Slashdot Mirror

THE PROBLEM: It is currently financially worthwhile for some companies to play loose with personal information. The perceived costs of the consequences of poor protection are not sufficient to warrant a change in their way of doing business.

Many merchants / agencies / whatever don't seem to want to provide us additional protections. All it would take is for a few companies who already take security very seriously to sign up for the best star rating listed below, chalk it up to advertising expense, and put the pressure on the other merchants who do not sign up. "Hey! *WE* take your security seriously, and we put our money where our mouth is. If *WE* mess up, we clean it up and pay *YOU* for your inconvenience. Why would you want to deal with anyone else?"

There is a financial opportunity for an enterprising group to make a fortune here. Existing insurance companies provided graduated coverages and fees depending on certain items. I can select how much liability insurance I want for my car. I can pay the insurance company a larger premium for a greater amount of coverage. Alternatively, if I have certain protective measures in place, then my premiums can be reduced. I choose the level of coverage that works for me.

whenever there is a security breach, make a payment to each CONSUMER! Get the consumer to be your best ally in getting merchants to sign up for the protection. So, if a merchant compromises the security of MY information, then the insurance company sends ME a check. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader on how this could be extended to cover other organizations that have access to personal info such as hospitals or government agencies.)

Also, and VERY important: advertise this feature like crazy - get the consumers to push the merchants to get the coverage along with an easy-to-remember grading scale for consumers to use to assess the degree of protection they are provided by a merchant. It took a few years, but now US car companies are advertising the NHTSA crash test ratings. I expect the same could work for credit protection.

NOTE: All dollar amounts are pulled out of a hat. I'm just trying to put something concrete out there to use as a starting point for discussion. Obviously, the size of the covered merchant would affect the premiums and payouts, and I have NOT worked those into these numbers. Please offer improvements! The examples listed here might be appropriate for a moderate to large merchant.

Have a graduated scale of costs and coverages that depended on what level of security measures were in place at the time of the loss / theft.

• PROTECTION LEVEL: ONE STAR:
  If a merchant takes no security precautions then the insurance company would:
  • charge high premiums: $10M per year, plus $10 per covered client.
  • require high deductible: $5M deductible (in escrow).
  • provide low payment to each consumer: $100.00 to each consumer.
  • provide limited credit monitoring protection: 6 months of credit reporting agency monitoring.

  The consumer gets some benefits, even if the merchant makes no great effort to protect the user. It's still better than anything that the consumer is now getting. After a few payouts, word-of-mouth will boost interest by consumers in seeking out at lest this minimal coverage. CEOs and CIOs will start to take notice.

• PROTECTION LEVEL: TWO STAR:
  If a merchant takes certain, documented, security precautions ( encrypted DBMSs, firewalls) then the insurance company would:
  • charge moderate premiums: $5M per year, plus $10 per covered client.
  • require moderate deductible: $1M deductible (in escrow).
  • provide better payment to each consumer: $500.00 to each consumer.
  • provide better credit monitoring protection: 1 year of credit reporting age

- Every 90-second a car is colliding with a train due to lacking regulations if crossing.

In 2002, incidents at public highway-rail crossings in the United States caused 311 deaths and 859 injuries.

Is a hazard to others with the intent to harass, intimidate, injure or obstruct another person and commits at least one of the following: failure to drive on the right side of highway, failure to drive in lanes marked for traffic, following too closely, failure to yield right of way, failure to obey traffic control device, passing on right, speeding, stopping on a highway.

Source. I'll grant you that it's the only offense that will net you an aggresive driving conviction that isn't illegal outright, but I woudln't exactly call including it on the list of things any one of which can get you written up for aggressive driving as "being fine with it."

"Wikipedia, as well, provided 0 examples of a state that enforces this, though it said it's still on the books in Massachusetts (which we fondly call 'mass of two shits')."

From Wikipedia:

In some U.S. states such as Massachusetts, although there are laws requiring all traffic on a public way to use the right-most lane unless overtaking,

Nice slam on Massachusetts and those other states like them, but which are those "some states?" Accoring to the NHTSA:

The following states reserve the left lane for passing: Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. However, restrictions vary from state to state. Check with your motor vehicle department.

How does your foot taste?

"Seems to me that if you'd done half the research yourself you'd have realized you were wrong."

I've apparently done more than you have. We wouldn't be having this conversation if you hadn't assumed both that you know the traffic laws of your own state and that laws against passing on the right are a fabrication. You could have spent some time yourself to verify the validity of your filippant comments, but instead you left yourself open to equating yourself with those you insult.

"But to make an argument that "most places are X" when EVEN YOUR OWN STATE is not X just proves that you are a tailgaiting apologist in my book."

1. I never said "most."
2. Yes, state driver's ed courses teach traffic laws from other states, because (ZOMG) roads cross state lines and it's a common courtesy when you have your state's driver's licenses respected via the "Full Faith and Credit" clause.
3. Non sequitur. This entire thread started because I pointed out that slower traffic does not have the opportunity to keep to the right when people are busily passing on the right. I at no point stated that those passing on the right would be better off tailgating; if anything, relying on my own personal experience from religiously setting my cruise control at the speed limit, I'd rather those impatient drivers to both get off my ass and give me half a second to move into the hole to my right instead of using said hole to pass me.

"If you find a chart of current laws, that encompasses all 50 states,"

And why is the burden of proof on me again? Why must I be the one to inform you of the laws that you must abide by?

"if more than 25 of those states actively enforce what you claim."

Again, I never said "most." And no matter how many states it's le

From http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSF20 04/809915.pdf Speeding is one of the most prevalent factors contributing to traffic crashes. The economic cost to society of speeding-related crashes is estimated by NHTSA to be $40.4 billion per year. In 2004, speeding was a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes, and 13,192 lives were lost in speeding-related crashes. Motor vehicle crashes cost society an estimated $7,300 per second. The total economic cost of crashes was estimated at $230.6 billion in 2000. In 2000, the cost of speeding-related crashes was estimated to be $40.4 billion -- $76,865 per minute or $1,281 per second.

Put a tag on the outside of your baggage with your name, home address, and home and work phone numbers. The airlines provide free stick-on tags. Most carriers also have "privacy tags" which conceal this information from passersby.

Put the same information inside each bag, and add an address and telephone number where you can be reached at your destination city.

http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/publications/bagtip s.htm

If you do a search for 'luggage airline put destination' in Google, you will see the same information is posted to airline sites, sites for seniors, etc.

They present problems, but no solutions.

God, you're an idiot. Solutions, like these? Or like these? Or these? But God forbid we use less energy, even if we could do so with no impact whatsoever on our quality of life.

all of them live in cities, obviously, which are the least environmental of surroundings imaginable

Hey, guess what? You're still an idiot.

It seems to me that is only half true. Smoking ANYTHING is going to greatly increase your risks of cancer. It's not a guarantee, of course, but your argument seems somewhat akin to me to saying that if you play Russian Roulette there's no specific reason to believe you're going to blow your brains out. After all, five out of six chambers are empty, and that's probably better odds.

I suspect you picked pot for your argument because it seems as though it is one of the more innocuous drugs.

Even if I can't convince you that there's a difference between choosing to ski and getting hurt and choosing to shoot heroin and getting addicted (and all the stuff that entails), I think you will agree that there is a difference between something you do that causes your harm and something somebody else does that causes you harm.

If you cross the street in a stupid way (dart out into traffic, don't look both ways, that sort of thing) then it's absolutely your fault. If you do it safely, it's a perfectly safe thing--barring the idiocy of other drivers. You can't control the actions of other people and in this example, crossing the street is likely something that you can not avoid in the way that drug use or even the skiing would be avoidable.

For the most part, I don't believe taxpayers should be forced to pay for negative consequences of those actions either, no. The only exception I draw is medical: I don't think it is right to let anybody die or suffer for lack of ability to pay, including drug users. However, other effects should be yours to deal with. It should be your responsibility to sober up. It should be your responsibility if whatever happens to you causes you to lose your job, or go to jail, or lose your house. If you spent your life savings on that ski trip or drug addiction, that's your problem. I'm not unsympathetic, and I would wholly support your fellow citizens or church groups or whatever CHOOSING to help you out; I simply don't support the forced charity that it would become to divert taxes.

Yeah, because Mexican signs look nothing like their American counterparts, and Americans who can't speak Spanish usually crash within 1 mile after crossing into Mexico. Granted, some signs don't look identical, but almost all of the important ones do, and it's a bit racist to assume they wouldn't attempt to learn what the others mean, just like you'd want to know what the signs meant in any foreign country you went to.

Also DUIs account for less than half of fatal accidents in the US, and 7% of total accidents. But maybe your definition of "most" is different from everybody else's.

Yeah, because Mexican signs look nothing like their American counterparts, and Americans who can't speak Spanish usually crash within 1 mile after crossing into Mexico. Granted, some signs don't look identical, but almost all of the important ones do, and it's a bit racist to assume they wouldn't attempt to learn what the others mean, just like you'd want to know what the signs meant in any foreign country you went to.

Also DUIs account for less than half of fatal accidents in the US, and 7% of total accidents. But maybe your definition of "most" is different from everybody else's.

Well, there's this; http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/RNote s/2005/809890.pdf (PDF Warning)

There's a bit of debate about this going on at the moment over here in Aus, since the NT is looking at imposing upper speed limits for the first time ever. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1780096.h tm

Re your stat, actually the number of fatalities on America's highways is about 40k. Drunk driving alone is involved with 17k a year

To put it into perspective, since 9/11, about 30x as many people died because of drunk drivers than died in the attacks. Don't get me wrong, the attacks were brutal and I'm sure the guys who were piloting the planes didn't reach the heaven they thought they were reaching, but as a nation we are overreacting.....

Ah, plasmacutter. How eager I am to read your babblings again...

Many more people are killed every year in the US in fatal car crashes due to simple speeding than are killed by terrorism.. on the order of 10 times more.. 50 times more if you leave outliers like 9/11 out of the computations.

Maybe we should start shipping speeders of to gitmo?

Because car accidents are the equivalent of planned mass murder. Clearly, they're comparable and we should only focus on the ends rather than the means in all situations.

I can just see this now... calling up a 911 operator to report a murder only to have the police tell the caller, "sorry, roughly twice as many people die in car accidents (according to CDC statistics), who cares about a murder? We obviously need to put more effort into traffic enforcement. Just bury your dead and get over it, OK?"

Of course, this also puts aside the slight problem of distribution. According to the NHTSA (don't worry - they're not run by the wealthy elite, just the poor, downtrodden ranks of middle America, so you can trust them) 37,862 people died in motor vehicle accidents in 2001, which would cause an average distribution of 103 a day. A 30x spike on one day is certainly notable, and in addition to the deaths of almost 3,000 people, the attacks caused (according to these statistics) $105 billion dollars of economic damage in one month to New York City alone, in addition to billions of dollars in insurance, clean up, and other costs.

Oh, but it's all ok. Because accidents are equivalent to planned murder for ideological reasons. No need to get too concerned about them.

Really, plasmacutter. Are you just this stupid? This argument is so tired, so ridiculous, and so idiotic it's simply beyond words. That said, it's precisely what I expect from you.

Good to know I've got a slashdot stalker, though! I was kind of getting bored without one. Keep 'em coming - I've got pink eye and I'm in a self-imposed quarantine. I need some good comedy to keep my spirits up. I

I'll conceed your point that violent acts change us, however I take issue with how you make that point. You say Muslims did these acts, not radical Muslims. This implys that all Muslims are responsible and condone these terrible acts. Here you are dead wrong, radical Muslims are a very small percentage of the Muslim population thankfully. We would stand no chance agains 1.3 Billion (1) determined attackers.

So yes acts of terror change us, but only as much as we let them change us. In 2005 14,493 people died in terrorist attacks (2) while 43,443 died in traffic accidents (3). So why are we so worried about terrorism when we are more likely to be killed by a jack-hole talking on a cellphone? We are letting a relativly minor problem get blowen way out of proportion.

I don't think most people here are denying that terrorism is a Bad Thing (TM) but that they take issue with how it is being used as an excuse to take away our cival liberties. Sure it probably wasn't the smartest thing to do but a goverment official saying your right to free speach end is scary and wrong. Its not like he was claming that carying a knife or some banned object was protected by free speach. He made a harmless critasism and was punished for it, that shouldn't happen.

1: Major Religious Groups
2: Page 4, Table I
3: DOT Traffic Statistics

With most people recharging at home, recharge stations exist only as convenience stores. So the convenience store has a high-voltage hook up, and a few road-warrior types plug in while they stop and get coffee -- for the convenience of a rapid charge, they pay 4x what it costs at home ($36 is still less than I pay now for 500mi). The demand for that is lower than for gas, so you don't need to redesign the grid to handle dozen of cars simultaneously hooking up for rapid recharge.

Some things that stop me from having an electric car now are that 1) the range is limited (~60-100 miles), 2) when you get to the end of that range, you're looking at a relatively long recharge, 3) the batteries perform even worse when cold, 4) lack of availability. Capacitors won't help #4, but do help the rest.

* Speaking of rapid discharge... what happens to these capacitors in an accident?

The FAA has already banned bulk shipments of non-rechargeable lithium batteries by air on passenger-carrying aircraft. "RSPA and FAA, working with fire-safety experts at the FAA's Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ, found that if a shipment of non-rechargeable lithium batteries caught fire in flight, current aircraft cargo fire-suppression systems would not be able to extinguish the fire. A single non-rechargeable lithium battery on fire within a cargo shipment would likely cause all surrounding batteries to catch fire and burn until the entire shipment is consumed."

Lithium-ion rechargeables are apparently less hazardous - they don't start a fire strong enough to ignite adjacent batteries. (Note that in Cox's laptop, one battery blew up, but the others did not ignite.)

For now, the FAA has decided not to ban laptops. They don't see such small fires as a serious threat to the aircraft. However, they're worried about future fuel cell powered devices.

Uh, the chart from

      http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/Environment/aqfactbk/page1 4.htm

gives an estimate of around 6,000 thousand short tons = 6,000,000 short tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOC) for light-duty vehicles emissions in the U.S. in 2004. Perhaps the chart is mislabeled.

During my few minutes of googling, I came across the following, somewhat related, page:

      http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/2006/econ-emissions.h tml

You're dead wrong:

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/Environment/aqfactbk/page0 5.htm

Even though population has increased 41% and there are 112% more vehicles, CO emissions have still gone down 62% since 1970.

There are a lot more pollutants emitted by China than just CO. China had a coal fire that was only recently put out (a fire burned for 130 years):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3978329.st m

The article states 100,000 tons of pollutants were emitted from this fire every year.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/Environment/aqfactbk/page1 4.htm

Light-duty vehicles in the US emitted about 6000 tons in 2004 (NOx and VOC). Which one do you think is worse?

Next time you open your big mouth as an AC, why don't you have the facts? I found that info in 2 minutes using Google.

You're dead wrong:

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/Environment/aqfactbk/page0 5.htm

Even though population has increased 41% and there are 112% more vehicles, CO emissions have still gone down 62% since 1970.

There are a lot more pollutants emitted by China than just CO. China had a coal fire that was only recently put out (a fire burned for 130 years):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3978329.st m

The article states 100,000 tons of pollutants were emitted from this fire every year.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/Environment/aqfactbk/page1 4.htm

Light-duty vehicles in the US emitted about 6000 tons in 2004 (NOx and VOC). Which one do you think is worse?

Next time you open your big mouth as an AC, why don't you have the facts? I found that info in 2 minutes using Google.

if these retards were only killing themselves, I'd say 'have at it', all the better. But when hundreds (thousands?) of people are killed every year due to idiots racing around the streets, it becomes exponentially worse.

Anyone whining about terrorism should look at the automobile fatality rates around the world - the TRUE terrorists are people driving 3000 lb moving weapons pretending they are all 'cool' while street racing.

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/

Fatalities
drivers & passengers: 37,594
pedestrians / non-motorists: 43,443

Almost 100,000 people killed by vehicles just in the states - and yet one terrorist incident causes the entire world to freak right the fuck out. The odds of getting killed by a terrorist in comparison is effectively a rounding error.

You've got to be kidding! In theory, the readers, and by extension the posters, of /. are better educated than the run-of-the-mill sheep in this country, but I really doubt that now. Does anyone actually read stories like this, this, or this.

People, let's start using that grey matter for once. Yes, there are definitely people who would want to blow up planes, and yes, there are ways that it could be done. The War on Moisture isn't going to make anyone safer. Beyond the huge inconvenience and expense factor (read Schneier's Wired essay (I posted the link to his blog rather than the Wired article due to updates), a simple question of proportion should come in here. According to the US government's own statistics, fewer than 2,000 people were killed WORLDWIDE in 2004 by terrorists. Even if you add in the thousands of people killed on 9/11, you're still talking about 10,000 people, tops. Compare that to the number of people killed each year in car crashes (38,000 US fatalities in 2004), malaria (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 per year worldwide, mostly in Africa), or heart disease (276 out of ever 100,000 people in the US in 1996, or 22,800 in New York City alone). In fact, if the statistics are right, more people are hit by lightning each year (1 person out of every 600,000 per year, or 10,000 worldwide) than are killed by terrorists.

So, are you going to stop driving your car? Stop smoking/drinking? Stop taking romantic walks in the rain? (ok, so maybe not a good one on /.) Think of all the lives that would be saved if the billions of dollars that are being spent protecting us from push-up bras and shampoo were spent on finding a cure for malaria, or tuburculosis, or lung cancer, or AIDS.

Bah, the world is filled with nothing but sheep.

Anyway, back on topic. The risk of terrorism is enough to warrent these drastic actions. I have frequent flyer cards with just about every airline ever. After the founding of the TSA, screeners were really mean and seemed to enjoy dumping things out of their bags and demanding that passengers replace them quickly and move along. I attended a speech by the undersecretary of Homeland Security who was in charge of airport security and even he complained that screeners were jerks. They have gotten much better lately, and I hope that they can find ways of rapidly searching people. These regulations might not make people 100% safe (nothing will) but they do decrease the risk of explosives getting onboard. When I was a congressional intern last semester, I always complained that they did not allow me to carry water when I was giving tours. Now I guess I know why.

The one part of the new regulations that I fail to understand is the fact that people cannot buy liquid inside of fare control and bring it onboard the plane. The system only works if there is trust in the screeners. They allow airport employees through security with potentially dangerous items (knives, heavy wrenches, blowtorches, etc.) but they have never bothered screening to see if they are on a plane. The police inside the airport have firearms, but they do not perform two searches for those. I do not want to be at the mercy of the airline for my food and drink! I like having the passengers in seats around me gazing with envy as I unwrap my Big Mac, fries, and large Coke. If someone makes it through primary screening with a contriband item they will also make it through secondary screening.

1) The original stopping points weren't established with economy in mind, but sheer pork-barrel politics. Many of the stops along Amtrak routes are TINY towns, and have always been such. In order to get the whole system approved, many of our congress-critters had to be appeased and stops in each district were established. Since each stop costs the same amount, this puts rail at a disadvantage to air-travel since all stops are served equally, regardless of base.

2) The original routes weren't established with people-transit in mind, but mostly freight. Often this corresponds nicely, but not always.

3) On many tracks, Amtrak is the guest, and freight owns the track. This means there are plenty of stops in the middle of nowhere for "no good reason" as the freight train has seniority, so to speak.

4) Sheer ticket cost. A single trip can cost several hundred dollars. Add in a couple of nights in a tiny sleeper car, and it's in the thousands.

Every couple of years, there's a bit of whining in Congress to make Amtrak self-sufficient, but it's notable that many of these elected officials doing the whining are the ones responsible for the inefficiencies in the first place.

Also: mass-transit is rarely self-sufficient; it is frequently, heavily, and often indirectly subsidized by government incentives, on the rationale that a mobile population is a working one. In the US, even personal transport via auto is the beneficiary of the Eisenhower plan to let the MILITARY move around quickly. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.ht ml

As it stands, the current target audience for the longer hauls (more than 200 miles) seems to be the wealthy elderly who are afraid of flying, and the poor who have no other means. On the shorter runs, it's stellar for a more general audience; the Chicago/Milwaukee route is fast, inexpensive, and pretty nice!

http://www.its.dot.gov/vii/ In summary, cars talk to cars that talk to a wireless roadway infrastructure for traffic, road, safety conditions, etc. I am about to start working on this project, as it seems to be slowly making progress between all the contributors but suffers overall management issues... mainly from all the car companies trying to make it a subscription-only service and other such nonsense. Write your reps and let them know we need this sooner than later, and not as some jacked up add-on service.

Good point.

The other problem I have with the "cellphones as bad as being drunk" claim is that if you look at the past 10 or 15 years, the number of cellphones has exploded; there ought to be a huge and obvious increase in the total number of auto accidents per year, roughly proportional to the adoption of cellphones. I've never seen anything that suggests this. In fact, the driving fatalities per million miles travelled has gone down over the past 10 years, as cellphone use has increased. While cars have gotten safer, I don't think the developments of safety technologies can be said to outweigh something as dangerous as a large percentage of drivers being "practically drunk," if that were the case.

While I'm sure that using a cellphone while driving can be distracting, and they're definitely a cause of accidents, I think their risk is being somewhat exaggerated: if they were as dangerous as people claim, then our roads would have to be far more dangerous than they are right now. While the number of fatal traffic accidents has gone up slightly since 1994, it's nowhere near the increase you'd expect if cellphones were as dangerous as some people are making them out to be. Either very few people are using them when driving (not likely -- anyone who's been outside recently can verify that a lot of people are), people are using them in place of some other already dangerous activity (using their cellphone instead of being drunk? Also not likely), or cellphones are not universally as dangerous as they're being made out to be.

I think there is a perception that cellphones are dangerous, because a lot of crappy drivers use their phones when they're driving. There is a correlation then between shitty driving and cellphone use, but it isn't necessarily causative as often as it might appear: the person who's dumb enough to run into you because they were dialing their phone might still have run into you, in the absence of a phone, because they would have found something else to do. The problem isn't the phone, it's the bad driver. The ultimate solution isn't to ban phones, it's to have tougher licensing requirements for drivers, and make it easier to take someone's license away if they're not up to the task. (My proposal is to require anyone who gets a moving violation to retake a drivers test. I think there are quite a few people on the road who probably couldn't pass if their lives depended on it; sadly, other people's lives do.)

See the statistics for yourself here:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/

In the DC/Baltimore region, there's WTOP on 103.5FM and 820AM for news traffic and weather (traffic is every 10mins on the 8's). Alternatively, if one must use a phone to check traffic status, several states have implemented the 511 phone number for checking traffic (in Virginia, this is useful for checking screw ups on the western side of the DC beltway; Maryland has yet to implement this, although their CHART system has an [autodetected] text-only mode for cell phone browsing).

What this feature would really be good for is on their main mapping service that could be checked before leaving to jump into some random traffic mess. Yahoo's maps beta system, while attempting to poorly mimic Google maps, has such a feature (and thus makes it somewhat of a useful service for the time being).

Your car sits in the parking lot all day long. Why does it matter that it would take 100x as long to "top off"? While you're at work, it charges.

There was a lot of infrastructure that had to be built before (ICE) cars became practical for the general populace. Should we've stuck with the horse & buggy because those funky horseless carriages required millions of miles of paved roads to be constructed (ref), an entire new industry dedicated to refining this new-fangled "gasoline", and tens of thousands of distribution stations built?

Compare traffic fatalites per annum with the terrorism fatalities.

• terrorism : 2,976 fatalities in 9/11 | spending 37.7 billion dollars (just for homeland security)
• traffic : 41,945 fatailities in 2000 | spending 5.3 billion dollars (just for the TSA)

-Phantom of the Operating System

references

• http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/homeland_securi ty_book.html
• http://www.tsa.dot.gov/public/display?theme=39
• http://www.madd.org/stats/2336
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11

There is a real concern that lithium batteries shipped as air cargo could cause a fire that would result in loss of the aircraft. See http://www.dot.gov/affairs/faa001.htm.

I agree. If we can show that a large amount of accidents are caused by cell phone calls then I can see restricting it. I think it needs to be studied to create data so we can make that decision.

I think that there is a *lot* of wiggle room in the phrase "large amount."

Looking back...
http://www.volpe.dot.gov/infosrc/journal/2005/pdfs /vj05intro.pdf

The rate of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles has dropped to a third of what it was in 1950.
The rate of deaths per 100 m.v.m. has been almost flat since 1990.

I see this as a strong indication that the "easy" fixes have been made and that anything we do now cost money, reduce freedom, yet reduce the fatality rate very little.

Back to my wiggle room point, I think that what public safety proponents consider a "large" number of deaths gets smaller with each passing year. I'm willing to have a tiny percentage of children drown each year so that they have the freedom (as I did) to swim in places that were not 100.000% safe only under adult supervision at a rate of 1 adult to every 8 children with $100 monitors attached to them measuring their heart rate and sounding an alarm if they appear fatigued.

It is like an extension of the "so clean we get sick because you need a certain amount of dirt to have a healthy immune system" issue. If we are too safe- we don't really get to be fully alive.

The only thing that this study "proves" is that the test they used doesn't appear to be a valid measure of accident avoidance.

Over the past fifteen years, cellphone use while driving has increased from nonexistent to ubiquitous. During the same period, the fatality rates and accident rates per passenger mile have fallen to historic lows. Road design, increased use of seat belts, and an apparent reduction in drunk driving have all contributed. (see NHTSA statistics for details)

If cellphone use made any significant difference, you would see the effect in the numbers. There are just too many cellphone users for it to be hidden. If cellphone users really were as bad as drunk drivers, there would be blood in the gutters.

This is not to say that cellphone users are good drivers, or that you're not a better driver if you're not talking on the phone. I'm just pointing out the obvious, which is that driving is a low-risk activity with a large margin for error, and talking on a cellphone, or talking to your passenger, or yelling at your kids, or the million other distractions that drivers endure every day, aren't by themselves enough to use up all that margin.

They probably do statistically increase the chance of an accident, but by the clear and obvious real-world numbers, the degree of increase (or even the fact of increase) is small and quite hard to measure.

See my response to the other guy. TOTAL accidents are way down, and accident rates down even more, since 1988. See http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFAn n/TSF2004.pdf

Reference: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFAn n/TSF2004.pdf

My guess is that Joe Blow finds it annoying to see somebody driving on the phone (perhaps because they think that person should be paying attention to Joe, not the person on the other end of the phone). So they make up stories about how dangerous it must be. But the statistics don't back up the stories.

Yeah, yeah, I know, anti-lock brakes, driver's ed, blah blah. Let's see some actual statistics to back up the "cell phones are evil" stuff, eh?

US fatalities, per 100 million vehicle miles, have fallen steadily ever since cell phones started becoming common. According to this table, the rate has fallen from 1.73 in 1994 to 1.44 in 2004, and the rate either fell or stayed the same every year (despite economic variations, etc.).

If cell phones are such a menace, why aren't more people dying in auto accidents?

"An operator who is properly secured by a seatbelt has a better chance of maintaining control of the vehicle in an emergency situation and of surviving a crash."

"I drive a race car for fun, not professionally (SpecE30 Mid-Atlantic #59). The first thing that they teach you in a car control clinic is that the primary purpose of your 3-point seatbelt or 5/6/7/8-point harness is to keep you in a position where you can control the vehicle; keeping you from vaulting through the windshield is just an added benefit. (Preventing serious injury requires airbags or an SFI 38.1-certified head and neck restraint system.)"

"Also, the safety belt helps belted drivers maintain control of the car by keeping them in the driver's seat. This increases the chance of preventing a second crash."

To dig further into the numbers, in 2004, 11,344 people were murdered with a firearm in 2004. On the other hand, according to the NHTSA website, there were 38,253 fatal car crashes in 2004, killing 42,636 people, or well over 3 times as many people killed by automobiles as by firearms. According to your logic, we shouldn't be allowed to own cars, either, because if we didn't own cars, there wouldn't be so many of them in the country, and thus far fewer people killed, right?

Sounds more like you're the no brainer.

One of the pivotal events in President Eisenhower's early years in the U.S. Army was his participation in the Army's first transcontinental motor vehicle convoy across the country. The vehicles left Washington, DC, on July 7, 1919, drove to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, turned west onto the Lincoln Highway, and remained on the named route the rest of the way to San Francisco -- where, that is, scouts could find the highway. The convoy reached the West Coast on September 6.

You want to turn the highway system into a mess of private toll roads? Why? We already have an excellent means of collection: the gasoline tax. We don't need the overhead of toll collection. More on that here. If you look into the history of the road system, you will learn that the US highway system started as a bunch of private named roads such as the Lincoln Highway and Dixie Highway. And you will read abundant reasons why we should not go back to such a system. Over and over, owners demonstrated that their interests did not align with the users' interests. A quote from an article at the FHA: "Many named trails ... were routed through dues paying cities rather than the shortest, best route for motorists."

As for construction and maintenance, that already is done by businesses who compete for contracts.

I find the current public road system an inspiration for the way software ought to be produced. Microsoft runs its software business similarly to the way these private road organizations used to operate their roads.

The mileage figure pretty much jives with what wikipedia says, so it sounds like the numbers are probably right.

As others have mentioned, if you count every overpass, underpass, and creek crossing slightly larger than a culvert as a bridge then it seems more reasonable.

I've been working in the industry for 10 years, and in every document and every reference, it's Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). No one refers to them as the FHA.

Even their website is http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/

If you can't even get basic things like this right...

I need to get my eye glasses prescription bumped up again. If you look at the page I linked to, it was a comma there (1,793 billion miles, not 1.793 billion miles), not a period. Which changes the calculation by three orders of magnitude. Doing some additional Googling I found that the NHTSA has broken down the numbers for us: there are roughly 1.51 deaths per *hundred million* miles travelled. This means that, by any definition of "miles travelled" the shuttle is less safe.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFAn n/TSF2001.pdf

But you need to understand something: We are at WAR. And the enemies of our country do not give a goddamn about our liberties, or freedoms, our lives, and do not operate by any societal rules whatsoever. We therefore have to conduct ourselves under this reality, and understand something basic such as knowing that if an enemy combatant (or agent or participant, or whatever) is making a PHONE CALL to someone else, and either (or both ends) of that phone call happen to be in that country... the government MUST have that information, period.

Congress is the only body in the United States that can declare war. It never did so, therefore we are not at war. The military may be engaged in overseas actions, but without a congressional declaration it is not a war.

Do you realize how bizzare it is to read "The enemy doesn't care about our liberties and freedoms" and then "We need to abandon them to defeat the enemy" in the very next sentence? In particular when considering the overwhelming threat that these enemies present. How many people have been killed or wounded by terrorism in the last 15 years? Ten thousand in Israel, 3000 on 9/11, thousands by Basque separatist attacks in Spain, 50000 Iraqis and 2000 American soldiers killed in Iraq, thousands by separatists in Indonesia? Even if the number comes in at almost 120000, you realize that that means you're willing to sacrifice critical liberties to stop an "enemy" who has killed as many people total in 15 years as America's highway system did since mid-2003? Who has killed as many Americans in those 15 years as our highways have since last month? An enemy about twice as dangerous as being hit by lightning?

The reason you're willing to sacrifice your liberties to stop "Terrorists" and not to stop highway deaths (which are 180 times more likely to kill you), is because terrorist attacks are spectacular. They scare you, and when people get scared they turn off rational thought and abandon all other considerations in the pursuit of safety or perceived safety. The terrorists know this, and corrupt governments the world over know this.

The terrorists know that if they can just strike occasionally, repeatedly shattering the perceived safety, they can destroy a democracy by making it's people give up anything (and eventually everything) to anyone who promises safety. It worked in Israel. It's working on the United States. Terrorists terrorize because they know it works, and it works because people let it work.

Governments also know that a scared populace is a compliant populace, which will allow them to do nigh anything without risk of reprisal. Throughout history, evil leaders have either used existing enemies or otherwise created fictitious ones that served just as well to sow fear and help them take power. Robert Mugabe uses fear (and hate) of Whitey to keep himself in control of Zimbabwe. Fidel Castro uses fear of evil running-dog exploitative Capitalists. Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists to get elected, then he told everyone it was das Jugen that were threatening them. And so the Bush administration uses the fear of Terrorists and terrorism to keep people scared and in line.

LIKE IT OR NOT, NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS TRUMP CIVILIAN PRIVACY CONCERNS, PERIOD. DEAL WITH IT. Blocking the government's ability to get the information it needs to potentially save lives or avert an attack, simply because you don't want the governement to know what you said to whomever is, in my view, giving indirect assistance to the enemy. YES, I SAID THAT.

We just have a fundamental divide here. I don't believe that giving up civil liberties in the name of fighting a nebulously-defined "enemy" which is somewhat more threatening than lightning and far less threatening than drunken assholes behind the wheel is acceptable.

And there was nothin

When I think of engineering mistakes, the Cypress Freeway comes to mind. A double-decker freeway built on soil that isn't solid in an earthquake-prone area is a disaster waiting to happen.

The former double-decker section of 880 has since been replaced with a new, single decker structure a bit to the west of the original alignment. The cost of that new, short freeway section was $1.13 billion dollars, more expensive than the costs of LA's Century Freeway (105), IIRC.

I think it is utterly stupid that so many people are worried about getting killed by terrorists, when over 40k people a year are killed in car crashes.

It seems to me that driving to work is far more dangerous than blocking wire-tapping efforts.

http://www.lotpro.com/cars/2006/hummer/h3/safety/

The NHTSA gives the H3 4 to 5 stars for front and side impacts.. 5 starts being the best in that vehicle class.

The front impact looks like it takes most the abuse: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/NCAP/Cars/3682.html

Maybe your aricles are a little "anti" sided perhaps? Of course.. you only said "Hummer" so maybe you mean the orignal.. these are H3 numbers.

Well this site indicates ABS isn't helping to reduce the number of accidents, even in wet weather. (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

Oddly enough, this writeup, referencing an IIHS study, mentions that cars with ABS actually have a higher fatality rate in single-vehicle collisions. The AAA Foundation for Highway Safety sheds more light on this issue.

Here is the NHTSA study. I'm too tired to look any more, but from what I've seen, I'm just as well off without ABS.

The NHTSA study can be found here. The results are very circumstance dependant and different vehicles (if I recall correctly never identified) definitely show different results. On loose gravel (snow was not tested) ABS increased stopping distances by 22%, a significant margin.

Another test was performed by the Finnish car magazine Tekniikan Maailma. Comparing ABS with completely locked wheels (not skilled driving or selective choices about when to lock) ABS reduced distances by about 10m on dry pavement and increased by about 10m on snow. On ice, ABS increased the stopping distance from 255m to 405m, a massive increase. This was a braking test from 80kph. The results on ice are sobering - many drivers believe that while ABS is defeated by loose surfaces ice is ideal for it. On ice, the ABS controller was simply unable to apply the brakes at all. Again, this is comparing completely locked wheels, not skilled driving.

Judging from both of these, I was in error when I said "marginal." However, the performance on ice really makes me cringe as in that case the dry performance improvement really is marginal compared to the ice performance hit.

My point is that while suboptimal tires increase stopping distance overall, ABS performance can really be defeated by poor tires and even on packed snow the results can be disasterous. What little wedge would have built up to help stop the vehicle does not because of the ABS and the lack of grip means the ABS system is continuously releasing the brakes. Newer ABS systems seem to be able to detect some of these situations and correct them, but are a fraction of ABS equipped vehicles on the road. I have frequently encountered people who are of the opinion that "Well, I have ABS, snow tires aren't worth it for me" when the truth is that ABS makes snow tires more important in climates where they are even remotely useful.

Like most technologies, ABS is a compromise. Lots of people assume that ABS is magic and always improves stopping distance. Lots of drivers assume ABS will improve winter performance /more/ than dry performance, because it is frequently targetted towards those markets. In fact, the reverse is true and usually snow and ice performance is worse. Even the benefit of being able to "steer while braking" is a dangerous assumption and frequently leads inexperienced people into the ditch around here. "But I had ABS! It must have malfunctioned!" No... the driver malfunctioned. More than anything else, the important thing to realize is that ABS alters a car's handling - not always in a positive direction - and the behavior of snow handling should be explored in a parking lot in order to fully understand it.

Here are some quotes from the first 4 google results for "ABS stopping distances" relating to cars:

In exchange for an increased stopping distance, the vehicle will remain stable and maintain full steering since the wheels won't be locked.

On very soft surfaces, such as loose gravel or unpacked snow, an ABS system may actually lengthen stopping distances.

During 1988-91, NHTSA performed two extensive series of stopping tests involving vehicles with four-wheel ABS, on various road surfaces. The tests confirmed that ABS was highly effective in preventing yawing and allowing the driver to steer the car during panic braking. Stopping distances decreased substantially with four-wheel ABS on wet surfaces, but decreased only slightly on dry pavement and increased considerably on gravel.

Under most conditions, a vehicle with a good anti-lock brake system can stop in a slightly shorter distance than an average driver could accomplish [but] that is not the main purpose of ABS, and the difference is generally not great enough to notice or be of any real use... ABS can actually lengthen stopping distances on some surfaces, such as loose snow, dirt, or gravel, because of effects that occur during locked-wheel skidding that are unique to those surfaces.

Let's look at the statistics. In 2004, a total of 42,636 people died, and 2.8 million were injured on U.S. highways... I'll bet that many of the drivers who instigated the accidents that led to those 42,636 deaths and 2.8 million injuries in 2004 had the same thoughts: "I want to be in control of my car." "I'm a better driver than a computer."

Apparently 39% of those who died were thinking, "I can drink and drive.". And 13% were minding their own business (pedestrians and bicyclists).

--Rob

Maybe this had nothing to do with the fact that the vehicle had ABS

On loose gravel, each of the nine vehicles stopped in the shortest distance with a panic brake application and disabled ABS, regardless of the loading condition. Stops made on the gravel were lengthened considerably when ABS was active: 24.6% when the test vehicles were fully laden and 30.0% when lightly laden.

It is generally accepted that the plowing of a vehicle's tires into a deformable surface such as loose gravel generates greater stopping forces than if the wheels were allowed to continue to roll over the surface (as in an ABS-assisted stop).

Part of the problem is that the environmental noise has gotten so bad, headphone wearers have to crank their portable devices to be able to hear their tunes over the noise of traffic, trains, construction, etc.

It's kinda sad that Congress wants to talk about iPod volume levels when in fact the government has the power to directly affect some of the underlying causes.

[disclaimer: I worked on some of the documents linked above]