Information wants to be free. Eventually, everyone who wants to know will know how to build a CNC machine like this, without any interlocks.
If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?
As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?
If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?
As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?