Where 'easy' is a rural limited-access divided highway in good condition, light traffic, no construction or other complications. mid-day, and clear weather?

You think the Democrats are swooning over Hilary? The whole reason we have Obama now is because he was the most viable "not Hilary" candidate in 2008. Granted, in hindsight that didn't work out so well. But given Hilary's recent scandals and overall poor performance I don't see her doing much better this time around.

Hell, this could be the election where it happens. If it ends up being Bush vs. Clinton, it's possible that enough people will throw their weight behind some of the other candidates out of pure disgust that they start to pick up some momentum, and if that means more people jump on board, it could snowball. That's basically what happened in Minnesota back in the 90's, resulting in Jesse Ventura being elected governor. While we're probably stuck with two parties, there's no reason it has to be the Democrats and Republicans, and it's about time a real alternative takes the Republican spot, turning the Republican party into the lunatic fringe third party it deserves to be.

Well, UFOs are real in the sense that unidentified flying objects have been spotted, some of which are not easily explained. However, since there are only 2,320 search results for "real extraterrestrials" suggests that they aren't alien in origin :)

Actually, clicking on a link could tell them if, say, you're signed into Facebook or Linkedin and the link has a tracker on it. Places like Linkedin and Monster make money selling that kind of information.

The problem is that their definition of a planet is terrible. For example, there is only eight planets in the entire Universe because, by their definition, a planet can only orbit "the Sun". Yes, with that capitalization, thus referring to our Sun. I would have hoped they would have come up with something a bit more generic that could be applied to other solar systems.

The sad thing is that if the employee has been with the company five years, the employer would be a lot better off with investing and training an employee with all that valuable internal knowledge as opposed to starting with someone fresh. It's really odd how companies will place a lot of value on skills that can be learned fairly quickly, but place almost no value on the type of knowledge you're only going to get by working at a specific company for several years.

Yeah, that's something I hate is how you end up becoming hyper-specialized in the eyes of employers if you don't aggressively changed jobs every few years (and that has its own problems). If you don't have the exact skill set they want, they won't even consider you, meanwhile they'll go and whine about how they can't find qualified candidates. It's like if a truck driver drove a Peterbilt truck for five years, and now finds that only companies that run Peterbilt trucks will consider hiring him, and all the companies that run Macks and Internationals won't even consider him. That's absurd, but seems to be the norm for STEM careers.

Well, up north you have the same problem when the parking brake cable eventually rusts through. Better hope that the friction of the engine can hold the weight of the car or it will take a drive on its own too.

I doubt it. I've played with GPS units from that era. They are slow compared to what you have now, taking several minutes to lock-on, and then you really only get coordinates and an altitude. The units now would blow a 486 away, but back then it's not like you'd be able to put something like a 486 in a handheld unit and expect it to work very long. Even so, the battery life was not terribly good anyway.

Interestingly, almost all units from then are paperweights now due to an absolute brilliant design decision where they used a 10-bit number to store the number of weeks since 1980, which rolled over sometime in 1999.

This is from the Windows 3.1 days. Not sure if it even made it into 95. Story I heard is that they were using Windows calculator to test for the FDIV bug, and ran across that. Which seems unlikely...

Surely the Tesla and Leaf also have a resistive heater? A heat pump is not going to produce a useful amount of heat when it's -10F out.

It's said that you should look carefully at a used luxury car, because they were often owned by people by people who stretched to simply purchase the car, and couldn't afford the upkeep.

With the said, if you can manage to find a well maintained one, it can be a bargain as luxury cars tend to depreciate quickly. However, the manufacturer will still gouge you for parts, so it's helpful to get one that shares major components (engine, transmission) with a non-luxury model.

Even if the engine makes it, the transmission won't. For some reason BMW thinks that you shouldn't have to change the transmission fluid so it's a non-serviceable, sealed unit. They last about as long as you might expect a transmission to last if you just drove it and completely ignored the fluid.

It's not a manufacturer thing. Around here some dealers have started offering a "lifetime" warranty. It's non-transferable, and generally has some asterisks attached to it, such as you have to have the every 15k mile service performed at the dealer or some such. They're obviously banking on the fact that most people don't keep cars more than a few years, and even if you did, that you'd eventually mess up the maintenance schedule and end up voiding it. Though I still wonder what they're going to do with the occasional oddball that manages to keep the warranty going then has a major breakdown on a rusted out 20 year old car. Maybe they just plan on worrying about that when the time comes.