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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (212064)	12/18/2012 12:43:48 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541236

I beg to differ. None of them (AFAIK) have done anything remotely as difficult as actually making a semiauto gun, something which a reasonably competent machinist can do. There are all sorts of things which a competent nutcase could do which would completely terrorize the establishment. And its not just lone nutcases in the USA who can't figure this out, its entire organizations of nutcases in the ME who show such cluelessness. Reasonably competent people have done things like this: barnardmicrosystems.com It would not be terribly difficult to couple a smartphone (no hardware design skills needed) to such a gadget and have a very interesting (and cheap) terror weapon, capable of targeting even a specific individual at distances easily across town, if not a few 100 miles away. In some sense, GPS and vision systems could be more dangerous than guns. But it takes a little bit more effort, and so far, as I've noted, the nutcases haven't shown such motivation. It amazes me that Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, etc continue to think that large dumb rockets have utility, when they could make vision guided model rockets which are more effective. The problem is they would need a couple of engineers rather than an army of homicidal idiots. We (IMHO) stand on the edge of having technology which is not developed for violence being able to enable some quite scary things. What will the response then be? BTW, I can remember even a decade ago, having to sign an agreement with Micron when I was evaluating a high-speed vision sensor, that I was not using this with any missile related work. And this was a commercial part, for high-speed industrial vision.