The only thing more amazing than the fact that people manage time and time and time again to convince them selves that constantly increasing growth is sustainable, is the shock they get when it turns out not to be.
The only thing more amazing than that is that people bother with trading Google stock at all, since they've (since before day 1) promised that none of it will be voting and that they will never pay a dividend.
Growth? Who gives a shit!
These aren't investments. These are charitable contributions to a corporation which one can withdraw at a variable price, hopefully at a time at which others are burdened with one's own "gain."
In that instance, neither of us are "most people." We needn't include them in this discussion.
Whatever the case, I'm intrigued. Feed me some model/year data on the cars in question and I'll try to dig up who actually built the ABS systems.
(Please note that car manufacturers normally don't handle this on their own. For instance, my praised E36 BMW that I helped start this thread with, waaay up there, has a braking system (including ABS) designed and built by Ate/Teves -- not BMW. Generalizing ABS behavior by the badge on the front grill is a recipe for vagueness and unknowledge and leads to confusion instead of a well-grounded understanding.)
If I had a vehicle acting in this fashion, right from brand new, I'd have had it fixed. And if it couldn't be fixed, I'd have it lemon lawed and buy something else that actually worked.
Because frankly I only see two possibilities here: You've been unluckily stricken with a series of dangerous new vehicles, or your driving practices are garbage. And I'm trying to give you the benefit of doubt.
Fully-automated self-driving car license (trivial to get, and why not? all you have to do is keep it maintained and make sure the sensors are free of obfuscation, the rest is just a bus ride)
Semi-automated car license (similar to our current driver's license requirements) for cars that can avoid things on their own, but still need operated primarily by a human
Advanced car license (requiring comprehensive training and testing, but allowing for certain merits in consideration).
This isn't all that dissimilar from the different classes of CDL currently offered in the States.
(And I suggest this even though I'd be "forced" to undergo more training and testing to get an advanced license to keep driving my current cars. That's where the consideration comes in...)
I use traction control all winter long unless I'm out playing with the car on purpose in a closed environment, and even then I turn it on from time to time just to see how hard it is to piss off*. It hasn't caused an accident yet, let alone for 9 out of 10 times it activates due to limited-grip conditions.
What is this, "new math"? WTF are you smoking?
*: It's hard to piss off, and the maneuvers that cause it to be pissed are equally bad with it disabled: There isn't much that can correct for throttle-lift-induced oversteer other than steering appropriately and applying more throttle, and neither traction control nor lack of same does that without the driver physically pressing on the accelerator.
The solution is pretty easy: make browsers that open external programs for a link show what they are doing and exactly what the command is, and/or have steam show the same when it loads the protocol command.
Because Little Johnny knows how to grok that shit, and wants to click something other than whatever button that means "GTFO, I just want you to do the thing I told you to do, you whiny bastard infernal machine!"
But do thinner tires have less air in the real world?
Usually, wider tires have a lower sidewall profile, while skinnier tires have higher sidewalls. (This is a generalization based upon real cars and their available, and reasonable, wheel/tire combinations.)
(I'll let you sort out the math. I only mean to raise the question.)
And just a reminder that if you're driving on a REALLY slippery surface, technology and mad skillz won't save you - you're at the mercy of inertia and external forces. I've been there, and it sucks.
Indeed true, although mad skillz help some: While it may seem incongruous to some, I've found that it's possible to drive too slowly on steeply-banked curves: Gravity's a bitch.
I discovered this one icy night on a familiar curve near my house. Everything was covered in a pristine and glass-like layer of ice. I was driving very slowly and carefully, and in the middle of that curved the back end of the FWD car got sucked downhill toward the inside of the curve by gravity.
I kept the car out of the ditch with luck* alone, and all was well.
Subsequently, I began accelerating before that curve to allow some equilibrium between centripetal and gravitational forces, before gently slowing back down immediately afterward**.
This balanced the problem, and the technique has served me well on countless other steeply-banked curves in all manner of weather.
I've seen a lot of cars in that ditch. Mine won't be one of them.
*: This is what most people consider mad skillz: Surviving unscathed in what appears to be a chaotic situation. **: This is closer to mad skillz: Using experience to predict enough of the chaos beforehand that it ceases to be chaotic and instead becomes mundane.
Engine braking on cars with open differentials can allow for one tire to spin backwards in instances where one driven wheel has an abundance of grip (dry pavement) and the other doesn't (ice).
And while I must confess that this is obviously very amusing and sometimes quite fun, I'm not sure that it's very good for safety.
My work truck did this sometimes, too. The system would experience a tiny amount of wheel slip (which really does happen on gravel/ice/manhole covers, since neither tires nor suspensions are perfect), and overreact as if it had detected a large amount of wheel slip.
It would then modulate the brake for me, even though I rightly knew that it shouldn't have been doing this. And in doing so, it must modulate both front* brakes to some extent in order to prevent brake steer and the resultant unintended change of direction.
The problem was an intermittent front wheel sensor. It was replaced, with no other work performed at the same time, and things have been fine since then.
Time to grab a meter and/or a scope, along with a hammer and figure out what's up with your ABS. It's broken, and you should probably fix it...
*: It may have been doing something with the rear brakes as well, but I didn't notice this if it was. They don't do a whole hell of a lot on my vehicle.
But the shape of the contact patch is not the same. This is important because in the real world we use tires for driving, and not for static measurements.
Wider tires must push more material out of the way in order to find good purchase on squishy road surfaces, and they'll be able to utilize that purchase for a smaller percentage of a revolution than a skinny tire.
ASC+T works great on my E36 BMW with some slight modification, though it wasn't at all bad in stock form.
Pro tip... install appropriate tires prior to driving on ice. I've got a set of skinny Blizzaks that I use for winter driving, and the combination makes the E36 the most stable and predictable car I've ever driven on snow and ice. It just works.
It is sad to see the discussion take such a tangent about the way to most-successfully shoot and intruder.
Really, this is all that should be necessary: "They were in my house, uninvited, fucking my things. I shot them, and they stopped fucking with my things." Done.
If this is insufficient, then the world is broken.
I'm 33. Looking back, there is a distinct disconnect between the way I did things in a world prior to Google, and the way I do things having Google available to me.
I increasingly no longer need to memorize specifics for things, so I find that I simply don't do that much anymore (I used to be very good at it). Instead, I get to grok an fast-increasing number of abstract concepts and Google any details that are missing on an as-needed basis.
I noticed that this trend accelerated rapidly when I replaced my Palm Pilot with a Droid a few of years ago: Having a semi-proper web browser in my pocket at all times changed my life, in that it was no longer necessary (and seldom even useful) to remember details for things that I only need to do occasionally.
I'm very much a generalist at heart, so I find that this usually works quite well for me.
On the other hand, I can easily find myself crippled when I'm in the field and Internet access isn't available to me for some reason or another -- it is as if part of my brain is lobotomized.
But the point is that I don't believe that age has anything to do with this shift in thinking, but just the availability of better tools. I used to memorize details because it helped me work easier (who wants to carry around, let alone use, reference books?), and now I think abstractly because that method has become easier thanks to Google and the other things that my pocket computer does for me.
This all combines to mean that I can grasp concepts far larger than I ever could before without getting bogged down in the details of implementation, but can still implement them very well when/if the time comes (as long as I have teh Intarwebs). In other words, I get more/bigger things done than I used to, with less effort. That's a good thing, but again I think it's more a function of a shift in the available tools than that of my own steadily-increasing age.
There was a time when AOL's content was more important than the Internet?
I'm old enough to have witnessed the birth, life, and near-death of AOL, but I don't remember ever wanting an AOL connection more than a routable IP address....
I've got some rather old machines, too, which certainly still work just fine.
I have less faith in newer stuff, though. From bonding failures on video card GPUs (IIRC the Geforce 8800 was initially a timebomb), to consumer electronics failing due to bad solder joints from lead-free solder (Xbox 360 RRoD), along with bad laser diodes (early PS3), not to mention the ongoing* bad capacitor debacle: In many cases, things simply aren't as good as they used to be.
*: I had to replace some caps in my not-so-old Samsung 52" LCD awhile back. The repair only cost me $2, using tools I already had, but seriously: WTF? Stuff just dies these days.
And because it's all running on the same frequency, there will be contention.
60GHz signals don't exactly work like that. At part 15 output limits, this stuff has a hard time penetrating anything, let alone neighboring homes. In practice, it acts much more like light than the more conventional RF spectrums that we're all familiar with.
Please allow me to speculate that the only way to make such a system work (at all) without careful physical antenna alignment and an unobstructed line of sight will be sophisticated beam-forming, phased-array antenna systems that can use multipath interference to their advantage. And even then, it'll only be good for talking across the room.
Your neighbors won't be very successful in making unwanted interference on your 60GHz WLAN even if they're actively trying to.
I've started my car with things at ~-30C. It was not any more dramatic than any other time I've started it, though it did crank a rather slower (which is easily explained by the fact that lead acid batteries hate this sort of treatment).
every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are
And you know this...how exactly?
Oh, right: Based on notions conceived during your time here on Earth, you assume that this is true. But you really can't really know anything about an alien race's understanding of numerical systems (neither can I, nor anyone else).
For all I know (and I don't pretend to know much): Numerical systems may not even exist outside of this planet.
Sure they're garbage, or you wouldn't complain about them...
It saddens me a bit to hear that BMW is headed down the no-spare road. My E36 (that I bought used, and which already had good tires) included 5 matching wheels, one of which was obviously a real spare.
I've only ever needed it once, and I was very glad to have it. A hunk of steel that looked like it was designed specifically to obliterate tires got wedged into a the tread on a tire on an on-ramp in Chicago, quickly releasing the air.
Once I found a place to stop, I put it on in a few minutes time using the provided tools, and went the rest of the 400 miles to home like it never happened (aside from being pissed at the bitch in the white Audi who actively cut me off, as if intending to prevent me from merging, even though I was going -plenty- fast enough to not get in her way). Sometime later, I bought a new tire, put it on the rim (which was still fine), put it in the trunk, and tried to forget about it. There was no real drama, only inconvenience and expense.
Ironically, and back to the point: I had to drive for several miles with that ruined tire because the freeway had no shoulder. It was a bit of a slow, bumpy, right-lane-and-flashers ride and I had no shortage of onlookers honking and pointing to alert me to the problem, but at no time did the car feel unstable in any way. And by "slow," I mean: As slow as I felt I could get away with, given traffic and visibility: Between 25 and 50MPH.
On the other hand: If it were a run-flat tire, I could have theoretically gone a bit faster if I chose to, which might have been safer on that particular road at that particular time, but I'd have been totally fucked once I found a place to pull off: Trying to find an appropriate tire at 6PM+ on a Sunday in a strange place can't be a fun time, and waiting until Monday would be even less fun.
So, the score:
Good BMW for designing suspensions and controls that are apparently able to work well with a totally fucked, flat tire when necessary -- even with embedded shrapnel at 80+ MPH and a few more miles of driving at about half that speed with zero air pressure.
Bad BMW for subsequently killing the driving joy of that awesome suspension system with garbage run-flat tires.
Bad BMW for also subsequently not including a spare, or even a lightweight donut. They don't build particularly light cars to begin with: Including some manner of spare is just a drop in the bucket.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing more amazing than that is that people bother with trading Google stock at all, since they've (since before day 1) promised that none of it will be voting and that they will never pay a dividend.
Growth? Who gives a shit!
These aren't investments. These are charitable contributions to a corporation which one can withdraw at a variable price, hopefully at a time at which others are burdened with one's own "gain."
Meh: At least tulips were a product.
How is that, exactly?
Myself, I'm happy to give at least two shits toward the most meaningless concepts -- it is not as if I, myself, have any remaining use for the shit.
In that instance, neither of us are "most people." We needn't include them in this discussion.
Whatever the case, I'm intrigued. Feed me some model/year data on the cars in question and I'll try to dig up who actually built the ABS systems.
(Please note that car manufacturers normally don't handle this on their own. For instance, my praised E36 BMW that I helped start this thread with, waaay up there, has a braking system (including ABS) designed and built by Ate/Teves -- not BMW. Generalizing ABS behavior by the badge on the front grill is a recipe for vagueness and unknowledge and leads to confusion instead of a well-grounded understanding.)
I generally find that sitting on a table is very uncomfortable whether or not I am editing documents.
If I had a vehicle acting in this fashion, right from brand new, I'd have had it fixed. And if it couldn't be fixed, I'd have it lemon lawed and buy something else that actually worked.
Because frankly I only see two possibilities here: You've been unluckily stricken with a series of dangerous new vehicles, or your driving practices are garbage. And I'm trying to give you the benefit of doubt.
Nay, three levels:
Fully-automated self-driving car license (trivial to get, and why not? all you have to do is keep it maintained and make sure the sensors are free of obfuscation, the rest is just a bus ride)
Semi-automated car license (similar to our current driver's license requirements) for cars that can avoid things on their own, but still need operated primarily by a human
Advanced car license (requiring comprehensive training and testing, but allowing for certain merits in consideration).
This isn't all that dissimilar from the different classes of CDL currently offered in the States.
(And I suggest this even though I'd be "forced" to undergo more training and testing to get an advanced license to keep driving my current cars. That's where the consideration comes in...)
9 out of 10?
I use traction control all winter long unless I'm out playing with the car on purpose in a closed environment, and even then I turn it on from time to time just to see how hard it is to piss off*. It hasn't caused an accident yet, let alone for 9 out of 10 times it activates due to limited-grip conditions.
What is this, "new math"? WTF are you smoking?
*: It's hard to piss off, and the maneuvers that cause it to be pissed are equally bad with it disabled: There isn't much that can correct for throttle-lift-induced oversteer other than steering appropriately and applying more throttle, and neither traction control nor lack of same does that without the driver physically pressing on the accelerator.
Because Little Johnny knows how to grok that shit, and wants to click something other than whatever button that means "GTFO, I just want you to do the thing I told you to do, you whiny bastard infernal machine!"
(Except, he doesn't.)
But do thinner tires have less air in the real world?
Usually, wider tires have a lower sidewall profile, while skinnier tires have higher sidewalls. (This is a generalization based upon real cars and their available, and reasonable, wheel/tire combinations.)
(I'll let you sort out the math. I only mean to raise the question.)
Indeed true, although mad skillz help some: While it may seem incongruous to some, I've found that it's possible to drive too slowly on steeply-banked curves: Gravity's a bitch.
I discovered this one icy night on a familiar curve near my house. Everything was covered in a pristine and glass-like layer of ice. I was driving very slowly and carefully, and in the middle of that curved the back end of the FWD car got sucked downhill toward the inside of the curve by gravity.
I kept the car out of the ditch with luck* alone, and all was well.
Subsequently, I began accelerating before that curve to allow some equilibrium between centripetal and gravitational forces, before gently slowing back down immediately afterward**.
This balanced the problem, and the technique has served me well on countless other steeply-banked curves in all manner of weather.
I've seen a lot of cars in that ditch. Mine won't be one of them.
*: This is what most people consider mad skillz: Surviving unscathed in what appears to be a chaotic situation.
**: This is closer to mad skillz: Using experience to predict enough of the chaos beforehand that it ceases to be chaotic and instead becomes mundane.
Engine braking on cars with open differentials can allow for one tire to spin backwards in instances where one driven wheel has an abundance of grip (dry pavement) and the other doesn't (ice).
And while I must confess that this is obviously very amusing and sometimes quite fun, I'm not sure that it's very good for safety.
(Planetary gearsets are neat.)
My work truck did this sometimes, too. The system would experience a tiny amount of wheel slip (which really does happen on gravel/ice/manhole covers, since neither tires nor suspensions are perfect), and overreact as if it had detected a large amount of wheel slip.
It would then modulate the brake for me, even though I rightly knew that it shouldn't have been doing this. And in doing so, it must modulate both front* brakes to some extent in order to prevent brake steer and the resultant unintended change of direction.
The problem was an intermittent front wheel sensor. It was replaced, with no other work performed at the same time, and things have been fine since then.
Time to grab a meter and/or a scope, along with a hammer and figure out what's up with your ABS. It's broken, and you should probably fix it...
*: It may have been doing something with the rear brakes as well, but I didn't notice this if it was. They don't do a whole hell of a lot on my vehicle.
But the shape of the contact patch is not the same. This is important because in the real world we use tires for driving, and not for static measurements.
Wider tires must push more material out of the way in order to find good purchase on squishy road surfaces, and they'll be able to utilize that purchase for a smaller percentage of a revolution than a skinny tire.
ASC+T works great on my E36 BMW with some slight modification, though it wasn't at all bad in stock form.
Pro tip... install appropriate tires prior to driving on ice. I've got a set of skinny Blizzaks that I use for winter driving, and the combination makes the E36 the most stable and predictable car I've ever driven on snow and ice. It just works.
I've always been under the impression that commercially-farmed mushrooms are always grown on shit.
And much of the stuff I grow in my own garden is grown with shit. I put it there myself.
Lots of good food thrives on a diet of shit. We've been growing food this way for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
The question here is this: Should fish also be fed shit? And if they should be, would it be useful to include that information on a label?
It is sad to see the discussion take such a tangent about the way to most-successfully shoot and intruder.
Really, this is all that should be necessary: "They were in my house, uninvited, fucking my things. I shot them, and they stopped fucking with my things." Done.
If this is insufficient, then the world is broken.
I'm 33. Looking back, there is a distinct disconnect between the way I did things in a world prior to Google, and the way I do things having Google available to me.
I increasingly no longer need to memorize specifics for things, so I find that I simply don't do that much anymore (I used to be very good at it). Instead, I get to grok an fast-increasing number of abstract concepts and Google any details that are missing on an as-needed basis.
I noticed that this trend accelerated rapidly when I replaced my Palm Pilot with a Droid a few of years ago: Having a semi-proper web browser in my pocket at all times changed my life, in that it was no longer necessary (and seldom even useful) to remember details for things that I only need to do occasionally.
I'm very much a generalist at heart, so I find that this usually works quite well for me.
On the other hand, I can easily find myself crippled when I'm in the field and Internet access isn't available to me for some reason or another -- it is as if part of my brain is lobotomized.
But the point is that I don't believe that age has anything to do with this shift in thinking, but just the availability of better tools. I used to memorize details because it helped me work easier (who wants to carry around, let alone use, reference books?), and now I think abstractly because that method has become easier thanks to Google and the other things that my pocket computer does for me.
This all combines to mean that I can grasp concepts far larger than I ever could before without getting bogged down in the details of implementation, but can still implement them very well when/if the time comes (as long as I have teh Intarwebs). In other words, I get more/bigger things done than I used to, with less effort. That's a good thing, but again I think it's more a function of a shift in the available tools than that of my own steadily-increasing age.
There was a time when AOL's content was more important than the Internet?
I'm old enough to have witnessed the birth, life, and near-death of AOL, but I don't remember ever wanting an AOL connection more than a routable IP address....
I've got some rather old machines, too, which certainly still work just fine.
I have less faith in newer stuff, though. From bonding failures on video card GPUs (IIRC the Geforce 8800 was initially a timebomb), to consumer electronics failing due to bad solder joints from lead-free solder (Xbox 360 RRoD), along with bad laser diodes (early PS3), not to mention the ongoing* bad capacitor debacle: In many cases, things simply aren't as good as they used to be.
*: I had to replace some caps in my not-so-old Samsung 52" LCD awhile back. The repair only cost me $2, using tools I already had, but seriously: WTF? Stuff just dies these days.
60GHz signals don't exactly work like that. At part 15 output limits, this stuff has a hard time penetrating anything, let alone neighboring homes. In practice, it acts much more like light than the more conventional RF spectrums that we're all familiar with.
Please allow me to speculate that the only way to make such a system work (at all) without careful physical antenna alignment and an unobstructed line of sight will be sophisticated beam-forming, phased-array antenna systems that can use multipath interference to their advantage. And even then, it'll only be good for talking across the room.
Your neighbors won't be very successful in making unwanted interference on your 60GHz WLAN even if they're actively trying to.
I've started my car with things at ~-30C. It was not any more dramatic than any other time I've started it, though it did crank a rather slower (which is easily explained by the fact that lead acid batteries hate this sort of treatment).
*shrug*
And you know this...how exactly?
Oh, right: Based on notions conceived during your time here on Earth, you assume that this is true. But you really can't really know anything about an alien race's understanding of numerical systems (neither can I, nor anyone else).
For all I know (and I don't pretend to know much): Numerical systems may not even exist outside of this planet.
Next!
Linky link.
Sure they're garbage, or you wouldn't complain about them...
It saddens me a bit to hear that BMW is headed down the no-spare road. My E36 (that I bought used, and which already had good tires) included 5 matching wheels, one of which was obviously a real spare.
I've only ever needed it once, and I was very glad to have it. A hunk of steel that looked like it was designed specifically to obliterate tires got wedged into a the tread on a tire on an on-ramp in Chicago, quickly releasing the air.
Once I found a place to stop, I put it on in a few minutes time using the provided tools, and went the rest of the 400 miles to home like it never happened (aside from being pissed at the bitch in the white Audi who actively cut me off, as if intending to prevent me from merging, even though I was going -plenty- fast enough to not get in her way). Sometime later, I bought a new tire, put it on the rim (which was still fine), put it in the trunk, and tried to forget about it. There was no real drama, only inconvenience and expense.
Ironically, and back to the point: I had to drive for several miles with that ruined tire because the freeway had no shoulder. It was a bit of a slow, bumpy, right-lane-and-flashers ride and I had no shortage of onlookers honking and pointing to alert me to the problem, but at no time did the car feel unstable in any way. And by "slow," I mean: As slow as I felt I could get away with, given traffic and visibility: Between 25 and 50MPH.
On the other hand: If it were a run-flat tire, I could have theoretically gone a bit faster if I chose to, which might have been safer on that particular road at that particular time, but I'd have been totally fucked once I found a place to pull off: Trying to find an appropriate tire at 6PM+ on a Sunday in a strange place can't be a fun time, and waiting until Monday would be even less fun.
So, the score:
Good BMW for designing suspensions and controls that are apparently able to work well with a totally fucked, flat tire when necessary -- even with embedded shrapnel at 80+ MPH and a few more miles of driving at about half that speed with zero air pressure.
Bad BMW for subsequently killing the driving joy of that awesome suspension system with garbage run-flat tires.
Bad BMW for also subsequently not including a spare, or even a lightweight donut. They don't build particularly light cars to begin with: Including some manner of spare is just a drop in the bucket.
1 out of 3 ain't so good.... :(
Rule #1: If you buy a car* that has the original tires on it, replace them. They're garbage.
*: A normal car for normal duties, not a Zonda or a 458 or some such thing.