To add to Errol's reply.. Basically, our minister of security and justice, Ivo Opstelten, loves to act like a rabid fanboy of the book 1984, and of the things the UK and USA are already doing. We're just lagging behind a year or two on the field of "massive disregard for citizens' rights".

Not an ideal choice, in other words.

Source: dutch citizen. Annoyed dutch citizen.

You think he was handing her a few dollars' worth of pennies? Ahem, maybe not "handing"...

I struggle to find out how SuricouRaven was being homophobic. Maybe pedophobic, if that's a word?

The protocol this site uses, thought up apparently two decades ago, would prevent people from falsely claiming to have killed the target. Read up on it. It's scarily effective.

I agree. It'd be good if any form of tracking that gets applied to more than 0.01% of the public in a year, first gets applied to the police force.

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

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.