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[Igel]

193. Of course.

But it's already different.

The claim is the police should have shot the guy. That would have been okay, I guess.

I suspect that the reaction would be entirely different if the killer had used a gun. If the "bad guys" use the same means as the police, the reaction would be different because, well, we're just all biased towards police. In fact, it's just tit-for-tat, and to be expected. Nothing wrong with it. I mean, same means of violence, so there shouldn't be any difference in reaction, right?

Yeah. It would be an escalation. But bad guys already use bombs against good guys. They just haven't figured out to mount them on something like this yet:

In a sense, it's cops catching up with civilians.

Notice that all over the country there are middle- and high-school robotics clubs. They have to do more complicated tasks--pick up things, go up ramps. sense colors and push buttons, so they use more expensive, more general-use hardware, but that's only a matter of degree. They have two types of trials to put their bots through: (1) in autonomous mode the teens program the bot to go in a certain direction for a certain amount of time or wheel rotations, turn a specific angle, and continue. They have the course map and basically encode the map in the program they run; (2) they control them using a cell phone and a joy stick or on-screen glide-pad. My kid plays with and helps build bots using off-the-shelf tech that makes the police bot look obsolete, and he's in 7th grade this fall.

Most explosives are banned. Some can be made at home and those can't be banned. Then there are things like thermite, using red iron oxide and aluminum powder (with typically a magnesium strip to get the reaction going). If you can't buy the stuff, get a file and make your own red rust powder and aluminum filings. ("We must ban all iron and all aluminum!" Yeah, now let me tell you about the copper-based explosives, if people are so hot for returning to the Chalcolithic.) Thermite can take out tanks, burn through concrete. My friend and I in high school (we liked making explosives) put a fairly deep hole in a sidewalk his father had poured a month before. Guy didn't swear, but when he came home and saw the mini-crater in his sidewalk he made an exception.

Militarized ...