So what else were they doing then? Where's the article on the raids? Why did they only report on a 3D printer which according to the article wasn't even being used to make anything illegal/dangerous? The more you think about it, the less information there really is in the story, to the point where it's almost just an advert for 3D printers and the fact that they can be used to possibly make guns. Above isn't aimed at you corky or anyone btw, more the BBC, had trouble wording it to come across right.
Because it makes great "oohh my gosh" headlines and panders to peoples fears, the BBC is just as guilty of bad reporting as the tabloids imho. Or maybe they are just reporting on the information they were given by the police, and i think its fair to say they don't know much about technology.
I can see the headlines in a month or two. "The English people call for an all out ban of 3D printers"
meh owned a makerbot for a bit before selling it on. and am defo gonna get another one in the future. just hope they dont make it difficult to own one.
Make your own Ceramic 3D Printer hard to police when the parts and plans are easy to get and fabricate your own.
QFT I guess the real fear is that, whereas you have to be shady and have some cash to get a real gun, these 3D printers are going to make deadly weapons downloadable products for any and all children. You know, any and all children who can afford to drop £2000 on a printer. With which you could more easily buy an actual gun*. *seriously, it's not difficult to buy a gun. 3D printing is going to have to be easier than a Drive-Thru takeaway before it can compete.
They banned pocket knives with blades longer than 3 inches, despite the fact that large kitchen knives, meat cleavers, steak knives and power tools are all available to all adults and present in most households. They'll ban anything if there's enough of a public outcry. And the public love to cry out in about things in earnest for misformed, stupid reasons, because a lot of them are goddamned idiots with no desire to seek out balanced information (look at the number of parents who're refusing to give their children vaccinations now).
Parents not wanting to shoot foreign substances into their children's bloodstream I can understand. It kind of makes sense to be somewhat wary about stuff like that...It makes far more sense than wanting to ban pocket knifes, if you ask me.
Many parents do and that's another problem, especially long term. Having said that, the food children are fed in school aren't exactly healthy either, and children spend far more time in school (unless they're homeschooled) than they do at home.
I forget where the info came from but there was a statistic floating around that you were more likely to be fatally stabbed with a screwdriver than a knife... If memory serves it was because of the type of wound a screwdriver would cause and the fact screwdrivers are easy to acquire and easy to hide... But as people have said, the media and the public love their outcry and the government love their knee-jerk reactions... And I'd take school food over hospital food any day...
But they are planning to make you pay for free school meals to be fed to other children regardless of their parents' income.
I wouldn't feed either option to your kids either [or mine if i had any]... but given a choice between the food served up in the local hospitals and starvation... starvation looks pretty tempting...
Blimey...printed metal is news to me. Legislation is inevitable, but I wonder whether it will focus on control of the printers themselves, the fabrication substances, or the blueprints. Limiting the former two would be a shame, because metal 3D printing would be an amazing thing to have access to domestically and could hugely benefit people and educational establishments. But in the piracy age, how the hell do you effectively control blueprints? I guess they could make distributing 'controllled' blueprints without authorization a much more serious and actively pursuable crime than, say, distributing copyrighted material without permission currently is. If it were prioritized and punished on the same scale as actual firearms trafficking, people would probably be suitably dissuaded.
Those guys are utter dicks. "The objective was not to print a gun, oh, no! It was to demonstrate that you can print functional metal parts hard and strong enough for real-world applications!". What, you couldn't print a little combustion engine? You know, one that would not cause a controversy as a transparent grab for publicity? See the future: it's not modders designing custom computer case or water cooling parts on SketchUp and printing them out at their local Maker Faire workshop; it's little clandestine factories operating from shipping containers or the backs of trucks to produce cheap untraceable guns for criminal purposes. Nice.
