Actually, that's done world wide. There was an interesting thing in TV a couple weeks ago, where they were talking about the way they've been redesigning intersections in various countries to make their traffic safer. They've taken a lot of design hints from the US, to achieve better flow while increasing safety.
The only American part of that was that we've been putting more time and research into it than a lot of countries. There are a lot of places that have pretty much lawless driving. You see a lot of it here, where immigrants outnumber Americans. Traffic signals and signs aren't really rules to follow, they are just a hint that there's an intersection. Lines on the road (if they exist) are just decorations.
Laws like this are applied throughout our legal system too. That's why we have things like labels on everything that could potentially be bad for you. At some point, we passed the point of laws helping guide us, and have become the government being our caretaker. If you go read through your states laws, you'll see traffic law is a very small subset of them.
Most laws are to allow safety for the lowest subset of the population. If 2.5% of the population can do something safely, but 97.5% cannot, the law will reflect that the majority cannot and therefore will not do that action.
We'll use another more obvious car analogy. I'm a good driver. I've been trained multiple times in advanced driving techniques for various purposes. I drive a very good and well tuned sports car.
Someone I know had an almost identical car. I told him about this road that I ended up on, in the middle of nowhere. It was a bit winding, but not all that bad. I was cruising at about 60mph. He told me about losing control at 50mph on that exact road, and sliding off the road into a body of water. Road conditions were the same. The insurance company totaled his car because of the water damage. The next time I drove through there (like, a year later), I noted the speed limit was 45mph. At 50mph, it was too fast for him to drive in a similar car. At 50mph, it may be too fast for someone in a vehicle that doesn't handle as well. The first time on the road, I saw a small Honda going about 60, and almost lose control. His car was leaning about 15 degrees because he was cornering so hard. My car didn't lean at all.
To make sure *EVERYONE* is safe on the road, they establish the rules so everyone can be safe. That's why speed limits get lowered in particular areas. That's why caution signs are put out on turns. And, that's why traffic lights are put out in low traffic areas that previously had stop signs. Hopefully those who aren't as attentive will notice a traffic light, versus a red sign on a post. Judging by other drivers behavior at stop signs, many are unskilled enough in traffic behavior to be able to negotiate even a simple 4 way stop.
I really didn't get it. Well, I already knew what hemostats are. I assumed that there was some huge practical joke by googling it. Nope. Maybe something in Google Images? Still nope.
And all the pot smokers I know smoke from glass pipes and bongs (errr, water pipes). So, it'd just be an amateur pot smoker using hemostats anyways. Maybe that's the joke.
Actually, if you've done any serious and/or defensive driving, you'll know that two hands on the wheel is very important. Your hand leaves the wheel long enough to shift, and then back.
Sure, you can cruise down the road with one hand on the wheel. You can even for the most part do normal maneuvers. Serious evasive maneuvers come very quickly, and you may not have the luxury of the second or two that it takes to get your hand back on the wheel.
We'll use a real life example. I was on a major highway that was 7 lanes wide each way. I was in the #3 lane, which became an offramp to another highway. There was a car in the #5 lane doing at least 40mph less than me. Without signaling, the other driver yanked the wheel and ended up in my lane. The timing would have been roughly, when they finished getting into the lane, I would have hit the passenger side rear bumper and probably spun both of us across the highway.
I was aware of my environment, so I knew one lane to my right was clear even though I hadn't intended previously to use it. My front seat passenger screamed just as I started my maneuver (hard right, hard left, don't spin). That required *BOTH* hands on the wheel. Otherwise, one hand grasping the wheel wouldn't have made it far enough. When my passenger stopped screaming, because they realized we didn't just die, their first comment was "What the hell was she thinking?!" The second one was "How the hell did you do that?"
It's important to be able to yank the impossible out of your ass on a moments notice, or you suddenly become another statistic. With either hard braking or a partial turn (if both hands weren't available), there would have definitely been an impact.
I'm a safe driver. I am probably one of the 1:40 that can text or use my cell phone while driving. I am also smart enough to know that it's not safe to text while driving. It takes a fraction of a second for someone in another car to do something stupid that could get me killed. That includes from kids who think they can text and drive, and from guys who have been driving 30 years so they think they know everything and can drive one-handed. I may text in the car, but it's when I'm stopped at a stop light, or I pull into a parking lot.
The last story that they ran on here regarding EM allergies was in Africa.
I went looking around for history on this. The oldest I could find online was a 2003 case where a school in Chicago refused to use wifi because it could potentially harm students.
Oddly enough, I found this story from Santa Fe (the same city as this case in this story), where Arthur Firstenberg, the leader of a group of wifi sensitives, sued the city to not allow wifi to be installed throughout the city. He lost.
Coincidentally, this came up again in January 2010 in this story, where Mr. Firstenberg sued his neighbor for using wifi.
And coincidentally, he's the same guy in today's article.
So, if you follow the trail back, you'll find that he's been making noise about this for a long time.
In this 2007 article is mentioned for forming the Cellular Phone Task Force
He is in the citations with: Electromagnetic Fields, (EMF) Killing Fields," Arthur Firstenberg, The Ecologist, v. 34, n. 5, 6-10-2004.
In 1997, his group published this mortality report. Obviously cell phones kill people. Everyone repeat after me "Correlation does not imply causation".
But hey, who am I to call a guy an attention seeking lunatic. Just because it's been spouting crap for over a decade *AND* getting published for it (drama queens love their attention), doesn't mean that he's all wrong. Talk to the guy yourself. On his site, http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/, he asks you to contact him. e-mail: info@cellphonetaskforce.org phone: (505) 471-0129 .
Yes, those were copy & pasted directly from his site. If he didn't want to call, he wouldn't have put the details up there.
When you call, remind him that there's electromagnetic fields around everything electrical. That includes the wires running inside the walls of his house. Yes Mr. Firstenberg, you're allergic to your own house. Run, run for the Faraday cage in the mountains. It's the only place you'll be safe. Well, kinda safe. You gotta watch out for the government using their ELF radios. I saw a X-Files once, where a guys head exploded because of ELF experiments. If it was on TV, it must be true.
I was out in LA for work, and met a couple in the hotel bar. They were in town to be on Judge Judy. It was a small claims court thing. The show contacted them, and asked if they wanted to be on the show. They were given the plane tickets and hotel room, and in exchange had to sign an agreement that they would be on the show and would accept the decision of the show.
I don't even remember the details that they told me, other than it sounded like the crap I've seen on there when channel surfing. There are some things I can't stand when channel surfing. One is crap daytime shows that exploit normal people in exchange for the wonders of being on broadcast TV. The other is religious broadcasting. Well, I have become fond of Pastor Melissa Scott, but that's only with the volume muted, and mentally undressing her. That gets boring pretty quick, and on to shows where I'll find gratuitous amounts of gunfire, explosions, partial nudity and sex.
You have to consider the size of the "light source". She put up a 1 watt light. This ranks up with the person have an acute light sensitivity, and then complaining the neighbors nightlight burns him.
(for reference, most night lights are about 7 watts)
He's suing because she's doing something perfectly legal in her house. She doesn't have a bank of 500W halogen lights lighting up the side of his house (which would be a legitimate complaint), nor does she have illegally amplified RF, like a 100W transmitter on her wifi (which would be a legitimate complaint and prosecuted by the FCC). Unless both of their walls are paper thin and almost adjoining, there probably isn't much signal getting to him at all.
It was indicated that they were friends before she moved in. It sounds like something else went bad, and he's trying to get revenge somehow.
I want to sit out in front of his house and crank up the wireless power on my laptop to 11!:)
Unfortunately, this urban legend has been manifesting itself around the world. People hear that many devices use the same (or similar) frequencies to microwave ovens, they panic, then their eyes light up and they think, "Lawsuit!"
The only urban legend is that it happens. It's the mentally unstable who believe it's happening to them.
I prefer the speedtest that you can download and put on your own servers.
There are far too many unknown when testing from point A (your PC) to point B (the speedtest server). Because it's a public speedtest server, that hans people are beating on it all the time. Is the server capable of handling it? The uplink? Is there a congestion problem between you and them. mtr helps to give a better image of potential problems during the test.
I have access to servers on Verizon FiOS and BrightHouse commercial lines. That covers most of the customers in my area. I know the bandwidth is as advertised on both circuits, and I know what their utilization is (measured at the switch attached to the uplink). From customer locations, sometimes I get the advertised rates, sometimes I don't. There is absolutely *HUGE* fluctuation between what I see on either of my hosts, and the public servers. A 10Mb/s down line (for example) will show just about that from either of my own servers. From the public servers, I'll see anything from 1Mb/s to 15Mb/s I know some providers fudge their numbers with QoS, and even unlimited traffic that they know is going speedtest servers.
When I've done these tests for friends and customers, sometimes they're satisfied. Sometimes it results in an angry call to the provider that a song and dance about intermittent problems, which suddenly gets resolved within minutes (i.e., the line was capped wrong, and they fixed it)
Funny you mention Mt. Wilson. I lived close to there for a while, and it was a really rough drive to get there. No matter how fast your car is, it's still going to take a good 1/2 hour or so to make it 18 miles.
A few of the times going up there, we'd loop around on Audio-Visual Rd (in front of the towers), and stop in a little spot to the Southwest. It had a great view of Pasadena, if the sky was clear. It's beautiful up there, but I have to wonder how bad that EM radiation was for me. At least we didn't spend long at a time there.
Out of habit, I always lock the doors on my car with the remote control. It didn't matter that we hadn't seen another person for miles. I know there's at least one person who lives up there. We had a nice chat with him about the facilities, even though everything was closed. Anyways, I had absolutely no problems locking or unlocking the doors of my car.
My remote is FCC ID AB01502T, which appears to be 315Mhz. I don't doubt that some had problems though, some of these things are just funny. I do recall a few years ago the military was testing some new communications equipment, which left cars unable to be remotely unlocked for miles around them.
I suppose you read up on the George Russell Weller case, where he ran his car through a farmers market in Los Angeles in 2003. 10 dead, 63 injured. He got confused to which pedal did what, and drove through the market at 40 to 60 mph before finally coming to a stop. He was 86 at the time. This car was a 1993 Buick LeSabre. (Picture of the car when it was done hitting everyone)
10 years before, he had a similar accident where he hit the gas instead of the brakes, and his car ended up on top of a K-rail (aka Jersey barrier), and was completely confused to how it happened. One of the LA TV stations had pictures of the first accident that they showed on TV, but I can't seem to find them online. It was one of those "how the hell did he get his car up there" pictures.
He wasn't charged with anything in the earlier case, but was found guilty of 10 counts of manslaughter in the 2003 case. Since it was so old (90 by the time of the conviction) he wasn't sent to prison.
George Russell Weller told police he had no idea how the car he was driving accelerated through a crowded farmers market in Santa Monica more than three years ago.
Nor, Weller said within an hour of the incident, did he know how his car came to a stop after leaving nearly 1,000 feet of carnage, 10 people dead and more than 60 injuries in its wake.
There were 427 accidents reported in the United States involving "unintended acceleration" in 1989 and 61 in 1992 -- the last year for which statistics are available -- after wider use of a mechanical change that made it impossible to put a car into gear unless the driver had a foot on the brake.
Drivers older than 70 are more than five times more likely than others to experience pedal error, according to Rae Tyson of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
I'm not sure that's originally attributable to an F-4 pilot. I've heard that quite a bit in the past, and always understood it to be a rocket reference.
You may want to check RFC 1925 for probably the longest version I've seen.
2. The Fundamental Truths
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.
But leave it to the US military to make flying robots and arm them with missiles. I won't ask how they terminate a bad node now, I just want to be sure to not ever be close to it.
I've hurt an arm or hand on occasion. It's really not that hard to drive with one hand. It's not impossible to shift a stick with your left hand, just kind of uncomfortable. Now, when I've hurt my left knee, it's almost impossible to drive. Every gear shift is accompanied with a screamed "FUCK!"
It's not even the remoteness of the conversation. A conversation, or worse a heated argument, with passengers in the car can be just as dangerous.
They've made laws regarding bus drivers, which is why you get the white line you can't cross. They can't be distracted while driving. Well, they *shouldn't* be distracted. It's harder to institute for cars though. It's not like you can stop the car, radio for a cop, and say "my wife was bothering me while I was driving."
Just picture the average family on a road trip. Kids screaming in the back seat, wife bitching that you're driving too fast, too slow, going taking the wrong route, etc, etc, etc. "Daddy, are we there yet?" "I have to pee" "I'm hungry" "Billy's poking me" "Can't you drive faster?" "I told you, if we took the other way, we'd already be there." "Do you know where you're going?" "We should stop for directions" "Can't you put something else on the radio?" "It's hot." "It's cold." "My ass hurts from this seat." "Can't you get us there any sooner?" "Why do you always ignore me?" "Go faster" "Do you have to drive so fast?" "Do you have to follow him so close?" "I'm bored." "Now I know why mother told me not to marry you."
SHUT UP AND LET ME DRIVE! I KNOW WHERE WE'RE GOING! WE'LL GET THERE WHEN I SAY! IF YOU HAVE TO PEE, PISS IN A BOTTLE! IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING GET OUT AND WALK! AND I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR FAT COW OF A MOTHER SAYS, YOUR DAD SAYS SHE'S A WHORE!
What's worse, that or a quick phone call, "Honey, I'll be home in 1/2 hour. Pick up milk? ok. See you soon."
I know, people are obnoxious about their phone calls, but at least those are shorter than the constant distraction of the passengers that you can't get rid of. Well, you can get rid of them, but there are laws about leaving dead bodies by the side of the highway. Something about littering and a $100 fine, if I remember the signs right.
Ya, it's a terrible distraction, when they're trying to smoke a cigarette, hold a drink, fix their makeup, beat the kids in the back seat, AND use the phone.
Hmmm, you'd think there would already be laws about driving while distracted, and it wouldn't matter. Oh.. wait.. there already were.
They're less likely to signal when they're eating their triple cheezeburger and sucking on their super-bladder-buster drinks. I don't see them making new laws against that. Oh, because fast food thrives on drive-through business. Cell phone companies don't lose on these laws, they win. Consumers go buy new whiz-bang bluetooth enabled phones and accessories.
Lets not forget, it has nothing to do with public safety. It has everything to do with money. I wonder who the primary backers of the original hands free laws were, and I'd bet you could tie their contributors back to the cell phone and automotive industries.
If you think there is no physical side to race car driving then I encourage you to ride as a passenger for one F1 race (not that you could)... I'd bet 2 months pay you couldn't stay conscious just being in the car for a race, let alone staying alert and driving. $50 says you couldn't sit in the car and deal with the heat alone for the length of time they do. $10 says you couldn't stand on the asphalt with the fire suit on for the 2 to 5 hour duration of a typical summer F1 in the US or Brazil or the like.
You post makes it clear that you have no clue whats involved in racing and think when you watch the Indy 500 on TV that its really as easy as it looks on camera.
You know, that's very accurate. I can't say that I've been involved with F1 racing, but I've done some amateur racing, and I've been with short track (1/4 to 1/2 mile oval) racers.
In amateur racing, running 30 minute sessions on a 3 mile street-type track, where you're constantly turning, shifting, and your dancing between the clutch, brakes, gas, and bracing yourself on turns. While you're doing it, you're focused on going faster, apex turns, perfect braking, perfect accelerating, and not losing control. 4 sessions, and most people are exhausted, unless they're driving a Geo Metro. Those drivers are kissing the ground, and thanking god they didn't get run over by the real cars.:) (just kidding, I've never seen a Geo on even an amateur course)
Short track racers are doing the same constant work, plus working harder to not get their cars destroyed, since the tolerances are so much closer. The only way you see a car with it's body perfect is if it hadn't been run yet, and there's always several tow trucks and at least a couple ambulances standing by because it's pretty likely someone is going to get hurt enough to earn a ride to the hospital. Those drivers are usually drenched in sweat after 20 minutes, and if they're running even a 100, they'll be out there quite a while. A few laps is a lot of fun. 400 laps will make you wish it'd just end. For many of them, they don't make it through the whole race, since it's harder on the car than the driver.
But, if you're opening up that bet to anyone, and you can get me track time in a F1 car, I'd be more than happy, win or lose.:)
Ummm, that wasn't safe mode. I did it, and my car turned into an Autobot. How the hell do I make it into a car again? I have to drive to work in the morning. It might seem cool, but having a giant robot walking down the highway is bound to freak out at least a few people. DHS may have something to say about my walking car with giant guns too.
I remember a news story from several years ago that even made the evening news. Someone had a Saturn car that they realized they couldn't afford and tried to return. The dealer wouldn't just take it back for a full refund, since it was now a used car.
Over the next few months, the driver had several "emergencies" with it, each time having it towed back to the dealership, where they couldn't find a problem. One in particular that was video taped by the police, the car was circling in a parking lot and the driver called 911. The insisted the car wouldn't stop. They told her to step on the brakes, use the emergency brake, throw it in neutral, shut it off, etc, etc, etc... She circled for something like 30 minutes. Finally they got her to open the drivers window, and an officer got in the middle of where it was circling. He ran for the side of the car, grabbed the wheel, and then turned off the key. The car (amazingly enough) came to a stop.
Of course, she claimed it wouldn't stop for her. There was all kinds of talk about lemon laws, and how Saturn vehicles weren't safe. She made a whole bunch of noise, and the dealership traded her car for another one. The problems persisted for her. Obviously Saturns were amazingly dangerous vehicles. Someone from the dealership (I think the owner) actually started driving her original car to work every day, to find out what the problem really was. He never had a problem.
Eventually, she was charged, I believe with reckless endangerment. Pretty much, she was driving dangerously, and endangered the officers who tried to help her.
I won't say that the mystery Toyota is driver error or a mechanical problem, but where the cases that have been in the news have massive parallels in other vehicles too, where drivers just did the wrong things.
A older lady in a Buick several years ago was pulling into the parking lot where I worked. I happened to be in the front of the store, and heard her tires squeal. She smashed into a parked car. That broke the parking pawl and sent the parked car across the parking lot into two other parked cars. One of those cars belonged to one of my coworkers, who wasn't exactly very happy that his car was totaled. I ran out to see if she was ok (once the cars stopped moving). She said "What happened?" I told her what she did. She was very insistent that she hit the brakes. I told her she spun the tires before hitting the first car. She said the other car must have done it. The driver of the other car was in the store at the time. At least everyone with wrecked cars had a good sense of humor about it, and no one was hurt. The funniest part was, her car was fine. There was absolutely no damage. It wasn't even scratched. The other three car were severely damaged though. Her insurance gave my coworker full book value on his car, even though it was a rusted piece of junk that barely ran. They were fully aware of it, they were just avoiding potential legal problems.
Redundancy in a car isn't essential for the computer, as long as it fails in a safe mode. In the case of a single bit being flipped in the data stream, that would be a transient error. In a throttle system, it would be so short lived, you'd never know it ever happened. How many times per second do you think the computer reads its inputs and adjusts things? (hint: it's more than 1).
Heck, you don't even (usually) notice misfires, and those happen all the time, even on perfectly tuned vehicles. It takes a whole series of misfires, or a constant fault to be noticeable. On a V8 engine, you can even lose a cylinder and not notice. I had someone once bring a car to me because it "doesn't accelerate well". It turned out three spark plug wires weren't on. And no, I didn't work on it before that, someone else messed up. It actually idled pretty well. The three cylinders weren't sequential, so it managed fine. That's even been included as a feature on some cars. For example, an 8 cyl car would disable 2 or 4 cylinders to get better fuel economy, and run on all 8 if full power was requested. It's sometimes referred to as a variable displacement engine. Versions have shown up in GM, Chrysler, Mercedes, and Honda vehicles over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
{sigh}
Boring.
Even that site is bored of itself.
It would have been more entertaining if it wasn't just listing the Slashdot April Fools stories.
And if you smoke from a pipe, you can smoke it all. I've heard of amateurs using forks and alligator clips for the same reason.
For reference, I don't partake in that. I've just observed the whole gambit of those that do.
Actually, that's done world wide. There was an interesting thing in TV a couple weeks ago, where they were talking about the way they've been redesigning intersections in various countries to make their traffic safer. They've taken a lot of design hints from the US, to achieve better flow while increasing safety.
The only American part of that was that we've been putting more time and research into it than a lot of countries. There are a lot of places that have pretty much lawless driving. You see a lot of it here, where immigrants outnumber Americans. Traffic signals and signs aren't really rules to follow, they are just a hint that there's an intersection. Lines on the road (if they exist) are just decorations.
Laws like this are applied throughout our legal system too. That's why we have things like labels on everything that could potentially be bad for you. At some point, we passed the point of laws helping guide us, and have become the government being our caretaker. If you go read through your states laws, you'll see traffic law is a very small subset of them.
Most laws are to allow safety for the lowest subset of the population. If 2.5% of the population can do something safely, but 97.5% cannot, the law will reflect that the majority cannot and therefore will not do that action.
We'll use another more obvious car analogy. I'm a good driver. I've been trained multiple times in advanced driving techniques for various purposes. I drive a very good and well tuned sports car.
Someone I know had an almost identical car. I told him about this road that I ended up on, in the middle of nowhere. It was a bit winding, but not all that bad. I was cruising at about 60mph. He told me about losing control at 50mph on that exact road, and sliding off the road into a body of water. Road conditions were the same. The insurance company totaled his car because of the water damage. The next time I drove through there (like, a year later), I noted the speed limit was 45mph. At 50mph, it was too fast for him to drive in a similar car. At 50mph, it may be too fast for someone in a vehicle that doesn't handle as well. The first time on the road, I saw a small Honda going about 60, and almost lose control. His car was leaning about 15 degrees because he was cornering so hard. My car didn't lean at all.
To make sure *EVERYONE* is safe on the road, they establish the rules so everyone can be safe. That's why speed limits get lowered in particular areas. That's why caution signs are put out on turns. And, that's why traffic lights are put out in low traffic areas that previously had stop signs. Hopefully those who aren't as attentive will notice a traffic light, versus a red sign on a post. Judging by other drivers behavior at stop signs, many are unskilled enough in traffic behavior to be able to negotiate even a simple 4 way stop.
I really didn't get it. Well, I already knew what hemostats are. I assumed that there was some huge practical joke by googling it. Nope. Maybe something in Google Images? Still nope.
And all the pot smokers I know smoke from glass pipes and bongs (errr, water pipes). So, it'd just be an amateur pot smoker using hemostats anyways. Maybe that's the joke.
Actually, if you've done any serious and/or defensive driving, you'll know that two hands on the wheel is very important. Your hand leaves the wheel long enough to shift, and then back.
Sure, you can cruise down the road with one hand on the wheel. You can even for the most part do normal maneuvers. Serious evasive maneuvers come very quickly, and you may not have the luxury of the second or two that it takes to get your hand back on the wheel.
We'll use a real life example. I was on a major highway that was 7 lanes wide each way. I was in the #3 lane, which became an offramp to another highway. There was a car in the #5 lane doing at least 40mph less than me. Without signaling, the other driver yanked the wheel and ended up in my lane. The timing would have been roughly, when they finished getting into the lane, I would have hit the passenger side rear bumper and probably spun both of us across the highway.
I was aware of my environment, so I knew one lane to my right was clear even though I hadn't intended previously to use it. My front seat passenger screamed just as I started my maneuver (hard right, hard left, don't spin). That required *BOTH* hands on the wheel. Otherwise, one hand grasping the wheel wouldn't have made it far enough. When my passenger stopped screaming, because they realized we didn't just die, their first comment was "What the hell was she thinking?!" The second one was "How the hell did you do that?"
It's important to be able to yank the impossible out of your ass on a moments notice, or you suddenly become another statistic. With either hard braking or a partial turn (if both hands weren't available), there would have definitely been an impact.
I'm a safe driver. I am probably one of the 1:40 that can text or use my cell phone while driving. I am also smart enough to know that it's not safe to text while driving. It takes a fraction of a second for someone in another car to do something stupid that could get me killed. That includes from kids who think they can text and drive, and from guys who have been driving 30 years so they think they know everything and can drive one-handed. I may text in the car, but it's when I'm stopped at a stop light, or I pull into a parking lot.
The last story that they ran on here regarding EM allergies was in Africa.
I went looking around for history on this. The oldest I could find online was a 2003 case where a school in Chicago refused to use wifi because it could potentially harm students.
this story references Canada and the UK.
Oddly enough, I found this story from Santa Fe (the same city as this case in this story), where Arthur Firstenberg, the leader of a group of wifi sensitives, sued the city to not allow wifi to be installed throughout the city. He lost.
Coincidentally, this came up again in January 2010 in this story, where Mr. Firstenberg sued his neighbor for using wifi.
And coincidentally, he's the same guy in today's article.
So, if you follow the trail back, you'll find that he's been making noise about this for a long time.
In this 2007 article is mentioned for forming the Cellular Phone Task Force
He is in the citations with:
Electromagnetic Fields, (EMF) Killing Fields," Arthur Firstenberg, The Ecologist, v. 34, n. 5, 6-10-2004.
"Radio Wave Packet," Arthur Firstenberg, Cellular Phone Task Force, Sept 2001
In 1997, his group published this mortality report. Obviously cell phones kill people. Everyone repeat after me "Correlation does not imply causation".
But hey, who am I to call a guy an attention seeking lunatic. Just because it's been spouting crap for over a decade *AND* getting published for it (drama queens love their attention), doesn't mean that he's all wrong. Talk to the guy yourself. On his site, http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/, he asks you to contact him. e-mail: info@cellphonetaskforce.org phone: (505) 471-0129 .
Yes, those were copy & pasted directly from his site. If he didn't want to call, he wouldn't have put the details up there.
Google phonebook reverses the number to his name.
When you call, remind him that there's electromagnetic fields around everything electrical. That includes the wires running inside the walls of his house. Yes Mr. Firstenberg, you're allergic to your own house. Run, run for the Faraday cage in the mountains. It's the only place you'll be safe. Well, kinda safe. You gotta watch out for the government using their ELF radios. I saw a X-Files once, where a guys head exploded because of ELF experiments. If it was on TV, it must be true.
Oh, don't get me started there...
I was out in LA for work, and met a couple in the hotel bar. They were in town to be on Judge Judy. It was a small claims court thing. The show contacted them, and asked if they wanted to be on the show. They were given the plane tickets and hotel room, and in exchange had to sign an agreement that they would be on the show and would accept the decision of the show.
I don't even remember the details that they told me, other than it sounded like the crap I've seen on there when channel surfing. There are some things I can't stand when channel surfing. One is crap daytime shows that exploit normal people in exchange for the wonders of being on broadcast TV. The other is religious broadcasting. Well, I have become fond of Pastor Melissa Scott, but that's only with the volume muted, and mentally undressing her. That gets boring pretty quick, and on to shows where I'll find gratuitous amounts of gunfire, explosions, partial nudity and sex.
You have to consider the size of the "light source". She put up a 1 watt light. This ranks up with the person have an acute light sensitivity, and then complaining the neighbors nightlight burns him.
(for reference, most night lights are about 7 watts)
He's suing because she's doing something perfectly legal in her house. She doesn't have a bank of 500W halogen lights lighting up the side of his house (which would be a legitimate complaint), nor does she have illegally amplified RF, like a 100W transmitter on her wifi (which would be a legitimate complaint and prosecuted by the FCC). Unless both of their walls are paper thin and almost adjoining, there probably isn't much signal getting to him at all.
It was indicated that they were friends before she moved in. It sounds like something else went bad, and he's trying to get revenge somehow.
I want to sit out in front of his house and crank up the wireless power on my laptop to 11! :)
He wasn't specific to who won. Someone always wins, and someone always loses. It never ends with "they hugged, made up, and went home." :)
Unfortunately, this urban legend has been manifesting itself around the world. People hear that many devices use the same (or similar) frequencies to microwave ovens, they panic, then their eyes light up and they think, "Lawsuit!"
The only urban legend is that it happens. It's the mentally unstable who believe it's happening to them.
I prefer the speedtest that you can download and put on your own servers.
There are far too many unknown when testing from point A (your PC) to point B (the speedtest server). Because it's a public speedtest server, that hans people are beating on it all the time. Is the server capable of handling it? The uplink? Is there a congestion problem between you and them. mtr helps to give a better image of potential problems during the test.
I have access to servers on Verizon FiOS and BrightHouse commercial lines. That covers most of the customers in my area. I know the bandwidth is as advertised on both circuits, and I know what their utilization is (measured at the switch attached to the uplink). From customer locations, sometimes I get the advertised rates, sometimes I don't. There is absolutely *HUGE* fluctuation between what I see on either of my hosts, and the public servers. A 10Mb/s down line (for example) will show just about that from either of my own servers. From the public servers, I'll see anything from 1Mb/s to 15Mb/s I know some providers fudge their numbers with QoS, and even unlimited traffic that they know is going speedtest servers.
When I've done these tests for friends and customers, sometimes they're satisfied. Sometimes it results in an angry call to the provider that a song and dance about intermittent problems, which suddenly gets resolved within minutes (i.e., the line was capped wrong, and they fixed it)
Funny you mention Mt. Wilson. I lived close to there for a while, and it was a really rough drive to get there. No matter how fast your car is, it's still going to take a good 1/2 hour or so to make it 18 miles.
A few of the times going up there, we'd loop around on Audio-Visual Rd (in front of the towers), and stop in a little spot to the Southwest. It had a great view of Pasadena, if the sky was clear. It's beautiful up there, but I have to wonder how bad that EM radiation was for me. At least we didn't spend long at a time there.
Out of habit, I always lock the doors on my car with the remote control. It didn't matter that we hadn't seen another person for miles. I know there's at least one person who lives up there. We had a nice chat with him about the facilities, even though everything was closed. Anyways, I had absolutely no problems locking or unlocking the doors of my car.
My remote is FCC ID AB01502T, which appears to be 315Mhz. I don't doubt that some had problems though, some of these things are just funny. I do recall a few years ago the military was testing some new communications equipment, which left cars unable to be remotely unlocked for miles around them.
I suppose you read up on the George Russell Weller case, where he ran his car through a farmers market in Los Angeles in 2003. 10 dead, 63 injured. He got confused to which pedal did what, and drove through the market at 40 to 60 mph before finally coming to a stop. He was 86 at the time. This car was a 1993 Buick LeSabre. (Picture of the car when it was done hitting everyone)
10 years before, he had a similar accident where he hit the gas instead of the brakes, and his car ended up on top of a K-rail (aka Jersey barrier), and was completely confused to how it happened. One of the LA TV stations had pictures of the first accident that they showed on TV, but I can't seem to find them online. It was one of those "how the hell did he get his car up there" pictures.
He wasn't charged with anything in the earlier case, but was found guilty of 10 counts of manslaughter in the 2003 case. Since it was so old (90 by the time of the conviction) he wasn't sent to prison.
In a 2006 story about that case, they had a few winning quotes.
I'm not sure that's originally attributable to an F-4 pilot. I've heard that quite a bit in the past, and always understood it to be a rocket reference.
You may want to check RFC 1925 for probably the longest version I've seen.
There are plenty of other ones, usually pertaining to pigs.
But, we've been flying bricks (things with lots of thrust but no wings for aerodynamic lift) since long before the F-4 existed.
Well, who do *you* think put Skynet up there?
Oh, I forgot, It was the UK.
But leave it to the US military to make flying robots and arm them with missiles. I won't ask how they terminate a bad node now, I just want to be sure to not ever be close to it.
I've hurt an arm or hand on occasion. It's really not that hard to drive with one hand. It's not impossible to shift a stick with your left hand, just kind of uncomfortable. Now, when I've hurt my left knee, it's almost impossible to drive. Every gear shift is accompanied with a screamed "FUCK!"
It's not even the remoteness of the conversation. A conversation, or worse a heated argument, with passengers in the car can be just as dangerous.
They've made laws regarding bus drivers, which is why you get the white line you can't cross. They can't be distracted while driving. Well, they *shouldn't* be distracted. It's harder to institute for cars though. It's not like you can stop the car, radio for a cop, and say "my wife was bothering me while I was driving."
Just picture the average family on a road trip. Kids screaming in the back seat, wife bitching that you're driving too fast, too slow, going taking the wrong route, etc, etc, etc. "Daddy, are we there yet?" "I have to pee" "I'm hungry" "Billy's poking me" "Can't you drive faster?" "I told you, if we took the other way, we'd already be there." "Do you know where you're going?" "We should stop for directions" "Can't you put something else on the radio?" "It's hot." "It's cold." "My ass hurts from this seat." "Can't you get us there any sooner?" "Why do you always ignore me?" "Go faster" "Do you have to drive so fast?" "Do you have to follow him so close?" "I'm bored." "Now I know why mother told me not to marry you."
SHUT UP AND LET ME DRIVE! I KNOW WHERE WE'RE GOING! WE'LL GET THERE WHEN I SAY! IF YOU HAVE TO PEE, PISS IN A BOTTLE! IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING GET OUT AND WALK! AND I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR FAT COW OF A MOTHER SAYS, YOUR DAD SAYS SHE'S A WHORE!
What's worse, that or a quick phone call, "Honey, I'll be home in 1/2 hour. Pick up milk? ok. See you soon."
I know, people are obnoxious about their phone calls, but at least those are shorter than the constant distraction of the passengers that you can't get rid of. Well, you can get rid of them, but there are laws about leaving dead bodies by the side of the highway. Something about littering and a $100 fine, if I remember the signs right.
Ya, it's a terrible distraction, when they're trying to smoke a cigarette, hold a drink, fix their makeup, beat the kids in the back seat, AND use the phone.
Hmmm, you'd think there would already be laws about driving while distracted, and it wouldn't matter. Oh.. wait.. there already were.
They're less likely to signal when they're eating their triple cheezeburger and sucking on their super-bladder-buster drinks. I don't see them making new laws against that. Oh, because fast food thrives on drive-through business. Cell phone companies don't lose on these laws, they win. Consumers go buy new whiz-bang bluetooth enabled phones and accessories.
Lets not forget, it has nothing to do with public safety. It has everything to do with money. I wonder who the primary backers of the original hands free laws were, and I'd bet you could tie their contributors back to the cell phone and automotive industries.
You know, that's very accurate. I can't say that I've been involved with F1 racing, but I've done some amateur racing, and I've been with short track (1/4 to 1/2 mile oval) racers.
In amateur racing, running 30 minute sessions on a 3 mile street-type track, where you're constantly turning, shifting, and your dancing between the clutch, brakes, gas, and bracing yourself on turns. While you're doing it, you're focused on going faster, apex turns, perfect braking, perfect accelerating, and not losing control. 4 sessions, and most people are exhausted, unless they're driving a Geo Metro. Those drivers are kissing the ground, and thanking god they didn't get run over by the real cars. :) (just kidding, I've never seen a Geo on even an amateur course)
Short track racers are doing the same constant work, plus working harder to not get their cars destroyed, since the tolerances are so much closer. The only way you see a car with it's body perfect is if it hadn't been run yet, and there's always several tow trucks and at least a couple ambulances standing by because it's pretty likely someone is going to get hurt enough to earn a ride to the hospital. Those drivers are usually drenched in sweat after 20 minutes, and if they're running even a 100, they'll be out there quite a while. A few laps is a lot of fun. 400 laps will make you wish it'd just end. For many of them, they don't make it through the whole race, since it's harder on the car than the driver.
But, if you're opening up that bet to anyone, and you can get me track time in a F1 car, I'd be more than happy, win or lose. :)
You can land just about anything on a carrier. Now, if it'll stop before it falls off the end of the deck is another story. :)
Ummm, that wasn't safe mode. I did it, and my car turned into an Autobot. How the hell do I make it into a car again? I have to drive to work in the morning. It might seem cool, but having a giant robot walking down the highway is bound to freak out at least a few people. DHS may have something to say about my walking car with giant guns too.
I remember a news story from several years ago that even made the evening news. Someone had a Saturn car that they realized they couldn't afford and tried to return. The dealer wouldn't just take it back for a full refund, since it was now a used car.
Over the next few months, the driver had several "emergencies" with it, each time having it towed back to the dealership, where they couldn't find a problem. One in particular that was video taped by the police, the car was circling in a parking lot and the driver called 911. The insisted the car wouldn't stop. They told her to step on the brakes, use the emergency brake, throw it in neutral, shut it off, etc, etc, etc... She circled for something like 30 minutes. Finally they got her to open the drivers window, and an officer got in the middle of where it was circling. He ran for the side of the car, grabbed the wheel, and then turned off the key. The car (amazingly enough) came to a stop.
Of course, she claimed it wouldn't stop for her. There was all kinds of talk about lemon laws, and how Saturn vehicles weren't safe. She made a whole bunch of noise, and the dealership traded her car for another one. The problems persisted for her. Obviously Saturns were amazingly dangerous vehicles. Someone from the dealership (I think the owner) actually started driving her original car to work every day, to find out what the problem really was. He never had a problem.
Eventually, she was charged, I believe with reckless endangerment. Pretty much, she was driving dangerously, and endangered the officers who tried to help her.
I won't say that the mystery Toyota is driver error or a mechanical problem, but where the cases that have been in the news have massive parallels in other vehicles too, where drivers just did the wrong things.
A older lady in a Buick several years ago was pulling into the parking lot where I worked. I happened to be in the front of the store, and heard her tires squeal. She smashed into a parked car. That broke the parking pawl and sent the parked car across the parking lot into two other parked cars. One of those cars belonged to one of my coworkers, who wasn't exactly very happy that his car was totaled. I ran out to see if she was ok (once the cars stopped moving). She said "What happened?" I told her what she did. She was very insistent that she hit the brakes. I told her she spun the tires before hitting the first car. She said the other car must have done it. The driver of the other car was in the store at the time. At least everyone with wrecked cars had a good sense of humor about it, and no one was hurt. The funniest part was, her car was fine. There was absolutely no damage. It wasn't even scratched. The other three car were severely damaged though. Her insurance gave my coworker full book value on his car, even though it was a rusted piece of junk that barely ran. They were fully aware of it, they were just avoiding potential legal problems.
Why post AC? You obviously work for NASA. :)
Redundancy in a car isn't essential for the computer, as long as it fails in a safe mode. In the case of a single bit being flipped in the data stream, that would be a transient error. In a throttle system, it would be so short lived, you'd never know it ever happened. How many times per second do you think the computer reads its inputs and adjusts things? (hint: it's more than 1).
Heck, you don't even (usually) notice misfires, and those happen all the time, even on perfectly tuned vehicles. It takes a whole series of misfires, or a constant fault to be noticeable. On a V8 engine, you can even lose a cylinder and not notice. I had someone once bring a car to me because it "doesn't accelerate well". It turned out three spark plug wires weren't on. And no, I didn't work on it before that, someone else messed up. It actually idled pretty well. The three cylinders weren't sequential, so it managed fine. That's even been included as a feature on some cars. For example, an 8 cyl car would disable 2 or 4 cylinders to get better fuel economy, and run on all 8 if full power was requested. It's sometimes referred to as a variable displacement engine. Versions have shown up in GM, Chrysler, Mercedes, and Honda vehicles over the years.