Revealing illegal government activity, on the other hand, appears to be relatively effective at triggering some change. Far more than reporting the illegal government to the employer and to the government, both of which Snowden did first, with no result at all.

If the government doesn't want people to "blow the whistle" publicly for their illegal activities, they might want to either consider not engaging in illegal activities, or responding to the notifications made through proper channels, so that people aren't forced to reveal the criminal activities publicly.

The question, of course, is whether it's legal for an NDA to require people to conceal illegal activities when their employer is trying to conceal them.

So are you arguing that the US is less secure now than it was in 1774? Back when we had almost nothing, fighting the globe-spanning England, we rejected torture as being against our principles. Now that we're the richest, most powerful country on the planet, "threatened" by terrorists (i.e. fighters without even the backing of a country) we're willing to give up our principles?

It's still a maturing industry, like 2D printing back when those printers were hundreds to thousands of dollars. But it's rapidly transitioning to a consumer-friendly technology. Every generation is better than the previous one, and the rate of advance is impressive. For example, the auto-leveling printers eliminate the primary cause of print failures. And the software is better and easier every year. Of course, it requires training and skill to design 3d objects, but that's true of good 2d products as well. The answer in 3D, just as it was in 2D, was for skilled people to create templates, so that novices could tweak and personalize even if they can't (or don't want to) do a ground-up design.

I think you got PLA and ABS backwards. PLA as a wide range of "glass transition" that starts to turn soft at 60c but melts around 160 c, ABS has a much narrower glass transition range (and the same melting temp) so it can take much higher temperatures without getting soft. Nylon can take higher temperatures, and Polycarbonate even higher.

The goal of RepRap is to make manufacturing (with plastic) cheap and universally available. You still need some non-plastic parts, like the hot end, electronics, and stepper motors. But they've got the electronics in 3D printers down to commodity stuff that's relatively cheaply available, so you can make a 3D printer for $200 or so of electronics, plus getting a friend to print a set of the printable parts.

It'll be a while until you can 3D print 100% of the device - it's hard to imagine being able to 3D print a controller, for example. But since they're dirt cheap, that's not a huge issue.

The most useful part I've printed is probably a repair part for a dishwasher. It was a plastic clip, and the manufacturer only wanted to sell the complete drawer assembly for $400 per drawer, so a little measuring and CAD saved me $800.

Whoever's saying that 3D printed parts can't be durable is out of date. Old-school PLA was pretty fragile, but modern PLA is much more durable, ABS is quite durable, and Nylon is effectively indestructible. Of course, bonded layers won't be as strong as injection molding, or CNC milling from a solid piece, but these days 3D printed parts from consumer printers are highly usable. Within the realm of what can be done with extruded plastic, of course. Some things you need to CNC mill from steel. That's fun, too.

If you observe a several hundred year trend in global climate, which has dips up and down for years and even decades, a few years of a dip doesn't disprove the long-term trend.

Let's compare it to the stock market. It's been going up as a general trend for decades, making stocks a generally very good investment with great long-term returns. There were certainly years where stocks went down, and certainly many individual stocks that collapsed, but that doesn't mean that stocks don't go up, or won't go up, just that some years and specific stocks deviated from the long-term trend.

You're missing the point, perhaps intentionally.

Global Climate Change is a change in the global climate, with is a broad, long-term change. The impact on a specific region or time period isn't global climate, it's regional weather, which is only very loosely correlated to the global climate.

Arguing that the weather recently in the east coast of the US is fine, so you don't care about global climate change, is like arguing that your chair is comfortable so you don't care that the house is on fire. Sure, you're fine right now where you are, but it's not going to stay that way forever. And ignoring what's going on around you is a bad long-term plan.

"People complain about the security procedures but if someone was able to hijack or blowup a plane the very same complainers would be howling about not having enough security"

People aren't complaining about security, they're complaining about things that don't improve security, but which do make travel an absurd hassle. Taking our shoes off, not carrying liquids, etc., don't prevent any significant threats. Both measures would detect attempted attacks that were both detected and stopped other ways when they were attempted, and both of which would have failed even if they'd not been stopped - the "liquid explosives" take hours to process during which time the attacker would have to be locked in the bathroom doing chemistry with the liquids, and the shoe bomb and the underwear bomb would have badly injured the attacker but not destroyed the plane.

Things that really improve security are measures that countries that take air travel security seriously take, with Israel the obvious example. A good start would be actually putting an Air Marshall on every flight, and to actually understand who the fliers are and interrogate anyone suspicious, which require real effort - they'd have to train tens of thousands of agents to put one on each flight daily. They likely have under 5,000 now, to cover 87K flights a day, so odds are there's no Air Marshal on any given flight. And there aren't trained detectives talking to fliers to pick out suspicious people - there are checklists given to "lowest cost bid" contractors. But they'd rather talk about security than do anything difficult or expensive, so Air Marshals are out. And, amazingly enough, they've been _cutting_ the number of Air Marshals.

So instead they funnel money into expensive equipment of marginal value (but profits for vendors, and lowest-cost-bid "agents" can operate them). So we get no security, but we get hassles.

The most absurd part is that the people working in "security" are all following orders, and appear to think that what they're doing improves security somehow.

The United States was formed specifically not to be just another country, but to hold itself to a higher standard. And it did so. When the US was just an idea, and our soldiers were fighting the most powerful country on the planet, we didn't justify torture.

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

If our current leadership has lost sight of the point of forming the United States, they need to be held to a higher standard, and replaced by leaders who respect the principles of the country.

The fundamental problem is that they're over-billing, the problem is that they've got a monopoly on a utility, generally with extremely weak oversight. So, as happens for hundreds of years, they use their control to extract money from everyone else. That's why it's a terrible idea to run utilities as unregulated, for-profit corporations. That's why whenever monopoly utilities are deregulated the prices go up while quality of service goes down. Competition only works if there is real competition.

Competition doesn't magically solve everything - that's why there should be both competition and legally defined minimum standards.

Compare it to food safety. Back before there was an FDA, food companies would often sell unsafe and even deadly food, because it was profitable to do so. And competition didn't stop them. What was effective is laws making it illegal to use unsafe practices in food production, combined with audits and penalties. And competition serves to improve things above that level, so that some food companies do better than the legally mandated minimum for food safety. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's far, far better than the horrors of the pre-FDA food supply. So now people have a right to know what's in the food they eat, and that there's basic minimum level of safety in food production. And those had to be made laws because food manufacturers didn't do either of those things, even with the magic of competition.

Similarly, the Net Neutrality is a law that says that when you buy an internet connection you can get to the whole internet and your ISP won't corrupt your network connection to increase their profits. That seems pretty obviously a good thing, which I suspect is why pretty much every major technology company supports it.

Sorry, you're right. Ivee was $149 on Kickstarter, which is less than the $199 Echo. But now it's retailing for $199, same as Echo, My bad.