His Volt was $45k, I saw the sticker. Tax credits aren't immediate. The Sportwagen TDI was $25k. VW recently raised the price as a result of demand. Did you see the part where I said if you're in the electric range the Volt wins hands down? The catch is as soon as you leave the electric range, the efficiency plummets badly. Over the range of a full tank for both cars, the efficiency is nearly equal.

You quoted a *base* Volt. With any options, the price shoots up fast. His is well equipped, the sticker on his was $45,185. This is trivial to find on Chevrolet's website. You are correct on the Sportwagen's price.

Don't call people liars if you're unwilling to look for truth.

A friend of mine bought a Volt too and was talking about how amazing it was. When I said I didn't find the numbers that impressive, he asked about my VW Sportwagen TDI. The VW has better performance, better handling, more cargo capacity, better fuel economy (compared to a Volt using its engine/generator), and more range per tank. He got pissed when he found out the VW cost $20,000 less than his Volt.

For city driving within the electric only range, the Volt wins, hands down. As soon as you drive beyond that however, the cost difference per tank between it and a TDI is almost zero.

That having been said, I agree, go Elon. I would like to see Tesla do well.

NetPositive!

Your information is out of date. KC is a huge engineering/tech hub, with Sprint HQ, Garmin HQ, Burns & McDonnell HQ, Black & Veatch HQ, and Honeywell/NNSA (where most of a modern nuclear weapon is made). There are tens of thousands of highly educated technical people in the KC metro area.

Come on down to south JoCo, Nehmo. There's still a lot of cheap places to live way down here, and I'm pretty sure I'm one of the scarier people on the streets late at night south of 151st in Olathe. Lenexa also has some nice, cheap places to live. A couple friends of mine just moved out of KCK to Lenexa and have been very happy there.

Lawrence has some very hilly areas. Its really pretty to take off from Lawrence airport, head east, then south, then west along 15th Street . There's some lovely rolling hills.

Kansas in general is surprisingly hilly. As another poster said, the Flint Hills are spectacular. Even in eastern Kansas and KC itself you'll see a lot of hills. There's even cave systems excavated in the hills for business and storage.

Garmin still believes in doing work in the USA.

All of their consumer electronics products for sale in the USA (except nuvis) were designed and developed in the USA. (Kansas, Arizona, Oklahoma) Nuvis have about 5% development in Taiwan, 95% in Kansas.

All avionics are designed, developed, and manufactured entirely in the USA. (Kansas, Arizona, Oregon)

The vast majority of the Marine devices are designed and developed in the US, with some assistance from the UK.

Most in-dash car stereo work is done in the USA, but out of the necessity to work with car stereo manufacturers, there is development done in Taiwan as well.

" built-in superconducting magnets in the souls"

I believe Massive Dynamic has a patent on these actually.

Brought to you by Monster Cable.

There's nothing wrong with GPS coverage, your receiver has a problem. It may require a firmware update or an external antenna.

I witnessed this also. Our IT department is mostly a Dell shop, and dsm_om_connsvcd went completely bonkers.

"I have to wonder why Samsung doesn't flip the disable bit on the features Apple is suing about"

Samsung didn't write any of the features Apple is suing over. The Galaxy Nexus is running AOSP Android 4.0. Outside of the modem, there is *zero* Samsung code running on the device. They're suing Samsung over something they don't like that Google wrote.

I had firearms training as part of my old job, and own several for recreation and personal defense. Here's some facts:

- my 70 year old Mosin-Nagant (Russian) rifle operates flawlessly.
- my 40 year old HK (German) rifle has a sticky charging handle, but otherwise cycles perfectly.
- my 60 year old Cugir (Romanian copy of a Russian design) semiautomatic pistol has operates flawlessly; in the several years I have owned it, it has NEVER failed to fire or jammed. I trust my life to it.
- my 25 year old Ceska Zbrojovka (Czech) semiautomatic pistol works perfectly if I give it quality ammo. Laquered case rounds jam it up when the ambient temperature is hot.
- my 10 year old Mossberg (American) shotgun has rust, a flimsy pump, and the mag tube is stuck on. The weapon is operational, but I can't break it down.

I've been at the range too many times watching guys delicately treating their AR-15s that jam up, while I blast away with my beat up HK 91. Yeah, good luck getting me to buy another American made firearm.

Its becoming a primary system. As the FAA decommissions radar stations and other navaids, GPS and ADS-B interrogation are replacing those technologies and services. Similarly, small aircraft can use GPS for precision approaches in instrument meteorological conditions instead of ILS. Many small airports don't have ILS runways, and many small civilian aircraft aren't equipped to use ILS. In the case of a GPS approach, if a fix is lost or wrong, the pilot must abort the landing and execute a missed approach.

FD: I'm a pilot and engineer with a background in avionics.