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Segway UK Boss Dies After Driving Off Cliff
necro81 writes "Jimi Heselden, the British multi-millionaire defense contractor and philanthropist, who bought the Segway company last December from inventor Dean Kamen, died yesterday after an accident while riding one of the machines. While using a ruggedized X2 version of the two-wheeled balancing scooter at his estate in North Yorkshire, he apparently drove over the edge of a precipice and into the River Wharfe. He was found later by a passerby and declared dead on the scene."
My condolences to his friends and relatives.
I'm sure there will be a lot of smart-ass comments making fun of this guy. The fact remains that a person lost his life in a tragic accident. Thoughts go out to his family.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
This will just be another clump of dirt on the corpse of Segway. It actually sucks in a way. It was invented to try to radically mix up society and how we travel, change the way we travel in cities. Use less gas, get people moving, less space for parking, all that cool stuff. Instead it became a toy for Segway Polo, jokes for Mall Cops, and t tours. Never getting the impact it was intended for..
simple fact:
if you combine
1. off road conditions
2. high speeds
you are basically deciding to do a passionate tango with death
a ruggedized segway? obviously in the same category as an ATV when it comes to "one dead me, please"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Irony is subjective. Almost anything can be considered ironic or not based on a point of view.
English is not a programming language.
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why don't you fall off a cliff, this guy left school at 15, become a miner , apparently gave millions to charity, provided defensive fortification's for the armed forces, i suspect he did a lot more in his life, to help and protect people than you ever will in your un-important existence. Your lack of respect and humanity says more about you , your values, your upbringing than anything else.
There are many different definitions of irony, and many people have a pet definition that they think is the 'right' one. Hell, even the oft made fun of Alanis Morissette song has at least a few scenarios that fall under one of the definitions or another. An outcome of events contrary to what was, expected; there is an irony to winning the lottery (and being set for life) and then dying a day later. There's also the definition: as if in mockery of the fitness or rightness of things. A death row pardon two minutes after the execution? Yes, I'd say that's a mockery of the way things should be. Now, a lot of the other scenarios in the song are most definitely not ironic, but there are a few that are.
It's marginal at best. If he'd bought the Segway company to save his life, or to safely be able to navigate near to cliffs, then I'd say it's definitely irony, but just because his actions inadvertently lead to his death doesn't make it ironic.
So do farmers and prostitutes.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Alanis Morissette was, ironically, an English major who does know what "ironic" means and has stated that the only actually ironic thing about that song was its title. Ironically, that is.
With spin like that she would have made a good communications major.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Why is paraphrasing the first sentence of the article (while attempting to contradict something that GP didn't actually say) modded informative?
At the bottom of the
God, everyone's so busy wanting to limit the definition of irony.
NO. Irony does not require that the result be contrary (much less directly opposite) to the stated intentions of the person whose actions led to the result. It does not require that it be contrary to any specific individual's intentions or expectations.
The definition is that it is contrary to what you might expect, and like it or not that's subjective. Most of us wouldn't expect the owner of a company that makes a given product to be sufficiently ill equipped to use that product safely that it ends up killing him or her.
To his credit, there are no Alanis Morissette fans really.
I was dragged to one of her shows a year or two ago by my wife, and she and her band put on a shockingly good and rock-like show, not at all what I would have expected. It was almost like watching a metal band fronted by Alanis Morissette cover the works of Alanis Morissette.
I'm a little ashamed to say it reminded me a lot of a Metallica concert, back before Metallica started sucking. AM was even headbanging to the guitar solos.
If that all sounds too surreal to be real, I can only say I would have thought the same thing.