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You're affected for up to 27 seconds after you put down the phone. Yes, there is a problem with screwing with your phone at a red light - it impairs you, short term, when the light switches. Which is also a relatively dangerous time (everyone accelerating, potential for late intersection runners, etc).

According to the National Safety Council, reading/texting at a stoplight will degrade your attention on the road for the next 30 seconds. So you are more of a danger as you start to move forward when the light turns green.

According to the National Safety Council, texting while driving is by far the most dangerous way to use a phone while driving - but even talking on the phone distracts drivers so badly that they can miss up to half of hazards as important as red lights and pedestrians crossing the road in front of them.

Note, too, that their tests have established that texting only while stopped at red lights still leaves drivers distracted for nearly half a minute after they put their phones down and resume driving.

That's why I only use my phone for turn-by-turn navigation by voice when I'm behind the wheel - and I input my destination and start the directions before I leave my driveway or the parking space from which I depart.

When I'm driving, I let all calls go to voicemail, as well, because none of them can possibly be as critical as the task of driving defensively. I take my responsibility for controlling a ton or more of mass moving at high velocity among other such vehicles (that I always assume are being driven by irresponsible cretins) as seriously as if my life, and the lives of my passengers, other motorists and their passengers, and pedestrians and bystanders depended on it.

It's also the reason I merge onto highways at the current speed of traffic on that road - because entering a freeway at a lower speed than the vehicles already on it is dangerous. That's why I survey traffic conditions on the road I'm entering as I'm negotiating the onramp, rather than blindly assuming that the other drivers will courteously leave me room to merge and graciously adjust their own speed to accomodate mine.

They won't.

You should always assume that every other driver on the road is actively suicidal - and determined to take you with him. It's the only way to be even marginally safe.

Other than taking off and nuking them from orbit, that is ...

The problem is that car accidents are in general vastly under-reported by the media. Until the last couple years, the single most dangerous thing you did was to get into a car (surpassed only recently by drug overdoses). On average, about 1 in 102 people you know are fated to die in a car accident. Compare to the odds of some of the other things the media devotes a disproportionately high (or low) amount of coverage time:

Suicide: 1 in 91
Police killed on duty: 1 in 104 (1.1 million officers / (135 per year * 78 year lifespan normalization)
Homicide by gun: 1 in 285
Drowning: 1 in 1,086
Fire: 1 in 1,506
Choking: 1 in 3,138
Killed by police: 1 in 4,336 (325.7 million / (963 * 78 year lifespan)
Complications from pregnancy: 1 in 5,965 (325.7 million / (700 * 78 year normalization)
Terrorism in U.S.: 1 in 28,033 (325.7 million / (3277 * 78 year lifespan / 22 years sample))
Killed by deer: 1 in 34,797 (325.7 million / (120 * 78 year lifespan)
Gun accident: 1 in 8305
Lightning: 1 in 114,195
School shootings: 1 in 121,033 (325.7 million / (138 * 78 year lifespan normalization / 4 years sample))
Dog attack: 1 in 132,614
Plane crash: 1 in 205,552
Terrorism in U.S. excluding 9/11: 1 in 248,954
Shark attack: 1 in 3,690,101 (325.7 million / (43 * 78 year lifespan / 38 year sample)

If news reports were truly unbiased, you'd expect to see:

Roughly 3x as many reports about fatal car accidents than gun homicides.
5x as many reports of women dying from pregnancy than reports of terrorism fatalities (including 9/11, 77x without).
39x as many stories about people dying of choking on food, versus school shootings.
43x as many stories about fatal car accidents than police shootings.
91x as many reports about suicides than gun accidents.
Over 100x as many stories about people being killed by deer, than killed by sharks.

The truth is the media picks and chooses which stories they want to publicize, whether it be because of their unusual and provocative nature (e.g. Tesla crashes, plane crashes, school shootings, shark attacks), or to serve a political agenda.

Why are we allowing corporations to "debug" their cars on our roads? You have no concept of reality. 700 deaths on US roads. What would the number be if every car was using Tesla's autonomous technology? It might be 10,000 deaths per week. How would you know?

There are these things called multiplication and division. There are 250 M cars on the road according ot this:

    https://www.statista.com/stati...

About 200k Teslas have been sold, which is recent enough that most of them should still be on the road. 200k / 250M = 0.08%

There are 40k deaths per year , according to this:

    http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocumen...

so we would expect 0.08% of that in deaths with Teslas, so that is 32 deaths. So to a first approximation, Tesla is very safe, since you do not have another news story every other week about someone having died in a Tesla.

Now one might want to adjust for the type of driving done, where autopilot only drives well on high ways, where maybe the death rate is less. The number is knowable, though, and it is definitely not 10 000 per week.

You're comparing apples to oranges, under 24 and over 75 represent about 65% of road fatalities. Those aren't demographics who drive Teslas. Accidents also skew towards lower-income groups who tend to drive more irresponsibly (alcohol or speed), again not Tesla drivers.

You've also got single vehicle crashes that claim multiple lives. Driving with kids is dangerous because of the potential distraction they pose, but do you really think many Tesla drivers are using the auto-pilot with their kids? Or drive in fresh snow with poor traction?

The auto-pilot is overwhelmingly used by upper-middle class to wealthy people who are old enough to drive responsibly, young enough to drive competently, and are driving in ideal road conditions without occupants, and usually driven in cities (which highways are much more dangerous). Plus some of those cars are older and lack new safety features.

As you pointed out we don't know the proper adjustment, but I can see a lot of factors that should make Telsa owners responsible for far less than 32 deaths per year.

A mere 30,000 to 40,000 per year in the US. Stop spreading FUD.

  http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/Fatality-estimates-June17.pdf

</s>

Actually, it doesn't matter. If you're looking or listening to your phone, you're not paying attention to the road. Looking somewhere near the road isn't good enough. http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-I... https://www.bostonglobe.com/op... and lots more articles that got pulled up when I Googled for "hands off cell phone safety"

Chart of odds of dying to back this up (2017 publication).

1 in 95 - Suicide
1 in 96 - Poisoning / overdoes (this is the new big one, courtesy of the opioid epidemic, but the press has mostly ignored it).*
1 in 114 - Motor vehicle crash
1 in 127 - Fall
1 in 370 - Assault by firearm
1 in 645 - Car occupant
1 in 647 - Pedestrian incident (mostly hit by cars)
1 in 948 - Motorcycle rider incident

Do note that these are overall odds of dying for the country as a whole. Not everyone participates in all of these activities so your individual risk may be higher. For example, the motorcyclist death rate for the country as a whole is 1 in 948. But there are approximately 30x as many cars as motorcycles, suggesting only about 1 in 30 people rides a motorcycle. So the fatality rate for an individual motorcyclist is probably closer to 1 in 32. (Yes, about 1 in every 100 people you know who rides in a car is fated to die in a car accident. About 1 in every 30 people you know who rides a motorcycle is fated to die in a motorcycle accident.)

* You remember that shooting at UCLA last year which resulted in 2 dead (murder/suicide)? That made national headlines with all the major networks carrying live coverage, because the press loves stories about gun violence. The exact same day a drug overdose incident at a concert in Florida killed 2 and hospitalized 57. But that story barely made it out of local news.

And just for completeness, there were 225 people killed by terrorists from 2001 (post-9/11) to 2016, or 15 per year. With a population of 323 million and an average lifespan of 79 years, that works out to a chance of dying of:

1 in 161,856 - Lightning strike
1 in 272,574 - Terrorism

40,000 motor vehicle deaths in 2016

You are so full of shit. Your link doesn't even support your claim. You said:

I appear to have angered you. Where does impairment start? The legal limit of .08, or the new metric MADD and NSC uses of "impairment starts with the first drink." http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-I...

On the contrary, one drink does not vitiate consent, unless it's been spiked with roofies. Grow the fuck up, moron. You can start by not putting words in my mouth and then arguing against them.

Are you going through some difficulties in your life that has caused a once reasonable person to write like the Anonymous Cowards that pollute Slashdot with that sort of stuff?

You see, your definition or even mine is not required. Roofies are not required. What is required is a person that claims they have been violated because they have had any amount of alcohol. And the definition is so broad that it extends to married couples.

And I'm a little curious about your statement of me putting words in your mouth - and rest assured if I did, I wouldn't use your foul language as insults. My reply that you are quoting was most certainly not to you.. If you look back at the threads, you will see that I was replying to Texmaize. So unless Texmaize is another pseudonym of yours, why are you trying to hijack the conversation and make up things to be insulted about?

All of which is to say, chillaxe, friend. I'm happy to converse with people who disagree with me, but much prefer that they eschew taking it over the edge into name calling, especially when they are being insulted by a post not even directed toward them. Otherwise I won't give you the gift of my witty wisdom and brilliant ripostes.

I was being half-snarky... the GOP health bill hasn't passed yet.
But for real, the Canada thing simply means that a cop is empowered to DO something if he sees a driver with a cell phone in his/her hand while driving, and the driver can't weasel out of it simply by claiming it was turned off, requiring the cop to prove he could tell whether it was on or off from the vantage point of his cruiser.

It's just a legal attempt, democratically passed, to get around the fact that cell phones impair drivers as much as being rip-roaring drunk, but there's no blood-alcohol test they can run on a texter to prove that he was actually texting and not just allegedly holding a switched-off phone while driving (yeah, right), particularly if the texter ditched or destroyed his phone at or just after being pulled-over or engaging in an accident.

That's right, some damn fool can kill your sister, but by raising his hand swearing in court that his phone was off just before it was thrown from his car and destroyed, there's reasonable doubt to that vehicular manslaughter charge.

Yeah, maybe there's evidence out there in cyberland, but what's to compel that knucklehead to serve up his Facebook password? Does the district have the money to subpoena the carrier, the provider, Facebook, and to carry out the cyber-forensics to prove he was texting, and not just ordinary driver careless oh gosh I didn't see the light change. Accidents happen, sorry about your sister, think of how my insurance is gonna go up and thank god my airbag worked right.

So, given that the risk of being T-Boned and instantly transformed into a quadriplegic by an asshole texter is very fucking real, please do enumerate the hardships and dangers of the so-called "nanny-state" that outweigh this attempt to put some teeth into no-texting-while-driving laws, particularly with respect to Canada.
I mean, is there evidence of waves of depressed Molson-drinking immigrants flooding over from the great North, thirsting for the Freedom to text and drive without oppression from storm-trooping Mounties?
I don't think so, I haven't seen it.
But maybe I'm wrong. Any Canadians in slashdot-land want to weigh in? Any youse guys feeling repressed up North up there? or are you guys just so chill you can live fine with your hands off your phones while driving?

The proposal to ban laptops from the cabins of planes appears to be attempting to take advantage of the following logical fallacies and cognitive biases:

• * Zero-risk bias: Prefer to reduce a small risk to zero, over a greater reduction of a larger risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
• * Nirvana/Perfection fallacy: Prefer to abandon functional good for unachievable perfection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
• * Identifiable victim effect: We respond more strongly to a single identified victim, than a faceless group of victims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Remember that time they said they needed porno scanners? It turned out that the porno scanners didn't work. https://radsec.org/secure1000-... And, DHS upper management (Chertoff http://www.motherjones.com/moj... ) got rich off the sale of the porno scanners. This shows that we should not blindly accept TSA/DHS proposals.

The TSA success rate at finding known weapons and explosives is 5%. IE, they only find 1 out of 20: https://www.theguardian.com/co... This means that the laptop change will not actually make a difference to the real risk.

If they are worried that a well funded group will make explosives that look like a laptop, why would they only do laptops? Why wouldn't an attacker make explosives that look like a suitcase? A CPAP? A baby stroller? Why can't an attacker disguise explosives as a big enough item that it doesn't make any difference where it is on a plane? If they can't find an explosive shaped like a laptop, they are not going to find an explosive shaped like other things. Are they going to ban all carry-ons and checked items?

On the face, It seems looke like they have decided to increase their security theater.

While we wait for the TSA's analysis, lets review a few facts. Here are some reference pages on various types of death in the US:

• * https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...
• * http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Image...
• * https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...
• * https://www.theguardian.com/us...

So, your chance of dying of various things in the US is:

• * US Citizen killed by terrorists from 2005 through 2014: (about 1 in 240K deaths.)
• * Killed by lightning in the US: (about 1 in 160K.) For every terrorism death, there are about 1 and 1/2 deaths by lightning.
• * Dying in a plane crash: (about 1 in 10,000) For every terrorism death, there are about 25 deaths by plane crashes
• * Being killed by police in the US: (about 1 in 2300) For every terrorism death, there are about 105 deaths by police
• * Drowning in the US: (about 1 in 1200) For every terrorism death, there are about 200 deaths by drowning.
• * Dying in a motor vehicle accident: (about 1 in 100.) For every terrorism death, there are about 2,200 deaths by motor vehicle accidents
• * Heart disease & cancer in the US: (about 1 in 7 deaths.) For every terrorism death, there are 35,000 deaths by heart disease and cancer.

There hasn't been a big increase in deaths by terrorism. Or laptop. Why aren't we banning laptops in order to protect people from lightning? It would make just as much sense.

It looks like you could show a decrease in deaths by

Here are some reference pages on various types of death in the US:

• - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...
• - http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Image...
• - https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...
• - https://www.theguardian.com/us...

So, your chance of dying of various things in the US is:

• - Heart disease & cancer in the US: (about 1 in 7 deaths.) For every terrorism death, there are 35,000 deaths by heart disease and cancer.
• - Dying in a motor vehicle accident: (about 1 in 100.) For every terrorism death, there are about 2,200 deaths by motor vehicle accidents
• - Drowning in the US: (about 1 in 1200) For every terrorism death, there are about 200 deaths by drowning.
• - Being killed by police in the US: (about 1 in 2300) For every terrorism death, there are about 105 deaths by police
• - Dying in a plane crash: (about 1 in 10,000) For every terrorism death, there are about 25 deaths by plane crashes
• - Killed by lightning in the US: (about 1 in 160K.) For every terrorism death, there are about 1 and 1/2 deaths by lightning.
• - US Citizen killed by terrorists from 2005 through 2014: (about 1 in 240K deaths.)

The TSA failure to find weapons and explosives rate is 95%. IE, they only find 1 out of 20: https://www.theguardian.com/co...

It looks like you could show a decrease in deaths by shutting down the TSA and spending the money on all kinds of other things. For example, you would probably save thousands of people every year, if you took the TSA's budget and used that money to give a daily carrot to everybody in America.

Of course, the future of the KID (Karrot Issuance Daily) agency is not all shiny orange. The yearly number of carroticides might even exceed the number of US people killed by terrorists. But, even factoring in the increase of death by carrot, there still would be tremendous net positive benefit.

The study counted hands free use as well making it quite a worthless metric for stopping accidents.

On the contrary, that makes it the correct metric. Studies have shown that "hand-free" is as as dangerous as other cell phone use. It's still completely distracting you from paying attention to the road, and thus it's still highly dangerous.

OK, numbers are hard to pin down so I am being conservative by merely claiming millions.

There are well over a million auto fatalities annually across this planet. The number of mobile phone related deaths is somewhere between 1%-10% of these.

Probably tens of millions, but I don't have the proof of that so I am going with millions.

Probably could find some relevant data below, but IDK nor care as I don't text+drive, watch TV+drive, nap+drive, etc. I do actively monitor my surroundings(forward/blind-spots/behind) and anticipate others' actions(probable & improbable, alike), I do signal & look for conflicting signals and, most importantly, I do drive 10's of thousands of miles/year without incident since 1998. It ain 't rocket surgery...

http://www.nsc.org/learn/safet...

The odds of dying from multiple causes:
http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Image...

I am planning on buying my first gun this week. I already have items in my home that can be used to commit suicide, that could poison me, and I drive probably more than average (including in high risk situations like driving on track). I have a healthy fear of heights and I don't smoke so that helps me on two big ones. Though I do love bacon.

That being said, I don't think my gun ownership will protect me against the gun violence category since I plan on having it for target shooting and recreational purposes, not self defense.

My point being is that many things are likely to kill you or the ones you love. You have to decide for yourself what risks you are willing to accept.

Yup. This is long overdue, not all the hand-wringing we're doing over silly code red terrorist crap. After disease, the most likely ways an American will die are:

1 in 100 = suicide
1 in 109 = unintentional poisoning
1 in 112 = motor vehicle accident
1 in 144 = falls (mostly elderly)
1 in 358 = assault by firearm
...
1 in 164,968 = struck by lightning
1 in 598,009 = terrorist attack (though the latest attack probably dropped this significantly because it's so rare)

Those annoying commercials telling you not to text while driving are thousands of times more important than our response to terrorism.

I suspect that overall we are only going to get to the autonomous vehicle stage when they are better than the "average" human driver by a factor of ten or more, so the cost of having to re-examine "who pays?" issues are probably going to be equally reduced.

I've tended to use 'half' myself. We're at around 32k deaths/year from automobiles, down from nearly 55k back in '72.

If you prevent 16k deaths, it would save the country $7.6M in damages per death, $122B per year. Even if you consider that each death might cost the insurance companies* far less, maybe $500k between liability and life insurance payouts, that's $8B the insurance industry can 'save' if they can cut the accident rate. Disability insurance

Countering that is if the liability costs are low enough manufacturers might get into the business, baking the insurance cost into the price of the car.

*Remember that most insurance companies issue many forms of insurance, doing car, home, and life.

They say the jamming 'could and may have had disastrous consequences by precluding the use of cell phones to reach life-saving 9-1-1 services provided by police, ambulance, and fire departments.'"

When people yapping on their cell are a bigger threat than drunk drivers it is great to see them wasting our tax dollars going after a guy who was stopping them.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/20...

http://www.nsc.org/safety_road...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://www.caranddriver.com/fe...

I can add as many other citations as you'd like.

Your data on the mig is inaccurate. http://www.nsc.org/news_resour... There are some more accurate figures for you, coward.

It is not the first time (nor the last) that the car industry try to eliminate alternatives to their products.

Car accidents is one of the main causes of death in US, 1 in 108 (and maybe other causes in that report should be grouped in that category as are caused directly or indirectly by cars), while bicycles are 1 in 5000 (and a lot of them could be caused by cars). And those 2 are often ignored by the people that mainly fear being killed by a shark or terrorists that are 1 in several millons each.

Why would you want to win a War on Terror, or defeat terrorism? The goal is endless war, not peace and the inviting of hatred is intentional. You can point to the acts of the people that you've brutalized and use that as justification for even more brutalization. You defeat terrorism by making people not want to attack you, not by provoking them into attack.

Terrorize the People enough with fears of bad guys lurking around every corner and you can get them to give you unlimited money and power. It's unfortunate but the masses aren't critical thinkers, they're sheep. Death from an act of terrorism doesn't even come close to being something you should worry about, check out the odds of dying from the National Safety Council. You're at least twice as likely to be killed be fireworks than by terrorists.

Since firearms accidents are quite rare (you're more than five times more likely to die in a fire than a gun accident, with just 600 out of 128,200 unintentional injury deaths in 2009 being from firearms), and "smart gun" technologies mostly would interfere with the ability to quickly deploy guns for defensive purposes, the call for these technologies ranges from well-intentioned ignorance to a back-door attempt to drive up the price of guns and make self-defense tools unavailable to poor people.

Show me the massive increase in accidents and fatalities that have come along with the massive increase in cell phone usage. Then I'll believe there's a real correlation. The results of a controlled test designed to yield a certain result isn't useful data.

Here's the fatality list through 2009. It shows steady decreases in fatalities per mile driven.

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

Of course, that's 3 years old now, but still... there's been an increase in cell phone use through 2009, so if using a cell phone is as dangerous as drunk driving, I'd expect to see a big increase in the fatality rate, not a decrease.

And here's another flawed study (2010)... http://www.nsc.org/Pages/NSCestimates16millioncrashescausedbydriversusingcellphonesandtexting.aspx

They estimate that 25% of crashes involve the use of cell phones. Based on that, I would expect accident rates to increase (to a degree) along with cell phone usage. But they don't. Many states have banned cell phone use by drivers. In those states, shouldn't see a big decrease in accidents? Do we? I doubt it.

-S

Actually that number is wrong. The odds are much much higher.

The odds of dying in a terrorist attack on a plane in a given year are 1 in 25,000,000.
The odds of a Westerner being killed by a terrorist in a given year are 1 in 3,000,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html

The odds of your dying in a 1 hour flight in a given year are less than 1 in 1,000,000.
http://planecrashinfo.com/

The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html

The odds of dying in a car accident within one year 1 in 18,585.
The odds of simply being in a car accident within one year are 1 in 5,889.
The odds of dying by an assault within one year are 1 in 16,421.
http://www.nsc.org/

I think, if I am not mistaken, I have a better chance to win a state lottery than die in an terrorist attack on an airplane. I am so much more likely to die from an assault than a terrorist, it is an order of magnitude that is just plain silly. So as you can see the odds are pretty slim to die by a terrorist attack of any kind. I think I can risk it, and have far less security at airport with no groping or radiation. If I get a choice, I choose my Constitutional freedoms, over being safe. If a terrorist kills me so be it. At least I died with all my freedoms, rather than beaten down by my own government.

National Safety Council estimates at least 28% of traffic accidents are caused by cell phones.

Washington, DC – The National Safety Council announced today that it estimates at least 28% of all traffic crashes – or at least 1.6 million crashes each year – are caused by drivers using cell phones and texting. NSC estimates that 1.4 million crashes each year are caused by drivers using cell phones and a minimum of 200,000 additional crashes each year are caused by drivers who are texting. The announcement came on the one-year anniversary of NSC’s call for a ban on all cell phone use and texting while driving.

The Washingtpost story links to http://www.nsc.org/Pages/Home.aspx

I don't know, I think that is a large percentage of traffic accidents. That story was from 01/2010.

Not saying I agree with the proposed law, but your statement made me curious to see what the number of accidents due to cell phones really was.

National Safety Council estimates at least 28% of traffic accidents are caused by cell phones.

Washington, DC – The National Safety Council announced today that it estimates at least 28% of all traffic crashes – or at least 1.6 million crashes each year – are caused by drivers using cell phones and texting. NSC estimates that 1.4 million crashes each year are caused by drivers using cell phones and a minimum of 200,000 additional crashes each year are caused by drivers who are texting. The announcement came on the one-year anniversary of NSC’s call for a ban on all cell phone use and texting while driving.

The Washingtpost story links to http://www.nsc.org/Pages/Home.aspx

I don't know, I think that is a large percentage of traffic accidents. That story was from 01/2010.

Not saying I agree with the proposed law, but your statement made me curious to see what the number of accidents due to cell phones really was.

there is no a single good study that actually show how dangerous...

A report by the National Safety Council found cell phone use leads to about 1.6 million crashes a year. About 200,000 of those accidents are caused by texting while driving. Studies show teenagers are especially prone to text and drive.

Link is Here.

..help you with today?

Nope, that's excellent.

Now we can compare numbers. According to the this NCS article based on this 2009 National Safety Council estimate (pdf) we have 636,000 crashes, 330,000 injuries, 12,000 serious injuries, and 2,600 deaths by cell phone. For a total of about 1.4 million crashes. I selected this new link as it had grand totals like your 2008 data. If we just compare injuries and deaths we have...

• drunk vs cell phone
• 257,000 vs 342,000 injuries
• 11,800 vs 2,600 deaths

Your numbers look good: 1) Drunks win at killing people 4 to 1. 2) Cell phone users pull ahead with injuries.

In conclusion: It's much more likely that I will be injured rather than killed. I'm slightly more likely to be injured by a cell phone user than a drunk. But, in the less likely case that the driver tries to kill me, drunks do a much better job.

Others can decide if the additional 636,000 crashes without injury are significant because we do not know how many drunks get away.

With the numbers above people can really decide on which they think is worse. I'd rather neither were driving around.

..help you with today?

Nope, that's excellent.

Now we can compare numbers. According to the this NCS article based on this 2009 National Safety Council estimate (pdf) we have 636,000 crashes, 330,000 injuries, 12,000 serious injuries, and 2,600 deaths by cell phone. For a total of about 1.4 million crashes. I selected this new link as it had grand totals like your 2008 data. If we just compare injuries and deaths we have...

• drunk vs cell phone
• 257,000 vs 342,000 injuries
• 11,800 vs 2,600 deaths

Your numbers look good: 1) Drunks win at killing people 4 to 1. 2) Cell phone users pull ahead with injuries.

In conclusion: It's much more likely that I will be injured rather than killed. I'm slightly more likely to be injured by a cell phone user than a drunk. But, in the less likely case that the driver tries to kill me, drunks do a much better job.

Others can decide if the additional 636,000 crashes without injury are significant because we do not know how many drunks get away.

With the numbers above people can really decide on which they think is worse. I'd rather neither were driving around.

Your linked paper is a report by a bunch of non-lawyers asking working scientists whether they think their work is adversely affected by IP law, and you consider that useful why?

Because the claim was made that IP (particularly patents) hobbles traditional biotech research. The paper shows directly that scientists are not changing their research behavior because of patents. If research continues unabated and unaltered despite patents, then the claim that patents hobble traditional research is incorrect. Would you care to explain why that is incorrect? If it's because the potential for lawsuits still exists, then I'll explain why that's wrong in a moment.

Would you also quote a paper that claims the copyright threat is overblown, because the vast majority of music downloaders self-report that they aren't being sued?

If the paper's claim was that the threat of copyright to the individual music downloader is overblown, then yes, I would. Most music downloaders will never be sued, especially now that the RIAA has basically stopped filing new suits (there were a few that were already prepared when they announced they were stopping and those got filed afterward but it's pretty much stopped now). According to the EFF, there were 28,000 people threatened with legal action or sued and there are roughly 60 million file sharers in US. That's .05% or 1 in 2,000. You are more likely to die of injury in a year than to get threatened or sued by the RIAA. (odds of dying by injury in a year in the United States: 1 in 1,643, source)

But even so, music downloaders and biotech researchers cannot be compared so simply. For starters, copyright and patents are very different (e.g., no statutory damages for patent infringement). The nature of patent damages makes it such that it's not economically rational for patentees to sue non-commercial researchers in most cases. Thus, patentees are unlikely to start suing researchers, especially since the recent trend has been to weaken patents, not strengthen them (see, e.g., the eBay and KSR cases).

Furthermore, patent infringement by a biotech researcher is pretty obvious. If the researcher publishes that he or she used Chemical X in a study but the patentee never sold any Chemical X to the researcher, you can bet there was infringement. And researchers keep detailed logs of their experiments. So, again, if patentees aren't suing it's not because it wouldn't be easy to prove infringement.

There are also comparatively few biotech researchers. If one researcher gets sued it would have a much larger impact than the downloader suits. So again, if patentees wanted to shape researcher behavior through lawsuits they would've done it by now.

The real problem is that the IP laws exist in the first place: they are a Sword of Damocles upon researchers, whether they look up or not.

First, in all probability, no, they are not. We have decades of history to show that. Second, legally, no, they are not. Post-eBay it's unlikely that a patentee would be able to enjoin an academic or non-commercial researcher and the damages would be minimal in any case. The rational thing for researchers to do is to continue their research unabated, which is exactly what they're doing.

Remember, most of these researchers work for universities, which have money and patent lawyers. If there were any real risk from a patent suit, the university would tell the researchers to do something else.

Motor-vehicle accidents, ------- 45,316------- 6,584 -------85

Air and space transport accidents, -------655 -------455,516 -------5,862

The difference is enormous in the amount of safety.

Fall from out of or through building or structure, -------628 -------475,100 -------6,115

I mean chances of dying from falling out of a building is just a little less for lifetime odds, and we all know how much we trust buildings!

In June of 1998, a special review panel convened by the NIEHS reviewed EMF health studies. A majority of the panel found "limited evidence that residential exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields may increase the risk of childhood leukemia." A majority also found limited evidence that workplace exposure to EMFs may cause chronic lymphocytic leukemia in adults.

According to NIEHS, "the probability that EMF exposure is truly a health hazard is currently small. The weak epidemiological associations and lack of any laboratory support for these associations provide only marginal scientific support that exposure to this agent is causing any degree of harm." The NIEHS did conclude, however, in its 1999 Report to Congress, that extremely-low-frequency EMF exposure cannot be recognized as entirely safe because of weak scientific evidence that exposure may pose a leukemia hazard; the associations reported for childhood leukemia and adult chronic lymphocytic leukemia cannot be dismissed easily as random or negative findings.

The available research in no way justifies the ELF. Not that they care.

Except that voice calls aren't safe either. Your eyes may be on the road, but your brain is somewhere else. (See: NSC Factsheet. Several studies have shown that the distraction caused by a cell phone conversation can cause accidents in ways that in-car conversations do not.

Handling manure safely is not a trivial problem. Manure Pit Gas Hazards

Managing digesters can be a full-time job for someone who really knows what he is doing.

You need to work with tons of this - shit - to generate a significant amount of fuel. Biogas is one of those things which have never made sense as a backyard project.

It may however , decrease the chance of accidents happing with guns.

The chances of a gun accident are already very, very low. You are more likely to die in a drowning accident than in a gun accident.

In 2004, 649 people died from accidental shootings. 878 died from choking on food. 1,638 died from falls on stairs. 3,308 died from drowning. While one death from a firearms accident is one too many, it's clear that gun accidents are a small threat.

Some intellectually dishonest advocated of gun control like to conflate suicides by means of firearms, with firearm accidents. Don't be fooled.

It seems when many consider risk they don't consider the probability of something happening only the possibility.

Consider the National Safety Council's Odds of Dying page. According to them, one has a 1 in 73,085 chance of dying in a motorcycle accident while there's a 1 in 19,216 of dying in a motor vehicle accident as a car occupant.

However, motorcycles are perceived ( at least by people I know, obviously a small sample ) as more risky because "people die riding those". Obviously that happens, but not to the same extent as people dying in car accidents.

Since many people drive every day, that's a routine activity they don't seem to associate with risk; your average person doesn't seem to assign the probability of risk very high even though it's statistically more dangerous.

I'm using the common ordinary definition of species.

species: A reproductively isolated aggregate of interbreeding organisms

All the examples of speciation I have seen attempt to either use some other criteria or attempt to alter that definition by using predisposition or other modifiers.

Still not very shocking, by the numbers.

They need to mod you up some more, it's only a 4.

There have been fewer than 3,000 deaths from terrorism on American soil this entire century. Meanwhile, 40,000 Americans die on the highways every single year. I'm far more afraid of the blonde terrorist in the SUV than I am of the Muslim terrorist in a bomb jacket.

Far worse, though, are the corporate terrorists. Osama Bin Laden killed almost 3,000 people, big fucking deal. R.J. Reynolds kills half a million every year from cancer, and that red and white striped clown terrorist Ronald McDonald kills another half million with heart disease.

Bin Laden is a piker. He should not be looked at as any more than a minor nuisance. more people die from tripping over their own clumsy feet!

It's time to retire this bogeyman. 3,000 in 7 years vs 280,000? I say lets put some of that Homeland Security money into a few guardrails!

-mcgrew

I'm very concerned about my civil liberties, but I'm even more concerned that the the next time I take the 'plane, the bus, the subway - or I'm just sitting at my desk, or on holiday with my family - I might get wiped out by some terrorist.

These data demonstrate that the phone conversation itself resulted in significant slowing in the response to simulated traffic signals, as well as an increase in the likelihood of missing these signals. Moreover, the fact that hand-held and hands-free cell phones resulted in equivalent dual-task deficits indicates that the interference was not due to peripheral factors such as holding the phone while conversing. These findings also rule out interpretations that attribute the deficits associated with a cell phone conversation to simply attending to verbal material, because dual-task deficits were not observed in the book-on-tape control. Active engagement in the cell phone conversation appears to be necessary to produce the observed dual-task interference.

The principal findings for this experiment are that: (a) SPs that engaged in cell phone conversations missed twice as many simulated traffic signals as when they were not talking on the cell phone, (b) SPs took longer to react to those signals that they did detect, and (c) these deficits were equivalent for both hand-held and hands-free cell phone users.

In sum, we found that conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell phone led to significant decrements in simulated driving performance. We suggest that the cellular phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.

Our data suggest that legislative initiatives that restrict hand-held devices but permit hands-free devices are not likely to reduce interference from the phone conversation, because the interference is, in this case, due to central attentional processes.

Here is the source of the "1 in 5051" figure cited by the GP.
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm
The methodology is also explained on that page. (Note, the NSC has many other interesting statistics and reports on this and related topics.)

Basically, the number of airplane crash deaths in the US was divided by the entire population of the US in the year of the study (2003). The data was presented in two forms, annual odds of dying a particular way and lifetime odds of dying a particular way. This means that all of the following discussion is directly relevant only to someone living (and/or dying!) in the US.

The airplane crash numbers were 1 in 391,981 (annual odds) and 1 in 5051 (lifetime odds). This means that the "1 in 5051" figure is the odds of a given person that died having died in a plane crash.

The odds of a person who died in a given year having died in a plane crash are 1 in 391,981. These numbers are NOT directly translatable into an individual's odds of dying each time they get onto an airplane. For that, you would have to know how many flights over US territory there are in a given year and how many plane crashes occur in that same time (since the odds of dying are roughly equal to the odds of a plane crash).

For an exact calculation, you'd need to know how many people flew on those flights (the aggregate would be ok), and how many people died in crashes (again, the aggregate is ok). From that, you could determine the odds of dying on any given plane flight.

The FAA also has some interesting data. The target safety rate for the U.S. is 0.010 fatal accidents per 100,000 departures (appears to include all flights, commercial and private, even though the statistic is called the "Commercial Airline Fatal Accident Rate"), though the current rate in 2007 is 0.023 fatal accidents per 100,000 departures.

http://www.faa.gov/data_statistics/accident_incide nt/

See the "Airline Fatal Accident Rate" PDF on the linked page.

For the below data, FAA/NTSB reports were used. Much more data is available at these sites for anyone who wants to do more analysis. For example, the commercial data below is a summary of Part 121, Part 135, and On-demand Part 135. The accident rates were much higher for the "On-demand Part 135" which not what we typically fly as commercial passengers.

Also: http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/A_Stat.htm has annual summarized reports.

The data for 2003 is:

Commercial Air Carriers:
Background data in 2003 (rounded to nearest whole million/billion):
639 million passengers boarded commercial airplanes
8 billion miles were flown
11 million departures
23 million flight hours
Accidents:
Total: 130
Fatal: 21
Deaths: 66
Fatal accidents per departure: 1.9091x10^(-6) (1 in 523,810)
Fatal accidents per hour: 9.130x1-^(-7) (1 in 1,095,239)

General Aviation:
Total Accidents: 1739
Fatal Accidents: 352
Injuries:
Fatal: 632
Serious: 324
Minor: 523
Involved but Not Injured: 1697

To protect a few hundreds of innocents from McCarthy-like harassment, America shackled its intelligence services in the past, which appears to have contributed substantially to the deaths of several thousands (and billions of dollars worth of destruction) in 2001 alone.

"The principal findings for this experiment are that: (a) SPs that engaged in cell phone conversations missed twice as many simulated traffic signals as when they were not talking on the cell phone, (b) SPs took longer to react to those signals that they did detect, and (c) these deficits were equivalent for both hand-held and hands-free cell phone users." http://www.nsc.org/issues/idrive/inincell.htm

why not flood us with links to statistical studies proving your inferred point?

I'll start.

From the study:

The principal findings for this experiment are that: (a) SPs [study participants] that engaged in cell phone conversations missed twice as many simulated traffic signals as when they were not talking on the cell phone, (b) SPs took longer to react to those signals that they did detect, and (c) these deficits were equivalent for both hand-held and hands-free cell phone users.

I wonder what my odds are of being shot and killed in school.

75,780,000 enrolled in school (U.S. census)

290,850,005 U.S. population (U.S. National Safety Council)

75,780,000 / 290,850,005 = 0.26 portion of US population in school

77.6 years life expectancy (U.S. National Safety Council)

50 murdered by gunmen while in school per year (my generous guess)

290,850,005 / 50 = 5,817,000 one year odds for US individual

(290,850,005 / 50) / 0.26 = 22,373,077 one year odds for US student

(290,850,005 / 50) / 77.6 = 74,961 lifetime odds for US individual

((290,850,005 / 50) / 77.6) / 0.26 = 288,311 lifetime odds for US individual while student

See other odds of death due to injury here:

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

I am not great at stats and math, but it seems that a person's odds of being killed by lightning are much better than his odds of being shot and killed in school.