hasty law to require metal components so the gun is detectable is meaningless, as that hunk of metal can easily be omitted (and in fact will be cheaper and easier for users TO omit) and there would be NO way to tell that someone has done so, just as there would be NO possible way to detect that someone has printed a gun in the first place.
There is, however, a high note. These plastic guns currently still require real bullets, as plastic as of yet can't substitute for gunpowder or a projectile that can withstand the strain. If proposed laws are to keep their teeth in the face of this new tech threat, there are only two ways to do it. First, they could make 3D printing illegal except in monitored public spaces like a store. This would allow authorities to track WHAT is being printed, but sadly would drastically hinder the 3D printing revolution we previously thought so beneficial. The second method, which has been surprisingly absent from current proposals, is to put a much larger focus on restrictions to bullets. As prophet of our times Chris Rock has noted, guns don't kill people, it's just those dang bullets. Massive tax increase on bullet purchasing coupled with all the same proposed laws on gun sale tracking being applied to the AMMO as well would be a great step in slowing down this oncoming influx of fundamentally untraceable home made guns.
Not when my cat is around, at least! After spending the winter inside, she's going out again, and caught her first mouse of the year today.
Unfortunately, she brought it back in... alive. Yeah. That is NOT fun. I managed to trap it and bring it out, where she promptly picked up torturing the thing. But mice aren't exactly wanted here, not in town... I wouldn't want to just let it go. At least she was outside at that point, though I did have to close the door to keep her from bringing it back in. :p
So yeah, my cat may be over 16 years old now, but she's still a capable hunter! Three mice last year, several each year the few years before that, now one this year... they aren't in this house, but she manages to find them somewhere, obviously.
Nothing you can do about it, though, and mice aren't good to have around anyway. And she's such a cute blob of purring cuteness... :) (Silly thing eats every speck in sight as soon as she sees it, she's only not badly overweight (and alive) because we've always had to carefully measure out her food, every meal. The constant begging for meals does get old, but hey, at least she's good at reminding me that she's around. :p
Recently I read about Itoi commenting on Star Fox 64's dialog, saying it is written like a historical drama.
Thinking about it, EVERY SINGLE LINE uttered in that game is quotable gold. I believe one could go through a day of conversation just using quotes from that game.
This apparently works very well. With Windows 7, it was hard to set it but could be done in registry. Windows 8 made it even harder, so this tool is a boon.
Alongside that, MS is releasing a service pack down the line that will finally put the start menu back into the "desktop mode" of Windows 8. I was all for revising the "desktop" paradigm, but MS screwed up the design of the new Windows 8 interface. It is ideal for touch screens, but very poor for mice. Glad they are fixing this. It was the thing that kept me from upgrading to the new OS.
Instead, there'll just be private media and business briefings, and some Nintendo Directs or something. Details to be announced. Their excuse is that they want people to play the games instead of just presenting them, but seriously... the press conference is important! If they really don't have a conference, while MS and Sony do, it won't look good for Nintendo, for sure. Hopefully they come up with something interesting, though... Nintendo Directs are okay, but don't have the excitement or attention of a full-on press conference. E3 tried this "scale down" thing several years back, but it didn't work. I kind of hope this doesn't work too, so we get full-scale Nintendo press conferences again... though at least a live Nintendo Direct, or something, would be good. I just don't want it to be only preshot videos, they aren't quite as interesting.
Boston is only a couple of hours south of here, it was a bit scary...
It was impressive how the younger one managed to hide for so long against such a massive police presence and while injured, but they got him in the end, and alive! It's great that he was taken alive. Much better than killing him. As for the older brother... taking him alive would have been good too, but he does seem to have been a committed Islamist, of the two, and probably was the one who came up with the idea in the first place... and he had a suicide bomb with trigger tied to his stomach, so it doesn't seem like he wanted to live. In comparison the younger brother didn't have one. In comparison the younger brother mostly seems to have just been influenced by his older brother, who he looked up to... though that's no excuse for what he did, that's for sure. I mean, particularly if they can prove that he put down one of those bombs...
Still though, it's too bad that he was too young and stupid to realize what a terrible decision he was making, in going along with his brother. But "stupid" is definitely a part of it. I mean, two days after the bombing, he was... back at college, going to classes and a party? Really?
I mean, it is good that Nintendo went back on their original statement and went ahead and made the thing for the super sized 3DS, but it also leaves open the simple problem that they should have simply worked the extra stick and buttons into the remodel from the very start. They claim they would have needed to shrink the battery to make it fit, but I wonder about that myself. I don't know that the circle pads are that deeply set into the 3DS that they would actually take up the battery space. And yes, it does appear that Monster Hunter basically forced their hand with this remodel. Yes, Monster Hunter, the series that forced Nintendo to remodel the Wii Classic Controller, make the FIRST circle pad pro, and now this XL/LL sized version. It's just THAT popular in Japan.
This is very interesting. This is a formula someone has found which chemically removes the oxidization from plastic. It does not put a coat on it, or alter the plastic fundamentally, it just reverts the chemistry back to how it was before all that oxygen yellowed or browned the plastic.
It isn't being sold, it can be made yourself using the listed ingredients. The results this shows are very impressive. I wish to make some of this myself for a few things I own, most notably my SNES. The top half is yellowed, the bottom half is not. Apparently the batches of plastic originally used came from two different factories for each "half".
