A) You're assuming that you'd be given a trial by jury, rather than branded a traitor (aiding the enemy) and either kept in guantanamo or tried in a secret court. They would hold you up as an example - head on pike, as it were - to all others who might dare to expose their illegal actions. If you look at the history of civil rights leaders, you'll find that Rosa Parks wasn't just some random hero who stood up for herself one day; she volunteered and was chosen by community leaders to be a test case. They picked their timing, circumstances, and people very carefully - both from a legal and a public-relations standpoint. Whistleblowers have no such luxury; they find incriminating information and are immediately presented with an ethical quandary and the necessity to act.

B) Why are you lambasting someone for not wanting to go to prison and face "enhanced interrogation methods"? He discharged his ethical duty by telling us what he found. He doesn't owe us a damned thing more.

Clearly, that will stop people from doing it. "I swear, officer, I was just holding that ABS plastic for a friend!" "Those stepper motors are for a completely legal CNC machine!" "Those aren't lead screws for a two-axis bed, they're carriage bolts for my landscaping cross-ties!" "You can't prove I was going to melt those milk jugs into printing filament!"

If carrying a rifle is an irrational behavior (which is a rather silly claim to make, IMHO), why is it okay for police to do it? Because we hire them to keep the peace, sure, but that inherently implies that there is a threat to the peace. They don't protect the peace in real time, they respond to violent events and do their best to eventually track down the perpetrator and remove them from society. That doesn't help you when you happen to be in the path of a nutjob on the rampage, but the police will be sure to remove the nutjob from society after they've finished killing you and a bunch of people around you. Is it also unfounded for the police to believe that a rifle is likely to be needed? Why is their belief valid and other peoples' not? Handgun rounds are more likely to miss than rifle rounds. Do police therefore also not care about bystander casualties? If so, why is it okay for them and not us? Does carrying a gun automatically equal "you don't care about bystander casualties"? Our training involves evaluating backstops and line of travel for any rounds we fire. It's not a decision taken lightly. Let me remind you that, statistically, non-police who've gone through the process to obtain a carry license are less likely to commit a crime than the police, statistically more knowledgeable about local use-of-force laws, and statistically far better shots than the average police officer.

You can already get around those checks; the average guy's garage workshop has everything needed to make a simple firearm. It's kind of tough to completely eradicate guns from society when anyone with a piece of sheet metal and a hammer can make a functioning rifle.

This might be feasible if it wasn't so darned easy to build your own 3D printer without DRM in it.

It just means they go wherever the money is. Is that really what we're looking for?

The sexual tension between you two is palpable

Mine was pulsed operation for that very reason. Two minutes on, three minutes off seemed to be a good timing setup, but it's certainly not empirical. I didn't have to reverse the polarity of the peltier block; the weather was hot enough. Again, though, you're missing my point - I'm not saying I did the exact same thing they did, but it was based on the same principles. There's no way I'm the only one who's done it, either.

Well, that depends on what you count as "something different" :\ They applied a bare peltier cooler to someone's wrist. I applied a water-cooled copper block to my forearm. The only difference I see is that my peltier cooler was already portable, had a heatsink fan, and transferred its thermal differential to my forearm via liquid coolant - but if you want to get technical, yes, I did something different

My point is, it's great that people are working on commercializing this, but it's not automatically a Big Brand New Development just because MIT strapped a 12V square to an old watch band and hooked it up to some temperature sensors.

I did this at college with a peltier cooler, a backpack full of batteries, and a GPU water-cooling kit :\ It ain't rocket science, and Atlanta heat is a powerful motivator.

Bureaucratic incompetence has been the strongest protector of civil liberties to date :\

I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"