It's sad that so many people share your views on DIY these days. A reasonably intelligent person is perfectly capable of doing almost anything for him/herself to a high standard with a little patience and humility. It's not the easiest, fastest, and often not the cheapest way to do something, but it is almost always the most satisfying way.

It's not a racing car, but it is very fast for a relatively cheap car with good fuel economy. It's just as fast as a comparable petrol engined car. Of course, there are faster diesel powered cars, I was just using the 335d as an example of a popular, reasonably priced option.

That would lead to a zombie apocalypse, obviously.

The 3D must have done something. I've only seen it in 2D, and the animation looked outdated and childish. It reminded me very much of a higher res version of a Warcraft 3 cutscene (night elves!). Not impressed at all with that, and the story was even worse. Yet a huge number of people rave about how good it looked -- I can only assume that the 3D effects took attention away from the poor animation quality...

There are plenty of high performance diesel cars made in europe. For example, the BMW 335d has a 3 liter twin turbo straight six producing ~290bhp and a maximum torque of 428lb-ft. 0-100km/h in just over 6 seconds.

It would be much more practical if only they could make it levitate 2m above the ground.... Hoverbus FTW.

Really? I guess bus drivers must be of a higher caliber where you come from. I'd feel safer sharing the road with a bus driven by a Windows ME machine than the half-wits driving our buses over here (New Zealand).

That's funny -- I could have sworn I owned a small business... Maybe I've finally lost it? Either that or you've just falsely assumed that engineers don't run businesses, which would be quite foolish considering the number of huge companies around that were started by engineers.

Yes, time can be at a premium when you own a small business, but sometimes money can be too. Which is more scarce at any one time just depends on your circumstances. It makes sense to make good use of any spare time that comes about, and writing a few little programs that will save you time in the future is a great way to do this.

I'm sure he can decide for himself whether he has spare time. Learning programming from the ground up may take too long to provide benefits, but what about starting with some VB? However much you hate it, using Excel and VBA can allow you to create many useful little programs right from the word go.

What utter nonsense. Why do you assume he is a moron? He may not be able to code up anything huge and amazing after one week of learning, but a little messing around with programming can get you a long way.

I'm a mechanical engineer, not a programmer. However, there have been many times where I have used my small amount of knowledge in programming in C or even VB to solve everyday problems in a quarter of the time that someone who was unable to program at all would take. One of the first things that learning about a subject will teach you is to recognise when your skills are inadequate anyway. When/if that point is reached, he can either get help or learn more, either way will work.

No, wider tyres only increase traction significantly up to a point. You still want to have an optimum force/area (pressure) loading on the tyre surface. Additionally, wider tyres lead to higher rolling resistance. With four wheel drive systems, there are already road cars that can get to 100km/h in around 2.5 seconds -- a much faster acceleration rate than any normally powered car could achieve, and also much faster than most people would be able to handle.

Unfortunately they've gone down hill lately, as proved by their new ads admitting that they have less fat than pizza hut pizzas and less salt than dominoes. Now, Hells are still better (by a huge margin in the case of dominoes), but by what stretch of the imagination is low fat & salt a good thing for a pizza?? I'm not eating pizza to lose weight and maintain a healthy heart or whatever, and personally I need my salt as I do quite a lot of exercise.

Anyway, Spagalimis do a better New Zealand pizza in my opinion, and they aren't as ridiculously expensive either.

All that is fine, but functionality should still be retained for people like me who know how to, and want to, maintain a good tidy filesystem. I don't think OSX or windows 7 has done this well.