In fact, this is one more reason for good authors to avoid traditional publishers. I can think of quite a few authors who would have a thing or two to say about algorithms like these being used to modify their work.

Just like in the music industry, big publishers are simply not necessary anymore. Editors most certainly are, but publishers?

If we are talking about American engines with their usual anemic power/weight ratio's, then probably yes. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is driving hundreds of thousands of kilometers with 1.3 l engines that deliver 100 KW or so.

Also, what's with the crazy units of measurements. 4 tablespoons per mile more - is that supposed to sound like "not a lot"? In real units of measurements, that would be around 40 ml/km or 4 l/100 km more which is an absolutely huge amount - in fact, on just that difference you can drive another small or hybrid car.

This is why the rest of the world uses this standardized system for units of measurements.

So, I was similarly surprised that in 2013 it is apparently still possible to build *and* sell new cars that consume 10 l/100km.

Randomly change anything and it will probably be an improvement, is how bad it is.

Despite that, I played the game for over 5 years. That's how good the meta-game is, if you're in the right alliance at least ;)

Because "pinning" things to the taskbar in Win7 is an atrocity: when an application is not running it looks like an icon, when it's running it's much bigger (normal taskbar entry). So applications don't stay in the same place, depending on other applications that may or may not be started. Plus it just looks terrible, having a taskbar with running applications and then there seem to be icons stuck in the middle. Saw it once, went like "is that a bug? Wait, it is actually designed to behave like that?" and put it firmly in "Do. Not. Want." territory. So re-adding the taskbar is one of the first things to do, right up with disabling grouping on the taskbar and resetting Alt-Tab to behave sensibly and without all the massively distracting animations.

The win7 start menu is a huge improvement over XP however. So I guess it's obvious it had to be taken out for Windows 8.

And we could call this supernatural selection!

I would go one further and admit to installing LibreOffice *alongside* a full MS Office installation at work. The ribbon interface in recent Office version just drives me completely nuts, and the versions of Office that do not have it yet are getting so outdated that they have serious problems opening files from the newer versions (even with the converters installed). Whereas LibreOffice generally doesn't. The formatting may be slightly off, but at least I can get to the content.

The company I work for has a full MS subscription so it's not about saving money. It's just that in recent version Microsoft made the interface so atrocious to use, while continuing to ignore long-standing, over a decade old formatting/style and image movement bugs that you run into with even the most trivial of documents (say, a few page design doc with some screenshots), and which type of problem I remember noticing since Office 97, that even LibreOffice is starting to look attractive by comparison. And yes, I fully agree that is saying something.

Yes, I seriously tried using the ribbons for a while, I just *cannot* bear it. Too bad they had to force this on all Office users, since it's holding me back from using quite a lot of nice new features (major improvements in Powerpoint, say) in recent versions.

Heh. I'm sure this recent incident didn't help either.

Where I live, short changing doesn't happen either way very often (or I just don't notice), but the times it does, I have actually seen it in both directions.

The funniest time was when we paid for some drinks, the owner thought/gave change as if we gave him a 50 when we actually paid with a 20. Got more money back than we paid in the first place. The place was OK so we did the nice thing and actually told him ;)

Speaking of Amazon though, this is why I will never buy DRM-encumbered anything. I have a Kindle and love it. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader how I obtain ebooks for it. I would gladly pay for them, if they did not come with DRM and where actually *cheaper* than the paperback editions. As it is, my bookshelf contains the paper edition, and I obtain the ebook for portable use by other means. A shame, really.

Of course they're not that dense.

This is all about getting the government to help you put your hand in the next guy's pocket.

Cynical people might say he did it to improve business, as apples are sour and contain a lot of sugar too, they are very bad for your teeth, even comparable to soft drinks.

They may be healthier to the rest of your body compared to candy and soft drinks, but for the teeth: not so much, apparently.

Over 45% is correct, likely it's even higher if you include VAT.

Where I live, current price is EUR 1.90/liter ($9.40 using the current exchange rate), of which 32% production costs, 9% in various margins (supplier, transport, gas station, etc.), the rest is taxes. So yep, the remaining 59% are specific taxes for fuel and "normal" VAT.

I cannot really imagine there are still that many (young) people who look at the keyboard while typing. Seriously? How do you see what you're typing, then?

You also don't really need the key labels (once you can touch type), just the small "braille"-like lines on the F and J keys to feel where the home keys are, IMO :)

Next up: vegetarians against using 0xdeadbeef to detect memory corruption? Well, Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!