I know this is difficult for one-track minds like this AC to understand, but many issues are in fact nuanced and complex. Shockingly, law appears to be one of those. Just to name a single example: data retention laws. They vary by jurisdiction.

As someone who runs NoScript, Adblock Plus and various other user scripts, I think it's a good thing to be able to take control over your own experience. It's good not to be passive. It's good to see only what you want to see. The more people do this, the more these companies have to comprehend that this is the nature of the network in which they have chosen to participate. The Web would lose most of its appeal to me if it were entirely corporate controlled like television.

What's really sad is that other mediums like television, radio, and periodicals are one-to-many, heavily centralized, and don't include such great control over what you see. They're package deals that require you to accept the crap along with the content and are often not worthwhile.

I use startpage.com myself. I like the idea of getting actual Google search results without any sort of Google tracking. They don't even log your IP address and they're outside of US jurisdiction.

By the way I hope our federal legislators appreciate that. I hope they are proud that now, "outside of US jurisdiction" has become a selling point.

You're right: you don't get it. But don't worry about it.

Is XKCD overhyped and overrated? Sure it is... like pretty much everything else with a certain level of popularity in the geek crowd. Even so, I often find XKCD funny, sometimes thought-provoking or profound, and generally interesting. And it's often applicable to everyday situations (hence the many "oblig XKCD" references here on /. )

Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.

An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.

While I'm sure there are contingency plans associated with being cut off from Air Force One and the need to travel to some rendezvous point to get choppered out, my guess is that the security protocol and planning is designed to prevent that very scenario.

The President doesn't just fly in solo on Air Force 1 -- often they send a second 747 as a backup along with a varying number of C-17s or C-5s with support vehicles and over a hundred Secret Service agents. On a Clinton trip to Africa, the air force ran 24 hour fighter missions overhead and the Navy kept a medical ship offshore.

I'm sure the goal is to both secure the plane, secure the route back to the plane and never leave the President cut off, up to the ability to conduct immediate air strikes to insure he can return to the plane.

There may be operational reliability or contingency issues which would limit an electric car overseas, but I think in DC it wouldn't be an unrealistic option.

The sad part is that is true even here, just look at how quickly the "truther" slur is trotted out whenever anybody asks why anything better than the frankly piss poor at best investigation wasn't done for the 9/11 attacks, like the government has never lied to us.....except for that "pesky" Gulf Of Tonkin thing that left 50,000 Americans and probably a couple million Asians dead....oops.

If there is one thing Wikileaks and Snowden should have taught us its that the MSM of pretty much every country is nothing but the puppet of the state and is about as truthful as Soviet Pravda.

Thanks. If you want dirt cheap media tanks check out Amazon as you can find ones like this all the time and unlike a used laptop not only does it look nice but you can easily add anything you want, BR drive,SSD, plenty of RAM and HDD, and its easy to add.

I've used the E350 a LOT at the shop and was impressed enough I sold my full size lappy for an E350, its THAT nice. HD videos, office work, hell I've played Torchlight and Portal on 'em and they are great little chips, all while just using 20w full load and 9w for most tasks. A word of advice though and this goes for ANY APU system...ALWAYS get the faster RAM, in fact if it comes down to 4Gb of faster or 8Gb of slower take the 4Gb because that AMD APUs really need decent RAM to shine. Nothing crazy, no need to OC the RAM, 1333 or better will do nicely. One of the barebone systems I picked up came with 4Gb of 1066, I did benches before and after I switched it for 1333 and depending on the tasks I got as much as 35% more performance simply by having the faster RAM, its THAT noticeable.

Sure when you show me a box that is an actual PC and not a thin client for that price, otherwise the comparison is moot as the Chrome isn't a PC, its a thin client. Here is a mini with SATA and wireless for $159, just add a RAM stick and unlike ChromeOS you aren't giving a corporation every single thing you do online...yay!

I'd be more worried about a bio-bomb as that would be the perfect carrier, hell you could infect the passengers and use them as the "payload" and then fly it over a large heavily populated city and blow it up at 10,000 feet, voila! the diseased body parts would be spread over a large area and cause maximum damage. To hamper cleanup you could always mix enough uranium to make the whole thing "dirty" enough to cause a panic and slow the responders to a crawl.

In any case I think there is more than a simple hijack and crash going on, too many conflicting stories to be that simple.

I've done pretty close already:

http://i.imgur.com/yz13tnR.png

All that's in there is a spanned RAR archive of a 10GB file consisting solely of the output of a windows variant of /dev/random, password protected using a full 64 character alphanumeric/symbolic password from GRC.

I tip my hat to your multiple levels of encryption, but I'm glad to know that somewhere out there, Google has redundantly stored about 9GB of completely useless data.

Now what DOES work well for Tesla is the blank check they'll get for making it. However, it will end up having a whole lot of redesign involved. Even if you tripled the battery pack's size, is it a linear gain for a vehicle that's somewhere around triple the weight of their existing models? Methinks not. The "in-flight refueling" truck situation has its own can of worms - you'd need a mobile charging unit capable of giving it enough juice to justify the trip in just a few minutes...I'm pretty sure that despite thirty years of work regarding power generation, we're still stuck with bolts of lightning and plutonium from Libyan nationalists to generate 1.21 gigawatts...neither of which are exactly 'portable', and all of THEM will have to be powered with something, so either you're simply offshoring the oil combustion, or "it's turtles all the way down".

Meanwhile, you'd need not just one of these things, but a dozen - remember that Tesla would have to build the decoy units, too...which means you'd also need a dozen refueling trucks. If you ditch all of that, then you'll have a fairly short range you'll be able to go, which will defeat most of the purpose of getting the limo replaced.

And after all of that...exactly what does that net Tesla? Are they looking to make alternatives to the Ford F150 or similar (justifying the work done on making a Tesla engine that can move that kind of weight)? Would it be a foot-in-door to get military contracts (justifying the R&D on an armored Tesla)? Could the charge-en-route tech be adapted for AAA tow trucks? ...Or would Uncle Sam simply pay for all the R&D because the tech needed for this project to work is so vastly different than Tesla's existing designs that monetizing them independently of the limo contract will prove impractical?

I love you too, APK. But my heart is promised to another.

It's not a syndrome. It's an intelligent observation. You should take notes.

That's wonderful. Now try reading and understanding history.

Or it could be because government is, by and large, a failed concept.

Keep thinking....

Newegg got really cheap on packaging too. I'm OK with Amazon for the stuff I'd buy from Newegg if they can avoid that mistake.