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I am no expert but some people say it was about 40k in 2005 (not counting pedestrians etc). That is a 9/11 per month. Rage war on that.

Dropping your odds of survival from 2% to 1.8% really doesn't impress me that much.

What say we put some very rough numbers to those percentages. Not counting differences in injuries, in 2003 there were 42 000 people killed in auto accidents in the US. 2% of that is 840, 1.8% is 756. 840-756=84. Does 84 people living instead of dying every year impress anyone, statistically speaking?

The trouble with this type of driverless car tech is that it's going to be as brittle as the AI it's based on. It may work fine for normal, complex or not, situations, but the day a child runs out in front of it in a way it's not been programmed to handle there's going to be a tragedy.

The question is, how prepared is the average driver? I don't mean hazardous driving but according to stats (1, 2) I found there's about 3 trillion miles driven, 6 million crashes and 40,000 fatalities in the US each year. That's one crash for every 500,000 miles driven - that sounds incredibly little to me but it says 3000 billion miles. Even if you consider that near-accidents and emergencies happen more often they're many thousands of miles apart. Nobody is really able to stay alert that long for something that doesn't happen 99.99% of the time.

It's great what you learned at your driver's exam, but most people aren't there. At best they're simply cruising and need to snap into emergency mode, not counting all those who aren't paying sufficient attention, are tired, fiddling with the stereo, their phone, distracted by passengers, fail to react, panic, do stupid things like swerve into opposing traffic, on alcohol, on drugs and so on. Nor do they have a 360 degree view or IR vision or any of the other tools an automated car would use. By far most often the threat is obvious if observed and the solution usually equally so.

After all, there's only so many things you can observe about the people around you too, you can see the child but you can't know what it's thinking. It's just the basics of that it's a child, what trajectory it's on, is it unaccompanied and in all honesty there's not that much you manage to process while you're driving by at a fair speed. It's mostly attention, if that child runs in direction of the road I have to react instantly and break which will cut a typical response time from 1.5 seconds to 0.2 seconds. It might just not be that relevant to a computer that's still analyzing all possible problems simultaneously.

Bunk. The first problem is the cost. It's already ridiculously expensive to build a road, and now you want us to make it even bigger to accommodate your childish need to drive at "Ludicrous Speed."

The second problem is design. Do you know how much effort goes into the design of roads? We start with "design designations," including design speed. All of the curves, both horizontal and vertical are designed with this design speed in mind. Raising the design speed will generally raise the cost.

The third and fourth problems are both related to safety:

What happens when you blow a tire at 180 MPH? Bad Things.

Still another problem is with the addition of a single lane. The slowest driver will necessarily define the speed of the lane. Therefore, there has to be an escape, which means adding a second, very expensive lane, or you have to allow this high speed traffic to mix with the adjacent slower-moving traffic.

I've seen this suggestion before, and it's as stupid now as it was then.

I can see Russia moving armies and throwing bombs ...
meanwhile in Russia : nearly 100 traffic deaths A DAY. http://www.car-accidents.com/country-car-accidents/russia-car-crash-accidents.html

Here's the data from the US DOT for miles driven and death rates.

As far as the 1 per 500,000 miles I am using 6 million car accidents per year in the US. If you have better data I'd be glad to see it.

I have a "near miss" about once or twice a year where only sheer luck and/or psychic ability has prevented an accident.

Exactly - near misses happen all the time but rarely result in an accident.

Himself. Motorcycles have a lot of speed, high acceleration and maneuverability, little mass, and very little between the rider and the road. If he'd met another vehicle at 127mph, the other vehicle would be operable with a dent, and this video would've ended with road pizza.

Stupid driving? Extremely. Dangerous to those around him? Not really.

That's assuming the other driver doesn't panic after being hit by a man at a difference in velocity of 50+ MPH, maintains control of their vehicle, and that nobody runs over said motorcyclist or bike.

I'd say it's about as dangerous as a deer on the highway (slightly slower relatively, yet heavier), and we consider that a danger:

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration there are about 1.5 million car accidents with deer each year that result in $1 billion in vehicle damage, about 150 human fatalities, and over 10,000 personal injuries. The actual numbers are probably higher because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's figures for deer accidents, rely on inconsistent state reporting- there is no standard reporting of deer accidents in the country yet, and a "reportable deer accident" varies significantly between states.

You say that as if the scale doesn't matter. It may not matter in a hypothetical happyland where results and not intentions matter scale is pretty damn important.

Yes, it doesn't matter. That is because you are failing to put it into perspective. According to the CDC (pdf) the number one cause of unintentional death is motor vehicle accidents. So lets keep in the meme of the antidote I presented earlier and assume each unintentional accident kills a family of 4.

You are not the only person driving and not the only person getting into accidents, especially in winter. In 2005, there were 6.4 million car accidents resulting in 42,600 some people dieing from those accidents. Now in the real world, a car manufacturer employs hundreds of thousands of people if not more. If none of those people knew that the car was dangerous, and none of the fatality accidents were caused by intention or reckless behavior, then more people are killed by accident with cars then by defects in cars.

But here is the rub, suppose a defect does work it's way into a car that makes it unsafe. What do you suppose should be done? Should No more cars be made? Should the car maker be sued into bankruptcy which would only hamper development and fixing of the problem? No, they issue a recall and fix the issue. If malice is shown to have existed, then whoever is responsible for that gets criminally charges just like you would if you caused a death. Something that you somehow do not seem to be understanding here is that a corporation can not act in any way, shape, or form, without a human making decisions. Often there are hundreds or thousands or more of humans doing this. In perspective, the bottom line is that the number of people who die per year due to safety defects in a car they purchased, is lower then the number of people who die each year from unintentional motor vehicle accidents.

If you are designing a network and ten thousand users go down are you going to argue that mistakes happen and it is no different having a single point of failure for four users versus having a single point of failure for ten thousand?

It's all relative and you are failing to see the real picture. Suppose this network is in one city and that city get nuked, a single point of failure right? Suppose that network was distributed across the world and an meteorite knocked out the satellite used to connect the backup stations as well as the main data center. Sure, it's like software as a service, host your apps on Google or set your servers up in the cloud at amazon- but what good does that do when a back hoe chops the fiber optics line leading from your production facility to the sales headquarters two states over. Sure, your local network is still working, your employees can play internet backgammon and print their scores out in the local building, but with no internet of communications access to the servers, everything else has stopped.

Or how about a more plausible point of failure. Suppose you have a tool that updates the routing in all the routers on the network. Now suppose this tool has the ability to do it all the routers at once so when you add a new node, you aren't updating 200 different routers individually. Now suppose one of the remote routers goes bad, you ask the tech to replace it with a backup and flash the configuration to the default so some diagnostics can be run. Now suppose this tech doesn't have the tools to do it, so you get a guy in another area to forward the tools and you will walk him through it. So you are off site, probably on the phone with this guy, he gets the tools that someone else left set in the update all mode, you walk the guy though flashing the router back to default which also flashes every other node back to default, and the single point of fai

The car accident death rate for teen male drivers and passengers is more than one and a half times female teen driver (19.4 killed per 100,000 male drivers compared with 11.1 killed per 100,000 female drivers.

Nope. Some people sing to the radio. For that matter, some people talk to the radio.

That's the next thing they'll ban. Horribly distracting. Car radios & CD players cause serious accidents.

http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html

There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.

http://www.theclaimsconnection.co.uk/road-accident-claims1.html

The number of people killed in road accidents was down from 2,946 in 2007 to 2,538. In accidents reported to the police the number of people either killed or seriously injured stood at 28,572, a fall of 7%.

So roughly 42,000 deaths versus 2,500 deaths. 307m people in the US version 61m in the UK. Therefore the death rate per 1m people is 137 in the US versus 41 in the UK.

So, no, there aren't more here (where I assume you mean the UK).

Check out the "new" images on page 3 :-)

But I think it would be more effective if people uploaded their best, rusted-out, 15-year-old Toyota car pictures. Or maybe something worse, like this, this, or this. The site has a whole gallery of photos definitely NOT taken by Toyota. Not big enough for wallpaper, unfortunately :-)

Check out the "new" images on page 3 :-)

But I think it would be more effective if people uploaded their best, rusted-out, 15-year-old Toyota car pictures. Or maybe something worse, like this, this, or this. The site has a whole gallery of photos definitely NOT taken by Toyota. Not big enough for wallpaper, unfortunately :-)

Check out the "new" images on page 3 :-)

But I think it would be more effective if people uploaded their best, rusted-out, 15-year-old Toyota car pictures. Or maybe something worse, like this, this, or this. The site has a whole gallery of photos definitely NOT taken by Toyota. Not big enough for wallpaper, unfortunately :-)

Check out the "new" images on page 3 :-)

But I think it would be more effective if people uploaded their best, rusted-out, 15-year-old Toyota car pictures. Or maybe something worse, like this, this, or this. The site has a whole gallery of photos definitely NOT taken by Toyota. Not big enough for wallpaper, unfortunately :-)

this type of vehicle isn't the lay driver who wants a "flying car" to dodge traffic and be cool

I should hope that anything that flys, regardless of how popular it becomes, still requires a pilots license and that the skill needed to attain such a license remain quite high. Lay drivers manage to kill 43,443 people in 2007. I don't want to see what the statistics would be if people were text, putting on makeup, eating, yelling at the kids in the backseat, playing with the radio, fighting off sleep, etc. while flying a plane. Sure, there is more open space in the sky than on the road, but with how many drivers act that's just giving them more rope to hang themselves with.

Fuel economy of airplanes vs ground transport is another rant entirely.

Speed variance is a bigger killer than raw speed

Do you have data to back up your absurd claim? Because a quick google search says you're talking out of your ass. http://www.car-accidents.com/car-accident-causes.html

The majority of car accidents sent to us seem to be caused by bad driving: driver inattention, failure to merge or yield, speeding, racing, aggressive driving and failure to exercise care in passing. Accidents sent to this site that can be attributed to specific causes aside from poor driving itself include: falling asleep; weather usually (Snow, Ice or Rain- a few related to fog); alcohol, drugs and drunk driving; driver distractions including cell phones, insects in the car, playing music; collisions with animals in the road, usually deer, but also birds, horses, cows and dogs.

http://www.weitzlux.com/freecaraccidentattorneyevaluation_766.html

Car Accident Causes
Many factors can result in a car accident, and sometimes multiple causes contribute to a single car accident. Car accident factors include the following:

• Driver distraction, including fiddling with technical devices, talking with passengers, eating or grooming in the car, dealing with children or pets in the back seat, or attempting to retrieve dropped items.
• Driver impairment by tiredness, illness, alcohol or other drugs, both legal and illegal. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is an organization made up of the families of the dead who were killed in car accidents caused by drunk drivers.
• Mechanical failure, including flat tires or tires blowing out, brake failure, axle failure, steering mechanism failure.
  Road conditions, including foreign obstacles or substances on the road surface; rain, ice, or snow making the roads slick; road damage including pot holes.
• Speed exceeding safe conditions, such as the speed for which the road was designed, the road condition, the weather, the speed of surrounding motorists, and so on.
• Road design and layout. Some roads are notorious for being accident "black spots" for a whole variety of reasons, many subtle and not necessarily immediately obvious. These include alignment, visibility, camber and surface conditions, road markings, etc. Finding out the causes for a repeated series of accidents on the same stretch of road is becoming a science in itself.

Not a single one of the top articles in a google search for "auto accident causes" listed "speed variance". Slow down, damn it. On the interstate in Illinois, you are legally allowed to drive between 45 and 65. The police in Illinois will pull you over if you are doing over 69, and will ticket you if you have a history of speeding or are doing over 74 (an Illinois State Trooper told me that).

When gas gets rediculously expensive I drive 50 when I travel to St Louis, and my gas mileage raises from the 27-30 mpg I get at 68 mph to 33-35 mpg. Your whizzing past at eighty is dangerous, and if I'm in an accident with you, know that I'm hiring my own lawyer rather than using my insurance company's lawyer, and going I'm for punitive damages. Your insurance won't cover the punitive damages.

I agree with the gist of your post, however we need to put it into perspective.

Terrorism is a real threat to the US and the "western" world.

There were fewer than 3,000 people killed by terrorists on American soil this century. Far more Americans were killed in combat in the Iraq war. In 2005 alone 4082 people were murdered by friends or acquaintences.

In 2003 42,643 people were killed in auto accidents.

Half a million Americans die of cancer every year, another half million die of heart disease. Personally, I'd like to see some of the "homeland security" money going to guard rails and cancer research (I'll probably be killed by the terrorists who own the tobacco companies; even though I gave up tobacco over eight years ago, I smoked cigarettes for thirty years and will likely die of lung cancer).

In Grandpa's day it was "we have nothing to fear but fear itself". Today it's OMG!!1! TEH TERRORISTS!!! WE MUST GIVE UP OUR RIGHTS!!!

Why not get the facts about seat belts - they were invented by the car industry in an attempt to make their vehicles safer, and it works.

http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/seat_belts.html

Seat Belts are the best protection in a car accident.

Failure to wear a seat belt contributes to more fatalities than any other single traffic safety-related behavior. 63% of people killed in accidents are not wearing seat belts. Wearing a seat belt use is still the single most effective thing we can do to save lives and reduce injuries on America's roadways.

Data suggests that education alone is not doing the job with young people, especially males ages 16 to 25 the age group least likely to buckle up. They simply do not believe they will be injured or killed. Yet they are the nation's highest-risk drivers, with more drunk driving, more speeding, and more crashes. Neither education nor fear of injury or death is strong enough to motivate this tough-to-reach group.

Rather, it takes stronger seat belt laws and high visibility enforcement campaigns to get them to buckle up.

Seat belts are the most effective safety devices in vehicles today, estimated to save 9,500 lives each year. Yet only 68 percent of the motor vehicle occupants are buckled. In 1996, more than 60 percent of the occupants killed in fatal crashes were unrestrained.

If 90 percent of Americans buckle up, we will prevent more than 5,500 deaths and 132,000 injuries annually.

The cost of unbuckled drivers and passengers goes beyond those killed and the loss to their families. We all pay for those who don't buckle up in higher taxes, higher health care and higher insurance costs.

On average, inpatient hospital care costs for an unbelted crash victim are 50 percent higher than those for a belted crash victim. Society bears 85 percent of those costs, not the individuals involved. Every American pays about $580 a year toward the cost of crashes. If everyone buckled up, this figure would drop significantly.

By reaching the goal of 90 percent seat belt use, and 25 percent reduction in child fatalities, we will save $8.8 billion annually.

Seat belts are more than 3x more effective than air bags. To the extent that people depend on air bags rather than buckling up, air bags net impact is that they cost lives.

We don't have a gun culture, what we have is a culture of media-ocrity. Kids spend more time watching television than going to school and the media exalts violence and commercialism. Lately it's been getting slutted up too. Anyone who says that watching eight hours of mass-media television a day won't rot your brain is obviously a dillhole, every system except for a few involving bacteria are garbage in, garbage out all the way. Any "gun culture" you may have believed existed is just an offshoot of our "media culture". It's part of the public paranoia promoted by a news media that shows us only the sensationalistic crap that will ensure their ratings because we as a people have shown that we react well to being shown bright and shiny things.

If we really had a "gun culture" problem then we'd have more firearm deaths than alcohol deaths or auto deaths. In 2001 (easy stats to find) we have around 75,000 alcohol deaths, ~40,000 auto accident deaths, and 29,573 firearms deaths, 57% of which were suicides - which means that they could as easily have been slit wrists or heads in the oven, assuming the statistic is correct. (ho ho)

As you can see from that last link, the total number of deaths is falling over time, and the percentage of suicide is rising... and of course the population is rising in this country. So uh... it looks like what gun problems we have - and there are problems, just as there are problems with knives, and there were problems with swords and bows before them, are being worked out.

So sorry, I don't see your gun culture bit. Guns are tools meant for killing, and we enshrine violence. Guns are just a symptom. They're the most convenient way to kill someone, so of course we're going to use them. Get rid of them and you'll just see more stabbings and stranglings.

is that hawt orange bikini Halle Berry slithered out of the water in on 'Die Another Day' back in 2002. Don't worry, they will, and they'll likely be done in together, in the same spot, around the same time, in the same type of vehicle http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html. You humans are so predictable ! Halle Berry on the other hand, is a fantastic example of what you humans may assimilate someday: http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0246460/Ss/0246460/au2_14s.jpg.html?path=gallery&path_key=0246460 which would truly be worth Dying Another Day ! (I know I'm getting modded wayyy down for including that nasty IMDB in a post!)

Excuse me but I pay a fortune to use the roads and should have the right to spend my normal 30-40 hours a week on the roads I paid for without inexpirienced idiots putting me in danger.

You know, you're right. You're right! You pay for it, you should be able to do whatever the heck you want with it. Speaking of that, I should go to an Air Force base and take a free ride on a jet fighter. Hey, I'm paying for it, right? Who cares what the "intent" of the program is. It's all about what "I want" to do with the program, right? Who cares whether the "intent" of the transportation budget is to move people and goods. If you want to use it for your own personal needs, screw the purpose of the transportation budget (moving people and goods), right?

The people who cause most accidents arnt truck drivers, taxis or couriers.

But they *do* cause accidents. Drunk drivers only cause ~40% of accidents. ~42,000 people die per year in auto accidents. Put 9-11, our troops lost in Iraq, and all of those sorts of things in perspective: 42,000 *per year*. Car accidents are the *leading cause of death* for people between ages 6 and 27. 394,000 large trucks were involved in crashes in 1999. 5,203 people died and 127,000 were injured. The economic damage of the accidents was a staggering $150 billion, just in 1999. Let's put that into perspective: Hurricane Katrina did only $81 billion.

This is not something trivial. You not only want the American public to pay for your entertainment, pay *huge amounts of money* for your entertainment, but you want to keep us in a system that injures half a million people a year, kills several tens of thousands per year, and does almost twice the economic damage as Hurricane Katrina each year. For your entertainment. Pardon me if I'm a wee bit hostile to the notion.

http://www.jmu.edu/safetyplan/vehicle/generaldriver/safetybelt.shtml/

http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/seat_belts.html/

And here is one from the UK government

http://www.roadsafetyni.gov.uk/index/cars/newseatbeltregulations/seatbelts.htm/

Our vehicles are out to get us. They are plotting against us and are even willing to sacrifice themselves to kill a few of us. Calling the sentient automobile threat overblown is burying one's head in the sand.

In the US alone, a week will on average contain:

Sentient Vehicle Attacks: 115,000
Dead Bodies: 788
Critically Injured: Lots

And for a whole month:
Sentient Vehicle Attacks: 500,000
Dead Bodies: 3400
Critically Injured: Lots * 4.3

These killings have been going on for years and are getting worse. The stated objective of the Sentient Vehicles is the total subjugation of the human race. It's a holy war, but we didn't start it. These are not the actions of a simple transportation machine. These are the actions of evil, murdering fucktards who consider mercy a weakness. They don't have any problems murdering women and children.

For the curious, I got my numbers from FARS and some car accident site. Neither one has 2007 data, and even though the charts show steady progression, I used rough estimate numbers that were probably a little bit low 10 years ago, so if anything the threat from these monstrosities is even worse than the picture I've painted.

I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.

Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.

I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.

Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.

I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.

Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.

I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.

Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.

I'm sorry, but until you can provide a reliable source, I strongly doubt this has happened, let alone is common enough to justify calling seatbelt laws the protection of other parties. I'm guessing this is just another one of those urban legends that got passed around so much some people started believing it.

Here is what typical head-on collisions look like. Most of the damage is absorbed by the front of the car. The frame around the windshield isn't usually twisted and the windshield doesn't normally pop out (unless the accident is bad enough to make survival period doubtful, or one of the cars involved was a truck, in which case the flying body would go straight into the grille first). And even if it did, its not going to fly out faster than than the driver, so he is still going to have to either go through it or be deflected off of it.

Re: your sig

> Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the state.

I submit the humble personal automobile. Since about 1950, it has killed about 40,000 people a year in the USA alone.

That's more than 10x 9/11 each and every year, and way more than WWII since 1945. Only about 400,000 Americans died in that war.

Terrorism is so overrated.

And what would you recommend?

Realizing who the real terrorist are.

And...

Understanding the context of a few thousand people dieing because of terrorism. We easily put up with much worse things in life.

Terrorism rates extremely low on the probability scale when it comes to how you will die.

Just for a start...

Oh yeah, I'd also recommend stop being such a chicken shit.

[peeve]
"... all intents and purposes ..."
[/peeve]

Unfortunately, you've performed the apples/oranges comparison yourself. For your argument to be valid, you need to scale-up the power generation capabilities of your car's tank of gas to be comparable to that of a nuclear power station. Lesse ... time for some napkin math - let's say your typical nuclear power station churns out 1000MW. A typical energy density of gasoline is about 130MJ/gallon. Your 10-gallon tank contains about 1300MJ. Estimating that you'll burn that whole tank at highway speeds in about 4 hours, the car's energy consumption rate is about (1300MJ/(4h*3600s/h)) = 90.2kW. Now we're taling a kW-to-kW comparison here. The 1000MW nuclear plant is about equivalent to 11086 cars ... running 24/7 at highway speeds. From this point, you should be able to mathematically compare deaths/kW for both automobiles and nuclear power stations. (I don't feel like hunting down the statistics.)

As for the car analogy being safer because the problem is localized ... that's crap. In 2000 we managed to kill 41000 people with our cars in the US, and injure another 3.2 million. We have lots of cars, and that's a big multiplier. Just because you spread the issue out into a really large volume, doesn't make it inherently safer.

Judging by the number of people who have a hard time negotiating their vehicles in 2D, I'm GLAD no one has them.

I don't know, over 40,000 people die each year in car accidents in US (source: http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats/2000_kill ed.html [car-accidents.com]). That seems to be significantly larger than terrorism casualties.

What's your point? That we are in some sort of wars against cars?

A "war" requires a thinking enemy who wishes to impose his will. Cars don't think.

Or that we are in a war against our own citizens for living their lives unwisely? I wouldn't want to be in such a moral police-state as that!

So what?

And the govt is limiting freedom. What do you think the information is used for, to give us frequent flier miles ?

The purpose of government is to enact vertical controls -- to threaten and use force -- to protect the rights of its citizens and to promote the general welfare.

It is just that the freedom taken this way is of the kind you do not care for as much as I and others do.

What freedom don't I care about?

"Privacy" isnt' a freedom. It can't logically be. "Privacy" (unlike speech, assembly, gunsmanship, bankruptcy, prostitution, inebriation, etc) isn't something you do. It is a state of ignorance by others.

And it's a pity, seeing as you do seem like an intelligent person.

Thank you.

Don't worry, as things are going, eventually your threshold will be reached as well, it's just that probably by then it will be quite difficult to do anything about it.

My threshold for what?

Dan tdaxp

I don't know, over 40,000 people die each year in car accidents in US (source: http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats/2000_kill ed.html). That seems to be significantly larger than terrorism casualties.

And the govt is limiting freedom. What do you think the information is used for, to give us frequent flier miles ? It is just that the freedom taken this way is of the kind you do not care for as much as I and others do. And it's a pity, seeing as you do seem like an intelligent person. Don't worry, as things are going, eventually your threshold will be reached as well, it's just that probably by then it will be quite difficult to do anything about it.

Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?

But seriously, only concerning speeding, this guy was issued a traffic ticket based on a speed check method that was thought to be accurate by the people who cleared it for use (though accurate to check speed or accurate in being a good revenue enhancer is debatable), and the guy showed the judge it wasn't.

As for people being accused of attemped speeding, in my highly scientific data collection I calculate that 99% of America speeds, and 90% 10mph safe (ie posted limits and taking conditions into account), so I have no problem with pretty much all speeding tickets issued. In a much more scientific way, the sheer number (There were about 2.9 million injury cases and 42643 car accident deaths) would seem to be highly indicative that people know jack shit about driving safely - the speed limit laws were made to be the maximum safe driving speed. Oh, and to get out of a ticket, get the sympathy of the officer in any way you can - this is much easier is you're female and play dumb, scared, and penitant.

But of course mileage is a pointless benchmark for shuttle fatalities, because we don't use the shuttle for travel. Actually, comparing the fatality rate at all is pretty useless; cars and shuttles are different entities entirely. It's like asking, "Which is more dangerous, using a digital camera or being a giant tortoise?"

Almost 300 Million Americans, and 6 Million are in an car crash ever year. Do the math. About 2% of Americans are involved in a car accident EACH YEAR.

Life is dangerous. Period.

In US? Probably 5 or so thanks to the Anthrax thingy (and a lot of people didn't even want their mailman on their property, not to mention their mail!)

And how many died from car accident?

Probably about 150,000. Historical sources are here and here. Oh, and there were about 10,000,000 people injured in crashes since 9/11...

Uh, check the number of murders and fatal car accidents in the United States. I think you'll find them to be frightenly high.

US Murder rate: 5.7 per 100,000 = 17100 murders.

Vehicular deaths = 41,000.

So, in the United States, which is not undergoing major upheavals and bombings, had over 50,000 people die.

One more item for that terrible list.

Car crash kills > >41.821 / year 2000

I think he'll regret this whole project when his iPod stops working, his Firestone tires fail and his Explorer rolls.

• Suicide - 11th leading cause of death (28,332 cases)
• Murder - 15th leading cause of death (16,137 cases)

• Car accident fatalities in 2000: 41,821 (source quotes FHA stats.)
• Airplane accident fatalities in 2000: 97 (NTSB source

• 1960 - 160.9 per 100,000 (288,460 cases)
• 2000 - 506.1 per 100,000 (1,424,289 cases)

-sk