Personally, the moment you talk about 'in-flight' refueling, I'm thinking what you need to do is make a strong hybrid - battery assist, but also with an engine, most likely diesel*, perhaps even a turbine like what's in the M1(updated and smaller, of course).

This gives you monster power when you need it, and increased efficiency which also increases the range. Between the armor and the battery weight, many things that would normally stop a vehicle won't stop the presidential one.

*less likely to explode if attacked by something like an IED, RPG, and such.

You could fly from San Francisco (SFO) to Orlando (MCO) That's a pretty big search radius, if this story is true.

That doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is that Google is constantly changing things and if you don't like it, tough.

I'd think that $50B would go a long way to making something more sensible than wind/solar (Which are still and will be a boondoggle with $50B poured into it (Where in the heck do you store energy so that it's sustained instead of feast/famine? Right now, you can't realistically replace coal with either- and without the storage tech to MAKE it so...it's a waste of time and money, bluntly put...)- which would be Thorium reactors.

Silly you, after mergers things downsize

and then executives cut themselves big bonuses

Or, by losing you win, but feel you didn't win, so keep trying and keep losing, until you are good enough to win and thus lose.

I had an answer. You take all the money, and they end up poor - and the poor are no better off, either. By eliminating the super wealthy, do we eliminate the poverty line? Is that your assertion? If not - then eliminating the super-wealthy, and spreading their money around (not nearly enough of it to raise everyone out of poverty), all we've done is increase the number of poor.

Benjamin Franklin said it best: "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became rich."

Yes, your ignorance is showing, but this is slashdot and talking out your rear is welcomed. So how much of a change would $283 be? Have you spent time in Ghana, or Haiti, or Uruguay, or Laos? I have - and whilst $283 would definitely help out - it would not significantly change anyone's lifestyle. It's going to take more than that - meaning it's better to focus on growing economies, not just handing out dollars (like ignorant Western people want to do).

There is reason many native Africans call for a halt to charity - and to refocus our efforts on assisting building economies. The whole "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" argument. But then, if you weren't doing that, how can you refocus your class envy?

I upgraded to an Indus GT. =]

It would cost much more than $50 Billion to replace that generation capacity. Here are a couple options:

Coal currently produces a ballpark average of 200,000 Megawatts of power for the US continuously (based on the published annual generation totals). So we use that number to figure out how much of alternative generation sources you would need.

Lets start with Nucular since that is (relatively) simple with almost continuous output: Most recent power plan under construction in the US is Watts Bar 2 (look it up) that will produce 1180 megawatts at a cost of ~4.5Billion. To replace 200,000 megawatts you would need about 170 of those Watts Bar 2 plants at a total cost of approximately $763Billion in today's dollars! Wowser. Also note that there is a fuel shortage looming that makes spinning up new multi-billion $ reactors a potential waste of time and $. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10...

Ok, lets move on to renewables. There are lots of options here...wind, solar, concentrated solar, tidal power, ect. The thing with non-hydro renewables is that most of them are cyclical or random like the weather. So you need huge storage capacity to go with them. Projects like the Bath County Pumped Storage Station are a great solution for this, but for 200,000 megawatts of renewables, you would need about 70 of those at a cost of $100Billion+. Thats just for the glorified "battery" and does not count the cost of the generation facilities themselves which would be hundreds of billions if not $1Trillion+.

Just keeping things in perspective:)

Sounds like a reasonable use of hipsters. They aren't much good for anything else:)

to pull out my old C64, dust it off and find my floppies.

to a happier and simpler time

And use those taxes to put the miners on welfare.

Yuh.

Again, please see the actual data. The top 1% average a 24% income tax rate. And IF it was just the 15% you claim, then it's still in the top 6%. Meaning more than 94% of all US taxpayers pay.

How is paying a much higher rate than 94 out of 100 in any way NOT progressive?

If it has value it can be embezzled.