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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.
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?
Please look up the definition of irony before posting anything with that particular word in it.
(This especially includes all Sheryl Crow fans)
Ironically, you probably meant Alanis Morissette.
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
The word they shall all be looking for, is apropos.
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)
Not in itself. But if he was seriously trying to be ironic by doing so, then the fact that it was not ironic and in a post requesting correct usage of irony, was itself ironic.
But it's important to uphold the principals, and not set a bad president.
Hi. This is ironic and certainly contrary to what was expected. I don't see how you can claim otherwise.
I buy the rights to a product. I intend to manufacture it and have it make me wealthy. Instead it kills me. This is irony.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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."
Irony is subjective. Almost anything can be considered ironic or not based on a point of view.
English is not a programming language.
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.
If you imagine watching him post in slow-motion in a stage production, then the part where he started typing "Shery..." was a scene with dramatic irony, because the audience knew he was about to complete a tragic error, whereas the character himself was unaware.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Where's the duc[tk] tape? My head's gonna blow.
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.
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.
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Double coincidence - "Jimi was chairman of Hesco Bastion Ltd, the world leading manufacturer of protective barriers"
Hmmm, he didn't sell enough, clearly.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
Irony is subjective. Almost anything can be considered ironic or not based on a point of view.
English is not a programming language.
Yes it is. ENGLISH
Is that ironic?
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.
To provide lab data about which sealants and tapes last, and which are likely to fail, research was conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Their major conclusion was that one should not use duct tape to seal ducts (specialty tapes are available for this purpose). (They defined duct tape as any fabric-based tape with rubber adhesive.) The testing done shows that under challenging but realistic conditions, duct tapes become brittle and may fail.[6] Commonly duct tape carries no safety certifications such as UL or Proposition 65, which means the tape may burn violently, producing toxic smoke; it may cause ingestion and contact toxicity; it can have irregular mechanical strength; and its adhesive may have low life expectancy. Its use in ducts has been prohibited by the state of California[7] and by building codes in most other places in the U.S. However, metalized and aluminum tapes used by professionals are still often called "duck/duct tapes".
from Wikipedia
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
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.