, but many Android phones seem to have very similar hardware specs and very similar prices to the iPhone
Not many.
A lot of Android phones have similar spec's to the Iphone of the same vintage, some have better specs. However few are offered at the same extortionate price point. Even Samsung and HTC flagship phones are $1-200 less, something like the Nexus 4 was half the price.
He never said it wasn't a problem. He simply stated it was overblown - ie, it's an issue, but not as big an issue as people (read: Apple and Microsoft) are making it out to be.
This,
Fragmentation is a minor issue for developers, it only crops up when you're trying to do specific things. If you target Android 1.5 then it will work on versions 1.5 to current (4.2), however if you target 4.0, your application might not work on version 2.3.
Thats the extent of fragmentation technical issues. For the consumer, Google Play filters incompatible applications for them.
The big problem with fragmentation is that Apple and Microsoft have nothing worse to bang on about as Android eats their lunch.
Because they have no clue what they are buying. They just wanted a cheap phone than runs apps.
Which is why high end Galaxy S# and HTC One phones sell so well huh?
Remember that a $350 Nexus 4 is in the same category as a $900 Iphone. So in that context, what you say is half true (I'd wager good money that Iphone buyers know less about phones than Android buyers), but a cheaper phone is not a crappier phone (in fact, between the Nexus 4 and the Iphone, you're getting more phone for less money).
Where I live, it's not a requirement for people to bag their dog poo at all. So bagging it and leaving it there would be a vast improvement to just ignoring that your dog shits on the footpath.
Although the theory goes that dog owners need to bag and dispose of the dog poo... but what happens in theory doesn't always happen in reality.
When everyone is a great driver, manners aren't needed. When you only change lanes when safe to do so, you don't need to worry about others cutting in, or letting them in, as they'll find their spot.
Cars have not been driven safely for decades; cars have been driven very unsafely for decades (with the body count to prove it)
You mean the continually dropping road toll and continually climbing number of vehicles on the road.
Your ignorance is showing here.
and having safety features in a car does not prevent you from practicing defensive driving.
Actually it does.
People who rely on proximity sensors to tell them if there is a car behind them or in a blind spot are less likely to use their mirrors or check their blind spot, when changing lanes on a multi-lane road this wont tell you if another car is merging from the lane next to the lane you're trying to move into.
You can't spot all potential hazards
At this point in time, I can spot more than a machine can, more over I know how to interpret them. All the driver assist technologies are reactive, defensive driving is proactive, so realistically driver assist technologies are not used in defensive driving at all because you avoid the situations where they will be useful. AND ABOVE THIS, all still require the driver to know what to do.
You have allowed the fact that you haven't been killed in an auto collision convince you that you are an incredible driver and if everyone drove like you there wouldn't be any accidents
This is your assertion, not mine.
My assertion is that driver assist technologies have made drivers more complacent which in turn has made them less capable.
Nice try with the Dunning-Kruger effect though, but if you read my post I have already bought that one up. It applies more to those who believe they are better drivers relying on machines to do things for them. Coddling is the perfect breeding ground for the Dunning-Kruger effect, this shows when people get flat tyre at 60 KPH and crash because of it. I've seen a lot of people turn off traction control when fiddling with the radio, if you become dependent on it and do this you are a statistic waiting to happen. I at the very least hope you are a registered organ donor.
Until Optical Computers and Quantum Entanglement Communications do exists, I don't think drones will be successful in dog fights.
Cool, but they can lob missiles at distant target... Pretty much like the manned planes we have today. Equip a drone with missiles for targeting at range and a CWIS-like mounted gun for anything that gets in close and fails an IFF check then it really becomes a game of drones. The biggest factor that matters is how many you can throw at them.
All a human operator has to do is say [these are targets] and [weapons free]. Automatic systems do the rest, hell we already have this kind of computer control on guided missles, mobile artillery and naval guns.
It doesn't matter if drones get shot down in a dog fight against a manned plane, you can replace them quickly and easily. How long does it take to train a new pilot. If you lose 100 to 1 against manned planes you're still getting an ROI.
I think the Congresspeople who proposed it should have to be the first to staff it.
(What do you mean there's no oxygen?)
We tried this in the 80's. We thought we were gods.
As it turns out when the second rocket was sent back to collect the corpses^H^H^H^H^H^H^H erm... important experimental apparatus, they were still alive. Our leading theory is that they had produced enough gas to allow them to survive an extended period in vacuum. What we cant explain is how the didn't rupture with the pressure differential.
Treating other road users with courtesy and respect is more important than any level of technical skill.
Not really, manners are good, but it wont make up for the fact someone cant drive.
You really need the technical skills there in order to do the job, I cant hire a sysadmin with no skills just because he's polite. Now one who's got skills and is polite, holy grail right there. Same with driving.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
And this is the key problem with driver assists. The traction control "handles all that", so you don't even notice that today the road is very slippery, and you end up with accidents like this one in Sweden last year (100 car pile-up): http://www.thelocal.se/45626/20130115/
Its not traction control that I rally about too much, all the other things like proximity sensors, parking assist that make drivers complacent on basic skills like looking and reversing.
Knowing how to brake without ABS may save your life one day... A useful skill but we're talking about "one day", not looking in your mirrors is going to kill you soon, not knowing how to stop in an emergency (I.E. blowing a tyre) will turn a survivable incident into a fatality. The more people rely on technology over common sense the more accidents we'll see.
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Way to miss his point. Sooner or later, you will run into a situation where your driving ability cannot ensure your safety. Often, we survive by blind luck. It would be nice if we could use computers to improve our chances.
I didn't miss his post, I got it completely.
You have apparantly missed my post, in fact you couldn't have missed it more if you were aiming in the opposite direction and the point was in another country all together.
Relying on computers to get you out of dangerous spots makes you more likely to get into them. It makes you complacent. As I said and as you conveniently missed, the best traction control system wont help you one iota when you have a tyre blowout at speed. I have had a blow out at 70 KPH, its not pleasant, but if you know how to control a car, easily survivable, if you're dependent on traction control to compensate for you, you're fucked.
Also, if the roads are far too dangerous for me to be able to drive safely on traction control wont help one iota. We are talking about situations where traction is impossible at 20 KPH (as in extremely rare scenarios).
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
Cars are, by their nature, inhumanly powerful and fast. If you would "avoid dangerous situations," you should avoid interacting with them at all.
And here you've demonstrated that you know nothing about driving.
Cars can be driven safely, we've been doing it for decades. It's unsafe drivers who make them unsafe and one of the biggest factors that make people unsafe behind the wheel is complacency.
I spot potential hazards before they happen. This is called "defensive driving" and is a very good skill for any driver. The day this can be replicated by a machine is the day the machine is driving the car. In the case of yourself and the GGP I think this is a good thing(TM).
I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.
The thing is, Apple can afford to keep throwing lawyers that cost thousands of dollars per hour at cases they have no hope of winning.
More likely they found out they would be judged against very, very soon and would rather the case ended ambiguously as opposed to having a precedent set. This way they can keep using the FUD and threats of a law suit.
...That means you get accidental deaths. And that also means that when we fail at the people end of things the damage is that much more catastrophic.
And this is less true of an SUV than it is of a gun? I don't think your distinction between items you categorize as "causes death only" and ones you categorize as "not built primarily for killing" is the most important one here.
Well actually it is. A cars primary purpose is transportation, a guns primary purpose is to kill. Just because a car can be used for killing does not make it a device designed to kill.
BTW, cars make pretty crappy killing devices, maiming yes, but in order to hit people you need to be slow enough to change direction as they do, in order to kill them, you need to be going fast. Also SUV is neither particularly fast (yep, 0-100 in 30 seconds) nor particularly manoeuvrable (20 metre turning circle) nor particularly well armoured (the same tin foil they make Yaris' out of) so a muscle car is a much better choice. To add to that, pedestrian malls tend to have a lot of things protruding out of the ground that stop cars.
But I digress, the purpose of the device cannot be removed because intent was also present, as the old saying goes "opportunity is 9/10 of the crime", not having an easy method to perform spree killings does reduce the number of people who perform them and yes, cars are not easy methods to perform single murders, let alone spree killings.
So - you DO have school shootings. All the propaganda that tells us that Europe is gun-free and safe is bullshit at the end of the day then. Rationalize it how you will, spin like crazy, you do hae school shootings.
The last school shooting in Europe was in 2012, the US has had 13 this year. The last one was 2 days ago FFS, killing three more people than the shooting in Toulouse.
Your examples of mass shootings in Europe have to go back years to be statistically significant.
You mother fucking McCarthyist. Gods damn. Do I have to spell this shit out for you?!
I 100% agree with you.
But the GP did unwittingly point out that a lot of kids join gangs to prevent themselves from being victims of gangs.
But to say the rest of his post was absolutely retarded is an insult to every genuine window licker throughout the entire world.
All detention centres will do is take them out of one gang and put them into another gang in another place (it would probably make them worse, teach them discipline, motivation and an absolute hatred of authority... That always works right, guys, right?).
If you want to stop gang violence then you need to look at why kids are joining gangs and target the causes, not simply target them once they've joined... Hey kind of like dealing with terrorists.
BTW, I drive a six speed manual without traction control. I drive a lot better than most because I dont expect my car to pull me out of dangerous situations I get myself into.
I am a completely mediocre driver
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Well you die.
This is why things like emergency braking, losing control of the rear wheels and stopping with a blowout needs to be tested. You get blow a tyre at 80 KPH, Traction control wont help you if you cant drive. This is exactly what I'm talking about, the driver aid does not help your reaction speed, it does not make you a better driver. It just coddles you and tricks you into believing you have a higher skill level than you really do (as if the Dunning Kruger effect wasn't enough). As I said, what happens when that system fails or you have to drive a vehicle without them (or more likely, accidentally turn traction control off, I see a lot of drivers do this when fiddling around with the GPS/Radio)
You'll also notice I left out ABS (because this is a good system) and electronic traction control (which is debatable) and focused on technologies that overtly make drivers complacent like parking asist.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
Being a good driver doesn't mean having a blanket self-ban on using such options. Being a good driver is about knowing when such things could be used
So very wrong.
Being a good driver is two things.
1. Being able to control your vehicle in the worst of conditions, especially when the fancy electronics fail.
2. Being able to predict and avoid dangerous situations. This is part of defensive driving.
Being a good driver has nothing what so ever to do with cruise control or any other drivers aid. If anything, reliance on these technologies detracts from a drivers ability to cope with changing road conditions).
So to be a good driver you must:
Know your limits.
Know your cars limits.
Understand how the road works.
Expect the unexpected in traffic.
Relying on a drivers aid to compensate for your lack of ability makes you a worse driver.
Or maybe because there are times driving manual really sucks.
Once again, dead wrong.
Driving a manual rocks, it's just that you just dont know how to drive one.
"Ideal" depends on what you are trying to achieve. To go fast, yes mid/rear or mid/awd is the way to go.
To be fair, I did specify performance and sports cars, so balance is key there.
If you're talking about a cheap runabout, Front Forward is the way to go as it gets better gains out of smaller engines, reduces the weight of the engine/drive train and are a hell of lot cheaper to build. People who buy a Toyota Yaris dont care about performance as much as just getting from A to B cheaply.
Ultimately, the cheapness of FF cars is what drives people towards them.
Not that FF cars are all bad (cheap and cheery), you get some crackers of FF's like the Honda Integra and Ford Focus ST's.
So you've got cars like the Subaru Forester/Outback which are labeled as All-Wheel Drive, and then you've got cars like Land Rover/Range Rover which seem to be Four Wheel Drive. What's the actual difference? I'm guessing it has something to do with the differential?
To me the difference is:
AWD and "4x4 on demand" are computer controlled. 4 Wheel Drive is either selectable or always on.
IIRC the AWD in the Subaru Impreza's distribute the power 70-30 between the front and rear wheels but the computer alters this according to the detected conditions. If you get into an old school Land Cruiser or Pajero, you'll see two sticks, one for selecting 2WD and 4WD and the other for selecting gears.
The golden rules:
Know your limits
Know your vehicles performance limits
Know your vehicles foot print on the pavement.
I couldn't agree with this more.
If you want to test your cars limits, go to the track (or at least to a place where you'll bother absolutely no-one else). Honestly, track day is the most fun you'll have with your clothes on.
who is better a CEO who wants a new BMW or the GOV?
The CEO, sadly, because he knows he has to convince me to give him my dollars.
The GOV will just take them by threat of violence.
LoL,
Don't pay our extortionate rates and you dont get health care. That isn't convincing, that's the same kind of coercion you accuse the govt of.
The difference is the government has to appease the people once every 3-4 years.
Now I'm from Australia, I pay $1350 in the Medicare levy (socialised medicine, the levy is 1.5% of my income) and another $850 for better hospital cover. So a total of $2200 for top hospital cover PER YEAR. In the US a single person younger than me can expect to pay US$700-800 PER MONTH for average care.
The only issue that I have with the system is that because I'm over 30 and earn over the A$84K threshold I have to get private health to avoid extra levy's and surcharges. But I earn $90K a year and pay $2.2K for health care.
Single payer really does work better because the govt's inefficiency is less of a cost than the private sectors profit motive.
Hence the state of their economy with several members of the EU on the brink of bankruptcy.
Yet it's not the most socialist European countries that are going broke. The Nordic nations, for example, are doing just fine. It's Mediterranean Europe that is having trouble, and they've had fiscal problems for decades. Putting them in a single currency union with the likes of Germany was just asking for a disaster to happen.
This,
Ireland is very "business friendly" and they're in dire straits.
The EU is in trouble because the EU could not stymie the endemic corruption and tax evasion that occurs in Greece, Italy and Spain where it's illegal, let alone in Ireland where corporate tax evasion was institutionalised.
As far as I know, modern cars are designed to crumple, and smash externally in order to dissipate shock in an accident as much as possible.
This x 1000.
Modern cars are designed to ablate and crumple as much as possible in order to protect the meat that crashed it.
People without a clue as to how physics works in a car crash often lament that their 19-dicket-2 car hardly gets a scratch in a low speed collision and completely forget that in a mid speed collision the car also harldy suffers a scratch, but the driver and passengers ended up going to the morgue.
The more bits that come off the car, the more crumpled it looks the less kinetic energy went into the occupants.
Trying to relate all of this with mpg or even lpk is much harder.
Unless it is what you're used to, and then it isn't harder. Knowing what a mile is and what a US gallon is probably makes MPG easier for me. Of course I know how far a kilometer is and how much a liter is, but since I use neither when driving, those numbers are completely meaningless to me when I want to figure out how far my car goes on a given amount of fuel.
Most of the world uses Kilometres and Litres so you're really the odd one out here. Also most places use Litres per 100 KM as to get an aggregate measure of fuel use. It's also a hell of a lot more computationally convenient than MPG, I.E. I drive 350 KM per week and use 9.4L per 100 KM. So I can calculate my weekly fuel use as 32.9L per week quickly and easily.
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Not many.
A lot of Android phones have similar spec's to the Iphone of the same vintage, some have better specs. However few are offered at the same extortionate price point. Even Samsung and HTC flagship phones are $1-200 less, something like the Nexus 4 was half the price.
He never said it wasn't a problem. He simply stated it was overblown - ie, it's an issue, but not as big an issue as people (read: Apple and Microsoft) are making it out to be.
This,
Fragmentation is a minor issue for developers, it only crops up when you're trying to do specific things. If you target Android 1.5 then it will work on versions 1.5 to current (4.2), however if you target 4.0, your application might not work on version 2.3.
Thats the extent of fragmentation technical issues. For the consumer, Google Play filters incompatible applications for them.
The big problem with fragmentation is that Apple and Microsoft have nothing worse to bang on about as Android eats their lunch.
Because they have no clue what they are buying. They just wanted a cheap phone than runs apps.
Which is why high end Galaxy S# and HTC One phones sell so well huh?
Remember that a $350 Nexus 4 is in the same category as a $900 Iphone. So in that context, what you say is half true (I'd wager good money that Iphone buyers know less about phones than Android buyers), but a cheaper phone is not a crappier phone (in fact, between the Nexus 4 and the Iphone, you're getting more phone for less money).
I hope you're being sarcastic,
Now why would _I_ be sarcastic?
Where I live, it's not a requirement for people to bag their dog poo at all. So bagging it and leaving it there would be a vast improvement to just ignoring that your dog shits on the footpath.
Although the theory goes that dog owners need to bag and dispose of the dog poo... but what happens in theory doesn't always happen in reality.
When everyone is a great driver, manners aren't needed. When you only change lanes when safe to do so, you don't need to worry about others cutting in, or letting them in, as they'll find their spot.
This is it.
Good driving naturally leads to good manners.
You mean the continually dropping road toll and continually climbing number of vehicles on the road.
Your ignorance is showing here.
Actually it does. People who rely on proximity sensors to tell them if there is a car behind them or in a blind spot are less likely to use their mirrors or check their blind spot, when changing lanes on a multi-lane road this wont tell you if another car is merging from the lane next to the lane you're trying to move into.
At this point in time, I can spot more than a machine can, more over I know how to interpret them. All the driver assist technologies are reactive, defensive driving is proactive, so realistically driver assist technologies are not used in defensive driving at all because you avoid the situations where they will be useful. AND ABOVE THIS, all still require the driver to know what to do.
This is your assertion, not mine.
My assertion is that driver assist technologies have made drivers more complacent which in turn has made them less capable.
Nice try with the Dunning-Kruger effect though, but if you read my post I have already bought that one up. It applies more to those who believe they are better drivers relying on machines to do things for them. Coddling is the perfect breeding ground for the Dunning-Kruger effect, this shows when people get flat tyre at 60 KPH and crash because of it. I've seen a lot of people turn off traction control when fiddling with the radio, if you become dependent on it and do this you are a statistic waiting to happen. I at the very least hope you are a registered organ donor.
Until Optical Computers and Quantum Entanglement Communications do exists, I don't think drones will be successful in dog fights.
Cool, but they can lob missiles at distant target... Pretty much like the manned planes we have today. Equip a drone with missiles for targeting at range and a CWIS-like mounted gun for anything that gets in close and fails an IFF check then it really becomes a game of drones. The biggest factor that matters is how many you can throw at them.
All a human operator has to do is say [these are targets] and [weapons free]. Automatic systems do the rest, hell we already have this kind of computer control on guided missles, mobile artillery and naval guns. It doesn't matter if drones get shot down in a dog fight against a manned plane, you can replace them quickly and easily. How long does it take to train a new pilot. If you lose 100 to 1 against manned planes you're still getting an ROI.
The park would be comprised of all artifacts left on the surface of the moon from the Apollo 11 through 17 missions.
Including bags of astronaut shit? Yeah, it just wouldn't be the same if someone cleaned those up...
At least they bagged it, I'm sick of having to avoid naked dog turds on the footpath.
I think the Congresspeople who proposed it should have to be the first to staff it.
(What do you mean there's no oxygen?)
We tried this in the 80's. We thought we were gods.
As it turns out when the second rocket was sent back to collect the corpses^H^H^H^H^H^H^H erm... important experimental apparatus, they were still alive. Our leading theory is that they had produced enough gas to allow them to survive an extended period in vacuum. What we cant explain is how the didn't rupture with the pressure differential.
Not really, manners are good, but it wont make up for the fact someone cant drive. You really need the technical skills there in order to do the job, I cant hire a sysadmin with no skills just because he's polite. Now one who's got skills and is polite, holy grail right there. Same with driving.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
And this is the key problem with driver assists. The traction control "handles all that", so you don't even notice that today the road is very slippery, and you end up with accidents like this one in Sweden last year (100 car pile-up): http://www.thelocal.se/45626/20130115/
Its not traction control that I rally about too much, all the other things like proximity sensors, parking assist that make drivers complacent on basic skills like looking and reversing.
Knowing how to brake without ABS may save your life one day... A useful skill but we're talking about "one day", not looking in your mirrors is going to kill you soon, not knowing how to stop in an emergency (I.E. blowing a tyre) will turn a survivable incident into a fatality. The more people rely on technology over common sense the more accidents we'll see.
I am a completely mediocre driver
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Way to miss his point. Sooner or later, you will run into a situation where your driving ability cannot ensure your safety. Often, we survive by blind luck. It would be nice if we could use computers to improve our chances.
I didn't miss his post, I got it completely.
You have apparantly missed my post, in fact you couldn't have missed it more if you were aiming in the opposite direction and the point was in another country all together.
Relying on computers to get you out of dangerous spots makes you more likely to get into them. It makes you complacent. As I said and as you conveniently missed, the best traction control system wont help you one iota when you have a tyre blowout at speed. I have had a blow out at 70 KPH, its not pleasant, but if you know how to control a car, easily survivable, if you're dependent on traction control to compensate for you, you're fucked.
Also, if the roads are far too dangerous for me to be able to drive safely on traction control wont help one iota. We are talking about situations where traction is impossible at 20 KPH (as in extremely rare scenarios).
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
Cars are, by their nature, inhumanly powerful and fast. If you would "avoid dangerous situations," you should avoid interacting with them at all.
And here you've demonstrated that you know nothing about driving.
Cars can be driven safely, we've been doing it for decades. It's unsafe drivers who make them unsafe and one of the biggest factors that make people unsafe behind the wheel is complacency.
I spot potential hazards before they happen. This is called "defensive driving" and is a very good skill for any driver. The day this can be replicated by a machine is the day the machine is driving the car. In the case of yourself and the GGP I think this is a good thing(TM).
I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.
The thing is, Apple can afford to keep throwing lawyers that cost thousands of dollars per hour at cases they have no hope of winning.
More likely they found out they would be judged against very, very soon and would rather the case ended ambiguously as opposed to having a precedent set. This way they can keep using the FUD and threats of a law suit.
And this is less true of an SUV than it is of a gun? I don't think your distinction between items you categorize as "causes death only" and ones you categorize as "not built primarily for killing" is the most important one here.
Well actually it is. A cars primary purpose is transportation, a guns primary purpose is to kill. Just because a car can be used for killing does not make it a device designed to kill.
BTW, cars make pretty crappy killing devices, maiming yes, but in order to hit people you need to be slow enough to change direction as they do, in order to kill them, you need to be going fast. Also SUV is neither particularly fast (yep, 0-100 in 30 seconds) nor particularly manoeuvrable (20 metre turning circle) nor particularly well armoured (the same tin foil they make Yaris' out of) so a muscle car is a much better choice. To add to that, pedestrian malls tend to have a lot of things protruding out of the ground that stop cars.
But I digress, the purpose of the device cannot be removed because intent was also present, as the old saying goes "opportunity is 9/10 of the crime", not having an easy method to perform spree killings does reduce the number of people who perform them and yes, cars are not easy methods to perform single murders, let alone spree killings.
So - you DO have school shootings. All the propaganda that tells us that Europe is gun-free and safe is bullshit at the end of the day then. Rationalize it how you will, spin like crazy, you do hae school shootings.
When was the last US mass shooting?
How many do you have per year?
The US needs it's own list of school shootings because it's too long to include with the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
The last school shooting in Europe was in 2012, the US has had 13 this year. The last one was 2 days ago FFS, killing three more people than the shooting in Toulouse.
Your examples of mass shootings in Europe have to go back years to be statistically significant.
So you were saying.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE YOU THINKING?!
You mother fucking McCarthyist. Gods damn. Do I have to spell this shit out for you?!
I 100% agree with you. But the GP did unwittingly point out that a lot of kids join gangs to prevent themselves from being victims of gangs.
But to say the rest of his post was absolutely retarded is an insult to every genuine window licker throughout the entire world.
All detention centres will do is take them out of one gang and put them into another gang in another place (it would probably make them worse, teach them discipline, motivation and an absolute hatred of authority... That always works right, guys, right?).
If you want to stop gang violence then you need to look at why kids are joining gangs and target the causes, not simply target them once they've joined... Hey kind of like dealing with terrorists.
BTW, I drive a six speed manual without traction control. I drive a lot better than most because I dont expect my car to pull me out of dangerous situations I get myself into.
I am a completely mediocre driver
And here in lies the problem. What if the computer fails and you find yourself in a situation where your driving ability is the only thing that can save you.
Well you die.
This is why things like emergency braking, losing control of the rear wheels and stopping with a blowout needs to be tested. You get blow a tyre at 80 KPH, Traction control wont help you if you cant drive. This is exactly what I'm talking about, the driver aid does not help your reaction speed, it does not make you a better driver. It just coddles you and tricks you into believing you have a higher skill level than you really do (as if the Dunning Kruger effect wasn't enough). As I said, what happens when that system fails or you have to drive a vehicle without them (or more likely, accidentally turn traction control off, I see a lot of drivers do this when fiddling around with the GPS/Radio)
You'll also notice I left out ABS (because this is a good system) and electronic traction control (which is debatable) and focused on technologies that overtly make drivers complacent like parking asist.
BTW, in case you missed it in the first post, I avoid dangerous situations rather then rely on my car to compensate for my lack of driving ability.
So very wrong.
Being a good driver is two things.
1. Being able to control your vehicle in the worst of conditions, especially when the fancy electronics fail.
2. Being able to predict and avoid dangerous situations. This is part of defensive driving.
Being a good driver has nothing what so ever to do with cruise control or any other drivers aid. If anything, reliance on these technologies detracts from a drivers ability to cope with changing road conditions).
So to be a good driver you must:
Know your limits.
Know your cars limits.
Understand how the road works.
Expect the unexpected in traffic.
Relying on a drivers aid to compensate for your lack of ability makes you a worse driver.
Once again, dead wrong.
Driving a manual rocks, it's just that you just dont know how to drive one.
"Ideal" depends on what you are trying to achieve. To go fast, yes mid/rear or mid/awd is the way to go.
To be fair, I did specify performance and sports cars, so balance is key there.
If you're talking about a cheap runabout, Front Forward is the way to go as it gets better gains out of smaller engines, reduces the weight of the engine/drive train and are a hell of lot cheaper to build. People who buy a Toyota Yaris dont care about performance as much as just getting from A to B cheaply.
Ultimately, the cheapness of FF cars is what drives people towards them.
Not that FF cars are all bad (cheap and cheery), you get some crackers of FF's like the Honda Integra and Ford Focus ST's.
So you've got cars like the Subaru Forester/Outback which are labeled as All-Wheel Drive, and then you've got cars like Land Rover/Range Rover which seem to be Four Wheel Drive. What's the actual difference? I'm guessing it has something to do with the differential?
To me the difference is:
AWD and "4x4 on demand" are computer controlled. 4 Wheel Drive is either selectable or always on.
IIRC the AWD in the Subaru Impreza's distribute the power 70-30 between the front and rear wheels but the computer alters this according to the detected conditions. If you get into an old school Land Cruiser or Pajero, you'll see two sticks, one for selecting 2WD and 4WD and the other for selecting gears.
The golden rules:
Know your limits
Know your vehicles performance limits
Know your vehicles foot print on the pavement.
I couldn't agree with this more.
If you want to test your cars limits, go to the track (or at least to a place where you'll bother absolutely no-one else). Honestly, track day is the most fun you'll have with your clothes on.
who is better a CEO who wants a new BMW or the GOV?
The CEO, sadly, because he knows he has to convince me to give him my dollars.
The GOV will just take them by threat of violence.
LoL,
Don't pay our extortionate rates and you dont get health care. That isn't convincing, that's the same kind of coercion you accuse the govt of.
The difference is the government has to appease the people once every 3-4 years.
Now I'm from Australia, I pay $1350 in the Medicare levy (socialised medicine, the levy is 1.5% of my income) and another $850 for better hospital cover. So a total of $2200 for top hospital cover PER YEAR. In the US a single person younger than me can expect to pay US$700-800 PER MONTH for average care.
The only issue that I have with the system is that because I'm over 30 and earn over the A$84K threshold I have to get private health to avoid extra levy's and surcharges. But I earn $90K a year and pay $2.2K for health care.
Single payer really does work better because the govt's inefficiency is less of a cost than the private sectors profit motive.
Hence the state of their economy with several members of the EU on the brink of bankruptcy.
Yet it's not the most socialist European countries that are going broke. The Nordic nations, for example, are doing just fine. It's Mediterranean Europe that is having trouble, and they've had fiscal problems for decades. Putting them in a single currency union with the likes of Germany was just asking for a disaster to happen.
This,
Ireland is very "business friendly" and they're in dire straits.
The EU is in trouble because the EU could not stymie the endemic corruption and tax evasion that occurs in Greece, Italy and Spain where it's illegal, let alone in Ireland where corporate tax evasion was institutionalised.
As far as I know, modern cars are designed to crumple, and smash externally in order to dissipate shock in an accident as much as possible.
This x 1000. Modern cars are designed to ablate and crumple as much as possible in order to protect the meat that crashed it.
People without a clue as to how physics works in a car crash often lament that their 19-dicket-2 car hardly gets a scratch in a low speed collision and completely forget that in a mid speed collision the car also harldy suffers a scratch, but the driver and passengers ended up going to the morgue.
The more bits that come off the car, the more crumpled it looks the less kinetic energy went into the occupants.
Trying to relate all of this with mpg or even lpk is much harder.
Unless it is what you're used to, and then it isn't harder. Knowing what a mile is and what a US gallon is probably makes MPG easier for me. Of course I know how far a kilometer is and how much a liter is, but since I use neither when driving, those numbers are completely meaningless to me when I want to figure out how far my car goes on a given amount of fuel.
Most of the world uses Kilometres and Litres so you're really the odd one out here. Also most places use Litres per 100 KM as to get an aggregate measure of fuel use. It's also a hell of a lot more computationally convenient than MPG, I.E. I drive 350 KM per week and use 9.4L per 100 KM. So I can calculate my weekly fuel use as 32.9L per week quickly and easily.