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Geek and Gadgets Set Cross-US Speed Record
Brikus writes "And you thought your car had gadgets. In this story from Wired magazine, we hear about Alex Roy and his quest to break the record time for a cross-USA road trip. One of the biggest roadblocks to breaking the record: highway patrol officers, about 31,000 along the way. So Roy decked out his E39 BMW M5 with a thermal camera, radar/laser detectors, GPS devices, police scanners, and other high-tech gadgets and toys."
Step 1: Speed across the United States while at the same time documenting your lawbreaking for all to see
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit???
Wow. If this guy doesn't get warrants out for his arrest because of this story I'll be really surprised.
:P
Congrats, Roy, I guess. Try not to drop the soap
(I woulda called the highway patrol on him too.)
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
How about: "Geek sets record by breaking the law and endangering innocent men, women, and children in selfish quest to do something pointless"
Seriously, this doesn't push any boundaries of technology or vehicle science. It tests two things: being able to stay awake, and being able to break laws and get away with it. Here they are tearing across the country in a car filled with distracting devices, sleep deprivation, fatigue, driving at unsafe speeds near vehicles filled with normal people trying to get to work or school.
Don't mistake haemorrhoids for testicles. He might be a dick, but he's definitely an asshole.
If you want to do something gutsy, go skyjumping, base jumping, downhill mountain-biking. Something that doesn't run the risk of injuring or killing innocent bystanders who want nothing to do with you.
What a fucking bastard.
To call him a geek is an insult to me and all other geeks i know of.
To endanger other people's lives like this is utterly despicable.
Obviously, he doesn't care if he kills someone along the way. If he did, he wouldn't do this.
Or what, is he a superhumanly safe driver is some non-imaginative way? Not fucking likely.
Put that asshole in jail(it would be OK to lose the key) right now, for showing that he has the obvious intent to go out try to kill people.
And why Slashdot sinks to the depths of publishing such a positively toned article about this psycho is far beyond me.
Baboons are cute.
If he really wants to break the record he should do it on a motorcycle.
3000 miles on a motorcycle would add a whole new dimension to the word "torture". I'm not sure there is a person alive that could sustain those speeds that long. Riding a bike is much more fatiguing and requires loads more concentration.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Speed limits are there for a reason, so stick to them! Traffic tickets should be depending on income/wealth instead of being fixed like they are now.
Karma to burn, so I bite the bullet.
You suggest that speed limits are there for a reason, then provide the reason: quick cash for the municipalities.
Some limits are ridiculous low in some cases: I have a 30 km/h sign right in front of my window - and my condo is in front of a freeway! Often they are just a trick to further tax car owners, without resorting to the politically unpopular word "tax".
Here (Italy) there's a huge scandal about similar behavior by the police enforcers, and one that is quickly making some heads roll.
At some specific, usually not dangerous crossroads, the traffic lights have been reprogrammed to have a very short "yellow" time - around two seconds. It has been documented in a broadcast inquire on TV, with actual videos and SMPTE'd times. With two seconds from green to red, it's materially impossible to slow down and stop at the crossroad, even sticking to the very low speed limit.
So you WILL cross the crossroad with a red. And of course, that crossroad has this new CCTV system to recognize plates and automatically issue tickets in case of crossing with red. There was an outburst of enraged citizens against this practice: in a two weeks period, they received in excess of 13'000 tickets, all at the same crossroad. In a town with around 50'000 people, not a major city either...
Speed limits and absurd, often intentional, road laws are demonstrably used to sanate local administrations' budgets and balances. Disguised as "think of the children" policies, they are just another way to transfer resources from citizens to public administrators.
While traffic violations do cover a number of items, you can apply non-traffic-specific laws as well. How about "reckless endangerment" or any variety of other laws that might still be within the limitations?
I'm not a huge fan of the "think about the children" type arguements, but would we be cheering this guy on if he'd hit a pedestrian, wrecked some property, or something else that may have occured had he not been lucky?
This guy's not a geek, he's just rich enough to afford some expensive toys, a fast car, and not enough common sense or respect for others.
Let's see: It's very spectacular, quite a bit of a deterrent, and it makes it clear that it is an actual punishment and not just an attempt at adding more money to the citys coffers.
Sounds like jealousy of the rich.
Well, in theory, the law should be the same for everyone ? So if you speed in your <$1000 rustbucket, it'll get crushed too.
You'd get a lot more benefit to society if the cars were auctioned.
Yeah, and you'd have all the sports car drivers whining how speed limits are only put there to transfer their money to the local government.
No, let's just crush the thing and avoid that discussion altogether.
There are those and there are those. Yes, those "speed limits" you describe exist, and they get more and more by the day. Most of the time you have some suspiciously well hidden or badly lit little sign , most of the time on top of a hill, just before it starts the dip, that tells you that instead of 70, you only may drive 30 here and, well, guess where your friendly and helpful law enforcement guys are sitting? Actually, these things make traffic less safe, not more, because, well, have you ever tried hitting the breaks on the top of a hill?
Neither do I understand an arbitrary speed limit of 55 mph which exists pretty much across the whole USA. Yes, it might have made sense in the 50s when cars could often go not much more than 55, and more often than not 55 was already a rather unsafe speed in said cars. We're now half a century further down the road and cars got heaps safer. At much higher speeds. Even my old and quite quirky Mazda 626 could easily handle the 130 (kph, around 80mph) speed limit without falling apart.
Still, there are speed limits that make sense. I wouldn't want to be a road worker trying to repair damages when right behind me cars zip by at 100 kph. Observing a speed limit of 70 would have saved me a car, right behind that limit was a rater narrow corner.
But one thing is true (and that last example illustrates it perfectly), when speed limits are imposed arbitrarily, as they are today more often than not, people start ignoring them. It's like with any laws, when you learn that a law makes no sense in 90% of the time, you start ignoring it in 100% of the time.
The roads would be much safer if speed limits existed only where they make sense. People would observe them because they would understand their need to exist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not necessarily. Some american drivers suck, and because of that american motorway speeds are incredibly low. Almost everywhere in Europe the maximum speed is around 80 mph, and everywhere you can safely drive at OVER 90mph, while in the US it's at 65 or 75mph. The problem with the american drivers is that they hardly ever use the mirrors. I've seen drivers going directly from the carpool lane to the exit quite a few times without ever bothering to check the damned mirrors. From my point of view, automatic gear-boxes combined with driving only on motorways, leads to bad drivers. I've also seen drivers with their feet on the dashboard. I can't possibly imagine how on earth is the driver supposed to brake and avoid a possible accident with his feet up.
They give an 18 year old a gun, they allow him to drive (which is potentially dangerous) at 16, but he can't have a beer until he's 21. Figure that out.
It seems pretty normal to me to learn about the effects of alcohol _BEFORE_ you can get a weapon or drive a car.
Getting back to the subject at hand. I think that the US should make the drivers license exam (the practical part) a lot harder. Driving on a mountain-side road with a lot of hairpin-turns in a manual gearbox car (possibly on snow or other bad conditions), teaches one about driving more than 1000 hours on a motorway. I also think that the guy has a very serious point by doing that.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
I am curious, as any time that I have done 120 plus MPH, my reaction time was affected by adrenaline
Or was it your perception of your reaction times that was affected? "Look at me, I'm going so fast, I'm so cool". Please.
On the highway, you are in one mode: Avoid everything.
Actually, this guy was probably in many modes. Look at GPS, look at radar detector, drink more coffee, try to stay awake. Oh, and maybe glance ahead every so often.
Assuming dry pavement
So it never rained on this whole trip? There were guaranteed to be no oil patches on the highway? No loose gravel? No glass that could cause a blowout? The highway is not a racetrack and is not maintained to the safety level of a racetrack.
That M5 likely would stop from 100 MPH in in under 200 feet
Awesome. So now he just has to make sure to stay 200ft behind any other vehicle at all times. Think he actually did that? Nah, me neither.
Speed doesn't kill. Bad decisions do.
People make bad decisions every day. Everyone does. When it comes to driving, speed invariably makes the results of those bad decisions much worse. He wants to throw his ass around a racetrack at high speed he's got my blessing, but stay the hell off the roads my kids are on.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
When it's putting other people at risk of death or serious injury so that you can enjoy youself. We're not talking about merely violating speed limits on an empty highway, which I've certainly been known to do myself; we're talking about weaving in and out of traffic inches from other cars, driving recklessly, hitting triple digits in downtown areas. These guys are a threat to the safety of other people, and should be locked up.
The Wikipedia article on Antisocial personality disorder quotes the DSM diagnositic critera. Their actions definitely meet two of the them:
Two others may be met:
For a diagnosis of APD, though, there needs to be "evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years", and of course we don't know their childhood. (But the ICD criterea are a little looser, with conduct disorder at a young age being suportive of a diagnosis but not necessary.) But regardless of whether a clinical diagnosis is appropriate, it's certainly accurate to refer to the behavior as "sociopathic".
It's no different than if I were to take my rifle and start shooting out of a window into a crowded street - even if I were aiming at inanimate targets, even if I were an expert marksman, putting others at risk so I can get my jollies is not tolerable behavior. You take your rifle to the range to shoot, you take your car to the track to drive fast.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The speeding laws are outdated and only serve to let the police reach their weekly quotas. It is the police who keep them outdated.
In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. This has shown to reduce accidents much more than speed-limiting laws, as tail-chasing is a very dangerous behavior, but simply speeding is not.
The next time when you drive slow enough but are tail-chasing the car in front of you ask yourself if you're not a reckless driver, just because the law says so.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Ahh, another day, another idiot who presumes that "doing 200Mph safely" has anything to do with your car.
First off, the M5 is electronically limited to 250kph, like most European vehicles that can go that fast.
Second, stopping distance is proportional to the square of speed. Your reaction time is not.
People who claim that driving at 125MPH is safe don't understand the problem. The problem is not whether or not you can control the car. The problem is what you do when something unexpected happens.
Considering that a pretty good fraction of our cars are manufactured in Korea, Japan, or Europe, I'm not sure what you mean by the "crappy suspension" that "we" put in "our cars". Wake up. Volvo, Jaguar, and Land Rover are owned by Ford. Until recently, Daimler owned Chrysler.
This expresses everything that's wrong with your attitude. You are driving on a public highway, putting everyone else at risk by the very nature of you being there. Good drivers cause crashes. Bad drivers cause crashes. You are not so skilled that you could not screw up. Even F1 drivers screw up.
This is the LAST place where you want to be testing the limits of your vehicle. And if you do screw up, it will be far, far worse if you are going 125MPH.
Note that this driver AVERAGED 90 MPH. Considering that he had to stop for gas and other necessities, he must have been going faster than 90 MPH for a fair portion of the trip.
I am so sick and fucking tired of these arguments. Somehow, it's always the OTHER drivers who are the problem. Somehow, YOU are "skilled" enough to drive excessively fast (note that over the limit doesn't necessarily mean excessive). Perhaps YOU have never made a mistake and caused an accident. That's not the point. Perhaps someone else will make the mistake. Perhaps you will slip up. IT HAPPENS FAR MORE OFTEN THAN YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADMIT.
We design and operate airplanes with significant safety margins, so that people don't die when mistakes or failures happen. The same logic should apply to motor vehicles.