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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."
He was last seen at the plant arguing with one of the engineers who had assured him the latest Segway was "uncrashable." He rode off muttering something about having the last laugh. Clearly he was a business and marketing genius but a bit of a lemming in day-to-day life.
But in all seriousness, I'm very sorry for him and his family. If I didn't constantly encounter the damned things on sidewalks and in pedestrian spaces on the National Mall in DC I wouldn't be so quick to lampoon their maker's untimely demise.
My work here is dung.
...what a way to go out. Fitting, but jeebus...
Living With a Nerd
Please look up the definition of irony before posting anything with that particular word in it.
(This especially includes all Sheryl Crow fans)
Thanks in advance.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
He must have fallen for the pre-launch hype, where the inventor and a variety of major tech figures were claiming that cities would be designed around the things. Maybe he thought it levitated?
amphibious assault Seguay couldn't keep its head above water
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..
This has to be the worst way to get free press for your product. But I'll give it to the man... He's dedicated.
He was a real stand-up kind of guy
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
And yes, I know I'm going to hell.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So what's the point? Blame (ban?) the Segway?
And, oh, by the way:
In the UK, it is illegal to drive a Segway on the road or even on pavements or cycle paths. They can only be used on private property, despite campaigns to let them be used on cycle paths.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Read the article. It was not the inventor that died, but the owner of the product.
Is this the first confirmed death while operating a Segway?
What is the British equivalent to "Hey, Ya'll, watch this!"
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
More info about the guy and the accident is available at the Daily Mail
Call it a Segw
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This ground is a way to get round the stupid whitespace filters
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Ban gravity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did you check your facts before you opened up the floodgates of your arse? The guy may have been a defence contractor, but his company made FORTIFICATIONS. Not in the sense of point-defence systems, but in the sense of freaking walls.
The Personal Transporter's *actual* inventor is this engineer I've bumped into -- I work with his brother. DK was "merely" the person who put money and PR behind it. Dean gets a lot of credit -- but really, *his* biggest invention was the insulin pump.
More specifically, he was the chairman of HESCO bastion, a company that makes large cube-shaped wire & cloth baskets you fill with sand. They are used for flood control as well as by the military for defensive walls.
Just an FYI, the XT and X2 lines have been out for years; *IF* that's what he was riding -- and there truly is no other "off-road" Segway -- then it is what it is... but it ain't new.
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.
So do farmers and prostitutes.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Well, in that case nobody should be giving haircuts, becoming medical doctors, or growing food either. Surely the bastards won't fight when they're starving with nobody to patch up their friends they accidentally shoot because they've got their hair in their eyes.
worst. crash. ever.
Facts have a liberal bias.
If you lost your balance (due to vertigo upon seeing the dropoff) near the cliff and leaned forward instead of back, then the segway would have killed you.
Personally, I think this is going to turn out to be what happened.
As to who's to blame... the Seqway isn't intuitive. You have to learn the muscle memory and you have to practice coupling it to situational awareness in order to get the machine to go where you want. If you are suddenly in a new situation -- something the randomness of rugged terrain does to you constantly -- it would be easy for your neuromuscular system to make an unexpected adjustment. You might as well be throwing control-system darts. Add vertigo, which is a condition where the neuromuscular system is misinterpreting and misapplying the information available to it, and you could continue to apply the wrong force. I.e., drunken control-system darts.
He'd have had to have trained under safe conditions (ropes, nets, etc.) in that configuration of ridge, cliff height, and lighting to learn how to use it near the edge of a cliff, and therefore take the Segway out of the blame equation. The rule for the thing should be never to ride it in a more dangerous situation than you've been trained to ride it in.
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from Wikipedia
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Whether it's a gun that kills more people or a barrier that allows troops to advance safely to where they can kill more people really amounts to the same thing.