How do you know E=MC^2? Did you figure it out yourself, or did someone in authority tell you it was true?
I did calculate it myself when I was a sophomore in college. The mathematics of it actually aren't all that hard.
How do we know Abraham Lincoln was a president of the US? Did you see him become president? Or did you rely on the authority of some written documents to tell you that he was?
As evidence we have written history, photographic evidence, copious reliable documentation, archaeological evidence, birth records, and much more - most of which is available for you to peruse yourself. There is even DNA evidence from known descendants. Furthermore there is not a single claim to a supernatural act in any of the above and I can tell you exactly what evidence would be needed to disprove the claim that he was President.
How do we know Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome? Where you there or are you relying on documents the earliest of which come from around 1000AD?
See the above, minus the photographs and with fewer surviving records and other bits of evidence. Again, no supernatural claims exist with regard to the existence and historical record of Julius Caesar and I can tell you exactly what it would take to convince me that he was not actually the emperor of Rome.
How do you know that person A murdered person B even though you haven't found the murder weapon? Is it because you performed some scientific test to determine it or is it because the bag lady across the street and said she saw him enter the apartment just before it happened and the neighbor said he saw him leave with a bloody knife?
It depends on the nature of the evidence. If the "bag lady" also claims to have seen a ghost rising to heaven or some other supernatural act, her credibility is rightly going to be suspect. Witnesses alone are rarely enough to convict someone of a capital crime.
Religion has all the evidence that everything else we rely on has.
WRONG. Religion makes no falsifiable claims. There is no way I can disprove the assertion that Jesus Christ was the son of "God". I can accept the assertion or not but I can not disprove it. Science and history actually do make falsifiable claims. I can find evidence to disprove a theory or a historical narrative. It might not be easy to do so but it is possible and I can tell you exactly what evidence I would need to disprove a scientific or historical theory. The worst abuses of religon come when historical fact is conflated with religious dogma. Much of the evidence from 2000 years ago is of course lost so it makes it easier for the charlatans who sell religion to dupe the unscrupulous and naive.
The short answer is that the society we live in is very complicated. The basic principles are pretty simple but hammering out the details requires a lot of lawmaking. These laws cover the corner cases of how we are to interact with each other. Turns out the best (and probably only) way to do that anyone has come up with is to have a lot of laws. This is better than the alternative which is basically monarchy. Better to have the rules spelled out (even if complicated) than to depend on the capricious whims of rules. (yes, yes, I know it's hard to tell the difference sometimes...)
Bear in mind too that those laws are just the regulations, codes, ordinances etc passed by legislative bodies. There is another set of relevant law found in case law.
How the hell is anyone supposed to avoid being a criminal when there are books and books of laws one has to obey?
You aren't. A government that cannot accuse you of breaking any laws cannot control you.
Dude, just slap together some random figures like the number of occupied inodes in your hard disk -- they are executives after all, what do you expect them to understand about technical stuff?
You do realize that the single most common undergraduate degree among S&P 500 CEOs is Engineering right? Over 20% of them have an undergrad degree in engineering. And of course not having a formal degree in the subject must mean they are an technologically illiterate. After all, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates never even graduated college so how could they possibly know anything about "technical stuff". Good thing we have smart guys like you to explain it to them.
Your arrogance really sounds like ignorance to me.
The problem is, especially with suits, is that what they want probably isn't in the same galaxy, let alone ballpark, as what they need or what they can use.
Right. They're all a bunch of idiots and got where they are by sheer incompetence. Almost makes sense... I'm sure you understand their job better than they do - after all, engineers like you and me know everything right?
The upshot is once you get that report all nice and automated they'll ask you for the exact same report three months later having entirely forgotten its existence. Don't tell them they've been getting that report daily/weekly already for the last three months. They don't like that for some reason.
Gee, wonder why they might not like a condescending answer...
Perhaps the reason they don't like your answer is found more in how you tell them than what you tell them.
I've noticed the "warm wire" problem on lots of high wattage appliances.
It's real but if the wire is of sufficient gauge you'll be less likely to notice it. Basically any time you send current down a copper wire there are some losses to resistive heating. This is why you don't want to buy cheap little flimsy extension cords for high power applications. With a small wire there is less area to dissipate the heat and with sufficient current the wire can even melt. When we design it that way it is called a fuse. When we don't it is called a lawsuit.:-)
However, the added safety of only using 110 VAC rather than 220 is probably worth a little wasted energy in wire heating.
It's not the volts that will kill you, it's the amps. Amperage is the actual electron flow - somewhat like the actual water flowing in a pipe. Voltage is a measure of the tendency of the electrons to flow - vaguely analogous to water pressure. A stun gun has 20000 volts but very little amperage and so it doesn't fry you. Power = Volts * Amps so if the power coming down the line is equal the 220 line is actually a little bit safer. (both can easily kill you though so it's really a mute point)
What do you consider "older?" 5 years old? 10 years old?
I mean older when I say older. Cars in general get better, safer and more reliable each year. The progression in just one year is small but it is steady and measurable. The difference between a car from 2009 and one from 1999 is more noticeable, and even more so the farther back you go.
Is a 10 year old car with 50,000 miles on it more unsafe than a 2 year old car with 150,000?
Depends on the car and the safety features without a specific car to point to odds are the newer car is safer. In general newer cars have newer and better safety features. Not to mention more years of engineering and design baked into them. Overall they also are measurably more reliable than a car from even 10 years ago. There are exceptions to be sure but I'm talking generalities here.
What about a 15 year old car that's been properly maintained and serviced? Is that more unsafe than a brand new car?
Quite possibly yes. 15 year old cars typically don't have side airbags, traction control, might not have ABS, and have materials and engineering that is 15 years older. State of the art has progressed in the last 15 years. Without getting into specific models, cars in general are safer, more reliable, and have better technology than older cars.
What is so "unsafe" about older cars anyway?
Depends on how far back you want to go. My dad had a 1971 Opel GT that had only a waist belt for a seatbelt. The 1993 Ford Taurus I drove for a while didn't have side airbags or traction control. My 2009 Honda has 4WD, side airbags, traction control, GPS, fog lights, a backup camera and lots of other features besides that you won't find in most vehicles more than a few years old.
I also notice that no appliance I own in the USA uses insulation on the live pins of the plug to prevent accidental shocks when the plug is slightly out of the socket,
Which it turns out is not actually a problem in real life. In 36 years in this country neither I nor anyone I know of has ever been shocked in that manner. Yes it's conceivable and I'm sure someone has done it somewhere but it really just isn't a problem. We've got a pretty detailed electrical code and I'm quite sure if it was a serious problem it would have been addressed.
none of the sockets contain safety shutters
They are available if you want them. My car (a Honda Ridgeline) has a 110V outlet with safety shutters actually. You can get them from any Home Depot or Lowes hardware store for use in your home. You also can get plugs to prevent access to the sockets when not in use. Again though, not really a serious problem.
and that 110V cords to high wattage appliances such as vacuum cleaners get warm
I suggest you buy better quality equipment then. If you buy a wire that is too small for the application this might happen. Any wire that is too thin for the power demands on it will overheat. This is how fuses work. Doesn't happen on my vacuum cleaner though - at least not that I can tell without a very accurate thermometer.
and the lights change brightness when I switch such appliances on and off.
Unless you are overloading the circuit, that almost certainly has nothing to do with the appliance. That means the power you have going to the outlet is either insufficient or of poor quality. For instance I had a loose neutral wire on my house last year which made everything flicker because the voltages were bouncing between 98V and 135V. Once the power company secured the neutral connection it's been rock steady ever since.
IMO the British home electrical system is much better than the USA system and I have tried to view it impartially over the year
That's right it wasn't. It was people blaming the equipment for their own failures.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective.
Umm, please show your calculations. You already admitted that the Audi 5000S was not defective so this should be interesting.
Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even if true (and you've provided no evidence that it is true) that has precisely nothing to do with a car sold in the United States where US consumer safety standards apply. Never mind that the Toytoa Camry is produced right here in the US (also in Japan, Russia, China and Australia).
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire.
Drive by wire does not make it a more dangerous design. It has DIFFERENT failure modes but different is not the same as dangerous. Fly by wire has become state of the art in airplanes where they have much stricter reliability standards so the technology clearly CAN be safe. While it is certainly possible Toyota has a defective system, I want to see some actual evidence of a fault beyond a few anecdotes of customers.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products
You do that every day whether you are aware of it or not. There is a reason we have product safety and liability laws. You trust your life to mass merchandise products every single day of your life.
If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire.
Good luck with that. Lots of cars are already drive by wire and within a few years nearly all will be. Enjoy driving unsafe older cars.
Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive.
Actually it doesn't have to be expensive at all. A pipe wrench is a great example highly fault tolerant engineering but it isn't expensive. Fault tolerance CAN be expensive but it doesn't have to be. With an appropriate design it can even be cheaper.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch.
It also matches the distribution of a handful of people standing on their accelerator pedal and being too embarrassed to admit they weren't using the brake. Remember the Audi? It's entirely reasonable to believe this is people trying to get money via our legal system instead of an actual engineering fault.
The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
The Ford Fusion DOES use drive by wire. Every hybrid car is drive by wire and soon enough so will (nearly) every non hybrid. Drive by Wire has FAR too many advantages in both cost and features to not be used.
Regarding quality, JD Power thinks you are full of crap and I tend to believe them more than you. 2010 Ford Fusion vs 2010 Toyota Camry
The hope has always been that if your air stuff is awesome enough, you don't need guys on the ground.
And it's been proven time and again that sooner or later there is no substitute for boots in contact with pavement. Never mind the fact that without ground support the drones are going to have a tough time figuring out what to shoot at. Little bit tough to identify Osama from 10,000 feet.
Considering the cost of the Panasonic ToughBooks, I would take a Dell XFR + CompleteCare any day!
You are missing the point. If you happen to work in any sort of extreme environment (very hot, very cold, very dusty, etc) your Dell is going to die pretty quickly if it even works at all. Furthermore there are jobs where equipment failure has serious consequences. The point is that it doesn't die in the first place, not that you can replace it. Take a standard laptop on a polar expedition or into the middle of a desert and getting your laptop serviced isn't exactly going to be an option you can exercise. And thanks to our good friend Murphy odds are it will break at the least convenient time possible.
Ruggedized laptops aren't for office workers. They are for people who work very far from climate controlled offices.
Did they compare the Dells to regular Thinkpads? They're not officially ruggedized, but they can take an awful lot of punishment
Depends on your definition of "awful lot". My brother-in-law's previous company has used thinkpads as their primary laptops for years and the consultants there managed to kill plenty of them. A shocking number actually. I agree that Thinkpads have historically been well constructed - I've had several myself. But they aren't *that* tough. Certainly not much tougher than most other non-ruggedized machines.
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
Not so much run over by a car but and decent sized IT dept will probably tell you that people abuse the hell out of laptops. Most of them quickly accumulate a veritable junkyard of spare parts from laptops that have been killed through various acts of neglect, malfeasance and random accidents. I've personally seen laptops get destroyed in countless ways. It's a fairly safe bet that a field service technician or traveling consultant is probably going to beat his laptop up pretty quickly. I've had a few clients myself where I wished I had something a little more rugged. We had one guy who killed 3 laptops in the space of a month through various acts of stupidity.
I don't know that I'd get a toughened notebook for someone irresponsible. Sometimes firing the guilty party is sometimes cheaper. But I've seen plenty of cases where a toughened laptop is a good idea.
AutoCAD has barely acceptable performance when running on *great* hardware...
Yep, and that's not even getting into what I would regard as the "serious" CAD packages like Catia or ProE. Ironically one of the biggest PTCs ProEngineer DROPPED linux support because there were apparently too few adopters. CAD is one of the applications that is least amenable to open source because there is so much specialized mathematical knowledge required to do the development.
I'm an engineer but I'm also an accountant and the lack of serious financial software for bookkeeping is also a problem. Yes there are a few native linux bookkeeping packages but NOBODY uses them. Nobody will either since it's easy to find bookkeepers that know Quickbooks or Peachtree. I can virtualize Quickbooks in some cases or run it on a Mac but there is no native substitute on linux.
Like a cutting edge CAD packages, games, financial management and office suites? Good thing we had you to tell us that open source will solve our every problem just by virtue of it being open source. I'm sure every print shop is going to dump Photoshop for GIMP, every finance firm will dump Excel for Openoffice Calc and every engineering firm will dump AutoCAD for... what exactly?
Maybe, just maybe open source isn't the answer for everything after all...
What you say sounds very reasonable, but I'm troubled by the reflexive denials I have been reading from quants and financial engineers.
I'd agree that a "reflexive denial" is a bad thing. But there also is a difference between explaining what a particular equation really means and denying responsibility. Since we're so fond of analogies here on/. try this one. It's a bit like an engineer who works on technology is dual use (both civilian and military applications). The problems with it isn't in the technology it is in the application which is a policy level decision.
Our current fiscal crisis was at its root caused by two things in my opinion. One was that internal risk management within many companies was either negligent or compliant in allowing unacceptable risks to be taken. The second was that the regulators (up to and including Congress) were asleep at the switch. Previous administrations AND Congress had been in a deregulatory mindset for some time and were unwilling or unable to acknowledge that the financial regulations that are needed in 2008 were not the same as those needed in 1978.
"hey I'm just a geek with a model, nobody listens to me, and the traders do just what they want anyway". I don't think you can have it both ways.
So you are arguing the Nuremburg defense applies here. I'd agree with you to a point. If someone sees unethical behavior or suspects disaster is impending, they have a fiduciary responsibility if they are convinced they are right.
Where you have to be careful though is that consequences of a model are not always clear except in hindsight. If lots of people could see the end game in the housing bubble crash, one could reasonably assume they would have acted on it but that didn't happen. A LOT of very smart people were caught out by the crash. It's easy to make an argument for malfeasance if it is just a few but if lots of people make the same mistake you have to consider the possibility that the problems weren't so obvious prior to the crash.
At the very least the models like VAR were used as a fig leaf to persuade folks that junk was AAA.
We know that now but back in 2005 that wasn't actually so clear. There were seemingly reasonable arguments that seemed to indicate the AAA rating was appropriate. Of course it turned out to be quite irrational but it wasn't so clear at the time.
If people knew that their models were being used inappropriately, then they had a duty to make a stink about it, even if it meant walking away from their bonus and stock options.
It's just NOT that simple. Ethically you are correct in principle but its rarely entirely clear in advance whether a model maker is correct in a given situation. A model is not the same thing as proof and even our best models have huge flaws. No financial model would ever be used if we had to live entirely within its limitations. We simply don't have a sufficient theoretical framework for financial systems to do that. Even the best models come with pages of simplifying assumptions and usually depend on unreliable and/or inadequate data. At some point we just have to use our best judgment and take a guess knowing that there is a good chance you are wrong.
Finance is the act of trying to predict the future with imperfect information and inadequate models. If you think financial information is always reliable, you are quite mistaken. I'm a certified accountant and I'll be the first to tell you that there is a LOT of ambiguity in how financial transactions are booked even when done properly. Even questions as seemingly simple as "when does a sale occur" turn out to be quite complicated in the real world. We can't even always agree on what happened in the past which obviously means that predicting the future will be that much harder.
Goldman Sachs actions were accidental or lacking foresight. These are the best minds in the country, they are specialists in predicting market trends and they pretty much invented most of the toxic assets that crippled everyone ELSE, while the profited
Goldman Sachs did not invent adjustable rate mortgages, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps. So what exactly is it that your think they invented? Or are you just using Goldman as a bogeyman proxy because you don't actually know anything about investment banking and they make a convenient scapegoat?
In fact Goldman actually stayed out of the subprime mess for the most part which has a lot to do with why they are still around. Other investment banks didn't and three of the five major US investment banks no longer exist as a result. There is PLENTY of blame to go around for the current mess but let's try to assign the blame correctly shall we?
Cringley should stick to technology since he clearly knows even less about finance than tech.
From TFA:
Trading relies on finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the system while investing grows the economy. Trading is a parasite on investing. I’m not saying to ban it, I AM saying that technology has enabled outfits like Goldman to be such efficient parasites that they threaten the survival of their hosts.
What he's really talking about is speculation. Despite speculators being the traditional scapegoat (frequently deservedly) whenever there is a problem with the financial system, a certain amount of speculation is arguably healthy. Speculators make certain critical markets liquid when they otherwise would not be. If you want to see the effect of no liquidity, you only have to look at our recent financial meltdown when the banks stopped lending. Liquidity is critical and speculation is frequently the grease that lets the machinery do its job.
Where Cringley is wrong in his argument is that technology has only a minor role in why we have the current financial situation. The current financial situation is complicated but was caused by a lack of controls, outdated regulation, excessive leverage and a lack of transparency among other causes. We have access to new financial instruments for which we have not yet developed adequate regulations. Our current fiscal crisis looks very much like a classic liquidity trap. Interest rates are about as low as they can go so further injections of cash will not lower interest rates and stimulate investment. Technology played no more than a minor supporting role. Factors such as the elimination of Glass-Steagall, inaccurate credit ratings, speculation, excessive leverage, low interest rates and others were at the root of the problem and these have nothing fundamentally to do with technology.
I’ve talked with these guys and they are clueless about the implications of their work.
I have more than a few friends who are in investment banking and NONE of them are clueless about the implications of their work. Their incentives are misaligned with the public good sometimes but they are well aware of that fact. It's rather like knowing that the smokestack in your factory is polluting the environment. Just because you are aware of it doesn't mean you are in a position to do anything about the problem. The folks at Goldman and Morgan Stanley are smart. VERY smart. They understand the macro-economic implications of what they are doing for the most part. When they don't get it, it's usually the case that few others understood the problem either. That doesn't mean they are blameless but I wouldn't for a second call them clueless.
This process builds financial bubbles until they pop then it is left to the despised government to fix things. But what if government runs out of options?
Then you have a long and protracted depression. Sometimes civil unrest if it is severe enough. Governments aren't omnipotent and their ability to influence the economy has always had limits. Financial bubbles are a regular occurrence. No amount of government regulation or intervention can stop all of them. But we can learn from past mistakes.
Remember the work of Black and Scholes that underlay the staggering growth of derivative securities was based on thermodynamics. We use principles from one area in another to good effect, but what makes an efficient heat exchanger can make a deadly security.
Only if one is stupid enough not to understand the limitations of Black-Scholes which only works under a huge pile of assumptions that exist in very narrow and rare circumstances. Black-Scholes is
I don't think standalone GPS is going to go away but it is probably going to drop significantly in marketshare. Between cars with built in GPS and phones with GPS options, the handheld units are going to go the way of the standalone PDA to some degree. They're useful and right now because they outperform the phone based GPS systems but much like MP3 players they are going to get increasingly integrated. There might me a small remaining market for standalone units but only so long as they can offer features not available on phones AND not in the car. I have a Garmin Nuvi but I only use it now when I'm traveling because my primary car has a built in GPS and my phone can't do the job adequately. If my phone could do the job I'd have little use for the Garmin and I've seen GPS systems for the iPhone that are approaching that level of performance. I think it might take another 5-10 years for the standalone units to lose most of their marketshare but I don't see them offering anything that would justify a separate device in the long term. Certainly not anywhere near the number of devices around right now anyway. I can see a few inexpensive low end standalone units but nothing more without some significant technological innovations.
Clearly you haven't actually read any of the transcriptions...
For those who don't use the service, the results are a bit like playing Mad Libs. Often useful but I have yet to see a transcription without some key words wrongly transcribed. It's especially bad at names. I'm also reminded of the handwriting "recognition" on early Apple Newtons. Granted, it's free so I'm hardly going to complain but the technology has a way to go.
And that is exactly what is wrong with your system. If you can afford a better lawyer that gets you a lower or no sentence, that means you have class justice.
You would think so but like so many things in life it's not as simple as a sound bite makes it. One of my cousins is a public defender. She's very good at her job, dedicated and loves what she does. However she is the first to tell you that virtually all of her clients ARE actually guilty. We're not talking probably guilty here, we're talking stone-cold-caught-in-the-act-and-probably-confessed guilty or something close to it. Speak to any public defender and they'll tell you basically the same thing. The overwhelming majority of their clients did what they are accused of doing. The job of the public defender at that point really is to get them the best sentencing deal they can but their resources for this are limited and the sentencing guidelines limit them even more. Yes, once in a blue moon she gets someone who is actually innocent but it's rare. Very rare. I know public defenders who can count the number of genuinely innocent clients they've had on their fingers. I'm pissed off that guilty rich people can get away with some things that they genuinely deserve punishment for but I'd rather have a system that errs on the side of freeing a guilty man over punishing an innocent one.
Please don't misunderstand me - I completely agree that it's not fair that we cannot have the best quality legal support for everyone. I'm just saying that it's not really a case of the poor get screwed merely because they are poor. They get "screwed" because they are poor AND we have a bizarre assault on judicial discretion which results in insane sentencing guidelines. The US does NOT have notably more crime than other countries but we do punish people severely for things that aren't punished as harshly elsewhere. It's a waste of money and other resources and the impact falls (like many other things) disproportionately on the poor.
(nearly) 1% of the population behind bars is an awful lot and compares very bad with the rest of the world.
Agreed but we could solve much of that problem with the stroke of a pen by not putting people in jail for minor drug offenses. We could solve a lot more by overhauling sentencing guidelines to something vaguely sane. The problem really is that we vote any politician out of office who dares to voice the fact that our sentencing laws have grown absurd in many cases. Such a politician is immediately labeled "soft on crime" even if they aren't.
Actually, manual cars can have a certain advantage at low speeds in light stop & go traffic. With engine braking, if you leave enough room between you and the car in front, you rarely have to break.
And wear out your left leg and the clutch in the process. Plus that only works well on relatively flat ground. Wouldn't try it on any decent or even a moderately steep ascent.
Even in heavy stop and go, I really don't mind a manual... at least enough that I still won't consider buying an auto.
To each their own. Personally I prefer a manual *except* when in a traffic jam. Then it's just annoying.
Yeah and your manu-matic resoponds SECONDS after you put in an input.
Only the shitty ones.
Rocking back and forth waiting for a light to change (cant do that without a clutch pedal)
And I would want to do that why? To waste gas? To wear out my clutch prematurely? To impress a bunch of immature 20 year old boys?
clutching up the engine speed (to spin up a turbo) or just to hit your power band, not without my clutch pedal.
Ahhh, for drag racing. Now I get it. I'm supposed to need a clutch so I can drive dangerously. Good reason!
I was very close to purchising a VW GTI with a DSG, due to the stupidly fast downshifting.
I've owned a GTI myself as well as a Scirocco, Mercecedes SLK, and several other fun small cars. Sounds like we have similar tastes.
But the one with the stick was just more fun. I can spin wheels whenever I want. I can rev my engine whenever it pleases me, even during hard braking. Sure a lot of these things do not help 'driving' and some are immature at best,
I think you understate the immature bit. If you've got enough power you can spin the wheels regardless of whether you have a manual clutch or not. If you are doing a burnout and are not actually located at the starting line of a drag strip then you are just being wasteful.
but they are not accomplished without a clutch.
And yet somehow many of the fastest cars in the world (Formula 1) manage to get remarkable performance without a manual clutch. Perhaps it doesn't really matter as much as you think it does? I'll take a car with advanced traction control and a "launch" button personally. If you are going to go fast, do it safely.
But a clutch pedal gives the driver a variable power delivery to the drive wheels, independant of engine speed and turbo boost.
Which is only actually useful if you are racing. Are we talking about racing or street legal driving?
What happens when there's a power steering failure?
It doesn't turn.:-)
I know it's not a common problem, but it is a problem which randomly comes up. At least with a steering wheel the driver can generally muscle the wheels to turn
Have you ever actually tried to muscle a turn out of a car with a failed power steering system? If it is a hydraulic system with physical linkages, you *might* be able to steer it with enormous effort. If it is electronic (drive by wire) you can't turn it at all if the electrical system fails. In practice it really isn't a big problem. Mostly you just coast to a stop and stay wherever you are. The main risk is usually traffic around you. I *can* think of conditions where it would be a more immediate risk but they involve failure while doing evasive maneuvering or risky driving you probably shouldn't be doing anyway.
Frankly if they trust fly by wire systems in aircraft where the consequences of failure are ordinarily MUCH higher I'm not too worried about it in a car. The car makers are pretty well aware of the legal and PR costs of a failed steering system and they're engineered quite sturdily. By far the most common problem is leaking fluid which is annoying but rarely a catastrophic failure.
Frightens the living daylights out of me driving an automatic car!
An automatically shifting car? Terrifying. What's next? Automatic traction control or *gasp* all-wheel drive? The horror... This automation thing has to stop.
You're driving along and suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears. Hey car, I want to decide when I want you to change gear, don't want you jumping up and down through the gearbox when you feel like it.
Spoken like someone who rarely gets stuck in traffic jams. I like a manual transmission too (prefer it actually) but there is a beauty in simply pointing the car and having it go. If your automatic transmission lurches that much that it bothers you there is probably something wrong with the machine. Lots of cars have a manu-matic as well if you are really that desperate to control the shift points. Virtually everyone who has a manu-matic pretty much lets the car do the shifting most of the time though. Shifting manually is fun but a pointless exercise most of the time for most people.
I want to slowly lift off the clutch and get the engine to bite when I want it to bite.
The high end transmissions these days are automated clutches in one form or another. You shift just like normal but the clutch engagement is automatic and (usually) much faster than you could do it yourself. You still chose the shift points but there is no shift pedal - just a stick or paddles. Hate to say it but the clutch pedal is a relic that has no functional reason to exist anymore. It only sticks around because people like it - not because it is actually necessary or even all that useful 99% of the time.
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How do you know E=MC^2? Did you figure it out yourself, or did someone in authority tell you it was true?
I did calculate it myself when I was a sophomore in college. The mathematics of it actually aren't all that hard.
How do we know Abraham Lincoln was a president of the US? Did you see him become president? Or did you rely on the authority of some written documents to tell you that he was?
As evidence we have written history, photographic evidence, copious reliable documentation, archaeological evidence, birth records, and much more - most of which is available for you to peruse yourself. There is even DNA evidence from known descendants. Furthermore there is not a single claim to a supernatural act in any of the above and I can tell you exactly what evidence would be needed to disprove the claim that he was President.
How do we know Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome? Where you there or are you relying on documents the earliest of which come from around 1000AD?
See the above, minus the photographs and with fewer surviving records and other bits of evidence. Again, no supernatural claims exist with regard to the existence and historical record of Julius Caesar and I can tell you exactly what it would take to convince me that he was not actually the emperor of Rome.
How do you know that person A murdered person B even though you haven't found the murder weapon? Is it because you performed some scientific test to determine it or is it because the bag lady across the street and said she saw him enter the apartment just before it happened and the neighbor said he saw him leave with a bloody knife?
It depends on the nature of the evidence. If the "bag lady" also claims to have seen a ghost rising to heaven or some other supernatural act, her credibility is rightly going to be suspect. Witnesses alone are rarely enough to convict someone of a capital crime.
Religion has all the evidence that everything else we rely on has.
WRONG. Religion makes no falsifiable claims. There is no way I can disprove the assertion that Jesus Christ was the son of "God". I can accept the assertion or not but I can not disprove it. Science and history actually do make falsifiable claims. I can find evidence to disprove a theory or a historical narrative. It might not be easy to do so but it is possible and I can tell you exactly what evidence I would need to disprove a scientific or historical theory. The worst abuses of religon come when historical fact is conflated with religious dogma. Much of the evidence from 2000 years ago is of course lost so it makes it easier for the charlatans who sell religion to dupe the unscrupulous and naive.
Why so many codes and regulations?
The short answer is that the society we live in is very complicated. The basic principles are pretty simple but hammering out the details requires a lot of lawmaking. These laws cover the corner cases of how we are to interact with each other. Turns out the best (and probably only) way to do that anyone has come up with is to have a lot of laws. This is better than the alternative which is basically monarchy. Better to have the rules spelled out (even if complicated) than to depend on the capricious whims of rules. (yes, yes, I know it's hard to tell the difference sometimes...)
Bear in mind too that those laws are just the regulations, codes, ordinances etc passed by legislative bodies. There is another set of relevant law found in case law.
How the hell is anyone supposed to avoid being a criminal when there are books and books of laws one has to obey?
You aren't. A government that cannot accuse you of breaking any laws cannot control you.
Dude, just slap together some random figures like the number of occupied inodes in your hard disk -- they are executives after all, what do you expect them to understand about technical stuff?
You do realize that the single most common undergraduate degree among S&P 500 CEOs is Engineering right? Over 20% of them have an undergrad degree in engineering. And of course not having a formal degree in the subject must mean they are an technologically illiterate. After all, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates never even graduated college so how could they possibly know anything about "technical stuff". Good thing we have smart guys like you to explain it to them.
Your arrogance really sounds like ignorance to me.
The problem is, especially with suits, is that what they want probably isn't in the same galaxy, let alone ballpark, as what they need or what they can use.
Right. They're all a bunch of idiots and got where they are by sheer incompetence. Almost makes sense... I'm sure you understand their job better than they do - after all, engineers like you and me know everything right?
The upshot is once you get that report all nice and automated they'll ask you for the exact same report three months later having entirely forgotten its existence. Don't tell them they've been getting that report daily/weekly already for the last three months. They don't like that for some reason.
Gee, wonder why they might not like a condescending answer...
Perhaps the reason they don't like your answer is found more in how you tell them than what you tell them.
I've noticed the "warm wire" problem on lots of high wattage appliances.
It's real but if the wire is of sufficient gauge you'll be less likely to notice it. Basically any time you send current down a copper wire there are some losses to resistive heating. This is why you don't want to buy cheap little flimsy extension cords for high power applications. With a small wire there is less area to dissipate the heat and with sufficient current the wire can even melt. When we design it that way it is called a fuse. When we don't it is called a lawsuit. :-)
However, the added safety of only using 110 VAC rather than 220 is probably worth a little wasted energy in wire heating.
It's not the volts that will kill you, it's the amps. Amperage is the actual electron flow - somewhat like the actual water flowing in a pipe. Voltage is a measure of the tendency of the electrons to flow - vaguely analogous to water pressure. A stun gun has 20000 volts but very little amperage and so it doesn't fry you. Power = Volts * Amps so if the power coming down the line is equal the 220 line is actually a little bit safer. (both can easily kill you though so it's really a mute point)
What do you consider "older?" 5 years old? 10 years old?
I mean older when I say older. Cars in general get better, safer and more reliable each year. The progression in just one year is small but it is steady and measurable. The difference between a car from 2009 and one from 1999 is more noticeable, and even more so the farther back you go.
Is a 10 year old car with 50,000 miles on it more unsafe than a 2 year old car with 150,000?
Depends on the car and the safety features without a specific car to point to odds are the newer car is safer. In general newer cars have newer and better safety features. Not to mention more years of engineering and design baked into them. Overall they also are measurably more reliable than a car from even 10 years ago. There are exceptions to be sure but I'm talking generalities here.
What about a 15 year old car that's been properly maintained and serviced? Is that more unsafe than a brand new car?
Quite possibly yes. 15 year old cars typically don't have side airbags, traction control, might not have ABS, and have materials and engineering that is 15 years older. State of the art has progressed in the last 15 years. Without getting into specific models, cars in general are safer, more reliable, and have better technology than older cars.
What is so "unsafe" about older cars anyway?
Depends on how far back you want to go. My dad had a 1971 Opel GT that had only a waist belt for a seatbelt. The 1993 Ford Taurus I drove for a while didn't have side airbags or traction control. My 2009 Honda has 4WD, side airbags, traction control, GPS, fog lights, a backup camera and lots of other features besides that you won't find in most vehicles more than a few years old.
I also notice that no appliance I own in the USA uses insulation on the live pins of the plug to prevent accidental shocks when the plug is slightly out of the socket,
Which it turns out is not actually a problem in real life. In 36 years in this country neither I nor anyone I know of has ever been shocked in that manner. Yes it's conceivable and I'm sure someone has done it somewhere but it really just isn't a problem. We've got a pretty detailed electrical code and I'm quite sure if it was a serious problem it would have been addressed.
none of the sockets contain safety shutters
They are available if you want them. My car (a Honda Ridgeline) has a 110V outlet with safety shutters actually. You can get them from any Home Depot or Lowes hardware store for use in your home. You also can get plugs to prevent access to the sockets when not in use. Again though, not really a serious problem.
and that 110V cords to high wattage appliances such as vacuum cleaners get warm
I suggest you buy better quality equipment then. If you buy a wire that is too small for the application this might happen. Any wire that is too thin for the power demands on it will overheat. This is how fuses work. Doesn't happen on my vacuum cleaner though - at least not that I can tell without a very accurate thermometer.
and the lights change brightness when I switch such appliances on and off.
Unless you are overloading the circuit, that almost certainly has nothing to do with the appliance. That means the power you have going to the outlet is either insufficient or of poor quality. For instance I had a loose neutral wire on my house last year which made everything flicker because the voltages were bouncing between 98V and 135V. Once the power company secured the neutral connection it's been rock steady ever since.
IMO the British home electrical system is much better than the USA system and I have tried to view it impartially over the year
Clearly...
The Audi 5000S was never defective...
That's right it wasn't. It was people blaming the equipment for their own failures.
As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective.
Umm, please show your calculations. You already admitted that the Audi 5000S was not defective so this should be interesting.
Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.
Even if true (and you've provided no evidence that it is true) that has precisely nothing to do with a car sold in the United States where US consumer safety standards apply. Never mind that the Toytoa Camry is produced right here in the US (also in Japan, Russia, China and Australia).
Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire.
Drive by wire does not make it a more dangerous design. It has DIFFERENT failure modes but different is not the same as dangerous. Fly by wire has become state of the art in airplanes where they have much stricter reliability standards so the technology clearly CAN be safe. While it is certainly possible Toyota has a defective system, I want to see some actual evidence of a fault beyond a few anecdotes of customers.
Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products
You do that every day whether you are aware of it or not. There is a reason we have product safety and liability laws. You trust your life to mass merchandise products every single day of your life.
If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire.
Good luck with that. Lots of cars are already drive by wire and within a few years nearly all will be. Enjoy driving unsafe older cars.
Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive.
Actually it doesn't have to be expensive at all. A pipe wrench is a great example highly fault tolerant engineering but it isn't expensive. Fault tolerance CAN be expensive but it doesn't have to be. With an appropriate design it can even be cheaper.
The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch.
It also matches the distribution of a handful of people standing on their accelerator pedal and being too embarrassed to admit they weren't using the brake. Remember the Audi? It's entirely reasonable to believe this is people trying to get money via our legal system instead of an actual engineering fault.
The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.
The Ford Fusion DOES use drive by wire. Every hybrid car is drive by wire and soon enough so will (nearly) every non hybrid. Drive by Wire has FAR too many advantages in both cost and features to not be used.
Regarding quality, JD Power thinks you are full of crap and I tend to believe them more than you. 2010 Ford Fusion vs 2010 Toyota Camry
The hope has always been that if your air stuff is awesome enough, you don't need guys on the ground.
And it's been proven time and again that sooner or later there is no substitute for boots in contact with pavement. Never mind the fact that without ground support the drones are going to have a tough time figuring out what to shoot at. Little bit tough to identify Osama from 10,000 feet.
Considering the cost of the Panasonic ToughBooks, I would take a Dell XFR + CompleteCare any day!
You are missing the point. If you happen to work in any sort of extreme environment (very hot, very cold, very dusty, etc) your Dell is going to die pretty quickly if it even works at all. Furthermore there are jobs where equipment failure has serious consequences. The point is that it doesn't die in the first place, not that you can replace it. Take a standard laptop on a polar expedition or into the middle of a desert and getting your laptop serviced isn't exactly going to be an option you can exercise. And thanks to our good friend Murphy odds are it will break at the least convenient time possible.
Ruggedized laptops aren't for office workers. They are for people who work very far from climate controlled offices.
FWIW, somebody picked up my MacBook to see how heavy it was, and managed to drop it off the desk.
How long did it take you to remove your hands from their throat?
Did they compare the Dells to regular Thinkpads? They're not officially ruggedized, but they can take an awful lot of punishment
Depends on your definition of "awful lot". My brother-in-law's previous company has used thinkpads as their primary laptops for years and the consultants there managed to kill plenty of them. A shocking number actually. I agree that Thinkpads have historically been well constructed - I've had several myself. But they aren't *that* tough. Certainly not much tougher than most other non-ruggedized machines.
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
Not so much run over by a car but and decent sized IT dept will probably tell you that people abuse the hell out of laptops. Most of them quickly accumulate a veritable junkyard of spare parts from laptops that have been killed through various acts of neglect, malfeasance and random accidents. I've personally seen laptops get destroyed in countless ways. It's a fairly safe bet that a field service technician or traveling consultant is probably going to beat his laptop up pretty quickly. I've had a few clients myself where I wished I had something a little more rugged. We had one guy who killed 3 laptops in the space of a month through various acts of stupidity.
I don't know that I'd get a toughened notebook for someone irresponsible. Sometimes firing the guilty party is sometimes cheaper. But I've seen plenty of cases where a toughened laptop is a good idea.
AutoCAD has barely acceptable performance when running on *great* hardware...
Yep, and that's not even getting into what I would regard as the "serious" CAD packages like Catia or ProE. Ironically one of the biggest PTCs ProEngineer DROPPED linux support because there were apparently too few adopters. CAD is one of the applications that is least amenable to open source because there is so much specialized mathematical knowledge required to do the development.
I'm an engineer but I'm also an accountant and the lack of serious financial software for bookkeeping is also a problem. Yes there are a few native linux bookkeeping packages but NOBODY uses them. Nobody will either since it's easy to find bookkeepers that know Quickbooks or Peachtree. I can virtualize Quickbooks in some cases or run it on a Mac but there is no native substitute on linux.
Use open source, get cutting edge things.
Like a cutting edge CAD packages, games, financial management and office suites? Good thing we had you to tell us that open source will solve our every problem just by virtue of it being open source. I'm sure every print shop is going to dump Photoshop for GIMP, every finance firm will dump Excel for Openoffice Calc and every engineering firm will dump AutoCAD for... what exactly?
Maybe, just maybe open source isn't the answer for everything after all...
What you say sounds very reasonable, but I'm troubled by the reflexive denials I have been reading from quants and financial engineers.
I'd agree that a "reflexive denial" is a bad thing. But there also is a difference between explaining what a particular equation really means and denying responsibility. Since we're so fond of analogies here on /. try this one. It's a bit like an engineer who works on technology is dual use (both civilian and military applications). The problems with it isn't in the technology it is in the application which is a policy level decision.
Our current fiscal crisis was at its root caused by two things in my opinion. One was that internal risk management within many companies was either negligent or compliant in allowing unacceptable risks to be taken. The second was that the regulators (up to and including Congress) were asleep at the switch. Previous administrations AND Congress had been in a deregulatory mindset for some time and were unwilling or unable to acknowledge that the financial regulations that are needed in 2008 were not the same as those needed in 1978.
"hey I'm just a geek with a model, nobody listens to me, and the traders do just what they want anyway". I don't think you can have it both ways.
So you are arguing the Nuremburg defense applies here. I'd agree with you to a point. If someone sees unethical behavior or suspects disaster is impending, they have a fiduciary responsibility if they are convinced they are right.
Where you have to be careful though is that consequences of a model are not always clear except in hindsight. If lots of people could see the end game in the housing bubble crash, one could reasonably assume they would have acted on it but that didn't happen. A LOT of very smart people were caught out by the crash. It's easy to make an argument for malfeasance if it is just a few but if lots of people make the same mistake you have to consider the possibility that the problems weren't so obvious prior to the crash.
At the very least the models like VAR were used as a fig leaf to persuade folks that junk was AAA.
We know that now but back in 2005 that wasn't actually so clear. There were seemingly reasonable arguments that seemed to indicate the AAA rating was appropriate. Of course it turned out to be quite irrational but it wasn't so clear at the time.
If people knew that their models were being used inappropriately, then they had a duty to make a stink about it, even if it meant walking away from their bonus and stock options.
It's just NOT that simple. Ethically you are correct in principle but its rarely entirely clear in advance whether a model maker is correct in a given situation. A model is not the same thing as proof and even our best models have huge flaws. No financial model would ever be used if we had to live entirely within its limitations. We simply don't have a sufficient theoretical framework for financial systems to do that. Even the best models come with pages of simplifying assumptions and usually depend on unreliable and/or inadequate data. At some point we just have to use our best judgment and take a guess knowing that there is a good chance you are wrong.
Finance is the act of trying to predict the future with imperfect information and inadequate models. If you think financial information is always reliable, you are quite mistaken. I'm a certified accountant and I'll be the first to tell you that there is a LOT of ambiguity in how financial transactions are booked even when done properly. Even questions as seemingly simple as "when does a sale occur" turn out to be quite complicated in the real world. We can't even always agree on what happened in the past which obviously means that predicting the future will be that much harder.
Every day we have p
Goldman Sachs actions were accidental or lacking foresight. These are the best minds in the country, they are specialists in predicting market trends and they pretty much invented most of the toxic assets that crippled everyone ELSE, while the profited
Goldman Sachs did not invent adjustable rate mortgages, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps. So what exactly is it that your think they invented? Or are you just using Goldman as a bogeyman proxy because you don't actually know anything about investment banking and they make a convenient scapegoat?
In fact Goldman actually stayed out of the subprime mess for the most part which has a lot to do with why they are still around. Other investment banks didn't and three of the five major US investment banks no longer exist as a result. There is PLENTY of blame to go around for the current mess but let's try to assign the blame correctly shall we?
Cringley should stick to technology since he clearly knows even less about finance than tech.
From TFA:
Trading relies on finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the system while investing grows the economy. Trading is a parasite on investing. I’m not saying to ban it, I AM saying that technology has enabled outfits like Goldman to be such efficient parasites that they threaten the survival of their hosts.
What he's really talking about is speculation. Despite speculators being the traditional scapegoat (frequently deservedly) whenever there is a problem with the financial system, a certain amount of speculation is arguably healthy. Speculators make certain critical markets liquid when they otherwise would not be. If you want to see the effect of no liquidity, you only have to look at our recent financial meltdown when the banks stopped lending. Liquidity is critical and speculation is frequently the grease that lets the machinery do its job.
Where Cringley is wrong in his argument is that technology has only a minor role in why we have the current financial situation. The current financial situation is complicated but was caused by a lack of controls, outdated regulation, excessive leverage and a lack of transparency among other causes. We have access to new financial instruments for which we have not yet developed adequate regulations. Our current fiscal crisis looks very much like a classic liquidity trap. Interest rates are about as low as they can go so further injections of cash will not lower interest rates and stimulate investment. Technology played no more than a minor supporting role. Factors such as the elimination of Glass-Steagall, inaccurate credit ratings, speculation, excessive leverage, low interest rates and others were at the root of the problem and these have nothing fundamentally to do with technology.
I’ve talked with these guys and they are clueless about the implications of their work.
I have more than a few friends who are in investment banking and NONE of them are clueless about the implications of their work. Their incentives are misaligned with the public good sometimes but they are well aware of that fact. It's rather like knowing that the smokestack in your factory is polluting the environment. Just because you are aware of it doesn't mean you are in a position to do anything about the problem. The folks at Goldman and Morgan Stanley are smart. VERY smart. They understand the macro-economic implications of what they are doing for the most part. When they don't get it, it's usually the case that few others understood the problem either. That doesn't mean they are blameless but I wouldn't for a second call them clueless.
This process builds financial bubbles until they pop then it is left to the despised government to fix things. But what if government runs out of options?
Then you have a long and protracted depression. Sometimes civil unrest if it is severe enough. Governments aren't omnipotent and their ability to influence the economy has always had limits. Financial bubbles are a regular occurrence. No amount of government regulation or intervention can stop all of them. But we can learn from past mistakes.
Remember the work of Black and Scholes that underlay the staggering growth of derivative securities was based on thermodynamics. We use principles from one area in another to good effect, but what makes an efficient heat exchanger can make a deadly security.
Only if one is stupid enough not to understand the limitations of Black-Scholes which only works under a huge pile of assumptions that exist in very narrow and rare circumstances. Black-Scholes is
I don't think standalone GPS is going to go away but it is probably going to drop significantly in marketshare. Between cars with built in GPS and phones with GPS options, the handheld units are going to go the way of the standalone PDA to some degree. They're useful and right now because they outperform the phone based GPS systems but much like MP3 players they are going to get increasingly integrated. There might me a small remaining market for standalone units but only so long as they can offer features not available on phones AND not in the car. I have a Garmin Nuvi but I only use it now when I'm traveling because my primary car has a built in GPS and my phone can't do the job adequately. If my phone could do the job I'd have little use for the Garmin and I've seen GPS systems for the iPhone that are approaching that level of performance. I think it might take another 5-10 years for the standalone units to lose most of their marketshare but I don't see them offering anything that would justify a separate device in the long term. Certainly not anywhere near the number of devices around right now anyway. I can see a few inexpensive low end standalone units but nothing more without some significant technological innovations.
google transcribes your voice mail
AKA "wire taps".
Clearly you haven't actually read any of the transcriptions...
For those who don't use the service, the results are a bit like playing Mad Libs. Often useful but I have yet to see a transcription without some key words wrongly transcribed. It's especially bad at names. I'm also reminded of the handwriting "recognition" on early Apple Newtons. Granted, it's free so I'm hardly going to complain but the technology has a way to go.
And that is exactly what is wrong with your system. If you can afford a better lawyer that gets you a lower or no sentence, that means you have class justice.
You would think so but like so many things in life it's not as simple as a sound bite makes it. One of my cousins is a public defender. She's very good at her job, dedicated and loves what she does. However she is the first to tell you that virtually all of her clients ARE actually guilty. We're not talking probably guilty here, we're talking stone-cold-caught-in-the-act-and-probably-confessed guilty or something close to it. Speak to any public defender and they'll tell you basically the same thing. The overwhelming majority of their clients did what they are accused of doing. The job of the public defender at that point really is to get them the best sentencing deal they can but their resources for this are limited and the sentencing guidelines limit them even more. Yes, once in a blue moon she gets someone who is actually innocent but it's rare. Very rare. I know public defenders who can count the number of genuinely innocent clients they've had on their fingers. I'm pissed off that guilty rich people can get away with some things that they genuinely deserve punishment for but I'd rather have a system that errs on the side of freeing a guilty man over punishing an innocent one.
Please don't misunderstand me - I completely agree that it's not fair that we cannot have the best quality legal support for everyone. I'm just saying that it's not really a case of the poor get screwed merely because they are poor. They get "screwed" because they are poor AND we have a bizarre assault on judicial discretion which results in insane sentencing guidelines. The US does NOT have notably more crime than other countries but we do punish people severely for things that aren't punished as harshly elsewhere. It's a waste of money and other resources and the impact falls (like many other things) disproportionately on the poor.
(nearly) 1% of the population behind bars is an awful lot and compares very bad with the rest of the world.
Agreed but we could solve much of that problem with the stroke of a pen by not putting people in jail for minor drug offenses. We could solve a lot more by overhauling sentencing guidelines to something vaguely sane. The problem really is that we vote any politician out of office who dares to voice the fact that our sentencing laws have grown absurd in many cases. Such a politician is immediately labeled "soft on crime" even if they aren't.
Actually, manual cars can have a certain advantage at low speeds in light stop & go traffic. With engine braking, if you leave enough room between you and the car in front, you rarely have to break.
And wear out your left leg and the clutch in the process. Plus that only works well on relatively flat ground. Wouldn't try it on any decent or even a moderately steep ascent.
Even in heavy stop and go, I really don't mind a manual... at least enough that I still won't consider buying an auto.
To each their own. Personally I prefer a manual *except* when in a traffic jam. Then it's just annoying.
Yeah and your manu-matic resoponds SECONDS after you put in an input.
Only the shitty ones.
Rocking back and forth waiting for a light to change (cant do that without a clutch pedal)
And I would want to do that why? To waste gas? To wear out my clutch prematurely? To impress a bunch of immature 20 year old boys?
clutching up the engine speed (to spin up a turbo) or just to hit your power band, not without my clutch pedal.
Ahhh, for drag racing. Now I get it. I'm supposed to need a clutch so I can drive dangerously. Good reason!
I was very close to purchising a VW GTI with a DSG, due to the stupidly fast downshifting.
I've owned a GTI myself as well as a Scirocco, Mercecedes SLK, and several other fun small cars. Sounds like we have similar tastes.
But the one with the stick was just more fun. I can spin wheels whenever I want. I can rev my engine whenever it pleases me, even during hard braking. Sure a lot of these things do not help 'driving' and some are immature at best,
I think you understate the immature bit. If you've got enough power you can spin the wheels regardless of whether you have a manual clutch or not. If you are doing a burnout and are not actually located at the starting line of a drag strip then you are just being wasteful.
but they are not accomplished without a clutch.
And yet somehow many of the fastest cars in the world (Formula 1) manage to get remarkable performance without a manual clutch. Perhaps it doesn't really matter as much as you think it does? I'll take a car with advanced traction control and a "launch" button personally. If you are going to go fast, do it safely.
But a clutch pedal gives the driver a variable power delivery to the drive wheels, independant of engine speed and turbo boost.
Which is only actually useful if you are racing. Are we talking about racing or street legal driving?
What happens when there's a power steering failure?
It doesn't turn. :-)
I know it's not a common problem, but it is a problem which randomly comes up. At least with a steering wheel the driver can generally muscle the wheels to turn
Have you ever actually tried to muscle a turn out of a car with a failed power steering system? If it is a hydraulic system with physical linkages, you *might* be able to steer it with enormous effort. If it is electronic (drive by wire) you can't turn it at all if the electrical system fails. In practice it really isn't a big problem. Mostly you just coast to a stop and stay wherever you are. The main risk is usually traffic around you. I *can* think of conditions where it would be a more immediate risk but they involve failure while doing evasive maneuvering or risky driving you probably shouldn't be doing anyway.
Frankly if they trust fly by wire systems in aircraft where the consequences of failure are ordinarily MUCH higher I'm not too worried about it in a car. The car makers are pretty well aware of the legal and PR costs of a failed steering system and they're engineered quite sturdily. By far the most common problem is leaking fluid which is annoying but rarely a catastrophic failure.
Frightens the living daylights out of me driving an automatic car!
An automatically shifting car? Terrifying. What's next? Automatic traction control or *gasp* all-wheel drive? The horror... This automation thing has to stop.
You're driving along and suddenly the car jumps and changes up or down the gears. Hey car, I want to decide when I want you to change gear, don't want you jumping up and down through the gearbox when you feel like it.
Spoken like someone who rarely gets stuck in traffic jams. I like a manual transmission too (prefer it actually) but there is a beauty in simply pointing the car and having it go. If your automatic transmission lurches that much that it bothers you there is probably something wrong with the machine. Lots of cars have a manu-matic as well if you are really that desperate to control the shift points. Virtually everyone who has a manu-matic pretty much lets the car do the shifting most of the time though. Shifting manually is fun but a pointless exercise most of the time for most people.
I want to slowly lift off the clutch and get the engine to bite when I want it to bite.
The high end transmissions these days are automated clutches in one form or another. You shift just like normal but the clutch engagement is automatic and (usually) much faster than you could do it yourself. You still chose the shift points but there is no shift pedal - just a stick or paddles. Hate to say it but the clutch pedal is a relic that has no functional reason to exist anymore. It only sticks around because people like it - not because it is actually necessary or even all that useful 99% of the time.