You bring up some good points, however if the speculation of the article is anywhere near close to reality then I doubt if the subtle communication issues will come through. I'm probably a little pessimistic about these things.
I tend to be a pessimist, too. The concept is good though this early implementation will probably leave a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, it's still a worthwhile goal and I think that the implementations will only improve with time.
Thanks for the grammar correction.:)
You are a good sport. Given the location of the error, I could not resist. Sorry about that.
Somehow the act of looking at each other makes a meeting more effective. I missed the logic in that one.
There is more to a meeting than the words that are spoken. Gestures, body language, intonation, inflections, and even the timing of the spoken word all provide insight into the speaker's thoughts, emotions, and attitudes. While much of this can be conveyed by effective writing, often the speaker does not want to convey it. How often have you read "I am confident that we will be done on schedule -- but if I were to say this in person, I would be fidgeting and averting my vision."?
These sort of things tend to appeal to people who are inept with written communication.
If you are going to belittle the writing abilities of others, at least do so with a grammatically correct sentence. (Hint: "This sort of thing...")
The Russians monitored the radio signals (do you think that they were in on the "hoax"?). Ham radio operators monitored these same signals. Sailors on aircraft carriers watched the capsule plummet into the ocean. Amateur astronomers watched the progress of Apollo through their telescopes. Many people went to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch. If this was a conspiracy or hoax, it was the largest one that ever existed, enjoying the cooperation of millions of people throughout the world.
Testimonials: Really? Do you know "thousands of people involed in the lunar missions"?
Yes. I know all of them. I have subjected each and every one of them to polygraphs and injected them with "truth serum" to verify their stories. I have checked their DNA samples against the people that they claimed were their parents. I have gone through birth and death records to verify their identities.
But seriously, that's an absurd question. I don't have to personally know thousands of people to believe that they are telling the truth in interviews.
What would it take to convince you of the authenticity of the landings? Would NASA have to fly you to the moon and point at the footprints? You act like anything that can be faked must be assumed to be fake. That's absurd and it's not how science works.
In hindsight the moon landing resulted in... nothing. Oh and do not even start me about the Teflon Pan
An understanding of where the moon came from, its age, its composition, is not "nothing." The value of exploration, scientific discovery, and man's understanding of his place in the universe is not measured in Teflon pans.
By your standards Galileo, Copernicus, Stephen Hawking, Sir Isaac Newton, and countless others contributed "nothing" because their work did not result in consumer products. It must be a very sad world in which you live.
If we had actually landed on the moon. Even with all the coverups and "debunkings" that have come out to prove that we in fact went to the moon, there is little solid evidence to support such a preposterous notion.
You are a moron. There are thousands of photos, 382kg of lunar samples, testimony from thousands of people involved in the lunar missions, from astronauts to engineers at private firms that built the spacecraft. If that's not enough, have someone read to you from this link: Bad Astronomy
If you are still unconvinced, please get a vasectomy or your tubes tied (your doctor can tell you which procedure is appropriate for you).
If only we had continued our space program... When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, the space travel, moon colonization, and missions throughout the solar system seemed only reasonable assumptions given the progress we had made. We have yet to land a man on any extraterrestrial body other than the moon and even that has not been done in almost 30 years.
If no money (or other consideration) changes hands, the contract is not valid. 2 outta 3 ain't bad, but it also ain't a contract.
The opportunity to participate in the study, combined with the possibility of fame and fortune, is consideration. The compute time made available to the study is consideration in the other direction.
So, there is offer, acceptance, and consideration.
I just wanted to thank you for letting us all know. I'm immediately liquidating all of my stock and mutual fund holdings related to either of those firms.
Oh, and thanks for also giving us such insightful explanations of why you have chosen to boycott AMD and Transmeta. It's that kind of technical commentary and expertise that makes Slashdot worthwhile.
When the LP went away, the record companies used it as an excuse to stop providing those things that added value for record purchasers. No longer do you get full-sized posters. You do not get lavishly-illustrated 12"x12" books. Beautiful album cover art (ala Hipgnosis) has basically gone away. If you are really lucky, you get a 5"x5" CD insert with incorrectly transcribed lyrics.
At the same time, the record industry used the CD as an excuse to grossly inflate prices, citing the "higher cost" of producing CDs compared to LPs. Despite the fact that the average CD costs about as much to produce as a chocolate bar, the price has not gone down and has even gone up.
The piracy has been caused by the record companys' predatory pricing coupled with the deletion of almost anything that adds value for the purchaser. Now they want to sue to make sure that they are not forced back into providing value for the consumer's money. I would be playing "My Heart Bleeds For Thee", but they'd sue me for not paying a royalty.
There's nothing illegal about cheating SETI with fake results.
So you think that vandalizing their data and experiment is legal?
What are they gonna charge you with?
There is a license that forbids connection to their servers with software other than the client they supply. That's a breach of contract. It's also a potential "trespass against chattels." There are simple charges like vandalism that can be made as well as charging the cheaters with violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
There are plenty of legal avenues that could be used.
Yes, you inbred moron! Hitler was the one who called for the creation of a "people's car" in 1937 -- the VW Beetle. VW was originally operated by the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), a Nazi organization. Volkswagon supplied military vehicles to the Nazis. The list goes on and on. Try reading before you post.
What SETI needs to do is get verified e-mail addresses, real home phone numbers, real-world addresses, IP addresses, etc. and verify the data. If they catch a cheater, publish the information on the net, complain to the abuse department at the cheater's ISP, etc. They might even go so far as to launch a civil suit for damages, punitive and compensatory, against the cheater. Take those steps and cheating would be a fraction of what it is today.
What offends me about this is that some aesthetically-challenged geek is going to modify movies and television programs in a way that may be totally offensive to the show's creators, actors, and director. If, for a hypothetical example, Steven Spielberg chooses not to include Volkswagon cars in his movies because of VW's ties to the Nazis, some marketing dweeb should not be able to command that VWs be digitally added to scenes in Jurassic Park or The Color Purple.
This is wholly different than a creative person agreeing to a "product placement" deal with a corporation. This is butchering something after it has been created. While we can all laugh at this being done to shows that we consider less-than-artistic, I don't want to see quality programs (MASH, ER, The Sopranos, or even The Simpsons) subjected to these heavy-handed edits.
Before any of you Young Republicans start spewing the 'capitalism is good' speech, art is better. Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and Schindler's List won't be improved by digitally adding products to the scenes and their impact could be lessened on an entire generation.
Boy, that's sure to get you laid when you tell all the women how you scored a first post on Slashdot! Not to mention how it impresses the technical types on Slashdot who were stupidly reading the article while you were typing "fp."
Everything you argue is based on how many Agenda units can be sold.
Yes. That is the crux of my argument. You need to sell enough units to pay the cost for development, marketing, tech support, etc. And I do not believe that this unit can do that. If you are selling 5,000 units and your competitor is selling 1,000,000 units, his production cost is probably a fraction of what yours is for a comparable product, so that's yet another reason that sales volume is important.
And what do you mean by a "full-fledged personal computer"?
Something with a real keyboard (i.e., one you can type on), hard drive, and screen of 10" diagonal or larger with a minimum resolution of 640x480. That's pretty basic, but it is worlds apart from the average Palmtop for usefulness (yes, I own a Palm -- actually two of them).
That's my prediction: The Agenda will be dead in a year. Between Palm, Visor, and the big guns (HP with their Jornada, for example), the market has no room for the Agenda. Having Linux/X is no great advantage in a palmtop. Palmtops are used for things like tip calculators, unit conversion, to-do lists, notes, storing phone numbers, and the like. No one needs to port Apache to a palmtop. Telnetting? SSH? X Sessions? Are you people on drugs? It's a palmtop, not a full-fledged personal computer.
For each geek that actually envisions using this device like that, there are 10,000 people who will go out and buy a Palm or a Visor -- and be perfectly happy. The Agenda has no compelling feature that will sell it to the public at large -- unless you think that the public will flock to it because it runs an OS that they can't operate.
Why is it that every distro of Linux I have ever installed has the ugliest, most unreadable fonts ever conceived by man? Why must Linux versions of Netscape default to Hideous Serif in 3pt size? It's like Microsoft and Apple share some kind of patent that give them exclusive rights to attractive, readable fonts that default to a normal size.
Linux on the desktop is dead for several reasons, but the main reason is that the applications are always in catch-up mode. Whether we like it or not, Microsoft Office is the standard for business communication and planning (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). A business cannot afford to be incapable of communicating in those formats. You cannot call your clients and say "StarOffice crashes when I try to open the Word 2000 file you sent. Please save it off as Word 6.0 format file and resend it."
The second reason that Linux on the desktop is dead is that there is a dearth of commercial apps for it. Common browser plug-ins simply don't exist for Linux users. There is no Adobe Photoshop (no, GIMP is not the same -- the graphics world runs on Photoshop). Web sites are being designed around Internet Explorer (not something I like, but neither is it something I control) and there is no IE for Linux.
Most businesses need to know that they can interoperate with their suppliers and customers. They can't afford to be behind the curve waiting for the Linux community to release some sort-of-compatible-most-of-the-time application.
As a server, Linux is fine. The average server runs a few apps and that's it. They don't need to understand file formats from other apps on other operating systems. They don't need the latest and greatest browser plug-ins. It's a whole different world.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the author of the original article.
I'm not "anti-Linux" and, in fact, I run Mandrake 8.0. Having a humorous signature line that pokes fun at one of Linux's weak points hardly makes me "anti-Linux". Nice try.
This is the same cut & paste troll that he (and his little friends?) post every time the name BSD appears in a posting. I have to wonder if he is some pissed-off janitor that got let go from Walnut Creek or BSDi. Why else would he be that interested in bad-mouthing an OS? I mean, either you use *BSD or you don't, but if you don't, why would you get your panties that twisted every time it is mentioned? I just hope that he gets moderated down like usual.
You don't need to be Kreskin to predict your future. The handwriting is on the wall: You face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for you because you are brain dead. Things are looking very bad for you. As many of us are already aware, you continue to lose readers. Your anti-BSD spam flows like a sewer of human waste.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
You don't need to be Kreskin to predict your future. The handwriting is on the wall: You face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for you because you are brain dead. Things are looking very bad for you. As many of us are already aware, you continue to lose readers. Your anti-BSD spam flows like a sewer of human waste.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
What the document said was that, of all fatalities, 54% were helmeted. It also says that 67% of riders use helmets and that over 300 more lives would have been saved if all motorcyclists wore helmets.
And how do you think they arrived at the number "54%"?
They used police accident reports, coroners' reports, and hospital reports. That's why they used the term "reported helmet use rates".
But in all honesty, you can't state that the helmet saved your life. You can believe that it did, but unless you are willing to set up that whole scenario and take another trip over the bars, this time without the helmet, then we won't know.
I don't need to repeat the accident to know that the helmet saved my life. I have enough engineering know-how to look at the damage to that helmet and know that it prevented a fatal injury. It's like saying "you don't know that the parachute saved your life unless you make the same jump without one."
If you are still unconvinced about the benefits of helmets, consider the following:
1. In 1997, Texas and Arkansas repealed their mandatory helmet laws. Helmet use dropped from 97% to 66% and 52% respectively after the repeal. Fatalities went up by 31% in Texas and 21% in Arkansas.
2. Data from Louisiana, the first state to repeal and then readopt a full helmet law, showed a 30 percent reduction in fatalities (40 fewer deaths) during 1982, the first year after helmet law reenactment. The reduction occurred even though motorcycle registrations increased 6 percent during the year. The helmet use rate increased from roughly 50 percent to 96 percent.
3. Since 1989, six states (Oregon, Nebraska, Texas, Washington, California, and Maryland) have enacted helmet use laws that govern all motorcycle
occupants. In Oregon, there was a 33 percent reduction in motorcycle fatalities the year after its helmet law was re-enacted; Nebraska experienced a 32 percent reduction in the first year of its law; Texas experienced a 23 percent reduction; Washington experienced a 15 percent reduction; California experienced a 37 percent reduction; and Maryland experienced a 20 percent reduction.
Note that I am not advocating helmet laws, but the statistics make it abundantly clear that helmet use significantly reduces motorcycle accident fatailities. Let's not encourage someone to make the wrong decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to be a pessimist, too. The concept is good though this early implementation will probably leave a lot to be desired. Nonetheless, it's still a worthwhile goal and I think that the implementations will only improve with time.
Thanks for the grammar correction. :)
You are a good sport. Given the location of the error, I could not resist. Sorry about that.
There is more to a meeting than the words that are spoken. Gestures, body language, intonation, inflections, and even the timing of the spoken word all provide insight into the speaker's thoughts, emotions, and attitudes. While much of this can be conveyed by effective writing, often the speaker does not want to convey it. How often have you read "I am confident that we will be done on schedule -- but if I were to say this in person, I would be fidgeting and averting my vision."?
These sort of things tend to appeal to people who are inept with written communication.
If you are going to belittle the writing abilities of others, at least do so with a grammatically correct sentence. (Hint: "This sort of thing...")
So do we.
The Russians monitored the radio signals (do you think that they were in on the "hoax"?). Ham radio operators monitored these same signals. Sailors on aircraft carriers watched the capsule plummet into the ocean. Amateur astronomers watched the progress of Apollo through their telescopes. Many people went to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch. If this was a conspiracy or hoax, it was the largest one that ever existed, enjoying the cooperation of millions of people throughout the world.
Testimonials: Really? Do you know "thousands of people involed in the lunar missions"?
Yes. I know all of them. I have subjected each and every one of them to polygraphs and injected them with "truth serum" to verify their stories. I have checked their DNA samples against the people that they claimed were their parents. I have gone through birth and death records to verify their identities.
But seriously, that's an absurd question. I don't have to personally know thousands of people to believe that they are telling the truth in interviews.
What would it take to convince you of the authenticity of the landings? Would NASA have to fly you to the moon and point at the footprints? You act like anything that can be faked must be assumed to be fake. That's absurd and it's not how science works.
An understanding of where the moon came from, its age, its composition, is not "nothing." The value of exploration, scientific discovery, and man's understanding of his place in the universe is not measured in Teflon pans.
By your standards Galileo, Copernicus, Stephen Hawking, Sir Isaac Newton, and countless others contributed "nothing" because their work did not result in consumer products. It must be a very sad world in which you live.
You are a moron. There are thousands of photos, 382kg of lunar samples, testimony from thousands of people involved in the lunar missions, from astronauts to engineers at private firms that built the spacecraft. If that's not enough, have someone read to you from this link: Bad Astronomy
If you are still unconvinced, please get a vasectomy or your tubes tied (your doctor can tell you which procedure is appropriate for you).
If only we had continued our space program... When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, the space travel, moon colonization, and missions throughout the solar system seemed only reasonable assumptions given the progress we had made. We have yet to land a man on any extraterrestrial body other than the moon and even that has not been done in almost 30 years.
The opportunity to participate in the study, combined with the possibility of fame and fortune, is consideration. The compute time made available to the study is consideration in the other direction.
So, there is offer, acceptance, and consideration.
I just wanted to thank you for letting us all know. I'm immediately liquidating all of my stock and mutual fund holdings related to either of those firms.
Oh, and thanks for also giving us such insightful explanations of why you have chosen to boycott AMD and Transmeta. It's that kind of technical commentary and expertise that makes Slashdot worthwhile.
At the same time, the record industry used the CD as an excuse to grossly inflate prices, citing the "higher cost" of producing CDs compared to LPs. Despite the fact that the average CD costs about as much to produce as a chocolate bar, the price has not gone down and has even gone up.
The piracy has been caused by the record companys' predatory pricing coupled with the deletion of almost anything that adds value for the purchaser. Now they want to sue to make sure that they are not forced back into providing value for the consumer's money. I would be playing "My Heart Bleeds For Thee", but they'd sue me for not paying a royalty.
So you think that vandalizing their data and experiment is legal?
What are they gonna charge you with?
There is a license that forbids connection to their servers with software other than the client they supply. That's a breach of contract. It's also a potential "trespass against chattels." There are simple charges like vandalism that can be made as well as charging the cheaters with violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
There are plenty of legal avenues that could be used.
Yes, you inbred moron! Hitler was the one who called for the creation of a "people's car" in 1937 -- the VW Beetle. VW was originally operated by the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), a Nazi organization. Volkswagon supplied military vehicles to the Nazis. The list goes on and on. Try reading before you post.
What SETI needs to do is get verified e-mail addresses, real home phone numbers, real-world addresses, IP addresses, etc. and verify the data. If they catch a cheater, publish the information on the net, complain to the abuse department at the cheater's ISP, etc. They might even go so far as to launch a civil suit for damages, punitive and compensatory, against the cheater. Take those steps and cheating would be a fraction of what it is today.
This is wholly different than a creative person agreeing to a "product placement" deal with a corporation. This is butchering something after it has been created. While we can all laugh at this being done to shows that we consider less-than-artistic, I don't want to see quality programs (MASH, ER, The Sopranos, or even The Simpsons) subjected to these heavy-handed edits.
Before any of you Young Republicans start spewing the 'capitalism is good' speech, art is better. Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and Schindler's List won't be improved by digitally adding products to the scenes and their impact could be lessened on an entire generation.
Boy, that's sure to get you laid when you tell all the women how you scored a first post on Slashdot! Not to mention how it impresses the technical types on Slashdot who were stupidly reading the article while you were typing "fp."
Yes. That is the crux of my argument. You need to sell enough units to pay the cost for development, marketing, tech support, etc. And I do not believe that this unit can do that. If you are selling 5,000 units and your competitor is selling 1,000,000 units, his production cost is probably a fraction of what yours is for a comparable product, so that's yet another reason that sales volume is important.
And what do you mean by a "full-fledged personal computer"?
Something with a real keyboard (i.e., one you can type on), hard drive, and screen of 10" diagonal or larger with a minimum resolution of 640x480. That's pretty basic, but it is worlds apart from the average Palmtop for usefulness (yes, I own a Palm -- actually two of them).
For each geek that actually envisions using this device like that, there are 10,000 people who will go out and buy a Palm or a Visor -- and be perfectly happy. The Agenda has no compelling feature that will sell it to the public at large -- unless you think that the public will flock to it because it runs an OS that they can't operate.
Signatures just prove that a package came with the distribution, not that the code was written by someone talented or intelligent.
Why is it that every distro of Linux I have ever installed has the ugliest, most unreadable fonts ever conceived by man? Why must Linux versions of Netscape default to Hideous Serif in 3pt size? It's like Microsoft and Apple share some kind of patent that give them exclusive rights to attractive, readable fonts that default to a normal size.
The second reason that Linux on the desktop is dead is that there is a dearth of commercial apps for it. Common browser plug-ins simply don't exist for Linux users. There is no Adobe Photoshop (no, GIMP is not the same -- the graphics world runs on Photoshop). Web sites are being designed around Internet Explorer (not something I like, but neither is it something I control) and there is no IE for Linux.
Most businesses need to know that they can interoperate with their suppliers and customers. They can't afford to be behind the curve waiting for the Linux community to release some sort-of-compatible-most-of-the-time application.
As a server, Linux is fine. The average server runs a few apps and that's it. They don't need to understand file formats from other apps on other operating systems. They don't need the latest and greatest browser plug-ins. It's a whole different world.
Sorry, but I have to agree with the author of the original article.
I'm not "anti-Linux" and, in fact, I run Mandrake 8.0. Having a humorous signature line that pokes fun at one of Linux's weak points hardly makes me "anti-Linux". Nice try.
This is the same cut & paste troll that he (and his little friends?) post every time the name BSD appears in a posting. I have to wonder if he is some pissed-off janitor that got let go from Walnut Creek or BSDi. Why else would he be that interested in bad-mouthing an OS? I mean, either you use *BSD or you don't, but if you don't, why would you get your panties that twisted every time it is mentioned? I just hope that he gets moderated down like usual.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
Slashdot readers stated that there are 7000 nearly identical posts of your anti-BSD spam. How many people actually believe it? Let's see. The number of intelligent Slashdot posts versus your anti-BSD spam is roughly in ratio of 500 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000*500 = 3,500,000 Slashdot users who are annoyed by your idiotic spam. A recent article put your spam at about 80 percent on the nonsense scale. Therefore there are many thousands of Slashdot readers who know that you are full of crap. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts stating so.
Due to the trouble you have thinking, abysmal IQ test scores and so on, you will be lucky to go out into the business world and land a job at McDonalds.
All major surveys show that your anti-BSD spam has steadily gotten more annoying. You are very sick and your long term survival prospects are very dim -- especially if your identity becomes known. If you are to survive at all it will be among other idiots, trolls, and the mentally ill. Interest in your anti-BSD spam continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could revive it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, you are completely brain dead.
Then read on...
What the document said was that, of all fatalities, 54% were helmeted. It also says that 67% of riders use helmets and that over 300 more lives would have been saved if all motorcyclists wore helmets.
And how do you think they arrived at the number "54%"?
They used police accident reports, coroners' reports, and hospital reports. That's why they used the term "reported helmet use rates".
But in all honesty, you can't state that the helmet saved your life. You can believe that it did, but unless you are willing to set up that whole scenario and take another trip over the bars, this time without the helmet, then we won't know.
I don't need to repeat the accident to know that the helmet saved my life. I have enough engineering know-how to look at the damage to that helmet and know that it prevented a fatal injury. It's like saying "you don't know that the parachute saved your life unless you make the same jump without one."
If you are still unconvinced about the benefits of helmets, consider the following:
1. In 1997, Texas and Arkansas repealed their mandatory helmet laws. Helmet use dropped from 97% to 66% and 52% respectively after the repeal. Fatalities went up by 31% in Texas and 21% in Arkansas.
2. Data from Louisiana, the first state to repeal and then readopt a full helmet law, showed a 30 percent reduction in fatalities (40 fewer deaths) during 1982, the first year after helmet law reenactment. The reduction occurred even though motorcycle registrations increased 6 percent during the year. The helmet use rate increased from roughly 50 percent to 96 percent.
3. Since 1989, six states (Oregon, Nebraska, Texas, Washington, California, and Maryland) have enacted helmet use laws that govern all motorcycle occupants. In Oregon, there was a 33 percent reduction in motorcycle fatalities the year after its helmet law was re-enacted; Nebraska experienced a 32 percent reduction in the first year of its law; Texas experienced a 23 percent reduction; Washington experienced a 15 percent reduction; California experienced a 37 percent reduction; and Maryland experienced a 20 percent reduction.
Note that I am not advocating helmet laws, but the statistics make it abundantly clear that helmet use significantly reduces motorcycle accident fatailities. Let's not encourage someone to make the wrong decision.