Pippi Wrote:
<"Personally I find it very disturbing to have computers in cars in that
capacity. It has driven up the cost of repair to alarming degrees. I
drive an older car which is from before that era. If something isn't
working right it can be trouble shooted in the backyard and fixed with a
little fiddling or maybe a quick trip to the junkyard and I've never spent
much more than a hundred dollars to repair it. A lot of repairs I've been
able to handle myself.">
That is certainly true. Don't forget that most people don't want to work
on their own cars, they just want to drive them. Further more without the
constant feedback and adjustment made possible by the emission monitoring
system, these internal combustion engines would be spewing out horrific
amounts of vile byproducts that would contaminate the environment. Without
computer control, there would be no effective way to monitor and maintain
low emission levels. Prior to the advent of the computer controls, the t
ypical emission control device worked on one of two principles:
One - reduce the amount of fuel combustion by eliminating spark advance -
which resulted in a reduction of the fuel actually burnt but pushed the raw
unburned fuel out the exhaust. Essentially trading one form of pollution
for another.
Two - Raising the temperature of combustion through the use of air pumps.
This worked but it is the same principle as the cutting torch - adding
oxygen to the flame, raising the temperature of combustion. As you can well
imagine this was tough on the engine, especially the exhaust valves which
would burn and warp, resulting in loss of compression followed by
inefficient operation and resulting in higher emission after all.
She also wrote:
<"Not to mention, if my PC crashes it's a nuisance, but if my cruise
control goes whacky it could kill me!">
Never fear - cruise controls are designed to fail in "It won't work" mode
not in "I can't stop it from working" mode. That is, it requires everything
to be functional in order to hold your accelerator open and if any of the
components fails, the accelerator closes. Of course if we believe that a
computer may become homicidal then I suppose the cruise control processor
could "decide" to kill itself and us along with it by running us into
something a full throttle. But the cruise control module is pretty far from
Hal (2001). It has the computational power of a hand-held calculator.
Sorry for continuing with the OT but you've got to admit modules that are
below 8088 power are pretty SurvPC <G>
Dave
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