It's a bit dodgy that it's allowed to do it automatically (after all, it could be asking for
How is that more "dodgy" than simply navigating to spy.malware.com via script? After all, every "Slashdot Approved" browser can be scripted to do that, and your malware.com could simply navigate back to the referring page after logging John Doe's underwear preference.
Agreed, though, it's the file-writing where things go all wrong.
It's worse than you think. The percentage of spam that has to hit a live address for the run to be considered successful is more like a single-digit percentage. After all, the actual purchase rate from spam campaigns is a tiny fraction of one percent.
Worse yet is the number of WILLING sysadmin accomplices out there, and I'm not even talking about the ISPs that openly support spammers. I don't remember where the articles are any more, but for awhile there was a lot of talk about van-based spammers literally bribing an admin at somebody's NOC -- then just driving up and running an ethernet cable through the back door, "borrowing" a company's bandwidth for the hour or so it took to blast out a few million H3RBAL V+I+A+G+R+A spams.
That means the engineering problem must be tackled through either a total revamp of the mail system -- something everyone agrees is sorely needed, but will probably never happen because the installed base is so large, and people will inevitably bitch about the expense -- or purely at the end-user side, which is sort of like firing the military and hoping private citizens invest in privately-owned tanks, planes and ships.
Take the Pentagon example. If it was necessary for a very large number of people to have somewhat limited access to the building on a continual basis
You've obviously never been there. THOUSANDS of people work there, and hundreds, possibly thousands more visit the building daily on various pieces of business. Once you're inside, there really isn't anything to keep you from wandering around pretty much at will. When I was a kid, I went there with my father all the time.
Of course, that fact probably refutes the grandparent post far better than your statement does...
Microsoft's decision to ship no Java Virtual Machine in Windows XP
That "decision" was made for them by a court. In other words, Sun managed to litigate a preinstalled VM off of the most popular and ubiquitous platform in the history of computing. This is something industry experts refer to as "stupid".
I understand the point you're making, but I'm still inclined to disagree. I would put more emphasis on driver responsibility than attributing any fault (or credit) to the vehicle. A level-headed but otherwise inexperienced driver who doesn't just get himself psyched out over climbing into a Viper (and therefore prone to stupid mistakes because his mind isn't on *driving*) would almost certainly turn better lap times in a Viper than in a Miata. The examples you gave really don't make any sense to me.
The limits aren't so high? That means you can't go nearly as fast (hence lower lap times), and worse, you'll find those limits faster in the less-capable car. A LOT faster. A novice driver would never dream of approaching the Viper's limits, no matter how much bravado they may exhibit prior to belting in and rolling out to the start/finish.
The car communicates a little better? I guess I'd have to drive a Miata (or you'd have to drive a Viper) before I could comment, but frankly I doubt it. The Viper has the stiffest frame of any production vehicle -- ever, anywhere. This is attached to a very stiff double A-arm suspension, and in stock form is only 2.8 inches off the ground. It has Koni adjustable shocks, a master cylinder and power steering pump each the size of your head. It is low and wide, and has enormous tires. You feel *everything*. I have driven and owned many performance cars, and I haven't ever experienced anything like the Viper's handling feedback. The most I'd concede without driving a Miata is that the Miata *might* be roughly equivalent -- but I doubt it.
More forgiving of mistakes? One day while swapping to my track rims, I put a tape measure across all four tires. The Viper has FIFTY TWO inches of stock tire width on the road at any given moment. I have taken turn 17 at Sebring, which is a 180 degree turn following a half-mile straight, at 85 MPH and my tires weren't even squealing (the last segment in this video is my friend's GTS going through that turn at about the same speed). There are three factors on a track: adhesion, braking, and acceleration. The Viper out-performs a Miata in all categories. Hence, I must conclude it will give you more time -- and more "tools" -- to get yourself out of a mistake.
I suppose you might be saying that as a variation on the theme that you can get yourself into more trouble in a Viper, but as I said before, I strongly doubt any half competent novice driver under track conditions is going to have the balls (frankly) to push a Viper to those limits. Braking is probably the only place where you might get it horribly wrong, but even then, you'd have to have made the bad decision to get the car moving so quickly you were out of your element. And I can tell you, with decent track pads even stock Viper brakes can haul that car down from the mid 100's very quickly. With even mild brake mods, scrubbing 80-90 MPH in 120 yards or so is really no problem at all.
I guess I'm trying to say this: A Viper can be driven slowly, too.:)
Heh, and I should also point out that I assumed *exactly* the kinds of things you're saying prior to buying one. I had driven Porsches, Ferraris, and all sorts of American muscle, and I was *still* freaked out when I first drove the Viper -- but not for good reason.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Nah. Third gear, sure.:) There are lots of "myths" (I guess that's the word) out there about them. The worst one is that they're hard to drive. I was pretty nervous when I first bought me -- make no mistake about it, it's a lot of power, and it can thoroughly ROAST a brand new set of 13 inch wide Pilot Sports -- but particularly in bone-stock form, it's a very easy car to drive. Pedal position is a bit odd (they're farther to the left than normal, the bellhousing is HUGE) and you sit so low that visibility is very poor, but that's about it.
What usually happens is somebody gets overconfident and starts showing off. That's when they get wrecked. Tires that big don't give you a lot of warning when they finally break loose. I have friends with FAR more track time than I have who can drift through on-ramps and not even interrupt their conversation, but I still prefer to stay on the grippy side of the threshold.
You'd be surprised, though. They're very affordable cars to purchase and own relative to what they can do. And they're EXTREMELY modification-friendly. They were designed as a race car first, and a street car second, so they're easy to work on, and the aftermarket is huge. In stock form, mine made about 410 HP, and with only minor mods it now turns about 525. (Being truly hand-built cars, the off-the-factory-floor horsepower varies widely.) I have friends with Vipers that range from a mild 5-lb SC setup making about 600 HP to a guy I know in Tampa with a dual-fuel-system dual-blower beast that makes over 1100 HP to the wheels -- and it's his daily driver.
How could you possibly derive illiteracy from my response? After all, I'm not the participant trumpeting "reading" graphic novels as an example of my advancing maturity.
By the way, Captain Literacy, the word "goddamn" has an "n" at the end.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Yeah, the GT40 will be nice, but it should be more or less equivalent (and I invoke the Corvette Argument: it'll be $150K list, and more like $170K for the first year or so... more than twice the cost of a Viper). As for the 2006 Z06, pretty much *every* year those poor GM guys start rumors promising themselves, "This year WE get to play king of the hill," and then GM applies their CAFE-centric no-gas-guzzler policy and produces yet another 15,000 same-as-last-year Vettes. I remember the Z06-Viper-killer rhetoric, too.
Besides, even if the GT40 did just end up slaughtering Vipers on the track, I'd say the Viper had a pretty damned respectable run. Twelve years is a long time to be on top like that. Now, of course, it's just a thorn in Mercedes' side. Oh well.
If you're patient, a babied, garage-kept, never-raced, low-mileage 96 GTS can be had for under 45K or so. Just make sure you have somebody specifically familiar with Vipers inspect it for you, the Viper market is plagued by washed salvage titles, particularly in Florida. (Anybody on viperclub.org in the area of the car will gladly do this.)
I mean, C# is a specific jab at Java. -- C# was not designed to steal the Java market. Similarity is not evidence for the same reason that Java's similarity to C syntax isn't evidence that it was intended to kill off C. However, the C# language WAS designed (among other things) to specifically address some of Java's shortcomings. Just like Java was designed to specifically address some of the shortcomings of it's predecessors such as C++. This is something we refer to as "progress".
Java wasn't built to wrestle control away from M$ C++ and their dev tools. -- No, it was designed to control cable TV set-top boxes. What's your point?
build the concept of a VM (CLR) into our OS -- Surprise, but VM, bytecode, and IL concepts (they are not all fully interchangable) are all MUCH older than Java. Furthermore, had Sun not sued them, Microsoft would be shipping a JVM with their OS, so don't go blaming MS for not bundling Your Favorite VM.
I'm not a fan of everything integrated into the OS -- I'm currently running two versions of.NET on my main machine. I have an old NT4 box at home which runs one version, and I can guarantee it wasn't built into the OS...
So, while my hat is off to all the people who have really busted their ass on Mono and dotGnu, I ultimately feel that it will be a lesson in frustration and disappointment. -- Here, we can agree.
But I do agree with you about Sci-Fi going in strange directions- when I heard that Bonnie Hunt (used to be a big Bab5 supporter) said "we want to get away from space shows" (ah, WTF? Sci-Fi?) I cringed.
Wow, I hadn't heard about that. It explains a lot. SciFi sucks compared to "the old days". Horror is not science fiction. Fantasy is not science fiction. Vampires are not science fiction. Reality TV is not science fiction. That voodoo sideshow fuckwit John Edwards is not science fiction. For the most part, the SciFi Channel is not science fiction. "Navy SEALs vs. a king-size Komodo dragon" is not science fiction.
(Do you happen to remember when/where she said this?)
And your response is whining Western apologist shorthand: it is the furthest galaxy yet discovered by humans. Imagine how tedious everything would be if we had to append the most nitpicking disqualifiers to every statement.
Or perhaps I should more properly say: "Imagine how tedious everything would seem (given the assumption that your world-view associates value with convenience and expediency versus the urge to pursue the most thoroughly complete exposition on every topic of discussion), if we human beings, in order to more properly avoid unintentional (or intentional) exlcusion of other better-qualified people (and I use that word in it's most inclusive sense), were required (or perhaps merely "encouraged" -- to avoid infringing on anyone's presumed right to intentionally pursue a contentionsly politically incorrect bent) to add disqualifiers to every statement which might not, in itself, properly represent the utterly complete and true scope of every consideration related to that statement."
Columbus did make a discovery. Just because Party A (hereinafter referred to as "Primitive Screwheads") knew about the Americas doesn't make Party B (hereinafter referred to as "The Permanent Floating Columbus Party Brigade", or PFCPB) any less-deserving of the title "discoverer". The PFCPB was not previously aware of the Americas. Finding it fully satisfies the definition of the term "discovery".
Additionally, your example is not an example of antropocentricity -- unless you're arguing that the Primitive Screwheads were not actually human. Or did I miss some sort of journalistic shorthand?
I can understand why, for example, Ferrari didn't want players using their cars to run from cops in Need For Speed 3. It annoyed me, and I think it probably had the opposite intended effect -- I ended up with a lower opinion of them. After all, I bought the game in order to run from cops (at least in part). But I can at least understand that.
What I can't understand is how they can possibly object to modeling vehicle damage. I just don't see how simulated damage is going to reflect negatively on... well, ANYTHING except the player's ability to "drive" a simulated car. It's just another case of lawyers taking things to extremes in order to justify their own existence.
I've also always wondered whether the licensing agreements contain terms stipulating certain performance levels (perhaps even in relation to competing products -- or even within their own product line). That also leads me to wonder how they address those games which permit cheesy modifications.
but you can definately tell that a Dodge Viper, while being hellaciously fast, is difficult to control
Except for the little problem of that not being true. I have put thousands of race track miles on my Viper. I chose the Viper precisely because it is both mind-bendingly powerful and handles extremely well. Yes, you can do things which will get you into trouble, but no more so than with any other car of similar power. I can't even count the number of ex-Porsche owners I've met who moved to the Viper after one put the beat-down on them at a Porsche Club event. (Not that Porsches are bad, of course.)
Project Gotham 2 is one of the few games I've played where the cars "feel" right -- at least in the sense that they appear to have reasonably accurate grip, and they respond to things like correct braking technique reasonably well (barring a certain well-known bug). And my comment does include the Grand Turisimo titles, which I find to be annoyingly video-gamey. The only people I know who insist the GT titles are realistic are people who have little or no track experience. (Sega GT 2002 is another game which seems to offer very pleasingly realistic handling, but the power of the cars is ridiculously unbalanced to favor Japanese brands -- for example, the Viper GTS-R is often out-accelerated by cars with hundreds of horsepower less.)
In general, though, I agree with you. I do believe these games can influence people's buying decisions. The key word is "influence".
So in Nasa's case, an engineer might say that the rover is getting to close to a rock, and the team will stear it away
Yeah, plus they have a week of meetings, planning sessions, etc. to decide whether the rock is really an obstacle worth diverting around or not.
You're forgetting that NASA is CMM Level 5. Add six weeks for paperwork and peer reviewing.
Re:The limitations of ECU modification
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If I wanted aftermarket forced-induction, I'd do a Roe supercharger (at least partly because Sean Roe is a good friend of mine, and his shop is less than an hour away). But mine is making 525 HP N/A, and that's plenty for road racing. Although, admittedly, the only street car in my racing club that can touch the NA Vipers is a Lingenfelter SC Vette. Not even the Mallet Vette can keep up with my lil' old near-stock RT/10.:)
Here's a fun sheet from a project they recently completed. MBN Viper... This is a daily-driven 2002 Final Edition GTS. They calculated peak HP at 1047 -- to the wheels. It sounds like a damned starship at idle.
Of course, there are turbos, and then there are TURBOS...:)
Re:The limitations of ECU modification
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They were FWD. A couple of guys here in Jax FL still have them. One is rather heavily modified and is fairly respectable. Another good 90's turbo domestic was the Daytona. I owned a 93 Pacifica and a 95 Daytona ES. They were quite fast for a 2.2L driving a relatively heavy 2+2, mainly because they ran huge amounts of boost. There was a Maserati BiTurbo I really used to enjoy picking on regularly. Also, the Maserati TC (TC=Turbo Chrysler) was really just a turbo Le Baron. Chrysler has always liked turbos.
Too bad they never offered them on the Viper. Heck, I'd have actually taken delivery of that 03 SRT-10 I ordered if they'd have given me a turbo. But the damned thing was just too ugly compared to my 01...
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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The Viper V10 has always been aluminum. I know a guy with a 1992, and I know two guys with 1993s. And frankly you don't want a Gen I... buy a 96 or newer. The Gen I engines have recurring head gasket problems.
Also, the displacement didn't change until last year's introduction of the Gen III engine. The truck (I have a 2001 V10 Ram), the Gen I Viper engine (1992-1996), and the Gen II Viper engine (1996-2002, I have a 2001 RT/10) were all 488 CID blocks. The Gen III engine (2003-current) is a 505 CID block -- really just a bored out 488. Most aftermarket parts work on any of these with little or no changes (I have a friend who makes bolt-on superchargers for these).
There is a LOT of misinformation about Vipers out there. You have to step up to something like a $275K Ferrari 575 before you'll find anything that a Viper won't eat alive (in stock-vs-stock form... once you get into modifications, it's purely a question of who has the most money to burn).
"Blown 930"? Why on Earth would you use a blower on a Porsche engine? I have to agree with most of what you said -- I love the blank stare when you mention "area under the curve" to a riceboy.
Re:NY Times REALLY needs more informed writers.
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And don't forget the downstream parts -- burned up O2 sensors and cats.
Those aren't given away for free, either.
Re:The limitations of ECU modification
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Omni GLH -- 1984
Re:Keep in mind the car in question
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because naturally aspirated (NA) cars don't benefit well from remapped ECUs
Huh, that's funny. My Viper picked up 52 HP just by tweaking the air/fuel mix. That's a 11% gain. Sounds pretty good to me... $130 for the controller, and $100 for a few dyno runs.
Even then you can generally only expect to make another 10hp at the very top end of your hp curve, and you might even lose torque at lower rpms (torque gets you up to speed, hp keeps you there).
Ridiculous. "only expect to make another 10HP"? On most V8 or larger engines, just adding headers will get you at least 10-15HP. If you change the intake manifold -- particularly if you go all out with porting and so on -- and the full exhaust system (no cats or hi-flow cats), you can easily find 25 HP on most cars. It's rare, to say the least, to LOSE torque from performance modifications. You may see little or no gain on small engines, but you won't lose it.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Another plus for the VW/Audi cars - there is a serial cable you connect to the car that you can interact with all electronic parts of the car - from the engine to the stereo to the anti-lock-brakes. And even better, the protocol spec is open and published for anyone. I can put a laptop on the front seat of my car while I drive and watch the turbo boost pressure, oil pressure, and tons of other cool real-time metrics. Very open-source'esque. You don't get that with the bland "big-three" or the "rice-boy" asian car crowd.
Any OBD-II compliant car has that same connector for reading information. We're also rapidly approaching the point where most cars from a given manufacturer have the same engine computer across their product line. This is true of ALL manufacturers. And there is huge aftermarket interest in the programming side of Japanese and "bland big three" computers.
"300 HP" hasn't been an impressive number since about 1970. An as far as the "bland big three" goes, I have hours of tape proving that my Viper can and will eat your 1.8L Audi alive on a road course.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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If you want more power, you buy a cheap car and then aftermarket parts. You pay the insurance for a cheap little 4 banger, but get the performance of a big block v-8. I have a Nissan Sentra SE-R SpecV (yeah that's annoying to say I wish they just called it a SpecV.) It was a bit over $21,000 fully loaded (around $17,000 base.) If I spend $7,000 on performance parts the car will be able to drag against dodge vipers that cost around $60,000 (I think a dodge viper has a 12 second 1/4 mile time, I know some SpecV's with under $10,000 of work that run 11 second 1/4 miles)
The best time for a bone-stock 2001 Viper RT/10 is currently 11.23 @ 123 MPH, run at Englishtown NJ in March of 2001. A 2001 RT/10 is about $70K, and a GTS is about $80K. And while it's true that you can build up just about anything to out drag-race a Viper, you should bear in mind that the Viper was designed for road racing. The fact that it's a reasonably good drag racer is just a function of it's massive horsepower. (I have friends whose Vipers run low 10's and there are several well-known Vipers out in Texas which regularly turn low 9's, and one heavily modified but still street-driven one in Tampa which runs 7's.)
The other thing is, a low-RPM big block is going to last a lot, lot longer than your tiny overworked 4-cylinder, no matter how many extra letters and numbers Nissan tacks on after the name.
Then there's the legal use of performance parts, drag strips, local tracks, auto-x events, tons of stuff you can participate in where just an extra 20hp might make a huge difference (yeah I know in auto-x and most track events handeling is better than horsepower but the horsepower helps a lot.)
Amen to that. I don't think most people realize how popular road racing actually is -- in Florida it's almost impossible for clubs to get weekend dates at the tracks because they're already rented out, year-round. Extra HP helps a lot on tracks with long straights. Handling is critical, but it's really nice to hit the long back straight at Sebring and open it up for that half-mile. Of course, you do need giant brakes, because that half-mile strip ends in a 180 degree turn (which an adequately prepared Viper can take at 80 MPH, meaning you only have to scrub about 75 MPH in that last 150-yard braking zone).
Slashdot Mirror
How is that more "dodgy" than simply navigating to spy.malware.com via script? After all, every "Slashdot Approved" browser can be scripted to do that, and your malware.com could simply navigate back to the referring page after logging John Doe's underwear preference.
Agreed, though, it's the file-writing where things go all wrong.
Yeah, Netscape and Sun both jumped on that bandwagon for a short time.
(Shhh! They're not The Great Satan!)
Worse yet is the number of WILLING sysadmin accomplices out there, and I'm not even talking about the ISPs that openly support spammers. I don't remember where the articles are any more, but for awhile there was a lot of talk about van-based spammers literally bribing an admin at somebody's NOC -- then just driving up and running an ethernet cable through the back door, "borrowing" a company's bandwidth for the hour or so it took to blast out a few million H3RBAL V+I+A+G+R+A spams.
That means the engineering problem must be tackled through either a total revamp of the mail system -- something everyone agrees is sorely needed, but will probably never happen because the installed base is so large, and people will inevitably bitch about the expense -- or purely at the end-user side, which is sort of like firing the military and hoping private citizens invest in privately-owned tanks, planes and ships.
You've obviously never been there. THOUSANDS of people work there, and hundreds, possibly thousands more visit the building daily on various pieces of business. Once you're inside, there really isn't anything to keep you from wandering around pretty much at will. When I was a kid, I went there with my father all the time.
Of course, that fact probably refutes the grandparent post far better than your statement does...
That "decision" was made for them by a court. In other words, Sun managed to litigate a preinstalled VM off of the most popular and ubiquitous platform in the history of computing. This is something industry experts refer to as "stupid".
The limits aren't so high? That means you can't go nearly as fast (hence lower lap times), and worse, you'll find those limits faster in the less-capable car. A LOT faster. A novice driver would never dream of approaching the Viper's limits, no matter how much bravado they may exhibit prior to belting in and rolling out to the start/finish.
The car communicates a little better? I guess I'd have to drive a Miata (or you'd have to drive a Viper) before I could comment, but frankly I doubt it. The Viper has the stiffest frame of any production vehicle -- ever, anywhere. This is attached to a very stiff double A-arm suspension, and in stock form is only 2.8 inches off the ground. It has Koni adjustable shocks, a master cylinder and power steering pump each the size of your head. It is low and wide, and has enormous tires. You feel *everything*. I have driven and owned many performance cars, and I haven't ever experienced anything like the Viper's handling feedback. The most I'd concede without driving a Miata is that the Miata *might* be roughly equivalent -- but I doubt it.
More forgiving of mistakes? One day while swapping to my track rims, I put a tape measure across all four tires. The Viper has FIFTY TWO inches of stock tire width on the road at any given moment. I have taken turn 17 at Sebring, which is a 180 degree turn following a half-mile straight, at 85 MPH and my tires weren't even squealing (the last segment in this video is my friend's GTS going through that turn at about the same speed). There are three factors on a track: adhesion, braking, and acceleration. The Viper out-performs a Miata in all categories. Hence, I must conclude it will give you more time -- and more "tools" -- to get yourself out of a mistake.
I suppose you might be saying that as a variation on the theme that you can get yourself into more trouble in a Viper, but as I said before, I strongly doubt any half competent novice driver under track conditions is going to have the balls (frankly) to push a Viper to those limits. Braking is probably the only place where you might get it horribly wrong, but even then, you'd have to have made the bad decision to get the car moving so quickly you were out of your element. And I can tell you, with decent track pads even stock Viper brakes can haul that car down from the mid 100's very quickly. With even mild brake mods, scrubbing 80-90 MPH in 120 yards or so is really no problem at all.
I guess I'm trying to say this: A Viper can be driven slowly, too. :)
Heh, and I should also point out that I assumed *exactly* the kinds of things you're saying prior to buying one. I had driven Porsches, Ferraris, and all sorts of American muscle, and I was *still* freaked out when I first drove the Viper -- but not for good reason.
What usually happens is somebody gets overconfident and starts showing off. That's when they get wrecked. Tires that big don't give you a lot of warning when they finally break loose. I have friends with FAR more track time than I have who can drift through on-ramps and not even interrupt their conversation, but I still prefer to stay on the grippy side of the threshold.
You'd be surprised, though. They're very affordable cars to purchase and own relative to what they can do. And they're EXTREMELY modification-friendly. They were designed as a race car first, and a street car second, so they're easy to work on, and the aftermarket is huge. In stock form, mine made about 410 HP, and with only minor mods it now turns about 525. (Being truly hand-built cars, the off-the-factory-floor horsepower varies widely.) I have friends with Vipers that range from a mild 5-lb SC setup making about 600 HP to a guy I know in Tampa with a dual-fuel-system dual-blower beast that makes over 1100 HP to the wheels -- and it's his daily driver.
By the way, Captain Literacy, the word "goddamn" has an "n" at the end.
Besides, even if the GT40 did just end up slaughtering Vipers on the track, I'd say the Viper had a pretty damned respectable run. Twelve years is a long time to be on top like that. Now, of course, it's just a thorn in Mercedes' side. Oh well.
If you're patient, a babied, garage-kept, never-raced, low-mileage 96 GTS can be had for under 45K or so. Just make sure you have somebody specifically familiar with Vipers inspect it for you, the Viper market is plagued by washed salvage titles, particularly in Florida. (Anybody on viperclub.org in the area of the car will gladly do this.)
Java wasn't built to wrestle control away from M$ C++ and their dev tools. -- No, it was designed to control cable TV set-top boxes. What's your point?
build the concept of a VM (CLR) into our OS -- Surprise, but VM, bytecode, and IL concepts (they are not all fully interchangable) are all MUCH older than Java. Furthermore, had Sun not sued them, Microsoft would be shipping a JVM with their OS, so don't go blaming MS for not bundling Your Favorite VM.
I'm not a fan of everything integrated into the OS -- I'm currently running two versions of .NET on my main machine. I have an old NT4 box at home which runs one version, and I can guarantee it wasn't built into the OS...
So, while my hat is off to all the people who have really busted their ass on Mono and dotGnu, I ultimately feel that it will be a lesson in frustration and disappointment. -- Here, we can agree.
Wow, I hadn't heard about that. It explains a lot. SciFi sucks compared to "the old days". Horror is not science fiction. Fantasy is not science fiction. Vampires are not science fiction. Reality TV is not science fiction. That voodoo sideshow fuckwit John Edwards is not science fiction. For the most part, the SciFi Channel is not science fiction. "Navy SEALs vs. a king-size Komodo dragon" is not science fiction.
(Do you happen to remember when/where she said this?)
That's exactly what this guy says here. Not only do you shoot him down, but then you turn around and post the same thing. Niiiice.
Or perhaps I should more properly say: "Imagine how tedious everything would seem (given the assumption that your world-view associates value with convenience and expediency versus the urge to pursue the most thoroughly complete exposition on every topic of discussion), if we human beings, in order to more properly avoid unintentional (or intentional) exlcusion of other better-qualified people (and I use that word in it's most inclusive sense), were required (or perhaps merely "encouraged" -- to avoid infringing on anyone's presumed right to intentionally pursue a contentionsly politically incorrect bent) to add disqualifiers to every statement which might not, in itself, properly represent the utterly complete and true scope of every consideration related to that statement."
Columbus did make a discovery. Just because Party A (hereinafter referred to as "Primitive Screwheads") knew about the Americas doesn't make Party B (hereinafter referred to as "The Permanent Floating Columbus Party Brigade", or PFCPB) any less-deserving of the title "discoverer". The PFCPB was not previously aware of the Americas. Finding it fully satisfies the definition of the term "discovery".
Additionally, your example is not an example of antropocentricity -- unless you're arguing that the Primitive Screwheads were not actually human. Or did I miss some sort of journalistic shorthand?
What I can't understand is how they can possibly object to modeling vehicle damage. I just don't see how simulated damage is going to reflect negatively on... well, ANYTHING except the player's ability to "drive" a simulated car. It's just another case of lawyers taking things to extremes in order to justify their own existence.
I've also always wondered whether the licensing agreements contain terms stipulating certain performance levels (perhaps even in relation to competing products -- or even within their own product line). That also leads me to wonder how they address those games which permit cheesy modifications.
Bah. Lawyers.
Except for the little problem of that not being true. I have put thousands of race track miles on my Viper. I chose the Viper precisely because it is both mind-bendingly powerful and handles extremely well. Yes, you can do things which will get you into trouble, but no more so than with any other car of similar power. I can't even count the number of ex-Porsche owners I've met who moved to the Viper after one put the beat-down on them at a Porsche Club event. (Not that Porsches are bad, of course.)
Project Gotham 2 is one of the few games I've played where the cars "feel" right -- at least in the sense that they appear to have reasonably accurate grip, and they respond to things like correct braking technique reasonably well (barring a certain well-known bug). And my comment does include the Grand Turisimo titles, which I find to be annoyingly video-gamey. The only people I know who insist the GT titles are realistic are people who have little or no track experience. (Sega GT 2002 is another game which seems to offer very pleasingly realistic handling, but the power of the cars is ridiculously unbalanced to favor Japanese brands -- for example, the Viper GTS-R is often out-accelerated by cars with hundreds of horsepower less.)
In general, though, I agree with you. I do believe these games can influence people's buying decisions. The key word is "influence".
Yeah, plus they have a week of meetings, planning sessions, etc. to decide whether the rock is really an obstacle worth diverting around or not.
You're forgetting that NASA is CMM Level 5. Add six weeks for paperwork and peer reviewing.
Here's a fun sheet from a project they recently completed. MBN Viper ... This is a daily-driven 2002 Final Edition GTS. They calculated peak HP at 1047 -- to the wheels. It sounds like a damned starship at idle.
Of course, there are turbos, and then there are TURBOS... :)
Too bad they never offered them on the Viper. Heck, I'd have actually taken delivery of that 03 SRT-10 I ordered if they'd have given me a turbo. But the damned thing was just too ugly compared to my 01...
Also, the displacement didn't change until last year's introduction of the Gen III engine. The truck (I have a 2001 V10 Ram), the Gen I Viper engine (1992-1996), and the Gen II Viper engine (1996-2002, I have a 2001 RT/10) were all 488 CID blocks. The Gen III engine (2003-current) is a 505 CID block -- really just a bored out 488. Most aftermarket parts work on any of these with little or no changes (I have a friend who makes bolt-on superchargers for these).
There is a LOT of misinformation about Vipers out there. You have to step up to something like a $275K Ferrari 575 before you'll find anything that a Viper won't eat alive (in stock-vs-stock form... once you get into modifications, it's purely a question of who has the most money to burn).
"Blown 930"? Why on Earth would you use a blower on a Porsche engine? I have to agree with most of what you said -- I love the blank stare when you mention "area under the curve" to a riceboy.
And don't forget the downstream parts -- burned up O2 sensors and cats.
Those aren't given away for free, either.
Omni GLH -- 1984
Huh, that's funny. My Viper picked up 52 HP just by tweaking the air/fuel mix. That's a 11% gain. Sounds pretty good to me... $130 for the controller, and $100 for a few dyno runs.
Even then you can generally only expect to make another 10hp at the very top end of your hp curve, and you might even lose torque at lower rpms (torque gets you up to speed, hp keeps you there).
Ridiculous. "only expect to make another 10HP"? On most V8 or larger engines, just adding headers will get you at least 10-15HP. If you change the intake manifold -- particularly if you go all out with porting and so on -- and the full exhaust system (no cats or hi-flow cats), you can easily find 25 HP on most cars. It's rare, to say the least, to LOSE torque from performance modifications. You may see little or no gain on small engines, but you won't lose it.
Any OBD-II compliant car has that same connector for reading information. We're also rapidly approaching the point where most cars from a given manufacturer have the same engine computer across their product line. This is true of ALL manufacturers. And there is huge aftermarket interest in the programming side of Japanese and "bland big three" computers.
"300 HP" hasn't been an impressive number since about 1970. An as far as the "bland big three" goes, I have hours of tape proving that my Viper can and will eat your 1.8L Audi alive on a road course.
The best time for a bone-stock 2001 Viper RT/10 is currently 11.23 @ 123 MPH, run at Englishtown NJ in March of 2001. A 2001 RT/10 is about $70K, and a GTS is about $80K. And while it's true that you can build up just about anything to out drag-race a Viper, you should bear in mind that the Viper was designed for road racing. The fact that it's a reasonably good drag racer is just a function of it's massive horsepower. (I have friends whose Vipers run low 10's and there are several well-known Vipers out in Texas which regularly turn low 9's, and one heavily modified but still street-driven one in Tampa which runs 7's.)
The other thing is, a low-RPM big block is going to last a lot, lot longer than your tiny overworked 4-cylinder, no matter how many extra letters and numbers Nissan tacks on after the name.
Then there's the legal use of performance parts, drag strips, local tracks, auto-x events, tons of stuff you can participate in where just an extra 20hp might make a huge difference (yeah I know in auto-x and most track events handeling is better than horsepower but the horsepower helps a lot.)
Amen to that. I don't think most people realize how popular road racing actually is -- in Florida it's almost impossible for clubs to get weekend dates at the tracks because they're already rented out, year-round. Extra HP helps a lot on tracks with long straights. Handling is critical, but it's really nice to hit the long back straight at Sebring and open it up for that half-mile. Of course, you do need giant brakes, because that half-mile strip ends in a 180 degree turn (which an adequately prepared Viper can take at 80 MPH, meaning you only have to scrub about 75 MPH in that last 150-yard braking zone).