This entire comment section is filled with some of the dumbest comments I've ever seen on slashdot, but yours, good sir, outreaches them all by leaps and bounds.
Grats. That is possibly the most idiotic thing anyone will ever post on slashdot, ever. Including cleanmypc spam, gamemaker spam, GNAA spam, all of it. You win.
There's a difference between the gov't giving money to Haliburton and Solyndra.
In the former, the government was paying them for services rendered. An existing company was contracted to do a job they said they could do and they were paid for their work. In the latter, the government handed a company money in the hopes they could some day do something with it -- not payment for goods delivered or services rendered, just money and hope that it'd pay off, somehow.
Ever hear someone say "There's no such thing as bad PR"? It's a fucking lie. Interfering with my life? Bad PR. Causing problems in my life? Bad PR.
That doesn't mean the wall street chuckleheads have me on their side, but it does mean that the OWS chuckleheads don't either. Neither group has shown an ounce of compassion for their fellow man, not one iota of decency and respect for other human beings. NEITHER group.
Fuck them all. Send them all to jail. Bring out the tasers and the tear gas and fuck the whole lot. I'm fucking done with people who think they're more important than everybody else, and I don't give two shits why they think that.
Your whole deal with the Woolsworth sit-ins is bullshit; nobody was prevented from ordering food, nobody was shitting in the streets. The protesters were nonviolent, respectful, and had a clear message with a clear solution. I don't even know what the fuck your deal with crack is -- are you suggesting that you SUPPORT the efforts undertaken by the War on Drugs, specifically with regards to crack cocaine? Are you fucking mentally retarded, or just a troll piece of shit? And yep, nobody notices the homeless -- except the many shelters and soup kitchens and outreach organizations.
The message of OWS -- at least, what message you can claim they have, as it's unclear, muddled, broad, and confused -- but the general message that wall street and corporate america is run by scumbags fleecing the nation for their own personal gain? I can get behind that, and have been behind that for a hell of a lot longer than anyone camping in a park has been able to read and fucking write.
The difference is that I take action by telling people about the problem, explaining why it is a problem, how it is a problem, and admitting that there is no clear and easy solution to it but that the first step is to recognize and agree that it is a problem.
They take action by disrupting the society they purport to support, by only inconveniencing and troubling those who are not a part of the problem, by acting like misanthropic children who hold the mistaken belief that theirs is a holy crusade that forgives all sins of those who ride under its standard. Actually they're not acting like that -- they ARE that.
I kinda cringe that you and I got modded down for being reasonable folk.
I'd say this country has gone to shit but it sounds like you're from Canada, so I suppose this continent has gone to shit. Which means this world has gone to shit.
If I'm trying to just get the fuck to work so I can pay my bills, suffering a delay because some OWS chuckleheads have decided that it's a good idea to form an impromptu road block or occupy a fucking bridge is NOT going to get me to think any better of them or anything they say. It's just going to piss me off and result in me considering them nothing more than spoiled fucking selfish assholes -- which is, incidentally, what many if not most of them are. The good eggs in the bunch need to get the fuck away from that childish bullshit.
Not all their points are idiotic and bad. They did raise a few valid points. More than that, however, all they did was whine and inflict themselves upon the 99%. The 1% doesn't give a shit about them. The 99% may have at one point, but the lack of social awareness and manners of the OWS groups has done and is doing nothing to win anyone to their side.
And learn some fucking history before laying every bad thing you ever hear of at the feet of GW. I'm not going to go to bat for that man, but Free Speech Zones have been A Thing for a hell of a lot longer than you believe.
To be kind to you, here's something to learn: A protest is completely ineffective if its only means of conveying an idea or concept is to be obnoxious and annoying and inconveniencing. You might have the answer to world hunger, a source of endless free energy, but if your way of getting that information and your viewpoint across is to simply pester and disturb me? I don't give half a fuck. I'll ignore you, because your behavior leads me to believe that if you think that is a proper way to win people to your side that you are nothing but a juvenile idiot who cannot possibly have an inkling of a good idea in that stunted malformed organ you try and pass off as your brain.
There is a WORLD of difference between snooping into business practices to make sure they're on the up-and-up, and snooping into the PRIVATE LIVES of citizens.
We accept business intrusions because it ensures that businesses (well, intends to ensure..) aren't exploiting workers or insider information.
We should never, ever accept snooping into private lives -- especially when that snooping is used to punish citizens for actions that took place outside and apart from the authority punishing them.
So 12 billion a year across a wide industry, of which how many companies went bankrupt? Didn't Solyndra get 2 billion? Wasn't there a few other billion-dollar handouts to solar firms that have gone belly-up?
Government money should not be involved in the creation or propping up of business and industry. Research, yes, and if such research leads to advancements that are economically feasible and viable.. money will find and support those advancements.
Sometimes salespeople are right. Just yesterday I had a guy ask me the difference between the cheaper HDMI cables and the pricey (yes, Monster) ones.
Halfway through my impromptu lecture on conductivity and signal interference and why everything's moving from analog signals to digital, he just grabbed the monster cables and walked off.
In this case, the douche deserves to spend 50 bucks on 5 feet of HDMI cable. Fuck you, guy who isn't interested in learning something new. I've had OLD people ask the same thing, and they at least pay attention to what I'm saying even if they don't understand it entirely. This guy? I DON'T UNDERSTAND SO I'M GOING TO TELL MYSELF YOU'RE WRONG! HURK!
Space lasers would be best, actually. Here's the problem.
Nobody wants us to do that.
China is FUCKING CRAZY. China's demonstrated that they'll destroy any orbiting thing they don't like -- they "tested" their anti-satellite capabilities once, and I think were it to come down to it.. they'd do it again. Or proxy and have N. Korea launch a real satellite, er, a "real" satellite, that "accidentally" would collide with our space lasers.
Kaboom. Space is gone. They'd shatter the skies and leave so much debris orbiting our planet that we'd be stuck close to this rock for longer than you or I will live.
it's a great idea, throw lasers in space... but it's potentially disastrous.
What would be nice is if they could downsize this airborn laser and fit it into.. hmm, maybe an older, super-high-speed airframe, maybe something that's pretty hard for most nations to detect, maybe something like the SR-71 -- there's still gotta be a few of those somewhere, drag them out of mothball and replace their surveillance payload with a giant laser? It'd solve one problem, being that the time between launch detection and the end of boost phase is so short that a 747 would have to be in the area before the ICBM was launched to be useful.
Maybe just stick them in subs. Not many nations really have much of a sub fleet anymore. There's China again, sure, but... while I don't suggest underestimating China's capabilities, their shit is still made in China, yanno?
Localities also have a climate. Climate does not equal global climate. Climate is merely the weather over a significant period of time of a particular location -- your back yard has a climate, though it likely matches your neighbor's climate. Valleys have a climate different than the mountains that surround them.
In short, in your attempt to be a pedant and nitpick the headline and the summary, you have instead shown yourself a fool. A foolish fool.
30 isn't smooth. That's likely caused by the screen you're watching it on. Good old CRT's with a fast refresh rate? You could, absolutely, tell the difference between 30 and 60 and 100fps. Very clearly.
LCDs and the like, not so much, because the refresh is limited by the speed at which the pixels can change from a bright color to a dark color or back.. which means framerate gain isn't as significant as it was back when you had a CRT that was doing an honest 120 refreshes per second, from full white to black if need be.
If you're talking about a television set, they tend to muddy things even worse than a computer monitor.
It's kinda atrocious really, but nobody fucking cares anymore, so.. I'm sorta just pissing in the wind when I complain about it.
What I am saying is that many of the brightest minds in history were... peculiar. They were often obsessive, and socially maladjusted. Autism isn't a yes/no thing -- it's a differentiation of brain function, which when to a great degree does constitute a disability that makes living difficult but, when to a minor degree, imparts no great burden on a person's survival but DOES tend to make them.. well, obsessive, socially maladjusted, detail-oriented. Christ, just read about Tesla for a bit and tell me he wasn't seven kinds of fucking crazy. Depression? Yes, when it's severe, it is crippling. When it's mild, it manifests more as a tendency to expect poor outcomes, to expect bad things. To complain. You know, shit that's important to society. It's the kind of thinking that says "That'll never work, and here's why". Or maybe "this much food will never last all of us long enough".
Go check out the info on diabetes. It's not a genetic disease the same way hemophilia is -- it doesn't necessarily confer any disadvantage to reproduction (and neither does mild autism or depression), and that's the ONE AND ONLY thing that would 'breed out' a trait. If it's severe enough to prevent reproduction.
Don't be an ass and write off anything that doesn't conform to your ideas of 'normal' as abhorrent and bad. The idea of 'normal' is much broader, and much more tenuous, than you believe. Yes, severe differences can be a disability. No, more mildly they are not -- and are of use to society in a way that your concept of a 'normal' person would not be.
Actually, depression and autism are useful for the species-as-a-whole. Sure, severe depression can be crippling -- but some depression is good for society. The pessimists are the ones who tend to see what's going to go wrong, problems with ideas. Worrying about every little thing, to a degree, means every little thing won't go wrong (some still will, but compare to cheery optimists who don't take time to prepare for unfortunate eventualities).
Autism is also a benefit to society, to a degree. Sure, it can be severe, and that's not helpful -- but good grief, go pick out any famous genius from the past, read up on how strange their behavior was. PROTIP: Some of our greatest advancements in knowledge and science came from the minds of people who had strange and inexplicable obsessive habits, who were not socially apt or adapt.
In short, you're pretty much an idiot lacking any understanding of the societal benefits of diversity.
These things persist in society precisely because they were useful.
Hemophilia? Not so much -- but it's rather rare, and ~1/3 of the cases of it aren't caused by genetic inheritance but rather from random gene mutation. Diabetes? Not really genetic. There can be a genetic predisposition for it, but that doesn't really CAUSE it -- just makes it more likely to happen.
We've had thousands of years "left to nature" for undesirable traits that hinder survival to be weeded out. That these traits persist should be a pretty big fucking clue to you.
Well.. yes, of course. It's all a matter of how long a period of time the acceleration takes place over, which I don't know.
Uhm, the deceleration, on the other hand.. is a fairly known value.. and in excess of what we can handle. You'd certainly get there, though! All OVER there!
Add phosphates in dishwashing detergent to your list. Not there anymore for consumers... and now we suffer with clothes that don't get as clean and dishes that come out of the dishwasher with a film on them.
And it's something absurd like 5% of phosphate pollution is caused by residential sources. The rest is agriculture and industry. Nobody's forcing them to clean that shit up.
North Korea would cause more damage to North Korea by trying to build dummy ICBMs than it would cause damage to any other country with a WORKING ICBM -- which it still hasn't gotten right.
Cheaply made decoys? More like stationary explosion towers. That's about all their missiles are as it is, and these are the ones they CARE about getting right...
They still only made things worse for themselves by mistreating this dude. Both legally over the visa fraud, and over their retaliatory actions against dudeman.. though I'd think the latter would be a civil matter.
Those were theories bandied about by the media, not supported by any testing later conducted.
The error was with the driver.
It's sad, and it's tragic, and it should be a lesson to everyone else so it never happens again... but all the media wants to do is hype up some problem that may be affecting YOUR CAR RIGHT NOW!.. rather than say "Hey, idiots, put your car into neutral. If this guy knew it, he'd still be alive". That's not a story people want to hear.
Of course, I don't entirely trust fly-by-wire in consumer vehicles.. and have always thought it a better idea if they had a braking system more like buses and tractor trucks, where the brakes are RELEASED by positive air pressure and in the case of a failure in the braking system are engaged fully.. but of course there's issues with air brakes. Still, I'd rather the failure mode be a safe state, a loss of motion rather than a loss of control.
Regardless.. the shifting "issues" were only ever mentioned because immediately people jumped on the Neutral issue, and that there may have been an issue moving the transmission to neutral was only to deflect criticism away from the man driving the car and place the blame back onto the car itself. The claims were unsubstantiated and unsupported. He just never thought to put it into neutral. The car was completely functionally sound, aside from a floor mat that MAY have been holding the gas pedal down (which can be easily fixed by your damnedable foot pulling the mat backwards when you realize your gas pedal is stuck depressed...).
There was never any evidence, let alone proof, that the computer was screwed up. That was media hype, because they didn't want to blame the man for killing himself and his family.
There was extensive testing done. They were unable to get the computers to screw up in such a way that would cause runaway acceleration and the inability to shift into neutral. They were unable to get the computers to screw up in such a way that braking power was lost.
They think the floor mat MAY have been installed incorrectly, and MAY have held the gas pedal down.
The fact is, that MAY have happened, and it may NOT have happened -- but regardless of whether or not the floor mat played any part in this accident, it could have been avoided had the man shifted into neutral. Or turned the car off, which I understand may have been difficult as it was a keyless ignition vehicle.
But shifting it to neutral? Will ALWAYS WORK. This guy did not try it. Not once. He tried the brakes, likely using them to keep himself at highway speed while muttering "Gee that's odd", and then once the brakes heated up and failed the acceleration increased. He never put the car in neutral or even tried. He may have tried to shut the car off, but didn't do it right.
Actually it's pretty fucking easy to do at-speed. It's the first fucking item on the List Of Shit To Do If Your Brakes Fail. THE FIRST FUCKING ITEM ON THE LIST.
Not knowing to shit to neutral only means that you're not fit to drive a car, that you are an irresponsible danger to others on the road.
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This entire comment section is filled with some of the dumbest comments I've ever seen on slashdot, but yours, good sir, outreaches them all by leaps and bounds.
Grats. That is possibly the most idiotic thing anyone will ever post on slashdot, ever. Including cleanmypc spam, gamemaker spam, GNAA spam, all of it. You win.
There's a difference between the gov't giving money to Haliburton and Solyndra.
In the former, the government was paying them for services rendered. An existing company was contracted to do a job they said they could do and they were paid for their work.
In the latter, the government handed a company money in the hopes they could some day do something with it -- not payment for goods delivered or services rendered, just money and hope that it'd pay off, somehow.
Ever hear someone say "There's no such thing as bad PR"? It's a fucking lie. Interfering with my life? Bad PR. Causing problems in my life? Bad PR.
That doesn't mean the wall street chuckleheads have me on their side, but it does mean that the OWS chuckleheads don't either. Neither group has shown an ounce of compassion for their fellow man, not one iota of decency and respect for other human beings. NEITHER group.
Fuck them all. Send them all to jail. Bring out the tasers and the tear gas and fuck the whole lot. I'm fucking done with people who think they're more important than everybody else, and I don't give two shits why they think that.
Your whole deal with the Woolsworth sit-ins is bullshit; nobody was prevented from ordering food, nobody was shitting in the streets. The protesters were nonviolent, respectful, and had a clear message with a clear solution. I don't even know what the fuck your deal with crack is -- are you suggesting that you SUPPORT the efforts undertaken by the War on Drugs, specifically with regards to crack cocaine? Are you fucking mentally retarded, or just a troll piece of shit? And yep, nobody notices the homeless -- except the many shelters and soup kitchens and outreach organizations.
The message of OWS -- at least, what message you can claim they have, as it's unclear, muddled, broad, and confused -- but the general message that wall street and corporate america is run by scumbags fleecing the nation for their own personal gain? I can get behind that, and have been behind that for a hell of a lot longer than anyone camping in a park has been able to read and fucking write.
The difference is that I take action by telling people about the problem, explaining why it is a problem, how it is a problem, and admitting that there is no clear and easy solution to it but that the first step is to recognize and agree that it is a problem.
They take action by disrupting the society they purport to support, by only inconveniencing and troubling those who are not a part of the problem, by acting like misanthropic children who hold the mistaken belief that theirs is a holy crusade that forgives all sins of those who ride under its standard. Actually they're not acting like that -- they ARE that.
I kinda cringe that you and I got modded down for being reasonable folk.
I'd say this country has gone to shit but it sounds like you're from Canada, so I suppose this continent has gone to shit. Which means this world has gone to shit.
Fucking awful.
You.. you just verbed verb
If I'm trying to just get the fuck to work so I can pay my bills, suffering a delay because some OWS chuckleheads have decided that it's a good idea to form an impromptu road block or occupy a fucking bridge is NOT going to get me to think any better of them or anything they say. It's just going to piss me off and result in me considering them nothing more than spoiled fucking selfish assholes -- which is, incidentally, what many if not most of them are. The good eggs in the bunch need to get the fuck away from that childish bullshit.
Not all their points are idiotic and bad. They did raise a few valid points. More than that, however, all they did was whine and inflict themselves upon the 99%. The 1% doesn't give a shit about them. The 99% may have at one point, but the lack of social awareness and manners of the OWS groups has done and is doing nothing to win anyone to their side.
And learn some fucking history before laying every bad thing you ever hear of at the feet of GW. I'm not going to go to bat for that man, but Free Speech Zones have been A Thing for a hell of a lot longer than you believe.
To be kind to you, here's something to learn: A protest is completely ineffective if its only means of conveying an idea or concept is to be obnoxious and annoying and inconveniencing. You might have the answer to world hunger, a source of endless free energy, but if your way of getting that information and your viewpoint across is to simply pester and disturb me? I don't give half a fuck. I'll ignore you, because your behavior leads me to believe that if you think that is a proper way to win people to your side that you are nothing but a juvenile idiot who cannot possibly have an inkling of a good idea in that stunted malformed organ you try and pass off as your brain.
Or start leaving guns around in his enclosure until he learns how to defend himself and starts eating the locals
Sorry, it was Solar Trust that got the 2.1 billion loan and the closed their doors. Wrong solar company.
There is a WORLD of difference between snooping into business practices to make sure they're on the up-and-up, and snooping into the PRIVATE LIVES of citizens.
We accept business intrusions because it ensures that businesses (well, intends to ensure..) aren't exploiting workers or insider information.
We should never, ever accept snooping into private lives -- especially when that snooping is used to punish citizens for actions that took place outside and apart from the authority punishing them.
So 12 billion a year across a wide industry, of which how many companies went bankrupt? Didn't Solyndra get 2 billion? Wasn't there a few other billion-dollar handouts to solar firms that have gone belly-up?
Government money should not be involved in the creation or propping up of business and industry. Research, yes, and if such research leads to advancements that are economically feasible and viable.. money will find and support those advancements.
Sometimes salespeople are right. Just yesterday I had a guy ask me the difference between the cheaper HDMI cables and the pricey (yes, Monster) ones.
Halfway through my impromptu lecture on conductivity and signal interference and why everything's moving from analog signals to digital, he just grabbed the monster cables and walked off.
In this case, the douche deserves to spend 50 bucks on 5 feet of HDMI cable. Fuck you, guy who isn't interested in learning something new. I've had OLD people ask the same thing, and they at least pay attention to what I'm saying even if they don't understand it entirely. This guy? I DON'T UNDERSTAND SO I'M GOING TO TELL MYSELF YOU'RE WRONG! HURK!
Space lasers would be best, actually.
Here's the problem.
Nobody wants us to do that.
China is FUCKING CRAZY. China's demonstrated that they'll destroy any orbiting thing they don't like -- they "tested" their anti-satellite capabilities once, and I think were it to come down to it.. they'd do it again. Or proxy and have N. Korea launch a real satellite, er, a "real" satellite, that "accidentally" would collide with our space lasers.
Kaboom. Space is gone. They'd shatter the skies and leave so much debris orbiting our planet that we'd be stuck close to this rock for longer than you or I will live.
it's a great idea, throw lasers in space... but it's potentially disastrous.
What would be nice is if they could downsize this airborn laser and fit it into.. hmm, maybe an older, super-high-speed airframe, maybe something that's pretty hard for most nations to detect, maybe something like the SR-71 -- there's still gotta be a few of those somewhere, drag them out of mothball and replace their surveillance payload with a giant laser? It'd solve one problem, being that the time between launch detection and the end of boost phase is so short that a 747 would have to be in the area before the ICBM was launched to be useful.
Maybe just stick them in subs. Not many nations really have much of a sub fleet anymore. There's China again, sure, but... while I don't suggest underestimating China's capabilities, their shit is still made in China, yanno?
Stop conflating climate with a global system.
Localities also have a climate. Climate does not equal global climate. Climate is merely the weather over a significant period of time of a particular location -- your back yard has a climate, though it likely matches your neighbor's climate. Valleys have a climate different than the mountains that surround them.
In short, in your attempt to be a pedant and nitpick the headline and the summary, you have instead shown yourself a fool. A foolish fool.
30 isn't smooth. That's likely caused by the screen you're watching it on.
Good old CRT's with a fast refresh rate? You could, absolutely, tell the difference between 30 and 60 and 100fps. Very clearly.
LCDs and the like, not so much, because the refresh is limited by the speed at which the pixels can change from a bright color to a dark color or back.. which means framerate gain isn't as significant as it was back when you had a CRT that was doing an honest 120 refreshes per second, from full white to black if need be.
If you're talking about a television set, they tend to muddy things even worse than a computer monitor.
It's kinda atrocious really, but nobody fucking cares anymore, so.. I'm sorta just pissing in the wind when I complain about it.
What I am saying is that many of the brightest minds in history were... peculiar. They were often obsessive, and socially maladjusted. Autism isn't a yes/no thing -- it's a differentiation of brain function, which when to a great degree does constitute a disability that makes living difficult but, when to a minor degree, imparts no great burden on a person's survival but DOES tend to make them.. well, obsessive, socially maladjusted, detail-oriented. Christ, just read about Tesla for a bit and tell me he wasn't seven kinds of fucking crazy.
Depression? Yes, when it's severe, it is crippling. When it's mild, it manifests more as a tendency to expect poor outcomes, to expect bad things. To complain. You know, shit that's important to society. It's the kind of thinking that says "That'll never work, and here's why". Or maybe "this much food will never last all of us long enough".
Go check out the info on diabetes. It's not a genetic disease the same way hemophilia is -- it doesn't necessarily confer any disadvantage to reproduction (and neither does mild autism or depression), and that's the ONE AND ONLY thing that would 'breed out' a trait. If it's severe enough to prevent reproduction.
Don't be an ass and write off anything that doesn't conform to your ideas of 'normal' as abhorrent and bad. The idea of 'normal' is much broader, and much more tenuous, than you believe. Yes, severe differences can be a disability. No, more mildly they are not -- and are of use to society in a way that your concept of a 'normal' person would not be.
LOLWAT.
Actually, depression and autism are useful for the species-as-a-whole. Sure, severe depression can be crippling -- but some depression is good for society. The pessimists are the ones who tend to see what's going to go wrong, problems with ideas. Worrying about every little thing, to a degree, means every little thing won't go wrong (some still will, but compare to cheery optimists who don't take time to prepare for unfortunate eventualities).
Autism is also a benefit to society, to a degree. Sure, it can be severe, and that's not helpful -- but good grief, go pick out any famous genius from the past, read up on how strange their behavior was. PROTIP: Some of our greatest advancements in knowledge and science came from the minds of people who had strange and inexplicable obsessive habits, who were not socially apt or adapt.
In short, you're pretty much an idiot lacking any understanding of the societal benefits of diversity.
These things persist in society precisely because they were useful.
Hemophilia? Not so much -- but it's rather rare, and ~1/3 of the cases of it aren't caused by genetic inheritance but rather from random gene mutation.
Diabetes? Not really genetic. There can be a genetic predisposition for it, but that doesn't really CAUSE it -- just makes it more likely to happen.
We've had thousands of years "left to nature" for undesirable traits that hinder survival to be weeded out. That these traits persist should be a pretty big fucking clue to you.
Well.. yes, of course. It's all a matter of how long a period of time the acceleration takes place over, which I don't know.
Uhm, the deceleration, on the other hand.. is a fairly known value.. and in excess of what we can handle. You'd certainly get there, though! All OVER there!
Add phosphates in dishwashing detergent to your list. Not there anymore for consumers... and now we suffer with clothes that don't get as clean and dishes that come out of the dishwasher with a film on them.
And it's something absurd like 5% of phosphate pollution is caused by residential sources. The rest is agriculture and industry. Nobody's forcing them to clean that shit up.
North Korea would cause more damage to North Korea by trying to build dummy ICBMs than it would cause damage to any other country with a WORKING ICBM -- which it still hasn't gotten right.
Cheaply made decoys? More like stationary explosion towers. That's about all their missiles are as it is, and these are the ones they CARE about getting right...
They still only made things worse for themselves by mistreating this dude. Both legally over the visa fraud, and over their retaliatory actions against dudeman.. though I'd think the latter would be a civil matter.
Those were theories bandied about by the media, not supported by any testing later conducted.
The error was with the driver.
It's sad, and it's tragic, and it should be a lesson to everyone else so it never happens again... but all the media wants to do is hype up some problem that may be affecting YOUR CAR RIGHT NOW!.. rather than say "Hey, idiots, put your car into neutral. If this guy knew it, he'd still be alive". That's not a story people want to hear.
Of course, I don't entirely trust fly-by-wire in consumer vehicles.. and have always thought it a better idea if they had a braking system more like buses and tractor trucks, where the brakes are RELEASED by positive air pressure and in the case of a failure in the braking system are engaged fully.. but of course there's issues with air brakes. Still, I'd rather the failure mode be a safe state, a loss of motion rather than a loss of control.
Regardless.. the shifting "issues" were only ever mentioned because immediately people jumped on the Neutral issue, and that there may have been an issue moving the transmission to neutral was only to deflect criticism away from the man driving the car and place the blame back onto the car itself. The claims were unsubstantiated and unsupported. He just never thought to put it into neutral. The car was completely functionally sound, aside from a floor mat that MAY have been holding the gas pedal down (which can be easily fixed by your damnedable foot pulling the mat backwards when you realize your gas pedal is stuck depressed...).
The music industry at the time didn't like mp3s, at all. Digitized music? FUCKING HERESY! Format shifting? More like format PIRATING!
Actually..... no.
There was never any evidence, let alone proof, that the computer was screwed up.
That was media hype, because they didn't want to blame the man for killing himself and his family.
There was extensive testing done. They were unable to get the computers to screw up in such a way that would cause runaway acceleration and the inability to shift into neutral. They were unable to get the computers to screw up in such a way that braking power was lost.
They think the floor mat MAY have been installed incorrectly, and MAY have held the gas pedal down.
The fact is, that MAY have happened, and it may NOT have happened -- but regardless of whether or not the floor mat played any part in this accident, it could have been avoided had the man shifted into neutral. Or turned the car off, which I understand may have been difficult as it was a keyless ignition vehicle.
But shifting it to neutral? Will ALWAYS WORK. This guy did not try it. Not once. He tried the brakes, likely using them to keep himself at highway speed while muttering "Gee that's odd", and then once the brakes heated up and failed the acceleration increased. He never put the car in neutral or even tried. He may have tried to shut the car off, but didn't do it right.
Actually it's pretty fucking easy to do at-speed. It's the first fucking item on the List Of Shit To Do If Your Brakes Fail. THE FIRST FUCKING ITEM ON THE LIST.
Not knowing to shit to neutral only means that you're not fit to drive a car, that you are an irresponsible danger to others on the road.
Neutral.
Neutral neutral neutral.
Car acting funny? Unintended power to the wheels? Throw it in neutral.
IT ALWAYS WORKS!