3poundkilograms

One monkey says to a group of other monkeys: "We all need to take one of the 5 bananas we individually have to feed the doctor monkey, the asphalt monkey and the teacher monkey, from whom we receive services."

One monkey from the group, which just came back in his car from the doctor monkey with his daughter that goes to the local monkey school: "I refuse to give up my bananas!".

Remember context. Full context is important.

As a Pebble user, I sleep with my watch on as it wakes me up in a much gentler way than any audio alarm does.

However, having a week long charge is also about more than just being able to avoid charging it at night. It also means that the remaining battery capacity (wear, age) will matter less. Is your battery dying, with only 50% of the design capacity left? Who cares, the watch still lasts for days. Not only that - the slow discharge also means that the battery will take ages to even experience reduced capacity.

The Apple Watch, on the other hand, sprints through the battery charges, and will both be completely intolerant to reduced battery capacity and reach reduced battery capacity faster.

... So yeah. It matters.

People seem to quite commonly write "Mac OS X 10.6", which duplicates the 10. News articles and Wikipedia included. I don't remember what the machines themselves reported, though. I don't have anything pre-Sierra anymore.

I think he meant that it was not supposed to be "Mac Oh Es Ten Ten Nine Two", but rather "Mac Oh Es Ten Nine Two" when referring to Mac OS X 10.9.2. Do you think people said "Mac Oh Es Nine Nine One", or "Mac Oh Es Nine One" for Mac OS 9.1?

Well, this is the point. It's really hard to convince people to make a change, especially if it costs them anything (such as synced chat logs), on basis of something they don't care about.

I would say that it is a massive problem that users don't care about security, though. They just don't know, because they haven't been screwed over yet. People cared a lot in retrospect when the password bruteforce leaked iCloud pictures, for example. People don't care about politics before it's too late, either.

On a positive note, Facebook seems to be screwing itself over in usability and content. I used to be on there reluctantly, but now I only check the input every two weeks or so to check for annoying relatives that might message me. The news feeds are nothing but uninteresting clickbaits, and they keep making it harder and hard to just check the bloody messenger inbox.

An instant messaging platform needs a network of users. I am more likely to use a platform that allows me to talk to all of my contacts, than to use multiple platforms that only allows me to talk to a few each. If I have multiple, I am also only likely to add the new platform if there is at least a handful of people I know there. Likewise, the more users that are on the platform, the more likely that new users will be attracted.

I am on Telegram primarily because it's the best I can come up with that my friends use, and moving my friends is an unlikely task as they have their friends on Telegram as well. You need to move or duplicate users from existing platforms to get a userbase, but you need a userbase to attract users from existing platforms.

I have been looking at Wire. They're using the signal protocol, but in a more closed model IIRC. I didn't know that they had a solution to this problem, though, and always just through of them as basic Signal clone. I guess I'll have to have a look. :)

Unfortunately, some Telegram usability comes from a reduction in security. Things like seamlessly going, with full chat-history, between multiple devices is a bit tricky when your protocol only permits one person to receive a message once, rather than storing the messages unencrypted on the server like Telegram does.

One "secure" approach would be that of the older Skype clients, where chat history synced between the logged in clients of a user. However, that was a horrible user experience, made worse by bad notification management.

So while Signal can get better, you will probably always have to decide between usability and security, which is most likely the very reason that "normal" people always end up with the less secure solution, which in turn renders the secure solution even less usable with its smaller userbase.

I should try a car with one of those transmissions, then. They sound quite interesting. While I have driven quite a lot of cars, I have never dealt with such a transmission, but it sounds both nice and efficient. How's the comfort tradeoff? I believe the lock-up was initially avoided due to comfort, as people liked the "gooey" transition between gears.

I'll keep that transmission in mind next time I go shopping.

1. I may misremember, but I do seem to recall a case where the unintended acceleration happened in a Toyota as the person was parking, with the car accelerating into the wall in front of them. But, indeed, that may be misinformation, so I'll retract the statement.

However, this does not mean that people all had the time or ability to stop. Unintended acceleration can happen in many cases, such as in a case of highway driving where, as they try to brake, they notice that the throttle is held. If this happens as someone needs to perform an emergency maneuver, the braking distance will be greatly increased, and they might lose control over car as power is still transferred.

In most cases, it might be very easy to handle the situation when you're prepared, but when you have very little time to observe the problem and correct it, things are less likely to turn out well. You might not have enough time to realize "Ah! My car is not reducing throttle, so I must set the automatic transmission to Neutral!", let alone perform the action prior to collision.

2. The steering wheel lock is different from car to car. My current car (VW) engages the lock when the key is removed and the gear is in "STOP", but my previous cars engaged when the key was rotated counter-clockwise two clicks, making it easy to hit the lock instead of simply stopping the engine. Not being able to steer is quite a fatal thing - see the accidents caused when steering wheel locks were first introduced. Especially when the electric kind was introduced (Chevrolet?), which had problems with spontaneously engaging the lock. This caused people to crash as they were suddenly unable to exit, or enter a turn, with only a second or two to stop the car. On a highway, you ultimately end up crashing into the barrier if your steering wheel lock engages.

3. And how are such designs implemented, if I may ask? Oh, software? Right. Do I need to say more, or do I have to explain exactly why this makes the mechanism entirely untrustworthy?

4. Wrong - you really at least read a bit on diesel engines. First of all, modern diesel engines (That is, 2016 model cars) have two diesel pumps - a low-pressure, electric pump in the fuel tank, and a high-pressure (that is, 1-2000 bars) pump driven mechanically by the drive belt. The electric pump is needed to bring fuel up when starting the car, as cold diesel is difficult to pump, and the starter won't result in significant pumping pressure from the high-pressure pump. However, once started, the low-pressure pump is irrelevant to engine operation, providing only a slight pumping assistance. Killing the engine the "proper" way is done by not opening the injectors, causing the pumps to simply recirculate fuel.

However, this has nothing to do with diesel runaway. During runaway, the diesel engine is not running on diesel, but on engine-oil leaking into the cylinder, often through the air-intake. Modern diesel engines almost always have turbochargers, which leak engine oil into the intercooler once their sleeve bearing, through which engine oil is actively pumped to avoid metal-to-metal contact, have been worn down, increasing the gap between turbine axle and bearing. Once enough oil has built up in the intercooler (which acts as an oil reservoir in this case), you risk sucking it in - and as any diesel engine will happily run uncontrolled on engine oil, this causes engine runaway. This can of course also happen due to other leaks, such as piston or injector seals. The lack of control means you either get to engage a gear and minimize damage as you wait for engine oil to stop flowing into the intake, or if you cannot provide any load, wait for the engine to explode, leaving behind melted pistons in what is now an expensive paper-weight. Remember that a diesel engine ignites fuel with compression (with fuel injected normally injected a full compression to allow for slight ignition timing adjustments, hence the crazy fuel pressure), not spark.

While gasoline engines can also suck in engine oil, they have electric rather than mechanic ignition, and they cannot burn engine oil well enough to run on it anyway.

5. You still need to overpower the engine, even when slamming the brake with all your might. A small gasoline car is probably easy to kill, but a more torquey engine will take quite some effort to stop.

6. Brake failure impossible? What? Brake pipes can burst, caliber piston seals can leak, and regular brake disks seize.

The first two modes of failure usually happen when you apply brake pressure. The more you apply, the more likely that you will break your old brake lines and piston seals. In other words, if your brakes are going to fail this way, they're going to fail when you need them. The dual fluid system of modern cars mean that in some cases, you will get more than one braking attempt (an attempt being a press on the pedal of any kind), but not many, and not in all braking modes.

Brake seizing is of course a possibility, unless you drive around with carbon fiber brakes.

7. Going up to the parent comment - "I am from Brazil", talking about the car reputation there. Feel free to join the comments, but don't try to pretend we're talking about something else now. I don't particularly care about Americans and their poor taste in cars, or your incorrect information about them not driving diesel cars (although they are not nearly as popular as in the rest of the world). Of course, the original post was about American transmission statistics, which are quite unrelated to the engine type.

Do you have any more incorrect or just plain uninteresting comments to try to disprove my assertions, or shall we let it be? :)

It's a bit hard to understand where you're trying to go here but assuming that you state it doesn't take fuel to "counter engine braking", you're wrong.

Engine braking is just that, using the engine as a brake. If no fuel is added, pumping losses will make it act as a (relatively weak) brake. If you want to coast without braking, with the clutch engaged, you will need to inject fuel to counter the pumping losses of the engine, losses which are higher if the engine is not idle. Losses in the power train add to the braking effect, which must further be counted with additional fuel.

If you're going downhill with clutch disengaged and maintaining your speed, engaging the clutch will very likely increase your fuel consumption for the same task (maintaining speed). Automatics have a coasting gear (usually the last or only overdrive gear) for this very reason.

(Sorry, I had to do that.)

Side notes: 1. Coasting is not braking. People seem to be mixing "coasting to a stop" and "coasting" in general. Engine braking, when your intention is to reduce your speed, is more efficient than friction brakes, but coasting does not mean that you intend to reduce your speed. 2. Who drives a car with a 2-stroke petrol engine? :)

In case of Toyota, the error was not with the driver. Not having ninja reflexes when your car misinterprets throttle input as you are parking is not user error.

Reasons that a driver might not simply turn off the engine: 1. Twisting the key to turn off the engine engages the steering wheel lock, which might not be a good idea if you're moving fast. 2. Modern cars with start/stop buttons might end up with issues that disallow stopping the engine - physical button failure, or software issues related to the button handling. 3. Diesel runaway - diesels are quite difficult to stop, as they need very little external assistance, and can run on basically anything. Oil buildup in the intercooler (which any used car will have) that ends up sucked into the intake is a fairly normal way for a diesel engine to self-destruct if you're not quick enough to clutch in so you can keep the engine under control with some load.

Reasons a driver might not be able to hold the engine at full throttle: 1. Brakes seize up at load, and "full power" is certainly a lot of continuous load. 2. Brake failure. 3. The sheer difficulty of holding the car. I have once in my life stopped a diesel van that was idling in first gear using only the brake (long story), and that required a lot of effort. I would not have been able to do it if any throttle had been applied.

I suspect that your brakes will seize very quickly if you try to battle your engine at full power.

Automatic transmissions back then were quite the hydraulic maze, as they operated entirely on hydraulics. These days, they're electronically controlled. I don't think the failure rate has changed.

In a manual, you can of course clutch out as long as your clutch cable (or hose for hydraulic clutched cars) doesn't fail, which is not an option you have for automatics. These kinds of failures do occur today, though. See the famous Toyota "unintentional acceleration" scandal, where a software error read "0% throttle" as "100% THROTTLE GO GO GO GO", causing death in a few cases. There's also a case of a person that was stuck in a car that could not stop, driving at constantly increasing speed on the highways of France, IIRC. He couldn't turn the car off or get it out of gear. You can disengage a manual if you're quick with an intact clutch cable, but you're a bit lost in an automatic, especially if it's too powerful to hold on the brake.

Up here, manuals are normal (with automatics slowly getting more and more popular), mostly because everyone knows just fine how to drive them, and automatics are much more expensive. I, personally, can't decide which I prefer. I'd much rather drive fully manual than a "retrofitted" automatic like the one in a Lupo 3L, and I still have to try a dual clutch transmission, for which I might end up having similar opinions. They always seem to change wrong, the changes are rough and slow, and the clutch engagement is very binary, leading to odd engage/disengage.

I like conventional automatics in cars that haul heavy loads (pushing a 4 metric tonne trailer over a curb in reverse at low speeds without the possibility of gaining some speed first make you worry a lot about your clutch in a manual), and our busses and trucks are generally fully automatic, with more gears than you would bother counting.

"We’ve combined the best attributes of conventional automatic, continuously variable and dual clutch transmissions. The transmission locks up to couple directly with the engine over a far wider range than other automatics. This delivers a significant improvement in fuel economy and a more direct, manual-like power delivery and driving feel. Shifts are quick, accurate and smooth across the six speeds."

So, as they mention, this transmission is unique. It does, however, not lock up in all conditions - it remains unlocked until you hit 8mph. It sounds like an interesting transmission, but this is not the "norm". All conventional automatic transmissions should be able to do this, although it results in very different wear patterns (brake rings and clutches in the transmission will see much greater wear). It is not quite as interesting as a dual shift transmission, though.

(Having looked at a picture of the transmission, ignore the "combined the best attributes of..." - it appears to be an entirely conventional automatic transmission with a very different operating profile.)

Well, engine braking to the red light would have been more efficient. :)

But indeed, automatic cars are less efficient. They do not know what you will do next, so they often make erroneous gear shifts that waste fuel and time. They don't know when to coast or when to engine brake (For older transmissions, the overdrive gear had permanent coasting, and could not engine brake at all), often have lossy pumps, etc.

Dual clutch transmission are awesome, though.

When you coast with engaged clutch, you will engine brake. Energy doesn't go to the engine for free. Adding the fuel to counter the engine braking is less efficient than letting the engine run idle while coasting due to losses in the power-train. Plus, more efficient cars still have to inject fuel. The electro-hydraulically controlled conventional gearbox of the Lupo 3L disengages the dry clutch while coasting for a reason.

Of course, engine braking is obviously more efficient than friction braking, but that's not coasting, that's engine braking.

Another funny note is that "conventional" automatic gearboxes have the highest gear (usually the only overdrive gear) have a coasting clutch on it, so it's not even technically possible to coast with engine engaged. You're always idling if you let go of the speeder, losing energy to the torque converter that doubles as oil pump for the transmission.

The lock-up only locks up in very limited conditions, especially older ones. There's basically a few specific speeds with a 10km/h margin that locks up.