You might need a set of sleeve valves or similar to seal off the intake ports. So the combustion chamber of the deactivated cylinder can act as the air spring.

I wonder if there is a limitation to how much power you can make from that size of linear generator/stator though, so you wouldn't get much advantage, I don't know that much about that side of things though.

They can be horizontal opposed in motion in the parallel twin design. This will give some second order imbalance though. Piston rings don't fail all the time, or you would see new cars blowing blue smoke all the time. They gradually wear out.

The other thing the article doesn't state, is that the cylinder and head design is similar to 2 stroke diesels. With exhaust ports at the top, and intake ports at the bottom, blocked off as the piston moves up. They generally use a supercharger or a turbocharger to force the exhaust gases out and the fresh intake charge in, so I assume this design is using some sort of electric supercharger in it's place.

I'm confused by this. I have 7 monitors on one machine, 3 connected to an AMD Radeon, the other 4 connected to a Nvidia Geforce (using a matrox triple head 2 go, to make 3 appear as 1 monitor to the card). And it all works seamlessly. Even have 3d applications/meda players spanning across them and it works. (Not quite sure how the 3D side of things work, backbuffer from one copied to the other?)

Depends, if the work is done under warranty, the manufacturer has how many hours they estimate the job to take. And that is what the dealership will get paid to do the work. If the mechanics takes longer, than the dealership gets screwed but that isn't your problem. These book hours may be used as estimates for out of warranty repairs, and if the customer quibbles they can claim that is what the manufacturer estimates the job will take. Independent mechanics, different story of course.

I can remember reading an article about how landing on mars was a bitch compared to the moon or earth. Earth has a descent amount of atmosphere, so you can rely on aero braking then parachute. On the moon you have no atmosphere so you can fire rocket engines in the direction your flying, and do a powered descent.

Mars has the problem of so little atmosphere that aero braking barely slows you down to a speed where you can open a parachute and not have it ripped apart as you are still travelling at supersonic speeds. And the atmosphere is just thick enough to upset rocket engines firing into the oncoming stream/airflow so you can't do a powered descent.

The Aerodynamic flight wasn't all that new. That was based on what the Apollo command module did on reentry. The sky crane engines were based off the ones that landed the Viking landers.

You could all buy my game, and learn to make correct car analogies.

That is a 104 years of theatre subscription, in your sound system alone!

Do we have the full story here? Has the maintainer done this repeatedly, or was this his first mistake? We are all human.

I think I may of replied to you before, but parts from my Solidoodle are very strong. The heat transfer from the extruder when printing at 0.3mm is more than enough to slightly melt the previous layer and fuse them. Printing at 0.1mm makes an almost seamless print. When printing with a heated bed, in an enclosed space the whole print is slightly tacky and soft. The prints do have a grain, and that is the weakest part, but you can design items with that in mind. If you are worried about printing something out of ABS/PLA that is going to fail due to stress, having it injection molded isn't going to increase the strength factor by enough margin to stop it breaking.

Well the SD itself has multiple 3d printed parts. I have printed gears and other parts I would happily use in robotics and other projects. The ABS plastics it builds are surprising strong and robust. I would not call the parts that much weaker than the equivalent injection moulded ABS part.

Although the base SD2 comes with no bed heater which makes it basically useless. The bed heater upgrade has "crept up" from $49 to $99. Although now some people are modifying theirs to not use the underpowered bed heater, but to use a large silicon heat mat instead. So if you want to go that option the base model is useful.

The writers of Repetier-Host are writing Repetier-Server that can be run on a RaspberryPi to remote your 3D printer of choice. See here for the plans https://github.com/repetier/Repetier-Host/issues/64