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Speeding To Become Impossible In UK?
dmearns writes: "Picked this up from comp.risks. It seems the UK government is planning on requiring computer controlled speed limiters on cars within 5 years. The system uses GPS to figure out if the vehicle is in a speed limited zone. The original story is here.
I suppose it is inevitable that officials would think of something like this, but I never thought people would accept it!"
What if you're rushing someone to the hospital. This is exactly the kind of "good intention" government crap that ends up screwing up peoples lives (like taxes!).
Someone you trust is one of us.
I'm, as cucked as a newrt. I've had a few ntognightr5, nd wqriet \franekhy;y I think i SOHGULD N'T Drive.
U;n avnazed I caj do HGTMML on an eZ basis. I'm surpsied I know what a
ius for.
Andrew van der Stock
Obviusly it's extremely dangerous if it's going to prevent you from exceeding the limit to get out of trouble. Imaging you're in the UK passing on the opposite side of the road, when an oncomingn vehicle appears out of nowhere...
Never mind the obvious danger, this would also massively congest roads. Motorway driving speeds in the UK are 80-90mph, vs the official limit of 70. If cars are limited to 70mph, then it's the same as turning the water pressure down on a hose - you're not going to get as much water through...
Never happened.
I suspect that if you start putting speed controls on cars, people will start fixing up the old ones to avoid having the privacy intrusion. New car sales will falter, and the speed controls will come out. No large corporation wants to get a bad reputation with it's clientele, and I think the fear of being labelled as a 'big brother' type of corporation will keep automakers from actually implementing this...The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
How I wish the UK government would give me the option to use mass-transit, as there's not much fun in sitting in traffic jams. However the free market doesn't allow for customer convenience, only massive profits.
That wouldn't be a problem for me considering my car won't do above 35 on a good day anyway ...
What about places where you can't get a good fix on GPS satillites? I know with my eMap, if theres enough tree or building blockage I can't get any satillites. In downtown minneapolis I have no reception at all.. will the cars just stop totally?
I suppose once the system is in place there won't be any more patrollers on the road looking for speeders. So if you crack it you can speed and no one will looking for you. So for once I suppose I'll be on time :-)
if you need to speed for some reason? If you need to get to a hospital or evade another vehicle? This has potential to cause harm as well as give protection...
Replace the sensor with a sensor that have a non-linear response curve. That way lower speeds will be reported more true to the actual speed, much higher speeds will appear much less (say, 80 MPH appears to system as 60MPH).
Won't work if they embed it in the engine control computer and drive it off the same sesore that times the spark.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm not saying I like the idea of being tracked, but this does have a positive side if it is used properly (a big "if").
Several months ago I was driving 70 mph on the freeway and I was about to switch lanes. An instant before I did, some idiot can flying by me at what must have been 120 mph. It scared the piss out of me. Had I switch lanes a second earlier, I might not be here to write this. There *is* a reason for speed limits, and there *is* a reason to enforce them!
Consider also that the idiots who would be most inconvenienced by this tracking system are usually also the same idiots who cause cause those traffic jams that waste a half hour of your time every couple of weeks.
Actually, if they set the thing to trigger at about 10-15 mph over the actual speed limit I don't think I would mind it.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
While I admire your ingenuity, I must also point out that you're not the first to think of the problem along those lines.
In fact, the data in any given 4 km area is substantially more complex than a vector and a few arcs. So there are significant bandwidth issues.
There are also significant geography issues--because your vehicle would have to know which 4 km square to download next. (In fact, you wouldn't download 4 km squares--you'd download .2 or .25-degree squares. GIS generally doesn't do miles or kilometers.)
And once again--you'd have to absolutely, positively guarantee, regardless of wind, weather, or atmospheric disturbance, that the data transfer happened in time. Or you could be sending cars at 100 kmph hurtling into an interchange whose speed limit was just reduced to 40 kmph.
Politicians love control. But they get very nervous about the possibility of large numbers of voters getting killed.
That would be assuming that all Brits are lovable cockney chimney sweeps. Just like Americans all talk like Texans y'all. Dumb Americans.
Hi!
You're essentially advocating one giant, massive computer to track all these vehicles. And you're suggesting a 10-second latency between vehicle reports. Here's an academic exercise for you: there are more than 5 million registered vehicles in the New York City metropolitan area (specifically, the FCC-designated MSC). If a position report requires a minimum of 64 bytes (it more or less does), and each vehicle is reporting every 10 seconds, how much bandwidth does it take to handle all the traffic?
Lots.
Having one massive system to control vehicle traffic can work--but only if it is
Which is to say, this works when you're the Federal Aviation Administration tracking airplanes through the sky (there are only several thousand airliners worldwide). The problem is vastly more complicated when you have hundreds of millions of cars in North America--the bandwidth requirements, and the computing requirements, are overwhelming. And all you need is one vehicle in the middle of it all to suddenly decide to fry its GeoBigBrother chip, and lots of people die.
Yes--some transit systems monitor the positions of their buses. Here's how: the bus does have geodata onboard--but since it is only traveling within the Portland area, it doesn't need any more data than a few counties. That's substantially less than 37 CD-ROMs. The bus also includes a radio transmitter that is talking back and forth with a controller. The system tells the controller where the bus is.
But--that bus gets "lost" all the time, depending on how often it passes large buildings, goes under bridges, etc. If there's a tunnel on the route, forget about it. In a real sense, these systems are just like cell phones (and in some cases, they are cell phones): there are some places where you just can't get radio reception. (And there's the opposite problem, too--sometimes you get radio reception a hundred miles away.)
The system you see when you ride the bus is a reporting system. A system to govern a vehicle's speed--with obvious life-and-death implications--is a command and control system. Don't confuse the two--the first is relatively easy. The second is extremely hard--and the consequences of a failure are catastrophic.
> What happens if my wife or whomever is about to give birth?
Well gollllly Jimmy-Bob, I think you should get in your car and drive 120 mph, because God knows childbirth is a dangerous life threatening situation that will always end badly if not done in a modern high-tech hospital.
(How the f*ck did that make it to 5-Insightful?)
Local authorities in the US have no desire to stop speeding. Their game plan is to set speed limits 15-20 MPH below the normal speed of traffic, and randomly pick out people from whom to collect tribute, er, fines.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You know, I wouldn't mind having this system in my car if it acted as some kind of insurance against speeding fines. But the gubmint won't let such a cash cow go that easily. Reminds me of the Bertelsmann Tax.
In an emergency, I won't be able to drive fast. How can I get my spouse/child/parent to the hospital in time?!
There are white trucks with red flashing lights, a siren and trained personnel called ambulances that handle this sort of thing.
As anyone familiar with basic arithmetic will realize, the time it takes for an ambulance to cover distance 2X is going to be greater than the time for a car to cover distance X (X = distance between emergency and hospital) unless the car's speed is less than half the speed it is physically possible to drive (which will clearly not be the case in an emergency situation).
But what if I'm in a remote area?
There's almost always some sort of "official personnel" nearby
Er, is this some new definition of the word "remote" with which I have not been familiar?
The government will know where I'm going! They'll know exactly what I'm doing! This invades my privacy!
If you're so naive to believe that this is a "new" problem created by this device, go ahead.
The new problem is that a government bureaucrat can track someone by pushing a few buttons in his comfy office. This makes tracking for trivial and illegitimate causes much more likely than the old system, under which agents in the field had to go observe in person and risk getting caught. (Example: If G. Gordon Liddy had been able to listen in on Democratic Party HQ by simply flipping a switch in the White House basement, we probably wouldn't know to this day that he'd done it.)
The government will know where I'm going! They'll know exactly what I'm doing! They'll know I'm speeding / visiting a prostitute / buying drugs / running guns!
GOOD. These are ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES.
"The government will know I'm visiting somebody on the Enemies' List / buying anarchist literature / running antiwar protests!
(Please don't make yourself look more foolish than you already do by asserting that harassment of political dissidents Can't Happen Here[tm].)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
A US insurance companyis selling insurance
pricd to one's driving habits- distance, urban/rural, time-of-day, etc.
The metering device is GPS.
Seems like if you killed someone (with a police officer watching mind you), you SHOULD be in jail. Unless you can prove that officer is lying you're gonna have a hell of a hrad time convincing any jury you didn't do it.
and sent us into a guardrail at 80mph. [...] would not have happened had my friends been driving the speed limit.
So if you had impacted at 70mph (the motorway/dual carrageway limit in the UK), you would have been fine?
Hang on, you're in a car. By law it has a speedo, in all probability it has power steering. So you know the speed of rotation of the wheels from which you can get an approximate speed relative to the ground, and you can calculate the approximate heading of the vehicle. Not perfect but possible and probably good enough considering the likely short distances involved. I've heard of satnav systems using this method to survive in tunnels.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
All that monitoring is there for a different reason. CALTRANS discovered in the 1980s that more than half of freeway traffic delays are due to accidents or other traffic-obstructing incidents. So they put in place systems to detect problems very rapidly and get emergency vehicles to the scene quickly. This increases the capacity of the freeway system by about one lane, but it's much cheaper. The policy change was that the emergency response is designed to clear the freeway as quickly as possible; law enforcement is a secondary priority. So more effort goes into getting tow trucks and CALTRANS vehicles to the scene. This took some re-education of the cops. At first they weren't happy responding to stuff like this:
But now it's accepted, and today when something happens on a freeway, there will be a CHP car, a CALTRANS truck, and whatever else is necessary. (And, months later, in Small Claims Court, CALTRANS will be collecting for damaged landscaping, sprinkler pipe, guard rails, and such.)More recently, TV cameras have been installed along major urban freeways. They have pan, tilt, and zoom, but they don't move much. Mostly they're ignored until some other sensor (usually the speed-sensing loops) detects a traffic disruption. This, in fact, is the real function of CALTRANS speed sensing. Anything that disrupts traffic flow is very visible from the speed sensor map, which has become a part of California culture. In L.A., it's on a cable channel.
Second, the car doesn't have a position, it has a velocity vector . From one point of data no, you can't tell if the car's on I-78 or CR-513, but by checking where the car was 10 seconds ago you can take a pretty good guess. And by seeing where the car is in 10 more seconds, you can tell for sure.
OK fine, but at any one point in time the only information you have is the current information, and historical information. It's no problem determining where he is now and where he was 10 seconds ago, but how do you suggest we figure out where he's going to be 10 seconds from now?? Are we going to make drivers plot their route beforehand? This is starting to sound like that automated highways stuff all over again....
Just today when I pulled out of my parking lot I made a 90 degree turn on a patch of ice and the speedometer believed I was going 20 miles an hour when in fact I was doing about 1 or 2 miles an hour while my wheels spun a bit. If it was tracking my movement that way it would have thought I turned all the way around several times, straightening out at an entirely random direction.
That's an extreme case, but even if the slippage were small - a patch of oil or a wet spot - it would make the computer think you were pointed in a different direction than you actually were. In an old city like London, with it's many roads going off at odd angles (as opposed to younger cities where the streets are mostly orthogonal) this would be a big problem. The computer can't just round-off to the nearest cardinal direction. For all it knows, a 137-degree turn might be perfectly valid.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Why would I be issued a speeding ticket if I wasn't speeding?
'Cause you're a minority and you live in a town like Indianapolis where the cops are so fucking racist even their cars have white hoods?
'Cause the cop pulled you over 'cause he didn't like your "DARE to Keep Cops Off Donuts" bumper sticker, and since THAT isn't illegal, wrote you a ticket for speeding instead?
'Cause he's in a hurry to fill quota and KNOWS you can't prove you weren't speeding?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
If this were the only source of positioning information then I'd agree - hence my comment about approximate data.
This is used to provide a best guess when the GPS signal goes, for whatever reason. It's not going to be used over large distances with lots of junctions - long distances in tunnels are possible but how many tunnels are crawling with subterranean junctions? In that context, it's good enough IMO.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
It is ridiculous to tear down barriers to government abuse -- much less to give the government new powers to abuse -- simply because they sometimes get away with abuses already. It's like deciding that, since a teenager will sometimes sneak a drink anyway, you might as well give him the key to the liquor cabinet.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
My point was that it doesn't even have to be going a long distance to be terribly wrong. In my example, it would have been tracking in a completely random direction after only a single turn.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The article talked about speed zones, which to me seems to imply that it would mark certain areas as having maximum speeds. In my neighborhood there aren't any streets with speed limits above 35mph -- so it would be a 35mph zone. The highway is a ways away, and it would have to have a 55mph corridor. So you could speed on the overpasses, but is that such a big deal? And you could speed in the 15mph parking lot in the 35mph zone, but that's just the way it would have to be.
This is not a lot of information. It's just covering the map with variuos polygons and respective speed limits. It doesn't have to be highly reactive to speed limit changes, because it's only trying to say what the highest speed limit in the area might be. It doesn't have to have a high resolution, because it's just an approximation anyway.
Still may or may not be a good idea, but it doesn't seem that hard. At least technically.
Why not? As a U.S. citizen, that is, as a rights-free subject under a police state, I can imagine being arrested, convicted, and subjected to a decade in jail for a rape and murder that someone else committed. Also, I can imagine being assassinated on my own doorstep by a police department death squad, each of whom later being found "not guilty" of even so much as a misdemeanor.
If you trust the cops, or the courts, or the legislatures, anywhere in this loathsome country even any at all, then shame on you for a fool, you obviously don't read the newspaper carefully enough.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
"So now they have no recourse against the government at all
Except for the democratic process of elections,of course.
"
Without armed citizens, what threat can be held against the government if they decide to NOT obey an election?
I cannot think of even ONE country that has disarmed it's citizens that is still free. The UK since Comrade Blair took office has been turning the UK rapidly into a fascist police state.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
After they get these in place, they'll have a means whereas patrol cars can stop your car remotely in any instance.
Patrol cars can already stop your car in any instance. What the hell do you plan to do if you see a police siren behind you, floor it and hope they'll decide not to pursue?
Speed limits exist for a reason. I have never been in a wreck when I was driving, but as a passenger I have been ejected from a car and another time my friend tried to avoid an animal in the road, overcorrected and sent us into a guardrail at 80mph. I can speak first hand of the pain caused by wrecks that would not have happened had my friends been driving the speed limit.
My question to you is, why were you in the car with someone who was endangering your life? You have only yourself to blame.
The issue here is not whether going to fast is bad (we already know that), and not whether speed limits should be changed (that's a whole other argument), but the nasty implications of this.
The potential for a black market is obvious, and there may be people already investigating this. The privacy implications are also preposterous. This technology allows cops to get around a few things in the constitution, if they try hard enough. (Maybe not technically, but it'll effectively be guilty until proven innocent.)
Bah.
-----
Just wait till you start seeing the "ModChip.com" ads reading "4 wire mod chips for cars!!".
I wonder how long it will take someone to reverse-engineer the protocol and build a transmitter that can send out forged speed limits. Turning the speed limit down to 5MPH (8KM/H) on a major highway at the height of rush hour would be a great piece of 'hactivism' to show what a totally brain-dead scheme this is. [ Of course, it would be an even better hack if you could force people to speed up when they are driving 40 in a 55 zone :-) ] I'm sure there are some more creative hacks that could be done as well...
Of course, anyone who has more than a half-dozen brain cells capable of working in unison would disable the damn thing as soon as they drove it home from the dealership. The US Army loves to put speed governers in it's vehicles to keep gung-ho young soldiers from driving around like total lunatics. So of course the young gung-ho soldiers waste no time in taking them out as soon as the CO's back is turned.
It is a basic premise of computer security that you cannot secure a system you do not have physical control over. You put one of these things in a hacker's car, and they are going have it pulled apart and under the 'scope before the paint is dry.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Is it just me, or does the lucidity of /. posts have a direct corelation to the User# and it's proximity to the Holy Creator?
Maybe that's why I've never been modded up:)
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Sounds simple to me. What are you waiting for?
-Nev
Beyond that: I agree, this would probably be a bad idea if implemented stupidly. However, as was said very elegantly by another poster in response to the NASA brain control of a aircraft discussion, why does everyone always automatically assume that the people developing the systems mentioned here are completely incapable of thinking of all the problems that everyone here comes up with in 30 seconds. I would bet you any reasonable sum of money that the people behind this system have already thought about emergency passing, gradually handling speed limit changes between zones, weather overrides, and all of that. If they haven't, you can bet someone will before they get around to implementing it in large scale five or ten years from now. Please, recognize that slashdot readers do not have a monopoly on common sense. ;-)
Roads are fixed, so the speed limitation could be very easily done with a fixed short-range transmitter posted at the start of the restricted-speed zone. No need for a messy and unreliable road speed database that has to be carried with the car and would never be up to date. Short-range transmitters, OTOH, could be setup whenever convenient or as needed (like for work slow-zones).
Capping the speed of the car wouldn't be very wise; for example, in case of emergency and you need the speed (like if you're overtaking that big tanker while a floatful of bricks is carreening your way). A loud siren inside the car (like in Singapore) would be safer.
Finally, a better thing would be an event recorder that records the last 30 minutes or so of whatever the driver has been doing (including the speed limitation he's been going through) which would be remotely downloadable by the police, so it could ticket offenders as soon as they run accross them. And also the information would be quite valuable to investigate eventual accidents.
--
Don't enforce speed limits exactly, but limit how much you can break them by.
That doesn't seem too unreasonable to me if they choose a margin that gives some lee-way that would give the driver some power.
Of course, then if the driver were to continuously use that leeway they'd find themselves without any leeway left if they needed it in an emergency.......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Yes, I would much rather go to court. Several reasons. It costs them more money than it's worth. Most (not all -- 105 in a 65 is probably dangerous in most instances because it's usually an idiot driving :) speeding tickets are issued as a means to increase revenue to the city, county, or state.
It works because people just sigh, pay it, and get on with life. If you actually go to court, plead "not guilty," and insist on a trial, you drag the cop off the streets for a few hours (stopping him writing more speeding tickets), force the judge and prosecutors to realize you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, and best, force the cop to actually prove you were speeding. Doesn't matter if you were speeding or not; make them prove you were, and never let them make you prove you weren't. This costs them way more than the ticket is worth.
Yes, there's a risk that they'll still find you guilty, but it's not an offense that can put you in jail. Take the points and pay the fine, and know you've made it a real pain in their asses.
Remember that if you're found innocent, you don't pay a cent (neither court fees nor the original ticket). You've burned up a few hours, but you've also just legally told the "system" where it can shove it.
People take tickets far too lightly. It's always disturbed me. Why sign the "guilty" line on the ticket and take the automatic plea bargain? Doesn't anyone have a problem with a system that's designed, right down to the citations issued by it, to assume you're guilty?
You can kill somebody and get a better defense (and have a better chance of an "innocent" verdict) than for some traffic infractions. It's rediculous, and it needs to stop.
Read my stuff.
Do you realize how inaccurate radar guns are? How is the cop on the side of the road supposed to know that you in your subcompact 4 lanes over was the one doing 11mph over the speed limit and not that 18 wheeler going the other way? If speed kills, why are accident and death rates still dropping after the repeal of the 55mph national speed limit? (When the NHTSA estimated that it would cause 10s of thousands of more deaths) Speed tickets are simply about revenue enhancement - unfortunately, it's not the $75 speeding ticket that nails you, it's the $1000 in insurance premiums you'll pay as you work off your "violation." Frequently the only viewpoint on speeding ever covered by the media is the government line provided by the NHTSA. For the other side of things take a look at the NMA.
What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast.
Why? Presumably the system would be designed to give some sort of audiable warning allowing the driver to break on their own, and then if they dom't comply, slowly break the vehicle down to the speed limit. It just plain silly to claim that it would be designed to slam on the anchors as soon as you crossed into a zone with a different speed limit.
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well?
Why would they need them...?
Not in the UK it doesn't, it certainly effects the advisory speed on Motorways, but not the maximum limit imposed by law...appart, of course, for the M25 which has variable speed limits, mostly due to...
...traffic conditions. However these speed limits already update the speed cameras (something I haven't seen much of in the US, so maybe you guys don't have them?) wouldn't be much bother to have them update the black box via a local radio signal. Not a major design consideration really.
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another?
Well obviously you have to obey the signs, its no defence to say that your car was letting you go faster than the posted limit, or we'd all be able to speed any time we wanted. If the central database had a slower speed than the posted limit, well tough, you file a complaint.
How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
I'm a Brit, I couldn't even tell you what an HOV lane is, although I could take a decent guess from context. Whatever they are, we don't have them.
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
Unlikely, how can you know that it operating normally at the time of the incident?
Al.--
The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
If speed limits were enforced rigidly, people would finally get up the political will to set them where they actually want them to be set. Maybe then we can travel at reasonable speeds without breaking the law.
Putting a GPS receiver and limiter into each car seems like a pretty expensive and heavy-handed approach. I think it would be better to have automated traffic cameras for enforcement. In addition, to help drivers comply, we should come up with a system of local transmitters (cheap, small, solar-powered boxes) that send information about local speed limits (and other local traffic information) to cars to be used as the cars and drivers see fit.
This is an extremely unsafe thing to implement. Anything that overrides your control of your vehicle could potentially make you lose control. What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast. What security model will they use, to prevent malicious hacking (in this case, a virus could have tragic/fatal consequences).
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well? after all, weather affects speed limits. how will they correct for traffic conditions (sometimes, someone going the speed limit on a highway can actually cause a rush hour traffic jam). What about night vs. day limits? (they change in many places)
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another? How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
The thing is, there are cases when speeding outweighs the cost of not speeding. A good example is a dying person who is being driven to the hospital, or a pregnant woman about to give birth. In certain cases, you want to let people speed, because they have justifiable reasons for doing so. Putting a mandatory enforceable limit on how fast cars can go is bad.
Even if they think about doing this, a better idea would be to not restrict the car's speed, but use the tracking information to deliver speeding tickets without having traffic cops posted all over the place.
-Laxitive
Sometimes I wish people could drive cars near campus at all, it would sure make things easier for me. But once I get home during breaks, and the scooter goes into my closet, I definitely like using my car to get around, so it's kind of a tough decision!
I'd have to say we'd be better off with these things than without, though.
ben.
Ben Schumin :-)
snip
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Personally, I'm not so paranoid that I'll gladly allow this type of cellphone. I would much rather have my cellphone company be able to tell where I am for whatever inane reason than be lying in a ditch somewhere in the middle of nowhere while I freeze, bleed, or be eaten alive while drifting in and out of conscienceness.
Firstly, what is the cellphone company going to do if they can locate me. They're not going to give out that info to Some Dumb Joe (tm). Have you ever even tried to get somebody else's cellphone number from the cellphone company. Last time I tried (I even told them it was an absolute emergency) they told me there was nothing they could do.
Secondly, if you were so paranoid as to be bothered by the fact that somebody might hack the signal and locate you, couldn't either (a) turn the thing off / take the battery out, or (b) not carry/own a cell phone at all??
Also, why don't people say the same thing about Chevy's NorthStar. They can track you in you car. Obviously they're able to give you directions/ unlock your doors / etc. Plus, when you get in a wreck (actually, any time the airbags deploy) they call 911 for you. Which is actually a really nice feature when you think about it.
Who cares if your cellphone told you that the store you were standing in front of was having a blue light special on fat men's uderwear. I think it'd be great if it could also find a list of coupons that are availble at the grocery store that I'm standing in. "Oh hey look, it's buy-1-get-1-free on ketchup. Maybe I should run in and grab 2 bottles for that picknic this weekend."
I'm all for it. Hell, it could even observe my driving patterns and inform me of upcoming traffic conjestion/wrecks/etc and re-route me. This would be great on the way to work. Or, I could easily check how busy my favorite restuarant is. "Hrm.. cell phone estimates almost 2 hour wait... wanna go somewhere else?"
I'm all for automation that makes life easier.
What about an emergency situation where you have to punch it to avoid a collision? They happen...so tough shit?
After they get these in place, they'll have a means whereas patrol cars can stop your car remotely in any instance. Will bring a new meaning to "fascist state"
As I understand it a GPS unit works out where it is from signals it receives, not emits.
If all the mapping/speedlimit information is stored in the unit then the unit would have no reason to 'dial-out' and allow you to be tracked.
That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it isn't a requirement of using this technology (to the best of my knowledge).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Of course, in the USA the pigs would never go for a system that actually physically prohbited speeding, since they wouldn't want to give up the revenues from the tickets.
Now, a system that auto-fined anyone who was speeding is exactly the kind of thing that our home-grown jackbooted thugs would go for in a heartbeat.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
For those who don't remember, about 6 months ago the US government decided to make military-grade GPS available to civilian GPS systems. This made them much more accurate as to location, speed, etc. However they reserved the right to turn the system back down to pre-SA levels at any time, per area of the world, as National Security or government whim dictates.
Now, for all the posters who ask, what will happen if there's a building or a cloud? Will the engine cut out? I wonder about another risk; if the US decides to back off of Selective Availability, what happens to cars in motion that find themselves suddenly hundreds of meters from where they were just a moment ago, due to suddenly and purposefully inaccurate data from the birds?
Dumb computer: I'm going 500 kph! [ticket / shutdown]
Do you trust the government to notice the moment of SA shutdown and nullify the tickets? Or pay for a new car if your engine locks up?
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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
hate to tell ya, but drunks are just as deadly regardless of mandatory speed limits... Example--Highway driving--two cars head on at 55mph is not a happy sight to behold.
Well, not really. The faster you go, the more dangerous it is, especially if you're drunk. 55 mph is bad enough, but it's a lot better than 90.
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[snip]
I'm so glad that the (former) American Colonies got fed up with this a long time ago and did the sensible thing.
hmmm... yeah...
Can you say DMCA or UTICA?
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
While those in the UK generally value the illusion of safety over liberty (it is an exaggeration I know, but not that great of one.), we here in the United States have this little legal principal that cannot be avoided, which is detailed in the 6th ammendment:
Notice the part that says "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." You are well within your rights to dispute a ticket, especially if the only 'proof' they have is some machine readout.
No illusion of security is worth trading your freedoms.... and make no mistake, it is just an illusion. I refuse to give up my rights, no matter how much "safer" that might make society. Would I put my life on the line to preserve the rights we hold here in the United States? Absolutely. Contrary to what some like to think, most governments that have a great deal of power over their citizens eventually degenerate into tyranny for the simple reason that greedy humans are involved; that is a variable that can never be removed from the equation.
-
The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I think it would be appropriate to also link to the responses already generated on Risks:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.23.html#subj14
Lots of good comments involving previous such experiments and some of the implementation dangers by folks who generally know what they're talking about.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The system uses GPS to figure out if the vehicle is in a speed limited zone.
So make a low-power GPS transmitter and fool it into thinking you're on the Autobahn.
"Every new law is a new opportunity for graft."
- From Heinlein's "Red Planet"
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Bull. I'd rather drive a sports car than an unsporty car at or under any speed limit. Am I alone?
no accounting for taste, but I do not like crippleware in cars. I can see it: "Officer, I tried to speed up to get out of the way, but i couldn't!"
But to think of it, I would not mind a test on commercial vehicles first, like those big rig truckers. they can be dangerous!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Of course not. They're going to feed it to the government in real time. If you think that's unrealistic, look at the Digital Telephony Act and Carnivore. That could enable some interesting opportunities for an alert law-enforcement type (and I'm just scratching the surface):
- A crime is committed at a certain address. Let's interview the ten cell phone users who were nearest at the time. We'll ask, "What were you doing on 15th street last night?" and see if they can come up with an alibi that matches their GPS trail.
- Analysis of the GPS trails will yield some phone users who live in the suburbs but travel into the ghetto periodically. Obviously they're getting drugs. Let's pull them over as they're leaving the ghetto - they'll either be high or carrying drugs. Even a 10% success rate makes it very worthwhile.
- When criminals are caught, their GPS trails can be used as a reference. So if it turns out that serial killers go to the library on Fridays, drive out of town on weekends, and go to Chinese restaurants on Sundays, other phone users who share these traits could be pre-emptively monitored, arrested, or searched. At least they'd be prime suspects if another serial killer starts operating.
Please note that I haven't even touched on abuse of the capabilities by a malicious cop. I've just listed some legal, sensible steps which law enforcement would take with this technology. I also haven't brushed on the commercial possibilites.Surely the police will fight it. Just imagine what would happen to their income should they not be able to give out any more speeding tickets. The police won't stand for it, I tell you!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I am.
- First, you don't need to keep any GIS data in the car. The car sends its location to The System, and The System tells it how fast to go. The System is all that needs to be up-to-date. This also allows for tracking of all vehicles in real time: certainly a wet dream for many.
- Second, the car doesn't have a position, it has a velocity vector. From one point of data no, you can't tell if the car's on I-78 or CR-513, but by checking where the car was 10 seconds ago you can take a pretty good guess. And by seeing where the car is in 10 more seconds, you can tell for sure.
- Finally, this is already happening, and it works really well. In Portland, Oregon (my home) the location of each and every public bus is monitored (not sure exactly how). Each driver has a little LCD screen next to the steering wheel that displays the route time. It displays the bus's current position in 10-second increments: e.g. "40 seconds behind schedule."
There are reasons for this system not to work on a larger scale, but they're not the ones you cited (see sigquestion: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
2) As a result of #1, driving cars at the speed limit actually feels obviously a safe speed (no doubts about this), and in fact sedate, and, pokey, lazy, etc.
3)As a result, the world of mouth will get out, and people will avoid buying the cars if at all possible. The used car market will get a shot in the arm.
4)And what about those fine folks with jaguars, etc.? I can see the salesman explaining how it can do zero to 60 in under 7 seconds, but the driver will never get to go faster than that. This is certain to kill off the sports car market.
The end result is that it will kill of alot of fine british industries.
It looks like Britain is being used as a test case for a controlled society. It is a very delicate balance between exercising enough control to actually improve the conditions of life, and social engineering for the benefits of those seeking to skim the cream off the top. Someone always wants some extra cream.
and of course, there are those crazy anachists on that nasty internet. Too many free thinkers there, y'know.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It's not an engineer's job to determine if it's something that people want. Is it possible? Does this violate my own code of ethics? Those are the only concerns.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"Speed limiters?" Here in the States, we call them "governors" (that is, they govern how fast your vehicle can go, how fast alcohol can be poured from the bottle, etc.) The introduction of these devices into England would inevitably lead to Britons getting into each other's vehicles and greeting each other with inane phrases such as "How's your guv'nah, guv'nah?" "Ah, give us a kiss, guv'nah, and let's burn some petrol up to the guv'nah, and then Jack's a doughnut, we'll be there!"
:-(
This would make the British even less intelligible than they already are.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
What happens if my wife or whomever is about to give birth? Then what do I do? Relax and enjoy the scenery, I guess.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I swear, some of you people would install Linux on toasters if you could.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
where pretty much everyone (IMHO) is against something like this--how can they find engineers to design something like that? Is everyone so immoral that they will sell out the freedom of a country for a decent sum of cash?
I'd work on it in a flash. I far more value my freedom of life and limb over your "freedom" to endanger me because you want to hear your car go zoom zoom. And to think I've been sitting around pestering the city council to install speed cameras in our neighborhood (apparently soon to be approved, you'll be happy to hear) when I could have been attacking the problem at the source. Sounds good to me.
A free society does not mean that people should be free to flaunt laws that are to everyone's benefit. That's anarchy, not society. You're welcome to live in anarchy as far as I'm concerned, but do it somewhere else: I'm sure as hell not going to pay for the roads and infrastructure you'll need in order to drive around. For further information please consult helpful reference Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
---raju1kabir, pedestrian and cyclist
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
A smart person would just keep the damn thing installed, but disable it. If a cop pulls you over, tell him that the device is there, and show it to him. What's he going to do, a computerized diagnostic on your car?
I swear, the Brits are getting worse and worse at passing commonsense law. That tainted beef must be starting to kick in...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Good point. England's had a lot of sponge-brained legislation in the last few decades.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Are millions of cars really going to be sending their current positions to some massively distributed system (it could never be centralised, of course)? Sounds hugely impractical and very expensive to deploy.
Your Portland bus example is quite irrelevant here - the bus system only has to get the bus's approximate position and then calculate how many route miles are left, and thus get the time to arrival. It doesn't know or care which road the bus is on.
Pretty much, yeah.
You determine from the last fix, speed and direction and you know current position.
Who missed the bits about using black-boxes in cars; then insurance companies totalling the car; taking the black-box to determine fault of the accident. Will the police demand a interface to the car's black box and then write a ticket for when you sped last month.
Fight Spammers!
I actually heard a company pitch this idea a few months ago in Silicon Valley, they enthusiastically described that in future the government could use the system to track everyone's driving, and how it could be made compulsory. I gave him a piece of my mind with respect to the privacy implications of this.
--
For some odd reason the UK is taking the worst of US free-market capitalism (big limitations on labor unions, wild deregulation, etc.) and mixing it with the worst of socialism (big brother everywhere). That's another reason I wouldn't live there... this and the terrible food ;)
my question is: in a situation like this, where pretty much everyone (IMHO) is against something like this--how can they find engineers to design something like that? Is everyone so immoral that they will sell out the freedom of a country for a decent sum of cash?
/. I know); maybe someone who lost a family member to a speeding drunk driver might be eager to implement this.
Well, first of all, just about every technologically-oriented freedom of restriction around would be impossible without engineers creating it. It's a point that slashdotters seem not to want to bring up when they complain about censorware, audio file watermarking, and DVD encryption.
Secondly, I don't really see what the problem is. These are public roads, I don't see anything wrong with restricting speeds. What people seem to have a problem with is the fact that they can't break a law that they accepted before.
Finally, not every engineer has the same ideology (heresy to suggest they're not all anarcho-capitalists/libertarians on
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Because too many state and municipal governments depend of speeding tickets for revenue. In my state, Pennsylvania, the state police had some quarrel with the governor and in retaliation they refused to ticket motorists for minor speeding infractions.
What happened? In less than a week the govornor caved in because the state stood to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue.
If this were to be proposed in the US, everyone from the mayors of podunk towns to the govornors, senators, and representatives of every state would be outspoken opponents because the only way to make up for the lost money would be to raise taxes. Voters don't like that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The more we come closer to a centralized control, the more we have to fear about these falling into the hands of the evil and vile.
Now imagine if there arises a new Hitler type character, and this person wishes to take over the world. What does he do first? He'd shoot down those GPS satellites.
And that would stop UK. UK would grind to a halt. The whole infrastructure would crumble. And he could just walk into the country and take it over it would be that simple.
We should never centralize things such as this. I think this issue would a bigger issue than the big brother aspect of the whole thing.
Enjoy.
Trust the source!
If you ask me, I'd rather you didn't [speed].
If you let me speed, it'll take me less time to get away from you!
But seriously, it's still not exactly right to prevent someone from ever breaking the law. People have accepted the crime causes punishment concept. They do not like the involuntary prevention concept. They are very different.
The British people have a long history of politely bending over and taking it in the ass from their Government every time the Gov't wants to. Witness the RIP act, or the surveillance cameras in public places.
I'm so glad that the (former) American Colonies got fed up with this a long time ago and did the sensible thing.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
than giving birth. Say you've started overtaking someone on the highway, and a car appears from the front, and you realise you need to floor it to make it past the guy you're overtaking. If you can't slow down and pull back behind the person (which is often the case as the people behind you pull up closer) then you're fucked, bigtime.
Not with your post, which makes perfect sense, but with your subject line. I don't think its a "nice concept" at all, I think its a really stupid concept. As others have pointed out, there are way too many cases where one legitimately has to break the speed limit (e.g. common one, when overtaking, and you suddenly need more speed because a car is approaching you in the opposite lane)
Suddenly, you hit an ice patch, and your engine speed goes up a couple hundred RPM, while your speedometer needle jumps as your wheels spin without effect. The car's automatic speed monitoring system kicks in, hitting the breaks. The built in GTS system also notices that you are now heading towards the edge of a cliff - a very dangerous predicament - and tries to compensate by turning the wheels in the other direction. Unfortunately for you, that is also the opposite direction of the skid, and your car goes flying through the gaurd rail. It explodes in mid air, moments after you tuck and roll on the road's shoulder. Still laying on the road, you pull out your cell phone, and punch a number. You start to speak.
"Blast it Q, the car was sabotaged!"
"Oh, James, I appoligize. I forgot to tell you about the new features that the manufacturers required to be included. I'm an old school cronie, and I was unable to reverse engineer the protocol. Next time I'll be sure to alert you to such features."
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yet another example of this latest UK government trying to control _everything_, and what's worse, we just accept it. The British public is so used to be told what to do, and so used to not being listened to, that we are in a demoralized condition, and just go with the flow.
I did actually write to my MP about the RIP bill to complain (before it was passed). Some months later, I got a reply from the MP, which also included the reply he had received from Jack Straw (principle pusher of the RIP bill, this speeding bill, and someone who truly deserves a bullet in the head). In his reply, he cited the 'dangerous criminals' and 'terrorists' who as we all know, comprise 99% of the online populace. He also cleverly avoided answering ANY of the points I had made - and that was that. Waste of time.
I'm pretty pissed off because I actually voted for this government, since the Conservative party had at the time sent the country to hell.
What a STUPID STUPID mistake.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Hi!
My firm is developing a web-based vehicle locator system which uses GPS receivers mounted in a vehicle, coupled with a GIS database. I can tell you that while this sounds technically feasible, it won't work.
A system like this requires two parts: a GPS-based locator; and a GIS (Geographic Information System). The GPS locator is relatively easy--there are commercial GPS chipsets that (depending on technology) can identify your position to +/- 3 meters. The latitute/longitude values can be mapped against a database of road segments--and that's where the problem begins.
With what speed limit data?
Even computer professionals tend to leap to unbelievable conclusions about the ability of computers. This is an excellent case: GIS data is stored in a massive database (the MapQuest.com database ships on 37 CD-ROMs). Look at any digital map--it is made up of bazillions of very short line segments. Each and every one of those segments has to be categorized by the type of road, the street numbers of buildings on the road, the lat/lon where the segment starts, the lat/lon where it ends, and lots more. But there is some surprising information that is not included in that data: weight restrictions, load restrictions (such as haz mats), and speed limits. Adding that information would be a big job--and an expensive job.
Expensive? We're talking about the government here....
Okay--so there has never been a government initiative yet that was dropped for being too expensive. That's not the only problem. Getting 37 CD-ROMs worth of data into storage on your vehicle may be a worthy challenge, but let's assume that the bright lights in government can handle that one too. (Stop snickering.) The big problem here is that geographic information changes--all the time. That new shopping center you drive past on your way to work? You may have noticed the new traffic signal--but did you notice that the shopping center driveway has a street name? Did you notice that the speed limit on the boulevard past the shopping center changed? Did you notice the housing development behind the shopping center, with a dozen new streets?
Anybody working with street-level GIS data gets a quarterly database update. (Which means we're all re-loading 37 CDs every quarter.) Streets get dug up and moved; streets get extended; streets get eliminated; streets get widened; bridges get closed. A quarter's update might include changes to millions of street segments--it is by no means trivial. And typically there is a 3 to 6 month lag between the time a street is changed or added and the time it appears in the database. In order for this system to work, every single car would have to be updated to the current speed limits--and they'd all have to be updated more or less simultaneously. Consider the spring construction schedule on your favorite interstate highway--what happens when construction starts? They'll drop the speed limit to 25 mph, and make all the computers slow all the vehicles down. What happens on the day the project ends--and only 96% of the cars have had their computers updated to show the speed limit on that road segment to be 75 mph again? Answer: 4% of your drivers die. Updating all that data to every single car--simultaneously poses a massive challenge.
And that's not all. With a GPS chipset that supports WAAG (fixed-position, ground-based GPS transmitters) we can determine your position to +/- 3 meters--but the road data frequently isn't that accurate. In the U.S., for instance, all but one commercial GIS data provider uses street data based on the U.S. Commerce Department TIGR data files. Different providers will tweak the data--fixing problems, even comparing the TIGR data to satellite photography (the difference in price between different vendors is generally due to the detail quality of their maps). But even with the best maps you can buy, vehicles sometimes still seem to appear well off the actual road. Not all the time, not most of the time, but often enough that this system won't work. Consider what happens when the onboard computer on a vehicle on I-78 in New Jersey (speed limit 65) decides that it is really on the adjacent service road (speed limit 25, just 15 meters south) and slows down....
As it happens, this level of imprecision drives me nuts. The client is continually having to remind me that GPS and GIS are about displaying information, and letting a human brain do the pattern analysis to determine what it sees. For example: suppose we have a position report that shows a vehicle at 40.638 North/74.8974 West. Is the vehicle on I-78 (speed limit 65 mph), County Route 513 (speed limit 40 mph), or Old Highway 22 (speed limit 25)? The answer is--could be any of the three. (The lat/lon--and it's real data--is an overpass.) You and I can easily answer that question based on our knowledge of other data points, and perhaps knowledge of the specific vehicle we're tracking. (We can see four other data points showing the vehicle westbound on I-78, and we know the vehicle is being driven by a Pennsylvania resident, and we know that the data points were mapped during the westbound rush hour: we can easily deduce that the vehicle is probably on I-78. But all we can do is deduce that--and all we can deduce is that the vehicle is probably on I-78. The driver may well be on the off-ramp, heading for a nearby McDonald's. We have to accept that level of imprecision, because that level of fuzziness is the best we can do.
There is an enthusiasm for technology today that sometimes can let people get carried away. This is one of those times. The developers will get a grant from the government to pursue the idea. And maybe they'll do pilot studies and tests and generate a lot of good PR. And hopefully they won't kill anybody before they realize the limits of this technology, and give it up.
hate to tell ya, but drunks are just as deadly regardless of mandatory speed limits... Example--Highway driving--two cars head on at 55mph is not a happy sight to behold.
Also, what if you need to get somewhere in a hurry? You are trying to tell me that you have never been in a hurry your entire life?
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
I agree with John Murdoch's excellent post (why is his post only +3? He offered much more authoritative information than the rest of us). It sounds like this is a large burden on an imprecise system, and that GPS is so lacking in contextual information as to be dangerous. By that I mean, if it can only determine your latitude and longitude, but cannot determine your "z-order" as it may be (whether you're on the overpass or underpass), then it cannot correctly set your speed.
However. One of the systems in place in San Francisco (and it has problems, I'm not offering a perfect solution here, just a working one) is a scanning device for people who use toll bridges. As you pass the toll booth, it scans your car, sees the account id plate you've attached, and debits your account. The solution for speed limiting is to simply reverse that system: put the scanners on the cars, and attach the "plates" to the speed limit signs that already exist.
This does a number of things. First, it distributes the load -- now we have a scalable system that can be put in place community by community. Second, it preserves context -- now someone on an overpass will scan the sign that is also on that overpass. It will not be able to scan the signs on the streets underneath, and will thus enjoy much less ambiguous data.
You may wonder about the risks. Well, since the system is already working in a few places (albeit in reverse), I think the system has more promise. However, it is open to manipulation -- signs could be vandalized, etc. And you would probably want to post more signs, so that redudant signals ensure "uptime" for the speed limiting device. And you would want to revert to no limit in the absence of data. But this may be more practical, and I haven't patented the idea if anyone wants to steal it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
There are several dangers associated with this concept
A) The devices themselves could be easily disabled, and not in an obvious fashion
B) These devices could limit speed in vehicles trying to escape from situations with non speed-limited vehicles (such as carjacking, pursuits, etc)
C) GPS Equipment is not without imperfections, what about the possibility of a wildly varying location when on a high speed road causing your vehicle's engine to cut out, leading to rear impacts. I wouldn't trust my Magellan GPS to be perfectly accurate, though the EPEs are better without Selective Availability, there are instances when it is still wildly incorrect.
D) This is the first enabling step for governments to install 2 way communications, in order to keep tabs on the locations of citizens. I would postulate that in the near future, the British Bureaucrats will say that their passive system is inadequate and that it needs central monitoring.
Keep in mind, though this is probably caused by well intentioned hyper-liberals trying to protect the masses, these types of measures are simply another example of why starting a business in Europe is so expensive...excessive regulation
--Do you fear the sign that reads "Please Check Nasal Septums at the Door?"
Your house is being robbed. You sneak out the door, jump in your car and drive away -- but the robbers spot you and give chase. You're limited to 25 mph, caught and murdered. Your family sues the city and that's the end of the GPS speed limiter.
(Hopefully someone can come up with a better scenario... perhaps you need to stomp on accelerator to avoid an accident...)
Nah. The system will notice if you're pushing on the accelerator when you're at the max allowed speed. It'll notify law enforcement, who will fine you for attempted speeding. Best of both worlds.
My first thought was, wow not very complicated with the upcoming UTMS mobile standart to send back where you drive to some kind of central DB, that gathers nice data where/when you drove.
I know that car rentals like Sixt use such systems in germany, if you rent an expensive (ie. Mercedes S 600) car, you are not allowed to drive to some countries in eastern europe with, if you try the engine will just stop working if you get to close to the boarder, cause GPS is build in...
Driving on an highway (Autobahn) with not much traffic, at speeds up to 250 Km/h is no problem
and AFAIK highways in germany were you are allowed to drive with this speed, or even more as fast as you can, is secure. Statistics show no evidence that there are more accidents due to having no speed limit.
Of course this is asuming you are not driving one of those cheap crap US cars.
From my personal driving expirience (~10 times around this planet) this stop and go or creeping around 90 - 120 Km/h, which is normal were I live on duty highways, is much more dangerous.
Michael
I'm getting mightily pissed off with these kinds of scare-stories.
I know this may come as a shock to a lot of US readers, but many countries OUTSIDE THE USA are ALSO DEMOCRACIES. This includes the UK.
There is simply no fucking way any political party wishing to stay or get in to government would be able to sustain this kind of policy.
Not to mention that the UK's second house, the House of Lords (now made up of life-service-award politicans of previous democratically elected governments- the old hereditary system went out last year), would never allow such bollocks laws through.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
First off, the police state types have this inconvienient problem of our written Constitution and bill of rights (which they do not have in the UK).
But imagine the outrage... While the masses may be ignorant enough of the technical details of the DMCA not to get up in arms over it (at least until it becomes impossible to tape stuff), THIS would hit every Joe 6-pack. EVERYONE speeds. Why? Because most highway speed limits are unreasonably low for the conditions and design of the road.
Also, I don't think the law enforcement types would like this either. One reason why speed limits are lower than they should be is that speeding tickets are an excellent form of tax revenue. This would eliminate the need for speed traps, and thus, the cops might actually have to go after REAL criminals.
But then again, this sort of thing does fit right in with a "1984" society, which we seem to be advancing towards at an alarming rate.
Only a completely mis-educated, ignorant citizenry would allow police THIS kind of control over them. Why aren't they burning things in the streets of London over this proposal, AND the odius "RIP" law (that allows any cop to demand your encryption keys at will, and mandates jail time if you refuse or reveal to anyone that they DID get your keys)?
Oh yes. I forgot. They disarmed UK citizens. So now they have no recourse against the government at all. Notice that they seem to be taking advantage of this?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Think of it this way, say a local map section was 4 square km. Your trasmitter would then transmit over a 16 square km area (numbers pulled out of my head.) They would simply use different frequencies to allow for overlap. Only 20 or so different frequencies could cover however large an area they wanted. Because the car must travel 2km before it needs the map - they wouldn't even require a high bandwith solution. Hell, each channel probably wouldn't need more then what an FM radio station gets. --- Just think, each road can be represented by a vector (and a few arcs). A 4 square km section would have under 100 roads. So you're basically sending 100 vectors with some speed info. The bandwith of one FM radio station would be overkill.
I seriously doubt there would be any two-way communications. The "map + speedlimit" data could be broadcast just like they do with the GPS data. A simple little on-board computer could do the work. This would also result in a much more reliable system - much like how radio is today.
This most definately can be done. But then I'm sure it will also be easy to disable if you have some electronics knowledge.. ;)
Willy
> "I suppose it is inevitable that officials would think of something like this, but I never
> thought people would accept it!"
This is the kind of attitude tht really pisses me off. "Oh no! Speeding is my Gog-given right!!! You can't take it away!"
Someone mentioned the need to speed in some emergencies. I agree. There are definitely times that extra speed is in order. I think cars should also have a device that will let you disable the governer, and will request a police escort for you. That way you could still get somewhere more quickly and you would hopefully be a little safer while en route. And if you were just speeding because you didn't want to bothered by a speed limit, then that cop would know when you reached you destination and there was no emergency. Then you should be given a fucking huge ticket. One that would actually teach you a lesson.
All this deferred adjudication and taking defensive driving over and over is stupid. I releases people from their responsibilities. Cars can kill quite easily. Careless, irresponsible mother-fuckers should not be allowed to drive.
The way things are now, there might as well be driver's license vending machines with cameras inside. You just stick in a $20 and out pops a license. Anyone who feels my opinions are too strong, go for a drive in Houston or Austin one day.
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
On a related note, there is a way to recapture at least some peace of mind (for us in the US, at least). I discovered Speetrap.com quite a while ago. It's a wonderful site. Excellent info on what kinds of speed traps to look for, what patrol cars look like, and all kinds of stuff (organized by state). Check it out before your next road-trip!
Steven N. Severinghaus
With this example I predict the US would never go for it like this; we'd rather let people break the law but catch them doing it (like cameras at traffic lights). But GPS in a car could report when someone was speeding, running a red light, even driving in a break-down or HOV lane!
Oh well, people will accept it because they think it doesn't affect them, only the poeple that break the law (little do they realize THEY break the law)
# debian/rules
I will admit that speeding can be dangerous, but I'll also say that it can be safe. If you're in control of your vehicle you are a safe driver. If you're not in control of your vehicle you are unsafe, regardless of the speed. There are situations where driving below the speed limit is the right thing to do: icy roads, low visibility, heavy traffic. There are many times where driving above the speed limit is perfectly safe as well. It's all about knowing the limitations of your vehicle, the limitations of the people around you and your own limitations.
Sometimes the best way out of an otherwise dangerous situation is to speed. I've been in a situation a few times where a tractor trailer has decided they really really want to share my lane and moved in. If you're near the tail end of the trailer when this happens the smart thing to do is slow down. If you're near the front of the rig slowing down would be suicidal. The proper thing to do is step on the gas and get out of the way. The wrong, and quite possibly fatal, thing to do is to be in that lane when the truck completes its move.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Granted, the computing power to do this would be nuts, and acceptance would be a pain, but it would be possible to construct a system that allows people to determine where they want to go and has the car drive them there. If everyone is using the same system, speed limits become irrelevant, because cars could be driven at whatever speed is most efficient for the route, depending on traffic, etc.
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-- Geof F. Morris
(Indeed, if I were World President for Road Safety, not only would I get rid of driver-side seatbelts, but I'd probably replace the driver-side airbag with a big spike instead.)
Of course, where the vulnerability increases the (all other things being equal) risk of accidents, like increasing speed limits, I can't be in favour of them, so I suspect you're right on the speed reduction saving more lives than a speed increase.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I love that movie... life would be so much more interesting if we were all mel brooks. Me too, would be more interesting if the movie had been directed by Mel Brooks too. You could have forgot about that lack-of-oil sub-plot and gone for cars powered by baked beans eating cowboys. That'd be cool.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
99 out of every 100 people injured in the U.S. transportation system are injured in motor vehicle crashes: approximately 5-6 million every year. Despite this fact, highway safety accounts for only one percent of the budget of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Motor vehicle crashes cost society more than $150 billion every year in medical, rehabilitation and long-term care costs, lost productivity, lost tax revenue, property damage and police, judicial and social service costs. The health care portion is approximately $14 billion (of which Medicare and Medicaid pay $3.7 billion or almost 30 percent).
Motor vehicle crashes remain a major public health problem. They are the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to 34 and the leading cause of injury for all age groups. The numbers are so mind numbing that fatal accidents rarely get news coverage unless it involves more than 5 people yet it is news when an aircraft just skids off a runway and no one is hurt.
Why should we have cars that can go 200mph/320 kph when the maximum speed limit is 70/120?
Why are there places where the wearing of seatbelts is not mandatory?
Why do we confiscate a hunters weapon and take their truck for poaching a deer yet if they drive drunk and hurt someone they may just get off with a fine and a temporary suspension?
If you say you hate someone you can get 7 years in jail for the hate crime yet if you drive over them and kill them when drunk you might get as much as 2 years.
I say that we have to stop the highway slaughter and this proposal to limit speed is a good start. Something also has to be done about drinking and driving. In 1994 alcohol-related deaths were 16,900 or 42 percent of total traffic fatalities. Why not use technology to not allow drunk drivers to drive? Penalties don't work.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I'm a Brit, I couldn't even tell you what an HOV lane is, although I could take a decent guess from context. Whatever they are, we don't have them.
High-Occupancy Vehicle - buses, carpools (2+ people in one car) etc. I believe they were talking about adding one to the M4, from Heathrow into the city at one point. At least one northern city has some (I think it was Leeds).
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
This is exactly why buses, coaches and trucks are banned from the outside lanes of motorways in the UK.
These vehicles are fitted with limiters that kick in at 90kph (56mph). What happens is that (this nearly happened to a friend of mine, in a bus they were driving) the bus/truck/whatever pulls out to overtake a slower vehicle, accelerates to 56 then goes no faster. Then a car behind them, still accelerating, runs up the back of them.
Your point is interesting. And, in fact, it can be implemented immediately, without GPS chips or GIS systems. It has been technically feasible, on some specific roads, for twenty years or more. I'm talking, of course, about toll tickets.
When you enter a toll highway that uses a ticket system (such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike) you get a mag-striped ticket that records the date and time you entered the turnpike, the weight of your vehicle, and where you entered. When you exit the turnpike the toll collector inserts your ticket into a mag stripe reader that checks where you entered, what your vehicle currently weighs (so truckers can't swap tickets to beat tolls), and how long you've been on the turnpike. The system can, with ease, determine how fast you have traveled between points A and B.
The toll highways have had the ability to do that for decades. With trasponder-based systems (like the EZ-Pass system in use from New York to Virginia) it can be even simpler--when a vehicle enters a highway its position is noted, along with the time, by a master server. Any device along the highway could send in a report of a specific vehicle at a specific location at a specific time--the server can do the math and determine if the vehicle has been speeding.
So why haven't the cops been all over this technology?
Because of an interesting quirk in the law. To paraphrase the National Rifle Association, cars don't break speed limit laws, people break speed limit laws. All that the computer, the transponders, or the toll tickets can prove is that the vehicle traveled at faster than the speed limit--they can't tell who was driving. You can't charge the car with speeding--you have to charge the driver.
There may yet come a day when we can do that. Several manufacturers now provide "smart keys" that identify the driver when inserted into the car's ignition. (This is a really cool feature--insert your keys, and the power seats, mirrors, etc. all move to your settings.) Replace the vehicle license tag with a transponder and you can tell who is driving the car. (The cops could argue, for instance, that the unique identification characteristics of the key constitute a "signature" under the Digital Signature Act.)
That, frankly, is substantially more feasible to implement that a GIS-enabled Big Brother system. Several municipalities across America are presently installing photographic systems to catch people running red lights or speeding--they take your photograph through the windshield, and get your license plate simultaneously from behind. With that, and some legislation, they can charge you more or less by remote control. That can work--and doesn't require anything so mission-critical as on-vehicle speed governors driven by a colossal GIS system.
(using Australian speed limits here by the way)
What if another car is going at 55kph and I want to overtake, I reach 60 but am now stuck in the wrong lane very slowly overtaking.
The thing was I mis-judged that I could overtake the car easy enough, and I judged it so I would do it intime before the oncomming traffic hit me.
For crying out loud just make it beep loudly when you speed.
It's turtles all the way down.
oh, okay. that explains why every single airplane ever manufactured has been CRASHED THE FIRST TIME OUT BY ONE OF US DUMB SLOW-REFLEX HUMANS. i'd almost forgotten that Almighty Jehovah put a 55mile/hour speed limit on synaptic activity.
Alright, how about this, genius. Fly the damn plane within 10 feet of several other planes. Why the hell do you think it makes the freaking news when one plane comes within a hundred yards of another? What is so difficult to understand about the fact that when the faster something goes the less time you have to react in controlling it?
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Few people oppose speed limits. Sure, you get the usual Slashdot rednecks who think that the damned fed'rule gubmint shouldn't be interfering in their god-given right to drive like a maniac. But, for the most part, most of us seem them as a way of ensuring we have a speed we can drive at safely on an unknown road, without getting slammed into from behind by every nutter in an pickup, while simultaneously slamming into the back of the OAP who wants to drive at 20 in the fast lane. It's a pretty reasonable restriction to protect safety. It doesn't prevent anyone from going anywhere, just reduces the number of accidents doing so. We have traffic lights and laws about yielding and other little notices to help out too.
This proposal, while in the form given on Slashdot, potentially having some negative safety aspects to counter the positive ones, is merely a way of enforcing that law. It's not a way that means people suffer unwarrented police intrusion - indeed, it reduces most peoples chances of being stopped by police. Privacy remains protected. Liberty, the right of free travel, remains the same.
But most of the postings here seem to be suggesting that the British proposal is fascist. Now let's read Enigma's article I'm replying to:
Let's be clear here. That's not Britain he's describing. That's the US. It's definitely true in Florida, local newspapers, such as the Port St Lucie News, have been running features on this for years. Individuals found having a large quantity of cash about their person during routine stops have had the money confiscated and not had it returned without legal fights, even when the individuals concerned were not, in the end, convicted of anything. Courts have routinely upheld the right of cops to do this.Just occasionally, the legislature here goes above what even the most extreme court would regard as constitutional. A few years ago, a law was passed allowing police to stop vehicles that were suspiciously obeying the speed limit. Concerned that drugs trafficers were taking goods up and down I95 from Fort Pierce to and from Miami, and to avoid being stopped, were using their cruise controls to force travel at exactly 69MpH in the 70 zones so police would have no pretext with which to stop them, the Florida legislature passed a law, subsequently struck down as unconstitutional, allowing police to stop vehicles under those circumstances.
So why is it that in this thread, Britain, wanting to use the latest in technology to enforce a law that most people agree with, that is no burden on liberty, and those technology is no burden on liberty, being portrayed as a fascist superstate, and the good ol' freedom loving US of A as the place to seek refuge?
At least come up with a better topic to discuss people. That anti-encryption law would work for starters.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.