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The government won't forbid the sale of transistors and solder. They don't have to, for two reasons. Firstly, nobody can build a computer to the standard of a
by waqf 15y ago
The government won't forbid the sale of transistors and solder. They don't have to, for two reasons.
Firstly, nobody can build a computer to the standard of a contemporary desktop out of transistors and solder. It simply can't be done, even if you don't care about its size or power consumption. You can build a little 4-bit computer, but that's no use to you. So they don't have to prevent all unsecured computation, they just have to prevent you doing more than, say, a billion cycles of computation.
Second, even if the bar is much lower than that — say, you can buy all the chips you need, you just can't buy them preassembled into circuit boards — that's already an effective suppression of general purpose computation. Maybe you personally have the skills and the time to build a computer from those pieces, but I and most people don't. So I've been effectively prevented from computation. I won't write programs and post them on the net, and the online programming communities will dwindle to a small bunch of experts.
And once almost nobody builds or uses general-purpose computers, it's much easier for the government to say "We can't think of a legitimate reason you need a computer, therefore, anyone who has one is a terrorist/pirate/communist." QED.
- sliverstorm 15y agoThe only devices I am aware of that are regulated to the point of "you must assemble them yourself" are hand grenades and fully automatic weapons. It may just be me, but I don't think our society views general purpose computers as quite that dangerous.
- lisper 15y agoYet.
- waqf 15y agoI wouldn't say that society views industrial quantities of fertilizer as dangerous, but the FBI keeps track of who's buying it.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIndustrial quantities of fertilizer IS dangerous. The Oslo bombing wasn't even that long ago, have you forgotten?
- whatusername 15y ago99.9% (and probably a few more 9's) of Fertilizer sold in Industrial Quantities is used on farms and not really all that dangerous.
- waqf 15y agoYou missed my point. Of course it's dangerous if you want it to be, but so is a kitchen knife. The point is, stuff eventually gets regulated because of how it might be used, not because of how it's normally used.
- sliverstorm 15y agoBut is fertilizer actually regulated?
- waqf 15y agoApparently yes: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fertilizer-control-dhs-creates-ammonium-nitrate-security-program http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fertilizer-control-dhs-creat... (Thanks for making me research it, I learned some interesting stuff and I would learn more if I had more time.)