My heatsink losened from my laptop (MSI GT683R, i7-2630QM?), one of the nuts that was supposed to be soldered to the board stopped being soldered to the board. I couldn't figure out why it was throttling.

  It was throttling at 95C and hit temperatures up to 102C.

Gaming on it gave a full framerate for 10-15 seconds, then no frames for about 5 seconds, repeat. Still runs fine now after resoldering the nut to the board. And it never turned off, just throttled down to 200MHz or so and cooled down.

(If I remember correct my P4 happily ran at 85C too. But I might misremember. After that my stationaries have been watercooled and it's hard to get them over 55C.)

But with the foam you would use a lot less copper, at least. It'll be cheaper (if it has the same production cost). Not sure how to produce metal foam, though?

Foam has another drawback: Isn't it tricky to transport the heat all the way to the actual airflow, given the thin filaments and probably longer distances?

To remember the launch code? :)

...only if it's in Google's interest to block services like this instead of asking the victim to pay more money.

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.)