Snowden is a hero. It's a damn good thing he wasn't stopped. Else, the American people would have had no chance to stop the fascism that is enacting a slow-mo coup d'etat of our democracy. Time will tell if we can do anything about it now anyway, but at least we have the knowledge if not yet the means.

We will know victory when the Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world and those on Capitol Hill and K Street who enable them are swinging from the trees that line the National Mall.

Yes and computers existed before the Apple IIe. But it was Apple that made computers a household item. So pointing out, hey, ENIAC pre-dated Apple so they're no big deal misses the point in the same way you're missing it.

MakerBot did not invent 3D printing, but they are popularizing it by making it affordable enough for mass adoption. What we're looking at right now is the Apple IIe of 3D printers.

I guess you haven't heard the joke:

A journalist asked a Russian, American, and Israeli, "Can you please give us your opinion on the food shortage?"

The Russian replied, "What is an 'opinion'?"

The American replied, "What is a 'shortage'?"

The Israeli replied, "What is 'please'?"

Fab@Home's approach makes more sense to me: have multiple attachments that can extrude a variety of materials. So you have one set of nozzles that print the circuits and another that prints the structural components. Layer-by-layer deposition that's used now would probably not survive because of the different amounts of contraction as different materials cool, or the possibility that the deposition of a metallic material would re-melt structural material and distort it.

Rate of printing is also a limiting factor now, but at least one of the models I saw at the Maker Faire in NYC a couple weeks ago was addressing that problem by having multiple nozzles. But give it time. We're in the very, very early days yet. 6 years ago Bre Pettis, the founder of MakerBot, was teaching public school in Brooklyn. We're only a couple years past when the first model hit the market, and with the rate of evolution we've seen so far it won't be long at all before the whole world has changed.

...it's just compiling.

I would much rather have a distributed energy system furnished by renewables. The older I get, the more done I feel with centralized command-and-control structures like the traditional energy grid. It's forced dependency, and it rankles. Fusion boosters might spin tales about how cheap such energy would be, but they fail to remember that the fatcats at ConEdison like the paychecks they get now, and even want more, and if they find a way to provide energy with fusion at a vastly cheaper rate it does not mean you and I will ever see that rate. They'll just pocket the difference and find a way to charge us even more because it's "clean" energy. Go ahead, just watch and see.

Whether it's coal, gas, oil, or boron is irrelevant. Energy freedom means never having to cut a check to another power company ever again.

I completely agree with the other posters, gasoline cars never catch fire and burn their occupants to death. I'm shocked, shocked that an electric car would burn. Obviously it's a death trap.

By extension, I'm also horrified by those who suggest we revive zeppelins to manage flight. Don't they know hydrogen burns? Also, jumbo jets never burn. Aviation fuel, I've read, is safe to drink and could never harm anyone. 13 people died awful agonizing deaths on the Hindenburg. Think of the humanity! What's that? 137 people died in a PanAm crash... *yawn* what's on Must-See TV tonight?

It used to be you could read Tom Clancy and identify with the characters, exult in the common mission, and marvel at his technical details. It didn't matter what part of the political spectrum you hailed from, you could still read his books and feel good about being an American. Then at some point, I think it was "Debt of Honor," his schtick slid beyond to a right-wing crazyland fantasy where I could not follow.

I come from a military family. I come from a family with deep roots in America, half native-American, half-original European settlers. I could not stomach the jingoism that defined his later writing. America is not a destination, it's a process. If you forget that, and kick everybody who you don't see eye-to-eye with off the bus, then you forfeit your own seat on the ride, as far as I'm concerned.

Please cut it out. We all know now both parties serve the same masters, and none of us number among said masters. It's BS top to bottom. But rolling out the tired and demonstrably untrue "both parties are too extreme" defies common sense. There is no Left in American politics. There is only the corporate lackies vs. the corporate lackies, all of whom do whatever they can to disguise that fact from the average American while the corporations steal everything that isn't nailed down, and salt it away in some ridiculous tax shelter like the Isle of Mann or Switzerland.

We can't live 1st World lives, advance science, cure diseases, solve eminently solvable problems because we are betrayed at every, every turn by sociopaths and leeches who have turned our very system of supposed universal suffrage against us. And, most of us being mentally healthy, find it difficult to accept that a defective few really would consign us and our children to misery and death for their personal benefit, yet that's exactly what they do under this arrangement, every day.

We try to "give them the benefit of the doubt" and do a thousand things we might do to preserve equity among our fellow, non-ill citizens. Except those measures are precisely those which the ill have learned well to exploit. And now we find ourselves at a point where the accretion of dysfunction from the Ill represents a mortal threat to everyone, and we can choose to excuse them to our doom, or deal with them in a way that saves everyone.

So I plead with fellow citizens who have not yet taken leave of their senses, resist! The sociopaths know they're outnumbered, vastly. Many of them know in their hearts that they're sick, and they secretly yearn for others to recognize their illness and help them. If we don't, then they reflexively act out in ways that are even more lamentable.

We must stop them now.

Apologists, please extract your heads from your own asses before your fellow citizens are compelled to do it for you. The NSA and many, many other revelations have firmly ripped away the curtain you're trying so very very hard to clutch about your loins. If we ever had representative democracy in this country, it is now surely gone. All of us have to take the measure of our own hearts and decide how much we're willing to do to get it back. Me, I'll gladly give my life if it means my kids won't grow up slaves; I can't help it, it's how I'm wired. You may be different. But whether you do a lot or a little, it all helps. The key thing is to refuse to play the game of the usurpers any more, to not play along or acquiesce to their evil. That, and only that, is the beginning of a return to freedom.

People have shared the Nobel Peace Prize and such before, why not award the prize to both Snowden and Malala this year? What they each did took a tremendous amount of courage and has made a powerful statement for human rights everywhere. And when I think about it, pissing off the Taliban the next village is a very scary and brave thing to do, but then so is pissing off the most powerful government on the planet which commands unlimited numbers of scary commandos, assassins, and gunmen who can kill you no matter where you go. They're both epic, epic heros for what they've done.

These programs didn't start under Obama. Echelon has been going for decades. Cheney and Bush had the Total Information Awareness program. So the reason I don't blame Obama exclusively is because both Republicans and Democrats are doing it at the command of the same masters, the corporations and the .01% who run them. It's out in the open now--much of this spying that Snowden has revealed was industrial espionage. Focusing ire on the party(ies) in charge in DC is a dodge, a convenient lightening rod for the powers-that-be to draw the popular anger that has historically hung people like them from trees and beheaded them. Every once in a while you throw one of your cannon fodd...er, Congressmen and Presidents to the wolves, Joe Sixpack grunts with clueless satisfaction, cracks open another beer, and puts the game back on; and you can get back to the business of robbing his pension fund blind under the cover of law.

To stop being part of the problem and part of the solution, we all have to stop pretending that the political process makes any difference or that there's such a thing as the rule of law; they have been entirely subverted and the American people will have to get about the messy business of re-asserting popular sovereignity and bringing the criminals and sociopaths who brought this about to justice. It sucks and I don't want to have to do it either, but it's our duty to our children to not condemn them to live in slavery.

I think it would be useful for the American citizenry to have a copy of this data so that we can know exactly who the NSA employees are, who they know, what they're doing, and where they are at all times. Also the heads of JP Morgan, Citibank, Halliburton, etc, and all the shadowy 1% who are implementing this police state.

Oh, it's only for informational purposes, you know. Not like we would act on any of that information.

Seriously, do these people think these tools can't be turned on them? Americans have grown pretty fat and lazy but we are still a relatively heavily armed people, and you can't exactly go around ordering F-15s to drop napalm on suburban Cleveland. That is, the troubles the US Army has had suppressing IEDs and small arms fire in Afghanistan and Iraq multiply exponentially when you're turning your artillery on the friends and families of the very people you count on to manufacture your ammo, grow your food, and ship it to your butt.

So go ahead, totalitarian fantasists, keep turning the weaponry and spying machinery on the very people you count on to make your activities possible. See how that turns out. ***Spoilers ahead*** It ends with you swinging for lampposts or torn limb from limb by angry mobs.

I remember sending my first email over a modem in the early 80's. By the time I was in college 10 years later Usenet, BBS'es, MUDs, and the like were old hat to me, but the general public had no real use for computers and even many of my classmates still used actual typewriters to write their papers. It wasn't until the Dot-Com era was in full swing that the general public started to pay attention to computers and the Internet. Even then, though, many people of my generation and older smirked to refer to themselves as "Roadkill on the Information Superhighway." That only really disappeared around 2005 when social media started to take off.

So the point is, from the perspective of the general public there is a significant lag between when a transformative technology changes the world and when your average Joe wakes up to the fact that a revolution has already happened. I suspect it will be much the same with 3D printing, and the other significant, significant technologies that are birthing now such as wearable computing or implantable electronics, RFID or the "Internet of Things."

However in this case the real transformation is not technical, but psycho-social. Getting people to transform from the brain-dead, passive consumers they've been conditioned to be the past 100 years to the self-directed, creative makers 3D printing and these other technologies will enable them to be (at a lower barrier to entry than before, naturally), will take a lot longer than the 30 years it's taken the Information Revolution to get truly underway. That does mean early adopters will enjoy a significant, significant competitive advantage for a generation because now more than ever they can talk to other like minds via the Internet and multiply their native talents. And, now more than ever, they can say who gives a shit if Joe Sixpack next door doesn't get it? I can run circles around him before he even knows there's a race on.

Amid the totalitarian shadow of the NSA and the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the Powers-That-Be, it's the one thing that gives me hope for the future.

$0.34/kwh is already what we pay ConEdison in NYC. So we're already at break-even here. ConEdison has raised rates double-digit percentages every year for the past 10 years. The price per watt solar panel installation has fallen to $2, and that's dropping quickly. With those two trends we don't need any government intervention to produce a sea-change from centralized- to distributed power generation in this country in the next decade.

There is also the not inconsiderable effect Hurricane Sandy had on hearts and minds in the northeast US, where most financial and political power in this country is concentrated. People were quite upset to be without power and gasoline for weeks and weeks. So even from a climate resilience perspective there is a keen and growing will to move to distributed power generation.