The difference, of course, is that a camera will accurately report what it sees. Police can, if the like, say whatever they feel they need to say to make a case. So if the police will freely lie about your behavior, you might as well put up a fight, because you might win. If the camera will show you being cooperative, you can trust that as being reliable evidence. And I'd hope that in court, the evidence of a digital camera (with timestamps and digital signatures, etc.) will trump witnesses, even police.

"and reports against officers dropped by 87% ...

While most people on here are focusing on the police portion, the civilian portion is more damning. It shows the amount of crap police have to put up with by people who think they'll file a brutality report so they can not be held responsible for their actions."

You're assuming that police behavior didn't change, and that people lied when reporting police violence 87% of the time. Of course, the previous sentence in the report (which you didn't quote) said that the police reported using force 60% less often, which means that the actual use of force reduced significantly, and must account for a significant portion of the decrease in public complaints about police behavior.

The way to moderate that is to treat disabling a camera as admission of guilt by whoever turned off the camera for whatever happened while the camera was off. That gives the police an incentive to make sure that the cameras are working, have a full charge, etc.

Given that you can make cameras that can record for days or weeks continuously, on a single charge, it should be possible to make them run reliably for the duration of a shift.

I'd think that privacy laws would apply to the footage. That is, unless the footage is released because it's relevant, they shouldn't be publishing all footage of everyone who walked in front of a policeman. Though it'd be an interesting experiment - eliminating all privacy for police and anyone near them. But I wouldn't want to live that way. But once the footage is relevant to a case, it should be public, just like any evidence used in a trial.

Then there's the question of who gets to decide what's relevant. That can't be the police, of course. Perhaps judges?

Number of times force was used dropped 59%, but that doesn't mean that represented 59% of police.

For example, imagine that 80% of police never used force, so the stats only related to the 20% that did. Which are typical numbers, based on other reports. So if the 20% of the officers who used force did so 59% less often with cameras, but still used force at least once a year, then the number of police using force wouldn't change, just the frequency with which they did so.

Make sense?

All of the wild speculation posted as if it were facts, by people who weren't there and this don't actually know what happened, is pretty good evidence that it'd be beneficial for police to wear body cameras that can't be disabled. Then if the truth were documented objectively, rather than the via the recollections of a bunch of people with imperfect memories and biases, then the situation would be better.

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.