Free Republic

I know the title is confusing, you probably think you know who I’m talking about but in fact, this is an art post. I was inspired by the art work contained in yesterday’s comments: from Son of Sobieski’s fine skeletor street art to Claire’s little granddaughter’s hand drawn and painted cartoon characters. So I’m just going to drop this lesson in optical illusion here for you to study. It seems a very helpful skill to have in today’s climate. So get your paper, pens, crayons (I’m talking to you Jetti) and rulers out so you too can practice the fine...

Cody Wilson, the owner of a company that makes untraceable 3D-printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant accusing him of sex with an underage girl, has left the U.S. and was last known to be in Taiwan, investigators in Texas said Wednesday.Austin Police Cmdr. Troy Officer told reporters that the department was working with national and international law enforcement to locate Wilson, whom Officer said missed a scheduled return flight to the U.S.Officer said it was unclear why Wilson went to Taiwan, but he added that a friend of the 16-year-old alleged victim told Wilson that he was...

A Seattle court prevented Cody Wilson from publishing 3D files on the Internet for free. Wilson obeys. Now he sells the 3D files in thumb drives instead. Cody Wilson, while complying with a court order requiring the State Department to retreat from a First Amendment legal settlement, has taken another route showing the irrationality of the court decision.Here is a brief history of this interesting, if silly, attempt to stop the flow of information. In 2013, Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed showed the technical potential of using 3D printers to make a simple, plastic, one shot pistol. They called...

Glock frame being completed with files not covered by federal injunction More Fake News from the ignorant and biased media. A brief recap: In 2013, the State Department, in the Barack Obama administration, unilateraly declared that posting computer code that could be used to print 3D firearm components, violated the vague International Traffic in Arms Regulations. This was new law, and had not been done before. In 2015 Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation filed a lawsuit against the State Department for violating their First Amendment rights. In 2018 the State Department agreed to a legal settlement of...

Judge Robert S. Lasnik, United States District Judge of the Western District of Washington, at Seattle, issued a permanent injunction against the Trump Administration State Department. The injunction is to prevent the State Department from implementing a court settlement with Defense Distributed, allowing them to exercise their First Amendment rights. The permanent injunction was issued on the 27th of August, 2018, in Seattle, Washington State.  The temporary restraining order had been issued on 31 July.   Judge Lasnik has taken the power of deciding what may or may not be lawful, based on the principle of potential harm. Potential, or irreparable...

A team of Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers have developed a way to bioprint tubular structures that better mimic native vessels and ducts in the body. The 3-D bioprinting technique allows fine-tuning of the printed tissues' properties, such as number of layers and ability to transport nutrients. These more complex tissues offer potentially viable replacements for damaged tissue. The team describes its new approach and results in a paper published on Aug. 23 in Advanced Materials. "The vessels in the body are not uniform," said Yu Shrike Zhang, PhD, senior author on the study and an associate bioengineer in BWH's...

Those pushing for a disarmed population have been educated to the fact that effective restrictions on arms cannot be achieved without strong government censorship and control over information. The First and Second Amendments in the Bill of Rights reinforce each other and make restrictions on both free expression and the right to keep and bear arms difficult. A spokesperson articulated the protestors passion for a government regulations that the believe will make them safe.  From CBS8.com: SAN DIEGO (NEWS 8) - Protestors of the Del Mar Gun Show addressed the Fair Board on Tuesday afternoon with their newest concerns....

On 18 July, 2018, on the Sunshine Coast of Eastern Australia, in the town of Mudjimba, police raided a house and found some 3D printed plastic guns, some printed false identification, and a small amount of drugs. From news.com.au: "They are all polymer and all they needed was a pin and a spring-type assembly pushed into it to make it work. For all intents and purposes they would look like a gun." Police allege that three 3D-printed handguns, along with weapon parts, a knuckle duster, false licences and drugs, were found at a house at Mudjimba on Wednesday. The...

There is a long history of banning books both here in the United States and abroad. Books that come to mind are D. H. Lawerence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and a whole host of others. In more recent times, the Supreme Court has rejected efforts to ban books just because someone didn't like it. See Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) Here is a book that you need to buy that many in the gun control industry would like to see banned. It is called The Liberator Code Book: An Exercise in Free Speech. The book...

FAIRFAX, Va.— Chris W. Cox, executive director, National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, released the following statement on Tuesday: “Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRA’s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.”

Elections have consequences. One of the levers of power in the executive branch is the ability to settle lawsuits. Trump era officials in the Department of Justice have agreed to settle a lawsuit meant to stop an egregious violation of First and Second Amendment rights. Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed published computer code that enabled people with 3D printers to print a crude single shot pistol and parts of semi-automatic rifles. The Federal government ordered Defense Distributed to stop distribution of the computer code. Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed complied, and filed a lawsuit, with the help of the...

The machine that printed the record-setting beam will be the 3D printer for Archinaut, a robotic system that Made In Space is developing. Archinaut will also feature robotic arms, allowing the spacecraft to repair satellites and build large structures in Earth orbit, company representatives have said. This same 3D printer passed a "thermal vacuum" test last summer, successfully printing out parts in a chamber that imposed the temperatures and vacuum of space.  That test was conducted at standard Earth gravity, but Made In Space does have experience manufacturing things in zero-G: The company has launched three separate machines to the...

For the last decade, the 3D printing sector has been dominated by closed systems, in which 3D printers could only be used with the manufacturer’s resin and software. The trouble with closed systems is that they limit innovation. One printer manufacturer alone cannot offer the variety of materials needed for the thousands of potential 3D printing applications. As a result, the development of new end-user applications and materials has stalled, and growth in 3D printing has plateaued. To break out, the industry must reinvent itself and become open. There has been progress in that direction. Players from adjacent industries have...

Wi-Fi can pass through walls. This fact is easy to take for granted, yet it's the reason we can surf the web using a wireless router located in another room. But not all of that microwave radiation makes it to (or from) our phones, tablets, and laptops. Routers scatter and bounce their signal off objects, illuminating our homes and offices like invisible light bulbs. Now, German scientists have found a way to exploit this property to take holograms, or 3D photographs, of objects inside a room — from outside it. "It can basically scan a room with someone's Wi-Fi transmission,"...

In the picture the 3D printed replicas are in the lower row. From the left, they are 1,3,4 and 5. The typical 3D printed striations are easily visible on #4. Australia has, in many ways, some of the most extreme gun regulations in the world. By jumping through a great many hoops, and carefully filling out the right forms over several months, you can own and use a significant number of firearms. The regulations are a wish list of most of those proposed by gun hating activists from around the world. The were rushed through the Australian political machine...

In late November of 2016, the leftist Guardian, in the UK, reported that 3D printers were used to make illegal submachine guns in Australia.  Reports of homemade submachine guns in Australia have become fairly common. From theguardian.com: A highly sophisticated weapons production facility using 3D printers and computers to make machine guns has been uncovered in a series of raids across the Gold Coast. Police say they found four homemade automatic submachine guns, silencers, ammunition, a replica handgun, a .45 calibre pistol and equipment used to make weapons at two Nerang businesses, as well as a pill press. The...

Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is using 3D printing to build the BE-4, a next-generation rocket engine fueled by liquefied natural gas. The engine will power Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital rocket and potentially a United Launch Alliance rocket too. Christmas is an understandably busy time for Amazon, the online megastore and one-stop destination for media, electronics, and last-minute gifts that are guaranteed to arrive by December 24. But now that the festive season is over, founder Jeff Bezos can busy himself with other matters, such as his Washington-based aerospace manufacturing company, Blue Origin....

Israeli 3D printer firm Nano Dimension has successfully lab-tested a 3D bioprinter for stem cells, paving the way for the potential printing of large tissues and organs, the company said on Wednesday. While 3D printers are used already to create stem cells for research, Nano Dimension said the trial, conducted with Israeli biotech firm Accellta Ltd, showed its adapted printer could make large volumes of high resolution cells quickly....

Image Source: Human Media Lab We’ve seen plenty of wild experimental smartphone concepts over the years but the new HoloFlex phone designed by Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab is something else. The phone combines 3D holographic images with a flexible display to create what might be a prototype for smartphones of the future.The Human Media Lab explains that the HoloFlex is “is capable of rendering 3D images with motion parallax and stereoscopy to multiple simultaneous users without head tracking or glasses.” All images on the device’s display are “rendered into 12-pixel wide circular blocks rendering the full view of the 3D...

SilencerCo Integrally Suppressed Prototype 9mm One of the first items that was attracting a significant amount of attention at the Shot Show Industry Day at the Range was this SilencerCo integrally suppressed 9mm.  They had brought out a similar prototype in September of 2015, but this was a new, improved, version.  It is not ready for sale, but I was told that they hope to have them on the market some time in 2016.  Of course, you will need a tax stamp from the ATF if you are not issued one in the military or as a peace officer...