Too bad the first thing GM did not do, was change the "1.4-liter gasoline-powered range-extending engine" with a state of the art Euro-turbo diesel. Then the thing could be diesel electric, not like a locomotive but more like a submarine. 1.6 liter might do it.
When you are slogging around in traffic it runs on the battery. The power unit could just cut in to fully charge the thing when necessary, and provide direct drive for hi-way speeds just as it does with the petrol unit.
Again this is GM, does anyone else remember the "Cimarron" looks like GM has done it again.
On another note, it is not an electric car like the Tesla it is a serial hybrid that cheats on the serial part a bit. Apparently it will never be elegant like the Tesla ether ...

The question is, what happens when M$ turns off the XP license server. If you try to reload with a valid key, how do you get it to activate ?? ...Is this the First M$ product going out of 'support' that needs this ??

"International cooperation hasn't proven that valuable"
That has been absolutely true.

However it would be necessary to overcome that to achieve a meaningful mars mission.
Mars is not the moon, you can't go there and hang out for 3 days and go home.
To be cost effective, may need to look to China as a resource.
Again it would not be an easy road to achieve International cooperation
It could become we (the US) pays for the bulk of it, but big pieces are outsourced.

Politically that could prove most difficult.

I don't believe that a manned mission to mars could ever be achieved from international competition. It would require international cooperation on a massive scale.

Costly, expensive does not even begin to cover it. A program for a manned mission to Mars is at least a magnitude of order more difficult than the Apollo program. A starting guess would be 10x of the cost of the Apollo program in adjusted dollars for inflation. One figure I found was $135-billion in 2005 Dollars (cost of the Apollo program).
Now if it is 10x harder to do mars, are we talking about 1.3 Trillion?

Personally I would like to see this seriously pursued in my lifetime, however ..
We have gotten good at robotic missions and I would like to see more exploration and science missions. I know that a sample return mission would get some level of excitement, but it is likely that placing more science on the surface is of more benefit. Maybe rovers with an ability to find samples to be sent to a surface based robotic lab instead of / in addition to of self contained rovers.
We also must ask if Mars is to use so many resources would we be neglecting other robotic planetary missions?

It is possible that 5 day service is needed for economic reasons, but let's make sure bulk mail is not subsidized ...

And who did he make it for.
There are pictures .....won,t see them in a VW add ...

In the past Trade mark has been used by automobile companies to prevent look a likes ...
In the 1970s There was a fiberglass replacement bonnet for VW type 1 (Bug) that had a Rolls Royce grill. Later in the Early 1980's there was a a fiberglass front end for convertible Mustangs that resembled a Mercedes SL. these products were removed from the marked via ligation.
The RR VW grill was a flagrant violation (had RR marking and symbol on grill work), the SL ford conversion I don't remember the detail, I thought the MB star was changed to a cross, not sure.

Personally I do not take my hard legitimately earned money, convert it to cash and then keep it under the floorboards at the local crack house.

Maybe it's current status is under investigation and the people in question are / will be under arrest as suspects
  er will I may have known some one who new some one who downloaded obviously unauthorized copyrighted material from megaupload that was blatantly available is mass. There would be no way in hell I would use that as a cloud service for anything important or otherwise critical.

Look you just got to have common sense.

The only required infrastructure for communication is that the Earth has an atmosphere, I guess for line of sight, that may not be necessary.

I have not had that the experience yet. When it gets slow it recovers usually within an hour or two. I have not yet had it not recover by 0200 hrs..

Signal strength has been marginal at my home, when I first got the service it was real bad, there was a promise of adding towers, which were added (3 months late). It got better after that, however it is weaker at home than at work. ( moving around the ‘box’ at home affects speed) and it rarely gets all of the lights on. The person that I work fore has the service in Arlington and has told me it rips at 8mb plus just about 24/7. At home the dongle barley achieves 1mbit.

I use Clear in the Dallas Area. The USB dongle runs 3 to 5 mbit at work (24 miles from home) and the ‘Box’ runs 2 to 4 mbit at home. As with any RF system range is going to be an issue, so is its inherent bandwidth limitation (as with any system). Yes sometimes the data rate can get real bad, even drop out. This does not usually last a long time but it can be annoying. I have never experienced anything that I would believe as targeted or intentional limiting, however if enough people suck on the same straw at the same time what do you think is going to happen? As far as being able to get out of a contract for poor performance, maybe that has merit I don’t know.
Clear (sprint is involved here) has been having financial challenges lately, personally for me it would be sad to see them go. By the standards of the cable companies I would be a download hog. (multi part large WinRared binaries ..Clear provides me an alternative option, I Live in an urban connectivity hell, DSL for me is at best 2mbit, usually 1.4 or so. There is no upgrade available yet ( 3 blocks away it is a different story), and no Fios in my neighborhood. I own my home and it is not something I would sell over something that in 5 to 10 years will change.

From TFA:
        “Qualcomm bought the wireless spectrum powering FLO TV -- Lower 700 MHz D and E block spectrum - for only $125 million”
From Wikipedia:
        Block D: 10 MHz bandwidth (758–763 and 788–793 MHz)
        Block E: 6 MHz bandwidth (722–728 MHz)
16Mhz of bandwidth for 1.925 Billion .. Bucks .
Spectrum real estate sure is doing better than the housing market.

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
HAL only had JK Flip Flops ....

Correct
For those who don’t have a lot of background on engines, review and under stand the “Opposed-piston engine” and keep this concept separate from opposed or “boxer engines” as in the, VW (air-cooled bug), Porsche, GM Corvair, BMW motorcycle, Subaru and others..
This ‘opoc’ engine combines these to architectures into a single engine.
It is kind’a cool, however as pointed out the complexity is not trivial.
A rebuild on a thing like that would be nasty.