Quick, someone inform the churches. There's lots of money in this.

EU actually have comparably working IP laws. And we point and laugh at your problems.

That is, unless they get something like ACTA through EU parliament. Then we'll have it too.

It's not too strange to get worse mileage with ethanol, considering the energy content is less than gasoline.

Diesel has the highest energy content of the three.

Pure diesel or pure ethanol is easiest to optimize the engines for, since the fuel itself is rather pure, so theoretically you could get better mileage that way. Gasoline can vary a lot and is more of a mix of things.

I have multiple devices, my friends have multiple devices.

There's no chat that works from multiple devices to multiple devices reliably. Which confuses me.

Traditional chats only works from one device to another device. There's no server sharing of information.

XMPP goes to only one device once that device has replied. That means that if the receiver is switching devices (goes from PC to phone to leave the house), messages might be lost and there's no history on the phone.

Message carbons tries to solve this - I think - but few clients support it, and even when it works, it doesn't solve the lock problem when leaving the house.

Google Talk is worse, instead of doing a handover to another device it steals the messages and sends you a Google Mail. Yay?

But this (the topic), I think, is one step worse.

What levels are we talking about?

If I could just pick any, I'd set someone who can write a tail-recursive strncpy in C on a whiteboard (and discuss the quirk) without any help at 2/10, and someone that can write/discuss a hardware UART driver or give me an idea of a posix-compatible SNMP SetRequest routine without any help at 8/10. Anyone who has implemented a HTTP server (without using a HTTP server library) in any language would score at least 5/10.

I think lots of programmers that score 2/10 can get work.

What are your 2/10 and 7/10? It's probably not my 2/10.

Or is there an official scale and my google-fu didn't find it?

It took me a while to realize you didn't mean a quarter of an hour.

A big car corporation - no names - I used to work at had an average speed of 2 lines per hour and team member.

I've been ready for that for years. I just didn't want to pay $$$ extra for that package (came with 'keyless entry' iirc).

I prioritized that my car can park itself and follow lanes using a camera (including that the car complains that i'm distracted/asleep).

Also, if the police would take it serious, and there were a risk of getting a SWAT team in your bedroom if you had a stolen iphone, I believe the attraction of owning a stolen iphone would somewhat be a little less.

Any crime the police stops caring about (stolen iphone, stolen bikes - I don't know where the limit is right now - pickpocketing, muggings?), that crime turns into not a crime. It'll be "ok" to do that. And there'll be a lot more of that crime, which means the police will not have the possibility to deal with it. It's a bad spiral.

If the police isn't protecting us, the police get meaningless and the laws get meaningless. It'd actually be better to change the law that iphone theft isn't a crime than to have it as a crime while the police refuse to do anything about it.

I think there's many, many similar stories to yours.

If they don't want civilians do to their job, they should do their job.

What's hard to understand about that?

Mind, It's also disproportionate to fetch iphones with SWAT teams.
These things do not always point to the correct address.

Are you saying that EA has any goodwill left?

I once swore never to buy anything EA again. I should learn to stick to that...

EA has for more than a decade been ruled by the kind of bonus-driven MBA that you talk about. After-sales-support has always been minimal.

But it's not like it's the only company that does that. (Asus, I'm looking at you this month.)

What surprised me in this video and in the 5D Mark III 14 bit RAW Video with Magic Lantern video is how low resolution you seem to get from the 5D Mark IIII. It seems rather blurry even in 1080p. I did not expect that.
Actually it seems slightly worse than my full-HD car dvr.

I have a long time been angry at my pocket camera (Sony) for not giving me the 14Mp it should have. The image files are that big, but it seems to be blurry and grouped in a way that I can maybe use a fourth of those pixels.

Where does this blurring come from?

If it needs to be there, I can totally see why you would want to use a sensor that is 4x the size of the target resolution.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the Canon 5D is a more useful full-HD camera when it comes to lenses and settings. But I didn't expect the sensor resolution to be that bad, and the effects from it.

I have a wireless glue gun (Bosch, works excellently).

I have a hard time seeing why I would want a 3d printing pen that wasn't wireless.

money state pays = purchase cost + lobbying cost + profit

Actually I think the biggest issue I have with firefox is that it hangs for a few seconds now and then. I would suspect javascript garbage collection (probably caused by the multitude of addons I have to run to make it useful). Since it hangs completely - even ignores redraw events - it's kind of disturbing.