One downside, though, of the design was that you had to adjust the valves every year or two. The low weight certainly helped as well, what with a Civic now weighing 3000lbs+

True. There's the above-ground ideas and potential market for this kind of product (and why you absolutely DO get the permits and business license as the creator) and the real less than honest reason which is what usually ends up happening to good intentions.

I smell legislation with the government coming down on this sort of printing like a bag of hammers in 5...4... 3...

Moral of the story: Get your ducks in a row before doing anything that is a legally or socially gray area. A couple of hundred dollars and a business license would have saved him a lot of angst and likely kept if from hitting the fan.

That's not actually true. It's smog control devices that mandate lower compression ratios in order to limit emissions. You can make a car that runs on any compression ratio that you desire. But good luck getting it to pass smog if it's much above 12:1.

Note - the 2012 Civic runs at a 10.6:1 ratio. Much lower since smog limits are so crazy as of late. The engine has a lot less power (actual torque) and it needs an extra gear in the transmission to keep fuel economy up.

People were doing this type of "conversion" back in the 70s. With exactly the same sort of pathetic 30-45 mile range. For half the cost, even adjusted for inflation. It would have been news. 40 years ago.

Personal rant: Is anyone at Slashdot actually taking time to double-check submissions any more? Most of what I see as of late isn't actually news or is news that you see everyplace else as well.

But this is a huge gray area since making it "one click" simple eventually, to make these at home is essentially distributing firearms. I suppose a judge would have to rule on it, but given the government's lack of humor about such things in the past, I'm not expecting the small guy to win here.

When you can print a lower for $5 in materials, and you can save half a pound off the weight of, say, a typical 1911, you've got a potentially marketable product. And as far as the money goes, the government doesn't care if he's making a a hundred dollars or ten cents in donations - it's going to make them mad at you if you don't have the proper licenses. No money, no items, and no blueprints/software/etc are allowed to change hands without it being considered to be a business by them.

He just screwed up by not filling in the right paperwork first. So the printer company yanked his lease to be safe. (I suspect a simple business license would have been enough, actually, to avoid all of this) Also, there's nothing to say that as a business, he couldn't be offering the plans for free. Some businesses offer free versions of their products. Free if you want, already completed and ready to purchase if you don't have a printer and a few dozen hours to mess with getting it calibrated and working right.

The home based 3d printing community actually follows this exact business model. Free if you want to DIY, or buy it ready to go. Open Source and Commercial working side by side without conflict.

I used to work for a data forensics company a few years ago and trust me. It's never gone. Don't even bother to try to hide it or destroy it. (the act of destruction alone is seen as admitting guilt to the courts - and there are huge fines as well) It's also why 90% of most lawsuits settle out of court. Every company does morally questionable practices and sometimes outright illegal ones, so getting a look at their data is the last thing they want their competition or lawyers to be able to do.

But, while it is not illegal to make a firearm for your own use. But he's got a major problem as the government sees "donations" and "selling" as pretty much the same thing when it comes to this. He's taking money in in some form and offering essentially DIY gun kits. Bad move. He's a moron for not paying the fees and doing the paperwork and then doing what hundreds of other companies small and large are doing legally. Firearms are BIG money in the U.S. He can then go one step further and offer the things as working cheaper alternatives, offer cheaper replacement parts, and so on.

That's how he makes money at this. Not via donations, but via running a proper business. After all, have you SEEN the price of most firearms lately? A half or quarter-priced alternative would sell like crazy. He'd probably get a major retailer interested as well if the designs were properly safe and functional. As that show Son of Guns says, "If you're properly trained; if you're properly licensed, and you follow all of the laws, you too can do this." It never ceases to amaze me how many people out there make their lives difficult when a few dollars and some forms would have solved everything. Get your paperwork in order and you're golden. Forget about it and you're going to be dealing with people with little or no sense of humor.

He had a genius idea and should have run it as a business. Now, he's given most of the info away and is stuck without the right permits and even a printer.

There's also the what emergency room workers call motorcycle riders who don't have helmets.

"Organ donors"

A shocking 42% of motorcycle deaths are attributed to not having a helmet. Now, true, some would have died anyways. Nothing's going to save you being launched 500 ft when you hit something at 150mph. But that also doesn't factor in the secondary issues like concussions, brain damage, and having half of your face ground off instead of your helmet taking the abrasions.

The evidence is clear Motorcycle helmets do save lives and are an absolute requirement if you plan on living to see your grandchildren as a rider. The only difference between a motorcycle and a bicycle is one typically goes 2-3 times faster than the other.(if you are obeying the law, naturally)

Some study in Europe is meaningless. Here in America, people drive massive 3 ton SUVs at 45mph just getting their kids to school on time. We consistently drive faster than any other nation on the planet, have more vehicles, more miles of paved roads, and our cars weigh the most on average. Getting hit by one of these yuppie idiots who is on their phone in their urban assault tank while on a bike is like being hit like a ping pong ball. Of course you wear a helmet. It's your only chance to even end up in the hospital instead of a coffin.

Imposing them? Well, I personally favor Darwinism for the stupid. But you're stupid to not wear one, law or not.

The main issue with running under WINE is that they have to use proprietary code for the mouse and input drivers.

What this means is that the mouse doesn't work in 80%+ of games. It's a known issue and they refuse to deal with it, despite having had a working solution when they were still offering their commercial product. They pontificate on their forums about how they support free software only and take the usual neckbeard cave-dweller *IX hard-line about "no commercial anything anywhere, any time." All the while while they HAVE the code.

They even go so far as to delete posts and requests about mouse problems from their forums and claim that there's no problem, or that it works fine. Wine are complete assholes about it. I can run Mass Effect 1 perfectly except there's ZERO control of the character with the mouse - it's just dead. No fix at all.

When I had Cedega, it ran perfectly. They killed Cedega and presto - everything simply broke due to worthless drivers.

You can bet that Steam will have no such issues getting the mouse and joystick working properly.

So after both parties come apart at the seams, what's going to happen? It is rather appalling that they have managed to shift politics so far to the right that basically we have New Republican and Fundamentalist to chose from. There isn't even a real moderate position, let alone anything truly progressive, liberal, libertarian, or that supports The Constitution.

I used to joke that it's a choice between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Now, It's not really that funny any more.

Romney's ambition has always been to be President, but things have gotten so much worse in the last few years. He's kind of got no options - either join up with the devil and pretend to be one of them, (like half of the members of Congress I suspect) or be his real self and not get the nomination. I find it almost comical how the RNC can't get candidates that legitimately win by a healthy margin(Bush being elected by the Supreme court's 5-4 decision is not a "win") because anyone who would get the nomination is unelectable, and anyone who would win the election can't survive the primaries.

Republicans love to say how great Regan was. Today, he wouldn't make it to the convention. Jeb Bush (as an example) was thinking about running at one point but gave up as it was clearly a waste of time to try to compete with the fundamentalist fist-pounding, rage-hate about Obama (mostly for no real reason, since he does what Congress wants anyways), and political agenda that was lifted from Ayn Rand. The RNC has completely self-destructed. And now they are throwing Romney under the bus because he's not good enough. No, it's not their morally bankrupt, bigoted, money-worshiping agenda. Of course it isn't. It has to be Romney that's the problem.

As for Ron Paul, you could see it when abortion, religion, and Obamahate(tm) came up. "me too" was pretty much his answer and he quickly moved on. And there's a TON of stuff he had to leave out because the other candidates would have looked at him like he was from Mars. (instead of like he was from some foreign country, like they did)

The President sends Congress a wish-list of what he wants them to do, but it's largely ignored by Congress. (this has been the pattern for several years now, actually). So, yes, Obama's. "budget" was not passed as he initially submitted it to them.. They basically told him where to stick it and did their own thing instead. Eventually the President had to cave in to Congress' demands. But a budget was actually passed. Just not really the one Obama wanted.

Congress passes a budget every year. Sometimes late, but they do actually get one passed.

You can check it if you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget
You can click on the 2011 above the little picture to go to 2011 and 2012's pages. See the "passed" and the date on every page?

Romney does come from one of the most liberal states in the country. So much so that he's not likely to even win his own state in the election. He's closer to, say, a Texas Democrat or Oregon Republican (read: fairly moderate) than the asshat fundamentalist that he's been trying to portray himself as in order to get the nomination. So of course nothing much makes sense. He's not being himself in any of this and refuses to say anything lest he be branded as a liberal by most of the extreme right in his party. After all, his positions ARE pretty similar to Obama's.

The problem is that he was a moderately conservative (his being a complete jerk aside) governor in an extremely liberal state who was pushed into the feeding frenzy that is Washington politics. So of course he got blind-sided. What he considered normal conservative practices and ideology wasn't even on the same planet as what the embittered fanatics in the RNC were espousing on a national level. Note how even Ron Paul also got pushed so hard to the right that he wasn't even able to say much of anything about his core Libertarian beliefs in the primaries.

As for Torvalds, he's as much of a spokesperson for Linux and its various distros and forks as Bill Gates is for Microsoft at this point. He has some connection to the product that he created, but essentially doesn't actually do anything meaningful at this point.

The Devs of Mint have their own version, Cinnamon, that they use and work on. I highly recommend it, since it's basically a front-end replacement for KDE. Very fast and slick. All of the newest fixes and apps and so on are being developed there first from what I can tell. It's a simple install, as it's really a re-worked shell and not a full distro.

Cinnamon is just awesome. A different interface look to be sure, but it isn't Unity BS or Gnome bloat.