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Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Cody R. Wilson Visits Fourmilab
Cody R. Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed and DEFCAD, pioneer in the creation of freely distributed designs for weapons and components which can be fabricated by additive manufacturing or “3D printing” visited Fourmilab today.
We talked about returning the ability to construct weapons for self-defence to the people for whom this is the most fundamental human right, Bitcoin as a way of escaping the impending collapse of the central planners' fiat currency, and enigmas such as why so many young people don't seem to be concerned with the extinction of privacy by the ubiquitous snooper state.
Defense Distributed is doing important work and, in my estimation, merits your support (Bitcoin is best, as PayPal takes a haircut off each donation).
I have long believed, after reading L. Neil Smith's The Nagasaki Vector (audio book), that there's no better way to deal with tyranny than what I've dubbed a “freedom flight”—a cargo plane dropping millions of single shot pistols, each with its own little parachute, to enable an oppressed population to use the pistols to obtain the weapons of those who enslave them. (Actually, I haven't worked out the terminal velocity of largely polymer pistols: the parachutes may not be necessary; you wouldn't want to hurt people or risk accidental discharges at impact.)
We are far from the political will for freedom flights, but fabrication engines with the ability to replicate themselves will change everything, and we are on the threshold of this capability. It was said of Samuel Colt, “God created men equal; Col. Colt made them equal.” Cody Wilson's work is making men and women once again the equals of the collectives which seek to subsume them into a subservient mass. Just as Colt harnessed the emerging manufacturing technology of his age to creating weapons for a a free people empowered to defend themselves, Wilson is deploying the distributed, open architecture tools of the next industrial revolution to ensure those who live in that epoch will remain free.
Posted at January 30, 2013 20:57