I'm cheap and of limited means, I will not purchase a car which anyone would consider "new", and consequently the transmissions in them are never the latest or greatest. That said, I have driven some newer AT cars and been less annoyed with them... but I still found that they had the same basic problem: I am better at driving the car than it is at driving itself. Even the best AT will make choices I don't like, and I am not about to go finding tricks to make it do what I want by doing things that might not be what I want just so that I can avoid doing something I don't mind doing at all.
As for pulling into traffic and needing to go fast, now... the traffic conditions in my area dictate that I either do it, or that I don't drive... walking to work isn't feasible any time of year, and biking to work could only work a couple of months of the year, but even then it would be a very long (time) ride and I'm not sure I would be able to be as presentable as I need to be once I get there. Public transit is theoretically possible, but the buses are far too infrequent and convoluted to be practical, even if taking them wouldn't actually cost me more in the long run (they are rather overpriced). If those conditions aren't applicable to you, then neither is your criticism applicable to me.
I've actually had the opportunity to drive a couple of recent CVTs, and they've been decent. They are also out of my price range. Maybe in a decade or so when the prices on such vehicles have come down I will consider one over a manual, but AT just doesn't do anything that I want or need. Manuals aren't better at all for general use, just for certain situations which happen to come up not infrequently enough for me that, personally, it is worth the very slight inconvenience they create.
See, here's the thing, I'm from New England. The needs are very different.
Having driven in some other parts of the country (Southeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Northwest), I've found that our road conditions just don't match what other people experience. For one thing, our population density and distribution is completely whacked... we have rural areas directly abutting urban centers, commercial districts in the middle of residential neighborhoods, industrial parks in town centers, etc. Also, our roads were largely built on an entirely different design philosophy, which is to say none at all: they are narrow, arbitrarily windy, and tend to route the heaviest traffic loads through inconvenient (though entirely understandable, once you realize that these are essentially paved-over foot paths) places. The terrain is unpredictable, rocky, and very much not flat or unbroken, there are rivers and streams everywhere.
Basically, if you built this place in SimCity, you would lose. Badly.
If I were driving in straight lines on flat ground following logical traffic progressions, I would drive an automatic because doing so would make life a lot easier... but I don't, not even close. Just leaving my driveway requires that I pull onto a road with 40 mph traffic and no stop lights which is also a major commuter thruway; waiting for a safe time to pull into traffic can take several minutes as it is, if I had to wait for such a time that I could do so with only limited control over my vehicle's acceleration and other behaviors I wouldn't be able to go to work in the morning. I suppose that I could make the commute at dawn and wait around until I actually have to be there (and since I don't have keys to the building, or meaningful work that I can do elsewhere, I'd really just be killing time... lots of it), or adopt other "solutions" that are simply unrealistic, but I'd rather just suffer through having one extra pedal and having to do the incredibly difficult task of operating my own gearbox. I could also suffer through using a system in a way that it isn't intended by treating an AT like a manual for those times that I need it, but they just don't work as well, and once I start doing that it suddenly becomes no more convenient anyway.
I don't care if other people drive automatics, and I actually recommend that new drivers learn how drive on them first (learning the rules of the road and creating muscle memory of how to maneuver a car is challenging enough without worrying about the transmission), but people who insist that MT is somehow inferior on any metric other than ease of use, or that people who use them can't possibly be doing so for valid reasons are just foolish.
"I said that if someone can't drive an automatic car safely (and that inherently requires you to feel safe doing it), then they have zero authority to be criticising anyone else's driving.'
Oh, so, you're basing this on nothing... got it, you're an idiot.
Would you be happier if I rephrased it to "I dislike driving automatics because they frequently shift at inopportune times, and if I'm just going to do it myself I'd rather have a vehicle designed for it than one that merely allows it"? It doesn't have the same ring, or sense of urgency, but is perhaps more factually accurate.
I'm also not sure where I criticized anybody;s driving... I tend not to do that unless I've actually seen them drive, since it's a rather silly thing to do. Wouldn't you agree?
If you would like to keep bringing up politics that are no longer relevant, then i will bring up the fact that Puerto Ricans are able to collect welfare because of Teddy Roosevelt and that Abraham Lincoln declared martial law, seized private arms, suspended Habeas Corpus and otherwise violated all sorts of basic Civil Liberties... they were both Republicans, in case you're wondering.
Now would you like to stop bringing up irrelevant historical labels and participate in a rational discussion like a good little boy?
Uh, what? I can drive an auto just fine... i prefer not to, because I am better at shifting than an automatic transmission.
I also find that human players tend to be better than bots at video games... mostly because they're smarter and better at planning.
So remind me again, why are you suggesting that somebody who prefers something that you don't like (I'm guessing that you tried driving a manual once, stalled, cried, and decided they are for idiots... correct me if I'm wrong), and is capable of operating far more vehicles than, is somehow wrong and you're right?
Would you also say that people who use CLIs are doing it wrong, because GUIs work just fine? Or that using a CLI is an archaic and outdated skill that is no longer of any value? I'll tell you now that I don't really care for CLIs, don't have much patience for them, and fully admit that I'm a less able tech because of it... it's one of the primary reasons I'm a hobbiest/enthusiast rather than a pro.
Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick? It's hard for about 3 hours, but once you get a feel for it you simply have so much more control over how the car behaves that it is actually hard to deal with not doing it. I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic... they always seem to upshift too early, sacrificing torque for smoothness, which would be great if I didn't have some whacko barreling up behind me at 50 and I need to be going fast enough that he won't smash into me 5 seconds ago.
Oh, and when they flub going up steep hills, that's just terrific.
But you just go ahead and keep knocking people who are better at driving than their cars, I'm sure you know better than they do.
- If not, can you install Linux with or without a 'hack'?
Yes, but installing anything from a floppy is obviously out of the question.
* What flavor of Linux would be best for a robot girlfriend? (and, no, you can't use 'GirLinux')
To be honest it doesn't much matter... the speech modules are poorly written no matter which you use, all of the personality packages clearly suffer from Asperger's, and the firmware for *ahem* down below was clearly written by somebody with no earthly idea of what it should be doing. Welcome to Linux.
* Will she still be considered 'female' once she's running Linux or will she be reset to a virgin teenage boy?
Gender differentiation is still in alpha... just expect androgyny and you won't be so disappointed.
* What type of DRM will she have?
Unauthorized users will be unable to open the legs.
- What will the pirate hack to break her DRM be called?
Roofies.
* And last, but not least, can she be programmed not to dump you?'
The technical process of making people lose all sense of reality and simply consume whatever is most successful at telling them "buy me because I'm cool, and you can be too" is pretty straightforward to describe, but actually quite complicated to implement. It's called marketing. Apple is a marketing company that also makes electronics, they are quite adept at their core business, such that people don't even realize that they are pretty mediocre when it comes to their secondary, and in fact believe them to be the absolute greatest of all time.
Think about it: Macs and iPods crash all the time, they require special software which is incompatible with other hardware to operate, they cost a ton of extra money, they are not measurably better for any particular use or application than competing products, and yet they still have legions of fanatical users who couldn't even imagine using something else.
Once you take off the sex appeal, Apple's actual devices don't have much going for them, yet they still dominate because the marketing is so good.
"It's true. It's also true that it was developed under Monarchy rule, which we've also rejected. Your point is what? That royally appointed judges are better lawmakers than elected officials?"
That judges are better judges than royals OR elected officials. We rejected monarchy, yet kept a judicial tradition that was largely created by the monarchy because it was a damned good idea.
If you're going to RTFA, read the actual opinion. It's in Jurisprech (a dialect of legalese), but if you can wade through it it's actually quite enlightening as to not only how sentencing works in this country (it is both more and less arbitrary and subjective than most people believe), but also to the work judges do in balancing competing needs. It's actually a pretty good read, and at 22 pages (with lots of whitespace and a rigid formatting convention that most C programmers would envy, opinions are not typographically dense) not even all that long... especially given that there are 2 concurring opinions and a thorough introduction.
Oddly enough, the judiciary, who are without a doubt the most lawyerish branch of government, also tend to write the most readable laws (and yes, their opinions ARE law... that's neither un-Constitutional nor new).
Except that 99% of successful businesses actually have a profit model, an actual plan, and require some sort of special skill or hard work on the part of the owner. So more like 10,000.
And initial reports confirm that the death was not AIDS-related, as many had first feared. It would truly have been a blow to his legacy had being HIV positive been a contributing factor in this matter.
I would suggest the precise opposite. When auto-tune is used to camouflage poor musicianship, it just feels dishonest, but when used to overtly alter the sound such that it can be used as an effect it is merely another form of distortion. We don't discriminate against wah pedals or guitarists who use them... why should autotune or vocalists be forced to play by different rules?
That said, T-Pain is a crappy singer and none of his vocal parts are interesting for any reason other than his liberal use of autotune. And Cher is totally a trap (I can tell by the pixels, and from having seen quite a few dickgirls in my day). Bash away.
"So the next time you see a well-thought-out, reasonable-sounding response to an obviously-trollish comment on Slashdot remember: IT COULD BE AN ASTROTURFER'
That is precisely what every Twitter feed I've actually seen is. I am well aware that there are other, arguably valuable Twitter feeds, but 99.9% of them are people broadcasting pointless drivel about their daily lives, and the other.1% I already have access to through about half a dozen other outlets that could only possibly be slower by 5, 10 minutes tops. I'm willing to find out 5 minutes after everyone* else for the privilege of not having to touch that vat of stupid.
*everyone who actually follows precisely the right feed, checks their phone every second for updates, and isn't too busy wading through their old roommate eating sushi 20 miles away... so pretty much nobody who actually uses Twitter.
It's not unheard of for sales tax to be applied to the "fair market value" rather than the actual sale price of an item. If I buy a car from my parents for $0, I still get to pay sales tax on it when I go to transfer the title... the RMV worker will just look it up in KBB and tell me to cough it up.
Never underestimate the lengths the state will go to collecting taxes that shouldn't exist in the first place.
So if I type "child porn" into the Google image search, should it return 8-year-olds giving blowjobs?
We censor things here too, we just draw the line differently. That doesn't make it right to draw the line somewhere else, but before you go off on Google, you should really think about what it means for a company to just violate any law they don't care for.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed length implies that death or other arbitrary events are irrelevant. 20 years is 20 years is 20 years.
I'm cheap and of limited means, I will not purchase a car which anyone would consider "new", and consequently the transmissions in them are never the latest or greatest. That said, I have driven some newer AT cars and been less annoyed with them... but I still found that they had the same basic problem: I am better at driving the car than it is at driving itself. Even the best AT will make choices I don't like, and I am not about to go finding tricks to make it do what I want by doing things that might not be what I want just so that I can avoid doing something I don't mind doing at all.
As for pulling into traffic and needing to go fast, now... the traffic conditions in my area dictate that I either do it, or that I don't drive... walking to work isn't feasible any time of year, and biking to work could only work a couple of months of the year, but even then it would be a very long (time) ride and I'm not sure I would be able to be as presentable as I need to be once I get there. Public transit is theoretically possible, but the buses are far too infrequent and convoluted to be practical, even if taking them wouldn't actually cost me more in the long run (they are rather overpriced). If those conditions aren't applicable to you, then neither is your criticism applicable to me.
I've actually had the opportunity to drive a couple of recent CVTs, and they've been decent. They are also out of my price range. Maybe in a decade or so when the prices on such vehicles have come down I will consider one over a manual, but AT just doesn't do anything that I want or need. Manuals aren't better at all for general use, just for certain situations which happen to come up not infrequently enough for me that, personally, it is worth the very slight inconvenience they create.
So... they choose it because it is less hard, and that is not the same thing as easier?
That's some fine logic you've got going there.
See, here's the thing, I'm from New England. The needs are very different.
Having driven in some other parts of the country (Southeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Northwest), I've found that our road conditions just don't match what other people experience. For one thing, our population density and distribution is completely whacked... we have rural areas directly abutting urban centers, commercial districts in the middle of residential neighborhoods, industrial parks in town centers, etc. Also, our roads were largely built on an entirely different design philosophy, which is to say none at all: they are narrow, arbitrarily windy, and tend to route the heaviest traffic loads through inconvenient (though entirely understandable, once you realize that these are essentially paved-over foot paths) places. The terrain is unpredictable, rocky, and very much not flat or unbroken, there are rivers and streams everywhere.
Basically, if you built this place in SimCity, you would lose. Badly.
If I were driving in straight lines on flat ground following logical traffic progressions, I would drive an automatic because doing so would make life a lot easier... but I don't, not even close. Just leaving my driveway requires that I pull onto a road with 40 mph traffic and no stop lights which is also a major commuter thruway; waiting for a safe time to pull into traffic can take several minutes as it is, if I had to wait for such a time that I could do so with only limited control over my vehicle's acceleration and other behaviors I wouldn't be able to go to work in the morning. I suppose that I could make the commute at dawn and wait around until I actually have to be there (and since I don't have keys to the building, or meaningful work that I can do elsewhere, I'd really just be killing time... lots of it), or adopt other "solutions" that are simply unrealistic, but I'd rather just suffer through having one extra pedal and having to do the incredibly difficult task of operating my own gearbox. I could also suffer through using a system in a way that it isn't intended by treating an AT like a manual for those times that I need it, but they just don't work as well, and once I start doing that it suddenly becomes no more convenient anyway.
I don't care if other people drive automatics, and I actually recommend that new drivers learn how drive on them first (learning the rules of the road and creating muscle memory of how to maneuver a car is challenging enough without worrying about the transmission), but people who insist that MT is somehow inferior on any metric other than ease of use, or that people who use them can't possibly be doing so for valid reasons are just foolish.
A modpoint, a modpoint, my kingdom for a modpoint...
Of course, I just blew 15 of them not 10 minutes ago, but still...
"I said that if someone can't drive an automatic car safely (and that inherently requires you to feel safe doing it), then they have zero authority to be criticising anyone else's driving.'
Oh, so, you're basing this on nothing... got it, you're an idiot.
Would you be happier if I rephrased it to "I dislike driving automatics because they frequently shift at inopportune times, and if I'm just going to do it myself I'd rather have a vehicle designed for it than one that merely allows it"? It doesn't have the same ring, or sense of urgency, but is perhaps more factually accurate.
I'm also not sure where I criticized anybody;s driving... I tend not to do that unless I've actually seen them drive, since it's a rather silly thing to do. Wouldn't you agree?
Yes, over 50 years ago.
If you would like to keep bringing up politics that are no longer relevant, then i will bring up the fact that Puerto Ricans are able to collect welfare because of Teddy Roosevelt and that Abraham Lincoln declared martial law, seized private arms, suspended Habeas Corpus and otherwise violated all sorts of basic Civil Liberties... they were both Republicans, in case you're wondering.
Now would you like to stop bringing up irrelevant historical labels and participate in a rational discussion like a good little boy?
Computer literacy is not the same as being a competent programmer any more than English literacy is the same as being a novelist.
Try not to get ahead of yourself.
Uh, what? I can drive an auto just fine... i prefer not to, because I am better at shifting than an automatic transmission.
I also find that human players tend to be better than bots at video games... mostly because they're smarter and better at planning.
So remind me again, why are you suggesting that somebody who prefers something that you don't like (I'm guessing that you tried driving a manual once, stalled, cried, and decided they are for idiots... correct me if I'm wrong), and is capable of operating far more vehicles than, is somehow wrong and you're right?
Would you also say that people who use CLIs are doing it wrong, because GUIs work just fine? Or that using a CLI is an archaic and outdated skill that is no longer of any value? I'll tell you now that I don't really care for CLIs, don't have much patience for them, and fully admit that I'm a less able tech because of it... it's one of the primary reasons I'm a hobbiest/enthusiast rather than a pro.
Spoken like a true AT fan. Have you ever even tried driving stick? It's hard for about 3 hours, but once you get a feel for it you simply have so much more control over how the car behaves that it is actually hard to deal with not doing it. I feel like I'm going to die every time I pull into busy traffic in an automatic... they always seem to upshift too early, sacrificing torque for smoothness, which would be great if I didn't have some whacko barreling up behind me at 50 and I need to be going fast enough that he won't smash into me 5 seconds ago.
Oh, and when they flub going up steep hills, that's just terrific.
But you just go ahead and keep knocking people who are better at driving than their cars, I'm sure you know better than they do.
"* Does she run Linux?
Nope, Windows XXX.
- If not, can you install Linux with or without a 'hack'?
Yes, but installing anything from a floppy is obviously out of the question.
* What flavor of Linux would be best for a robot girlfriend? (and, no, you can't use 'GirLinux')
To be honest it doesn't much matter... the speech modules are poorly written no matter which you use, all of the personality packages clearly suffer from Asperger's, and the firmware for *ahem* down below was clearly written by somebody with no earthly idea of what it should be doing. Welcome to Linux.
* Will she still be considered 'female' once she's running Linux or will she be reset to a virgin teenage boy?
Gender differentiation is still in alpha... just expect androgyny and you won't be so disappointed.
* What type of DRM will she have?
Unauthorized users will be unable to open the legs.
- What will the pirate hack to break her DRM be called?
Roofies.
* And last, but not least, can she be programmed not to dump you?'
Who cares? She'll have a mute button anyway.
The technical process of making people lose all sense of reality and simply consume whatever is most successful at telling them "buy me because I'm cool, and you can be too" is pretty straightforward to describe, but actually quite complicated to implement. It's called marketing. Apple is a marketing company that also makes electronics, they are quite adept at their core business, such that people don't even realize that they are pretty mediocre when it comes to their secondary, and in fact believe them to be the absolute greatest of all time.
Think about it: Macs and iPods crash all the time, they require special software which is incompatible with other hardware to operate, they cost a ton of extra money, they are not measurably better for any particular use or application than competing products, and yet they still have legions of fanatical users who couldn't even imagine using something else.
Once you take off the sex appeal, Apple's actual devices don't have much going for them, yet they still dominate because the marketing is so good.
"It's true. It's also true that it was developed under Monarchy rule, which we've also rejected. Your point is what? That royally appointed judges are better lawmakers than elected officials?"
That judges are better judges than royals OR elected officials. We rejected monarchy, yet kept a judicial tradition that was largely created by the monarchy because it was a damned good idea.
So what's your better idea?
"a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs"
L O effing L.
Where do they find these idiots?
If you're going to RTFA, read the actual opinion. It's in Jurisprech (a dialect of legalese), but if you can wade through it it's actually quite enlightening as to not only how sentencing works in this country (it is both more and less arbitrary and subjective than most people believe), but also to the work judges do in balancing competing needs. It's actually a pretty good read, and at 22 pages (with lots of whitespace and a rigid formatting convention that most C programmers would envy, opinions are not typographically dense) not even all that long... especially given that there are 2 concurring opinions and a thorough introduction.
Oddly enough, the judiciary, who are without a doubt the most lawyerish branch of government, also tend to write the most readable laws (and yes, their opinions ARE law... that's neither un-Constitutional nor new).
Son of a bitch, let a btard near your computer for 15 minutes unsupervised...
Sorry folks.
Except that 99% of successful businesses actually have a profit model, an actual plan, and require some sort of special skill or hard work on the part of the owner. So more like 10,000.
And initial reports confirm that the death was not AIDS-related, as many had first feared. It would truly have been a blow to his legacy had being HIV positive been a contributing factor in this matter.
I would suggest the precise opposite. When auto-tune is used to camouflage poor musicianship, it just feels dishonest, but when used to overtly alter the sound such that it can be used as an effect it is merely another form of distortion. We don't discriminate against wah pedals or guitarists who use them... why should autotune or vocalists be forced to play by different rules?
That said, T-Pain is a crappy singer and none of his vocal parts are interesting for any reason other than his liberal use of autotune. And Cher is totally a trap (I can tell by the pixels, and from having seen quite a few dickgirls in my day). Bash away.
Sure you can. You just need to be in the .1%.
It means they didn't take you for a big enough sucker to be worth their time.
"So the next time you see a well-thought-out, reasonable-sounding response to an obviously-trollish comment on Slashdot remember: IT COULD BE AN ASTROTURFER'
Sounds sweet. Can we have some of those?
That is precisely what every Twitter feed I've actually seen is. I am well aware that there are other, arguably valuable Twitter feeds, but 99.9% of them are people broadcasting pointless drivel about their daily lives, and the other .1% I already have access to through about half a dozen other outlets that could only possibly be slower by 5, 10 minutes tops. I'm willing to find out 5 minutes after everyone* else for the privilege of not having to touch that vat of stupid.
*everyone who actually follows precisely the right feed, checks their phone every second for updates, and isn't too busy wading through their old roommate eating sushi 20 miles away... so pretty much nobody who actually uses Twitter.
It's not unheard of for sales tax to be applied to the "fair market value" rather than the actual sale price of an item. If I buy a car from my parents for $0, I still get to pay sales tax on it when I go to transfer the title... the RMV worker will just look it up in KBB and tell me to cough it up.
Never underestimate the lengths the state will go to collecting taxes that shouldn't exist in the first place.
So if I type "child porn" into the Google image search, should it return 8-year-olds giving blowjobs?
We censor things here too, we just draw the line differently. That doesn't make it right to draw the line somewhere else, but before you go off on Google, you should really think about what it means for a company to just violate any law they don't care for.