> Hmm. I wonder how many people there are in the US? Even so, that's A LOT 
> of cars. You buys must be loaded! :-D

In 2004 2.6 million new cars were sold in the UK.  There's 60 million people 
in the UK.

> I believe my dad had a curtisy car like that one time... Damn weird. It 
> also had a dashboard that looked like the bridge of a starship...!

The prize for that one has to go to the Honda Civic I had a few months back. 
Definitely like controlling a spaceship with it's 2-tier curvy dashboard, 
blue lights everywhere, and big 7-segment digital speedo at the top.

> I still can't figure out why they don't make a car that's electric, but 
> has a small deisel generator in the boot...
>
> (You'd only need to run it when the battery gets low. You wouldn't waste 
> fuel sitting in traffic. Electric motors don't require a gearbox or a 
> differential, so you'd get continuous acceleration without gear shifts...)

Actually you would need a gearbox for it to be useful.  Electric motors 
generate maximum torque at very slow speeds, the faster the motor goes the 
lower the torque.  This is exactly the wrong thing you need for a car, where 
the faster you go the more torque you need to overcome the speed squared air 
drag.  If you didn't use a gearbox you'd end up with a car capable of 
burning out the tyres at low speed, but that took 10 minutes to accelerate 
from 60 to 70 mph.

And "small" diesel generator?  What happens if you run out of juice while 
doing 80mph on the motorway?  Stop and wait 45 minutes for it to recharge 
the batteries enough to get you home without being run over by trucks?

> Do I really give that impression? Interesting... Certainly when everybody 
> tells me I'm an idiot for not knowing who Stallman or So Greats is, I 
> don't *feel* particularly cleaver. :-S

But compared to the average person in the street earning an average salary 
doing an average job, yeh, you seem pretty clever.

> Anyway, I'm hoping to get a better job soon. The problem is going to be 
> that I have no experience as a commercial programmer, and I don't know any 
> of the trendy languages except Java... [And I have to give 3 months' 
> notice.]

Don't worry about the 3 months notice, a lot of people have that and your 
new employer will expect it.  Is there not anything else you would like to 
do apart from being a full-time programmer in some language you probably 
won't even like?  Even just applying to be an IT dude for a larger company 
will likely get you more money, or at least the opportunity to move on in 
your career.  And then you might get the opportunity to show off some of 
your programming talent.

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