That's the problem with byzantine failures - you can't replicate them. My car never went out of control again.
>>Loose floormats have been confirmed to cause it
When my car when out of control (the accelerator floored) my first thought was that a floormat had covered it so I reached down and, nope. I even pulled the accelerator pedal out with my hands. After that I put it in neutral and then turned it off when the engine redlined. This is eliding all of the oh shit oh shit stuff that was going on at the time.
>>But "the car accelerated, I applied the brake and only the brake once the acceleration started and pushed it as hard as I could and the vehicle continued to accelerate out of control" cases have, as far as I know, *never* been replicated.
That's great for you, but is exactly what happened to me. I was pushing on the brakes as hard as I could with both feet, and the car still accelerated out of control.
>>The brakes are somewhere around ten times more powerful than the engine.
That's a great theory you have there. The truth of the matter is, you're wrong.
>>It was the cruise control that got stuck in the "accelerate" position.
I also flicked the cruise control on and off when it was out of control, and it did nothing.
>>Confirmed cases of runaway acceleration are virtually non-existent.
And how do you confirm it? Ask the person?
My '84 Cutlass Supreme went out of control accelerating when I was driving on the campus loop (back in '97 or so), but how could you confirm this? It did happen, but how can you verify it? (I've posted the story on Slashdot before, if you really dig back into my history, long before the runaway Toyota thing entered our national consciousness.)
And to the snarky people posting on this - it's terrifying as fuck for your car to accelerate arbitrarily fast (especially when you run a stop and have to dodge pedestrians), and no, the brakes didn't work. Long story short, I had to kill the gas and use non-power assist brakes to come to a stop, fortunately without killing anyone.
um no. with the old meters you can't jack up someone's power bill without shattering the glass globe which surrounds it. and you can't use a laptop to shut off their power. you have to physically cut the cables which leaves marks.
So it isn't the same situation. breaking a physical lock leaves traces. using a laptop to hack the meter and kill power to each house. doesn't leave a lot of marks that can be traced.
Heh, if you think that police actually investigate crimes like this, you're very optimistic. They won't even come out if someone broke into your car or house and stole all your crap... you think they'd send out a full CSI team to investigate a cut on a cable? They just tell you to call PG&E and get it fixed.
And IIRC, there are ways of tampering with physical meters without breaking the glass.
If I were the power company, I'd be MUCH more worried about people hacking their smart meters to get free or reduced service.
Rich people can afford to extend their lifespans, make themselves beautiful, smarter, and so on. The elite become physically different from birth: physically, mentally, perhaps even morally superior. Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long. Do you think this would be just? Do you think freedom and stability could exist under these circumstances?
If the future is anything like today, then there would be massive subsidies for poor people to get their brain implants and skull cannons.
Just like how poor people today don't pay taxes, and get subsidies on their phone service, computers, gas & electric, smog repair, mass transit, etc., with subsidies going all the way up to "free".
>>In Beijing, you would hear it pronounced "waer" (sounds like "war")
Yeah, my wife mocks me for wanting to wanr in the yuanr. That's what I get from learning Mandarin from people from Beijing.
Hmm, so maybe Mandarin speakers can confuse a trailing L then, since there's no syllables that end in L in pinyin. But I've never heard a Mandarin speaker make the Rice/Lice confusion.
>>This is not true. If you disable your ethernet card so that it looks like you do not even have an IP, Steam will prompt to run in offline mode, even if it was formerly applying an update.
I tried this. It doesn't work.
Offline mode doesn't work (in any form) if Steam knows there's a patch queued.
>>You say that Steam requires and internet connection. But then your example is a rare edge-case involving a half-way downloaded patch.
It's not a halfway downloaded patch. Steam doesn't automatically patch while running - it'll note that there's a patch available, and will patch the next time it loads. So if you've had a computer running for a long time (and new patches come out every couple weeks) odds are you'll have a patch queued. Then when your internet connection goes down and you try to restart steam, you have lost access to all your games.
Like I said, bad design, and not a rare edge case at all. I found lots of people complaining about this, going back years.
The annoying part is that it knows a patch is available, but doesn't download it or do anything with it, it just notes the fact, and then refuses to run if the internet goes down before it gets patched. This is a Really Bad Design for a service that supplies single player games. Not quite as bad as the DRM fiascos people are reporting, but it's been an extant issue with Steam (with people complaining about it) for years.
>>I figured out they were Mandarin speakers, although they had never heard that word, and claimed there was just one kind of Chinese (although they spoke "weird" in Hong Kong)
Lol.
When they make the 'r' sound, they should be pursing their lips, and making a weird 'rrr' sound when doing it. I posted some sound files above of what the r sounds like in Mandarin. It may sound funny, but they shouldn't be confusing the r and l. =)
>>Oh, and thanks to Steam's constant stream of special deals, I don't have to pay 50-70 for each game.
The only trouble with Steam is that it requires... an internet connection.
People will say that Steam can run in offline mode, and that's true... as long as there's no patch pending for Steam.
If there is, then when you run Steam offline, it tells you it is trying to patch, and canceling or trying anything else results in it quitting. There's literally no solution until you get internet access again, which really sucks if you're on a laptop without access, or if rain gets into a conduit and your internet goes down for a week, like it did for me last Thanksgiving. I'd just bought Dragon Age, and being unable to play it for an entire week because of Steam's butt fucking retardnessness really turned me off to the platform.
It's been a "known issue" for, oh, since Steam began.
>>Strange, because the Chinese I've studied with did mix up l and r, or at least had big trouble producing a tapped r in such a way that it could be distinguished from l. Also they had no chance at rolled r's.
Were they native Mandarin or Cantonese speakers?
If you want to tell what dialect a Chinese guy speaks, ask them to say "World". That hits all the hard sounds for them in one word.
Cantonese speakers have more trouble with R/W & L/N confusion, but I've never met a Mandarin speaker that has had much trouble. Ri and Le are identical sounds except for the R/L difference, so it's very important that they pronounce them differently. Likewise, C, Z, J and S are all very very close in sound, so they tend to always get those straight.
There could be individual exceptions, I guess... Barbara Walters certainly can't speak English very well.
Wow, I can't believe you (not you alone) think of this as mocking. Maybe it comes because we have grown up in different places. Man, my Asian friends certainly aren't offended by this one. Probably would be on the receiving end of a Dutchman joke though... at which I can laugh too. Not everything is a racial issue lol.
It doesn't bother me that you're mocking a race, it bothers me that you're mocking the wrong race. =)
It's like... making fun of Dutchmen for eating sauerkraut and invading Poland.
Or, I dunno, maybe you guys like sauerkraut. So, uh... put "ethnic food of your choice" there.
>>The Chinese people don't leally cale about Google. So I do not undelstand why we talk so much about this. Just my 50 ct.
Oh, lord.
It's the Japanese (mainly) that have the R/L confusion. Mandarin has distinct R's and L's. Their r sound is a little funny, hind of like a "rrreh" sound (http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/ri4.aif or http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/rang4.aif). Cantonese speakers commonly confuse L and N, though they can have trouble with R's as well (confusing it with W). However, they usually get exposed to R via Mandarin or British English, so the problem isn't as prevalent.
Please, if you're going to mock a race, at least make sure you get it right. It'd be like making fun of the British for bombing Hiroshima.
They also featured prominently (and very positively) in Super Freakonomics.
All the other issues aside, they make a very good point on geoengineering our climate. As Dr. Evil would say, "Why spend trillions, when you can spend... millions?" on fixing the environment.
>>I've got no beef with socialism in general, but what Chavez is doing isn't socialism.
I think the word you're looking for is communism, and it is.
Communism very naturally results in restrictions on freedom of speech (thought enemies) and other liberties (shutting down power to opposition companies), and a general disregard for natural rights.
Remember, by the communist mindset (and socialists and even liberals reflect this concept to lesser degrees), Pravda (greater truth) is much more important than mere factual truth. You don't let mere facts get in the way of the bigger story. The fact that millions of your people are starving to death is not counterfactual to our great strides forward with collectivized agriculture, comrade. Upton Sinclair thought that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but he wrote Boston anyway. Etc., ad nauseum.
Until you're stuck solving a problem that could be solved using maths you don't know. And then you wish you'd taken more classes back in college.
I think I've used something from every college math class I've taken at least once in my programming life. It depends on your job, of course, but knowing more math is always going to help you out.
The issue isn't the insurance premiums, but the culture of defensive medicine that it creates. There's billions and billions of dollars of unneeded tests run every year, due to 1) defensive medicine CYAs and 2) medicare fraud.
You're assuming this because you're too lazy to do the research for yourself, and I'm too lazy to dig up my references from when I researched it myself, since my experience with people on slashdot is that even when you rub their faces in the fact that they're wrong, they refuse to accept it.
It really does help to have math. There have been times when a software solution became ten times easier because I recognized it from a college math class.
Contrawise, when I work on software that uses math beyond my ability, I have trouble debugging it, and constantly have to rely on the math person I'm working with for help.
>>Get some first hand experience with carpentry and build yourself one. It's not difficult.
The only B I got in middle school was in woodworking. I did win the award for "Best Citizenship in Woodworking", which was kind of like getting kicked in the nuts for the long drive out to the school awards ceremony.
I've been looking for a gaming table for a while now. If their prices were about half what they are now, I'd probably buy one.
There's inevitably some noise that creeps in with a line-level jack on your PC. It's not much, but it drives audiophiles to distraction. Moving it to a USB device helps reduce the noise by an order of magnitude or so. That may be one thing driving the change.
Just charge them 10x as much for the same laptop, and they'll be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You replicate it and see if it happens again
That's the problem with byzantine failures - you can't replicate them. My car never went out of control again.
>>Loose floormats have been confirmed to cause it
When my car when out of control (the accelerator floored) my first thought was that a floormat had covered it so I reached down and, nope. I even pulled the accelerator pedal out with my hands. After that I put it in neutral and then turned it off when the engine redlined. This is eliding all of the oh shit oh shit stuff that was going on at the time.
>>But "the car accelerated, I applied the brake and only the brake once the acceleration started and pushed it as hard as I could and the vehicle continued to accelerate out of control" cases have, as far as I know, *never* been replicated.
That's great for you, but is exactly what happened to me. I was pushing on the brakes as hard as I could with both feet, and the car still accelerated out of control.
>>The brakes are somewhere around ten times more powerful than the engine.
That's a great theory you have there. The truth of the matter is, you're wrong.
>>It was the cruise control that got stuck in the "accelerate" position.
I also flicked the cruise control on and off when it was out of control, and it did nothing.
>>Confirmed cases of runaway acceleration are virtually non-existent.
And how do you confirm it? Ask the person?
My '84 Cutlass Supreme went out of control accelerating when I was driving on the campus loop (back in '97 or so), but how could you confirm this? It did happen, but how can you verify it? (I've posted the story on Slashdot before, if you really dig back into my history, long before the runaway Toyota thing entered our national consciousness.)
And to the snarky people posting on this - it's terrifying as fuck for your car to accelerate arbitrarily fast (especially when you run a stop and have to dodge pedestrians), and no, the brakes didn't work. Long story short, I had to kill the gas and use non-power assist brakes to come to a stop, fortunately without killing anyone.
Heh, if you think that police actually investigate crimes like this, you're very optimistic. They won't even come out if someone broke into your car or house and stole all your crap... you think they'd send out a full CSI team to investigate a cut on a cable? They just tell you to call PG&E and get it fixed.
And IIRC, there are ways of tampering with physical meters without breaking the glass.
If I were the power company, I'd be MUCH more worried about people hacking their smart meters to get free or reduced service.
If the future is anything like today, then there would be massive subsidies for poor people to get their brain implants and skull cannons.
Just like how poor people today don't pay taxes, and get subsidies on their phone service, computers, gas & electric, smog repair, mass transit, etc., with subsidies going all the way up to "free".
>>Now it will smell like rubbish and perfume! Two great scents that go great together!
It'll mix nicely from the open-vent sewers they have in Beijing.
Seriously.
I thought I was going to puke when my taxi, windows open, got parked on top of one of those things in traffic for a few minutes.
>>In Beijing, you would hear it pronounced "waer" (sounds like "war")
Yeah, my wife mocks me for wanting to wanr in the yuanr. That's what I get from learning Mandarin from people from Beijing.
Hmm, so maybe Mandarin speakers can confuse a trailing L then, since there's no syllables that end in L in pinyin. But I've never heard a Mandarin speaker make the Rice/Lice confusion.
>>This is not true. If you disable your ethernet card so that it looks like you do not even have an IP, Steam will prompt to run in offline mode, even if it was formerly applying an update.
I tried this. It doesn't work.
Offline mode doesn't work (in any form) if Steam knows there's a patch queued.
>>You say that Steam requires and internet connection. But then your example is a rare edge-case involving a half-way downloaded patch.
It's not a halfway downloaded patch. Steam doesn't automatically patch while running - it'll note that there's a patch available, and will patch the next time it loads. So if you've had a computer running for a long time (and new patches come out every couple weeks) odds are you'll have a patch queued. Then when your internet connection goes down and you try to restart steam, you have lost access to all your games.
Like I said, bad design, and not a rare edge case at all. I found lots of people complaining about this, going back years.
The annoying part is that it knows a patch is available, but doesn't download it or do anything with it, it just notes the fact, and then refuses to run if the internet goes down before it gets patched. This is a Really Bad Design for a service that supplies single player games. Not quite as bad as the DRM fiascos people are reporting, but it's been an extant issue with Steam (with people complaining about it) for years.
>>I figured out they were Mandarin speakers, although they had never heard that word, and claimed there was just one kind of Chinese (although they spoke "weird" in Hong Kong)
Lol.
When they make the 'r' sound, they should be pursing their lips, and making a weird 'rrr' sound when doing it. I posted some sound files above of what the r sounds like in Mandarin. It may sound funny, but they shouldn't be confusing the r and l. =)
>>Oh, and thanks to Steam's constant stream of special deals, I don't have to pay 50-70 for each game.
The only trouble with Steam is that it requires... an internet connection.
People will say that Steam can run in offline mode, and that's true... as long as there's no patch pending for Steam.
If there is, then when you run Steam offline, it tells you it is trying to patch, and canceling or trying anything else results in it quitting. There's literally no solution until you get internet access again, which really sucks if you're on a laptop without access, or if rain gets into a conduit and your internet goes down for a week, like it did for me last Thanksgiving. I'd just bought Dragon Age, and being unable to play it for an entire week because of Steam's butt fucking retardnessness really turned me off to the platform.
It's been a "known issue" for, oh, since Steam began.
>>Strange, because the Chinese I've studied with did mix up l and r, or at least had big trouble producing a tapped r in such a way that it could be distinguished from l. Also they had no chance at rolled r's.
Were they native Mandarin or Cantonese speakers?
If you want to tell what dialect a Chinese guy speaks, ask them to say "World". That hits all the hard sounds for them in one word.
Cantonese speakers have more trouble with R/W & L/N confusion, but I've never met a Mandarin speaker that has had much trouble. Ri and Le are identical sounds except for the R/L difference, so it's very important that they pronounce them differently. Likewise, C, Z, J and S are all very very close in sound, so they tend to always get those straight.
There could be individual exceptions, I guess... Barbara Walters certainly can't speak English very well.
It doesn't bother me that you're mocking a race, it bothers me that you're mocking the wrong race. =)
It's like... making fun of Dutchmen for eating sauerkraut and invading Poland.
Or, I dunno, maybe you guys like sauerkraut. So, uh... put "ethnic food of your choice" there.
>>The Chinese people don't leally cale about Google. So I do not undelstand why we talk so much about this. Just my 50 ct.
Oh, lord.
It's the Japanese (mainly) that have the R/L confusion. Mandarin has distinct R's and L's. Their r sound is a little funny, hind of like a "rrreh" sound (http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/ri4.aif or http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/rang4.aif). Cantonese speakers commonly confuse L and N, though they can have trouble with R's as well (confusing it with W). However, they usually get exposed to R via Mandarin or British English, so the problem isn't as prevalent.
Please, if you're going to mock a race, at least make sure you get it right. It'd be like making fun of the British for bombing Hiroshima.
Not mocking his English, but the content.
His English is excellent, certainly better than the foreign languages I speak, cultural illiterate that I am.
Well played, sir!
You have acted the part of a lunatic Chavez supporter with convincing emphasis and vigor!
I tip my top hat to you.
They also featured prominently (and very positively) in Super Freakonomics.
All the other issues aside, they make a very good point on geoengineering our climate. As Dr. Evil would say, "Why spend trillions, when you can spend... millions?" on fixing the environment.
>>I've got no beef with socialism in general, but what Chavez is doing isn't socialism.
I think the word you're looking for is communism, and it is.
Communism very naturally results in restrictions on freedom of speech (thought enemies) and other liberties (shutting down power to opposition companies), and a general disregard for natural rights.
Remember, by the communist mindset (and socialists and even liberals reflect this concept to lesser degrees), Pravda (greater truth) is much more important than mere factual truth. You don't let mere facts get in the way of the bigger story. The fact that millions of your people are starving to death is not counterfactual to our great strides forward with collectivized agriculture, comrade. Upton Sinclair thought that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but he wrote Boston anyway. Etc., ad nauseum.
Power is more important than liberty or truth.
>>No thanks... I would pass.
Until you're stuck solving a problem that could be solved using maths you don't know. And then you wish you'd taken more classes back in college.
I think I've used something from every college math class I've taken at least once in my programming life. It depends on your job, of course, but knowing more math is always going to help you out.
The issue isn't the insurance premiums, but the culture of defensive medicine that it creates. There's billions and billions of dollars of unneeded tests run every year, due to 1) defensive medicine CYAs and 2) medicare fraud.
>>I will assume that is because it doesn't exist.
You're assuming this because you're too lazy to do the research for yourself, and I'm too lazy to dig up my references from when I researched it myself, since my experience with people on slashdot is that even when you rub their faces in the fact that they're wrong, they refuse to accept it.
It really does help to have math. There have been times when a software solution became ten times easier because I recognized it from a college math class.
Contrawise, when I work on software that uses math beyond my ability, I have trouble debugging it, and constantly have to rely on the math person I'm working with for help.
>>Get some first hand experience with carpentry and build yourself one. It's not difficult.
The only B I got in middle school was in woodworking. I did win the award for "Best Citizenship in Woodworking", which was kind of like getting kicked in the nuts for the long drive out to the school awards ceremony.
I've been looking for a gaming table for a while now. If their prices were about half what they are now, I'd probably buy one.
And that's why the Spartans outlawed slavery and got the right to yell FREEDOM! at Xerxes at Thermopoylae.
Or wait.
No.
They'd gun down slaves for fun, and as a right of passage.
Just charge them 10x as much for the same laptop, and they'll be fine.