dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

Your yearly reminder that the original Paddington Bear stuffed toy was designed and made by Shirley Clarkson and given to her son: Jeremy Clarkson.

Yes, that Jeremy Clarkson. You know, the “Speed and Power!” guy.

(Although this was not the origin of the character himself. Michael Bond bought a generic toy bear from a toy shop and named it after nearby Paddington station. He wrote some stories using the bear as a character, and then they got published, and then he probably got very rich.)

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago

This means that we may face a situation where hobbyists, small businesses, and aerial photographers who make a living with drones can suddenly no longer fly them, but cops will.

That was always the goal.

China (and probably Russia still) have satellites that can read the headlines on your newspaper from orbit. The notion that they’d need or use noisy, unreliable, and easily noticed commercial hobbyist drones for this purpose is laughably absurd. Even if they are planning on secretly snooping on the feeds of privately owned fliers, which is probably not actually feasible at scale anyway. How is the data supposed to be transmitted back to China? Magic? Through the cloud via the user’s cell phone data, with no one noticing? Gigabytes and gigabytes of it per flight? I’m not buying it.

The real reason the US government is so scared of drones is because it will allow the citizenry (i.e., us) to document abuses and authoritarianism in a manner that’s pretty tough to stop with the usual billy clubs/guns/tear gas/water cannons method. Think BLM, Occupy, future climate protests, and all of those sorts of things. Unchecked aerial photography and video that contradicts the Official Narrative from whatever today’s incident happens to be making it out to the internet and going viral would be highly inconvenient, wouldn’t it? Someone can be capturing video of the police shooting protestors or whatever and easily be half a mile away from where the drone itself is located.

It speaks volumes about the pathology and mindset of American legislators and law enforcement that they inherently see drones as a “spy” technology. That’s because this is exactly what they plan to use them for, and are terrified that someone else might do the same thing to them.

Well, tough fucking titty.

dual_sport_dork , 4 days ago

And even the KJV edits did not manage to paper over the fact that there are in fact 18 if you count Sky Daddy’s recitation/rant in Exodus after the whole golden calf incident.

dual_sport_dork , 5 days ago

Provided they’re fine with cutting off 100% of their business coming from customers older than 50, that’d probably work great. I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

dual_sport_dork , 5 days ago

Apparently they don’t need him because Ronald was fired… Er, “retired,” in 2016.

The final vestige of the clown that I know of was his silhouette being used in the “throw this into a trash can and not on the damn ground” message on the bottom of their paper bags, but even that seems to be gone now.

dual_sport_dork , 4 days ago

You just need one water bucket.

Glunk. Tss, tss, tss, tss, tss.

You bought a diamond pickaxe too, right?

dual_sport_dork , 4 days ago

Hydrogen is a dead end. The only company left trying to chase that particular dragon is Toyota, and I predict eventually they’ll be forced to admit that it’ll never work en masse for private vehicles. Ordinary consumers can already barely be trusted with gasoline, which is neither under high pressure nor requires industrial grade refrigeration to keep it in liquid form, and is a lot harder to ignite… The delivery systems for hydrogen are extremely complex and must maintain an absolute 0% failure rate or else somebody will either get blown up or frozen to a pump. Gasoline is at least a liquid and behaves predictably when spilled, and doesn’t phase change instantly when it leaves containment. And a mechanical failure in the delivery system can be mitigated by simply shutting off the pump. You poke a hole in a hydrogen filling system and you’re going to have a very interesting time. Current systems have redundancies on top of safety devices on top of redundancies for this reason which makes them fantastically expensive.

Hydrogen also has crap for energy density (around 8 kJ/liter in liquid form, compared to 32 kJ/liter for gasoline) and even if you’re producing it via electrolysis or something is a wildly inefficient way to store and transport energy. If you’re going to use electricity to create and compress hydrogen to transport it and create electricity with it later, it is monumentally more efficient to take the electricity and put it in batteries. So you may as well just to that.

The thing with battery swapping is that it will absolutely require strong government regulation to ensure standardization and fair treatment of owners. Replaceable batteries in consumer devices obviously aren’t a new concept, and before proprietary lithium packs took over everything, every single consumer device was powered by AAA, AA, C, or D batteries which were very well understood by everybody and were – and are – completely interchangeable commodity items that are readily available to this day. That’s the only way it’ll work. Manufacturers will have to be forced to standardize on a set of pack sizes because without oversight they’ll inevitably try to turn everything into a subscription-only walled garden pretty much exactly as you have predicted. But if there is a thing as an equivalent of an AAA vehicle battery (for motorcycles and scooters), AA vehicle battery (for city microcars, NEV’s, golf carts, etc.) and C vehicle battery (full size passenger cars) and D vehicle battery (light trucks) etc., and nobody is allowed to try to make up their own bullshit, then no one will have to give a rat’s ass about battery health, the dealership, lock-in, or anything else. If you buy a used vehicle with a knackered pack in it or your battery gets cacked, you could just bop down to your local AutoZone or whatever and buy a new one. Or push your car to the nearest swap station. You’ll turn in your old one for the core charge. Exactly like how 12v vehicle batteries work now.

We’ll have to get people used to the notion that, yes, these things will be kind of a battery lottery and you may get swapped in a pack that’s in slightly worse condition than your last one if you go around pack-swapping all the time. But you know, the next time you swap you’ll get a different one again. And you can play already this game right now if you want to – just go buy some fuel in a third world country.

dual_sport_dork , 4 days ago

FYI, there is no “better” way to use hydrogen that will result in extracting more energy from it than it physically contains and can be released via oxidation. This is not a matter of “development” or “breakthroughs.” It is physically impossible. The standard enthalpy change of combustion of hydrogen is 141.83 MJ/kg. Period. That’s it. That’s all you can ever get out of it, provided you achieve perfect efficiency (which currently we don’t). Ongoing research is surely working on getting is closer to 100% efficiency, but it will never get past it. You can’t defy the laws of physics.

Insofar as I am aware all current hydrogen vehicles already use fuel cells to generate electricity and use that to drive electric motors for motive power. No one is burning hydrogen in a combustion engine in vehicular applications. There are some power plants that are doing it, though, mostly as a mechanism for storing and later reusing excess energy generated from other sources. You can go cross-eyed reading up on it here, if you are so inclined.

There is the notion of the “hydrogen economy” floating around, that is the use of hydrogen as an energy storage and carrying medium – not, notably, as a fuel for actual generation of energy – but it’s pretty certain that outside of some limited applications this will always be a worse deal than just taking the energy in the form of electricity and putting it in a wire.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

Maybe in full HD we’ll be able to determine definitively if anyone in Ivalice actually has a nose.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

undermining regional carmakers

I think the word they’re looking for is in fact “outcompeting.”

Yutaro-Katori-with-butterfly-meme: Is this capitalism?

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

Ah, I see. So it’s cool when we do it (fossil fuel and ag subsidies, the auto industry bailout in 2008, etc.) but not when they do it.

Got it.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

It would be elementary to make bump stocks illegal, because bump stocks are not firearms. Making bump stocks illegal wouldn’t cross the Second Amendment.

Correct. The issue was that the ATF tried to do an end-run around the legal process. Somebody in there did not watch that Schoolhouse Rock song about how bills become law… All that has to happen (federally, anyway) is that Congress must pass a law prohibiting them and the president has to sign it. But that’s not what happened. The ATF – under Trump’s direction, mind you – tried unilaterally to redefine an item that is not a firearm as a regulated firearm. What is and is not a firearm (and what is and is not a “machine gun” also) is already codified into law.

You can argue for or against unelected agencies having the ability to create new regulations with the force of law behind them without involving the usual system of checks-and-balances, but specifically in the case of the ATF they have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not able to use such a privilege in good faith. They would be (and are) exceedingly likely to use it as a cudgel to play these “legal yesterday, felony today” types of games with people so give themselves excuses to kick in doors and shoot people’s dogs.

Various state laws already prohibit bump stocks. My state is one of them.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

Are we going to tackle the dumbass pistol brace fiasco next?

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

mechanically activating a trigger rapidly with a motor activated with a single button press would be legal.

I believe it is. So are crank triggers, which clamp on to your trigger guard and click the trigger for you 2/3/4 times per revolution.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

The problem now is that in the modern global age we have plenty of enemies who have massive standing armies. China and Russia leap to mind. That sort of thing may have worked when America was physically isolated from outside forces by a several months long boat ride. Not the case anymore.

Abolishing everybody’s massive standing armies would be a pretty good idea, but I don’t foresee that happening any time soon.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

Yes. Already exists, too:

www.tacticalinc.com/catalog/product/id-1247

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

I ain’t bringing logic into it, I’m just pointing out how the law has been interpreted.

Attaching things to guns that enable fully automatic fire as it is defined by the law, i.e. more than one shot per activation of the trigger, do count, though. This includes things such as full auto sear or those fucking “Glock switches” that are so popular these days.

With a crank trigger you have to keep cranking it to keep firing, like an old wild west Gatling gun. You can’t just hold it down and the gun dumps the magazine on its own. A bump stock aids the user in rapidly pressing the trigger over and over again. You can bump fire a rifle even without a bump stock if you are sufficiently practiced or skilled.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

Diaper Don, the “Take away their guns and worry about the due process later” guy? That Donald Trump, right?

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

The comment was in this context:

thehill.com/…/376097-trump-take-the-guns-first-go…

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago

He probably could, but he can’t buy a gun to put on it so what he’s got is a funny shaped ineffective club.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

America.

Retailers are allowed to disclaim the merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose of the items they sell and most do. The customer is free to refuse, of course, via the simple expedient of going away and buying it somewhere else.

This is partially a blame-shifting exercise to reduce costs, yes, but it’s also a shield against the ceaseless horde of dipshits we have in this country who will willfully misuse a product and then immediately try to sue the retailer they bought it from when it doesn’t work or they hurt themselves with it via their own stupidity. It is much easier from a legal perspective to make a blanket “we don’t imply this product is applicable for any purpose” statement vs. having to explicitly predict whatever cockamamie thing someone might try it on and have to say “no, moron, that chainsaw is not suitable for cutting bricks,” etc.

Read all that fine print on the back of your receipt some day. You will be enlightened and, most likely, also infuriated.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago

The nomenclature I always hear is, “Experiencing a higher than expected call volume,” and since no one can prove how low their expectations actually are there is no crack in which to insert the prybar of legal complaint.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

For the classic 1950’s atomic war scenario, probably more for flying glass and so forth.

Obviously it’s not going to save you from a direct hit. You need to get in a fridge to be protected from that sort of thing…

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

Do it. Do it and use them to troll the fuck out of all the MAGA-hat snowflakes who aren’t up on their news.

Oh, and be sure to post their inevitable unhinged responses everywhere for yuks as well.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

It will be after the inevitable lawsuit happens about 0.0002 seconds after they fully roll this out.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

I have nothing of value to add other than I used to have those exact same plates. I bought them at K-Mart.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

traffic stop

Never break more than one law at a time…

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

This is a nightmare for security and privacy-conscious users, especially as Microsoft recently blocked the last easy workaround to set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Microsoft is likely doing this to stop unscrupulous users from generating illegal images like child and non-consensual deep fake pornography.

So, just don’t include this dumbshit “feature” in your product which no one appears to actually want anyway? Seems pretty simple to me.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

I use MS Paint for similar purposes all the time.

It can be launched from the run prompt (Win + R and just slam in “mspaint” and hit enter), loads instantly, and is perfect for cropping a selection out of a screenshot and then using the chunky unprofessional doodle tools to draw a bunch of circles and arrows to illustrate with maximum snideness the position of whatever paragraph or interface element is clearly right there in the user’s screen, but rather than use their eyeballs and comprehend with their brain they decided the best course of action was to bleat at me about it in a passive-aggressive email instead.

Two can play at that game. If I’m feeling particularly vindictive, I will intentionally not use the text tool but rather draw out my various “Look, dumbass, it’s right here” labels with my mouse. The more they’ve irritated me the more eye-searing colors I’ll use.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Because I’ve been doing it that way since Windows 95. Don’t mess with my workflow, man.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Something like this is why every single Microsoft program or OS still has all the old options, shortcuts, control panel page, and MMC snap-in buried in it somewhere.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

But! You see, the accounting department of this Fortune 500 company is run by Gladys. Gladys wears 1000 denier stockings, a turtleneck sweater, and keeps her pointed glasses on a chain around her neck. Gladys never smiles. Gladys has been doing this job since 1992 so she knows it better than you, buster.

And Gladys has a spreadsheet she uses to calculate the entire company’s payroll of several million dollars per month, and she originally made it in Excel 4.0 using XLM macros, and it relies on undocumented bugs from that version which now must be faithfully reproduced going forward forevermore. Otherwise Gladys will have a thermonuclear tantrum, the payroll will be late, and Microsoft will get sued.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

The Ranger/B2000, S-10, and first Tacoma were really the sweet spot for compact pickup trucks but you won’t get them back, because all of them got killed by CAFE.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

?

Every automatic transmission car sold since the 1970’s and probably earlier has had a transmission cooler, right there alongside or in front of the radiator.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Not me. I’m content to be the minority. My truck is from ‘99 and newer vehicles annoy the shit out of me.

I don’t want gadgets and I don’t want to need a stepladder to get in it, either. 8’ bed, single cab, crank windows.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Wow. The remaining 7,950,999,999 people on this planet now have something to be thankful for, because none of them are as wrong as you.

You clearly did not actually understand what your mechanic told you.

A transmission cooler is exactly what it sounds like. It is built exactly like a radiator and works the same way. It is mounted in front of or next to the radiator for the engine. On a lot of newer cars it is actually part of the main radiator. Transmission fluid flows through it and excess heat is dumped into the air. On many vehicles it’s also served by the radiator fan, i.e. for situations where the vehicle is not getting airflow because it’s not moving.

The torque converter is part of your automatic transmission literally operates by moving the transmission fluid. There is no separation between the transmission fluid used in the torque converter and the rest of the transmission where the hydraulic valves use it to actuate the clutch bands, etc. to shift gears. The same bath of transmission fluid is circulated through the torque converter, the rest of the transmission, and the transmission cooler.

This is not a truck thing. Even my dinkum Saturn SL I had when I was a teenager that was so pathetic it was literally made of plastic and did not crack 100 horsepower had a transmission cooler – as designed from the factory. The vast majority of passenger vehicles made in the last half century or more with automatic transmissions have transmission coolers built in. It has nothing to do with towing, either.

Your torque converter absolutely can be locked under acceleration and in fact, nearly all vehicles equipped with a locking torque converter do so as part of their normal shifting pattern when moving up through their gears. This is observable from the driver’s seat if you know what’s happening. The locking and unlocking of the torque converter feels like an “extra gear” in between the gears. Some Japanese cars from the 80’s have a “TC Locked” light on a dash that illuminates when the converter is locked and you can watch this happen in real time. The usual pattern is 1st gear, shift to 2nd gear, lock converter, unlock converter and shift to 3rd, lock converter, unlock converter and shift to 4th, etc. A traditional automatic transmission only has 4 gear ratios, but it will feel like it has seven. Guess why.

Think about it real hard for a minute. A locked torque converter is the same, mechanically, as a fully engaged clutch. If you could not lock the torque converter during acceleration, by the same logic you would not be able to fully release the clutch pedal during acceleration on a manual transmission car, either. It is glaringly obvious that this is not the case.

I am not a “random lemming.” I have four decades of actual real world mechanical experience and have disassembled and rebuilt more transmissions, engines, and vehicles in general than you have probably sat in throughout your entire life.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Tell us you didn’t read what I just wrote without telling us you didn’t read it.

The engine will only stall under load if it is at so low of an RPM that it is generating insufficient torque to overcome the inertia. Which if you are moving and in the correct gear for your speed is never.

Which is why your transmission has more than one gear.

Remember back 30 seconds ago when I told you to think? Actually try it this time. Or maybe plug some of your bullshit into Google first before continuing to make a fool of yourself in front of everybody.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

Which is why automatics have torque converters and manuals have clutches. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle or something!

Millions and millions of vehicles are driving on the world’s roads right now, happily tooling along under the sound mechanical and physical principles known as “reality,” completely heedless of your apparent inability to understand it.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

And? Come on, you’re almost there. Just two more neurons to put together:

That’s why the transmission cooler is there.

Wrap up: Your original claim that Americans “can’t” tow due to predominantly driving automatic transmission cars, in addition to being an uncreative and tired thinly veiled attempt at insulting Americans, is not only wrong but also prima facie absurd.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

And is the cooler in cars big enough to have noticeable towing capacity

Yes, it is. Do you realize that manufacturers publish a maximum towing capacity as part of their specifications for every vehicle? This is publicly available information, right there on the internet. It’s not a secret. The required surface area for the cooler is designed right in by the manufacturer for the transmission to work for the vehicle’s application. This not a case of something “extra” being added. It’s just how cars with automatic transmissions are built to begin with.

The published towing capacity for most vehicles that are available in both automatic and stick are exactly the same. Would you care to guess why that is? You could have figured it out for yourself if you would bother to actually do some extremely minimal internet research instead of continuing to shoot your mouth off on whatever this ill-informed little crusade of yours is.

Your initial claim is false. End of discussion. Just stop. You’re making a fool of yourself.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

What, so now you’re trying to split hairs over the regulatory differences between the US and Europe to attempt to distract from the fact that you still haven’t addressed making the following demonstrably false statements?

• Your notion that automatic transmissions “need” active cooling that they “don’t” have when in fact they do, and
• Your claim that torque converters “can’t” be locked during acceleration when they provably regularly are, and
• Your claim that your engine “will stall” if the transmission can’t “slip” even while the vehicle is already in motion. (Hint: Get your car rolling, don’t touch the clutch, and take your foot off the accelerator pedal. Did it stall instantly? Did it stall when you got back on the accelerator, either? Of course it didn’t, because inertia is a process that exists.)
• Bonus points for blathering about “trying to slip the lock of the converter,” which also makes no sense because that’s not how torque converter lockups work nor attempt to work, nor has anyone proposed they work that way.

For the benefit of anyone else reading this, the difference in rated tow capacities between US spec and Euro spec vehicles is, as you have almost correctly observed, down to regulations and the trailer designs and not the tow vehicles themselves. There is no difference between the cars or their transmissions mechanically (nor the laws of physics – anywhere on the planet, I guarantee it). European regulations have two critical differences between the US, to wit:

1. Vehicles towing trailers are typically limited to ~60 MPH or the equivalent, whereas in the US they are not (at least outside of some specific state laws).
2. Tongue weight requirements are significantly lower, because nobody owns a body-on-frame truck which is necessary to support a high tongue weight.

This is because it is dangerous to tow a low tongue weight trailer at high speed. America has no such speed or tongue weight restriction, and we also have interstates with 85 MPH speed limits. Thus our target tongue weight is roughly 15% of the total load, largely in order to keep the trailer under control at speed and prevent it from snaking all over the place and rolling itself and the vehicle. All other things being equal this ultimately winds up in the tongue weight being the limiting factor for most unibody vehicles. If your tongue weight is limited at e.g. 200 pounds, which it is for my bog standard Subaru Crosstrek, solving for the estimated tow capacity assuming 15% of it is 200 lbs would be roughly 1333 lbs. What’s the US spec rated tow capacity of a Crosstrek? Oh wow, it’s 1500 pounds. Imagine that. (For both the manual and automatic/CVT versions, by the way.)

FYI, we also have trailer brakes over here, and many states require them to be used on loads exceeding 3000 pounds. Below that, the trucks most people use have adequate mass and braking capacity to handle towing trailer loads in and of themselves. It turns out, the actual reason Americans tow with trucks is because Americans tow with trucks, and our towing regulations and trailers are designed around the expectation of towing with trucks. It’s a just a cultural thing. No need to try to make it complicated nor make up fictitious bullshit about automatic transmissions.

But none of this has anything to do with your original assertions re: automatic vs. manual transmissions. I’m not arguing any other points with you.

As a matter of fact, I’m not arguing any more points with you at all. You have no idea how cars work. Go away.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

And Sony originally had the intention of each symbol alluding to a particular action or concept:

• O is confirm or okay.
• X is cancel or go back.
• ☐ is map, menu, or option
• Δ is heading, recenter, or point of view

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

They are used precisely that way in most Japanese titles, but for some reason when Playstation games were localized outside of the Japanese market the baffling decision was made to swap the positions of the OK and cancel buttons. So we got X for OK and O for cancel, which totally makes sense…

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

IIRC this was originally a Squaresoft decision, and was originally done for ergonomic reasons. Then other publishers started following suit. Square switched from the Japanese style O for OK, X for cancel between Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 in the US. 7 has Japanese style controls, 8 by default has the American style layout. I have never actually seen a definitive explanation given, though.

FWIW, the original Playstation predated the XBox by six years (1995 vs. 2001). The X/O switch for non-Japanese Playstation games was well in effect long before the XBox ever landed on store shelves, so I’m pretty sure the reverse is actually true. The XBox button layout is designed to ape the Playstation’s ergonomically, but the letters are shuffled around so it is not the same as the Nintendo/SNES controller most likely for lawsuit avoidance purposes.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago

To be fair, I have seen the XBox theory floated repeatedly on the internet, never with any acknowledgement that the timeline doesn’t make sense…

Insofar as I can determine from my standpoint of being a video game collector who has no inside knowledge but was at least there at the time, Sony copied the SNES pad when they split from Nintendo after the original Play Station add-on debacle. As a matter of fact, the original original plan was to just use the SNES controller itself to begin with. The button conventions for the subsequent Playstation pad were obviously meant to be a direct copy-paste of the above and intended to be used in the same way as was currently the norm for Japanese console RPG’s on Nintendo’s machine: A was for OK and B was for cancel/back. The Playstation O button is where the SNES A button is, and the Playstation X button is where the SNES B button is. It all makes sense.

…Until it got switched. Only outside of Japan. For reasons that no one responsible has ever seen fit to document, at least publicly.