Well, I hate to say this, but while corporations are just greedy entities that seem only care about expansion and profit, not in that order, governments actually should be somewhat ideological in nature.

As such I'd rather have particular governments spy on me. At the moment, I could deal with the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Swiss, Dutch, possibly maybe the German, Belgian, French and Finnish governments spying on me. As for the rest, I am not so sure.

Conceptually speaking I do endorse governments before corporations.

I am assuming that whole post should have been modded up +5 Funny, but for those that don't get the sarcasm it represents I would like to add my two cents to the mix.

Let alone the fact that the good old US of A violates the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention and a whole slew of international and sensible treaties on Human rights and rights in general faster than you'd be able to say porridge, I must also point out the sheer arrogance of many US citizens when they indeed trumpet their nation as the birthplace of anything that's democratic (a Greek word) and free (an old Saxon/Frisian/Germanic/Scandinavian word).

Firstly, the United States are not the only country on the planet that has a Constitution. it might behoove people to remember that (amongst others) the Dutch Unie van Utrecht out of 1579 and the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish served as inspiration for Jefferson et al when they were looking to write their constitution and declaration of independence. So no, the US did not invent humanism, the enlightenment, the notion of an inalienable freedom to believe what you wish and other core things. Those have been around far longer than the US across many cultures on this globe.

Hell, I use a shaving soap from a factory that was started in 1565. My shaving soap is actually older than the US itself.

Secondly, given the levels of poverty, incarceration, the amount of annual executions, the lack of healthcare or even access to education many of your citizens suffer do point in the direction that the USA is actually becoming an impoverished, brutish, oppressive and uncivilized nation. As we all know paranoia, poverty and an unlimited supply of guns for the largest army on the planet are hardly a mix I would call "a jolly good idea".

Having said all that, for those that still don't get the sarcasm of the poster I'm replying to: I do indeed suggest you let the Canadians spy on you. They do seem more civilized than the other options in the poll.

From a quick glance at the text and photos, I'd say this looks about as comfortable as my current life... and the surveillance there is only marginally worse than it is atm, thanks to the NSA :P

Why thank you. I really try, so it's a nice compliment.

The poster you just replied to took the words right out of my mouth.

While I agree with you, and not a lot of people seem to disagree here, that vaccinations against dangerous diseases are a good thing, I think over-medication is the bane of our health care systems.

In the Netherlands, doctors have a reputation for not easily medicating people. We're cautious about antibiotics, we're cautious about many types of drugs. The usual response of a Dutch doctor to fever is that as long as it's not over 40 degrees C and doesn't last for longer than three days, it's nothing to worry about. Of course this can be nuanced based on symptoms seen, but you get the gist of it.

This means that the amount of people that develop an immunity to antibiotics and whatnot is much lower than in countries such as Israel and Bulgaria, where people tend to be over-medicated in my view.

To get back to vaccination, I do think it's our collective responsibility to weed out things like polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus as much as we can, not getting flu shots is hardly morally offensive for the reasons already stipulated by the poster above.

In the Netherlands there's a huge debate over religious freedom vis a vis the vaccination of children from families that are religious to the point where they don't vaccinate. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's a collective responsibility to make sure these children don't fall victim to their parents' backwards views.

What you believe should be your prerogative, but as soon as you let it endanger unsuspecting minors your belief should be a secondary concern relative to the safety of those unsuspecting minors.

Either which way, a degree of nuance is called for in any such debate, so I don't think you should make messaging as simple as a blanket statement of "please get vaccinated" any more than you should advise people not to get vaccinated at all.

Raspberry Pi?

If your hardware is compromised, you've got a problem anyway. And it's more likely for commonly used computer systems to be compromised, like desktop PCs and laptops, than something as geeky as a Raspberry. Other than that, those things are far easier to carry wherever, and have no wifi built in as far as I know. Most/all of the storage is removable, and you could probably set said storage to be read-only.

If you're going to build an air-gapped encryption/decryption device, you might as well go for a Raspberry Pi.

They can see the message going from your pc to Slashdot. They'll know about your hypothetical drug-smuggling plans anyway. Isn't that lovely?

But a plane meant for surveillance is probably not going to be similarly-equipped to a commercial airliner. And not having to put lots of food, a toilet, and two pilots on the plane would probably save quite a bit of space, fuel efficiency and cost.

And I'm getting the impression that you're just being as pedantically "no, I am right here" as I am.

You'll still agree with me that it's easier to keep a pilot focused on task for multi-day flights, if you can provide him with decent meals, decent bathroom breaks and even sleep (swapping out with a second pilot) once in a while?

I may have misunderstood, but the concept of hovering over an area near-perpetually was supposed to be one of the surveillance advantages of drones.

Still, the biggest distinction is that each manned plane requires 1 trained pilot. Drones can go on autopilot for most of the uninteresting bits, swapping out the pilot to a drone that's about to make a more difficult manoeuvre. The pilots can also rest when they need to, so the drone can stay up in the air for multiple days while a piloted craft would probably need to land once in a while to physically swap out the pilot for a rested one.

Trained people are a major hurdle in getting large amounts of manned aircraft in the sky at all time.

I can actually speak from experience when I say it doesn't catch fire quickly. The heating elements just don't get enough power to really do anything horrible unless you leave it sitting, active, for multiple hours. At the rate it was going the one time my thermistor misreported temperatures, it would've probably taken a few hours for it to even melt away the PEEK nozzle holder. Not sure what the combustion points of PLA or ABS are, and I assume that of PEEK and brass will be quite a bit higher.. but yeah.

The only way it could reasonably cause a fire in the time it'd take for an average print is probably if you shorted some of the 12v wires. The 4pi electronics board I use has a ton of safety features built in. Shorting the heater wires would probably just blow the fuse, and I could replace that easily. The Arduino+RAMPS electronics that most RepRap users have are a bit easier to get in trouble with, I guess.

Though you do have a point. If it did catch fire, I'd probably be screwed. But the same would go for any other interesting tinkering experiment.

No, I don't know of a group that has made such a printer for less than $50k. Few people have a need for such sizes, given that it'd take ages to print things at such scales with current speeds. No interest means that nobody's really looked at it much. Hence, there are few large-scale RepRap design. The Kamermaker in Amsterdam is the first to come to mind, and that's not quite open source.

One thing that would probably help a lot is if people started using multiple extruders with vastly varying nozzle sizes, like close to 2mm for infill (3mm filament is pretty much the standard for RepRaps; 1.75mm for some other printers) and about 0.5-0.3mm for perimeters. Even then, it'd take some impressive printer designs to print anything with a bounding box near a meter in size, in a sane timeframe.

It might be thinkable to use some pellet-based extruder that has a nozzle beyond 3mm, to really speed up the internal structures.

People can download files made by others, so they don't have to design everything they want to print themselves. That said, I do easily spend about $80 worth of time, mindlessly staring at a print in progress. Mostly because it's damn near hypnotizing, not because my printer really needs babysitting when I'm printing PLA with it.

RepRap Mendel90 with 4pi electronics, by the way.

RepRap uses no position sensors. It uses stepper motors. It's cheaper that way, and doesn't reduce accuracy if you turn up the current of the motors or turn down the acceleration/speed of the print enough. The main concern would probably be sagging.

I'm thinking a sort of rollercoaster-like rail and carriage would help prevent sagging along the X and Y axis. The Z axis doesn't even really need it unless you're moving a lot of mass at your extruder. Other than that... you'd just need to extend the frame and wires, which can probably be done for less than $25.

Sadly, that's not what Ubuntu looks like anymore, in my experience. That lovely menu bar was replaced by a sidebar that appears if you crash your mouse into the relevant side-... or into the border between your screens, where it'll stop the mouse from going further as well.