No automatic transmission car I've ever driven has given me any resistance when trying to drop the car into neutral, at any speed and rpm, with the engine on or off. You don't even have to push the release button to do it. It's a traditional design feature. And I see no reason why a new Toyota would be any different.
But then again, most people have no idea what neutral or the low gears are for.
The only car where I've nudged the cruise control upa few times and it has just taken off has been a 2009 Audi A6, and it wasn't a bug. The cruise was designed to bump up (or down) your speed by 10 km/h if you held the "speed up" button long enough. Or "speed down". I didn't really care for that feature, and would have preferred the car just accelerate 1 km/hr at a time, not jumping up to 10 km/hr after it has sped up (or down) by 1, 2, then 3 km/hr. But maybe some people like that feature.
Ok, those replies make sense. I do remember carrying around all those books in university and it was a pain. Literally. I hadn't thought of that. But in terms of grade-school kids, is it really necessary?
I don't even see the value of having a Kindle in the classroom to begin with. It's like "cable in the classroom" - totally worthless. TV has been shown to have very little educational value, that's why you hardly ever got to watch videos in class as a kid.
In grade 8 I was in a special class that was half full of kids with these lame Brother laptops (PN-4400 or something). I'm no smarter now than I would have been without it that year. And no more computer-literate either. It's just another technological toy to get in the way.
I wonder if we'll get this in Canada. Probably not. Xbox Live doesn't get Netflix in Canada, but I was hoping this would be a change. Not holding my breath though.
One time, um, I read this trilogy of books by Timothy Zahn called Conqueror's Pride, and the aliens in it were susceptible to radio waves. So they thought the humans were attacking them, but really we were just communicating with radio waves, but it was hurting them so a war started. It was mostly a good trilogy. Mostly.
I feel like I have eaten from the tree of knowledge. My eyes are opened. Please mod parent up. I'm serious here. This isn't flamebait and I'm not trolling and I'm not trying to be funny here. But the above comment represents a very well-written argument and if I had some mod points he'd certainly get one.
Wow this is a really good point. I have to admit this complex setup stuff is way over my head, but someone should mod parent up, because he raises an important point.
Good one, you got it right. We do get hosed here, and to add another reason as to why that's the case, I'd submit that in general our government basically follows what the U.S. does, in terms of most things like technology. Things like bilingualism are confounding factors.
I don't know though, I'm really looking forward to watching the exploits of Relic and them on my phone. Except it won't even be complete shows, it'll be clips. Yay.
But then anyone approaching an intersectio shold be slowing down, and to get hit from behind by a slow-moving car is preferrable to getting smoked from the side by someone going through an intersection. And in poor visibility conditions, the guy behind should be going slower anyway and be prepared to stop. So even your argument can be countered by the principles of defensive driving.
Yeah, it didn't say he tried dropping it into neutral. I'm not totally familiar with the Australian version of an '02 Explorer, but I doubt (based on the model year) that it had drive-by-wire. I also very much doubt that it did not have a direct mechanical connection between the shifter linkage and the transmission. Therefore, if that was the case, dropping into neutral would have saved him earlier.
BTW, he probably lost power assist to the brakes because if hte throttle was jammed open, there's no vaccuum available to the vaccuum-power-brake booster. Note that he did finally get it stopped by pressing very hard on the brake, so that means the brakes still worked - just no power assist.
In May and June this year, I went to Germany and Holland with my father. We rented an Audi with a GPS built in. It was a gift from the gods of navigation. Without it we would have been totally inept, and neither of us had used one before. I generally ran the nav system while he drove (because I picked up the fine points of the system quicker than he did).
One day, in Germany on the Autobahn (can't remember exactly where right now but I do have notes on it) there was a huge traffic jam. I had no idea that traffic there gets like that. But everything was backed up. People shut off their cars and got out to chat. Nobody was moving, in either direction. Remember this is the Autobahn.
Anyway, two notable things happened. We decided to follow a small group of cars that were driving on the shoulder and trying to find a way out. This was probably illegal, but whatever. After getting off the main highway, we wound up alone somewhere. Check the GPS, we found exactly where we were (with the traffic lady letting us know that noone was moving) and it was one a dirt road. I zoomed in on the map, found the next nearest hamlet and we navigated there. Then I did that again and again, and we drove through about a dozen tiny villages. It was amazing. We saw old buildings that no tourist ever sees, and some had scars in them, maybe from WW2. Got to see a lot of neat things.
Later, back on the main highway, we were stopped at a light or something and the kid in the car behind us jumped out, came to my window and asked for directions to some town he was trying to reach. I used the gps and gave him what he needed. That was cool too.
GPS is not distracting. I found it very helpful. Witout it we never would have seen those off-the-beaten path villages.
I borrowed the game from a friend and played it a fair amount. But it scared the shit out of me. I just couldn't finish it. I'm serious, it was too much. This was on my PS3. Which has since died the blu-ray laser death. Anyway, maybe I'll get around to finishing it someday if I fix my PS3. And I didn't mind the controls or the view or camera angles at all. But then I'm used to Grand Theft Auto and the 3rd person view to begin with. I think a sequel could be good, as long as there are some real evolutionary improvements and not just a rehash of the original. Scared the shit out of me, man.
French schools teach students to use spaces to separate thousands, eg. 11 500 Euro, 115 000 Euro, 1 150 000 Euros.
Yes and so do Canadian schools. I had a math teacher in grade 8 who taught us that if you put commas in your numbers to separate thousands it will confuse computers and people from other locales who are interpreting your documents. Since then I've always used spaces. The "metric" way is to use spaces. Unfortunately, most people don't care about this little detail and it can be confusing for people from other countries when they try to interpret documents with numbers written incorrectly.
The problem is still with the lack of a worldwide standard. This business of using commas to denote decimals is seriously misguided, IMHO, but maybe that's just a bit of North-Americo-centricity I'm expressing. I think one group needs to change to adopt the other's convention. And I think it should be the Europeans who change, because using points to denote decimals fits better with the use of points in written language. This is hard to explain, but you know what I'm getting at.
In all fairness, the first sentence was meaningful, and I suppose he deserves a bit of credit for being the first one to say what was one everyone's minds after reading the summary. But then the rest was fluff.
We used to have a good utility system in Alberta, until the conservative government of the past decade or so started to privatize the utilities. Now, the quality of service has generally gone down, while prices have gone up. The idea was that by introducing competition, that the oposite of what I just described would occur.
Oh, there's competition now alright - yesterday my 84-year-old next door neighbour told me about a phone call she got from some unknown gas company trying to convince her to bundle gas and electricity into some contract-based plan. She asked them to send an information package, and what they did was sign her up, and send her the info. Fortunately a bright relative of hers sent a letter to the company and straightened it out, removing her from their list. Things like this happen all the time now. I even heard that when the AB government was considering de-regulation of electricity, the state government of California warned them not to do it, citing the awful experience they had with the same experiment in the late '90's. But then, this is Alberta and we don't listen to reason.
That's basically what was done at my company. Originally the network was set up by my boss who used all pirated software. This isa small engineering company. But it's owned by a larger corpaorate parent, and this office is inside the main headquarters. Anyway, i ddin't even realize as an average user that everythjing was bogus until they hired a real IT guy who started diggin all this up. He took about 6 months but I think it's all legit now. Incidentally I'm not happy with openoffice, though I have nothing against it personally, and do miss having acrobat pro and the cad software this thing had before.
I was mad about all this and told my boss that he should have just paid for the stuipid MS licenses when setting up the computers, when business was booming. But now we're stuck with the current situation. I believe this goes on all the time, and especially in small engineering companies.
On the other hand, if the LHC is really a universe suicide machine then there must be an uncountable number of universes which died, due to the baguette hitting the wrong exterior portion of the LHC, etc.
Yeah. This would also mean our civilization is the most advanced out of any and all other intelligent civilizations out there. Or maybe that we are the only ones that haven't realized the LHC will destroy our universe (small "u"). If that's the case, then presuming that experiments which are only executable by using an LHC are required for Star-Trek-style interstellar travel and communication, there's no way for another (more advanced) civilization to tell us what's going on. Wierd.
I find the whole concept that we can destroy the Universe fundamentally ridiculous.
Even more if it still has the sticker on the bottom saying it's property of the phone company. And more on top of that if you're still paying the phone rental fee.
I do it all the time, since it's a great way to get two birds stoned at once. A real time-saver. I sit and wait til conversation is over before flushing, sometimes. Depends on who it is - if it's just a guy friend talking about stupid stuff, flush. Otherwise, no.
We didn't get a touch-tone phone in the house til I was in about grade 10. That was maybe 13 years ago. In junior high school I had this flyer-delivery route and you were supposed to confirm that you did all the deliveries at the end of every day by going through this touch-tone menu they had set up. Well we had a pulse-dialing push-button phone, so that's what I used. I don't think it ever worked with their system. But nobody ever complained. Another wierd thing was how we often didn't get most of the flyers delivered somehow, and they ended up getting burned in the firepit in the backyard. Wierd how that happened. I think they kept sending me too many. The other funny thing was nobody ever complained about that either. I wonder why.
Anyway, yeah I'd go for a cordless phone computer syncing thing. Then I could get a flyer route again to pay for it.
In Alberta you get serious demerit points for not signalling during lane changes. I always signal when changing lanes, but sometimes I don't bother when making a routine turn when there's nobody behind me. I too have noticed your phenomenon of people inhibiting your intentions when you signal, by speeding up or whatever. Yes it's annoying, seriously. Also, I have noticed I sometimes drive a little too close behind the guy in front of me, and I think it's because some wanker will pull in front of me, no matter how little room I"m leaving in there... And why do semi's around here travel in the middle lane always?
Slashdot Mirror
Citation please.
No automatic transmission car I've ever driven has given me any resistance when trying to drop the car into neutral, at any speed and rpm, with the engine on or off. You don't even have to push the release button to do it. It's a traditional design feature. And I see no reason why a new Toyota would be any different.
But then again, most people have no idea what neutral or the low gears are for.
The only car where I've nudged the cruise control upa few times and it has just taken off has been a 2009 Audi A6, and it wasn't a bug. The cruise was designed to bump up (or down) your speed by 10 km/h if you held the "speed up" button long enough. Or "speed down". I didn't really care for that feature, and would have preferred the car just accelerate 1 km/hr at a time, not jumping up to 10 km/hr after it has sped up (or down) by 1, 2, then 3 km/hr. But maybe some people like that feature.
This is not Flamebait.
Ya plus they thought the humans were attacking with radio waves from their individual escape pods after the first ship was blown up.
Ok, those replies make sense. I do remember carrying around all those books in university and it was a pain. Literally. I hadn't thought of that. But in terms of grade-school kids, is it really necessary?
I don't even see the value of having a Kindle in the classroom to begin with. It's like "cable in the classroom" - totally worthless. TV has been shown to have very little educational value, that's why you hardly ever got to watch videos in class as a kid.
In grade 8 I was in a special class that was half full of kids with these lame Brother laptops (PN-4400 or something). I'm no smarter now than I would have been without it that year. And no more computer-literate either. It's just another technological toy to get in the way.
I wonder if we'll get this in Canada. Probably not. Xbox Live doesn't get Netflix in Canada, but I was hoping this would be a change. Not holding my breath though.
You have thirty minutes to move your cube.
One time, um, I read this trilogy of books by Timothy Zahn called Conqueror's Pride, and the aliens in it were susceptible to radio waves. So they thought the humans were attacking them, but really we were just communicating with radio waves, but it was hurting them so a war started. It was mostly a good trilogy. Mostly.
I feel like I have eaten from the tree of knowledge. My eyes are opened. Please mod parent up. I'm serious here. This isn't flamebait and I'm not trolling and I'm not trying to be funny here. But the above comment represents a very well-written argument and if I had some mod points he'd certainly get one.
Wow this is a really good point. I have to admit this complex setup stuff is way over my head, but someone should mod parent up, because he raises an important point.
Good one, you got it right. We do get hosed here, and to add another reason as to why that's the case, I'd submit that in general our government basically follows what the U.S. does, in terms of most things like technology. Things like bilingualism are confounding factors.
I don't know though, I'm really looking forward to watching the exploits of Relic and them on my phone. Except it won't even be complete shows, it'll be clips. Yay.
But then anyone approaching an intersectio shold be slowing down, and to get hit from behind by a slow-moving car is preferrable to getting smoked from the side by someone going through an intersection. And in poor visibility conditions, the guy behind should be going slower anyway and be prepared to stop. So even your argument can be countered by the principles of defensive driving.
Yeah, it didn't say he tried dropping it into neutral. I'm not totally familiar with the Australian version of an '02 Explorer, but I doubt (based on the model year) that it had drive-by-wire. I also very much doubt that it did not have a direct mechanical connection between the shifter linkage and the transmission. Therefore, if that was the case, dropping into neutral would have saved him earlier.
BTW, he probably lost power assist to the brakes because if hte throttle was jammed open, there's no vaccuum available to the vaccuum-power-brake booster. Note that he did finally get it stopped by pressing very hard on the brake, so that means the brakes still worked - just no power assist.
In May and June this year, I went to Germany and Holland with my father. We rented an Audi with a GPS built in. It was a gift from the gods of navigation. Without it we would have been totally inept, and neither of us had used one before. I generally ran the nav system while he drove (because I picked up the fine points of the system quicker than he did).
One day, in Germany on the Autobahn (can't remember exactly where right now but I do have notes on it) there was a huge traffic jam. I had no idea that traffic there gets like that. But everything was backed up. People shut off their cars and got out to chat. Nobody was moving, in either direction. Remember this is the Autobahn.
Anyway, two notable things happened. We decided to follow a small group of cars that were driving on the shoulder and trying to find a way out. This was probably illegal, but whatever. After getting off the main highway, we wound up alone somewhere. Check the GPS, we found exactly where we were (with the traffic lady letting us know that noone was moving) and it was one a dirt road. I zoomed in on the map, found the next nearest hamlet and we navigated there. Then I did that again and again, and we drove through about a dozen tiny villages. It was amazing. We saw old buildings that no tourist ever sees, and some had scars in them, maybe from WW2. Got to see a lot of neat things.
Later, back on the main highway, we were stopped at a light or something and the kid in the car behind us jumped out, came to my window and asked for directions to some town he was trying to reach. I used the gps and gave him what he needed. That was cool too.
GPS is not distracting. I found it very helpful. Witout it we never would have seen those off-the-beaten path villages.
I borrowed the game from a friend and played it a fair amount. But it scared the shit out of me. I just couldn't finish it. I'm serious, it was too much. This was on my PS3. Which has since died the blu-ray laser death. Anyway, maybe I'll get around to finishing it someday if I fix my PS3. And I didn't mind the controls or the view or camera angles at all. But then I'm used to Grand Theft Auto and the 3rd person view to begin with. I think a sequel could be good, as long as there are some real evolutionary improvements and not just a rehash of the original. Scared the shit out of me, man.
French schools teach students to use spaces to separate thousands, eg. 11 500 Euro, 115 000 Euro, 1 150 000 Euros.
Yes and so do Canadian schools. I had a math teacher in grade 8 who taught us that if you put commas in your numbers to separate thousands it will confuse computers and people from other locales who are interpreting your documents. Since then I've always used spaces. The "metric" way is to use spaces. Unfortunately, most people don't care about this little detail and it can be confusing for people from other countries when they try to interpret documents with numbers written incorrectly.
The problem is still with the lack of a worldwide standard. This business of using commas to denote decimals is seriously misguided, IMHO, but maybe that's just a bit of North-Americo-centricity I'm expressing. I think one group needs to change to adopt the other's convention. And I think it should be the Europeans who change, because using points to denote decimals fits better with the use of points in written language. This is hard to explain, but you know what I'm getting at.
In all fairness, the first sentence was meaningful, and I suppose he deserves a bit of credit for being the first one to say what was one everyone's minds after reading the summary. But then the rest was fluff.
We used to have a good utility system in Alberta, until the conservative government of the past decade or so started to privatize the utilities. Now, the quality of service has generally gone down, while prices have gone up. The idea was that by introducing competition, that the oposite of what I just described would occur.
Oh, there's competition now alright - yesterday my 84-year-old next door neighbour told me about a phone call she got from some unknown gas company trying to convince her to bundle gas and electricity into some contract-based plan. She asked them to send an information package, and what they did was sign her up, and send her the info. Fortunately a bright relative of hers sent a letter to the company and straightened it out, removing her from their list. Things like this happen all the time now. I even heard that when the AB government was considering de-regulation of electricity, the state government of California warned them not to do it, citing the awful experience they had with the same experiment in the late '90's. But then, this is Alberta and we don't listen to reason.
That's basically what was done at my company. Originally the network was set up by my boss who used all pirated software. This isa small engineering company. But it's owned by a larger corpaorate parent, and this office is inside the main headquarters. Anyway, i ddin't even realize as an average user that everythjing was bogus until they hired a real IT guy who started diggin all this up. He took about 6 months but I think it's all legit now. Incidentally I'm not happy with openoffice, though I have nothing against it personally, and do miss having acrobat pro and the cad software this thing had before.
I was mad about all this and told my boss that he should have just paid for the stuipid MS licenses when setting up the computers, when business was booming. But now we're stuck with the current situation. I believe this goes on all the time, and especially in small engineering companies.
Multi-reply:
On the other hand, if the LHC is really a universe suicide machine then there must be an uncountable number of universes which died, due to the baguette hitting the wrong exterior portion of the LHC, etc.
Yeah. This would also mean our civilization is the most advanced out of any and all other intelligent civilizations out there. Or maybe that we are the only ones that haven't realized the LHC will destroy our universe (small "u"). If that's the case, then presuming that experiments which are only executable by using an LHC are required for Star-Trek-style interstellar travel and communication, there's no way for another (more advanced) civilization to tell us what's going on. Wierd.
I find the whole concept that we can destroy the Universe fundamentally ridiculous.
Agreed.
Even more if it still has the sticker on the bottom saying it's property of the phone company. And more on top of that if you're still paying the phone rental fee.
I do it all the time, since it's a great way to get two birds stoned at once. A real time-saver. I sit and wait til conversation is over before flushing, sometimes. Depends on who it is - if it's just a guy friend talking about stupid stuff, flush. Otherwise, no.
BTW, mod parent up - that's hilariously clever.
We didn't get a touch-tone phone in the house til I was in about grade 10. That was maybe 13 years ago. In junior high school I had this flyer-delivery route and you were supposed to confirm that you did all the deliveries at the end of every day by going through this touch-tone menu they had set up. Well we had a pulse-dialing push-button phone, so that's what I used. I don't think it ever worked with their system. But nobody ever complained. Another wierd thing was how we often didn't get most of the flyers delivered somehow, and they ended up getting burned in the firepit in the backyard. Wierd how that happened. I think they kept sending me too many. The other funny thing was nobody ever complained about that either. I wonder why.
Anyway, yeah I'd go for a cordless phone computer syncing thing. Then I could get a flyer route again to pay for it.
In Alberta you get serious demerit points for not signalling during lane changes. I always signal when changing lanes, but sometimes I don't bother when making a routine turn when there's nobody behind me. I too have noticed your phenomenon of people inhibiting your intentions when you signal, by speeding up or whatever. Yes it's annoying, seriously. Also, I have noticed I sometimes drive a little too close behind the guy in front of me, and I think it's because some wanker will pull in front of me, no matter how little room I"m leaving in there... And why do semi's around here travel in the middle lane always?
End Gripe