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It's only in Hollywood gasoline make cars explode with impact (or rather just before).

Sure they don't.

"Hell, car engines are noting but a hunk of iron with a series of explosions in them."

So are most Pintos

Sure, it would be easy to fix . . . but it's just not worth it.

Indeed

Better than a flying Pinto.

The flying Pinto crashed and burned:

http://www.fordpinto.com/mitzar1.htm

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=84720&key=0

Lest we not forget the Flying Ford Pinto

Sounds a lot like the AVE Mizar (AKA "The Flying Pinto").

Not to mention a hydrogen-oxygen tank would be incredibly dangerous.

So is a gasoline tank. Well, Ford's anyway.

It's DANGEROUS!

Not nearly as dangerous as gasoline...

I don't think anybody has a right to privacy about something that happens in public.

Why did the guy crash? According to this the driver had a "history of seizures". If so, then he shouldn't be driving at all, he was a danger to others. Or perhaps it was a suicide, or he could have been drunk or asleep, who knows. But anyway, he was the only one to blame on what happened. It was only luck that made him hit a toll booth and no one else was injured, he could have very easily killed innocent people.

Now, the reason why I think the highway agency is trying to kill this video is because it shows how insecure the toll booths are. It would be very easy and cheap to build a crash barrier so that any car that goes off the lanes would be stopped without exploding like the car in the video did. Just a few sand-filled plastic barrels in front of each booth would do it.

If anybody has a right to sue, I guess it would be the family of the driver that would have the right to sue the NJTA over the lack of such a protective barrier. I believe it should fall more or less in the same case of the people who successfully sued Ford because their relatives were killed in a Pinto that burst in flames in a crash. Even if Ford didn't cause those accidents, they should have provided better protection for the gas tank in the car.

Oh boy! Another Pinto!

Yes, there were problems but it was a really fun car with a good engine.

It's not like the Chevy Vega (wonder what that might mean in Portuguese;-).

Gas tanks don't spontaneously explode. A few liters of gasoline will burn quite nicely, but it doesn't explode.

Yes, you're correct.

Debatable...

Just like everything else in your post.

Charge them $500 a month to have the car blow up upon impact and kill the whole family.

I think you have your car manufacturers mixed up.

This is Honda, not Ford

Nine Apollo missions, and one near catastrophic. Compared to 113 shuttle missions, no near catastrophic, and two catastrophic. Soyuz, for comparison, had 92 missions, two catastrophic, and two near catastrophic. The shuttle clearly has the best safety record of the bunch.

I did consider that when I said, If we had kept the Apollo program running, we would probably have zero mission fatalities to this day. It was that good. Well, with less than 15 launches, who knows?

Neither thermal tiles. *RCC* has resulted in a fatality, but that's one of the strongest materials out there.

And because of poor design due to budget constraints, it failed. Which brings me to my real(original?) point. The shuttle is a great idea that was turned into a horrible boondoggle because of dirty, corrupt, greedy politics. This especially applies to Challenger as it was pure politics that said "no more delays. We're going dammit!". It does not take a great deal of knowledge to realize that to launch with all that frozen stuff around was a sure disaster. And the engineers in the trenches knew it. They expected it to blow on the pad. Neither Columbia nor Challenger were destroyed by "unforseen" engineering problems, any more than Lee Iacocca didn't know about the defects in the Ford Pnto in the early 70s. They considered it cheaper to deal with the consequences later on. It just goes to show that whether you're making widgets or building space ships, everybody suffers from the same foibles. Without the politics, we might have had "second generation" the first time around. Oh, and since you insist that the tank isn't worth converting, I'll grant you that. I won't argue the costs, but I still disagree. I believe that if you invest a few extra pennies up front, it can save you lots in the future. But that's not the world we live in, and so we'll live with kerosene(hydrogen, whatever) burning space jalopies for some time to come. We have yet to make one that can come back intact. We're still working with 700+ year old tech using the brute force of a computer to keep it under control. When you try to stand a pin up on its point, you will get lucky a few times, but you will get bit. It's great drama, but it's no way to run a circus.

a simple google search will show you that ford was debating this, yet chose not to in order to beat the competitor to market. http://www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm

Reminds me of a fine overview of the phenomenon of flying cars, and in particular all the hype surrounding the Mitzar, a "flying Ford Pinto", that recorded one takeoff and no landings. Let's hope the SkyScooter, or whatever it's called, and the Mollar SkyCar don't meet the same fate of lots of hype and one tangled mess.

Reminds me of a fine overview of the phenomenon of flying cars, and in particular all the hype surrounding the Mitzar, a "flying Ford Pinto", that recorded one takeoff and no landings. Let's hope the SkyScooter, or whatever it's called, and the Mollar SkyCar don't meet the same fate of lots of hype and one tangled mess.

Reminds me of a fine overview of the phenomenon of flying cars, and in particular all the hype surrounding the Mitzar, a "flying Ford Pinto", that recorded one takeoff and no landings. Let's hope the SkyScooter, or whatever it's called, and the Mollar SkyCar don't meet the same fate of lots of hype and one tangled mess.

This hasn't always been the case.

Just as some software is built with the attention to safety that Volvo and Saab are famed for (e.g. OpenBSD), other software is built much like the Ford Pinto was. Users keep picking the Pinto-equivalents because it's cheaper (specifically: cheaper from a convenience and familiarity point-of-view, rather than in monetary terms). Manufacturers of Pinto-software keep producing it because customers keep buying it and there's no laws that prevent them from selling it.

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

Here's two real life examples of this kind of thinking Ford and Chevrolet. In both these cases the car manufacturer knew about the problems but figured it was cheaper to pay out any court cost rather than fix the problem.

is this in reference to a particular car model? http://www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm

The adulteration of orange juice: In 1990 an employee of Sun Up Foods, an orange juice processor, told the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the company had set up secret rooms in its facilities to hold tanks of liquid beet sugar, a common adulterant of orange juice.

Why would anyone use rabbit shit in coffee? Chicory is the standard item used to dilute or adulterate coffee.

We can contemplate the Ford Pinto without much further comment.

How about a little Alfatoxin in your peanut butter!

Need a chest X-Ray or a really fast sun tan?

Or maybe you want to take a trip in Sir Geoffrey de Havilland's Comet?

And if you still think that you can consume or use products or services without paying close attention, I have a bridge to sell you.

Now, WHERE is my flying car...

Right here Of course you know what will happen if you land too hard...

...and my army of hotbabe amazon robots?

I'm sorry. This is the best I could do.

The particular example in Unsafe at Any Speed was the Chevrolet Corvair (which was quite rapidly fixed). The Pinto came later.

But the pinto can fly

Inexplicably, some of these relics still manage to survive.

If you think that's amazing, check this out: the Pinto has its own domain name and cult following.

Here's my munged link:

http://www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm

Preview, damnit, preview next time!

They got it all wrong.

It was a Ford Pinto exploding nearby that caused the glitch in the signal.

Get with it...

Ralph Nader brought the automotive industries up to safety standards. I'm too young to remember the public's preception of him, but it sounds like we need someone like him around again. Microsoft has enough defects inside it's operating system to make it the 2000's equivalent of the Ford Pinto. They should be held accountable.

What about the users though? This isn't the 70's and information is readily available about Microsoft's security practices. Why do they do it? Is it like riding a rollercoaster that has a 6 junction split at the end, only 2 of which leads to the egress queue, 3 of which leave you hanging on the top of a hill until you debug the rollercoaster, and the final split has a jump through a fiery ring with no landing zone? I mean come on, they all saw the rollercoaster... They all knew the ramifications of their actions.. What about them?

-B

The pinto story is a mis-truth blown to extreme proportionThere's professional ethics for you. The Pinto was a sensational story - in less than six years over 500 people burned to death in them. It's not blown (video of exploding Pinto here) out of proportion - it was a national tradgedy.

That brings me back to my original point: who cares if the programmers want to be "software engineers"? If my garbage man is a sanitary engineer don't you think it's too late to rescue the word engineer from the common and vulgar?

The point is that personal privacy depends upon personal data being restricted and given out as sparingly as possible. What information you give out today will be used in unanticipated ways in the future. Witholding information is therefore your best defense.

Their best intrest (sic) IS mine. If they can sell me something then we BOTH win

*You* only win if the item being sold was (a) something you wanted/needed and (b) at the best price. As anyone living in a modern society should have figured out by now, the most heavily-advertised products are invariably the most expensive (the prices include the cost of advertising) and price is never a guarantee of quality. Saying that a corporation's interest aligns with yours is high-order naivety - did those buyers of Ford Pintos who ended up horribly disfigured in accidents due to the car's design flaws have their interests served by Ford?

Laws cannot protect privacy. Intrusions of privacy can be too undetectable these days, the only way to protect someone's privacy would be to destroy everyone else's.

Rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish. European countries like Norway have strong and effective legislation. Breaches on an individual scale can be stopped by using encryption and auditing all database accesses. Breaches on a company scale will tend to show up more easily due to the scale involved but can be countered by offering rewards to employees who reveal company lawbreaking, along with having a properly empowered regulator. The last point you made about having to destroy everyone else's privacy is ridiculous - can you provide an example?

1984 is probably the most miscited book ever. Analysis after analysis has shown...

Examples of this analysis please? Links? The point about the 1984 reference was the issue of an all-powerful state determining every aspect of its citizen's lives. With the increasing amount of personal information floating around and the US Government's desire to access and integrate it, this scenario is becoming more likely. And yes, control *can* be maintained with a good enough security apparatus and contempt for human rights (look at Iraq, China, Burma for good examples).

Here are your options for the future. These are the only two.

No they are not. A third option is to have regulation of computer data (as in most European countries), but with extra restrictions on data transfer between companies. Strong one-way encryption of databases can be used to prevent illegal or illicit transfers (as covered here). And those politicians coming up with uber-databases and big-brother style legislation should be voted out of office.

This of course, requires active monitoring of the legal system and lobbying by the people of companies and legislatures. And it will be the sheep like you that rely on the activists to protect your rights.

The technology is out and there's no way to stop it. But... why would you want to stop it anyway? Just because you have a little irrational hangup on privacy....

If you want to live in a house with webcams everywhere making sure that you are not brewing bombs for Al'Qaeda in your bathroom, that's your choice. If you want every little action to be subject to public scrutiny and challenge then that is also your choice. It is however not mine, nor is it likely to be that of most of the people browsing this site. If you want to dismiss privacy as an "irrational hangup" then you deserve all the junk mail, intrusive advertising, conmen selling you penis expanders and "get rich quick" scams and other personal invasions that you are going to get.

-Andy

Well I'm gonna blow a hole in your minds.

Phasers *are* visible - Phasers != Lasers. Phasers have a particle beam of ions/plasma fired at the enemy ship, these emit an omnidirectional glow (sci-fi movies are correct). This pulsating light will hit the observer-ship's hull (light has a weight of 1g/m^2) making it vibrate. Vibrating membrane becomes sound in the observer ship's atmosphere, which is picked up by the microphone on the observer ship. Try it - fire a pulsating laser at a microphone, it WILL make a noise. Using lasers only you don't need shields, just a mirrored surface on your ship. Plus the fact that these ion beams might need a toroidal electromagnetic field to constrict them, this changing electromagnetic field indices movement (thus sound) in the ferrous/superconducting components of the super-sensitive microphone thus sound

Sparking bulletsArmour piercing bullets on Stargate SG-1 are coated with teflon, plus military issue bullets can be made of depleted uranium. Does this spark?

Flaming Cars - Ford Pinto ***BOYCOTT FORD, RIAA***. This is why the (RI|MP)AA will win - was Ford forced out of business? Nope.

Mac 10 - I don't dispute this.

A person who jumps through a safety glass window would be far more likely to survive than if he jumped through a plate glass window but would still sustain at least minor injuries