Nothing magic about Ford, it was in terrible shape at that time too, but they did managed to get their massive loan financed privately before the credit markets froze. If they would have waited a few more weeks, they would have been in exactly the same shape.
Good for them, but still, lets not make them into something they aren't

I could see a small vampire draw to keep a few of the embedded systems online, but the amount quoted in the article seems extreme

Based on the author's experience, the Chevy Volt did not experience a similar draw when it was shut down

No turbine necessary. Conventional internal combustion engines run on methane just fine.
In fact it burns so clean, you can change your oil every 20k miles and your plugs every 200k miles and be just fine.

There doesn't seem to be much of a point in using natural gas to produce hydrogen, to produce electrical energy, to produce mechanical energy.

Why not just use the natural gas in an existing internal combustion engine.
Thats what the nat gas civic does, and its available today, for less than 10k more than the gasoline version, has a 250 mile range, and the natural gas pipeline structure is already built. All we need to do is solve the 'last mile' problem by having more nat gas filling stations, which is easily solvable with today's technology

Hydrogen only seems to make sense if we started a WW2 scale effort to build dozens of new Nuclear power plants, producing an abundance of electricity and removing coal from the mix.. Which we should do, but won't

No: they are bullshit AND these charges should be dropped
The polygraph is a turn of the century medical quackery masquerading as science
not only are there ways to "fool" it (i.e. manipulate the biofeedback it records to confuse the "analyst"), but with no countermeasures employed, it has been proven (many times actually) to have a false positive and false negative rate so high as to render its results statistically worthless...

You sound angry. I'm glad my NSA is keeping tabs on you, who knows what you are capable of.

Car dealers have absolutely no qualms with using the good-ole-boy network and government lobbying to quash competition.

Their existence is the worst kind of anachronism. Their overall value-add to society is zero, actually less than zero...

Nobody should be running any fully functional, system aware, computer program in a browser...
A java applet is a java computer program written by "someone" coming from "somewhere" running in a browser on your computer.

Replace "java computer program" with "c++ computer program" (or any other "real" language) in the previous sentence, and it describes a situation no less dangerous, arguably more-so.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with the language, its the paradigm.

Latest update: "Limited Quotes" at 3:10, full trading at 3:25

Latest news: They are going to start trading at 2:45 EDT.
My prediction is a brief panic sell-off, followed by a return to normalcy, considering putting in a few limit orders.

No, we can't stop

And that's actually a good thing. There are so many inherent advantages to web-based applications from a maintenance and overhead perspective, that businesses, large and small, are going to push more applications to them.

Mobile apps exist because the capabilities of the hardware got so far out in front of browser software that a decent experience couldn't be provided. But, back to point 1, as the capabilities of browser based software inevitably improves, a lot of this development is going to get sucked back into the web. It is inevitable.
Just looking at where Microsoft has came between IE 8 and IE 10 (not that isn't a lot of work still to be done) is an indicator what way the wind is blowing.

In this respect, I see the mobile-app craze as a rear guard action against the inevitable.

The hack described in the article is interesting from a technical perspective, but the use of the term "blackout" is hysterical and misleading.

When I think of the term "blackout", I take that to mean no more 120/240 in any of my sockets.

Yes, appliance hacks are something that we all should think about as more and more of the ubiquitous appliances, like lights, HVAC, water and sewer, that truly make the modern world function come online, but cmon....

"The master of the school was adamant any reports of students using their knowledge to harm others"

That's ok, if you ever tried using Tae Kwon Do in a street fight against and even moderately physically fit/skilled opponent you'd just end up on your backside getting choked/pummled anyways....

SEDC technology is what I call it... Somebody Else's Data Center

Always use an acronym, everything's better with acronyms