asciilifeform: eh we just skinned a balloon, haven't we.

asciilifeform: and i can hardly imagine a modern big-game hunter having any serious troubles with a mastodon.

asciilifeform: e often than you might think. ... ... Space enthusiasts say, 'If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?' "The answer, Simberg explains, is that we can't "because most of the people who did it are in their dotage or dead, and a lot of it was more art than science."'

asciilifeform: 'Knowledge can be lost. Sometimes this is perfectly reasonable: No one knows how to kill and skin a mastodon anymore, for obvious reasons. And cultures frequently lose knowledge as they evolve past it--you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could write a computer program on punch-cards today. But there is something worrisome about misplacing knowledge that is only a generation or two old. And this happens mor

asciilifeform: state that can't keep a secret << incidentally, notice that no complete 'dump' for ru nuke of whatever variety ever hit the net.

asciilifeform: but a demonstration of 'with fiddybucks any discontented sod can now do it where he wants'

asciilifeform: at any rate, the operative boojum wouldn't be the demolition of a particular plot of real estate.

asciilifeform: right now it takes more than one man, however enthusiastic, working in his basement for twenty years, to level a city.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you sit down and think about it for a bit, you can figure out six different methods.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: give man a few days with ion beam workstation.

asciilifeform: unless the case is one of 'intrinsic' safety a la fissile mechanics

asciilifeform: to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.'

asciilifeform: 'Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end ☟︎

asciilifeform: doesn't even matter if 99 in a hundred men who open theirs, die

asciilifeform: decimation: the actual 'silent pistol' does not use a gas silencer.

asciilifeform: a la 'jacob's ladder.

asciilifeform: i suppose it's hard to blow yer own brains out with a drone.

asciilifeform: switch on a toy green laser in dark room.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i don't even think code as tight can still be made, much like you can't have a proper boot made... << oh but it can.