Oculus VR Co-founder Andrew Reisse Killed In Auto Collision

ccguy writes with this excerpt from a sad report on CNET: "Oculus Rift co-founder and lead engineer Andrew Reisse was hit in Santa Ana, where he was a resident, by a speeding car being pursued by police." Reisse was killed, says the report, when the car "slammed into two vehicles during the pursuit before hitting Reisse at Flower Street and MacArthur Boulevard."

Comments

FTA

[rmdingler]

Police were pursuing a vehicle for an unnamed offense which ran several red lights before striking Reisse's vehicle at an intersection. The cynic in me says the offense wasn't extremely grievous if it has thus far gone unnamed: these testosterone-fueled police chases kill far too many innocents.

Re:FTA

[dunkelfalke]

Let us be fair. Cars kill too many innocents. Cities should be for the people, not for cars!

Re:FTA

[gl4ss]

Police were pursuing a vehicle for an unnamed offense which ran several red lights before striking Reisse's vehicle at an intersection. The cynic in me says the offense wasn't extremely grievous if it has thus far gone unnamed: these testosterone-fueled police chases kill far too many innocents.

the offence was fleeing after a firefight.. apparently the perps were on probation too(and had warrants on their heads).

Re:FTA

[kurt555gs]

Cars don't kill people, people kill people.

Re:FTA

[Dins]

When you outlaw cars, only outlaws will have cars.

Re:FTA

[cffrost]

Because if they had suspended the chase, the offending vehicle would have slowed down and obeyed all traffic laws thereafter?

Probably — why risk wrecking the vehicle or attracting further attention once the pursuing police have fallen back?

Re:FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

And in cities, they typically are reserved for this. "when needed" includes "i need to get somewhere that's not well served by public transportation"

Which in the US unfortunately is pretty much every trip that has an endpoint outside the core of the city....

Re:FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

That is precisely what the police do. If a pursuit will lead to a prolonged, high speed chase, the police cruisers are supposed to be pulled back and a helicopter is used to follow the perpetrators until they can be apprehended more safely.

Re:FTA

[ClioCJS]

Anytime someone gets killed by someone, we should take it away from all the people who don't kill anyone with it.

Also, when one kid in class chews gum, everyone in the class should get detention.

When a right is abused, it should be taken away too. Because of Westboro Baptist Church, we should repeal the 1st Amendment.

Re:FTA

[candeoastrum]

Because you know, guys with guns fleeing after a firefight and a violent encounter with police are totally white, nice and fluffy, model citizens

What does being white have to do with anything?

Re:FTA

[g0bshiTe]

True, but if you simply remove people from the cities you have the same result. Then the cars can still roam free in their natural habitat.

Re:FTA

[Alef]

For what it's worth, that is the standard operating procedure for Swedish police: They fall back and essentially just track the fleeing vehicle at a distance, then coordinate a road block using other vehicles, or just wait until the suspects eventually stop and apprehend them then. The reasoning is that, in most cases, a close pursuit will create even greater danger for innocent bystanders, and for the people in the fleeing car, some of which could be innocent as well (e.g. children).

Re:FTA

[Jappus]

If cars were banned people would just leave the cities. Might be a good thing after generations of living like rats.

Actually, the opposite would happen.

If you would ban cars, people would leave their suburbs in droves and return back into the city core.

After all, that's how it was from the very first cities of Mesopotamia (~65k inhabitants for the city of Ur in 2000 BC!) over the cities and city-states of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece (~100k inhabitants in 1000-500BC), continuing with Ancient Rome and the first large cities in South America (up to 250k inhabitants) all the way to the metropolises of the industrial Revolution (London, Paris, Berlin; with millions of inhabitants) and finally the mega-cities of today; like Tokio, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico and New York City with each near or exceeding tens of millions of inhabitants.

As you notice; all the way up to the very recent histories, these cities grew from ~65k people to over 6 million people; all without the help of cars. The jump from then to now (when cars were available) only pushed that up by a factor of 2.

Cars are actually the reason why cities grew slower than before, with the suburbs and "greater metropolitan" areas soaking up most of the excess population that'd otherwise live much closer to the city core where they could make use of public transportation much more easily. You would see nearby cities grow together, until the boundary between them vanishes; like the Ruhrpott [1] (which grew without the presence of cars) which is more like a huge city with multiple city cores.

So tldr; : No cars would mean even bigger cities. Not in terms of density, but sheer diameter and area filled with people.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrpott

Re:FTA

[Solandri]

As you notice; all the way up to the very recent histories, these cities grew from ~65k people to over 6 million people; all without the help of cars. The jump from then to now (when cars were available) only pushed that up by a factor of 2.

You're comparing 4000 years of growth and 100 years of growth as if they're somehow equivalent?

So tldr; : No cars would mean even bigger cities. Not in terms of density, but sheer diameter and area filled with people.

That conclusion doesn't fit the data. Here's U.S. census data from 1800 to 1990 of the percentage of the population living in urban vs. rural areas. As you can see, the advent of widespread car ownership does not correlate with a slowdown in urbanization as you're hypothesizing.

What's going on is that in order to support a city, you need to be able to transport goods and resources in and out of the city. Improved transportation facilitated that, and allowed cities to grow bigger than before. If a city needs x amount of food every day, and transportation in the 1800s by horse and wagon can only bring food from a 25 mile radius into the city in a day, then the city's population is capped at whatever food you can grow in a 25 mile radius (this is a simplified explanation - I know some food can survive trips of greater than a day). In the 1900s transportation improved to where you can bring in food from a 250 mile radius, and thus the city's population cap was higher. Current trucking and speed limits pushes that radius out to about 500 miles (though modern refrigeration increases the timeframe to several days), and so our cities can be much larger. The start of the shift to an urban population in the U.S. actually correlates almost exactly with the advent of railroads (1830s-1850s).

Last words.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's so real, it's like it's coming right at me !"

Re:Reckless Cops

[Charliemopps]

Ok, think of it this way. Lets say instead of jumping into a car, the suspects picked up a pipe bomb with a dead-mans switch. Would the police chase them? No. They'd follow slowly at a safe distance. Now, why wouldn't they chase them with the same vigor as the car chase? There's a big difference between a car chase and a pipe bomb, and it's not really obvious at first. Both chases end with a lethal release of energy... the bomb explodes, the car crashes. No suspect fleeing from a murder scene is going to stop until he crashes after all... The difference is the cars lethal force is uni-directional. The POLICE'S lives are not in danger. When the suspects come to a stop that lethal force is applied in the opposite direction of the police. So the police will not risk their own lives, but if it's the public who's in danger from their actions they're not as concerned.

Re:He should not have been pursued

[AlphaWolf_HK]

You mean as in being held accountable for the same laws, and having everything they do recorded on camera? Wow, enlightened England is so unique and smart, I wish we would have thought of that. And surely having a violent crime rate more than four times that of the US makes them more than four times better, right?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html

Clearly the problem is that America has too many guns.