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Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair
German police have confiscated the world's fastest office chair and arrested its 17-year-old inventors. The duo added a lawnmower engine, brakes and a metal frame to the office chair and were reported to be driving it all over the streets of Gross-Zimmern. Police did not comment on the chair's handling or acceleration but I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear.
God forbid that a bunch of kids make something on their own. They might, you know, invent something useful.
I think the problem isn't that they invented something, it's that they were very irresponsible with it (driving a motor vehicle on the streets without proper training or safety measures).
And I wouldn't call a lawnmower-engine powered office chair "useful". Interesting, and amusing, but not useful.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Is the picture misleading (i.e. not the chair referred to in the article) or did they do something significantly more than put a lawnmower engine on it?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
>> Oh, please. Making the chair is cool. Driving it on public roads is not so cool.
If they were potentially causing a danger on those streets, then OK. But if they weren't being reckless and disrupting safe traffic, then this deserved a "hey kids, cut that out", not a pair of handcuffs.
If I made that chair, you bet I'd go find a nice non-busy stretch of road to haul ass on.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
I suppose this is probably one of those "happy-days" fantasies, but how cool would it be to live back in an age where regulation didn't exist. Where danger was all around. Where you could invent, and wow people. Where accidents happened. Where imagination was your only limit.
The lawyer has replaced the priest.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
"Good engineering accommodates the errors and omissions of users. Bad engineering relies on laws and conventions to overcome inherent systemic flaws. Laws and conventions are, therefore, indicative of bad engineering."
Good engineering accommodates errors and omissions INSOFAR as it is practical/cost effective. Your solutions all require significantly more capital investment than the ones in existence now.
There is also a similar hazard in that relying on engineering to make something idiot proof allows the idiots to have a false sense of security, inevitably leading them to strive to newer, previously unimaginable heights of stupidity that the engineers hadn't even thought possible.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Use a roundabout instead of a 4-way stop.
You do realise that if there are no traffic regulations, then people are free to drive straight over the roundabout, go the wrong way around it, or use it as a meeting place for a pimped-out-bouncy-suspension car convention?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You realize what regulations do? They enforce not only speed limits (wouldn't want some idiot to go 160km/h in a residential area), they also enforce basic vehicle safety standards. Easy example: Parts that fall off or increase the danger for other people in a crash. If your car is so crappy that your trunk cover falls off that's a definite safety hazard and can very well end up killing people. Adorning your car with spikes is a terrible idea, especially if it's done on the front (that you get arrested after killing somebody with them is little consolation to their next of kin!). There's simply too many things that can go wrong when you've got metal hunks of 1t and over moving at speeds in excess of even 30km/h. Humans are NOT naturally capable of handling these things!
This whole "laws are only about control" bullshit meme is used way too often, I have no idea what people got hit with to get such idiotic ideas. We don't live in a world of Nietzschean supermen, people don't behave on their own and to allow reasonably safe coexistence with that many humans around it's simply necessary to make laws.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
He was austrian. You know, we are very precise and stuff over here.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Two people arrive at a 4-way stop at right angles to each other. Who has the right of way? Regulation: The person to your right. Solution: Use a roundabout instead of a 4-way stop.
Yes because replacing every single 4 way intersection in a residential neighborhood would be so simple, or in a city. EVERY intersection within 6 blocks of me is a 4 way stop, in at congested, 200+ year old city with small houses and tiny streets. PREDATING automobiles. I find your solution laughable and your assertation regarding engineering proposterous given that the road was developed before the automobile.