The ideal computing experience has been a moving target over the years. I've been watching it from the days of the Commodore 64, when GEOS was the third most popular operating system in the world. Back then, you could predict that if computers could keep up the pace, you'd eventually be able to see pictures, movies, music, and have realistic games. You should be able to communicate with far away computers as well. You should be able to do business on them.
It's been an incredibly complex journey, and it has taken 20+ years to get here. We're not there yet, but we are a lot closer. After a while, people stopped waiting for new "killer apps", and we standardized on the "office suite" that included components including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, among a short few others of diminishing importance.
Along the way, security has reared its head as the internet became the killer app. Ultimately, that problem has to be solved for a commodity computer that is "good enough". In much the same way that the problem of small arms started with stones and has been commoditized with the AK-47. Easy to manufacture, simple to operate, kills people reliably at typical combat distances. Security is similar to the reliability component - for a computer to be reliable in the internet environment it has to be secure.
The FOSS approach to commoditize the PC is proceeding on two fronts. The first is to to emulate the latest and greatest features and application set of Windows, like Ubuntu, Fedora and others. The other is a pedantic approach like OpenBSD, where you start from the trivial and work your way outwards, debugging and locking everything down.
I'm amazed at how far Linux has come in the 10 years I've played with it. Ubuntu is quite usable now, and it has to be more secure than MS. But I wouldn't be surprised if the OpenBSD-like approach triumphs in the end.
Anyone who acquires a taste for something can find more of it on the internet. Amazon user comments, genre searches, you name it, if you like something you can find stuff that is similar and may trigger another depth first search down a whole new genre. Your life would surely finish before you reached the end of this process.
A person, once they learn this, begins to realize that there is good music to be found that does not have posters plastered everywhere and is not on heavy rotation on the radio or MTV. From then on it's all about maximizing benefit/cost.
And in this day and age, your average teenager is learning this AT OR BEFORE they have a disposable income.
The manufactured group thing had a lot going for it in the days of airwave oligopoly (before cheap digital storage and transmission arrived). Take a talented but ugly and uncharismatic songwriter, add some generic musicians and a good looking singer, plaster their names everywhere in place of yesterday's group and the recording oligopoly takes the lions share of the profit. Rinse, repeat.
It's kind of like the logical endpoint that bean counting brought American motor manufacturing to with planned obsolescence/ poor product quality. It's hard to feel sorry for such companies when the worm turns, and laughable that their priorities were ever "about the artist".
Which was probably an outgrowth of the racist background of African people, who took popular European instruments and played music on them among their people instead of hiring original European musicians! The cheek of them!
"My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex."
"Old" and "new" are orthogonal to "good". Much like EF Codd's ideas on databases.
I'd be hard pressed to design something more useful than vim is from the ground up. It feels as if it was designed to: a) minimize keystroke use b) minimize RSI c) allow a person to predict how to use new functions intuitively (e.g. 5dd deletes 5 lines, 5Y yanks five lines) d) edit code in general
If a person thinks that there is any chance he will be doing a fair bit of coding over a lifetime, perhaps a large chunk, it makes sense to devote a few hours in the beginning to learning an editor with the above priorities. In much the same way as a young engineer ought to consider learning RPN and buying an HP calculator. It is an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
"It sounds to me like we're making a classic stupid military mistake: we keep on defending ourselves, at our homes, schools, and workplaces".
I don't think there's that much to worry about. RIAA/MPAA are fighting a battle that is very difficult to win in the face of rapidly reducing costs of information storage and dispersal and no means to prevent it.
It's not that much unlike Viet Nam or Iraq. Robert S McNamara's book "In Retrospect" talks about how much redundancy the North Vietnamese supply chain had, and how small the quantities of supplies were that they needed to carry on resisting. Carpet bombing had not a hope of working, despite more bombs being dropped on Viet Nam than in all of WWII.
The only way the fight could be taken to the enemy's home turf was the occasional image or story of what it took to wage the war. This has similar effect to the stories of grandmothers and children being taken to court for file sharing. It may have helped stop the war, but even in the absence of this it did not make the war able to be won. http://servumpecus.canalblog.com/images/Vietnam_na palm_19721.jpg
And a lot of the effects of the MAFIAA's war waging efforts is just natural selection - prosecute enough people and the remnant will find a way to share files without an IP address being easily traced, without servers, etc.
Copyright prior to the early nineties was much more effective because it was much more expensive to be a pirate. The only way it could be done effectively was to run it as a business, and as a result it had to be done very furtively. The average person could not transmit an exact copy of a given piece of media to a friend, whereas they can today.
Of course, the fight against file sharing can go on as long as the MPAA/RIAA has money coming in from their monopoly, just like the War on Terror could conceivably go on for as long the US cares to throw billions at it. It doesn't mean that it can be won, any more than Iraq or Viet Nam could be won. (Well technically I suppose the MAFIAA could convince someone to turn the world into a glass parking lot, and it might make them happy but then they would not have funds to continue their fight.)
Those 5 reasons to use mysql are more informative than those 8 "reasons" against, simply because the majority of those "reasons" are in fact straw men.
I mean, ACID compliance being called a "feature" of a RDBMS? Unless your company views its data as replaceable junk that will never be need to be made sense of again at any point in the future, ACID compliance should be mandatory and enabled by default. Surely a comment on this would be useful to CIOs? Instead, all we get is this:
"Feature Set Maturity... However, if the user's temperament is particularly gun-shy toward new technology, the longer-supported feature is the more certain bet. In this case, these three major features are still relatively recent additions. Even as of MySQL 5.0, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) consistency is not guaranteed in the case of a crash when some kinds of stored procedures or functions are used to modify the database."
"Not saying there is no censorship in Russian media, but why can't "state controlled" network can't impose its own agenda like many other media companies do?"
It's a good question, but to answer it you need learn to read between the lines. You have to understand that a monopoly of influence is "good" when one group of people wield it, and "bad" when another group of people wield it.
Putin is "bad" because he dispossessed several oligarchs of their ill-gotten wealth. If he were "good", Putin would allow so-called "private" news organizations to portray him and his policies in a bad light so that whoever they choose to replace him will be seen as a better alternative. It has nothing to do with truth or justice, it is all about who is doing what to whom.
There is no such thing as a "free" press. Every publisher decides what content he allows his readership to read. If he is too stupid to exercise that control, an editor will only too gladly exercise that control for him.
And the distinction between state control of the media and private control of the media is also arbitrary. Control of the media leads to control of opinion which leads to control of the laws on the books and enforcement of those laws.
It's the reason for the cliche that "the first casualty of war is the truth", and why the first target of any occupation government is always the media organs of the country they wish to control.
"Otherwise, we would all get the OS and Office for free, or close to free, as OSes and word processors are mature technology which has already been fully paid for. How else could OpenOffice and Linux be so successful?"
This is a good point. I think the current situation of software vendors jealously holding out for more money for the mature technology is actually good in a way. At least with something like OpenOffice and Linux, we can see the source if we want to. A free but closed Office and Windows would always be closed and there would be much less incentive to create or switch to an OSS alternative.
"I have a dream! I have a dream, that one day, Linux users will be more then 50% of the people who use computers I have a dream that people will not use Linux as a user-friendly OS, but actually use it's command-line, and learn how to use it to improve their performance."
You'd better start studying up on eugenics if you ever want to see THAT dream realized.
If you want more than 50% of the population to use linux (or bsd) without the massive eugenics program in place necessary for them to revel in the command line, it is going to have to be dumbed down pretty hard core.
Here is the distrowatch page hit ranking: Last 3 months: 2 Last 6 months: 3 2006: 8 2005: 13
Just to give some comparison, Ubuntu was still number 1 in 2005, as it is today. But provided Texstar doesn't get run over by a bus any time soon, I would be totally unsurprised if PCLOS overtakes Ubuntu in popularity within a year or two.
"It's not that the wine developers havent tried, it's just that emulating a Piece of Shit like Windows is nearly fucking impossible.. nobody can emulate the development hysteria that went into building windows."
Joel On Software has a good article on this. At least in part, here's why developing WINE is like cleaning out the Aegean Stables:
Ahhh... that explains that one then. Episode 5 is so much better than 4. I'm not sure why Irvin Kirschner was picked though. The rest of his directing career is fairly mediocre, with that one superlative success.
"To kill a religion, you'd either have to kill every single person whose faith is in this religion, or you have to convince everyone who believes that his religion is wrong. Now, the former is by its very definition impossible. Ya know, there was a nation about 60 years ago whose plan was exactly that. It costed millions of lives, but it did certainly not destroy the religion."
The Catholic church at the height of its powers (3rd-4th century) did a pretty good of destroying all the followers of competing sects or "convincing" them that they were wrong. But they were just Christians.
Jews? No way. Guaranteed the ethno-religion of 54% of the world's chess champions since 1886 is smart enough to have a contingency plan for everything including mass nuclear warfare. It would literally take an act of god to wipe them out. (e.g. Moon sized asteroid hitting the earth, sun going supernova, God accidentally hitting the Red Button). And if they had any forewarning at all, their efforts in conquering space would make the Manhattan project look like a science fair project.
"Because of the auditory hallucinations, you may think your body is occupied by multiple entities (a belief of L. Ron's), and come up with a bizzarre world-view that attempts to explain the world that you are perceiving (Scientology or TimeCube)"
Or perhaps you just want to come up with one of the first MLM schemes ever, use religion as a way to avoid taxes, and admit it to one of your fellow writer friends.
That's what the good professor is really worried about. Someone being able to write an alternate history besides an ordained priest from Harvard university, using a simple search engine (or in the restricted future, some sort of search on a private hard drive), and doing a better job. And also being able to research the Harvard high priest who wrote the official whitewash, so that he can be identified as not just a name assumed to be authoritative and objective but a real live person with a background and an agenda. Fancy that!
At the moment there is no real memory hole. Which was in large part what enabled the world of 1984 to function. TPTB would declare "Oceania is at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia." And Winston Smith and co would dutifully clip out any conlicting references.
But now 'tinfoil hat wearing' 'paranoid' 'conspiracy theorists' can say "'Ang on a sec mate! Oceania was at war with Eastasia just 10 years ago, and we were at peace with Eurasia then. Why, 'ave a look 'ere at this 'ere photo, it shows Big Brov shaking hands with Dear Leader Foo Wang! Wot do ya make of that, then?"
So this professor wants us to all have default erased family photographs, records and the like, expecting us to believe that Big Brother is dutifully doing the same thing, so it can't embarrass us at some future time. Because "forgetting is so central to society's fundamental values".
I wonder why he's gone in the direction he has. It's not as if he needs the money. Perhaps he's going senile, or maybe he is naturally prone to employing sycophants. By the time of Return of the Jedi, everyone (male) under 30 probably thought Lucas could do no wrong, so it was probably only natural for him to think that anyone with an independent viewpoint was just jealous.
Some people adapt to fame well. Bohr would often seek the opinion of Feynman simply because Feynman wasn't intimidated and would say what he thought whether it independent of Bohr. I wonder how Harrison Ford would have went with suggesting a deviation from the script like "I know" to Leia's "I love you" later on in Lucas' career.
I find it hard to believe that with the quality of the recent dialogue, the actors in the last 3 films weren't jumping over themselves with suggestions. I bet Lucas just didn't listen.
"That means if you coast to a stop in gear (compression braking), you're not using any fuel. If you shift to neutral while coasting, the engine speed will drop and it will start using fuel to maintain idle."
One often has to be careful with this, because braking in general means that you probably accelerated a bit too much when you shouldn't have (i.e. you are saving a little bit of gas now when you could have saved a lot earlier). You are exchanging heating up the brake pads for heating up the engine/exhaust. (Different of course if you are say, coasting to a far off red light at 40kph in 5th gear, where the compression effect is almost negligible.)
If you know what you are doing, you can shut the engine off, put it in idle, and bump start (pick high gear, turn on, drop clutch) it when you need some more juice. Not legal, but difficult to detect.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal computing experience has been a moving target over the years. I've been watching it from the days of the Commodore 64, when GEOS was the third most popular operating system in the world. Back then, you could predict that if computers could keep up the pace, you'd eventually be able to see pictures, movies, music, and have realistic games. You should be able to communicate with far away computers as well. You should be able to do business on them.
It's been an incredibly complex journey, and it has taken 20+ years to get here. We're not there yet, but we are a lot closer. After a while, people stopped waiting for new "killer apps", and we standardized on the "office suite" that included components including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, among a short few others of diminishing importance.
Along the way, security has reared its head as the internet became the killer app. Ultimately, that problem has to be solved for a commodity computer that is "good enough". In much the same way that the problem of small arms started with stones and has been commoditized with the AK-47. Easy to manufacture, simple to operate, kills people reliably at typical combat distances. Security is similar to the reliability component - for a computer to be reliable in the internet environment it has to be secure.
The FOSS approach to commoditize the PC is proceeding on two fronts. The first is to to emulate the latest and greatest features and application set of Windows, like Ubuntu, Fedora and others. The other is a pedantic approach like OpenBSD, where you start from the trivial and work your way outwards, debugging and locking everything down.
I'm amazed at how far Linux has come in the 10 years I've played with it. Ubuntu is quite usable now, and it has to be more secure than MS. But I wouldn't be surprised if the OpenBSD-like approach triumphs in the end.
This is certainly a decent part of it.
Anyone who acquires a taste for something can find more of it on the internet. Amazon user comments, genre searches, you name it, if you like something you can find stuff that is similar and may trigger another depth first search down a whole new genre. Your life would surely finish before you reached the end of this process.
A person, once they learn this, begins to realize that there is good music to be found that does not have posters plastered everywhere and is not on heavy rotation on the radio or MTV. From then on it's all about maximizing benefit/cost.
And in this day and age, your average teenager is learning this AT OR BEFORE they have a disposable income.
The manufactured group thing had a lot going for it in the days of airwave oligopoly (before cheap digital storage and transmission arrived). Take a talented but ugly and uncharismatic songwriter, add some generic musicians and a good looking singer, plaster their names everywhere in place of yesterday's group and the recording oligopoly takes the lions share of the profit. Rinse, repeat.
It's kind of like the logical endpoint that bean counting brought American motor manufacturing to with planned obsolescence/ poor product quality. It's hard to feel sorry for such companies when the worm turns, and laughable that their priorities were ever "about the artist".
Which was probably an outgrowth of the racist background of African people, who took popular European instruments and played music on them among their people instead of hiring original European musicians! The cheek of them!
...and Ticketmaster's monopoly takes a fair chunk out of that, too.
"My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex."
"Old" and "new" are orthogonal to "good". Much like EF Codd's ideas on databases.
I'd be hard pressed to design something more useful than vim is from the ground up. It feels as if it was designed to:
a) minimize keystroke use
b) minimize RSI
c) allow a person to predict how to use new functions intuitively (e.g. 5dd deletes 5 lines, 5Y yanks five lines)
d) edit code in general
If a person thinks that there is any chance he will be doing a fair bit of coding over a lifetime, perhaps a large chunk, it makes sense to devote a few hours in the beginning to learning an editor with the above priorities. In much the same way as a young engineer ought to consider learning RPN and buying an HP calculator. It is an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
Thanks, that was classic! (And even though I grudgingly like the design of the IPod. Which I am yet to buy.)
"Western values"? You must have meant to say "values propagated by the US media".
"Security is like sex... once you're penetrated you're ****ed."
I think a car analogy would work better here... at least cars are something most people here have a passing familiarity with.
"Ethanol has slightly more energy than straight sugar, because the fermentation adds energy to the system."
How does that work? Where is the yeast getting the energy from to multiply, let alone heat the vessel you are fermenting in, if not from the sugar?
"It sounds to me like we're making a classic stupid military mistake: we keep on defending ourselves, at our homes, schools, and workplaces".
a palm_19721.jpg
I don't think there's that much to worry about. RIAA/MPAA are fighting a battle that is very difficult to win in the face of rapidly reducing costs of information storage and dispersal and no means to prevent it.
It's not that much unlike Viet Nam or Iraq. Robert S McNamara's book "In Retrospect" talks about how much redundancy the North Vietnamese supply chain had, and how small the quantities of supplies were that they needed to carry on resisting. Carpet bombing had not a hope of working, despite more bombs being dropped on Viet Nam than in all of WWII.
The only way the fight could be taken to the enemy's home turf was the occasional image or story of what it took to wage the war. This has similar effect to the stories of grandmothers and children being taken to court for file sharing. It may have helped stop the war, but even in the absence of this it did not make the war able to be won.
http://servumpecus.canalblog.com/images/Vietnam_n
And a lot of the effects of the MAFIAA's war waging efforts is just natural selection - prosecute enough people and the remnant will find a way to share files without an IP address being easily traced, without servers, etc.
Copyright prior to the early nineties was much more effective because it was much more expensive to be a pirate. The only way it could be done effectively was to run it as a business, and as a result it had to be done very furtively. The average person could not transmit an exact copy of a given piece of media to a friend, whereas they can today.
Of course, the fight against file sharing can go on as long as the MPAA/RIAA has money coming in from their monopoly, just like the War on Terror could conceivably go on for as long the US cares to throw billions at it. It doesn't mean that it can be won, any more than Iraq or Viet Nam could be won. (Well technically I suppose the MAFIAA could convince someone to turn the world into a glass parking lot, and it might make them happy but then they would not have funds to continue their fight.)
Those 5 reasons to use mysql are more informative than those 8 "reasons" against, simply because the majority of those "reasons" are in fact straw men.
...
I mean, ACID compliance being called a "feature" of a RDBMS? Unless your company views its data as replaceable junk that will never be need to be made sense of again at any point in the future, ACID compliance should be mandatory and enabled by default. Surely a comment on this would be useful to CIOs? Instead, all we get is this:
"Feature Set Maturity
However, if the user's temperament is particularly gun-shy toward new technology, the longer-supported feature is the more certain bet. In this case, these three major features are still relatively recent additions. Even as of MySQL 5.0, ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) consistency is not guaranteed in the case of a crash when some kinds of stored procedures or functions are used to modify the database."
"Not saying there is no censorship in Russian media, but why can't "state controlled" network can't impose its own agenda like many other media companies do?"
It's a good question, but to answer it you need learn to read between the lines. You have to understand that a monopoly of influence is "good" when one group of people wield it, and "bad" when another group of people wield it.
Putin is "bad" because he dispossessed several oligarchs of their ill-gotten wealth. If he were "good", Putin would allow so-called "private" news organizations to portray him and his policies in a bad light so that whoever they choose to replace him will be seen as a better alternative. It has nothing to do with truth or justice, it is all about who is doing what to whom.
There is no such thing as a "free" press. Every publisher decides what content he allows his readership to read. If he is too stupid to exercise that control, an editor will only too gladly exercise that control for him.
And the distinction between state control of the media and private control of the media is also arbitrary. Control of the media leads to control of opinion which leads to control of the laws on the books and enforcement of those laws.
It's the reason for the cliche that "the first casualty of war is the truth", and why the first target of any occupation government is always the media organs of the country they wish to control.
"Otherwise, we would all get the OS and Office for free, or close to free, as OSes and word processors are mature technology which has already been fully paid for. How else could OpenOffice and Linux be so successful?"
This is a good point. I think the current situation of software vendors jealously holding out for more money for the mature technology is actually good in a way. At least with something like OpenOffice and Linux, we can see the source if we want to. A free but closed Office and Windows would always be closed and there would be much less incentive to create or switch to an OSS alternative.
photo of L Ron Hubbard "auditing" a tomato.j pg
http://www.clambake.org/archive/books/bfm/tomato.
I'd say it still has a few thetans to go before it makes clear.
"I have a dream! I have a dream, that one day, Linux users will be more then 50% of the people who use computers
I have a dream that people will not use Linux as a user-friendly OS, but actually use it's command-line, and learn how to use it to improve their performance."
You'd better start studying up on eugenics if you ever want to see THAT dream realized.
If you want more than 50% of the population to use linux (or bsd) without the massive eugenics program in place necessary for them to revel in the command line, it is going to have to be dumbed down pretty hard core.
PCLOS is a pretty good start.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/
Here is the distrowatch page hit ranking:
Last 3 months: 2
Last 6 months: 3
2006: 8
2005: 13
Just to give some comparison, Ubuntu was still number 1 in 2005, as it is today. But provided Texstar doesn't get run over by a bus any time soon, I would be totally unsurprised if PCLOS overtakes Ubuntu in popularity within a year or two.
"It's not that the wine developers havent tried, it's just that emulating a Piece of Shit like Windows is nearly fucking impossible.. nobody can emulate the development hysteria that went into building windows."
l
Joel On Software has a good article on this. At least in part, here's why developing WINE is like cleaning out the Aegean Stables:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
Ahhh... that explains that one then. Episode 5 is so much better than 4. I'm not sure why Irvin Kirschner was picked though. The rest of his directing career is fairly mediocre, with that one superlative success.
"To kill a religion, you'd either have to kill every single person whose faith is in this religion, or you have to convince everyone who believes that his religion is wrong. Now, the former is by its very definition impossible. Ya know, there was a nation about 60 years ago whose plan was exactly that. It costed millions of lives, but it did certainly not destroy the religion."
It depends. Ever heard of the Nag Hammadi Library?
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html
The Catholic church at the height of its powers (3rd-4th century) did a pretty good of destroying all the followers of competing sects or "convincing" them that they were wrong. But they were just Christians.
Jews? No way. Guaranteed the ethno-religion of 54% of the world's chess champions since 1886 is smart enough to have a contingency plan for everything including mass nuclear warfare. It would literally take an act of god to wipe them out. (e.g. Moon sized asteroid hitting the earth, sun going supernova, God accidentally hitting the Red Button). And if they had any forewarning at all, their efforts in conquering space would make the Manhattan project look like a science fair project.
"Because of the auditory hallucinations, you may think your body is occupied by multiple entities (a belief of L. Ron's), and come up with a bizzarre world-view that attempts to explain the world that you are perceiving (Scientology or TimeCube)"
Or perhaps you just want to come up with one of the first MLM schemes ever, use religion as a way to avoid taxes, and admit it to one of your fellow writer friends.
"I trust in creators, not franchises."
You must not be a Star Wars fan.
That's what the good professor is really worried about. Someone being able to write an alternate history besides an ordained priest from Harvard university, using a simple search engine (or in the restricted future, some sort of search on a private hard drive), and doing a better job. And also being able to research the Harvard high priest who wrote the official whitewash, so that he can be identified as not just a name assumed to be authoritative and objective but a real live person with a background and an agenda. Fancy that!
At the moment there is no real memory hole. Which was in large part what enabled the world of 1984 to function. TPTB would declare "Oceania is at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia." And Winston Smith and co would dutifully clip out any conlicting references.
But now 'tinfoil hat wearing' 'paranoid' 'conspiracy theorists' can say "'Ang on a sec mate! Oceania was at war with Eastasia just 10 years ago, and we were at peace with Eurasia then. Why, 'ave a look 'ere at this 'ere photo, it shows Big Brov shaking hands with Dear Leader Foo Wang! Wot do ya make of that, then?"
So this professor wants us to all have default erased family photographs, records and the like, expecting us to believe that Big Brother is dutifully doing the same thing, so it can't embarrass us at some future time. Because "forgetting is so central to society's fundamental values".
Who the hell is he kidding?
I wonder why he's gone in the direction he has. It's not as if he needs the money. Perhaps he's going senile, or maybe he is naturally prone to employing sycophants. By the time of Return of the Jedi, everyone (male) under 30 probably thought Lucas could do no wrong, so it was probably only natural for him to think that anyone with an independent viewpoint was just jealous.
Some people adapt to fame well. Bohr would often seek the opinion of Feynman simply because Feynman wasn't intimidated and would say what he thought whether it independent of Bohr. I wonder how Harrison Ford would have went with suggesting a deviation from the script like "I know" to Leia's "I love you" later on in Lucas' career.
I find it hard to believe that with the quality of the recent dialogue, the actors in the last 3 films weren't jumping over themselves with suggestions. I bet Lucas just didn't listen.
In most versions however, you just get to choose the same exact guy but with different clothes.
"That means if you coast to a stop in gear (compression braking), you're not using any fuel. If you shift to neutral while coasting, the engine speed will drop and it will start using fuel to maintain idle."
One often has to be careful with this, because braking in general means that you probably accelerated a bit too much when you shouldn't have (i.e. you are saving a little bit of gas now when you could have saved a lot earlier). You are exchanging heating up the brake pads for heating up the engine/exhaust. (Different of course if you are say, coasting to a far off red light at 40kph in 5th gear, where the compression effect is almost negligible.)
If you know what you are doing, you can shut the engine off, put it in idle, and bump start (pick high gear, turn on, drop clutch) it when you need some more juice. Not legal, but difficult to detect.