One small kink in your plan: Toyota, Honda, Nissan and everybody is is just as messed up as Ford, because they all use the same supplier base. The parts that go into your Honda are made in the same plant that puts the parts in your GM, Chrysler or BMW.

Also, the intellectual property of these manufacturers isn't transferable in any real sense. What works at one manufacturer won't work at another, because the production of the components requires not just plans, but an ecosystem built up around that production, from the management of the factory to the knowledge of the workers on the line. There is nothing low-tech or unskilled about automobile manufacture.

Drugs in jail aren't a problem? Weapons in jail aren't a problem? Not sure where you live. I come from Flint and Detroit. It's an issue. Not some obscure human rights debate, but a problem the jails have to deal with here on the ground.

The strip search isn't part of the punishment, folks. The guy running the jail, and the strip search, doesn't give a rat's backside if you've been convicted or not. What he wants to do is make sure you're not bringing contraband into the prison population. It's a security measure for the jail. Otherwise, it becomes a pretty easy method of getting all kinds of unpleasant things into the jail. I don't have to stretch my imagination too far to see how to get weapons in, and smuggling drugs wouldn't be too hard either.

My habit may have been stronger than yours. It wasn't unusual for me to drink a pot before noon, and then put another on.

As for the grand infernal machine, mostly I tell it to stuff itself. The work it gets from me when making unreasonable demands is unreasonably poor.

If you're like me, and love coffee, but hate the fact that your cat looks at you in disgust because you're awake too late at night, this is perfect. And before you say it doesn't affect you that way, try quitting it cold turkey. Just be prepared to hate everyone, and for everyone to hate you, for about two weeks.

Now I'll just get back to my heathen apostate business.....

Sure, I couldn't get it today. I'm in the U.S., so I might not get it at all. But the rapid sales of this first batch is giving them a fat wad of cash for a second batch, which can be larger, and that will fuel even more production capability. Within six months, probably less, anybody who wants to buy one will be able to get it. I'll build my beer-brewing robot then.

Supposedly if you can charge from 440v mains, charge time is on the order of 20 minutes. Time enough for a cup of coffee and a toilet break after 120 miles.

I saw it there, and it's one of the few cars on the floor that shows you all of the mechanicals (Ford did it with their trucks, which was also really cool). The mechanics of this car are incredibly simple. This should significantly reduce ongoing maintenance costs and make car ownership easier for the majority of people.

Absolutely nothing. I run Mac at work, and Linux at home.

The Man is paying you to write this routine code because it's mind numbing, soul-sucking work that nobody would ever do of their free will. If the problem you were solving was fun, there's be an open source project that was solving it.

The solution I had to use was writing my own software to solve problems I found interesting. That also let me test out new techniques and tools that I couldn't do at the day job. After all, there are only so many ways to CReate, Update and Delete records from a monolithic database.