Slashdot Mirror
Severn Bridge, a Main Route Between England and Wales, Shuts as Drone Flown From Tower (bbc.com)
A main route between England and Wales was closed after a man climbed a bridge and flew a drone from the top. An anonymous reader shares a report: Traffic was stopped on the M48 -- the older of two Severn crossings -- because of "concern for welfare," police said. The man, in his 20s, came down voluntarily from the 47m (154ft) bridge tower and was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance. Highways England said it was deeply concerned and that "a person has put their life at serious risk". "The incident was quickly spotted on our security cameras and reported to police and thankfully there was no injury or worse on this occasion," it said. "Appropriate security is in place on the bridge, we are liaising with Avon and Somerset Police and will be undertaking investigations to determine if any damage was caused during the incident." Police said: "Officers attended the M48 Severn Bridge at 08:10 this morning after concerns were raised for a man who appeared to have climbed one of the towers and was flying a drone off it."
I have no problem with that. Idiots and their Instagram/Youtube drone videos.
Fucking up traffic for hundreds of people isn't hacking and it isn't a prank. It's just being a dick and causing problems because you can.
There must be a quad-copter owners' version of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory... DOFT?
Traffic was only fucked up because the cops chose to stop it -- if he was ignored and allowed to do his thing, traffic wouldn't have been affected much.
Why is it worse than launching a model airplane or model balloon as a prank?
I know it's the hot thing to bring up drone related closings - but in this case, wasn't the road closed because there was some guy far above it that might have fallen or dropped things on the road from above, rather than the drone being a factor?
The drone doesn't seem to be a reason for the closure, at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Waiting for the YT video....
Philosophically I support that ethos.
But only to a point. Nice to meet you, idealism. I'd like to introduce you to my friend, reality.
Huge numbers of people rely on public infrastructure. There are rules that govern how people behave in public spaces, since the actions of one person can have a bad effect on large numbers of others. An irresponsible drone operator on a bridge could easily crash a quadcopter into a car, leading to a chain of accidents that could result in death. This guy clearly needed to be arrested and slapped with a fine large enough to deter him from doing it again.
Make public rules too loose, and the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless. Make public rules too tight, and you restrict personal freedoms of movement and expression. Yes, there is a sweet spot in the middle. No, we haven't quite found it yet for drone operation. Using a public bridge like a personal jungle gym, however, is firmly in "idiot" territory.
This! Exactly how is a quad copter going to damage a bridge?
But buying a computer and posting on forums isn't?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
A few years ago this wouldn't have been a problem. Police would have just waited him out and arrested him for being stupid. But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more. They police where not acting on the drone, they where acting on the fool flying the drone.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
It isn't, but the idiots who climb it might have done something. Youtube is full of hipsters climbing that bridge.
Well SirAsshole - if this asshole (a relative perhaps?) had fallen from the tower onto the road below and caused a bus full of school kids to swerve and crash you would probably be saying something different.
I once had a dream about a drone. I called the Mayor of London to tell him and he closed down the entire city for 6 days!
We Brits take our drones very seriously.
Quite the opposite - deaths due to terrorism by christians has gone down significantly over the last few decades. As have killed the greatest numbers by an order of magnitude or two in the UK, I'll presume that's the certain religion you're talking about.
https://researchbriefings.parl...
But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
They police where not acting on the drone, they where acting on the fool flying the drone.
Crime rates have declined dramatically since the 1990s, for reasons that have nothing to do with "policing", yet today we have more police than ever. So they have to fabricate and exaggerate "crimes" to justify the inflated cost of over-policing.
Come election day, when you receive a mailer that says a candidate is endorsed by the police chief, you should vote for the other guy.
They probably would have just shot down the drone, anyway, and then gave the drone pilot a fine for flying it in an unauthorized area if they were feeling extra mean.
It's still better than shutting down traffic on a major interstate and creating a headline news story about it, anyway.
the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless.
That is what happened in this case ... except it was the actions of the police, not the drone operator, that caused the problem.
If the guy climbed it with a rifle strapped to his back then, sure, take some precautionary steps.
Shutting down traffic because someone is flying an RC aircraft from the top of a bridge ?
Really ?
That stupid decision caused far more problems than it solved.
If the drivers there are anything like the ones in the States, they would not have noticed it in the first place because they are usually staring at their phones.
I swear half the planet is terrified of their own shadow these days.
Damn helpful cops and safety laws to protect stupid people.
They're the reason we don't have nearly enough Darwin Prizes.
#DeleteFacebook
When I grew up these incidents where called model airplane incident. When did they renamed them drones? I know this is off topic, but it is new years eve. Time to become nostalgic.
Certain PARANOIA about followers of a certain religion, rather. The number of actual terrorist attacks has been so low as to be a minor issue.
I'm just not a coward and remember when the world had a sense of humor -- in the 1970s, someone stretched a tightrope between the Twin Towers and walked on it for a while. He was given a slap on the hand and most people appreciated the stunt rather than freaking out about it. If not being for a perfectly safe, sterile society makes me a psychopathic idiot, I wear that badge with pride.
"When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than dornes"
Absolutely true. In fact, pressure cookers are a far bigger risk than recreational drone flying (3 dead, hundreds injured by pressure-cooker bombs in the Boston Marathon attack) -- so why is it that in most countries, people owning drones weighing more than 250g have to be registered yet people owning pressure cookers don't?
This incident, plus the Gatwick one shows that the hysteria over "dangerous drones" has reached unacceptable and ridiculous proportions.
How many young children have died from suffocation as a result of plastic bags? (answer: a lot more than one).
How many people have been killed by manned aircraft crashing into populated areas? (answer, a double-digit number every year).
How many people have died as a result of domesticated dog attacks? (answer, far more than you might realise)
And here's the really important question:
How many people have died as a result of recreational multirotor drone use? Answer: A BIG FAT ZERO!
That's right, despite all the claims that these things are dangerous, that these things will bring down airliners, that these things will result in needless deaths... NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON has been killed as a result of recreational multirotor drone operation ANYWHERE in the world, EVER.
Firstly they said that if a drone collides with a plane, people will die. Then, after several documented instances of collisions between drones and planes -- without even an injury to show for it, they said "Ah, but if a drone collides with a HELICOPTER, *then* people will undoubtedly die.
After the collision with a military helicopter over NY harbour where nobody was injured and the helicopter landed safely they said "Ah, but if a drone strikes a helicopter's tail rotor -- *then* people will die".
After a drone struck an MD500 helicopter's tail-rotor at the Baha races and the craft landed safely without injuries they said "Ah, but if a drone strikes an airliner, *then* people will die".
Do you see the way this is playing out?
But let's look at the science instead of the hysteria (not that the media nor the regulators seem interested in doing so).
As reported by ArsTechnica, one university crunched the numbers some time ago and came to the conclusion that drones are a lot safer than we're being led to believe.
Who are you going to believe -- academics who've done the science or a bunch of hysterical know-nothings in the media who simply want to sell papers or accumulate clicks on web-pages?
I love how this scientific paper has been completely ignored -- in favour of predictions by parties (such as unions of commercial pilots, who stand to lose their jobs if/when drones take over).
But not all pilots believe that drones are the devil's spawn. Check out what Captain Chris Mano, a veteran 737 pilot for a major US carrier has to say in his blog about the issue of drone risk to airliners.
I'm sorry but I get really peeved when I see the mainstream media blowing the true risks (as proven by the passage of time and in complete contradiction to the predictions of death and disaster by the ignorant or those parties with their own agendas) right out of proportion.
I trust that those who use Slashdot will appreciate the reality of the situation and not be suckered into believing that recreational drone use is a major threat to public safety -- as the media would have us believe.
It is a shame that people are not able to fundamentally grasp that the government is in the wrong here. No wonder government constantly oversteps its bounds, people are just so used to letting police overreact to every little thing.
Many places have had to write laws to stop police from automatically starting a grand chase if a person they are chasing is not shown to be an immediate & serious risk to everyone around them. Instead get the plate and track them down later. Too many times police will unnecessarily escalate situations complicating matters in ways that just are not necessary to resolve the problem.
The person that made the call to stop traffic should have been reprimanded and be forced to teach a class on what he did wrong around the country and how it should have been handled instead.
Would you bother to read 'Bridge closes when man climbs to top'?
So creates all these false flags to whip up fear so the public won't object too hard. H.L. Mencken said:
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Looking more and more prophetic and correct by the day.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Nothing to do with terrorism. They have been doing this for years every time some kid starts throwing stuff off motorway bridges.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes. I think the hysteria is overblown -- I don't think that schools should be turned into secure fortresses because of a few incidents.
Yes, but they're not shooting their dicks off in the meat section of an Arizona Wal-Mart.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The article doesn't say how the person was flying the drone but it is possible to fly it so that it pops in front of someone's windshield causing them to make an unexpected motion such as slamming on the brakes or swerving into another lane. Just think of how people behave when a bird flies too close to the car.
The article doesn't say what type of drone was being used so we don't know if it was a small one under 250 grams like you assume. It could have been a larger one with a camera attached. Maybe he wanted to video/photograph the bridge to build a model replica and did it in the dumbest way possible.
Or maybe he was trying to have "fun" like the idiots who stand on a highway overpass and throw rocks at the cars below. The article just doesn't give us enough details to make any judgements. But there are idiots out there that don't think when using drones.
I'm gonna be bit harsh in my response - This is a standard logic fail and people on this site should know better by now.
When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
When an ultra-rare adverse immunization event causes a death, people conclude immunizations are evil. Forget the fact that immunization has been absolutely proven to save more lives than..... well, pretty much anything else, with the exception of perhaps antibiotics.
Seat belts occasionally decapitate someone, so some idiots conclude that seat belts are fascism. Seat belts actually save tons of lives? Irrelevant! One guy died from them and that makes people mad.
Some teenage monkey with social media on the brain and wwwwwaaayyyy too much testosterone in his veins climbs a public bridge and launches a drone. The cops close the bridge in order to deal with it safely. Your conclusion - cops are bad! Possibility he might fall? Drop something onto a car below? Gawkers create a multicar pile-up in the middle of the bridge? Cops or safety workers might get hit by a car while dealing with the situation? Nah, all irrelevant. Most people don't like being told what to do and everyone has seen a Youtube video of some guy being abused by a cop! Screw The Man!
We're not islands. We live in large social groups. We're governed by a complex, evolving, imperfect set of rules that allow *most* of us to get along *most* of the time. Occasionally the rules are arbitrary or just plain wrong and lead to stupidity. When that happens, people need to call out the flaws in the rules so they can be modified. Cops aren't perfect, and authorities sometimes make bad calls. The cops probably called this one right. Hard truth: occasionally your freedom to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, gets curtailed in order to keep you from putting 150 people around you in danger. That's what happened here. Boo hoo.
How is that any different than on a [street|highway|parkinglot|freeway|interstate|tunnel|parkway|train|etc]?
I was stuck for 2 hours on the freeway because someone climbed over the side wall of an overpass. Police were afraid he was going to suicide by jumping into freeway traffic below, so shut down traffic to protect the lives of people driving underneath.
What people need to realize is there is no singular sweet spot. No perfect balance which results in the optimal outcome for all cases. Any level of restriction you pick will be too much in some scenarios, not enough in others. So no matter what sweet spot you pick, nay-sayers will always be able to come up with examples where the current spot fails.
Writing laws based solely on ways the law has failed most recently will just result in the law constantly oscillating back and forth as new incidents pull it one way, then the opposite, over and over. You have to pick a spot, and live with it, accepting that there will always be exceptions where the law fails. If you think it's failing too often, then you can decide to tweak it. But it should never be tweaked in response to just a single outlier incident.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones
What was he using the drone for? What if he was using the drone to scout out soft targets to shoot at? Granted, he probably wasn't but you can't be sure. Again, this isn't about the drone. It's about the idiot flying the drone. The drone just just small part of a bigger issue.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You're right, of course. I was trying to point out that thing's aren't black-and-white as simply as possible. The idea that there might be even more layers of nuance? Let's be careful not to blow people's minds up too quickly.
The only reason for flying the drone was for the "epic" selfie he'd post to the soc-nets. Only reason the BBC mentioned the drone was so they could add a few paragraphs about the airport incident before Christmas.
It's like the media elites don't want the rest of us invading their airspace. They paid big bucks for those helicopters and here you come with your Mavic Pro. Better make them illegal so the 'beeb can go back to their monopoly on TV.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Wait are you talking about the person or the cops? Because I honestly can't tell.
Actually, traffic was fucked up because this guy was a pedestrian on a vehicle-only road - a "motorway" in EN_GB. It is an offence to be a pedestrian on these roads without authorisation (road workers) or good cause (your vehicle has broken down and you are walking from the breakdown to the nearest emergency phone). (Bicyclists and horse riders / horse-drawn vehicles are also banned.) So the police were doing an operation to detain a criminal and shut down the road for their (perceived) convenience or safety. I believe American police have comparable powers. You'll notice that I haven't mentioned the drone. I've given it all the importance it warrants.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It is a shame that people are not able to fundamentally grasp that the government is in the wrong here.
They would be if it were true. But the reality is that a person had climbed a structure not meant to be climbed and posed a danger to himself and the people underneath it. In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
There's nothing wrong with protecting the life of stupid people as well as those they may impact (if he fell). The fact that a drone was involved is clickbait and irrelevant.
Too many times police will unnecessarily escalate situations complicating matters in ways that just are not necessary to resolve the problem.
They reduced risk at the cost of a bit of traffic. A textbook case of deescalating an unknown and risky situation. Boo fucking hoo.
That'd be Christianity, would it? Most American terrorism is from rabid redneck Christians attacking people who differ from them in skin-colour, religion, or which bits of their body they rub against other people for fun.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Would be much cheaper if government just ignored this slob or waited for him to come down an arrest him without all of this "over reactive BS".
Would it be cheaper if he fell? Hit a car causing a chain of accidents that took hours to clear and closed the bridge for a significantly longer time?
Check yourself before you wreak yourself man. That anti-government anger vein on your forehead looks like it's about to burst.
On March 29, the UK will shoot itself in the foot. A well rehearsed drone campaign with disruptions to infrastructure and transportaion networks could insure that the wound festers properly.
You're supposed to have the drone fly up to the top of the towers so that you don't have to climb up to get the photo.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Only because the spud-munchers are having a time out - a situation which may well change due that lovely Mr Farage.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Interesting... Is the troll mod for suggesting that it might not be Muslim terrorism?
Is Islamic terror really some kind of blanket that snowflakes cling to to justify their hatred to themselves?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
it is possible to fly it so that it pops in front of someone's windshield
ANYTHING is "possible". It is possible that the bridge will be struck by a meteor next week. So should we close it, you know, just in case?
What if he was using the drone to scout out soft targets to shoot at?
Why would he need a drone to do that?
Again, this isn't about the drone. It's about the idiot flying the drone.
Actually, it is about the idiotic over-reaction by the police. That is what made this newsworthy.
The drone just just small part of a bigger issue.
The bigger issue is that we have way too many police, and they don't have enough real work to do, so they go around manufacturing crises.
When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
Nonsense. Nobody is saying we should just let people speed. But there is also no need for cops to chase offenders at high speed through residential neighborhoods. The proper thing to do is to run the plates, and go arrest the guy while he is watching TV later than evening.
Same thing with the guy on the bridge. One cop could have waited at the bottom of the tower and arrested him when he descended. There was no need to involve half the police force and inconvenience thousands of people. They only did that to add drama and pat themselves on the back for being "heros".
can destroy a 100 ton airliner, why wouldn't you believe that it can also destroy a bridge?
Interesting... Is the troll mod for suggesting that it might not be Muslim terrorism?
Don't be silly. Of course that is what it is. You dare to insult or even imply an insult to the lefts favorite barbaric superstition. Just look at how many jump to defend even an implied insult the muslim pedo based cult. But are more than happy to bash christan based superstition.
Fucking hypocrites the lot of them
the world doesn't need more pranksters, particularly pranksters who think their mission is to wreck other people's lives. consider what the role of the trickster in society was, a thousand years ago, and then ask yourself if we need an entire society of pranksters constantly trying to shock everyone into thinking differently. the role is popular with teenaged boys because wrecking someone else's shit is empowering. it's why there are so many games about being an assassin.
nobody ever got rich with a video game about being a sewer pipe repairman, but nobody calls an assassin - or a prankster - when their toilet backs up. the first would kill you, and the second would make it worse and then laugh at you.
I Know the area. People climbing the towers is not new or unusual. There is just a fad for doing stupid things while flying a drone.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
The real reason of this campaign is that drones give too much power in hands of citizen journalists. In some parts of the world the civil drones are banned completely already.
There are countless cases when a corrupted official with a modest official salary built himself a palace hidden behind a high wall, or a respected businessman pours into a river contaminated waste to gain more profit, and so on and so forth.
Now all this dirt instead of being well hidden is being filmed and published readily available in HD, or even in 4K, and from recently with the lossless(!) zoom.
So this technology starts to interfere with the social structure of the society itself. I read that there are still in England the aristocratic lords living in luxury castles placed in vast fenced parks. These people are certainly extremely rich and influential, so adding 2 + 2 we may better understand why all these stories started to happen in the UK.
Ammosexual. On the first day of the new year I learned a cool new word! Thanks!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Concentrated in a small insignificant corner of the country yes. Involved in a localized Civil War. That is not the same. They mostly killed each other and did not often kill random civilians outside of the area in which they lived. Well not much anyway.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Sounds much like the hysteria about nuclear plants. Question: how many people died because of Fukushima? Answer: Zero. None. Zip
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Well, since you are on the subject of child molesting pedophiles... the catholics have a bad score in that department. It is really a little ethically dubious to judge Mohammed on his behaviour according to the cultural norms in the 5th century. The west was not any better at the time.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
If there are traitorous things, sure.
If not, it was a colossal abuse by one political faction to use the gearwork of government to harm a political enemy, which is a sad thing, just like it was for Bill Clinton.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Are you trying to imply that PopeRatzo can't have any dairy products?
#DeleteFacebook
In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
The more sensible one that your parents grew up in. The one before 'out of an abundance of caution' became a thing. When more sensible people balanced public safety with public inconvenience and did not always shut down entire cities or highways or airports because an unplanned paper airplane was launched.
Everyone is so afraid now. Is it the fault of the helicopter parents who raised the current generation who never let the kids play out of their sight? Now those same overprotected kids have grown up and apply the same principles to everything they do. Shutting down an entire bridge because of a little buzzing toy that was of no threat to anyone is ridiculous and cowardly.
If what the guy did was illegal the cops could be waiting for him and just arrest him when he comes down. That's what would have happened up to the early 80s. Traffic may have still slowed a bit because of the police presence but it wouldn't have stopped. That would have been a more balanced and sensible solution. There was no reason to believe that man was a threat to anyone.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Don't you think arresting someone whose car's been stolen is adding insult to injury?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your first point has some validity, but it's really easy to make the right call after the event, when all the facts are known. When presented with a speeder in reality, the cops have to make a snap judgement call: do we allow the speeder to go for now and arrest later? If we do, he might just keep on speeding through 25mph streets and eventually flatten a toddler. In that case, a high speed chase might prevent a death. On the other hand, if he's just trying to get away from us, then we should let him go and do exactly what you said. Arrest later. I don't envy having to make that call.
You're analyzing the bridge situation in the same way. The guy turned out to be harmless.The cops could have been a lot more relaxed in dealing with it, but ONLY IF THEY WERE OMNISCIENT AT THAT POINT IN TIME. They aren't. At that point in time that the cops had no way of knowing if he was suicidal, a prankster, a vandal hoping to drop a brick on traffic, a terrorist, or just a dumb teenage monkey trying to get a selfie. They had to make a call that balanced safety, convenience and police resources.
Because you just take it out of a box and put batteries in it and use it to create Youtube videos for revenue.
That bird has flown. It's difficult enough to monetize YouTube videos even if you're producing content people want to watch. Without the knowledge and luck required to become a successful content producer, a drone will just be tits on a bull.
Video game streaming is the same way - a few people do make money doing it, but the majority don't.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The more sensible one that your parents grew up in.
Horseshit. People have been closing roads due to risk from climbers for as far back as anyone can remember.
This! Exactly how is a quad copter going to damage a bridge?
I think the concern would be that the (drunk?) drone pilot might fall off the bridge and injure an innocent car driver or cause an accident when someone swerved to avoid the body.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Concentrated in a small insignificant corner of the country yes. Involved in a localized Civil War. That is not the same. They mostly killed each other and did not often kill random civilians outside of the area in which they lived. Well not much anyway.
Yeah, they never killed any random civilians in bombings in London or Birmingham or Guildford or Manchester or...oh wait, yes of course they fucking did.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I read that there are still in England the aristocratic lords living in luxury castles placed in vast fenced parks.
Yes, absolutely, England is currently the only country in the entire world with extremely wealthy people living there.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
The problem here isn't the risk of terrorism on the M48 Severn crossing, rather the risk of some idiot falling out of a bridge tower (or throwing himself out) which would shut down the motorway for hours here in the UK. Although this might explain why the M4 was so clear on the 31st... Everyone was using the M48.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's not like it would be the first time, youtuber Ally Law went up there last February with a group of people and a drone. They caused the bridge to be shutdown as a result too though. Video can be found on his youtube channel though. Definitely a sweaty palm sorta video though