No, it's not just you. I see Dagon and I think Shadow Over Innsmouth, or Dagon (2001) every time. It would be cool to have a name like that.. sort of like being Fred Cthulhu, or Samson Yog-sothoth.

Thank you for the pointer. I will indeed check it out: But those two novels I mentioned. Sheesh. Brutal.

And Charles Stross' little diatribe isn't narcissistic projection?

The whole thing is all about his his own writing process is superior!

Charles Stross just figured out what every Trekker has known for a decade or more. The writers depend on someone else to fill in the science-y sounding gaps. ... and then goes on to write a huge diatribe about how much better his writing is.

I've read his writing. For all the nerd-dropping[1] I couldn't get through more than 3/4 of it before I had to put it down in disgust.

His rip-off novel Saturn's Children (he should've just called it Friday 2) was readable only because it was borderline erotica.

You don't tear down an infinitely more successful (and therefore relevant) .. Universe.. of scifi.. by comparing it to your own works without inviting a legion of people to mock you endlessly for all the stupid little mistakes and problems in your own writing.

And Star Trek isn't *SCIENCE FICTION* you turd. It's scifi. The entire genre is borderline space opera--and this is what you're claiming you dislike! So what?

Space Opera
SciFi ] CS stuff is
Science Fiction ] right in between here.
Hard Science Fiction

His "science" isn't science either. There's just as much hand-wavy fucking CRAP in the Atrocity Archives as any ST:TNG episode with Q plagued with techno-babble in the whole friggin' series.

If you're going to so completely rip someone else off (*cough* Lovecraft) that your work is no longer a work of original fiction, but a derivative--and a poor one at that--don't sit back and congratulate yourself on how smart and clever you are.

You want a bad-ass Lovecraftian book with an interesting spin on it? Resume with Monsters. There's a mostly-original piece that doesn't constantly congratulate itself on how COOL it is, on how much the author GETS IT, on how well the author is HIP AND TRENDY. There's an amusing story with an interesting core of an idea!

Nothing HAPPENS in CS's Atrocity Archives. The only reason to read it, by the halfway point, is to find out how the author ENDS it.

[1] Nerd-dropping is the constant dropping of nerdy concepts and marketing-friendly terms that will rapidly make your work irrelevant once people get over the idea that you've managed to--poorly--fuse geekery and Lovecraft into a single work.

You are constructing a meaning for the term which has an etymology of only incorrect uses of the prescriptive meaning.

Would you like to ax me a question? Irregardless of correct grammar and my continuous misuse of said, this "pedantry" of which you speak? Is what keeps meaning meaningful between two isolated geographies that would unerringly, impendingly, inexorably otherwise devolve into inomprehensible, abhorrent dialect, and be nearly completely unable to communicate, upon happening a lone speaker of one on another.

Be thankful that literacy rates (as abysmal as they are) are as fixative for spoken grammar almost as much as they are for literative, or we'd all be speaking and writing in long, irritating puns.

You, sir, are an agent of chaos, with poor excuses for bad, indeliberate behaviour on the grammar offenders. And so it is, that it is safe to ignore your bleatings.

Run along now, Agent Chaos.

Do they? Not where I live..

I wish they did. But.. oh well.

P.S. I'm aware that anecdotal evidence isn't, but I guess my offtopic point is made.

Well, it's not really a tiny bit. I'm guessing the city you're imagining is a slight bit different from the city I live in. Frost, black ice, and snow are a fact of life in most Canadian cities (even Victoria) for many months of the year. Having been in a fully-limited-slip AWD vehicle in dozens (hundreds?) of downhill sliding scenarios, I can say with full confidence that it is a serious advantage. (And quite scary for the people behind me, a fact of which I am very painfully aware.)

But you're 100% right about the OP.. a Yaris is not one of the vehicles I describe. :)

Except you admit it is possible, and therefore even in the limited universe the grandparent of this note constructed, AWD can in fact be a better way to slow down and assist in stopping.

Really, any slippery downhill slope is a candidate for this. It's tough to imagine a scenario that the person the grandparent was writing about was describing where some form of slippage isn't involved, and thus this particular AWD construct could be a help in any of those slippage scenarios.

The unfortunate reality is that high-quality, effective limited-slip differentials that can lock all four wheels together are actually pretty rare, even on many AWD vehicles (including Subarus.) They're rare because they're heavy and not particularly economical on mass-produced vehicles: open differentials mean you can under-engineer drive shafts and half-axles and save a pile of money on transmission parts. Why? Because if you have an open differential and the engine drives enough power to slip a tire, only one tire slips and the others stay stationary: the torque load on things like drive shafts is only enough to break free a single tire, and then it's released.

On a WRX STi or a Lancer Evo, the drive shafts have to be strong enough to bear the torque of all four tires' friction simultaneously before everything breaks free and you get an AWD burnout. It's pretty badass. Most normal cars have parts that would snap and break under those stresses, and are therefore less expensive to build.

So, only the insane rally-racer cars like the Lancer Evo or the WRX STi tend to have the full-on ability to lock all four wheels together. Well.. those and the expensive offroaders, whose oversized tires tend not to be a big help on snow and ice and slippery surfaces anyway. (Wrong tire compound, not enough biting edges, missing studs, whatever.)

Except for, say, the fact that truckers undergo significantly more driver training, they are required by law to pull out at brake-check stops, are constantly weighing their cargo (and thus know how much momentum they can build,) that SUVs have no maintenance schedules enforced on drivers by law, and are driven by barely-competent people who, on average, were last tested half their lifetime ago?

Partially incorrect. There are conceivable scenarios where AWD systems will in fact give the vehicle better stopping power than any brakes or brake systems in any two-wheel drive vehicle.

Therefore, the type of all-wheel drive in-use can be a factor in slowing down better and with more control than a simple two-wheel drive vehicle.

The reason is simple: some AWD systems include three four-wheel limited-slip differentials (front-left-right, rear-left-right, and front-rear) which will prevent any one single wheel from spinning when forces on it act to spin it independently of any of the other wheels.

This means that in those situations where the driver can not reasonably stop or even apply brakes without inducing an immediate slide (black ice on a downhill, say) and the best they can do is ease off the gas, chances are much better that the road is not 100% ice and that at least two wheels can get enough purchase to apply some deceleration forces on the car as a unit. The fact that the two wheels in question can literally be *any* two wheels on these rare AWD vehicles means the chances of clutch-engaged deceleration are significantly higher. I don't mean stopping entirely; I just mean slowing down to engine compression/slope equilibrium. (Which helps stopping considerably.)

Also, if a slide is already occurring on all four wheels, ABS is worse than useless and could mean that brakes are temporarily rendered inoperable when it's possible that at the end of the slide, the tires regain traction.

I just wanted to point out that even open differentials where right-left brakes are applied to prevent wheel slippage (active stability) are less effective than those that involve that all-important front-rear limited slip. I know of no cars on the market that aren't already AWD that can do this.

Flesh-coloured hand? It was white wasn't it?

Careful.. if you fight back the tide, it'll grow twice as strong and be back for more in about a week!

Intelligence is an emergent property?

You fail biology forever.

.. awesome. :)

You rule, dude.