At the time I write this, pirateat40 hasn't even lost the best with Vandroiy. The final date for losing the bet is tomorrow at 5:00 pacific time.
And then after that, the next deadline is the day after.
And then after that, the next deadline is Sep 9.
It's *possible* (but admittedly a stretch) that he stated BTCST defaulted so interest would no longer accrue. But since the feds won't touch it until the money's been gone for like 30 days, and he just announced his "default" today, all you're doing is feeding into the panic and driving peoples' accounts straight into the hands of the risk-friendly debt buyers.
So, it's just a tad premature to say it's "collapsed" with a "loss" with a dollar figure attached. Just a little.
It's called a diphthong and yes, the Canadian ear can hear it. We can tell it's a different phoneme from both the phonemes in around, and the ones in the actual "boot". It's the American ear that can't hear the difference, which is why when Canadians say it, the American ear translates it to the nearest sound they grok, which is the "oot" in boot, and why we sit there puzzled when Americans think we're saying "a boot".
Actually, it's not. Much of the medicine practised by doctors isn't actually well-studied, scientific medicine, because many of the studies that would falsify hypotheses aren't ethical to run.
.. to share my car's data with everyone. Radar detector, geiger counters, WiFi scanners, everything. Everyone else can have direct access to this information, streaming, live, while they mesh with me on the road. I would love to be able to do that. Send them slip statistics pulled from ABS or traction-control triggering, how fast my windshield wipers are going, or just plain water collector sensors, airspeed (for crosswind detection in winter,) the whole kit.
I would love to be able to build a reputation system too: when I cut someone off, they can stamp me as a dangerous driver. When I let someone in, they can stamp me as a courteous driver. "Courteous driver ahead." "Jerk behind me." I can feel comfortable driving in the middle of a pack of "thumbs-up" drivers, or I can be more cautious when I'm stuck in the middle of a pack of ragers (or people who just refuse to participate, period.)
That writer is a jerk.. Verbal sparring is not a pleasant way to spend a day, and it's not the best way to get someone to be honest with you. His interviewing skills even as he presents them need work, his writing is short, clipped, and irritating, and lacks rhythm and even a trace of poetry. He is also mildly cruel and says very inappropriate things at inappropriate times. I would never spend a day with someone like that.
Brutal interview. Bravo to William Shatner for dealing with him as he did. It's the only way to do it. He must have spotted him coming a mile away.
Neonatal jaundice is not a lack of Vit D. And all you need to do is put them in a little blue incubator in the more severe cases, or just feed them more.
There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."
There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.
Ask those guys what consciousness is, and what it means to be conscious. And ask them what our brains' quantum-scale structures' purposes are.
Not a single one of these guys will give you an answer, because humans don't have the answers yet. Once we can actually define these things, then we can start making these sorts of predictions. "Superhuman" intelligence indeed.. we don't even really know what human intelligence is!
Robots running around doing human tasks, flying cars, donut-shaped energy sources that power cities, and intra-solar space travel were all things people in the 1950s predicted, too, and how close to those are we now, now that we have better-defined the problems involved?
No, it's not just you. I see Dagon and I think Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Dagon (2001) every time. It would be cool to have a name like that.. sort of like being Fred Cthulhu, or Samson Yog-sothoth.
Charles Stross just figured out what every Trekker has known for a decade or more. The writers depend on someone else to fill in the science-y sounding gaps.... and then goes on to write a huge diatribe about how much better his writing is.
I've read his writing. For all the nerd-dropping[1] I couldn't get through more than 3/4 of it before I had to put it down in disgust.
His rip-off novel Saturn's Children (he should've just called it Friday 2) was readable only because it was borderline erotica.
You don't tear down an infinitely more successful (and therefore relevant).. Universe.. of scifi.. by comparing it to your own works without inviting a legion of people to mock you endlessly for all the stupid little mistakes and problems in your own writing.
And Star Trek isn't *SCIENCE FICTION* you turd. It's scifi. The entire genre is borderline space opera--and this is what you're claiming you dislike! So what?
Space Opera SciFi ] CS stuff is Science Fiction ] right in between here. Hard Science Fiction
His "science" isn't science either. There's just as much hand-wavy fucking CRAP in the Atrocity Archives as any ST:TNG episode with Q plagued with techno-babble in the whole friggin' series.
If you're going to so completely rip someone else off (*cough* Lovecraft) that your work is no longer a work of original fiction, but a derivative--and a poor one at that--don't sit back and congratulate yourself on how smart and clever you are.
You want a bad-ass Lovecraftian book with an interesting spin on it? Resume with Monsters. There's a mostly-original piece that doesn't constantly congratulate itself on how COOL it is, on how much the author GETS IT, on how well the author is HIP AND TRENDY. There's an amusing story with an interesting core of an idea!
Nothing HAPPENS in CS's Atrocity Archives. The only reason to read it, by the halfway point, is to find out how the author ENDS it.
[1] Nerd-dropping is the constant dropping of nerdy concepts and marketing-friendly terms that will rapidly make your work irrelevant once people get over the idea that you've managed to--poorly--fuse geekery and Lovecraft into a single work.
You are constructing a meaning for the term which has an etymology of only incorrect uses of the prescriptive meaning.
Would you like to ax me a question? Irregardless of correct grammar and my continuous misuse of said, this "pedantry" of which you speak? Is what keeps meaning meaningful between two isolated geographies that would unerringly, impendingly, inexorably otherwise devolve into inomprehensible, abhorrent dialect, and be nearly completely unable to communicate, upon happening a lone speaker of one on another.
Be thankful that literacy rates (as abysmal as they are) are as fixative for spoken grammar almost as much as they are for literative, or we'd all be speaking and writing in long, irritating puns.
You, sir, are an agent of chaos, with poor excuses for bad, indeliberate behaviour on the grammar offenders. And so it is, that it is safe to ignore your bleatings.
Well, it's not really a tiny bit. I'm guessing the city you're imagining is a slight bit different from the city I live in. Frost, black ice, and snow are a fact of life in most Canadian cities (even Victoria) for many months of the year. Having been in a fully-limited-slip AWD vehicle in dozens (hundreds?) of downhill sliding scenarios, I can say with full confidence that it is a serious advantage. (And quite scary for the people behind me, a fact of which I am very painfully aware.)
But you're 100% right about the OP.. a Yaris is not one of the vehicles I describe.:)
Except you admit it is possible, and therefore even in the limited universe the grandparent of this note constructed, AWD can in fact be a better way to slow down and assist in stopping.
Really, any slippery downhill slope is a candidate for this. It's tough to imagine a scenario that the person the grandparent was writing about was describing where some form of slippage isn't involved, and thus this particular AWD construct could be a help in any of those slippage scenarios.
The unfortunate reality is that high-quality, effective limited-slip differentials that can lock all four wheels together are actually pretty rare, even on many AWD vehicles (including Subarus.) They're rare because they're heavy and not particularly economical on mass-produced vehicles: open differentials mean you can under-engineer drive shafts and half-axles and save a pile of money on transmission parts. Why? Because if you have an open differential and the engine drives enough power to slip a tire, only one tire slips and the others stay stationary: the torque load on things like drive shafts is only enough to break free a single tire, and then it's released.
On a WRX STi or a Lancer Evo, the drive shafts have to be strong enough to bear the torque of all four tires' friction simultaneously before everything breaks free and you get an AWD burnout. It's pretty badass. Most normal cars have parts that would snap and break under those stresses, and are therefore less expensive to build.
So, only the insane rally-racer cars like the Lancer Evo or the WRX STi tend to have the full-on ability to lock all four wheels together. Well.. those and the expensive offroaders, whose oversized tires tend not to be a big help on snow and ice and slippery surfaces anyway. (Wrong tire compound, not enough biting edges, missing studs, whatever.)
Except for, say, the fact that truckers undergo significantly more driver training, they are required by law to pull out at brake-check stops, are constantly weighing their cargo (and thus know how much momentum they can build,) that SUVs have no maintenance schedules enforced on drivers by law, and are driven by barely-competent people who, on average, were last tested half their lifetime ago?
Partially incorrect. There are conceivable scenarios where AWD systems will in fact give the vehicle better stopping power than any brakes or brake systems in any two-wheel drive vehicle.
Therefore, the type of all-wheel drive in-use can be a factor in slowing down better and with more control than a simple two-wheel drive vehicle.
The reason is simple: some AWD systems include three four-wheel limited-slip differentials (front-left-right, rear-left-right, and front-rear) which will prevent any one single wheel from spinning when forces on it act to spin it independently of any of the other wheels.
This means that in those situations where the driver can not reasonably stop or even apply brakes without inducing an immediate slide (black ice on a downhill, say) and the best they can do is ease off the gas, chances are much better that the road is not 100% ice and that at least two wheels can get enough purchase to apply some deceleration forces on the car as a unit. The fact that the two wheels in question can literally be *any* two wheels on these rare AWD vehicles means the chances of clutch-engaged deceleration are significantly higher. I don't mean stopping entirely; I just mean slowing down to engine compression/slope equilibrium. (Which helps stopping considerably.)
Also, if a slide is already occurring on all four wheels, ABS is worse than useless and could mean that brakes are temporarily rendered inoperable when it's possible that at the end of the slide, the tires regain traction.
I just wanted to point out that even open differentials where right-left brakes are applied to prevent wheel slippage (active stability) are less effective than those that involve that all-important front-rear limited slip. I know of no cars on the market that aren't already AWD that can do this.
Slashdot Mirror
If you grind immediately after roasting, you don't get to experience peak.
At the time I write this, pirateat40 hasn't even lost the best with Vandroiy. The final date for losing the bet is tomorrow at 5:00 pacific time.
And then after that, the next deadline is the day after.
And then after that, the next deadline is Sep 9.
It's *possible* (but admittedly a stretch) that he stated BTCST defaulted so interest would no longer accrue. But since the feds won't touch it until the money's been gone for like 30 days, and he just announced his "default" today, all you're doing is feeding into the panic and driving peoples' accounts straight into the hands of the risk-friendly debt buyers.
So, it's just a tad premature to say it's "collapsed" with a "loss" with a dollar figure attached. Just a little.
It's called a diphthong and yes, the Canadian ear can hear it. We can tell it's a different phoneme from both the phonemes in around, and the ones in the actual "boot". It's the American ear that can't hear the difference, which is why when Canadians say it, the American ear translates it to the nearest sound they grok, which is the "oot" in boot, and why we sit there puzzled when Americans think we're saying "a boot".
Actually, it's not. Much of the medicine practised by doctors isn't actually well-studied, scientific medicine, because many of the studies that would falsify hypotheses aren't ethical to run.
.. to share my car's data with everyone. Radar detector, geiger counters, WiFi scanners, everything. Everyone else can have direct access to this information, streaming, live, while they mesh with me on the road. I would love to be able to do that. Send them slip statistics pulled from ABS or traction-control triggering, how fast my windshield wipers are going, or just plain water collector sensors, airspeed (for crosswind detection in winter,) the whole kit.
I would love to be able to build a reputation system too: when I cut someone off, they can stamp me as a dangerous driver. When I let someone in, they can stamp me as a courteous driver. "Courteous driver ahead." "Jerk behind me." I can feel comfortable driving in the middle of a pack of "thumbs-up" drivers, or I can be more cautious when I'm stuck in the middle of a pack of ragers (or people who just refuse to participate, period.)
We've known this for years now. Duh!
That writer is a jerk.. Verbal sparring is not a pleasant way to spend a day, and it's not the best way to get someone to be honest with you. His interviewing skills even as he presents them need work, his writing is short, clipped, and irritating, and lacks rhythm and even a trace of poetry. He is also mildly cruel and says very inappropriate things at inappropriate times. I would never spend a day with someone like that.
Brutal interview. Bravo to William Shatner for dealing with him as he did. It's the only way to do it. He must have spotted him coming a mile away.
That's pretty cool..!
Neonatal jaundice is not a lack of Vit D. And all you need to do is put them in a little blue incubator in the more severe cases, or just feed them more.
Move along. Doctors have known about this for a long time. Real doctors, even.
"Superintelligence" known as the cloud?
There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."
There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.
Could you post an older webpage to the front page of Slashdot?!
Geez, this thing has been around for frickin ages..
Yes! Exactly!
Ask those guys what consciousness is, and what it means to be conscious. And ask them what our brains' quantum-scale structures' purposes are.
Not a single one of these guys will give you an answer, because humans don't have the answers yet. Once we can actually define these things, then we can start making these sorts of predictions. "Superhuman" intelligence indeed.. we don't even really know what human intelligence is!
Robots running around doing human tasks, flying cars, donut-shaped energy sources that power cities, and intra-solar space travel were all things people in the 1950s predicted, too, and how close to those are we now, now that we have better-defined the problems involved?
No, it's not just you. I see Dagon and I think Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Dagon (2001) every time. It would be cool to have a name like that.. sort of like being Fred Cthulhu, or Samson Yog-sothoth.
Thank you for the pointer. I will indeed check it out: But those two novels I mentioned. Sheesh. Brutal.
And Charles Stross' little diatribe isn't narcissistic projection?
The whole thing is all about his his own writing process is superior!
Charles Stross just figured out what every Trekker has known for a decade or more. The writers depend on someone else to fill in the science-y sounding gaps. ... and then goes on to write a huge diatribe about how much better his writing is.
I've read his writing. For all the nerd-dropping[1] I couldn't get through more than 3/4 of it before I had to put it down in disgust.
His rip-off novel Saturn's Children (he should've just called it Friday 2) was readable only because it was borderline erotica.
You don't tear down an infinitely more successful (and therefore relevant) .. Universe.. of scifi.. by comparing it to your own works without inviting a legion of people to mock you endlessly for all the stupid little mistakes and problems in your own writing.
And Star Trek isn't *SCIENCE FICTION* you turd. It's scifi. The entire genre is borderline space opera--and this is what you're claiming you dislike! So what?
Space Opera
SciFi ] CS stuff is
Science Fiction ] right in between here.
Hard Science Fiction
His "science" isn't science either. There's just as much hand-wavy fucking CRAP in the Atrocity Archives as any ST:TNG episode with Q plagued with techno-babble in the whole friggin' series.
If you're going to so completely rip someone else off (*cough* Lovecraft) that your work is no longer a work of original fiction, but a derivative--and a poor one at that--don't sit back and congratulate yourself on how smart and clever you are.
You want a bad-ass Lovecraftian book with an interesting spin on it? Resume with Monsters. There's a mostly-original piece that doesn't constantly congratulate itself on how COOL it is, on how much the author GETS IT, on how well the author is HIP AND TRENDY. There's an amusing story with an interesting core of an idea!
Nothing HAPPENS in CS's Atrocity Archives. The only reason to read it, by the halfway point, is to find out how the author ENDS it.
[1] Nerd-dropping is the constant dropping of nerdy concepts and marketing-friendly terms that will rapidly make your work irrelevant once people get over the idea that you've managed to--poorly--fuse geekery and Lovecraft into a single work.
You are constructing a meaning for the term which has an etymology of only incorrect uses of the prescriptive meaning.
Would you like to ax me a question? Irregardless of correct grammar and my continuous misuse of said, this "pedantry" of which you speak? Is what keeps meaning meaningful between two isolated geographies that would unerringly, impendingly, inexorably otherwise devolve into inomprehensible, abhorrent dialect, and be nearly completely unable to communicate, upon happening a lone speaker of one on another.
Be thankful that literacy rates (as abysmal as they are) are as fixative for spoken grammar almost as much as they are for literative, or we'd all be speaking and writing in long, irritating puns.
You, sir, are an agent of chaos, with poor excuses for bad, indeliberate behaviour on the grammar offenders. And so it is, that it is safe to ignore your bleatings.
Run along now, Agent Chaos.
Do they? Not where I live..
I wish they did. But.. oh well.
P.S. I'm aware that anecdotal evidence isn't, but I guess my offtopic point is made.
Well, it's not really a tiny bit. I'm guessing the city you're imagining is a slight bit different from the city I live in. Frost, black ice, and snow are a fact of life in most Canadian cities (even Victoria) for many months of the year. Having been in a fully-limited-slip AWD vehicle in dozens (hundreds?) of downhill sliding scenarios, I can say with full confidence that it is a serious advantage. (And quite scary for the people behind me, a fact of which I am very painfully aware.)
But you're 100% right about the OP.. a Yaris is not one of the vehicles I describe. :)
Except you admit it is possible, and therefore even in the limited universe the grandparent of this note constructed, AWD can in fact be a better way to slow down and assist in stopping.
Really, any slippery downhill slope is a candidate for this. It's tough to imagine a scenario that the person the grandparent was writing about was describing where some form of slippage isn't involved, and thus this particular AWD construct could be a help in any of those slippage scenarios.
The unfortunate reality is that high-quality, effective limited-slip differentials that can lock all four wheels together are actually pretty rare, even on many AWD vehicles (including Subarus.) They're rare because they're heavy and not particularly economical on mass-produced vehicles: open differentials mean you can under-engineer drive shafts and half-axles and save a pile of money on transmission parts. Why? Because if you have an open differential and the engine drives enough power to slip a tire, only one tire slips and the others stay stationary: the torque load on things like drive shafts is only enough to break free a single tire, and then it's released.
On a WRX STi or a Lancer Evo, the drive shafts have to be strong enough to bear the torque of all four tires' friction simultaneously before everything breaks free and you get an AWD burnout. It's pretty badass. Most normal cars have parts that would snap and break under those stresses, and are therefore less expensive to build.
So, only the insane rally-racer cars like the Lancer Evo or the WRX STi tend to have the full-on ability to lock all four wheels together. Well.. those and the expensive offroaders, whose oversized tires tend not to be a big help on snow and ice and slippery surfaces anyway. (Wrong tire compound, not enough biting edges, missing studs, whatever.)
Except for, say, the fact that truckers undergo significantly more driver training, they are required by law to pull out at brake-check stops, are constantly weighing their cargo (and thus know how much momentum they can build,) that SUVs have no maintenance schedules enforced on drivers by law, and are driven by barely-competent people who, on average, were last tested half their lifetime ago?
Partially incorrect. There are conceivable scenarios where AWD systems will in fact give the vehicle better stopping power than any brakes or brake systems in any two-wheel drive vehicle.
Therefore, the type of all-wheel drive in-use can be a factor in slowing down better and with more control than a simple two-wheel drive vehicle.
The reason is simple: some AWD systems include three four-wheel limited-slip differentials (front-left-right, rear-left-right, and front-rear) which will prevent any one single wheel from spinning when forces on it act to spin it independently of any of the other wheels.
This means that in those situations where the driver can not reasonably stop or even apply brakes without inducing an immediate slide (black ice on a downhill, say) and the best they can do is ease off the gas, chances are much better that the road is not 100% ice and that at least two wheels can get enough purchase to apply some deceleration forces on the car as a unit. The fact that the two wheels in question can literally be *any* two wheels on these rare AWD vehicles means the chances of clutch-engaged deceleration are significantly higher. I don't mean stopping entirely; I just mean slowing down to engine compression/slope equilibrium. (Which helps stopping considerably.)
Also, if a slide is already occurring on all four wheels, ABS is worse than useless and could mean that brakes are temporarily rendered inoperable when it's possible that at the end of the slide, the tires regain traction.
I just wanted to point out that even open differentials where right-left brakes are applied to prevent wheel slippage (active stability) are less effective than those that involve that all-important front-rear limited slip. I know of no cars on the market that aren't already AWD that can do this.