“Printcrime” by Cory Doctorow
craphound.com
craphound.com
Ever since Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy's cover in my hand grabbed his attention at the library [following up quickly with a purchased copy of the complete series helped seal the deal] last winter, I've been on a roll for recommending books with him. Player Piano was the only thing close to Hitch-Hiker's Guide I could think of, and his finishing it was how we got to Slaughter-House Five. Indeed, the mentioning of last year's suggestion of Sword of Shannara has been rendered less painful between us by the recent success.
Anyway, he really dug Little Brother. So much so he made sure to take it to middle-school everyday and walk out to the bus stop "reading" it, in the morning. As fortune would have it, the evening of the very day he finished it, I was at the library and what should be on the new fiction rack but Homeland. He finished that, too.
Now one of the questions that comes around on Ask HN is how do I get my child interested in programming, and I don't think you do, really other than perhaps by modeling behavior, and I've said as much from time to time. But, reading Doctorow sparked my son to check out the computer section at the library - that trip was with mom and he came back with an "Intro to turning a computer on" type book. A couple of days later it was in the back-to-the-library stack.
Then about two weeks ago, he asked me if I had a book about Lisp because that was what he had really been looking for at the library. Well of course I did, and he knew it - Graham's Ansi Common Lisp has been floating around the house since I picked it up used from Amazon last August. So a few nights a week he sits and reads and takes notes for a half hour all on his own and in his own way, which is of course the best way to come to any adult activity for a young person.*
*OK so I did Youtube the first part of the first SICP lecture video for him on our way to a soccer tournament a week earlier. Until he fell asleep about 15 minutes in. As he was dozing off, however, we got to the part where Sussman says that what we can program is only limited by what we can imagine. That got him to stop nodding his head.
the big block to doing these sorts of things really tends to be fear of failure. after a few electrocutions, burnt devices, and realizing that failure really isnt quite as bad as it's built up to be, I think any kid would be much more brave to try and open tech up.
if you are a programmer, do a 24 hour project yourself, a quick game, a quick project on arduino, basically something to get tangled with quickly and accomplish quickly.
hah what got me interested though is just curiosity / hunger for more knowledge, some of my first conversations with my dad revoled around ohm's law, newton's laws. and learning how to take things apart meant that I also had to learn to put my dad's toys back together before I got caught :)
anyways I'm a 3d artist now, but I'm also one of the only ones at my company who can write cgfx shaders, fix hardware, and troubleshoot the computers without calling IT.
http://docs.racket-lang.org/draw/overview.html#(part._.Lines...
Or even processing.
Some of my early programming was messing with graphics -- first in BASIC and Assembler on the Amiga -- later on a Casio calculator (mixing the worst of assembler and BASIC, with performance lower than our old VIC20) -- using the book "Mathematical Toursit"[1] as guide.
I was very proud when after 4 hours I could look at the screen and see a black-and-white mandelbrot :-)
This made me smile. I had forgotten about that book and how much my young self enjoyed escaping into it. I'm guessing from your comment that this is one of those "better remembered than revisited" fantasy titles :)
I'm going to keep pretending it was close to perfection :p
They have all the opportunity they could want. They will all "graduate" with deeper than average computer science knowledge, but that urge to hack isn't something that can be taught.
All the homeschooling families I've seen were the religious-nut kind, but I frequently see commenters on HN mention that they homeschool their kids, which is causing me to do a double take on the whole thing.
I'm quite a few years from having kids, but am curious about the subject. Thanks in advance!
The time we get together is amazing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love the fact that they can spend a Thursday building Lego and making stop motion animations, and it is an acceptable educational activity.
They get a lot of social time too. People generally worry about that, but it hasn't been an issue.
Do many people genuinely think that we are close to this kind of machine? Because to me I simply see far too many hurdles for it to even become realistic. I know everyone is excited about 3-D printers, but within the current constraints of reality I cannot see how the current ones can do much more than print small plastic mechanical parts.
And those are not "machines which mold plastic shapes", these are "machines that put various materials to precise computer instructions and can be built at home for less than $1k".
As soon as 3d printers will be able to replicate themselves, every regulation will be moot. Information always finds a way to propagate.
I don't get this. In theory, if it were illegal to print "Item #325" having 200 printers doesn't make it any less illegal to print "Item #325".
> Information always finds a way to propagate.
Doesn't this presuppose that no secret has ever been kept?
> I don't get this. In theory, if it were illegal to print "Item #325" having 200 printers doesn't make it any less illegal to print "Item #325".
It might be illegal. But the law would be unenforceable.
>> Information always finds a way to propagate.
> Doesn't this presuppose that no secret has ever been kept?
Valid point. What I meant is information that is out in the open. The cad files by Defense Distributed where published intentionally. You need a North Korean style regime to significantly slow down the propagation of such material.
It is presumably already illegal to 3-D print several types of 3-D things, where such things themselves are illegal or where there is some form of copyright, trademark or patent infringement.
There are 1.3 billion people in China who would probably disagree.
I'm sure humanity will find some
Be specific.
Is a military mortar a tool when ski patrols use it to save lives by safely triggering avalanches?
The thing is, drones and robots work pretty much the same way. They work much more that way, actually, because if you find a vulnerability in one, it's likely present in all of them since they all came off the same assembly line. You don't have to kill all the drones, you just have to kill the ones guarding the drone control facility, or convert the drone operators to your side.
The most dangerous thing about robot armies isn't that it will make governments too powerful, it's that a terrorist could take control of them. And the only way to prevent that is to not build them.
(Once a society has achieved democracy, the equation may be different (and closer to what you are saying). However, only a small minority of human societies have achieved democracy.)
TL;DR: fuck it, print weapons
MendelMax1.5(or 2.0 if you don't care to source it yourself) or the Prusa i3.
As for kits, people seem to like Ultimaker or Lulzbot's AO-10x.
If you'd like a deltabot, there's the Kossel and SeeMeCNC's Rostock Max.
I wrote a buying guide a few weeks back. You might want to check it out.
http://blog.cubehero.com/2013/04/12/what-you-need-to-know-ab...
> This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007
craphound.com has been Cory's website for as long as I can remember.
and peterkelley wasn't being "snarky" either. he was making a joke, based on the description of the subject-matter of the book.
oh, and i'm not being "snarky" either. but it's so very difficult to resist the temptation!, i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do it!, i can feel myself slipping even as i continue typing!...
-bowerbird
i'm still kinda new at hacker-news, and its threading is still a mystery to me.
-bowerbird
this was one of many valuable lessons of what not to do. ever.
Close that vehicle/system lid citizen, there are trade secrets in there, step away, don't make me Taze you.
And after that, there will be "mind-crime".
By the way, a very relevant username :)
I'm just waiting for thoughtcriminal[1] to post in this thread, actually.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What is the solution if a person uses a printer to print devices that are used for what most people consider criminal behavior? For example, someone printing high performing secret remote detonating bomb materials for political enemy rallies. After they serve the prison sentence. Do you let them own an open source printer again and let them use it without restriction?
With the power to print "anything" at low cost comes a tremendous power to kill thousands, even millions of people easily. How do you find the balance between freedom to let people print anything their hearts desire, and restrictions to stop the evil people from using that tremendous power for great evil?
A garage is a place, not a tool.
What defines a crime is intention. For instance, firing a gun is not a crime per se. Or in the case of the United States, even building one isn't illegal, since no one made a law to make it so. [1]
On the other hand, attempt to shoot, shooting or killing someone, are all possibly crimes, depending if there's intention and the circumstances (e.g., self-defense).
So in your example, if someone makes materials for political enemies, first you need to prove intention or connection to the crimes committed by these parties (I'm assuming you don't mean illegal/controlled materials here). Then, when this person is sentenced, the judge can rule about restricting access to these materials anymore (for instance, restricting him from getting a job in industry). It's the same case as hackers sentenced for years away from computers.
[1] http://www.cracked.com/article_17016_7-items-you-wont-believ...
Which always was, and remains, complete nonsense.
If someone steals a car, you don't prohibit them from driving their own car to work after they return to society.
The analogy the proponents of this nonsense will present is that it's more like lawyers being disbarred or bankers being prohibited from working in the financial industry. But that analogy fails, because prohibiting you from using a computer is not the analog of prohibiting you from being a lawyer or a banker, it's the analog of denying access to the court system or the ability to use money.
On what basis can you really restrict peoples capacity to do something illegal using generally benign tools? You can't. Not without some serious shenanigans. I can bludgeon you to death with a stout leather shoe you know. No one is outlawing loafers next Tuesday.
According to one of the extra features on a well-known activist documentary about health care, in Norway a man convicted of murdering his family with a chainsaw was rehabilitated in part by employing him as a (well-supervised) logger, presumably to ensure his mind is well-trained in correct and incorrect uses of chainsaws.
So "serve the prison sentence" is the wrong way to look at it. Instead we should be saying, "After they've been rehabilitated and reintegrated into society," with the focus on rehabilitation to prevent recidivism, rather than retribution to satisfy our primitive lust for revenge.