It may be a pain, but considering lorries and buses squeeze their way through most areas it's more an issue of parking than driving. Although some "car squeezes" would probably be very difficult to go through.
In a minor accident, the Hummer and the driver would both survive intact. In a major accident, the Hummer just uses the other car to soften the impact. It doesn't matter which vehicle has the crumple zones, you know, as long as they crumple.
See, crash ratings are, well, the same thing as a Hummer hitting another Hummer, or an Odyssey hitting another Odyssey. What would the crash rating be for a Hummer hitting an Odyssey?
Most collisions involve more than 1 vehicle. (Yes, a few involve cars hitting trees, or deer, etc. In the tree case, the Volvo may do as well as the Hummer, depending on the tree size, etc. In the case of hitting a deer, the Hummer will do far better than a Volvo because of its greater mass. The greater ride height also does a lot of good in that case, since your bumper/grille will hit the deer rather than the windshield.)
Big engines use lots of gas. People like to talk ill of SUVs and will pass by an M5 thinking only "hey, nice car!" Take a look at actual car mileages sometime -- just grab a Road & Track and take a look at their car review history near the back -- you may be surprised at who the biggest offenders are in terms of mileage.
Not to mention, there's a certain, shall we say, CONTRADICTION when one criticizes a Hummer driver for driving short distances, and then for using lots of gas. Well, which is it? Someone driving a Civic 50 miles to work each day is using a lot more gas than someone driving a Hummer 5 miles to work each day.
I'm not trying to defend bad fuel economy here. There's lots of room for improvement in that department. But if you're concerned about it, may as well be sensible.
Since everyone who replied to my post seems to have misunderstood what I said exactly the same, moronic way, I'll reply to it just once. You don't recklessly cut off an H2 the same way you would a small, light car. A driving mistake around an H2 is much more costly than around a car you can toss around easily. That's what commanding respect on the road means. An aggressive H2 driver will get his/her way more often than not because the H2 is dangerous in a collision, regardless of whose fault it is.
It's not the same kind of respect a Gallardo would get on the road, but it serves the same purpose -- you let it go where it wants.
The H1 is over $100k, the H2 is $70k+, and the H3 is close to $40k if you don't want a bare-bones one.
None of the cars are "sissy" by any standard except maybe when compared to the HMMWV, which is the military version of the H1. An H2 commands plenty of respect on the road (and off the road). The H3 is a more expensive and less reliable XTerra, so it's rubbish in that sense but it's definitely not a sissy car.
And no Volvo would do well in an actual collision with any of the Hummer models. The Volvo SUV might do OK in a collision with an H3, but that's it.
And why exactly should religion get this respect? What is it about religion that makes people give it a free ride no matter what? The free world has acquired a dirty habit of bending over backwards for every demand Muslims make, and this is just another example of that. Buddhist texts shouldn't be given *undue* respect, either (note that they probably deserve more than most of the Qur'An), but that's a non-issue since Buddhists aren't the ones censoring material on the grounds of their religious beliefs.
You're far from entirely correct. There are cars here that aren't in Japan, and vice versa, but there are many that are both here and there.
I know what cars are driven in Japan. Most of them are the same but perhaps with different names. There's a "Harrier" which is basically the Lexus RS SUV and, the Infiniti G35 is the Nissan "Skyline" there, etc. What Japan doesn't have is "big" SUVs (like the Sequoia) and proper pickup trucks (they have a lot of small, dinky ones though).
Japan has many more "boxy" microbus-style cars than in the US, as well.
Anyway all the cars I mentioned in my other post are definitely there.
It's too bad that aerodynamics don't favor angry-faced cars. Alas, anything that has low drag is going to end up looking more or less like a Prius. (Those little longitudinal wrinkles on the roof are not styling, by the way).
This is sarcasm, yes? Ever heard of, um, Vipers, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Nissan GT-R, Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, etc.? Probably 80-90% of sports/racing cars have aggressive, "angry" faces. A Prius is low drag? Maybe compared to a Wrangler, but not compared to cars with actually low drag.
Well, for every "happy" Supra there's an angry Mitsubishi EVO... actually more like 10 EVOs. Then there's the GT-R, etc. Lexuses don't look happy at all. I think the personality thing is right, and maybe Japanese have certain expectations about certain cars. Some should be happy, and some should be aggressive.
Richard Dawkins is actually extremely gracious and very much NOT an ass in the least. It's just that we're not used to religion being taken through the gautlet the way everything else is, because people like to kiss religion's arse even if they're not religious themselves. A lot of undeserved respect taken for granted. Richard makes a point not to show that undeserved respect, and it's shocking to a lot of people.
Blah, you seem to be a PC shooter elitist:-( Well, PC's got a lot of good ones, consoles have probably as many good ones, and nowadays they're usually cross-platform anyway (PC gets Halo/Gears eventually, consoles get FEAR eventually, and games like Bioshock are multiplatform from the get-go). Gears isn't even a FPS technically, and it's certainly not "common-as-muck," as I've yet to see a tactical co-op game that's as fun (even co-op Halo isn't quite as good).
Reason people like Halo and Gears is that they not only brought something new to the table (though Halo didn't bring *as* much), but that they were VERY polished games. The way Blizzard's WoW isn't exactly the most original game ever but just damn well put together.
Perfect Dark's better than Goldeneye, heh. Though if there were no Goldeneye there wouldn't have been PD (it was supposed to be another Bond game but United Artists went retarded and decided not to give Rare the license anymore following Goldeneye).
It's true, though, that prior to Halo, Goldeneye and PD were about the only good shooters on the console (oh, and Turok 1 and 2 were cool as well; 3 was horrid). And you're right that Halo was overrated, in large part because many people didn't realize it wasn't the only FPS ever made. But, consoles definitely hold their own with PCs nowadays in terms of shooting games, whether 1st person (Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Halo, Bioshock, etc.) or 3rd (Resident Evil 4+, Gears, Mass Effect, etc.).
That all being said, it really helps to know what a game *is* before talking about it, so yeah I suppose all-in-all I agree with almost everything you wrote. All but the "generic common-as-muck shooters" bit.
What about blank Blu-Rays? Those are in the $10 range. For now 16Gb and 32Gb SD cards aren't cheap, but like you said those are consumer-level prices and the companies producing them aren't *trying* to compete with optical disc media.
I think high capacity flash ought to completely replace optical discs as media storage. The media distribution companies are the only thing I see in the way of that progression.
Damn, I was working on rather pricey machines while at Cambridge and even pricier ones while at OSU. Never were times so hard at the University that we had to work on Apple II's. Has MIT indeed wasted *all* of its money on random crap like robots?
I'd like to add that Slashdot is in thrall to the government, as clearly seen from their tendency to add "Coward" to the name of someone posting anonymously.
I post on richarddawkins.net (non-anonymously) as often as I post here and I'm not afraid to admit it ^_^. Hopefully in time, no-one will be afraid to admit such things. Much of what you mentioned, such as asking about abortion options, criticizing religions and cults, etc. -- hopefully in time people will find that they don't need to feel threatened when they do them. Anonymity can a very useful and even necessary thing for people with non-malicious intentions, but I do hope that as time goes by, as people become more and more enlightened, anonymity to hide from the religious ideology that frowns upon half the things you mentioned will no longer be necessary.
Nope pretty much every single web page is html + javascript:-P Also, standards compliance is only relevant in the browser; I don't know any people who seriously use Dreamweaver as a WYSIWYG; they just use F12/Shift+F12 browser preview for FF/IE.
A lot of people stopped paying for movies and started downloading them because nowadays ticket prices are really freaking high. In which case, download/bootleg != ticket because the only other option the person was considering was also "nothing" since movie theaters lose out to more affordable entertainment.
Less than 5 years ago I was paying $6 a ticket, now I'm paying $9 (it's not a BIG city; I'd be paying $10-$12 easy at this point). That's a 50% increase, and not everyone's managed to find a job today that pays 150% of what they were earning 5 years ago.
The more expensive movie tickets get, the more people will wait until a DVD comes out that costs the same as 1.5 tickets. Or just rent it from Netflix/Blockbuster. Or get a freaking video game. Funny how sales of certain entertainment suffer while others boom... media companies think people have infinite $ or something.
Since I'm sure most people will cover the *good* parts of the movie, I'll touch on the *bad* ones exclusively since it's not that interesting to just nod in agreement on stuff like Heath Ledger's fantastic Joker.
(BTW holy spoiler alert, Batman!)
1) Implausible SuperBatman action. Ok we know Batman is pretty badass and is expected to be able to do things that 99.99999% of people could never even hope to do. But the whole airplane hook business? And jumping out of Wayne's penthouse to catch Rachel and, without really slowing down the fall, land on top of a car? It just looked silly.
2) Forgetting to finish filming certain scenes. So, after Batman and Rachel crashed onto a car roof from a 30+ story building without suffering so much as a concussion, did Joker and his goons just leave the rest of the guests at the fundraiser some parting words and split? Weren't they after Harvey Dent, who Wayne simply locked up/barricaded in a random room? Maybe Alfred unleashed his ninja skills on them and sent them all running. I don't know, but that's not the kind of scene you want to just forget about without resolving it.
3) Lucius Fox giving away Batman's identity. The accountant says "hey Wayne Enterprises is spending an AWFUL lot of money on R&D, and there's these Batmobile schematics I found also...." Lucius is like "OMG YOU NOW KNOW THAT BRUCE WAYNE IS BATMAN!" Holy jumping to conclusions, Batman! Couldn't he say something like "Wayne Enterprises has a lot of clients, and they may or may not include someone associated with Bruce Way.. err.. I mean, Batman. Whoops! You didn't hear that! I'm an idiot."
3) Rachel Dawes... why, again? Diffrent actress. Different personality. Different kind of role. So, why the same character? It does more to kill continuity than to preserve it, honestly. Besides that, I'll echo what some people have said about Maggie Gyllenhaal not being nearly attractive enough to warrant the Joker calling her beautiful in the scene where he crashes the fundraiser. When he said it I was like "whoa, looks like *someone* forgot Katie Holmes was replaced!"
4) Nolan can't film fight scenes to save his life. I could crap better camera placement than what Nolan and his crew came up with. Yes, it's better than the complete mess we were treated to in Batman Begins, where you literally couldn't see a single move Batman did while fighting thugs. But it's still pretty abysmal. I mean, of all comic book characters, Batman is supposed to have the most impressive combat sequences. Not the *least* impressive, like what Nolan managed. Freaking hire Jackie Chan or something, someone who knows where the camera needs to be to capture the choreography. With a $180,000,000 budget on a Batman movie, there's no excuse for the rubbish fight scenes they managed.
5) The ending makes no sense Batman wants to show that Joker didn't corrupt Harvey Dent. So instead he opts to show that Joker corrupted Batman??? The public sees Batman as a force of good as well. He's not demonized by the public in this movie. So why would Batman want to be demonized? Isn't that the opposite of what he's fighting for? (Yes, it is the opposite.) The whole "Batman's not a hero, so he can be whatever the city needs him to be" line might sound cool on the surface, but honestly the LAST thing the city needs him to be is a serial killer that the cops are all after, and that's what he is at the end of TDK. So effectively, this is how the movie ends: Harvey Dent is dead (I think; he certainly looked dead), Joker has managed to turn Batman from a force of good in the eyes of the public to a murderer, the police are busy chasing Batman instead of doing useful stuff like fight crime, Batman is running from the police instead of doing useful stuff like fight crime, and there's a douchebag out there who knows Batman's identity because Lucius is a senile fool. Fantastic. Maybe the douchebag will be nice to Batman since Bruce Wayne saved his life by crashing his Murcielago into the pickup that was going to ram th
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It may be a pain, but considering lorries and buses squeeze their way through most areas it's more an issue of parking than driving. Although some "car squeezes" would probably be very difficult to go through.
In a minor accident, the Hummer and the driver would both survive intact. In a major accident, the Hummer just uses the other car to soften the impact. It doesn't matter which vehicle has the crumple zones, you know, as long as they crumple.
See, crash ratings are, well, the same thing as a Hummer hitting another Hummer, or an Odyssey hitting another Odyssey. What would the crash rating be for a Hummer hitting an Odyssey?
Most collisions involve more than 1 vehicle. (Yes, a few involve cars hitting trees, or deer, etc. In the tree case, the Volvo may do as well as the Hummer, depending on the tree size, etc. In the case of hitting a deer, the Hummer will do far better than a Volvo because of its greater mass. The greater ride height also does a lot of good in that case, since your bumper/grille will hit the deer rather than the windshield.)
Ah yes, because only SUVs use gas...
Big engines use lots of gas. People like to talk ill of SUVs and will pass by an M5 thinking only "hey, nice car!" Take a look at actual car mileages sometime -- just grab a Road & Track and take a look at their car review history near the back -- you may be surprised at who the biggest offenders are in terms of mileage.
Not to mention, there's a certain, shall we say, CONTRADICTION when one criticizes a Hummer driver for driving short distances, and then for using lots of gas. Well, which is it? Someone driving a Civic 50 miles to work each day is using a lot more gas than someone driving a Hummer 5 miles to work each day.
I'm not trying to defend bad fuel economy here. There's lots of room for improvement in that department. But if you're concerned about it, may as well be sensible.
Uhh the F350 is for heavy towing, the H2 is for off-roading. Whoever put money on the H2 in that tug of war is a retard.
Since everyone who replied to my post seems to have misunderstood what I said exactly the same, moronic way, I'll reply to it just once. You don't recklessly cut off an H2 the same way you would a small, light car. A driving mistake around an H2 is much more costly than around a car you can toss around easily. That's what commanding respect on the road means. An aggressive H2 driver will get his/her way more often than not because the H2 is dangerous in a collision, regardless of whose fault it is.
It's not the same kind of respect a Gallardo would get on the road, but it serves the same purpose -- you let it go where it wants.
The H1 is over $100k, the H2 is $70k+, and the H3 is close to $40k if you don't want a bare-bones one.
None of the cars are "sissy" by any standard except maybe when compared to the HMMWV, which is the military version of the H1. An H2 commands plenty of respect on the road (and off the road). The H3 is a more expensive and less reliable XTerra, so it's rubbish in that sense but it's definitely not a sissy car.
And no Volvo would do well in an actual collision with any of the Hummer models. The Volvo SUV might do OK in a collision with an H3, but that's it.
And why exactly should religion get this respect? What is it about religion that makes people give it a free ride no matter what? The free world has acquired a dirty habit of bending over backwards for every demand Muslims make, and this is just another example of that. Buddhist texts shouldn't be given *undue* respect, either (note that they probably deserve more than most of the Qur'An), but that's a non-issue since Buddhists aren't the ones censoring material on the grounds of their religious beliefs.
You're far from entirely correct. There are cars here that aren't in Japan, and vice versa, but there are many that are both here and there.
I know what cars are driven in Japan. Most of them are the same but perhaps with different names. There's a "Harrier" which is basically the Lexus RS SUV and, the Infiniti G35 is the Nissan "Skyline" there, etc. What Japan doesn't have is "big" SUVs (like the Sequoia) and proper pickup trucks (they have a lot of small, dinky ones though).
Japan has many more "boxy" microbus-style cars than in the US, as well.
Anyway all the cars I mentioned in my other post are definitely there.
It's too bad that aerodynamics don't favor angry-faced cars. Alas, anything that has low drag is going to end up looking more or less like a Prius. (Those little longitudinal wrinkles on the roof are not styling, by the way).
This is sarcasm, yes? Ever heard of, um, Vipers, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Nissan GT-R, Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, etc.? Probably 80-90% of sports/racing cars have aggressive, "angry" faces. A Prius is low drag? Maybe compared to a Wrangler, but not compared to cars with actually low drag.
Well, for every "happy" Supra there's an angry Mitsubishi EVO... actually more like 10 EVOs. Then there's the GT-R, etc. Lexuses don't look happy at all. I think the personality thing is right, and maybe Japanese have certain expectations about certain cars. Some should be happy, and some should be aggressive.
Angry cars: Viper, Aston Martin, BMW, Mercedes, Lancer Evolution, GT-R, Lamborghini, Pontiac G8, etc.
Happy cars: old Eagle Talon... Prius I guess?
Angry cars are the sports cars. People like them because they have approximately 250x more horsepower than happy cars, not because they're angry.
Probably a Veritech pilot (from Macross). Makes the most sense to me....
If all I played was Everquest II then I'd be depressed, too.
Richard Dawkins is actually extremely gracious and very much NOT an ass in the least. It's just that we're not used to religion being taken through the gautlet the way everything else is, because people like to kiss religion's arse even if they're not religious themselves. A lot of undeserved respect taken for granted. Richard makes a point not to show that undeserved respect, and it's shocking to a lot of people.
Blah, you seem to be a PC shooter elitist :-( Well, PC's got a lot of good ones, consoles have probably as many good ones, and nowadays they're usually cross-platform anyway (PC gets Halo/Gears eventually, consoles get FEAR eventually, and games like Bioshock are multiplatform from the get-go). Gears isn't even a FPS technically, and it's certainly not "common-as-muck," as I've yet to see a tactical co-op game that's as fun (even co-op Halo isn't quite as good).
Reason people like Halo and Gears is that they not only brought something new to the table (though Halo didn't bring *as* much), but that they were VERY polished games. The way Blizzard's WoW isn't exactly the most original game ever but just damn well put together.
Perfect Dark's better than Goldeneye, heh. Though if there were no Goldeneye there wouldn't have been PD (it was supposed to be another Bond game but United Artists went retarded and decided not to give Rare the license anymore following Goldeneye).
It's true, though, that prior to Halo, Goldeneye and PD were about the only good shooters on the console (oh, and Turok 1 and 2 were cool as well; 3 was horrid). And you're right that Halo was overrated, in large part because many people didn't realize it wasn't the only FPS ever made. But, consoles definitely hold their own with PCs nowadays in terms of shooting games, whether 1st person (Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Halo, Bioshock, etc.) or 3rd (Resident Evil 4+, Gears, Mass Effect, etc.).
That all being said, it really helps to know what a game *is* before talking about it, so yeah I suppose all-in-all I agree with almost everything you wrote. All but the "generic common-as-muck shooters" bit.
What about blank Blu-Rays? Those are in the $10 range. For now 16Gb and 32Gb SD cards aren't cheap, but like you said those are consumer-level prices and the companies producing them aren't *trying* to compete with optical disc media.
I think high capacity flash ought to completely replace optical discs as media storage. The media distribution companies are the only thing I see in the way of that progression.
"MIT Team Working On a $12 Apple (II) Desktop"
Damn, I was working on rather pricey machines while at Cambridge and even pricier ones while at OSU. Never were times so hard at the University that we had to work on Apple II's. Has MIT indeed wasted *all* of its money on random crap like robots?
Well, I was posting kind of tongue-in-cheek there, but I agree that the whole notion of "anonymous posts not being worth reading" is retarded.
I'd like to add that Slashdot is in thrall to the government, as clearly seen from their tendency to add "Coward" to the name of someone posting anonymously.
when you visit that atheism web-site
I post on richarddawkins.net (non-anonymously) as often as I post here and I'm not afraid to admit it ^_^. Hopefully in time, no-one will be afraid to admit such things. Much of what you mentioned, such as asking about abortion options, criticizing religions and cults, etc. -- hopefully in time people will find that they don't need to feel threatened when they do them. Anonymity can a very useful and even necessary thing for people with non-malicious intentions, but I do hope that as time goes by, as people become more and more enlightened, anonymity to hide from the religious ideology that frowns upon half the things you mentioned will no longer be necessary.
ventI caramel mAcchiaTo
Man oh man I can tell you don't actually have an iPhone.
Nope pretty much every single web page is html + javascript :-P Also, standards compliance is only relevant in the browser; I don't know any people who seriously use Dreamweaver as a WYSIWYG; they just use F12/Shift+F12 browser preview for FF/IE.
A lot of people stopped paying for movies and started downloading them because nowadays ticket prices are really freaking high. In which case, download/bootleg != ticket because the only other option the person was considering was also "nothing" since movie theaters lose out to more affordable entertainment.
Less than 5 years ago I was paying $6 a ticket, now I'm paying $9 (it's not a BIG city; I'd be paying $10-$12 easy at this point). That's a 50% increase, and not everyone's managed to find a job today that pays 150% of what they were earning 5 years ago.
The more expensive movie tickets get, the more people will wait until a DVD comes out that costs the same as 1.5 tickets. Or just rent it from Netflix/Blockbuster. Or get a freaking video game. Funny how sales of certain entertainment suffer while others boom... media companies think people have infinite $ or something.
Since I'm sure most people will cover the *good* parts of the movie, I'll touch on the *bad* ones exclusively since it's not that interesting to just nod in agreement on stuff like Heath Ledger's fantastic Joker.
(BTW holy spoiler alert, Batman!)
1) Implausible SuperBatman action.
Ok we know Batman is pretty badass and is expected to be able to do things that 99.99999% of people could never even hope to do. But the whole airplane hook business? And jumping out of Wayne's penthouse to catch Rachel and, without really slowing down the fall, land on top of a car? It just looked silly.
2) Forgetting to finish filming certain scenes.
So, after Batman and Rachel crashed onto a car roof from a 30+ story building without suffering so much as a concussion, did Joker and his goons just leave the rest of the guests at the fundraiser some parting words and split? Weren't they after Harvey Dent, who Wayne simply locked up/barricaded in a random room? Maybe Alfred unleashed his ninja skills on them and sent them all running. I don't know, but that's not the kind of scene you want to just forget about without resolving it.
3) Lucius Fox giving away Batman's identity.
The accountant says "hey Wayne Enterprises is spending an AWFUL lot of money on R&D, and there's these Batmobile schematics I found also...." Lucius is like "OMG YOU NOW KNOW THAT BRUCE WAYNE IS BATMAN!" Holy jumping to conclusions, Batman! Couldn't he say something like "Wayne Enterprises has a lot of clients, and they may or may not include someone associated with Bruce Way.. err.. I mean, Batman. Whoops! You didn't hear that! I'm an idiot."
3) Rachel Dawes... why, again?
Diffrent actress. Different personality. Different kind of role. So, why the same character? It does more to kill continuity than to preserve it, honestly. Besides that, I'll echo what some people have said about Maggie Gyllenhaal not being nearly attractive enough to warrant the Joker calling her beautiful in the scene where he crashes the fundraiser. When he said it I was like "whoa, looks like *someone* forgot Katie Holmes was replaced!"
4) Nolan can't film fight scenes to save his life.
I could crap better camera placement than what Nolan and his crew came up with. Yes, it's better than the complete mess we were treated to in Batman Begins, where you literally couldn't see a single move Batman did while fighting thugs. But it's still pretty abysmal. I mean, of all comic book characters, Batman is supposed to have the most impressive combat sequences. Not the *least* impressive, like what Nolan managed. Freaking hire Jackie Chan or something, someone who knows where the camera needs to be to capture the choreography. With a $180,000,000 budget on a Batman movie, there's no excuse for the rubbish fight scenes they managed.
5) The ending makes no sense
Batman wants to show that Joker didn't corrupt Harvey Dent. So instead he opts to show that Joker corrupted Batman??? The public sees Batman as a force of good as well. He's not demonized by the public in this movie. So why would Batman want to be demonized? Isn't that the opposite of what he's fighting for? (Yes, it is the opposite.) The whole "Batman's not a hero, so he can be whatever the city needs him to be" line might sound cool on the surface, but honestly the LAST thing the city needs him to be is a serial killer that the cops are all after, and that's what he is at the end of TDK. So effectively, this is how the movie ends: Harvey Dent is dead (I think; he certainly looked dead), Joker has managed to turn Batman from a force of good in the eyes of the public to a murderer, the police are busy chasing Batman instead of doing useful stuff like fight crime, Batman is running from the police instead of doing useful stuff like fight crime, and there's a douchebag out there who knows Batman's identity because Lucius is a senile fool. Fantastic. Maybe the douchebag will be nice to Batman since Bruce Wayne saved his life by crashing his Murcielago into the pickup that was going to ram th