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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."
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.
Alex Roy is essentially the man behind Team Polizei: http://www.teampolizei.com/ Does Gumball rallies and such. This sort of thing isn't new to him. And no matter what, his M5 kicks some serious ass.
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.
The article forgot to mention that he needed to install blue tail lights so they appeared red to those behind him after Doppler shift.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Commence acceleration.
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
32h07m divided by 31,000 highway cops means driving past one patrol officer on average every 3.7 seconds. How can the gadgets help under such circumstances? Go-go gadget donut-thrower!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
He waited for the statute of limitations to expire on all of the traffic violations before having the story published, so he's no longer in risk of being prosecuted for them.
#include ".signature"
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.
These are also the same group people that killed an innocent couple during last years gumball. How many will they kill this year?
http://jalopnik.com/cars/gumball-3000/gumballers-nick-morley-and-matthew-mcconville-arrested-after-hit+and+run-fatality-257447.php
Yet I guess that, should he cause an accident, possibly killing people who have the bad luck of getting on the streets to commute and owning less safe cars than his precious M5, he'll run away like whatever 18 year old drunk coward.
Shame on slashdot for posting this shit.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
To be fair:
1) The couple the racers hit ran a stop sign and were hit by a porsche going 6 miles over the limit
2) The man had a heart atack when hit and died. His wife died a few days later (not sure why)
3) The family of the deceased pleaded with the court to let him go. And they did.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Yes, but they left the scene of the accident, and tried to flee the country.
The mitigating factors you mention may bring them down from "string them up by their thumbs" to "super asshole who deserves prison", but the latter is still not a very good state.
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.
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
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.