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Comment: Re:Power Steering failure? (Score 1) 609

by caseih (#29825631) Attached to: Toyota Experimenting With Joystick Control For Cars

Fly by wire is statistically much safer than direct mechanical linkage. It's trivial to get redundancy and such a system is not as likely to experience mechanical failure. Hence power steering failure just doesn't happen randomly in a purely electrical system. If you lost all electrical power, that would be a problem, but that also means you have a lot of other problems too, such as your engine quitting very suddenly. As long as the car is moving, sufficient electrical energy can be generated (using redundant systems even) to steer. Towing wouldn't be an issue either as just like normal steering, the design of the steering knuckle assembly is such that the wheels will turn in whatever direction they are pulled.

A few years ago, one of the car companies researched electric brakes. The results were very good. Breaking responsiveness was very high. Also they could run multiple, redundant electrical control lines to the brake units, making them much more safe compared to the single, exposed brake line. But potential customers freaked out, citing arguments such as yours which, in reality, were baseless.

I watched a program years ago about using a joystick steering system in a car. They found that cornering and steering in general was much more accurate than a wheel. But ultimately there, the ignorance of the drivers (opposition to anything different than what they were used to) killed it. I hope Toyota succeeds. Unfortunately many car advancements have been held back by consumers' irrational fear.

Comment: Re:No more!! (Score 1) 184

by commodore64_love (#29824305) Attached to: NVIDIA Targeting Real-Time Cloud Rendering

>>>these young punks have a huge ego, but no knowledge of computing history. They don't realize that "cloud computing" is merely what we called "mainframes" back in the day.

What I don't understand, even if these young'uns have no knowledge of history, why do they think cloud computing is a good idea? Why would they want to offload all the processing onto some distant central computer, when they have a quadruple CPU sitting right here in front of them? It makes no logical sense.

My own computer may "only" be a Pentium 4, but it's still about 12,000 times faster than the old 8-bit machine where I used to write book reports. If that ancient machine could handle the workload than my current computer certainly can - there's no need to connect to some distant mainframe.

Comment: Re:Political correctness assaulting opposers (Score 1) 1364

by Forge (#29824251) Attached to: Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law
Everyone on Slashdot can read and the link dose in deed point to several instances of churches and their members being hauled to court, sometimes successfully for refusal to participate in gay weddings.

There have been fines, cash awards and even the revocation of none profit status.

So before you come back to this discussion go and do some research. The cases cited are not the only ones.

The one that shook me the worst was the photographer who responded to a request to shoot a gay wedding that it doesn't fit with his beliefs and so he won't do it.

From near the bottom of the same article.

Wedding services: A same sex couple in Albuquerque asked a photographer, Elaine Huguenin, to shoot their commitment ceremony. The photographer declined, saying her Christian beliefs prevented her from sanctioning same-sex unions. The couple sued, and the New Mexico Human Rights Commission found the photographer guilty of discrimination. It ordered her to pay the lesbian couple's legal fees ($6,600). The photographer is appealing.

I remember running a photography business over a decade ago. I flatly refused to film certain things. Top of my list was funerals. Apparently, I couldn't do that in NM. Not now. Go figure.

Comment: Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score 2, Informative) 429

by shutdown -p now (#29824157) Attached to: 125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich

For God's sake, say it any way you want, and write it in ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. Since no-one in the world uses YYYY-DD-MM, it is perfectly unambiguous.

Personally, I'm constantly irked by the fact that, in Canada, when you see something like 05/10/2010, you never know whether it's month or day first. In general, I see DD/MM more often, but because of strong American influence, every now and then you get a form with MM/DD, so you always have to look out for that.

Comment: Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score 1) 429

by shutdown -p now (#29823887) Attached to: 125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich

Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you.

I was born and schooled in a country which is fully metric, and where virtually no-one even knows whether foot or yard is larger, much less by how much. I have some contact with Imperial units now that I'm living in Canada - gladly, not as much as it would be a little bit further south - and I hate it with a passion.

However, for D&D (and any other fantasy RP) I find it to be perfectly reasonable, for all the same reasons why it's inappropriate IRL. It gives the game that old-fashioned "medieval" feel, and having one more table for conversions alongside the few dozen that you already have to use regularly is no big deal.

"Stones" and "leagues" are even more awesome like that.


by Andy Dodd (#29822697) Attached to: NVIDIA Driver Developer Discusses Linux Graphics

This is why I don't understand the requests for an improved installer.

The way the NVidia drivers are distributed already makes it annoying for packagers, the installer someone was asking about makes that situation WORSE. It's a step backwards.

NVidia needs to make the drivers more packager-friendly, not less.

Every time I've used non-distro-packaged NVidia drivers it has led to much pain and suffering.

Comment: Re:IBM's hardware vendor mind is taking over (Score 2, Insightful) 863

by DangerFace (#29820493) Attached to: IBM's Answer To Windows 7 Is Ubuntu Linux

Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform... 2 freakin hours to install some software on CentOS? Tracking down weird shit in the configure logs to figure out what the hell is going on. 30 minutes on Google to figure out it is a problem with the libxml2 linking. Another hour to fix the damn thing. That's not going to pass the Granny Test.

I agree wholeheartedly! I mean, I use RandomTechieLinuxDistro, and for some reason using a distro set up to be technical is a technical experience! The gall! OK, so on Ubuntu I would click on add/remove programs and have several thousand programs right there. So what? Grannies obviously usually compile their own kernels and just boot into a shell. Why would they ever use the most popular Linux distro out there, just because it takes way less time to install than XP or OSX, can be tested from a live disk, is free, and is laughably easy to use?
