That question reads somewhat like "so when did you start beating your wife?" - at least for Clinton. There was that whole Balkan involvement clusterfuck: implicit involvement in the genocide and various other crimes is almost a given on account of doing too little, too late, and then going about it in a way which really didn't do much more than blow shit up and spend tax payer money. Really, it was a show for the news: "Look, we're fighting war and our troops aren't dying!"
If you consider Iran/Contra, then Regan is on the hook, too. But I'd argue that's more of a political event than war.
GP is correct; lithium isn't radioactive, not sure why I wrote that. Was probably thinking of the limited lifespan of a lithium battery (on account of its short half-life and general instability).
But you're incorrect: lithium ion batteries have (best case scenario) a charge efficiency of 80-90%. On top of that, this efficiency level diminishes significantly as the battery pack gets "old" (ie over 2.5 years or so) or the battery pack is subjected to "extreme" temperatures (pretty much anything under 32F or over 110F). Combine this with lithium ion's cycle life limitations and their intended use when in vehicles, and you're faced with a lose-lose situation: the pack will die progressively whether the vehicle is driven or not, regardless of driving conditions or frequency of driving.
Brushless motors are a good idea, particularly when driven directly from an alternator behind a diesel turbine ICE, I think. Such setups have shown themselves to be very efficient. It's just the stupidity of using lossy batteries for the task which baffles the bejesus out of me: why could anyone with a scientific background think this is even a remotely good idea, never mind a preferable alternative to an ICE?
Sorry, you gave the impression that you were talking about a larger vehicle when you said "family with all of their stuff" - not a sedan.
Yes, a sedan can hold a family for a drive across town or a trip to the park. A sedan can not take a family on a trip with any degree of comfort, even a family of small people. Just forget that trip to Grandma's across the state: it's going to be a miserable experience.
Even going shopping with the kids will also be approaching-impossible in a sedan. They're too small unless you're only shopping for part of a week or plan to routinely stack things on top of your children.
It is humorous that you'd consider a Jetta, Golf, or especially an Audi a 'family vehicle'. (It's additionally almost humorous that fueleconomy.gov considers the Prius a 'family sedan', when it's barely fit for toodling two about in the front, nevermind the back - failing both the 'family' and 'sedan' descriptions miserably).
Note: most of those vehicles are compact cars. No idea why fueleconomy.gov is wrong on this, other than possibly gov't fuel economy pressure put on manufacturers to mis-classify:
These vehicles offer little more room than a Honda Accord. They don't fit even half a family's weekly probable use cases: sports games, grocery shopping, weekend outings, overnight road trips or longer day trips, etc.
What you're realistically looking at for a new family vehicle these days is a station wagon, an SUV, van/minivan or the like. You're going to be able to get in the mid-20s with some of these, but not over 30 without (as you say) hybrid crap.
The alternative to one of these larger vehicles is to say, "Sorry kids, we can't go to this weekend: our car isn't big enough for all of us." You're not going to fit beach chairs and a cooler in the trunk of one of these compact cars along with 2 adults and 2 kids; not unless they're very small kids (which, naturally, stack easily).
Any 4 cylinder petrol ICE with 2.0L or less displacement can get close to 30mpg, if the car manufacturer is trying. Anything bigger than that (engine size) - you have to resort to fancy tricks like hybrid or what have you.
Not quite: you're not going to get anything near that with a vehicle that can be used for more than general commuting. Need to throw a bike in the back? Want to give a friend a ride? Weekend camping trip? All quite difficult in the vehicles you list (except maybe the Chevy Malibu, ironically; it used to be considered a very small car).
I personally think that the hybrid thing is a bad idea (good for the producers, not so good for the purchaser), and for any length of driving beyond commuting, the hybrids don't seem to do so well on the gas mileage - especially once you jump up to what they're calling an SUV now (and would've been in the same category as the Chevy Tracker 10 years ago).
Please do keep in mind that I live in the upper Western US and not (as some word use in your post suggests) in Europe or a more urbanized locale. Going anywhere means driving for at least 20 minutes; with small kids, that means an hour or two minimum for even a small task. So a cooler along is always a necessity, and things just get worse from there on out (coloring books, worksheets, toys, etc.)
Somehow, I don't think a transmission at 980k miles (which has been driven for its entire life in that same fashion) is going to exhibit any problems due to not clutching; it would have done so much sooner if that were the case.
I generally upgrade my video card twice as often as my CPU. If this becomes the norm then eventually I'll either get bottlenecked or have to waste money on something I don't really need.
That depends: do you buy Intel or AMD processors, currently?
Because if you buy Intel processors, I can see your point (and the reason behind not frequently upgrading your CPU): CPU upgrades are costly if the socket changes with every upgrade, requiring a new board at the same time. With AMD processors, however, they've retained the same basic socket for quite some time (to negligible performance detriment and the ability to upgrade components largely independently). This is Good Design on their part.
If they continue to do this paired with the GPCPU, it'll arguably not be that different, and you might even save some money by getting a small incremental CPU upgrade when you upgrade the chip for increased graphics processing. Your board will (may) be cheaper due to not needing a PCI bus for extra cards at all (as a graphics card is often the only add-on most people put in their systems, these days). And on and on...
I have to hand it to the guy for coming up with a very clever implementation. This is why we need to support the math, science and physics departments everywhere, because in the end, the world is a physical place and the countries who prosper the most will be the ones with the most technologically up-to-date innovators.
Yet, the innovators are usually not the "professionals" in a given field. They're the cobblers and jack-of-all-trades, as in this case: the guy is a plumber.
Seems that "professionals" of a given trade - those formally and highly schooled - tend to not be able to think outside the box. They think in a very regimented, mathematical fashion and can't see the practical, every-day applications that actually lead to innovation.
You'd gain nothing by putting this on a bike, unless you're talking about the kind that has twin Vs.
It would appear to me that this kind of transmission depends on an engine capable of high torque and low RPM power curve output. That's not the human body; a diesel ICE of some sort would be the ticket.
An electric motor with a diesel turbine engine would be more efficient than that stupid 'battery' setup.
Sure, use a battery cache, by all means; it'll allow the engine to shut off at some point. But it'll also lose 20% or more efficiency due to the additional energy required to charge the batteries.
If car companies would focus on the right range (forget about exotic expensive 150+ mpg carbon fiber hybrids that hold two people, focus on 30+mpg vehicles that hold a family and gear) they would have a LOT more impact
There are two absurdities in the above statement.
First, it's the assumption that nothing comes from focusing on high efficiency. If you can test the limits, small changes will make more variance in the results, allowing them to be more readily observed: these changes are then "back-ported" to the more common, standardized systems we know. IE, your family sedan has a lot of "race car" innovations from the last 50 years of automotive racing, and the current software on your computer was more-than-likely not made through a series of small patches and bug fixes to a 10-year-old piece of software (there were big version changes and those changes trickled back).
Second, show me a vehicle which can get 30mpg with even two people and loaded with their junk, on the market today - never mind a family (4+ people). It's not possible with a petrol ICE, at least: you're going to have to move to a diesel and a higher gear ratio capability to get highway speed efficiency.
Also:
The difference between a 15mpg car and a 25mpg car is 320 gallons of gas per year per car.
At 12k miles/year (which is supposedly fairly close to national average), that's still only a cost difference of around $1k/year in fuel at current costs. Compare that to, say, anywhere from $2400 - $12k per year for a "cheap" and efficient recent-year vehicle. If you only drive around 16 miles a day (as I do), that "used vehicle" cost is half the above quoted figure.
So yeah, I'll keep my 20-year-old oil-burning-and-leaking 14MPG Econoline, thanks. If figured in dollars (assuming a dollar of industrial construction ~ equivalent in ecological impact), the ecological damage is significantly less than moving to a new(er) vehicle. That's including the $20 or so in oil that spills from my engine each year. These people who buy a new vehicle every couple years for "good fuel efficiency" and only drive 10k-20k miles/year or so are kidding themselves: they're being horribly ecologically destructive by making new waste and not using what they've got.
With a manual, it depends a lot more on the skill of the driver at clutching.
I've got a friend who has a manual diesel with 980k miles on it. He doesn't use the clutch: he's able to 'feel' the vehicle well enough to not need it, and can shift seamlessly. It's quite the feat to watch.
That's largely due to lack of maintenance, but also due to the cheaper transmission construction.
Most people don't realize that transmission fluid needs to be flushed regularly. It may be a closed system, but it's got metal-on-metal contact, lots of heat, and a fair amount of friction. The transmission oil breaks down at a molecular level due to these high levels of heat.
I've met people who did not realize that transmission fluid even needed to be changed. I know a guy who burnt out a transmission with only 12k miles on the engine/transmission: it was a 30-year-old vehicle and the transmission fluid had not been flushed since it was first constructed. Well, guess what: petroleum products break down with age as well as heat.
You're supposed to change your tranny fluid approximately every 20-40k miles, depending on the vehicle, how it's been driven, and so on. A good transmission (Mercedes) could probably go 100k without changing; a bad one would likely need it every 20k, and still not last all that long (1990s Ford Taurus).
You're supposed to change your fuel pump filter every year or 10k miles, too. I'm sure there are vehicles out there with over 100k that have never had it done and still running fine (due to the use of different fuel tank materials that don't rust, I'd suspect).
It would seem to me that this is an ideal application for a (diesel) turbine engine. A turbine has very consistent RPM/torque output: this is why, despite its efficiency, they have not been used in vehicles with any regularity.
If you could "seamlessly clutch" from "stopped" to full speed, back to "stopped" and then into reverse all while remaining at a consistent, low RPM, you'd have the perfect transmission for a diesel turbine. Very exciting! We might be able to significantly increase the petroleum efficiency of our new production ICE vehicles without being dependent on expensive, radioactive, inefficient rare-earth metals! (That's only a very short-term solution, anyway: it'll only last a couple years longer until people realize the overall cost is significantly higher.)
Furthermore, it looks like this transmission might be easily shoehorned into existing (low-RPM) diesel vehicles and realize a performance increase, provided it's not an inefficient design - the video looks like it's got fewer points for energy loss than a traditional shifting transmission, at any rate.
Windows (and Linux) users exhibit it too; the degree of smugness seems to be proportionate to the degree of difficulty and level of esoterica: the harder and less common it is, the more smugness.
Windows users who can reinstall Windows have gotten significantly less smug in the last couple years on account of Windows 7, I've noticed. No longer is a reinstall an all-day affair: it's 20 minutes from a fast flash drive and one or two clicks. Grandma can do it with a little coaching. Contrast this to 10 years ago, when it was an exercise in black magic.
The more competent (and, by proxy, more smug) Windows users have since moved to Ubuntu and OS X: they can still have their elitist superiority through the oddity of "look what I can do"/"look what I have". Linux zealots have either moved on to other things (*BSD, OS X) to preserve their smugness and elitism or they've matured to adulthood. It's a vicious circle of life.
You can stall a modern vehicle with a microwave gun:
Given this (fairly widely known) vulnerability, I'd suspect that the Presidential Motorcade is EMP shielded (with a Faraday cage, or what have you). I know Air Force One is, so why not the (highly customized) motorcade?
I suspect the Faraday would inhibit the use of remote detonation devices as well (which is, essentially, what this device would be). And I don't doubt they sweep the vehicle for tell-tale signals or receivers.
They're kinda over-hyping their abilities (and the required effort) to do this, aren't they?
You can buy an OBDII scanner and the requisite (clicky Windows) software to do this for around $60. The most difficult part of altering the operation parameters of a vehicle is finding the port to gain access.
Despite FreeBSD now having version 13 implementation of ZFS in 7.3 and 8.0 RELEASE, it's still a complete gongshow. (I'd argue that's largely the case with FreeBSD methods in general - lacking "best practices" and all that, but I'm sure I'd get flamed.)
In the 7.x releases, there's support for ZFS. It works, mostly, with some cryptic kernel loader configuration changes to set memory allocation and the like - provided you've got at least 4GB of RAM. Otherwise, expect instability and file loss.
In 8.0 RELEASE, this situation has been much improved. Except there's still no ability to boot from ZFS directly, and so you're stuck with a half-assed kludge. The workable technique of booting from USB devices in 7.x no longer is on account of the "new and improved" USB stack which uh, isn't improved on account of it barely ever working properly (storage doesn't get recognized, devices falling off the bus, little stuff). Oh yeah, and the "needs 4GB of RAM, or else" issue is still there, though in light of everything else is relatively minor.
but simple components assembled in complex ways are generally more trust-worthy than complex components assembled in simple ways.
This is (probably?) true. At least it sounds true.:)
It doesn't hold true for XFS (I seem to recall the code was reasonably complex), but I've heard it holds true for ZFS. The first release of ZFS was incredibly small/few lines of code, and it's really not all that large as it sits today.
In fact, going back to the early XFS days (when SGI released Red Hat installers and even a few releases before), I found XFS to be much more stable and much more reliable than reiserfs, even though reiserfs has been around longer and was considered mainstream.
I started using XFS in the summer of 2000 on Linux (this was at least 6 months before reiserfs was released). I started building servers with it (Debian, of course) in the spring of 2001. In that time, I've had a total of two problems with it: one was due to corruption caused by the disk controller and the other caused by a bad power supply: neither resulted in filesystem loss or irreparable damage, but the power supply glitching came close.
In my experience, XFS has been more stable than the extended filesystems as well - though ext2 is pretty decent and seems to just keep ticking, but suffers from more actual problems. I had to laugh when so-called knowledgeable people were using reiserfs, only to later get bit in the ass by its stability issues: lost files, corruption, and filesystems simply disappearing (oh joy).
As for the topic at hand... I'm still running XFS (and ZFS on FreeBSD). I will likely jump to btrfs once a sufficient period of time passes that I don't hear of problems: the Linux kernel developers have not, historically, proven to be all that good at designing a stable and well-performing filesystem, so my trust for their competence is somewhat low in that regard.
Yeah, but they did it "accidentally". That's like accidentally slipping and putting your dick in someone's vagina: mapping APs and associating the traffic going through them does not occur without intention.
It's not a "joke" in the traditional sense. There's a turn of phrase for what you'd classify this type of humor, but I can't recall what it is.
What makes it funny is that it's a humorous abortion of something we (some people) encounter in every-day life - it's hyperbolic. It takes the benign and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity, making people realize how absurd the benign is. At its crudest level, it's similar to something like stickdeath.com (that still around?) Far Side does this (commenting on the social events of dinosaurs, single cell organisms, etc.); Calvin and Hobbes did this (his wild forays into imagination).
Case in point: http://xkcd.com/705/
Yes, it's got a substantial cultural reference. But it just happens that I read this on a day after a marathon of "omg it's broken" and Die Hard is my favorite movie. So I laughed, because I could relate and the context soothed my soul.
Humor is funny: not everyone thinks the same thing qualifies as either.
You may recall that in 2008, rather than risk that a large piece of a failing spy satellite would fall on populated areas, the government blasted it out of the sky.
That may have been the excuse that was given, but that was most certainly not the actual reason as anyone with half a brain might be able to conclude.
It's a spy satellite. It likely has a lot of single-purpose hardware in it which, if it were to fall into enemy hands (or any hands,really) could be reverse engineered to either be used against us in their own equipment or used to decipher and disrupt our existing satellites. Falling in the Pacific, where it might be more difficult to retrieve quickly/before someone else and there is a negligible "populated" area adds to this line of reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
That question reads somewhat like "so when did you start beating your wife?" - at least for Clinton. There was that whole Balkan involvement clusterfuck: implicit involvement in the genocide and various other crimes is almost a given on account of doing too little, too late, and then going about it in a way which really didn't do much more than blow shit up and spend tax payer money. Really, it was a show for the news: "Look, we're fighting war and our troops aren't dying!"
If you consider Iran/Contra, then Regan is on the hook, too. But I'd argue that's more of a political event than war.
GP is correct; lithium isn't radioactive, not sure why I wrote that. Was probably thinking of the limited lifespan of a lithium battery (on account of its short half-life and general instability).
But you're incorrect: lithium ion batteries have (best case scenario) a charge efficiency of 80-90%. On top of that, this efficiency level diminishes significantly as the battery pack gets "old" (ie over 2.5 years or so) or the battery pack is subjected to "extreme" temperatures (pretty much anything under 32F or over 110F). Combine this with lithium ion's cycle life limitations and their intended use when in vehicles, and you're faced with a lose-lose situation: the pack will die progressively whether the vehicle is driven or not, regardless of driving conditions or frequency of driving.
Brushless motors are a good idea, particularly when driven directly from an alternator behind a diesel turbine ICE, I think. Such setups have shown themselves to be very efficient. It's just the stupidity of using lossy batteries for the task which baffles the bejesus out of me: why could anyone with a scientific background think this is even a remotely good idea, never mind a preferable alternative to an ICE?
Sorry, you gave the impression that you were talking about a larger vehicle when you said "family with all of their stuff" - not a sedan.
Yes, a sedan can hold a family for a drive across town or a trip to the park. A sedan can not take a family on a trip with any degree of comfort, even a family of small people. Just forget that trip to Grandma's across the state: it's going to be a miserable experience.
Even going shopping with the kids will also be approaching-impossible in a sedan. They're too small unless you're only shopping for part of a week or plan to routinely stack things on top of your children.
It is humorous that you'd consider a Jetta, Golf, or especially an Audi a 'family vehicle'. (It's additionally almost humorous that fueleconomy.gov considers the Prius a 'family sedan', when it's barely fit for toodling two about in the front, nevermind the back - failing both the 'family' and 'sedan' descriptions miserably).
Note: most of those vehicles are compact cars. No idea why fueleconomy.gov is wrong on this, other than possibly gov't fuel economy pressure put on manufacturers to mis-classify:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(automobile)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_car
These vehicles offer little more room than a Honda Accord. They don't fit even half a family's weekly probable use cases: sports games, grocery shopping, weekend outings, overnight road trips or longer day trips, etc.
What you're realistically looking at for a new family vehicle these days is a station wagon, an SUV, van/minivan or the like. You're going to be able to get in the mid-20s with some of these, but not over 30 without (as you say) hybrid crap.
The alternative to one of these larger vehicles is to say, "Sorry kids, we can't go to this weekend: our car isn't big enough for all of us." You're not going to fit beach chairs and a cooler in the trunk of one of these compact cars along with 2 adults and 2 kids; not unless they're very small kids (which, naturally, stack easily).
Any 4 cylinder petrol ICE with 2.0L or less displacement can get close to 30mpg, if the car manufacturer is trying. Anything bigger than that (engine size) - you have to resort to fancy tricks like hybrid or what have you.
Not quite: you're not going to get anything near that with a vehicle that can be used for more than general commuting. Need to throw a bike in the back? Want to give a friend a ride? Weekend camping trip? All quite difficult in the vehicles you list (except maybe the Chevy Malibu, ironically; it used to be considered a very small car).
I personally think that the hybrid thing is a bad idea (good for the producers, not so good for the purchaser), and for any length of driving beyond commuting, the hybrids don't seem to do so well on the gas mileage - especially once you jump up to what they're calling an SUV now (and would've been in the same category as the Chevy Tracker 10 years ago).
Please do keep in mind that I live in the upper Western US and not (as some word use in your post suggests) in Europe or a more urbanized locale. Going anywhere means driving for at least 20 minutes; with small kids, that means an hour or two minimum for even a small task. So a cooler along is always a necessity, and things just get worse from there on out (coloring books, worksheets, toys, etc.)
Somehow, I don't think a transmission at 980k miles (which has been driven for its entire life in that same fashion) is going to exhibit any problems due to not clutching; it would have done so much sooner if that were the case.
Per chance he's just That Good?
I generally upgrade my video card twice as often as my CPU. If this becomes the norm then eventually I'll either get bottlenecked or have to waste money on something I don't really need.
That depends: do you buy Intel or AMD processors, currently?
Because if you buy Intel processors, I can see your point (and the reason behind not frequently upgrading your CPU): CPU upgrades are costly if the socket changes with every upgrade, requiring a new board at the same time. With AMD processors, however, they've retained the same basic socket for quite some time (to negligible performance detriment and the ability to upgrade components largely independently). This is Good Design on their part.
If they continue to do this paired with the GPCPU, it'll arguably not be that different, and you might even save some money by getting a small incremental CPU upgrade when you upgrade the chip for increased graphics processing. Your board will (may) be cheaper due to not needing a PCI bus for extra cards at all (as a graphics card is often the only add-on most people put in their systems, these days). And on and on...
I have to hand it to the guy for coming up with a very clever implementation. This is why we need to support the math, science and physics departments everywhere, because in the end, the world is a physical place and the countries who prosper the most will be the ones with the most technologically up-to-date innovators.
Yet, the innovators are usually not the "professionals" in a given field. They're the cobblers and jack-of-all-trades, as in this case: the guy is a plumber.
Seems that "professionals" of a given trade - those formally and highly schooled - tend to not be able to think outside the box. They think in a very regimented, mathematical fashion and can't see the practical, every-day applications that actually lead to innovation.
You'd gain nothing by putting this on a bike, unless you're talking about the kind that has twin Vs.
It would appear to me that this kind of transmission depends on an engine capable of high torque and low RPM power curve output. That's not the human body; a diesel ICE of some sort would be the ticket.
An electric motor with a diesel turbine engine would be more efficient than that stupid 'battery' setup.
Sure, use a battery cache, by all means; it'll allow the engine to shut off at some point. But it'll also lose 20% or more efficiency due to the additional energy required to charge the batteries.
If car companies would focus on the right range (forget about exotic expensive 150+ mpg carbon fiber hybrids that hold two people, focus on 30+mpg vehicles that hold a family and gear) they would have a LOT more impact
There are two absurdities in the above statement.
First, it's the assumption that nothing comes from focusing on high efficiency. If you can test the limits, small changes will make more variance in the results, allowing them to be more readily observed: these changes are then "back-ported" to the more common, standardized systems we know. IE, your family sedan has a lot of "race car" innovations from the last 50 years of automotive racing, and the current software on your computer was more-than-likely not made through a series of small patches and bug fixes to a 10-year-old piece of software (there were big version changes and those changes trickled back).
Second, show me a vehicle which can get 30mpg with even two people and loaded with their junk, on the market today - never mind a family (4+ people). It's not possible with a petrol ICE, at least: you're going to have to move to a diesel and a higher gear ratio capability to get highway speed efficiency.
Also:
The difference between a 15mpg car and a 25mpg car is 320 gallons of gas per year per car.
At 12k miles/year (which is supposedly fairly close to national average), that's still only a cost difference of around $1k/year in fuel at current costs. Compare that to, say, anywhere from $2400 - $12k per year for a "cheap" and efficient recent-year vehicle. If you only drive around 16 miles a day (as I do), that "used vehicle" cost is half the above quoted figure.
So yeah, I'll keep my 20-year-old oil-burning-and-leaking 14MPG Econoline, thanks. If figured in dollars (assuming a dollar of industrial construction ~ equivalent in ecological impact), the ecological damage is significantly less than moving to a new(er) vehicle. That's including the $20 or so in oil that spills from my engine each year. These people who buy a new vehicle every couple years for "good fuel efficiency" and only drive 10k-20k miles/year or so are kidding themselves: they're being horribly ecologically destructive by making new waste and not using what they've got.
With a manual, it depends a lot more on the skill of the driver at clutching.
I've got a friend who has a manual diesel with 980k miles on it. He doesn't use the clutch: he's able to 'feel' the vehicle well enough to not need it, and can shift seamlessly. It's quite the feat to watch.
I've seen someone smoking, talking on their cell, and holding a cup of coffee - all while driving. That's skill.
That's largely due to lack of maintenance, but also due to the cheaper transmission construction.
Most people don't realize that transmission fluid needs to be flushed regularly. It may be a closed system, but it's got metal-on-metal contact, lots of heat, and a fair amount of friction. The transmission oil breaks down at a molecular level due to these high levels of heat.
I've met people who did not realize that transmission fluid even needed to be changed. I know a guy who burnt out a transmission with only 12k miles on the engine/transmission: it was a 30-year-old vehicle and the transmission fluid had not been flushed since it was first constructed. Well, guess what: petroleum products break down with age as well as heat.
You're supposed to change your tranny fluid approximately every 20-40k miles, depending on the vehicle, how it's been driven, and so on. A good transmission (Mercedes) could probably go 100k without changing; a bad one would likely need it every 20k, and still not last all that long (1990s Ford Taurus).
You're supposed to change your fuel pump filter every year or 10k miles, too. I'm sure there are vehicles out there with over 100k that have never had it done and still running fine (due to the use of different fuel tank materials that don't rust, I'd suspect).
It would seem to me that this is an ideal application for a (diesel) turbine engine. A turbine has very consistent RPM/torque output: this is why, despite its efficiency, they have not been used in vehicles with any regularity.
If you could "seamlessly clutch" from "stopped" to full speed, back to "stopped" and then into reverse all while remaining at a consistent, low RPM, you'd have the perfect transmission for a diesel turbine. Very exciting! We might be able to significantly increase the petroleum efficiency of our new production ICE vehicles without being dependent on expensive, radioactive, inefficient rare-earth metals! (That's only a very short-term solution, anyway: it'll only last a couple years longer until people realize the overall cost is significantly higher.)
Furthermore, it looks like this transmission might be easily shoehorned into existing (low-RPM) diesel vehicles and realize a performance increase, provided it's not an inefficient design - the video looks like it's got fewer points for energy loss than a traditional shifting transmission, at any rate.
Windows (and Linux) users exhibit it too; the degree of smugness seems to be proportionate to the degree of difficulty and level of esoterica: the harder and less common it is, the more smugness.
Windows users who can reinstall Windows have gotten significantly less smug in the last couple years on account of Windows 7, I've noticed. No longer is a reinstall an all-day affair: it's 20 minutes from a fast flash drive and one or two clicks. Grandma can do it with a little coaching. Contrast this to 10 years ago, when it was an exercise in black magic.
The more competent (and, by proxy, more smug) Windows users have since moved to Ubuntu and OS X: they can still have their elitist superiority through the oddity of "look what I can do"/"look what I have". Linux zealots have either moved on to other things (*BSD, OS X) to preserve their smugness and elitism or they've matured to adulthood. It's a vicious circle of life.
FreeBSD devs are assholes. Why would they call their development trunk 'stable'?
where Steven Seagal jumps onto the moving out-of-control-VIP-car
With or without his wheelchair? Either way, that's impressive!
You can stall a modern vehicle with a microwave gun:
Given this (fairly widely known) vulnerability, I'd suspect that the Presidential Motorcade is EMP shielded (with a Faraday cage, or what have you). I know Air Force One is, so why not the (highly customized) motorcade?
I suspect the Faraday would inhibit the use of remote detonation devices as well (which is, essentially, what this device would be). And I don't doubt they sweep the vehicle for tell-tale signals or receivers.
They're kinda over-hyping their abilities (and the required effort) to do this, aren't they?
You can buy an OBDII scanner and the requisite (clicky Windows) software to do this for around $60. The most difficult part of altering the operation parameters of a vehicle is finding the port to gain access.
Despite FreeBSD now having version 13 implementation of ZFS in 7.3 and 8.0 RELEASE, it's still a complete gongshow. (I'd argue that's largely the case with FreeBSD methods in general - lacking "best practices" and all that, but I'm sure I'd get flamed.)
In the 7.x releases, there's support for ZFS. It works, mostly, with some cryptic kernel loader configuration changes to set memory allocation and the like - provided you've got at least 4GB of RAM. Otherwise, expect instability and file loss.
In 8.0 RELEASE, this situation has been much improved. Except there's still no ability to boot from ZFS directly, and so you're stuck with a half-assed kludge. The workable technique of booting from USB devices in 7.x no longer is on account of the "new and improved" USB stack which uh, isn't improved on account of it barely ever working properly (storage doesn't get recognized, devices falling off the bus, little stuff). Oh yeah, and the "needs 4GB of RAM, or else" issue is still there, though in light of everything else is relatively minor.
How's a linux user supposed to retain their air of smug supperiority if the average schmoe can install it.
Become a FreeBSD user, of course. Or was that a rhetorical question? Have you ever met a FreeBSD user?
but simple components assembled in complex ways are generally more trust-worthy than complex components assembled in simple ways.
This is (probably?) true. At least it sounds true. :)
It doesn't hold true for XFS (I seem to recall the code was reasonably complex), but I've heard it holds true for ZFS. The first release of ZFS was incredibly small/few lines of code, and it's really not all that large as it sits today.
In fact, going back to the early XFS days (when SGI released Red Hat installers and even a few releases before), I found XFS to be much more stable and much more reliable than reiserfs, even though reiserfs has been around longer and was considered mainstream.
I started using XFS in the summer of 2000 on Linux (this was at least 6 months before reiserfs was released). I started building servers with it (Debian, of course) in the spring of 2001. In that time, I've had a total of two problems with it: one was due to corruption caused by the disk controller and the other caused by a bad power supply: neither resulted in filesystem loss or irreparable damage, but the power supply glitching came close.
In my experience, XFS has been more stable than the extended filesystems as well - though ext2 is pretty decent and seems to just keep ticking, but suffers from more actual problems. I had to laugh when so-called knowledgeable people were using reiserfs, only to later get bit in the ass by its stability issues: lost files, corruption, and filesystems simply disappearing (oh joy).
As for the topic at hand... I'm still running XFS (and ZFS on FreeBSD). I will likely jump to btrfs once a sufficient period of time passes that I don't hear of problems: the Linux kernel developers have not, historically, proven to be all that good at designing a stable and well-performing filesystem, so my trust for their competence is somewhat low in that regard.
Yeah, but they did it "accidentally". That's like accidentally slipping and putting your dick in someone's vagina: mapping APs and associating the traffic going through them does not occur without intention.
It's not a "joke" in the traditional sense. There's a turn of phrase for what you'd classify this type of humor, but I can't recall what it is.
What makes it funny is that it's a humorous abortion of something we (some people) encounter in every-day life - it's hyperbolic. It takes the benign and exaggerates it to the point of absurdity, making people realize how absurd the benign is. At its crudest level, it's similar to something like stickdeath.com (that still around?) Far Side does this (commenting on the social events of dinosaurs, single cell organisms, etc.); Calvin and Hobbes did this (his wild forays into imagination).
Case in point: http://xkcd.com/705/
Yes, it's got a substantial cultural reference. But it just happens that I read this on a day after a marathon of "omg it's broken" and Die Hard is my favorite movie. So I laughed, because I could relate and the context soothed my soul.
Humor is funny: not everyone thinks the same thing qualifies as either.
You, sir, have entirely too much faith in your fellow man and human nature in general.
Human nature is to do the easy, quick thing that gets desirable results. It's only the pedantic and slightly OCD geek who does otherwise.
(Thank God for the pedantic, OCD geek, or nothing would ever be done right.)
You may recall that in 2008, rather than risk that a large piece of a failing spy satellite would fall on populated areas, the government blasted it out of the sky.
That may have been the excuse that was given, but that was most certainly not the actual reason as anyone with half a brain might be able to conclude.
It's a spy satellite. It likely has a lot of single-purpose hardware in it which, if it were to fall into enemy hands (or any hands,really) could be reverse engineered to either be used against us in their own equipment or used to decipher and disrupt our existing satellites. Falling in the Pacific, where it might be more difficult to retrieve quickly/before someone else and there is a negligible "populated" area adds to this line of reasoning.