This is an excellent question. Do you need to perform arbitrarily complex operations on geometries, or are you looking for very simple geospatial operations? If, for example, you need to find all points within a complex polygon, or calculate overlaps then it's likely to be useful either to buy into a real GIS system, or investigate something like the GDAL OGR library. If, however, all you want to do is the sort of thing you describe, you can probably get away with calculating a bounding rectangle from the set of points you have and extending that in each direction by an arbitrary amount. Lo - store grid references or Lat/Long, and you need no geospatial support in your database at all. If you *did* need geospatial support, and were persuaded that MS-SQL were the way to go, then check if you qualify for WebSiteSpark in Canada - that will get rid of most of the 20k you need to spend and get you Server 2008, SQL Sever 2008, Visual Studio 2010 &c for $100 over 3 years. How much data do you have? SQL Server 2008 Express has the spatial extensions.

I've lived in both the technical domain (mainframe operating systems and *IX device drivers) and the business (anything that will turn a buck :-) as far as writing code is concerned, and in both development and support. You can get away without a lot of comment in a linux device driver because everyone who reads it *already knows* what you're trying to do. In arbitrary desktop application code this just isn't true. I'm not a specialist in geodesy (for example) , but I have to support a whole load of code which projects points in space to Cartesian coordinates. If I had a programmer who thought that it was a good idea to omit comments about intention from this sort of code base I'd be tempted to encourage them to find some other sort of job.

Give it to them for free. Iron out the wrinkles. Make it efficient and supportable. But do it on the written understanding that they'll be a reference site for you when you move to sell the same solution to other organisations.

These guys never heard of LCD welding helmets?

This is functionally untrue. Over here in the UK, the average house has a single phase 230V 80A mains connection.

If you happen to own two cars, then there will have to be some pretty spiffy load management going on.

The problem gets worse if you expect (for example) an hotel to charge all its guests' cars. Let's see : 250 (cars) x 16A x 230V is just under a megaWatt. If you want a supply over 275kVA over here then you have to install your own 11kV substation (and you need the space to put it).

That's just *local* infrastructure. We're not sure we can avoid large-scale power outages over the next 10 years because of ramping demand and limited generating capacity, without factoring in a move to electric cars.

This problem is much bigger than it looks.