Uh, yeah, we definitly need more people trying to back up and manuever with trailers. Trailers are so easy to work with. And it's really easy to park trailers when you have on-street parking. But other then that you are a genius.
Soooo.... people drive SUVs because they're too stupid to learn how a trailer behaves? Can't argue with you there, we're in total agreement: people drive SUVs because they're idiots.
Wouldn't you call them stupid when you see them driving in a little car with 2 large dogs barely fitting?
No, I'd call them stupid for taking two large dogs everwhere.
An Element/CR-V is an SUV in name only and has very few of the attributes that are traditionally associated with what is normally known as an SUV. All it is, in reality, is a funny looking Civic with a chassis that's been slightly modified so it better suits the higher, unibody frame.
Because you basically just compared the single most durable SUV frame on the market against one of the least durable compact frames. Jeep has, by far, the strongest unibody steel frame available, and Dodge Neons are practically wheels wrapped in aluminum foil.
Note that in a well-built machine the engine will not come into the cabin at all, save for a truly ferocious head-on collision. The frame of the car, in such a heavy impact, should partially crumple in on itself to dissipate some of the shock. A BMW 3 series probably could have hit the same thing at the same speed and not had the engine do anything more than possibly break off the mounts and fall out the bottom of the bay.
Providing a conclusion prior to presenting the evidence, especially when you put the conclusion right in the damn title, is a persuasive writing tactic used when you want to reinforce the existing beliefs of an audience. It is not a useful method for writing neutral pieces in which you wish to have the reader come to their own conclusion, or where you want to convince a neutral or opposing party of your view.
This is a very basic writing concept that was, at least for us, taught in high school. I am not interested in reading party-line propaganda.
His view may or may not be valid, but since he's attempting to make me believe it before I even open the dust jacket of his book, I'm not going to waste my time or money trying to find out.
It has come to my attention that you have no idea what you are talking about. Kindly do us both a favor and come to a basic understanding of the proper application of Occam's razor as a principle for deriving meaning based on the most likely solution to a problem in which inconclusive but significant evidence is available.
Specifically, please come to understand it well enough to know that no intelligent person would be so silly as to attempt to apply it after observing only one data point.
HOW SMART PEOPLE TOW MODERATELY SIZED THINGS WITH CARS
Step 1: Buy a hitch. Step 2: Buy a trailer. Step 3: Install hitch and latch trailer. Step 4: Load trailer. Step 5: Drive to destination. Step 6: Unload trailer.
Regarding the dogs, presuming you aren't taking them everywhere, that's no excuse. If you buy a special vehicle type just for your pets, you have much deeper cognitive problems than we can address here.
Regarding the rest of your drivel, nothing you mentioned there either:
1. Fits anything even remotely approaching the majority of people. 2. Can't be done with a car.
Besides, even ignoring the fact that your excuses were pointless and easily overcome, the best overall vehicle type for you is a station wagon, not an SUV.
If he wants to sell an honest analysis he should give the book an honest title.
You can't judge a book by its cover, but I can't waste my time reading every single book out there just to find out whether or not it's been mistitled either.
There is nothing more inherintly simple about being ego driven vs. being practical.
Except the fact that I have observed, consistently, over years, that the cause of most SUV purchases, where most is best defined as "nearly all", is egomania.
But, hey, never mind. Even if 1 in 1000 people buy an SUV for a non-egomanical reason that's a good enough chance to take a critical, neutral approach to every single SUV driver, right?
No, of course not. That's ridiculous.
The majority, by far, of SUV owners purchased for ego. I will automatically default to that conclusion when presented with any new SUV driver, and I will almost always be right.
Yea, they feel safer because when they hit someone and kill them they're less likely to be hurt.
Protip: 4WD and AWD provide only one useful function: start movement on bad terrain. After that, weight and tire size are the ONLY benefits an SUV has over a car, and they do not contribute to road manners significantly well enough to make them much more useable in poor conditions unless they're in the hands of a skilled driver.
In fact, as an amusing aside, I don't know if there are any SUVs left that don't have ABS since they're so prone to being driven on dry pavement. That works against them in a HUGE way on slick surfaces and probably negates any benefits to be had from tire size and tread when trying to stop in a winter weather.
Obligatory joke about face related political parties here.
Democracy works just fine for the most part. Despite the stupidity of the 2000 election, there's little reason to belive what happened in the U.S. was particularly bad.
Now, in the event that the mistake is repeated I would very strongly urge them to worry.
...you neglect to account for the possible neccesity of such a vehicle, perhaps this many has a large family and a boat which he frequently tows.
Y'know, people have been making that argument to me for the last six years now. Undoubtedly, I've seen people towing boats, trailers, etc from time to time behind an SUV, but by far the most common use I see for SUVs is... drum roll please:
Carrying one person to and from work on the expressway at unncessarily high speeds.
See, the SUV crowd keeps SAYING things like this, but I never really see any evidence that any of it is true. If there's so much need for it, I'd really love to know why I'm never seeing it. I mean, over certain periods of time I'm willing to accept that I'm just missing these people with their massive "needs", but Occam's Razor is starting to tell me that the reason I see these "needs" so infrequently is because they're a crock that people like you invented to justify buying overpriced, under-functional trucks from shifty salesman that you weren't bright enough to handle.
Almost nobody in the U.S., especially in metro areas, can rationally justify an SUV purchase. They get bought because they got popular and people just couldn't resist not having the latest trendy gadget, no matter how expensive and pointless and dangerous it was.
Go play in traffic. Nobody with even half a brain is stupid enough anymore to believe that the majority of people with SUVs bought them for any other reason than they were "the cool thing to have".
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1. Posts utilizing "common sense". 2. Posts resulting from "informed users". 3. Posts attempting to obtain a fair compromise on an issue.
Specifically, your post above violates the following principle(s) which have been listed as approved opinions that may be posted on Slashdot:
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Please immediately cease and desist all activites which may be characterized as "free thinking", "reasoned", or "rational". Failure to comply may result in poor moderation which could lead to the removal of your posting ability for pre-determined amounts of time, or for your posts to be removed from a threshold visible by normal users. However, note that the moderation system should not be construed as a form of censorship.
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Like when people were taking umbrance with over-reaching parts of the Patriot Act and they kept saying "you should go ahead and renew that part, because we never ever had to use it, so how could we have abused it!"?
That was cute. As a recall, the argument was "we're not abusing the library records power, we've never used it, so you don't have to worry about us renewing it". Uh.... yea.
In related news, V For Vendetta will be about on DVD tomorrow, but you'd be doing yourself a much bigger favor if you hit your local comics shop and got the original graphic trade instead since the political undercurrent is entirely different and much more poignant (spoilers: V isn't necessarily a heroic archetype in the graphic novel, which makes the story much more real).
People like me? You've obviously assumed that I'm some sort of partisan Republican blindly supporting Bush. I am not, and my comment said nothing to that effect.
I used to work at a company that did the same thing. What they did, they did poorly, because management had a poor attitude toward employees, customers, and partners.
Rather than fix these things, which would have soiled their resumes by admitting error, they desperately attempted to cut costs to ridiculous extremes and move into new market segments that didn't in any way leverage their strengths.
Last I knew, they were still losing money (now that they can't cut any further) and competent employees were fleeing for their lives to much better and more stable opportunities.
I enjoy the fact that Bush's antics have gotten so severely anti-American that people like you don't even bother to try and defend them anymore, you just try and mock anybody who chastises him and hope people will automatically assume you're right....
...they are the agency that is in charge of keeping obscenity of the airwaves.
No, they're not. They're in charge of responding to and investigating complaints when the public complains about something perceived to be obscene on the airwaves.
See, if you'd bothered to inform yourself (gasp! Not on Slashdot!) you'd realize that the reason that the FCC refuses to set guidelines before hand is that they're job is to evaluate content based on the viewing/listening area and determine if, to the best of their knowledge, that material is obscene by the community standards of the people who consumed that material.
They don't censor anything, they penalize people when the public complains that a group has violated a community decency standard over that community's airwaves.
I misrepresented my position in that particular comment. The meaning I meant to convey, and didn't, was that the government is not obligated to allow you to talk to anybody you want in the sense that it's not infringing on your rights if they don't create the channels necessary to do it. I didn't mean to imply they could just keep your from talking to people arbitrarily, I meant that it's not their obligation to enable you to do it if the channel doesn't already exist for you to do so (exceptions apply, of course. See: legal representation).
In other words, if you wish to socialize with someone, it's your responsibility to create the channels to do so, not the government's.
Such an ignorant argument. I have a better idea, let's boil YOUR opinion down to extremist rhetoric: YOU are saying that you should be allowed to do whatever you want no matter what harm it causes other people, which is a horrifying statement.
Now go away. You're being completely irrational. This is a legal argument where legal data is relevant. You haven't got a legal leg to stand on which explains your moronic argument that the system must be fundamentally flawed.
Fine, that's your opinion. My opinion of your opinion is that it shows a completely childish view of social structures and a completely unworkable approach to human units of cooperation on anything less trivial than a dozen people. In effect, you're advocating either true anarchy where tribal units would define what's acceptable, or an extremist form of anarchy where the only useful law is self-imposed moral limits.
Frankly, that, to me, is the realm of sheer stupidity, and I don't really feel any particular need to argue with you about it.
You have no idea what you're talking about. When you've bothered to read and understand this bill and COPA, which it largely relies on for legality and relevance, feel free to come back and chatter about this story. Until then, you're obviously completely uninformed on the subject, and I'm not going to sit here and educate on every tiny detail everything you say something stupid like "they could simply be pricks about it".
Here's a clue for you. For years there were laws on the books, Jim Crow laws, which were finally all struck down in the 1950's and 1960's. Nothing wrong immediately goes away just because it is wrong. Even this Gitmo anti-Geneva Convention fiasco has denied people Due Process for years. These things need to be fought before they are passed into law.
Then file a court challenge if it passes and shut up.
You have no "right to the internet", don't be ridiculous.
And, no, you can say it all you want, but being inconvenienced in the process of exercising a right is not, by any relevant standard, a violation of that right when there is a legitimate reason for the inconvenience.
It's not outlined in the bill. Based on prior legislation, very likely this would be done by librarians using community standards. If all else fails, and it's being abused, a court challenge in the district can be mounted.
AFAIK this system has not caused any problems yet. If you know of any, please cite them.
Slashdot Mirror
Soooo.... people drive SUVs because they're too stupid to learn how a trailer behaves? Can't argue with you there, we're in total agreement: people drive SUVs because they're idiots.
No, I'd call them stupid for taking two large dogs everwhere.
An Element/CR-V is an SUV in name only and has very few of the attributes that are traditionally associated with what is normally known as an SUV. All it is, in reality, is a funny looking Civic with a chassis that's been slightly modified so it better suits the higher, unibody frame.
Because you basically just compared the single most durable SUV frame on the market against one of the least durable compact frames. Jeep has, by far, the strongest unibody steel frame available, and Dodge Neons are practically wheels wrapped in aluminum foil.
Note that in a well-built machine the engine will not come into the cabin at all, save for a truly ferocious head-on collision. The frame of the car, in such a heavy impact, should partially crumple in on itself to dissipate some of the shock. A BMW 3 series probably could have hit the same thing at the same speed and not had the engine do anything more than possibly break off the mounts and fall out the bottom of the bay.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192689&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=15818993#158191 04
Already addressed.
Providing a conclusion prior to presenting the evidence, especially when you put the conclusion right in the damn title, is a persuasive writing tactic used when you want to reinforce the existing beliefs of an audience. It is not a useful method for writing neutral pieces in which you wish to have the reader come to their own conclusion, or where you want to convince a neutral or opposing party of your view.
This is a very basic writing concept that was, at least for us, taught in high school. I am not interested in reading party-line propaganda.
His view may or may not be valid, but since he's attempting to make me believe it before I even open the dust jacket of his book, I'm not going to waste my time or money trying to find out.
Dear Sir,
It has come to my attention that you have no idea what you are talking about. Kindly do us both a favor and come to a basic understanding of the proper application of Occam's razor as a principle for deriving meaning based on the most likely solution to a problem in which inconclusive but significant evidence is available.
Specifically, please come to understand it well enough to know that no intelligent person would be so silly as to attempt to apply it after observing only one data point.
Thank you.
HOW SMART PEOPLE TOW MODERATELY SIZED THINGS WITH CARS
Step 1: Buy a hitch.
Step 2: Buy a trailer.
Step 3: Install hitch and latch trailer.
Step 4: Load trailer.
Step 5: Drive to destination.
Step 6: Unload trailer.
Regarding the dogs, presuming you aren't taking them everywhere, that's no excuse. If you buy a special vehicle type just for your pets, you have much deeper cognitive problems than we can address here.
Regarding the rest of your drivel, nothing you mentioned there either:
1. Fits anything even remotely approaching the majority of people.
2. Can't be done with a car.
Besides, even ignoring the fact that your excuses were pointless and easily overcome, the best overall vehicle type for you is a station wagon, not an SUV.
If he wants to sell an honest analysis he should give the book an honest title.
You can't judge a book by its cover, but I can't waste my time reading every single book out there just to find out whether or not it's been mistitled either.
Wow. With such an unbiased and straightforward title like that, it sure doesn't make me think that it's left-leaning polipop propaganda. Noooooooo.
Except the fact that I have observed, consistently, over years, that the cause of most SUV purchases, where most is best defined as "nearly all", is egomania.
But, hey, never mind. Even if 1 in 1000 people buy an SUV for a non-egomanical reason that's a good enough chance to take a critical, neutral approach to every single SUV driver, right?
No, of course not. That's ridiculous.
The majority, by far, of SUV owners purchased for ego. I will automatically default to that conclusion when presented with any new SUV driver, and I will almost always be right.
Yea, they feel safer because when they hit someone and kill them they're less likely to be hurt.
Protip: 4WD and AWD provide only one useful function: start movement on bad terrain. After that, weight and tire size are the ONLY benefits an SUV has over a car, and they do not contribute to road manners significantly well enough to make them much more useable in poor conditions unless they're in the hands of a skilled driver.
In fact, as an amusing aside, I don't know if there are any SUVs left that don't have ABS since they're so prone to being driven on dry pavement. That works against them in a HUGE way on slick surfaces and probably negates any benefits to be had from tire size and tread when trying to stop in a winter weather.
Democracy works just fine for the most part. Despite the stupidity of the 2000 election, there's little reason to belive what happened in the U.S. was particularly bad.
Now, in the event that the mistake is repeated I would very strongly urge them to worry.
Y'know, people have been making that argument to me for the last six years now. Undoubtedly, I've seen people towing boats, trailers, etc from time to time behind an SUV, but by far the most common use I see for SUVs is... drum roll please:
Carrying one person to and from work on the expressway at unncessarily high speeds.
See, the SUV crowd keeps SAYING things like this, but I never really see any evidence that any of it is true. If there's so much need for it, I'd really love to know why I'm never seeing it. I mean, over certain periods of time I'm willing to accept that I'm just missing these people with their massive "needs", but Occam's Razor is starting to tell me that the reason I see these "needs" so infrequently is because they're a crock that people like you invented to justify buying overpriced, under-functional trucks from shifty salesman that you weren't bright enough to handle.
Almost nobody in the U.S., especially in metro areas, can rationally justify an SUV purchase. They get bought because they got popular and people just couldn't resist not having the latest trendy gadget, no matter how expensive and pointless and dangerous it was.
Go play in traffic. Nobody with even half a brain is stupid enough anymore to believe that the majority of people with SUVs bought them for any other reason than they were "the cool thing to have".
HALT CITIZEN
------
The Slashbot and Troll Unbiased Primary Insight Diagram does not include reasoning which leads to the above opinion on the related matter. Common causes for deviating from the Primary Diagram include the following:
1. Posts utilizing "common sense".
2. Posts resulting from "informed users".
3. Posts attempting to obtain a fair compromise on an issue.
Specifically, your post above violates the following principle(s) which have been listed as approved opinions that may be posted on Slashdot:
1. All activities engaged in by children, being pure and innocent, and never engaging in any behavior beyond the bounds set by "good" parents, which are not sanctioned as acceptable by the Slashdot population, are a direct result of poor parenting.
2. All monitoring, on any level, in any capacity, by any person and of any person, for any reason or goal, is strictly a matter of Big Brotherism and is to be abhorred without question or additional information, the circumstances not bearing relevance on the approved opinion.
Please immediately cease and desist all activites which may be characterized as "free thinking", "reasoned", or "rational". Failure to comply may result in poor moderation which could lead to the removal of your posting ability for pre-determined amounts of time, or for your posts to be removed from a threshold visible by normal users. However, note that the moderation system should not be construed as a form of censorship.
The Slashdot Pre-approved User and Troll Unbiased Moderation Committee thanks you for your cooperation. Together, we can make slashdot a wonderful place to mouthbreathe.
Like when people were taking umbrance with over-reaching parts of the Patriot Act and they kept saying "you should go ahead and renew that part, because we never ever had to use it, so how could we have abused it!"?
That was cute. As a recall, the argument was "we're not abusing the library records power, we've never used it, so you don't have to worry about us renewing it". Uh.... yea.
In related news, V For Vendetta will be about on DVD tomorrow, but you'd be doing yourself a much bigger favor if you hit your local comics shop and got the original graphic trade instead since the political undercurrent is entirely different and much more poignant (spoilers: V isn't necessarily a heroic archetype in the graphic novel, which makes the story much more real).
Well, then you're just whiney.
Crappy business model.
I used to work at a company that did the same thing. What they did, they did poorly, because management had a poor attitude toward employees, customers, and partners.
Rather than fix these things, which would have soiled their resumes by admitting error, they desperately attempted to cut costs to ridiculous extremes and move into new market segments that didn't in any way leverage their strengths.
Last I knew, they were still losing money (now that they can't cut any further) and competent employees were fleeing for their lives to much better and more stable opportunities.
I enjoy the fact that Bush's antics have gotten so severely anti-American that people like you don't even bother to try and defend them anymore, you just try and mock anybody who chastises him and hope people will automatically assume you're right....
No, they're not. They're in charge of responding to and investigating complaints when the public complains about something perceived to be obscene on the airwaves.
See, if you'd bothered to inform yourself (gasp! Not on Slashdot!) you'd realize that the reason that the FCC refuses to set guidelines before hand is that they're job is to evaluate content based on the viewing/listening area and determine if, to the best of their knowledge, that material is obscene by the community standards of the people who consumed that material.
They don't censor anything, they penalize people when the public complains that a group has violated a community decency standard over that community's airwaves.
I misrepresented my position in that particular comment. The meaning I meant to convey, and didn't, was that the government is not obligated to allow you to talk to anybody you want in the sense that it's not infringing on your rights if they don't create the channels necessary to do it. I didn't mean to imply they could just keep your from talking to people arbitrarily, I meant that it's not their obligation to enable you to do it if the channel doesn't already exist for you to do so (exceptions apply, of course. See: legal representation).
In other words, if you wish to socialize with someone, it's your responsibility to create the channels to do so, not the government's.
Such an ignorant argument. I have a better idea, let's boil YOUR opinion down to extremist rhetoric: YOU are saying that you should be allowed to do whatever you want no matter what harm it causes other people, which is a horrifying statement.
Now go away. You're being completely irrational. This is a legal argument where legal data is relevant. You haven't got a legal leg to stand on which explains your moronic argument that the system must be fundamentally flawed.
Fine, that's your opinion. My opinion of your opinion is that it shows a completely childish view of social structures and a completely unworkable approach to human units of cooperation on anything less trivial than a dozen people. In effect, you're advocating either true anarchy where tribal units would define what's acceptable, or an extremist form of anarchy where the only useful law is self-imposed moral limits.
Frankly, that, to me, is the realm of sheer stupidity, and I don't really feel any particular need to argue with you about it.
Then file a court challenge if it passes and shut up.
You have no "right to the internet", don't be ridiculous.
And, no, you can say it all you want, but being inconvenienced in the process of exercising a right is not, by any relevant standard, a violation of that right when there is a legitimate reason for the inconvenience.
It's not outlined in the bill. Based on prior legislation, very likely this would be done by librarians using community standards. If all else fails, and it's being abused, a court challenge in the district can be mounted.
AFAIK this system has not caused any problems yet. If you know of any, please cite them.