There was a case of somebody who was trying to back out of their garage, but had the car in the wrong gear and went forward instead... and wound up pinning a family member against the wall. They tried to hit the brakes as hard as they could but the car didn't stop, and wound up crushing their family member.
An investigation afterwards found that they'd been stomping on the *gas* pedal so hard that it was bent.
I was taught in driver's ed that if you lose power there is still enough vacuum for a good hard brake to slow yourself down. Is this not true? Never had it happen to me so I've no experience.
Power steering isn't a necessity, especially at speed. My mom's power steering pump on a Mercury Sable (a land-barge) died while on twisty mountain roads in the Appalachians. She's 60 years old and five feet tall -- not exactly a paragon of physical strength. But she managed to get the damn thing home.
My car (about as cheap of a new car as you can get) has a governor on the engine: it won't go above (I think) 5500 RPM with the clutch in. It *will* go faster than that in gear, and it is up to the driver not to blow the engine up.
Then that's a problem with the push-button system, not with the pedals or the drivetrain. If someone wrecks because they can't turn their car off then the solution is maybe to make it so that they can turn their car off.
There's a difference between not doing anything and intentionally making a medical condition worse.
If you're having a severe asthma attack on the street, the decent thing for me to do would be to call an ambulance. Just walking on by is not decent, but it's also not a crime (unless I'm a medical provider). But blowing cigar smoke in your face hoping that I can make your condition worse so that you keel over? That's different.
I'm normally a pretty ardent "speech should not be illegal" type, but intentionally egging on someone who is depressed with the intent to provoke them into suicide ought to be a crime.
If I know you've got a potentially lethal peanut allergy, and I slip peanut oil into your food (something normally harmless) knowing that it will provoke a severe medical condition, then I ought to be held liable.
This is no different than intentionally exacerbating a mental illness, IMO: it's taking advantage of someone's medical condition to hurt them by doing something that, because of that condition, is uniquely able to harm them.
... it seems like if beaming a RF signal is all it takes to control the device, it's a terrible, terrible design.
If I were designing an implantable device that I wanted to be robust to attacks like this, I'd build in a two-stage security system. The first would be a piezoelectric element connected to an oscillator tuned to a particular frequency that acts as a switch for the radio receiver; only when exposed to a strong signal at the appropriate frequency will it even start *listening* for an RF signal. The advantage of this is that sound propagates quite strongly directly through tissue; it would be very difficult to trigger the receiver by just shouting at it, but fairly easy to just strike a tuning fork of the right frequency and place its base on top of the device, relying on the very strong mechanical coupling through the skin to amplify the transmission. If you want, make the frequency 440-A -- the goal here is not security through obscurity, but to require physical contact with the patient.
This turns on the RF receiver itself, which would then require authentication with some standard key-exchange method before agreeing to do whatever. The acoustic trigger is both there to serve as another "factor" for two-factor authentication and to guard against any sort of DoS attack by making the radio not even pay attention until some condition is met.
We'll make a trade: the police can insist that I follow their speed limits if those speed limits are set to the maximum speed that a well-maintained, maneuverable car can be driven safely under optimum conditions by a competent and alert driver.
There was basically the biggest earthquake that the earth is capable of making, a tremendous tsunami that killed 20k people, and a 50-year-old power plant had some problems that added a couple of percent to the death toll? This is a tragedy, certainly, and we need to work on making reactors that don't do that. But it is hardly a condemnation of nuclear power.
That has nothing to do with probability theory. It turns out that you can predict how much wealth people have from one to the next very neatly. Failure comes in when you assume that the distribution is Gaussian. It's not; it's log-normal. The billionaire is no more an outlier in that distribution than a pauper.
Certainly -- I was speaking to the fact that many people have said that that law somehow makes it more difficult than it should be to arrest someone who has committed an act of violence and claimed self-defense.
This is a good point. I spent a long time in Arizona, and nobody there described themselves as "half Hispanic". Either you had enough Mexican heritage to call yourself Hispanic or you didn't, but nobody worried with the fraction.
And everyone talks like this is unique to the Stand-Your-Ground law. All that law says is that the police have to have reasonable suspicion that you didn't fire in self-defense to arrest you -- just like every other damn crime.
That's in fact what the law says, at least in Arizona: you cannot claim self-defense in a confrontation you yourself provoked, unless you've clearly stated your intent to withdraw from the confrontation and the other party doesn't let you.
I spent six years in Tucson and I know folks who have PV panels on their rooftops which provide most of their power. There are lots of urban areas that get a shitload of sunshine.
I agree, though -- solar isn't going to provide baseload power. It's not just coal and oil, though -- nuclear can, too. So can geothermal.
I'm able to do my job (high-performance computational simulations in physics) just fine without worrying about "hackers".
I buy shit off the internet, pay my bills, have cybersex with my girlfriend, play online games, and read the news -- no problems.
How are we "losing the war on hackers" if I can basically do all sorts of useful crap on the internet without having to greatly alter my patterns of behavior because of hackers?
I definitely am more worried about non-computer theft (which I've been the victim of quite a few times) than ONOZ HACKERS. Yes, there is computer crime, but it is really not that big of a deal.
The fact that an investigation will reveal that there is a reasonable suspicion that he is lying, the police will arrest him, and then the prosecutor will show beyond a reasonable doubt that he is lying.
This is how this works all the time. The fact that a self-defense claim is involved makes no more difference than, say, an alibi.
Well said. I mean mostly that at worst it's a problem with the local police and not with the law. If the Feds want to do an investigation they can, but as you say they need to not listen to Al Sharpton while doing it.
And the NBP's probably need to think before they advocate putting bounties on folks' heads...
Slashdot Mirror
That is true for healthy adults. It is not true for sick ones.
There was a case of somebody who was trying to back out of their garage, but had the car in the wrong gear and went forward instead... and wound up pinning a family member against the wall. They tried to hit the brakes as hard as they could but the car didn't stop, and wound up crushing their family member.
An investigation afterwards found that they'd been stomping on the *gas* pedal so hard that it was bent.
Honestly, if you don't know what the clutch (or the neutral position on an automatic) do, you shouldn't be driving.
I am hardly a "car guy", but I know that stomping on that little pedal on the left makes the engine stop making the wheels go.
I was taught in driver's ed that if you lose power there is still enough vacuum for a good hard brake to slow yourself down. Is this not true? Never had it happen to me so I've no experience.
Power steering isn't a necessity, especially at speed. My mom's power steering pump on a Mercury Sable (a land-barge) died while on twisty mountain roads in the Appalachians. She's 60 years old and five feet tall -- not exactly a paragon of physical strength. But she managed to get the damn thing home.
My car (about as cheap of a new car as you can get) has a governor on the engine: it won't go above (I think) 5500 RPM with the clutch in. It *will* go faster than that in gear, and it is up to the driver not to blow the engine up.
Then that's a problem with the push-button system, not with the pedals or the drivetrain. If someone wrecks because they can't turn their car off then the solution is maybe to make it so that they can turn their car off.
There's a difference between not doing anything and intentionally making a medical condition worse.
If you're having a severe asthma attack on the street, the decent thing for me to do would be to call an ambulance. Just walking on by is not decent, but it's also not a crime (unless I'm a medical provider). But blowing cigar smoke in your face hoping that I can make your condition worse so that you keel over? That's different.
I'm normally a pretty ardent "speech should not be illegal" type, but intentionally egging on someone who is depressed with the intent to provoke them into suicide ought to be a crime.
If I know you've got a potentially lethal peanut allergy, and I slip peanut oil into your food (something normally harmless) knowing that it will provoke a severe medical condition, then I ought to be held liable.
This is no different than intentionally exacerbating a mental illness, IMO: it's taking advantage of someone's medical condition to hurt them by doing something that, because of that condition, is uniquely able to harm them.
... it seems like if beaming a RF signal is all it takes to control the device, it's a terrible, terrible design.
If I were designing an implantable device that I wanted to be robust to attacks like this, I'd build in a two-stage security system. The first would be a piezoelectric element connected to an oscillator tuned to a particular frequency that acts as a switch for the radio receiver; only when exposed to a strong signal at the appropriate frequency will it even start *listening* for an RF signal. The advantage of this is that sound propagates quite strongly directly through tissue; it would be very difficult to trigger the receiver by just shouting at it, but fairly easy to just strike a tuning fork of the right frequency and place its base on top of the device, relying on the very strong mechanical coupling through the skin to amplify the transmission. If you want, make the frequency 440-A -- the goal here is not security through obscurity, but to require physical contact with the patient.
This turns on the RF receiver itself, which would then require authentication with some standard key-exchange method before agreeing to do whatever. The acoustic trigger is both there to serve as another "factor" for two-factor authentication and to guard against any sort of DoS attack by making the radio not even pay attention until some condition is met.
We'll make a trade: the police can insist that I follow their speed limits if those speed limits are set to the maximum speed that a well-maintained, maneuverable car can be driven safely under optimum conditions by a competent and alert driver.
This is an excellent post.
There was basically the biggest earthquake that the earth is capable of making, a tremendous tsunami that killed 20k people, and a 50-year-old power plant had some problems that added a couple of percent to the death toll? This is a tragedy, certainly, and we need to work on making reactors that don't do that. But it is hardly a condemnation of nuclear power.
That has nothing to do with probability theory. It turns out that you can predict how much wealth people have from one to the next very neatly. Failure comes in when you assume that the distribution is Gaussian. It's not; it's log-normal. The billionaire is no more an outlier in that distribution than a pauper.
Never played Mass Effect, but in Dragon Age there are a couple of gay male characters (Anders and Zevran come to mind).
Certainly -- I was speaking to the fact that many people have said that that law somehow makes it more difficult than it should be to arrest someone who has committed an act of violence and claimed self-defense.
This is a good point. I spent a long time in Arizona, and nobody there described themselves as "half Hispanic". Either you had enough Mexican heritage to call yourself Hispanic or you didn't, but nobody worried with the fraction.
And everyone talks like this is unique to the Stand-Your-Ground law. All that law says is that the police have to have reasonable suspicion that you didn't fire in self-defense to arrest you -- just like every other damn crime.
There is no legal obligation to do what the 911 operator tells you to -- or even the police, unless the request is being made in a particular way.
That's in fact what the law says, at least in Arizona: you cannot claim self-defense in a confrontation you yourself provoked, unless you've clearly stated your intent to withdraw from the confrontation and the other party doesn't let you.
The hilarity is that if the nerds really wanted to play havoc with US air travel, they could, and there's not a damn thing the TSA could do about it.
No, that's Mormon underwear.
I spent six years in Tucson and I know folks who have PV panels on their rooftops which provide most of their power. There are lots of urban areas that get a shitload of sunshine.
I agree, though -- solar isn't going to provide baseload power. It's not just coal and oil, though -- nuclear can, too. So can geothermal.
I'm able to do my job (high-performance computational simulations in physics) just fine without worrying about "hackers".
I buy shit off the internet, pay my bills, have cybersex with my girlfriend, play online games, and read the news -- no problems.
How are we "losing the war on hackers" if I can basically do all sorts of useful crap on the internet without having to greatly alter my patterns of behavior because of hackers?
I definitely am more worried about non-computer theft (which I've been the victim of quite a few times) than ONOZ HACKERS. Yes, there is computer crime, but it is really not that big of a deal.
The fact that an investigation will reveal that there is a reasonable suspicion that he is lying, the police will arrest him, and then the prosecutor will show beyond a reasonable doubt that he is lying.
This is how this works all the time. The fact that a self-defense claim is involved makes no more difference than, say, an alibi.
Well said. I mean mostly that at worst it's a problem with the local police and not with the law. If the Feds want to do an investigation they can, but as you say they need to not listen to Al Sharpton while doing it.
And the NBP's probably need to think before they advocate putting bounties on folks' heads...