What the GP roughly paraphrases (but gets key details of wrong), is the basic principles of felony murder. The doctrine of felony murder simply holds that if someone dies while you are in the process of committing an inherently dangerous felony (i.e. a violent one), whether that death is deliberate or accidental, you are guilty of murder for that death. In this case, what hurts you because of your friend's felony murder is that the doctrine extends to all co-conspirators in the original felony.
It's a highly controversial doctrine, because in many states, it carries the death penalty, and it requires no intent to kill, and it requires little to no foreseeability or only tenuous causation. A more extreme example would be that you would be guilty of felony murder if someone got scared and had a heart attack during the robbery.
Knowledge of the gun has absolutely nothing to do with it -- just willing participation in a conspiracy to commit or in the commission of a dangerous felony.
if my wife leaves for the grocery store. she asked me before she left if i wanted anything but i didn't notice we were out of orange juice until after she left. i know she quite possibly is still driving when i text her, to not forget the orange juice. however, i very much don't expect her to check the text message while she is still driving, i expect her to check it after she reaches the store.
so how am i negligent for texting someone that i know is driving? the text message doesn't need instant attention.
The key there is that you "very much don't expect her to check the text message while she is still driving." If you don't have reason to believe she will act dangerously as a result of your actions, then if she causes an accident by acting in an unforeseeable way, then you are not liable. You would have to know or a reasonably objective person would have to have reason to believe that she would act irresponsibly to be responsible as well.
Does this mean that liquor companies/distributors/salespeople/bar tenders will now get in trouble if they sell alcoholic beverages to someone that might drive while under the influence of this alcohol?
Yes. It's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop>dram shop liability. It's a little more strict than "might drive while under the influence of alcohol," but in essence, you are not allowed in any state (as far as I am aware) to continue serving people who are visible intoxicated. Some states actually criminalize this as "serving intoxicated people." In most states, this requires the person to be just blatantly hammered first, but not all. Some states also extend dram shop liability to social hosts (e.g. people holding a party).
It's clearly not the fault of the driver for answering the text while driving...
The judge doesn't say or even imply that. The sender's liability is merely in addition to the driver's liability, and most juries would probably apportion the majority of the liability on the driver if in a jurisdiction in which they don't simply have joint liability.
Also, since that opinion does not seem to be part of the decision it is not tested in court so is not actually part of the law, just harder to throw out such a case as having no merit. The implications of such a law might be a little too much as it would be risky to text or even call someone with directions if they were lost.
Well, the statement is just dicta, but it's pretty much a straightforward application of negligence. I don't think there's anyone who has passed torts who would find the statement all that controversial in principle (though you can always quibble the facts of any individual case).
There will likely never be a situation where the non-driving texter can be held responsible. Burden of proof will always be on the plaintiff, and proving that the non-driver knew that the driver would read his or her texts while driving will almost always be a legal impossibility.
You're right, if there's only a single message involved before the accident.
You're very, very wrong if a conservation develops between the two parties. Then the only burden involved is showing that the one party knew the other was driving at the time, which may be easy to tell from the conversation itself or from other evidence (knowing the other's schedule, having sent the driver to grocery store, the driver is on their way to the other party, etc.). If they did know that, and they receive a reply, then they have prima facie evidence that any further messages create a hazard.
Oh, and there's the question of whether or not this is an acknowledged habit, which could be picked up by subpoenaing other conversations between the two.
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
And you're not liable unless you have good reason to believe that the person you're texting isn't smart enough not to answer immediately. The harm has to be foreseeable, after all.
Would seem that any action that distracts a driver would then be fair game.
Yes. If and only if, your actions were negligent (or worse) in doing so. Negligence requires that your actions be a proximate cause of the harm and that the results be reasonably foreseeable.
In the hypothetical laid out by the judge, if you knew the person (a) was a driving AND (b) had a propensity to recklessly respond to messages, then you in fact would bear some responsibility for calling someone with those properties in spite of the known risk in doing so. That is, unless the cost of not contacting the driver was greater than the cost of the harm times the risk of it occurring or unless some affirmative defense like necessity applies. Etc. Etc.
There's nothing especially controversial from a legal standpoint about the argument he's making -- it's a straightforward application of the criteria for negligence.
Your problem was your attitude and your adrenaline level, not your speed.
Well, true, but I find the two are highly correlated in other drivers as well. The most aggressive drivers on the road are almost always the fastest. It is possible to be a safe, fast driver, but much of what motivates people to drive so fast in the first place plays into being unsafe -- impatience, competitiveness, disregard of the the law "because I know better," thrill seeking, etc.
Missed me by *that* much. Not much you, me, or Nissan automaton can do about things like that. Common occurence in this neck of the woods, too. People constanly hit or get hit by deer around here.
Yeah, I know. Same in my neck of the woods too. I lost a side mirror once to a deer that bumped into me from the side when it bolted in the same direction I was traveling and then swerved with me, when I tried to slow down and give it some room. I also danged near got killed by a 8-12 point buck crossing a highway in the fog. One of the scariest moments in my life.
I wonder how they're going to deal with that too. A driverless cars's lidar system should be able to spot a deer much better than a human can, but how are they going to filter for false positives?
Sounds like you've been drinking the "Super Speeder" kool-aid popular with grandstanding politicians and fine-happy courts, though. Sure you're not a cop?:-)
Of course not. And you can trust this, because cops can't lie when people ask them if they're a cop. Look it up, it's on the internet.
So if it says yes you can drive the car from Alaska to Russia. BMW could be brought to court under the law for making false calms about it's car capabilities.
I'm pretty sure that the AI system won't be advanced enough to even let you ask such a question and get a meaningful response.
Oh, and I have it on good authority that (as I always suspected) the "consulting my manager" theatre means "putting the kettle on in preparation for a celebratory brew" (maybe in the US it is more likely to be turning on the coffee machine)... or maybe headbutting the wall a few times if the stubborn customer has insisted on actually paying for the car, thus depriving you of the finance company commission.
Pretty much. When I bought my car, I did two things that help change the pressure of the situation immensely. I brought a friend and a book. The book came out when the guy pulled the whole "let me talk with my manager" bit, so that it was obvious he wasn't going to get me to stew in my juices in isolation, and the friend came in handy by letting me know the guy was just talking about sports to another salesperson after wandering around a bit and spotting him.
Now that you are older, aren't you going to die in the nearer term future than younger persons? I would think that would cause you to want to speed up, since you don't have that much time left, and every minute wasted on the road is another minute you aren't going to be spending with family and friends.
Pfft, no. See, I used to make what's about a 75 minute drive at the speed limit every weekend to see my family. The difference between driving at the speed limit or driving 10-15 MPH over was only about 10 minutes or so. The difference in how long it takes me to get home from work or vice versa at those speeds is at most The risk of injury or tickets isn't worth that. Those minutes can be taken out of other things that don't cost my safety, and I think my loved ones would appreciate me still being around to see them.
But let's not pretend that the desperate *need* to spend as much time with your family is what motivates speeding. It's just impatience. Well, I've got plenty of that too, which is why I look forward to a time in which my attention can be spent on better things than driving -- that horrible mix of tedium combined with the need for alertness to keep from getting killed by some other driver.
If I go the speed limit in my area, I'll get rear ended. The speed limts in my area's highway are set 10mph lower than average people actually go, seemingly put in as a way for cops to rake in cash.
The highway speeds in my state are pretty much the same as the rest of the country as far as I've seen when driving across it: 65-70 MPH on long interstates between cities, 55 MPH on interstates in urban areas, and 45 MPH on "highways" that actually have businesses along the side of them. I've been in 23 states, and I haven't really seen any that deviate much from that -- except mountainous areas and parts of Utah (where it's 80 MPH). The difference isn't the posted numbers; the difference is the enforcement and the driving culture.
Where I live, no one is going to actually hit your car for driving the speed limit. They'll just get on your tail and ride you. As long as you stay out of the left lane, that's probably all you'll ever see. If you don't, you may get flashing headlights or people zipping around you and cutting you off on the way back into the lane. After all, they don't really want to get into an accident either, much less one where they're at fault; they just want to express their displeasure in a passive-aggressive way.
So, I think your fears are a bit overblown there. Stop giving into peer pressure. Or at least, minimize the amount you do give in. I do about 5 over in the right lane, and I only get tailgated maybe about 2-3 times a day. I'm on cruise control, so I just ignore them and get on with my life, and they usually pass eventually.
All these cars will religiously follow the speed limit, boxing up roads and not permitting those of us who are in a rush to get around them. The road rage will cause accidents, I guarantee that.
Learn to let go, then. The problem isn't the law-abiding the drivers. It's the high strung ones.
I've driven in states where the standard is to speed heavily, and I've driven in states where the standard is to go the speed limit. In my experience, there's a lot less road rage when people are going the speed limit. There's less variation in speed when everyone is following the same standard, which means less people tailgating, less lane changes to pass, and less people cutting each other off.
For me, eliminating the "must get there quicker" mentality sharply decreased my aggression when driving. I am a *much* better driver now than I was when I was younger and treating the highway like a personal race track and getting frustrated when someone got in the way of going the speed I wanted to go. Being forced to go the speed limit taught me to chill and let go of the little irritations that are the seeds of road rage.
So, I say bring on the fleet of law-abiding autonomous vehicles. Maybe it'll teach the rest of you to cool your frigging heads. (And to get off my lawn!)
I only have backspace go back in history when I use MSIE *all* other browsers behave correctly and don't map the back button to backspace.
I just tested this in the most recent versions of Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and both go back a page when you hit Backspace without focus on a typeable element. It is super annoying.
I don't know who modded the parent a troll, but he's got a good point. These things have a screen only 5 inches by 7.5 or so, with a resolution (rotated) of 1024 x 768. That's pathetic for reading something like a textbook that you're studying from.
I surf the web on my phone, but I wouldn't want to study calculus or read caselaw on it.
You only read half of the statement, missing "or behave stupidly".
I took it to mean in the general case, building on "be stupid" rather than contrasting with it. My mistake.
This is not a unique thing to English speaking countries, and I think the leaks from Snowden make this abundantly clear. Mix with information regarding Gladios and you have a longer running world wide issue.
True, but it's happening more rapidly (or perhaps more visibly to me) in English-speaking countries than it is in the Scandinavian and Germanic countries, for example. It also causes me more grief, because they are the easiest places to acclimate to if I ever felt that America has drifted so far from my values that I can't call it home anymore, since I don't have to learn a new language, and we share a lot of pop-culture and general values. I don't think that I'm ever likely to just give up and move, but I feel much more comfortable having a Plan B even if I don't intend to use it.
The way to fix it is for people to stop being duped and admit that bad people will do bad things if given the tools. Control and monitoring is essential, not blind faith.
Well, of course. I wholeheartedly agree. I just think in this case, it's best to go with "trust, but verify" over "the sky is falling." It might be that self-driving cars are a danger to future society, but I'd rather us work towards preventing them from becoming that than from happening than preventing the cars themselves from happening.
None of those are examples in which the federal government heavily resisted state autonomy to make such a decision, with the exception of the Fugitive Slave Act. Thus, none of them are things done in the name of state's rights.
These are the ones that pop into my head, but I'm sure I could list of similar examples all day long. State law has been at the forefront of just about every major civil rights issue in our nation's history.
They've also been at the far other side. Many of the Southern states refused to ratify the 19th Amendment and led the charge against women's suffrage; several never even signed it until the late 20th century. Many states (also again in the South) have amended their own constitution to deny gays the right to marry.
Do we even need to talk about slavery and race relations? Except maybe to acknowledge the nadir of American race relations post-Reconstruction? How about California's "Foreign Miner's Tax" of 1850 or the "Anti-Coolie Law" of 1862 to go after the Chinese? (19th century California's hate-on for the Chinese is frequently forgotten.) Or how about their "Greaser Act" against Mexicans from 1855?
You also have wonders like Texas leading the way in 1883 on the convict-lease system to use prisoners as slave labor. You know, the chain-gangs of old.
In order for a person's point to be stupid the person must also be stupid or behave stupidly.
Not necessarily. Smart people can believe dumb things. Look at Linus Pauling turning total crank over vitamins despite an absolutely brilliant career that earned him two Nobel prizes, or how many wonderfully, quotably wrong things Lord Kelvin said about the future of physics.
Heck, smart people are the *best* at defending dumb ideas because they turn all the tools of rationality to rationalization, and they have come to expect that they are usually *right* in any given scenario. Plus, smart people are more susceptible to cognitive bias.
So, let me say that despite strongly disagreeing with the sentiment that we should all fear self-driving cars as a future tool of oppression and state monitoring, I don't think you're an idiot. I just think you're being a little paranoid and that you (perhaps deliberately) misinterpreted the top post in this discussion which said that he was hoping he could take his car when incapacitated to twist his words into a more short-sighted statement for the purposes of painting a nightmare scenario in total contrast to what he was wishing for, which was to legally be able to do so.
I will state that I try to avoid it, but I am human and like all humans can have emotion in debate.
Yeah, me too. I got up to high on my horse in my first reply for the same reason. Sorry for the escalation of tone.
You know, I'm not really advocating for the state. I'm actually angry almost to the point of fatigue over the growth of the police state apparatus in English-speaking countries every time I think about it. I just really, really hate driving and have high hopes for a technology that will remove the tedious and life-threatening chore from my day.
I'm actually fairly certain terrorists don't blow stuff up during Ramadan.
Actually,they do. It often causes more moderate Muslims a lot of outrage, but militants often think that attacking during a holy day mean's that their actions will be more blessed.
Episcopalians and Catholics on the other hand might as well belong to the same religion.. Oh wait, they do. Ironic how the kernel of your post was about ignorance.
Since the Episcopal Church is essentially the US version of the Anglican Church, I think may Irish people would take strong objection to the notion that they are the same religion. Like practitioners of Hindu and Islam on the Indian subcontinent, many Irish Protestants and Catholics have fresh, living memory of whole communities doing violence to their neighbors over it. You still don't wear the wrong colors in the wrong pub there.
This unlike Irish pagans who have been mostly ignored and merely scoffed at, with rare exceptions. Frankly being assumed to be a pagan would basically to have been assumed to be largely harmless, unlike 3 of the 4 other faiths discussed above (not that Hindu nationalists haven't committed horrible violence either, but they don't usually make terrorism watchlists in the West).
So, I wouldn't be so quick to accuse of ignorance, if you lump all Christian faiths together and assume they see each other as all the same. The metaphor may have not been perfect, but it was far better than your alternative.
That is why states need to have a majority of the power. It essentially makes them 50 counties with unifying treaties. The closer the government is to the people, the more likely that those people are under a rule that they agree with.
Tell that to black people, circa 60+ years ago. Our federal system has done much to blunt or prevent the worst of tyranny of the majority over its lifetime.
Calling someone's point "trolling", "FUD", and "ridiculous" matches the definition of ad hominem perfectly.
I'm afraid that it doesn't. It goes directly to the argument and not "to the person," which is what ad hominem means. An ad hominem attack says that the source of the argument makes the argument itself invalid. Calling the argument itself "ridiculous FUD" is against the argument itself.
On reflection, an accusation of "trolling" might be, though. So will concede the point on that.
I guess you missed that both were fantasies in your zeal to defend the great leader, government and it's abuses, or what ever else you decide you were defending.
I'd point out the hypocrisy in this statement coupled with your earlier complaint, but I'll leave to the reader to work it out.
I have yet to see a law that excludes people from liability in a self driving car. There are still manual controls. I never claimed that the driver was a passenger, I claimed that even if the car was self driving they are currently still a legal driver.
You haven't seen such a law yet. Not a surprise since we don't even have any vehicles on the market at this point.
Now if you want to start citing laws that have been passed that absolve a driver of responsibility when the auto-pilot turns... Oh wait, you probably can cite no law on the books so I won't wait.
No, and I can't cite laws on responsible use of teleporters or home cloning tanks either. But that's because the law is almost never written in anticipation of technology.
Yeah, there is absolutely no precedent set for this is there? Wholly fuck go read a Newspaper or something, then cram your ad hominem right on up your asshole.
You are tossing around fantasy land scenarios to scare people about cars. Tracking and spying on people is one thing, but locking them in a box and whisking them away to somewhere they don't want to be preys on several common phobias. No one would stand for it -- not at least until the frog's been warming in the pot for a much, much longer period of time.
(P.S. I don't think you actually know what an ad hominem attack is. Google it.)
Is this really going to happen...Specially in crowded traffic...These ideas are too far fetched..
Most crowded traffic is the result of impatient drivers with poor reflexes constantly riding up the driver in front of them and then having to slam to a stop when the car in front of them brakes. This propagates backwards and creates traffic waves. Interestingly, all it takes is one driver to put an end to stop-and-go traffic.
Now imagine that 5% of the cars on the road were replaced with driverless cars that not only give the car in front of them plenty of room but also signal ahead to other driverless and safety assisted cars (e.g. ones with predictive braking) what they are about to do. Imagine that these cars didn't rubberneck or get angry and tailgate or cut people off without signaling first, because they don't have emotional humans driving them.
Imagine a world with no traffic jams thanks to driverless cars.
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What the GP roughly paraphrases (but gets key details of wrong), is the basic principles of felony murder. The doctrine of felony murder simply holds that if someone dies while you are in the process of committing an inherently dangerous felony (i.e. a violent one), whether that death is deliberate or accidental, you are guilty of murder for that death. In this case, what hurts you because of your friend's felony murder is that the doctrine extends to all co-conspirators in the original felony.
It's a highly controversial doctrine, because in many states, it carries the death penalty, and it requires no intent to kill, and it requires little to no foreseeability or only tenuous causation. A more extreme example would be that you would be guilty of felony murder if someone got scared and had a heart attack during the robbery.
Knowledge of the gun has absolutely nothing to do with it -- just willing participation in a conspiracy to commit or in the commission of a dangerous felony.
if my wife leaves for the grocery store. she asked me before she left if i wanted anything but i didn't notice we were out of orange juice until after she left. i know she quite possibly is still driving when i text her, to not forget the orange juice. however, i very much don't expect her to check the text message while she is still driving, i expect her to check it after she reaches the store.
so how am i negligent for texting someone that i know is driving? the text message doesn't need instant attention.
The key there is that you "very much don't expect her to check the text message while she is still driving." If you don't have reason to believe she will act dangerously as a result of your actions, then if she causes an accident by acting in an unforeseeable way, then you are not liable. You would have to know or a reasonably objective person would have to have reason to believe that she would act irresponsibly to be responsible as well.
Does this mean that liquor companies/distributors/salespeople/bar tenders will now get in trouble if they sell alcoholic beverages to someone that might drive while under the influence of this alcohol?
Yes. It's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop>dram shop liability. It's a little more strict than "might drive while under the influence of alcohol," but in essence, you are not allowed in any state (as far as I am aware) to continue serving people who are visible intoxicated. Some states actually criminalize this as "serving intoxicated people." In most states, this requires the person to be just blatantly hammered first, but not all. Some states also extend dram shop liability to social hosts (e.g. people holding a party).
It's clearly not the fault of the driver for answering the text while driving...
The judge doesn't say or even imply that. The sender's liability is merely in addition to the driver's liability, and most juries would probably apportion the majority of the liability on the driver if in a jurisdiction in which they don't simply have joint liability.
Also, since that opinion does not seem to be part of the decision it is not tested in court so is not actually part of the law, just harder to throw out such a case as having no merit. The implications of such a law might be a little too much as it would be risky to text or even call someone with directions if they were lost.
Well, the statement is just dicta, but it's pretty much a straightforward application of negligence. I don't think there's anyone who has passed torts who would find the statement all that controversial in principle (though you can always quibble the facts of any individual case).
There will likely never be a situation where the non-driving texter can be held responsible. Burden of proof will always be on the plaintiff, and proving that the non-driver knew that the driver would read his or her texts while driving will almost always be a legal impossibility.
You're right, if there's only a single message involved before the accident.
You're very, very wrong if a conservation develops between the two parties. Then the only burden involved is showing that the one party knew the other was driving at the time, which may be easy to tell from the conversation itself or from other evidence (knowing the other's schedule, having sent the driver to grocery store, the driver is on their way to the other party, etc.). If they did know that, and they receive a reply, then they have prima facie evidence that any further messages create a hazard.
Oh, and there's the question of whether or not this is an acknowledged habit, which could be picked up by subpoenaing other conversations between the two.
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
And you're not liable unless you have good reason to believe that the person you're texting isn't smart enough not to answer immediately. The harm has to be foreseeable, after all.
Would seem that any action that distracts a driver would then be fair game.
Yes. If and only if, your actions were negligent (or worse) in doing so. Negligence requires that your actions be a proximate cause of the harm and that the results be reasonably foreseeable.
In the hypothetical laid out by the judge, if you knew the person (a) was a driving AND (b) had a propensity to recklessly respond to messages, then you in fact would bear some responsibility for calling someone with those properties in spite of the known risk in doing so. That is, unless the cost of not contacting the driver was greater than the cost of the harm times the risk of it occurring or unless some affirmative defense like necessity applies. Etc. Etc.
There's nothing especially controversial from a legal standpoint about the argument he's making -- it's a straightforward application of the criteria for negligence.
Your problem was your attitude and your adrenaline level, not your speed.
Well, true, but I find the two are highly correlated in other drivers as well. The most aggressive drivers on the road are almost always the fastest. It is possible to be a safe, fast driver, but much of what motivates people to drive so fast in the first place plays into being unsafe -- impatience, competitiveness, disregard of the the law "because I know better," thrill seeking, etc.
Missed me by *that* much. Not much you, me, or Nissan automaton can do about things like that. Common occurence in this neck of the woods, too. People constanly hit or get hit by deer around here.
Yeah, I know. Same in my neck of the woods too. I lost a side mirror once to a deer that bumped into me from the side when it bolted in the same direction I was traveling and then swerved with me, when I tried to slow down and give it some room. I also danged near got killed by a 8-12 point buck crossing a highway in the fog. One of the scariest moments in my life.
I wonder how they're going to deal with that too. A driverless cars's lidar system should be able to spot a deer much better than a human can, but how are they going to filter for false positives?
Sounds like you've been drinking the "Super Speeder" kool-aid popular with grandstanding politicians and fine-happy courts, though. Sure you're not a cop? :-)
Of course not. And you can trust this, because cops can't lie when people ask them if they're a cop. Look it up, it's on the internet.
So if it says yes you can drive the car from Alaska to Russia. BMW could be brought to court under the law for making false calms about it's car capabilities.
I'm pretty sure that the AI system won't be advanced enough to even let you ask such a question and get a meaningful response.
Oh, and I have it on good authority that (as I always suspected) the "consulting my manager" theatre means "putting the kettle on in preparation for a celebratory brew" (maybe in the US it is more likely to be turning on the coffee machine)... or maybe headbutting the wall a few times if the stubborn customer has insisted on actually paying for the car, thus depriving you of the finance company commission.
Pretty much. When I bought my car, I did two things that help change the pressure of the situation immensely. I brought a friend and a book. The book came out when the guy pulled the whole "let me talk with my manager" bit, so that it was obvious he wasn't going to get me to stew in my juices in isolation, and the friend came in handy by letting me know the guy was just talking about sports to another salesperson after wandering around a bit and spotting him.
Now that you are older, aren't you going to die in the nearer term future than younger persons? I would think that would cause you to want to speed up, since you don't have that much time left, and every minute wasted on the road is another minute you aren't going to be spending with family and friends.
Pfft, no. See, I used to make what's about a 75 minute drive at the speed limit every weekend to see my family. The difference between driving at the speed limit or driving 10-15 MPH over was only about 10 minutes or so. The difference in how long it takes me to get home from work or vice versa at those speeds is at most The risk of injury or tickets isn't worth that. Those minutes can be taken out of other things that don't cost my safety, and I think my loved ones would appreciate me still being around to see them.
But let's not pretend that the desperate *need* to spend as much time with your family is what motivates speeding. It's just impatience. Well, I've got plenty of that too, which is why I look forward to a time in which my attention can be spent on better things than driving -- that horrible mix of tedium combined with the need for alertness to keep from getting killed by some other driver.
If I go the speed limit in my area, I'll get rear ended. The speed limts in my area's highway are set 10mph lower than average people actually go, seemingly put in as a way for cops to rake in cash.
The highway speeds in my state are pretty much the same as the rest of the country as far as I've seen when driving across it: 65-70 MPH on long interstates between cities, 55 MPH on interstates in urban areas, and 45 MPH on "highways" that actually have businesses along the side of them. I've been in 23 states, and I haven't really seen any that deviate much from that -- except mountainous areas and parts of Utah (where it's 80 MPH). The difference isn't the posted numbers; the difference is the enforcement and the driving culture.
Where I live, no one is going to actually hit your car for driving the speed limit. They'll just get on your tail and ride you. As long as you stay out of the left lane, that's probably all you'll ever see. If you don't, you may get flashing headlights or people zipping around you and cutting you off on the way back into the lane. After all, they don't really want to get into an accident either, much less one where they're at fault; they just want to express their displeasure in a passive-aggressive way.
So, I think your fears are a bit overblown there. Stop giving into peer pressure. Or at least, minimize the amount you do give in. I do about 5 over in the right lane, and I only get tailgated maybe about 2-3 times a day. I'm on cruise control, so I just ignore them and get on with my life, and they usually pass eventually.
All these cars will religiously follow the speed limit, boxing up roads and not permitting those of us who are in a rush to get around them. The road rage will cause accidents, I guarantee that.
Learn to let go, then. The problem isn't the law-abiding the drivers. It's the high strung ones.
I've driven in states where the standard is to speed heavily, and I've driven in states where the standard is to go the speed limit. In my experience, there's a lot less road rage when people are going the speed limit. There's less variation in speed when everyone is following the same standard, which means less people tailgating, less lane changes to pass, and less people cutting each other off.
For me, eliminating the "must get there quicker" mentality sharply decreased my aggression when driving. I am a *much* better driver now than I was when I was younger and treating the highway like a personal race track and getting frustrated when someone got in the way of going the speed I wanted to go. Being forced to go the speed limit taught me to chill and let go of the little irritations that are the seeds of road rage.
So, I say bring on the fleet of law-abiding autonomous vehicles. Maybe it'll teach the rest of you to cool your frigging heads. (And to get off my lawn!)
I only have backspace go back in history when I use MSIE
*all* other browsers behave correctly and don't map the back button to backspace.
I just tested this in the most recent versions of Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and both go back a page when you hit Backspace without focus on a typeable element. It is super annoying.
I don't know who modded the parent a troll, but he's got a good point. These things have a screen only 5 inches by 7.5 or so, with a resolution (rotated) of 1024 x 768. That's pathetic for reading something like a textbook that you're studying from.
I surf the web on my phone, but I wouldn't want to study calculus or read caselaw on it.
You only read half of the statement, missing "or behave stupidly".
I took it to mean in the general case, building on "be stupid" rather than contrasting with it. My mistake.
This is not a unique thing to English speaking countries, and I think the leaks from Snowden make this abundantly clear. Mix with information regarding Gladios and you have a longer running world wide issue.
True, but it's happening more rapidly (or perhaps more visibly to me) in English-speaking countries than it is in the Scandinavian and Germanic countries, for example. It also causes me more grief, because they are the easiest places to acclimate to if I ever felt that America has drifted so far from my values that I can't call it home anymore, since I don't have to learn a new language, and we share a lot of pop-culture and general values. I don't think that I'm ever likely to just give up and move, but I feel much more comfortable having a Plan B even if I don't intend to use it.
The way to fix it is for people to stop being duped and admit that bad people will do bad things if given the tools. Control and monitoring is essential, not blind faith.
Well, of course. I wholeheartedly agree. I just think in this case, it's best to go with "trust, but verify" over "the sky is falling." It might be that self-driving cars are a danger to future society, but I'd rather us work towards preventing them from becoming that than from happening than preventing the cars themselves from happening.
None of those are examples in which the federal government heavily resisted state autonomy to make such a decision, with the exception of the Fugitive Slave Act. Thus, none of them are things done in the name of state's rights.
These are the ones that pop into my head, but I'm sure I could list of similar examples all day long. State law has been at the forefront of just about every major civil rights issue in our nation's history.
They've also been at the far other side. Many of the Southern states refused to ratify the 19th Amendment and led the charge against women's suffrage; several never even signed it until the late 20th century. Many states (also again in the South) have amended their own constitution to deny gays the right to marry.
Do we even need to talk about slavery and race relations? Except maybe to acknowledge the nadir of American race relations post-Reconstruction? How about California's "Foreign Miner's Tax" of 1850 or the "Anti-Coolie Law" of 1862 to go after the Chinese? (19th century California's hate-on for the Chinese is frequently forgotten.) Or how about their "Greaser Act" against Mexicans from 1855?
You also have wonders like Texas leading the way in 1883 on the convict-lease system to use prisoners as slave labor. You know, the chain-gangs of old.
I'm from the South. I don't trust my state legislature not to attempt to put the screws to anyone that's likely to vote against them. Just look at the wave of laws North Carolina passed as soon as section 5 of the Voting Rights Act got knocked out.
In order for a person's point to be stupid the person must also be stupid or behave stupidly.
Not necessarily. Smart people can believe dumb things. Look at Linus Pauling turning total crank over vitamins despite an absolutely brilliant career that earned him two Nobel prizes, or how many wonderfully, quotably wrong things Lord Kelvin said about the future of physics.
Heck, smart people are the *best* at defending dumb ideas because they turn all the tools of rationality to rationalization, and they have come to expect that they are usually *right* in any given scenario. Plus, smart people are more susceptible to cognitive bias.
So, let me say that despite strongly disagreeing with the sentiment that we should all fear self-driving cars as a future tool of oppression and state monitoring, I don't think you're an idiot. I just think you're being a little paranoid and that you (perhaps deliberately) misinterpreted the top post in this discussion which said that he was hoping he could take his car when incapacitated to twist his words into a more short-sighted statement for the purposes of painting a nightmare scenario in total contrast to what he was wishing for, which was to legally be able to do so.
I will state that I try to avoid it, but I am human and like all humans can have emotion in debate.
Yeah, me too. I got up to high on my horse in my first reply for the same reason. Sorry for the escalation of tone.
You know, I'm not really advocating for the state. I'm actually angry almost to the point of fatigue over the growth of the police state apparatus in English-speaking countries every time I think about it. I just really, really hate driving and have high hopes for a technology that will remove the tedious and life-threatening chore from my day.
I'm actually fairly certain terrorists don't blow stuff up during Ramadan.
Actually, they do. It often causes more moderate Muslims a lot of outrage, but militants often think that attacking during a holy day mean's that their actions will be more blessed.
Episcopalians and Catholics on the other hand might as well belong to the same religion.. Oh wait, they do. Ironic how the kernel of your post was about ignorance.
Since the Episcopal Church is essentially the US version of the Anglican Church, I think may Irish people would take strong objection to the notion that they are the same religion. Like practitioners of Hindu and Islam on the Indian subcontinent, many Irish Protestants and Catholics have fresh, living memory of whole communities doing violence to their neighbors over it. You still don't wear the wrong colors in the wrong pub there.
This unlike Irish pagans who have been mostly ignored and merely scoffed at, with rare exceptions. Frankly being assumed to be a pagan would basically to have been assumed to be largely harmless, unlike 3 of the 4 other faiths discussed above (not that Hindu nationalists haven't committed horrible violence either, but they don't usually make terrorism watchlists in the West).
So, I wouldn't be so quick to accuse of ignorance, if you lump all Christian faiths together and assume they see each other as all the same. The metaphor may have not been perfect, but it was far better than your alternative.
That is why states need to have a majority of the power. It essentially makes them 50 counties with unifying treaties. The closer the government is to the people, the more likely that those people are under a rule that they agree with.
Tell that to black people, circa 60+ years ago. Our federal system has done much to blunt or prevent the worst of tyranny of the majority over its lifetime.
Calling someone's point "trolling", "FUD", and "ridiculous" matches the definition of ad hominem perfectly.
I'm afraid that it doesn't. It goes directly to the argument and not "to the person," which is what ad hominem means. An ad hominem attack says that the source of the argument makes the argument itself invalid. Calling the argument itself "ridiculous FUD" is against the argument itself.
On reflection, an accusation of "trolling" might be, though. So will concede the point on that.
I guess you missed that both were fantasies in your zeal to defend the great leader, government and it's abuses, or what ever else you decide you were defending.
I'd point out the hypocrisy in this statement coupled with your earlier complaint, but I'll leave to the reader to work it out.
I have yet to see a law that excludes people from liability in a self driving car. There are still manual controls. I never claimed that the driver was a passenger, I claimed that even if the car was self driving they are currently still a legal driver.
You haven't seen such a law yet. Not a surprise since we don't even have any vehicles on the market at this point.
Now if you want to start citing laws that have been passed that absolve a driver of responsibility when the auto-pilot turns... Oh wait, you probably can cite no law on the books so I won't wait.
No, and I can't cite laws on responsible use of teleporters or home cloning tanks either. But that's because the law is almost never written in anticipation of technology.
Yeah, there is absolutely no precedent set for this is there? Wholly fuck go read a Newspaper or something, then cram your ad hominem right on up your asshole.
You are tossing around fantasy land scenarios to scare people about cars. Tracking and spying on people is one thing, but locking them in a box and whisking them away to somewhere they don't want to be preys on several common phobias. No one would stand for it -- not at least until the frog's been warming in the pot for a much, much longer period of time.
(P.S. I don't think you actually know what an ad hominem attack is. Google it.)
Is this really going to happen...Specially in crowded traffic...These ideas are too far fetched..
Most crowded traffic is the result of impatient drivers with poor reflexes constantly riding up the driver in front of them and then having to slam to a stop when the car in front of them brakes. This propagates backwards and creates traffic waves. Interestingly, all it takes is one driver to put an end to stop-and-go traffic.
Now imagine that 5% of the cars on the road were replaced with driverless cars that not only give the car in front of them plenty of room but also signal ahead to other driverless and safety assisted cars (e.g. ones with predictive braking) what they are about to do. Imagine that these cars didn't rubberneck or get angry and tailgate or cut people off without signaling first, because they don't have emotional humans driving them.
Imagine a world with no traffic jams thanks to driverless cars.