It can make sense to try and buy the worst polluting cars just to get them off the road. Especially since the wost polluting cars tend to be old in and in poor shape so aren't worth that much anyway. That's not what the whole Cash for Clunkers thing did though, as it was simply a stupidly designed program to bail out the automakers, and didn't even work at that.

Some of the problems:
1. It required the purchase of a new car. The worst cars on the road generally are owned by people who couldn't afford that even with the subsidy, so those cars stayed on the road.
2. It vastly overpaid per vehicle, which meant that many of the vehicles turned in were relatively late model vehicles in decent condition with functional emissions and safety systems. These vehicles were destroyed instead of being allowed to progress down the food chain. A sudden influx of cheap used cars would have resulted in many of the vehicles from #1 being scrapped anyway.
3. You could quality for a rebate buying a gas guzzling truck or SUV so long as it got a few MPG better than the vehicle turned in. The most popular swap was a Ford F150 for another Ford F150. People who had already chosen to drive a fuel efficient vehicle were locked out of the program. It seemed mostly like a bailout for people who bought into the late 90's-early 2000's SUV craze, and for empty-nesters to unload the old family hauler in a way that guaranteed that it wouldn't be passed down to the next family who needed one.

Vista was pretty much a sacrificial release. Microsoft needed to cure third party vendors of their bad habits from the 9x days, as well as update their driver model. They could publish guidelines and best practice whitepapers all they wanted, but the only way to get many of them actually take action was to break their shit. Which is exactly what they did with Vista. By the time Windows 7 came out, most vendors had managed to fix their stuff so most things just worked on Windows 7 with minimal fuss, which is why Windows 7 was a much smoother release. Since Vista and 7 are pretty much the same OS with some cosmetic differences by this time Vista was also working fine if you stuck with it.

SP1 was all that you needed to get it stable. SP2 added a significant amount of bloat, but arguably that was due to all the new security features that were pretty much required to be added. SP3, as far as I can tell, is pure bloat.

It's kind of amazing how a stock SP0 install will fly on a P3 with 256MB of ram (so long as you're smart enough NOT to try to hook it the internet), but a fully patched SP3 system on a high end P4 with 2GB+ of ram pretty much crawls.

I could see trying to invoke the "felony murder rule", though it may be hard to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim committed suicide because of the identity theft.

Did Ford win anything or did Tesla decide to back down on their own? I don't see how Ford can claim ownership over a trademark they haven't used in decades. And no, this doesn't have anything to do with Ford's E-Series vans either (which was my other thought).

The same liberals who decided they'd rather have Obama in 2008 than Clinton the first time around? It'll be curious to see if we get another circus of "not Hilary" candidates like we did in 2012 with the "not Romney" candidates.

I gotten a Windows 95 machine up to the 49.7 day limit. The key was the machine was hooked up to some special scanner that didn't get used that much, so the computer spent 99% of its time idling at the desktop. Once I realized it was getting close I figured out when exactly it was going to hit the limit so I could witness what would happen. Which turned out to be nothing, until I clicked the mouse and it BSOD'd.

I've also managed to get a Vista machine up to the 497 day limit. In that case the computer was still running okay other than the networking being hosed.

You might throw them off-guard, but ultimately it won't work because they'll just come up with some other reason to reject you.

Actually, it's pretty damn simple to embed an MSHTML control into a Windows application, which you can use to make your own IE-based browser. Almost certainly easier than trying to start with Webkit/Chromium. However, said browser will only run on Windows.

The idea is that you charge this thing at night using cheap off-peak electricity, and then during the day you draw power from your battery instead of paying peak rates. If you already pay for power this way and you're smart about it, you're already not doing laundry or running the oven at peak usage times if at all possible. And you're still connected to the grid, so if you need to run a high-power appliance it's not like you can't if you don't mind paying peak rates to do it.

The battery would run the lights about 8 hours. Then what?

Sure they can't. I've seen car batteries run completely dead. Charge them back up, and they work fine.

Maybe Elon's plan is to sell batteries to people who aren't stupid enough to try and run an electric oven off of them?

The reason why you can more easily get away without is that 1) you're in desert where the humidity is lower, which means that your body can more easily cool itself by sweating and 2) you're in a desert where it gets down to the 20's at night so it's not miserably hot when you're trying to sleep. I don't mind the heat so much during the day, but to sleep when it's 30C+ and 70% humidity and you'd want air conditioning too.

It'll last 10 hours if you draw 1kw from it the whole time. Maybe running the air conditioner off of it is a bad idea, but it'll easily run a modern fridge (about 1kwh/day) for 8 days, with enough power left over for a few lights and some occasional TV.