Well, I would think it would depend entirely on the transmission. The WS6 (assuming the six speed manual with 3.42:1 rear gears) is geared to compensate for its weight and the Ram Air would make the power of the two cars similar at speed (assuming the Eclipse is turbo and all 350hp are not available off-idle.) If the Eclipse is still geared to be a soft riding, automatic shifting, light weight street cruiser it might have a hard time putting that 350 to good use in which case the AWD is nothing but a power drain. If that's the case it's going to come down to the driver. If the Eclipse is geared right, it's going to lay the smack down _HARD_ on the T/A no matter who's driving it. Problem with ricers, though, is that you can never tell if the builder actually thought things through before buying the parts. (Well, that's not entirely true. In most cases you can tell they didn't.)
You know what the funny thing is? I never get to race the rice boys in my T/A or my Charger. They won't take the bait. The only ones I get around here will only try to race me when I'm in my honey's Intrepid. When I go to the dragstrip, they won't even line up with me on test/tune runs. I guess that goes to show what fabulous machines they're driving.:)
But in any case, those aren't chicks. They're high school girls. Stupid kids. You wouldn't want one anyway. They'd be spending the whole night on their cell phones coordinating outfits with their other high school girl friends so that they could all match eachother _AND_ their boyfriends' cars. Real chicks dig the T/A. As my honey says: "They're just sexy cars".
What? It's better to get into a traffic accident? *sheesh* What is this world coming to? You know, in the situation he's talking about the prize for this kind of stupidity isn't a scratched bumper and hurt feelings. It can be a mangled body, a car that catches fire (rear end of the car is the absolute worst place to take an impact of this magnitude. Many cars *COUGH*MUSTANG*COUGH* gush fuel from the slighest tap in this area.) Any rear wheel drive car risks fishtailing into the next lane and causing further problems for people who have nothing to do with your dumb decision if the impact isn't perfectly square. A head-on or side impact collision is likely to give you whiplash. A rear-ender can just snap your neck and leave you dead. Believe me. It happened to a friend of mine. When the car stops moving forward suddenly, you hit the seatbelt and stretch it to lose energy. When the car suddenly lurches forward, your first impact with the car is from the seat hitting you. A lot of cars don't have proper headrests, or they don't work well, or they're misadjusted. head moves backward at 90 degrees to the spine which is held in place by the seat, and *SNAP* welcome to your wheelchair if you're lucky. I just hope you don't end up in front of me because I don't want to live with that on my conciense if you jam the brakes to give some guy who doesn't know how to merge the right of way.
I've already taken them several times at the request of the DoT.:D Of course, that was ten years ago when I was admittedly much more of an idiot than I am now.(I hope)
Defensive driving courses can be boiled down to two sentances:
1) pay attention to everything you can see (if this isn't common sense by now, we're all in trouble)
2) if it looks like something "bad" is going to happen, slow down.
That's it. That's defensive driving in a nutshell. Unfortunately, it only works if everyone is doing it, or if nothing ever happens that you couldn't see in advance.
You know what? An awful lot of the other people on the road _ARE_ dicks. You can tell which ones are, and which ones aren't. You can spot them a mile (or more, litterally) away. You can tell who's going to try to fit in the gap between you and the car in front of you and who is not. You can tell when it is safer to close that gap up a bit and not give them the chance than to let them in. Am I an expert driver? Well, I don't know. How does one rate that? I've gotten out of some seriously bad situations. Situations that left me shaking and jittery for at least a day. I've kept my car on the road on ice and snow against all odds. I've been in cars with others who were not able to do so. I, too, drive with wife and kids in the car and anything that prevents anyone else's car from making contact with mine is justified in my book. I spend about a thousand hours a year in my car. on average. Used to be a lot more, but I commute by train a lot now. I've been doing so for eleven years. I've driven through blizards, ice storms, rain, fog so thick you couldn't see the end of your hood... you name it. I drove an RV through a tornado on a road trip through Kentucky with the wife and kids asleep in back. I've had semis nearly run me off the road. I've been driving down the highway minding my own business and suddenly there's a Cadillac Eldorado sideways in my lane about 20' in front of me. I've been around the block once or twice and seen some shit. I've come out of more ugly situations that should have left me dead than any one should ever have to deal with.
It may very well be that in driving your cute little kids around your cute little neighborhood in your cute little minivan you don't find yourself in the wide variety of situations others do. If that's the case, GREAT! It sounds like you wouldn't handle them very well anyway, so both you and the roads I travel are safer for it. Those of us who are out here doing it for hours a day every day know that there are too many situations to sit and make a blanket statement about how to deal with them all.
As for your insanely accurate intuition:
0 for 3, and if you grew up the only "city-slicker" computer nerd in a town where the one and only black kid got a cross burned in his yard more than once, you'd probably understand. Out-of-control rednecks? Yeah. Absolutely. Willing to kill, or at least hospitalize someone for being different? Yup. Likely to catch my ass? nope. not a chance. Not a single one of those hicks could keep up on a winding gravel road.:D
The 400cid Trans-Am that I built went a long way to keeping me alive. It could outrun any pickup truck out there.:D Of course, this was before the ford lightening. Real shame when that car got hit by a train. Of course, that's just yet another freakish thing I survived but shouldn't have.
I'm guessing you have not been in your fair share of accidents. The kinds of accidents you would choose to involve yourself in are still lethal, enough, or at best a good way to ruin vast chunks of your life. The odds of having a traffic accident at the posted speed limit (in most places) and having a normal day the next day are nearly zero. The difference in the chance for, or type of injury does not change substantially with a ten to fifteen MPH speed difference unless you are talking speeds under five MPH and no seat belts. If that's the case, you deserve what you get. In most cases, a crash at the 35 MPH posted speed limit will not be significantly less life changing than a crash at 45 MPH. That being the case, if you see a way to avoid the crash, you avoid the damned crash. There's too much at stake any time you let two vehicles attempt to occupy the same physical space.
For example, you may be willing to take the hit, but what if the car that hits you contains an unbuckled child and you allow the accident to happen rather than take an evasive action because you are opposed to that action on principle? Whatever action prevents an accident from occuring is the right action, always.
Heh. Yeah. That's what I was taught, too. And I drive extensively in the Chicago area. You know what happens on the Dan Ryan when you increase your following distance to compensate for a tailgater? Some asshole takes the gap in front of you so now you have a tailgater _AND_ you yourself are tailgating. The situation does not improve.:( It's a shame I don't have an "obliterate" button on my dash for vaporizing the jerks who pull that stunt. Rockets from under the bumper aren't good enough. They would leave debris for me to run over. I need full scale vaporization.
Dude... Chicks don't dig the 4.6L mod motor. Chicks dig the LS1. You should sell that shitbox and get a Trans Am. Chicks dig the curvy F-bod, and it's fast to boot.
You just became my friend, my man. I've been driving hundreds if not thousands of miles a week since I was sixteen (11 years) and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the one-rule-fits-all approach taught in defensive driving courses is a sure way to get yourself killed.
I drive in all immaginable conditions in all types of passenger vehicles. I've put in my time in the city battling cabs, on the highways of rush hour traffic, on the open highway with nothing but big trucks and deer to keep me amused, backroads of all types, and each of these in every possible weather condition and the one constant is that you never know what you're going to have to do until the situation presents itself. Your car is capable of moving in four directions (five if you count stopping) and if you rule out one of those as an escape route in a dangerous situation, you cut your chances of escaping unharmed.
Here's another situation our inexperienced pal might want to consider. This happens more often than you might think. I drive a rear wheel drive car. I was leaving a gas station situated near a curve on a four lane (two each way) undivided highway frequented by semis hauling steel. The conditions were eighth-mile visibility due to falling snow with several inches on the road. I began to pull out slowly in order to keep traction. Semi appeared around the curve.
Choice one: stop where I am, hope the truck can swerve (not likely, it's got 15 tons of steel on it with a hell of a lot of inertia). Needless to say, it's not going to stop.
Choice two: slow down and become stuck in place when I lose momentum. See choice one.
Choice three: put the hammer down, get the wheels spinning, push the tach to about 4500 RPM and the speedo to about 100, hold it until I'm clear of the truck's lane, bring it down to 50 MPH then cut the wheel. Once the car starts to turn, tap the brakes to spin into my lane, then hammer down again to get enough speed that if a truck comes the other way it doesn't wipe me out from behind.
You can guess which option I chose by using context clues. Namely the fact that I'm not a grease spot on a leather seat right now. If my car was trying to guess what I was up to it would have thought I was doing between fifty and a hundred in a 45 MPH zone for nearly a minute.
There are way too many situations to say that one strategy will always keep you alive. If you don't know what all your options are, and when (and how) to use the appropriately, you will not survive. I've got driving horror stories enough to fill a book. Some times the way to safety was to swerve. Sometimes to stop. Sometimes to ballance slowing and accelerating to stay in a very small pocket. Sometimes it has even been to shut the engine off entirely. No automated system could ever react appropriately in all situations. The only way I'm going to stay alive is if I'm the one in charge.
All that said, there is yet another thing that I'll be damned if someone is going to take away from me and that's the ability to put it to the floor to get away from someone who is _not_ the police. Ever been in a car chase where someone wanted to do you bodily harm and only your ability to go like a bat out of hell has kept you in one piece? I have. I used to work in Gary, IN. I've driven through strike lines at the steel mill. I've been chased out of the ghetto. Now I work in Chicago and drive through some _nice_ (note the sarcasm) neighborhoods. I've had rednecks want to beat me down in a town of 400 people. It's happened more times that I would like to admit.
In my oppinion, the answer to preventing deadly police chases is to not engage in them. Use helicopters, use tracking devices, take your time and use your head. Don't pursue someone who's willing to risk the lives of civilians with their stupidity. The way to stop speeding is to get rid of speed limits where they don't make sense, and enforce them where they do. Of course, that doesn't make for a fancy headline so it will never happen.
WTF does time to reboot or time to defrag have to do with how fast your _CPU_ is? IIRC, when you defrag a hard drive you thrash the hell out of it while the CPU sits mostly idle. WHen you boot, you thrash the hell out of your drive while your CPU sits mostly idle. When you... Let's just say, most of the time your CPU sits mostly idle.
I have l33t z3r0 day patches! I patch before the bugs are even discovered.:)
Seriously. Yeah. Let's have a bunch of people describe for us exactly where they work and what their window of vulnerability is. That would rock. I've got paper and pencil handy.
I bet the boss of the guy who submitted this is thrilled to see this information broadcast to the whole/. crowd.
Knowing what you're talking about has never been a prerequisite for posting on slashdot, but you really do sound like a moron. The "flag pledge" is not a pledge to God. It's a pledge "to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands". The words "under God" are one of several attributes of said Republic listed in the pledge.
I don't understand why you guys are acting so surprised. Why shouldn't SCO think that? Microsoft has been doing precisely that (BSA) and they're not exactly going bankrupt, are they?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. Mod this shit funny.
Well, I would think it would depend entirely on the transmission. The WS6 (assuming the six speed manual with 3.42:1 rear gears) is geared to compensate for its weight and the Ram Air would make the power of the two cars similar at speed (assuming the Eclipse is turbo and all 350hp are not available off-idle.) If the Eclipse is still geared to be a soft riding, automatic shifting, light weight street cruiser it might have a hard time putting that 350 to good use in which case the AWD is nothing but a power drain. If that's the case it's going to come down to the driver. If the Eclipse is geared right, it's going to lay the smack down _HARD_ on the T/A no matter who's driving it. Problem with ricers, though, is that you can never tell if the builder actually thought things through before buying the parts. (Well, that's not entirely true. In most cases you can tell they didn't.)
:)
You know what the funny thing is? I never get to race the rice boys in my T/A or my Charger. They won't take the bait. The only ones I get around here will only try to race me when I'm in my honey's Intrepid. When I go to the dragstrip, they won't even line up with me on test/tune runs. I guess that goes to show what fabulous machines they're driving.
But in any case, those aren't chicks. They're high school girls. Stupid kids. You wouldn't want one anyway. They'd be spending the whole night on their cell phones coordinating outfits with their other high school girl friends so that they could all match eachother _AND_ their boyfriends' cars. Real chicks dig the T/A. As my honey says: "They're just sexy cars".
What? It's better to get into a traffic accident? *sheesh* What is this world coming to? You know, in the situation he's talking about the prize for this kind of stupidity isn't a scratched bumper and hurt feelings. It can be a mangled body, a car that catches fire (rear end of the car is the absolute worst place to take an impact of this magnitude. Many cars *COUGH*MUSTANG*COUGH* gush fuel from the slighest tap in this area.) Any rear wheel drive car risks fishtailing into the next lane and causing further problems for people who have nothing to do with your dumb decision if the impact isn't perfectly square. A head-on or side impact collision is likely to give you whiplash. A rear-ender can just snap your neck and leave you dead. Believe me. It happened to a friend of mine. When the car stops moving forward suddenly, you hit the seatbelt and stretch it to lose energy. When the car suddenly lurches forward, your first impact with the car is from the seat hitting you. A lot of cars don't have proper headrests, or they don't work well, or they're misadjusted. head moves backward at 90 degrees to the spine which is held in place by the seat, and *SNAP* welcome to your wheelchair if you're lucky. I just hope you don't end up in front of me because I don't want to live with that on my conciense if you jam the brakes to give some guy who doesn't know how to merge the right of way.
I've already taken them several times at the request of the DoT. :D Of course, that was ten years ago when I was admittedly much more of an idiot than I am now.(I hope)
Defensive driving courses can be boiled down to two sentances:
1) pay attention to everything you can see (if this isn't common sense by now, we're all in trouble)
2) if it looks like something "bad" is going to happen, slow down.
That's it. That's defensive driving in a nutshell. Unfortunately, it only works if everyone is doing it, or if nothing ever happens that you couldn't see in advance.
You know what? An awful lot of the other people on the road _ARE_ dicks. You can tell which ones are, and which ones aren't. You can spot them a mile (or more, litterally) away. You can tell who's going to try to fit in the gap between you and the car in front of you and who is not. You can tell when it is safer to close that gap up a bit and not give them the chance than to let them in. Am I an expert driver? Well, I don't know. How does one rate that? I've gotten out of some seriously bad situations. Situations that left me shaking and jittery for at least a day. I've kept my car on the road on ice and snow against all odds. I've been in cars with others who were not able to do so. I, too, drive with wife and kids in the car and anything that prevents anyone else's car from making contact with mine is justified in my book. I spend about a thousand hours a year in my car. on average. Used to be a lot more, but I commute by train a lot now. I've been doing so for eleven years. I've driven through blizards, ice storms, rain, fog so thick you couldn't see the end of your hood... you name it. I drove an RV through a tornado on a road trip through Kentucky with the wife and kids asleep in back. I've had semis nearly run me off the road. I've been driving down the highway minding my own business and suddenly there's a Cadillac Eldorado sideways in my lane about 20' in front of me. I've been around the block once or twice and seen some shit. I've come out of more ugly situations that should have left me dead than any one should ever have to deal with.
:D
:D Of course, this was before the ford lightening. Real shame when that car got hit by a train. Of course, that's just yet another freakish thing I survived but shouldn't have.
It may very well be that in driving your cute little kids around your cute little neighborhood in your cute little minivan you don't find yourself in the wide variety of situations others do. If that's the case, GREAT! It sounds like you wouldn't handle them very well anyway, so both you and the roads I travel are safer for it. Those of us who are out here doing it for hours a day every day know that there are too many situations to sit and make a blanket statement about how to deal with them all.
As for your insanely accurate intuition:
0 for 3, and if you grew up the only "city-slicker" computer nerd in a town where the one and only black kid got a cross burned in his yard more than once, you'd probably understand. Out-of-control rednecks? Yeah. Absolutely. Willing to kill, or at least hospitalize someone for being different? Yup. Likely to catch my ass? nope. not a chance. Not a single one of those hicks could keep up on a winding gravel road.
The 400cid Trans-Am that I built went a long way to keeping me alive. It could outrun any pickup truck out there.
I'm guessing you have not been in your fair share of accidents. The kinds of accidents you would choose to involve yourself in are still lethal, enough, or at best a good way to ruin vast chunks of your life. The odds of having a traffic accident at the posted speed limit (in most places) and having a normal day the next day are nearly zero. The difference in the chance for, or type of injury does not change substantially with a ten to fifteen MPH speed difference unless you are talking speeds under five MPH and no seat belts. If that's the case, you deserve what you get. In most cases, a crash at the 35 MPH posted speed limit will not be significantly less life changing than a crash at 45 MPH. That being the case, if you see a way to avoid the crash, you avoid the damned crash. There's too much at stake any time you let two vehicles attempt to occupy the same physical space.
For example, you may be willing to take the hit, but what if the car that hits you contains an unbuckled child and you allow the accident to happen rather than take an evasive action because you are opposed to that action on principle? Whatever action prevents an accident from occuring is the right action, always.
Heh. Yeah. That's what I was taught, too. And I drive extensively in the Chicago area. You know what happens on the Dan Ryan when you increase your following distance to compensate for a tailgater? Some asshole takes the gap in front of you so now you have a tailgater _AND_ you yourself are tailgating. The situation does not improve. :( It's a shame I don't have an "obliterate" button on my dash for vaporizing the jerks who pull that stunt. Rockets from under the bumper aren't good enough. They would leave debris for me to run over. I need full scale vaporization.
Dude... Chicks don't dig the 4.6L mod motor. Chicks dig the LS1. You should sell that shitbox and get a Trans Am. Chicks dig the curvy F-bod, and it's fast to boot.
You just became my friend, my man. I've been driving hundreds if not thousands of miles a week since I was sixteen (11 years) and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the one-rule-fits-all approach taught in defensive driving courses is a sure way to get yourself killed.
I drive in all immaginable conditions in all types of passenger vehicles. I've put in my time in the city battling cabs, on the highways of rush hour traffic, on the open highway with nothing but big trucks and deer to keep me amused, backroads of all types, and each of these in every possible weather condition and the one constant is that you never know what you're going to have to do until the situation presents itself. Your car is capable of moving in four directions (five if you count stopping) and if you rule out one of those as an escape route in a dangerous situation, you cut your chances of escaping unharmed.
Here's another situation our inexperienced pal might want to consider. This happens more often than you might think. I drive a rear wheel drive car. I was leaving a gas station situated near a curve on a four lane (two each way) undivided highway frequented by semis hauling steel. The conditions were eighth-mile visibility due to falling snow with several inches on the road. I began to pull out slowly in order to keep traction. Semi appeared around the curve.
Choice one: stop where I am, hope the truck can swerve (not likely, it's got 15 tons of steel on it with a hell of a lot of inertia). Needless to say, it's not going to stop.
Choice two: slow down and become stuck in place when I lose momentum. See choice one.
Choice three: put the hammer down, get the wheels spinning, push the tach to about 4500 RPM and the speedo to about 100, hold it until I'm clear of the truck's lane, bring it down to 50 MPH then cut the wheel. Once the car starts to turn, tap the brakes to spin into my lane, then hammer down again to get enough speed that if a truck comes the other way it doesn't wipe me out from behind.
You can guess which option I chose by using context clues. Namely the fact that I'm not a grease spot on a leather seat right now. If my car was trying to guess what I was up to it would have thought I was doing between fifty and a hundred in a 45 MPH zone for nearly a minute.
There are way too many situations to say that one strategy will always keep you alive. If you don't know what all your options are, and when (and how) to use the appropriately, you will not survive. I've got driving horror stories enough to fill a book. Some times the way to safety was to swerve. Sometimes to stop. Sometimes to ballance slowing and accelerating to stay in a very small pocket. Sometimes it has even been to shut the engine off entirely. No automated system could ever react appropriately in all situations. The only way I'm going to stay alive is if I'm the one in charge.
All that said, there is yet another thing that I'll be damned if someone is going to take away from me and that's the ability to put it to the floor to get away from someone who is _not_ the police. Ever been in a car chase where someone wanted to do you bodily harm and only your ability to go like a bat out of hell has kept you in one piece? I have. I used to work in Gary, IN. I've driven through strike lines at the steel mill. I've been chased out of the ghetto. Now I work in Chicago and drive through some _nice_ (note the sarcasm) neighborhoods. I've had rednecks want to beat me down in a town of 400 people. It's happened more times that I would like to admit.
In my oppinion, the answer to preventing deadly police chases is to not engage in them. Use helicopters, use tracking devices, take your time and use your head. Don't pursue someone who's willing to risk the lives of civilians with their stupidity. The way to stop speeding is to get rid of speed limits where they don't make sense, and enforce them where they do. Of course, that doesn't make for a fancy headline so it will never happen.
WTF? This didn't get modded up "+5 Fucking hilarious?"
What is this world coming to?
WTF does time to reboot or time to defrag have to do with how fast your _CPU_ is? IIRC, when you defrag a hard drive you thrash the hell out of it while the CPU sits mostly idle. WHen you boot, you thrash the hell out of your drive while your CPU sits mostly idle. When you... Let's just say, most of the time your CPU sits mostly idle.
Republicans? Okay... That does it. I'm switching to Mac.
Wait... You're saying people _read_ the articles?
Okay. Now I'm confused.
Great. Because nothing says "I take a firm stand on important issues" like wearing _fake_ leather to protest real leather.
What kind of logs are we talking about?
Nov 12 08:16:20 localhost eviltrojanz0r[27518] Installing Trojan Horse Without User's Knowledge
Nov 12 08:16:20 localhost eviltrojanz0r[27518] Beginning DDoS Attack Without User's Knowledge
Nov 12 08:16:21 localhost eviltrojanz0r[27518] Deleting Self...
I dunno, dude. I kind of doubt it.
the average peasant was a malnourished hovel dweller.
You mean, they were computer nerds?
Oh, come on! Mod this up, already! It was funny as hell.
I have l33t z3r0 day patches! I patch before the bugs are even discovered. :)
/. crowd.
Seriously. Yeah. Let's have a bunch of people describe for us exactly where they work and what their window of vulnerability is. That would rock. I've got paper and pencil handy.
I bet the boss of the guy who submitted this is thrilled to see this information broadcast to the whole
Knowing what you're talking about has never been a prerequisite for posting on slashdot, but you really do sound like a moron. The "flag pledge" is not a pledge to God. It's a pledge "to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands". The words "under God" are one of several attributes of said Republic listed in the pledge.
Wow. I never thought I'd seem the day some moron tried to equate seatbelts with the PATRIOT act. *sigh*
I don't understand why you guys are acting so surprised. Why shouldn't SCO think that? Microsoft has been doing precisely that (BSA) and they're not exactly going bankrupt, are they?
Doesn't the fact that you know what's contained in their passwords negate the security of using special characters in a password?
[obvious joke]
If they work like you, you won't get anything out of them anyway, so it's probably not worth it.
[/obvious]
This could put a great new twist on the IE vs Netscape story.
What does this have to do with the Star Trek?