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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. It's depressing how quick people can be to dismiss something as stupid without considering how those rules came about in the first place.

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And so what? some guy stabs someone with a screwdriver and the US regulate the export of them between Commonwealth countries, still without regulating the AK-47 in its own country? There is more regulation on CNC machining center than on firearms. It's stupid. The US doesn't refrain from sending hellfires missiles on weddings, which kills more surely than the once in a lifetime freak who assemble some mildly radioactive stuff in his backyard. If it's for the radiations, I see people playing with X-ray on youtube everywhere, there is 0% chance of chain reaction, nobody cares about chemical contamination in the US, so I don't know why they would freak about a mildly radioactive contamination in a foreign country either.

What I begin to see, is an entire world under occupation.

Incidentally, automatic rifles such as AK-47s are heavily regulated in the US. It's possible to get them, but it requires a lot of paperwork, they're all at least 25 years old, and more cannot be imported.

The More You Know.

they make some in maker fairs in garages in California.

That's because an AK-47 is an AK-47: it's not a game-changer. But a CNC machining system that lets you build silent ship propellers can dramatically change the threats the world faces.

Building a CNC machine with a regular lathe and mill may not be hobbyist level easy, but it's certainly doable by someone as rich in machining tradition as Russia.

Amusingly, the incident would also dispell the (western) myth that it takes very advanced machining technology to build a nuclear bomb. You can't have it both ways.

I suspect the real incident was the software to mill those propellers, but that wasn't on the list of illegal goods. It's one thing to have a fancy but dumb CNC machine, another to come up with a silent prop design.

All the advances in CNC machining systems are published on the internet. And there is some degree of self replicating capability in them (basically you can machine the parts yourself, and fine-tune the design by hand to get a machine of better capability than the previous one).

> But a CNC machining system that lets you build silent ship propellers can dramatically change the threats the world faces.

Bullshit. (and yes I know about the Toshiba incident)

I didn't know about it, so I had to look it up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal

Thank you for elevating our level of discourse a bit :-)

one guy, one time, managed to get his hands on enough smoke detectors to make himself glow in the dark.. yes, seems perfectly reasonable to freak out about.

I do not know what you are referencing, but in general radiation doesn't make you glow.

He's talking about the radioactive boy scout.

Also he was talking in hyperbole.

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