Gun enthusiasts have been machining their own DIY guns for decades. In fact many of the guns used by military forces around the world began with an idea in the workshop of a private citizen. David Marshall Williams designed the M-1 Carbine automatic rifle used in WWII while he was in prison. He was allowed to use the prison machine shop and guards let him service their weapons.

There are thousands of amateur machinists who could build an assortment of exotic and scary guns if they wanted to. Mr. Wilson has simply developed a potentially better machine for doing what has always been doable by any common person with access to tools for over the past hundred years.

BTW - there is no national law that makes it illegal to manufacture your own guns or ammunition. According to the ATF:

True. Somalia doesn't regulate their cricket matches, which makes the game absolutely incomprehensible.

Exactly why American Football never appealed to me, even as a child. That and most sportscasters and commentary are obnoxious. Can't stand commentary continuously announced over any event.

You actually GO to games and concerts IN PERSON? Even though you can watch it all on a smart phone, TV, or laptop? Let me guess, you also GO to the cinema also, even though you could just download the torrent. I guess I'll just never get "people" people.

This discussion has actually inspired me to write a poem. OK, here it goes:

"Stories don't need plots, and poems don't need to rhyme."

That got me an A+ in my postmodern creative writing class.

Now I'm reminded of all the people who carefully watched every episode of Lost like there was going to be some sort of meaningful ending that could never had been predicted, made total sense once revealed, and made all the hours invested in over-stretched side plots worth enduring.

Fact is there is no "literature". There are only profits. And keeping an audience in a perpetual state of suspense like a crack addict waiting for his next high is now the commonly accepted practice to keep reeling in ad revenue. Actually having a plan for how to close the series does not matter. Show me a TV series that had an AWESOME final episode since the ending of Newhart in 1990.

Over the decades we have outsourced our most hazardous production to other nations such as China since in the US complying with our strict labor and environmental safety regulations makes it very expensive, and some industries probably can't be clean or safe enough to be legal. But now we stand at our clean and smog-free shores and pat ourselves on the back while pointing at the very nations we shipped our hazardous production to and accuse them of being unsafe and dirty.

Reminds of the scene from Game of Thrones when Joffrey says his mother has told him that a king should not strike a woman, then he orders Ser Meryn to hit Sansa. Meryn immediately obeys the command without hesitation or concern for the young lady. The US is Joffrey, Ser Meryn is China, Sansa is Mother Nature, and we are all hypocrites.

Put the kids on pedal-powered generators and make child labor fun while cutting back on the need to burn coal. Get American kids to join in and we could solve the child obesity crisis, save the climate, gamble on televised kid-power competitions, create jobs for bicycle mechanics and generator technicians, end abusive fitness club contracts, and cut street crime from bored pre-teens running amok on our (and China's) streets.

Together we can make it happen. Vote for me in 2016.

Everyone knows that cooking the iPhone for 1:30 will destroy it. But just 10 seconds will set the password to 0000, making it easy to access your phone if you forget your password. Saves a trip to the Apple Store, which will burn you a lot harder.

No, idgit is a food app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to detect when you have blended your smoothie to perfection. Just place iPhone in a zip-loc bag (note - must be zip-loc, not plastic wrap or aluminum foil), then place in blender with smoothie ingredients while the app is running. Then start blending and wait for the iPhone to beep when your smoothie is ready.

In the US governments grant public money to be used by private companies and do allow exclusive access to critical resources. One such example is the $3 million, five-year grant to Yulex Corp. to exclusively develop rubber from the guayule plant in Arizona. Yulex holds the exclusive license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for USDA's patented guayule latex production technology. Since I'm not part of this exclusive government-business partnership I can't even buy a seed or a plant for my own independent study. So much for a free market.

The "have vs have not" discussion is not about the dissatisfaction from having only basic cable when other people get to have HBO, it is about the "haves" who can almost literally buy elections, design their own regulations, and even engage in rent-seeking endeavors to force the public to buy their product, and the "have-nots" who don't even have time to think about their own disenfranchisement because they are literally struggling to keep paying basic needs such as shelter and food. To be honest, this is more of a concern for exploited workers in "developing" countries, but workers in the US have been watching their standard of living decline to the point now that they are becoming focused on maintaining a standard of living that keeps them employable. That is, they may have clothes that aren't rags, they may have convenient access to restroom and shower facilities, they may have enough nutrition to barely maintain sufficient health to do their job, and they may have transportation to and from their jobs, but there isn't any money left from their pay after a week of work. They are literally working for the sake of work with little or no joy, no expectation of a better tomorrow, no expectation that their kids will be better off, and worse, they fear that pushed just one notch further they will be sucked into the inescapable void of homeless and government dependency. Many Americans, unfortunately, are already dependent on government programs even though they work almost full time, or two or more jobs that combined exceed 40 hours each week. There are Americans who "admit" to having a drug addiction they don't even have because otherwise they would be denied the aid they need.

You cannot force shame of dependency onto an entire population, deny access to the paid ears of their elected representatives, and then blame them for not taking "personal responsibility" for their circumstances after they played by the rules, worked hard to succeed at their jobs, lived frugally, pursued higher education, served their country with honor, saved and managed their own retirement accounts, only to be forced to empty those accounts to pay for food on today's table and today's rent. The only option left for them now to take "personal responsibility" is to take to the streets in a Bastille Day type fashion to correct a dysfunctional society. Recalling the Reign of Terror in France, I don't think that's how we would want to push the working masses to the brink.

Oddly enough, many of the problems that are threatening working people could be corrected with either a laissez-faire free market approach, or an effective Scandinavian-style social-democratic system. But what we have here today in the US is a neo-feudal corporate oligarchy empowered by urban Fascism. Try bettering yourself by selling fruit from a street cart in any American city and see how far you get with no more than an upfront investment that a working person could actually save from living a Spartan existence to be just barely employable over the course of three months. For the sake of a fair and rational argument on behalf of American workers, let's presume that no taxes are evaded and no labor or business laws have to be broken to succeed, as in the case of those who use the "if the illegals can come here and succeed" fallacy.

The drawback is that it keeps the body and the brain both from aging. Not sure if I want my 16 yo girlfriend to well, you know, like, keep the same mental maturity, or something like that, you know? Like, OMG, for real. LOL. BFN.

Don't discount grammar - it can save a human life. There's a big difference between "let's eat, Grandma!" and "let's eat Grandma!".

Impressive yes, but ultimately a failed allocation of resources. Had they used the stone and the labor to build better defenses rather than monuments they may had been able to prevent the numerous times the whole region was attack and invaded by outside conquerors.

Combined with straw that would become the mortar between each stone. In ancient times no resource went unused.