My little padawan,

relax.

Most of your post is quite correct. But you've got something wrong about accelerating and decelerating up / downhills. Really wrong. Look it up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_theory.

Then again, I'm a 'BM'-driver. Why do I feel kind of annoyed? My 120d does an average of 5.5l/100km, or 42mpg. Not all too shabby.

And yes, there *are* BMW-drivers that do respect the 'highway code', including me.

With the exception of course, that in Germany, I can legally go 140mph, and somtimes do :-)

In this case, 1996 was the year of Linux. My department (Aerodynamics, TU-Darmstadt) ordered a DUAL Pentium 200 pro with a whopping 128MB of RAM (in order to replace the expensive SGI "Pizza boxes", aka SGI Indy). It outpaced the existing workstations by a factor of five, costing half. This is when commodity hardware started to do number crunching on Linux (preliminary Navier-Stokes stuff for the Airbus 3XX, now known as the Airbus 380). This was home-grown Fortran code, the kernel was 2.0.twentiiesh, and it already did SMP.
By the way, this was *my* year of Linux, I threw Windows 3.1 off my HD, installed (Debian)-Linux and never looked back. Ever.