On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 05:54:02PM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
And in case you missed it, there's 100s of sites these days such as http://opensourcemachinetools.org/wordpress/
Which don't tell you how to make a pencil.
On 2019-09-23 09:33, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
How many years was the interval between when RMS started his version of "the free software movement/ community" and now (now being a relevant point in time where we see an incredibly abundant cornucopia of all manner of computer software, in free forms available to all) ?
Since that software was produced by handful of very smart people, that irrelevant to question of whether you can make a pencil without a boss telling you how to do it.
You can make some gun parts with a threedee printer and software downloaded from the internet, but some gun parts you cannot. And for a very long time, no one could make those parts except existing large scale gun makers.
And watching Ivan the Troll make those gun parts, it was absolutely obvious to me that come civil war II, it is not going to be a large number of people making full auto weapons in their home workshop. We are going to have to conscript Ivan the Troll, and conscript a thousand people to do what he damn well tells them to do.
There's a principle there I do agree with. The benevolent dictator, the individual with capacity - call it creative intuitive or inherent or something. I am well aware that those of capacity ("any relevant level of capacity" perhaps?) cannot be duplicated in general. And yes, come civil war, very few will have the ability and capacity to create anything particularly useful, in a relevant time frame, to the defence of their family. I think calling "inherent intuitive ability in one or more areas" "a boss" leads to unfortunate descent of the conversation. One of the great problems of today is the Marxist indoctrination of many, when they go to college, and combined with the relative technological abundance and access to Wikipedia we have, a lot of "spoilt brats" think not only can they do anything, but that the world owes them everything and they ought not have to lift a finger to receive everthing, and this approach has gottem them a fair way in the "cotton wool parents" world we now live in. And come civil war, a few inherent but long buried facts will, usefully if painfully, expose themselves rather rudely to those who've been living such delusions. Anyway, there are those who are intent on building up the publicly accessible knowledge base on how to make things. Some will join them. Perhaps even someone who already knows how to make pencils, and perhaps few people will even be able to follow the instructions - perhaps none (though I doubt that - such a view smacks of ego hubris); timeframes though... I can't stop wondering about the Werner von Braun and NASA USA rocket building history though ... I usually prefer to have the discussion on the list by the way. Regards, Zenaan