the driver driving the high rate of speed is at fault.
No. It's the moron who doesn't check his rear view mirror before entering the passing lane where he knows cars can be approaching at speeds of 150mph or greater who is at fault, and I bet the insurance companies would agree with me on that. I've had very few car accidents in my 25 years of driving, but nearly every one was caused by someone pulling in front of me without looking and in every case they were found to be at fault even though I was the one who was driving much faster and who slammed into their vehicle. I guess some people just don't have a sense of self-preservation and checking your mirrors before changing lanes is just too much trouble. I've read it's the East German truckers who are most guilty of this sort of thing. Maybe it's a cultural thing. I've lived in countries where most people habitually pass on blind curves. It was just the way people drove in those places.
Well said. The slowpokes like to think they are being smart. That intelligence is what makes them different from faster drivers. But what they really are is afraid. I would guess that they don't take any risks in other areas of their lives either. There is definitely room for such people on our large planet. I just wish they wouldn't always be trying to make everyone else more like them and to stop other people from adding even the tiniest amount of risk to their own lives.
I think the famous lack of Montana speed limits was only for a few years. Eventually they wanted to once again dine at the federal trough. And as your link points out, fatalities actually went down during the no limit era and quickly jumped when the limits were re-established and enforced. The fact is most people have a sense of self-preservation and aren't comfortable driving above a certain speed which varies depending on the road and weather conditions. Also monitoring your speed by actually looking at your speedometer is a dangerous distraction. I remember when Nissan had a heads-up display that projected your speed reading onto the windshield. I think some exotic sports cars also have that feature. Now that was an excellent idea.
Have you considered the idea that they are not idiots? That you are just highly risk averse and they are not? Some people are quite rationally willing to take risks that you are not. Some totally insane risk takers are even willing to do stuff like climb mountains or get into a boat that is designed to sink hundreds of feet underwater or even strap themselves into the tiny tip of a massive fireball and travel into space where there is no air.
So what you are saying is that once you get above the magical 55 mph you are dead anyway. So why worry about 85 mph or even 100 mph speed limits? Perhaps you are arguing that we should return to a nationwide 55mph even though all the statistics show that there are fewer fatalities with a 65mph limit.
Once you have the initial disruption, a car at 85mph (vs. 55mph) (a) is much less stable, and much harder to get back under control
Interesting hypothesis. Now all you have to do is prove it
But the death rate goes up pretty fast above 55mph.
You would be part of the causal chain. Any unbiased observer would have to admit that. You could easily have taken an action that would have prevented all of those deaths but chose not to based on your perceived absolute right to drive slow. There's also the matter of you possibly being affected by the head-on collision. Depending on the dynamics you might get slammed as well. So much for "I'll be safe as long as I drive slow".
As far as passing on blind curves being stupid, what would you do if I were to pass you and then simply slow to a stop and park on this hypothetical narrow winding road. I could maybe go to sleep for a few hours or read a book. And, yes, I would be doing it just to fuck with you and make you later than you had anticipated just like you do to so many others. I would assume that eventually you would try to pass me on the blind curve, but maybe not.
Now that I've thought of this I have to try it. Next time I get behind a real slow poke on a curvy back road. Someone who doesn't have some obvious excuse like being 90 years old or something. I'm going to pass them and then stop and put my hazards on and just stay there for a while. I'm betting that they (and you) would pass me eventually. Probably after only a minute or two. It would be interesting to see if a truly risk averse person would stay there as long as I did.
Unfortunately, most drivers don't take those factors into consideration either. Especially after a few beers.
If you are going to make laws based on drunk drivers then you'd have to lower all speed limits to like 10 mph. Drunk driving at any speed is already illegal and has very serious criminal penalties associated with it which makes the monetary penalties of speeding pale in comparison.
Force is Mass x Acceleration. Energy is 1/2mv^2. A higher speed collision releases more energy and that's about the only argument that the 'slower is always better' crowd can make. But for me they first have to prove that a 75 mph collision (or whatever) is not lethal. Once you reach a lethal speed any further increase in speed will only make a slightly less attractive corpse at the funeral. But even then I value freedom more than safety. I don't believe in forcing everyone to behave in some manner that I approve of to allegedly save other people from themselves.
Newly licensed teenagers, old grannies and then you have drunks, lunatics and people who are just having a bad day.
Well there should probably be a granny lane with a minimum speed of 60 or something. Cops almost never pull people over for driving too slow anyway (although they should). Other than that do you really believe that teenagers who just got their license, lunatics, and drunks are going to care what the speed limit is? You really think they are that afraid of speeding tickets. It's not like they are going to be summarily executed or something. The drunks are going to be more afraid of getting pulled over for drunk driving than for speeding. The penalties are far worse. Someone who isn't extremely drunk and has half a brain is likely to be driving at less than the speed limit. Not more. If I were a cop on the lookout for drunk drivers I'd be looking for people that are driving suspiciously slow. Not fast.
If that's a law of physics then please cite it. I have 3 different undergraduate physics books sitting right here. So I can look it up. It is true that the kinetic energy released in a collision with a fixed object increases at the square of the velocity (1/2mv^2), but at some point it doesn't matter how much more energy is released. You will just be more dead.
I'll wait for that citation of yours. Meanwhile, here are some for you:
even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
The article, which was mostly fluff, does not state that. Tapeworms most definitely exist in the US as well. In fact they are very common. Perhaps you can cite your source.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Dogs? Because only dogs can have tapeworm infections? If you want to be safe you should avoid eating any raw vegetables that weren't grown somewhere protected from wild animals. Like hydroponic or greenhouse vegetables.
Don't eat raw meat.
Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
Eosinophil counts are not diagnostically reliable. Eosinophilia is sporadically present and does not correlate with the severity of the infection. Eosinophil counts also do not help in monitoring treatment modalities.
Is it not trivial to convert a.mobi file to.epub? I think they are both html formats. I have done that very thing many times with Calibre. I have never actually purchased an ebook on Amazon, but I think Amazon's ebook DRM was cracked long ago.
Amazon could give its own authors an advance. I don't think editors themselves are useless. They will always be needed even if they eventually all work for some giant online megacorp that distributes most written works. Amazon could also have a department of professionals that rates manuscript 'quality'.
I'm also not convinced that Amazon really is "dumping". I might be willing to believe that they might occasionally have a sale that sells a book at cost, but I would need some pretty strong evidence that they were losing money on most of the books they sell because they will "make up for it" with their other merchandise. No one makes money by selling at a loss. It is not an economically viable strategy and even if it were Amazon is the 800 lb gorilla. Whatever competition they have they have no reason to worry about.
Then maybe ebooks just don't make much sense economically. There are always going to be people like me who value a physical object like a real book far more than an html file. Sell them at the same price, and I might buy the paper book, but I will never buy the html version. I do have an extensive collection of ebooks, but they were all downloaded for free. I have never and will never actually buy an ebook for anywhere near the same price as the paper version.
You mention editing. When I buy an ebook I'd also want a 100% money back guarantee that there will not even be a single misspelled word or typo or layout problem when compared to the paper version. There are far too many ebooks being sold with all kinds of errors that the paper version doesn't have.
If I were an author I would sell my ebooks directly on Amazon and on my own web site for a fraction of the price that publishers are asking. I'd use a good spell checker and then hire an English major (or two) to read it over for obvious errors. Printing a physical book is one thing, but for ebooks there is just no reason for a middleman.
There's only one juror 'ability' you need to know about: jury nullification. If you think the law is unjust then the accused is not guilty by definition.
You argue that 75 mph is 'reasonable'. Someone else argues that 100 is reasonable. I might argue that 25 is reasonable. Someone else might argue that anything faster than walking speed is too dangerous. In a free country there would be no speed limits at all on other people. Of course you are always free to limit your own speed as you see fit. Or just walk if that makes you feel safer.
Where was that blowout? In your driveway? On the highways where I live, near a major US city, at least 50% of the drivers are driving at 80-85 mph already.
I've got news for you. People already drive 90-100 mph regardless of the speed limit when the conditions warrant it. And yes, we do it because we know we can get away with it most of the time. Especially in the desert. Neither raising not lowering speed limits will have any affect on this because we are gambling that we won't get caught.
One thing I have noticed about slow drivers is that they don't pay attention to speed limits either. Their natural driving speed, the speed they feel most comfortable at, is already so slow that they are used to not paying attention to the posted limits. Let's say they naturally like to drive at 30 mph most of the time. When they pass a 15mph sign most of them do not slow down.
I have passed cars who were driving under the speed limit on winding back roads. It is pure chance that I did not crash into an oncoming car. Slow drivers would just claim that it is their right to drive slow and the deaths from head-on collisions in the other lane are 100% the fault of the driver passing them, ignoring the fact that if they had either been driving a more reasonable speed or had been willing to pull over to let the faster drive pass them none of those people would have died.
Occassionally, after passing such a slow driver, I slow down significantly slower than they were driving before to give them a taste of their own medicine. It would be interesting to see how slow I would have to go to get that slow cautious driver to pass me on a blind curve. And what would they do if I just parked? Right there in front of them, leaned back and started reading a novel for an hour or so.
I think I'm still misunderstanding you. If the reference frame is Earth and you are not considering time dilation or the elapsed time from the POV of the space traveler then the total elapsed time would just depend on the average speed of the ship and the amount of time he spent "puttering around".
Or perhaps you want to consider time dilation. I've always like the Lorentz time dilation equation: T = To / sqrt(1 - (v^2/c^2)) where T is the elapsed time for a fixed reference frame observer on Earth, To is the elapsed time for the moving clock or person, and v is the constant or (roughly) average velocity of the ship (or the clock that is in motion wrt the fixed reference frame).
Assume that you have a ship that quickly accelerates to 0.93c (so that the acceleration time is negligible) with an average velocity of 0.9c. It would take a photon 40.6 years to make a round trip to Gliese 581. The ship is traveling 10% slower and will take 10% longer for a trip time of 44.66 years. That is how much time will have elapsed for clocks on Earth. That's T. So what is the elapsed time To for the traveler? You could use this time dilation calculator or just plug and chug.
So T = 44.66 years and v=0.9(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.43589. So 44.66 = To / 0.43589 or To = 44.66 * 0.43589 = 19.466 years or around 19 years and 6 months.
At a more realistic average speed for current abilities with a nuclear pulse propulsion system of.05c the trip would take 20 times longer than a photon or 812 years from earth clocks. So T = 812 years and v=(.05)(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.99875. So 812 = To / 0.99875. To = 812(.99875) = 810.984 years. Just one year less time will have elapsed for the astronaut's ship in that case.
I guess I should have added a disclaimer about not actually being able to reach the speed of light itself. The point was that it would take about a year at 1 G if you could reach it and that it would still take about the same amount of time to reach.93c or whatever the highest practical speed is with a hypothetical ideal energy source. And before you point out that the energy source would have to output larger and larger amounts of energy in a non-linear fashion in order to maintain a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 of an increasingly massive object I am aware of that. Now I want to calculate how low your acceleration would have to be in order to actually accelerate/decelerate continuously for a travel time of 5 years to Alpha Centauri A. Another good calculus problem. If you assume an ideal energy source the increasing power necessary to generate the increasing force to propel an increasingly massive object can be ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
the driver driving the high rate of speed is at fault.
No. It's the moron who doesn't check his rear view mirror before entering the passing lane where he knows cars can be approaching at speeds of 150mph or greater who is at fault, and I bet the insurance companies would agree with me on that. I've had very few car accidents in my 25 years of driving, but nearly every one was caused by someone pulling in front of me without looking and in every case they were found to be at fault even though I was the one who was driving much faster and who slammed into their vehicle. I guess some people just don't have a sense of self-preservation and checking your mirrors before changing lanes is just too much trouble. I've read it's the East German truckers who are most guilty of this sort of thing. Maybe it's a cultural thing. I've lived in countries where most people habitually pass on blind curves. It was just the way people drove in those places.
Well said. The slowpokes like to think they are being smart. That intelligence is what makes them different from faster drivers. But what they really are is afraid. I would guess that they don't take any risks in other areas of their lives either. There is definitely room for such people on our large planet. I just wish they wouldn't always be trying to make everyone else more like them and to stop other people from adding even the tiniest amount of risk to their own lives.
I think the famous lack of Montana speed limits was only for a few years. Eventually they wanted to once again dine at the federal trough. And as your link points out, fatalities actually went down during the no limit era and quickly jumped when the limits were re-established and enforced. The fact is most people have a sense of self-preservation and aren't comfortable driving above a certain speed which varies depending on the road and weather conditions. Also monitoring your speed by actually looking at your speedometer is a dangerous distraction. I remember when Nissan had a heads-up display that projected your speed reading onto the windshield. I think some exotic sports cars also have that feature. Now that was an excellent idea.
Have you considered the idea that they are not idiots? That you are just highly risk averse and they are not? Some people are quite rationally willing to take risks that you are not. Some totally insane risk takers are even willing to do stuff like climb mountains or get into a boat that is designed to sink hundreds of feet underwater or even strap themselves into the tiny tip of a massive fireball and travel into space where there is no air.
In fact, most people don't survive a head-on collision at >55mph, as this classic study http://papers.sae.org/670925/ by Nils Bohlin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin found out. Great read, BTW (if you're a physics/engineering nerd).
So what you are saying is that once you get above the magical 55 mph you are dead anyway. So why worry about 85 mph or even 100 mph speed limits? Perhaps you are arguing that we should return to a nationwide 55mph even though all the statistics show that there are fewer fatalities with a 65mph limit.
Once you have the initial disruption, a car at 85mph (vs. 55mph) (a) is much less stable, and much harder to get back under control
Interesting hypothesis. Now all you have to do is prove it
But the death rate goes up pretty fast above 55mph.
Citation needed.
You would be part of the causal chain. Any unbiased observer would have to admit that. You could easily have taken an action that would have prevented all of those deaths but chose not to based on your perceived absolute right to drive slow. There's also the matter of you possibly being affected by the head-on collision. Depending on the dynamics you might get slammed as well. So much for "I'll be safe as long as I drive slow".
As far as passing on blind curves being stupid, what would you do if I were to pass you and then simply slow to a stop and park on this hypothetical narrow winding road. I could maybe go to sleep for a few hours or read a book. And, yes, I would be doing it just to fuck with you and make you later than you had anticipated just like you do to so many others. I would assume that eventually you would try to pass me on the blind curve, but maybe not.
Now that I've thought of this I have to try it. Next time I get behind a real slow poke on a curvy back road. Someone who doesn't have some obvious excuse like being 90 years old or something. I'm going to pass them and then stop and put my hazards on and just stay there for a while. I'm betting that they (and you) would pass me eventually. Probably after only a minute or two. It would be interesting to see if a truly risk averse person would stay there as long as I did.
Unfortunately, most drivers don't take those factors into consideration either. Especially after a few beers.
If you are going to make laws based on drunk drivers then you'd have to lower all speed limits to like 10 mph. Drunk driving at any speed is already illegal and has very serious criminal penalties associated with it which makes the monetary penalties of speeding pale in comparison.
Force is Mass x Acceleration. Energy is 1/2mv^2. A higher speed collision releases more energy and that's about the only argument that the 'slower is always better' crowd can make. But for me they first have to prove that a 75 mph collision (or whatever) is not lethal. Once you reach a lethal speed any further increase in speed will only make a slightly less attractive corpse at the funeral. But even then I value freedom more than safety. I don't believe in forcing everyone to behave in some manner that I approve of to allegedly save other people from themselves.
Newly licensed teenagers, old grannies and then you have drunks, lunatics and people who are just having a bad day.
Well there should probably be a granny lane with a minimum speed of 60 or something. Cops almost never pull people over for driving too slow anyway (although they should). Other than that do you really believe that teenagers who just got their license, lunatics, and drunks are going to care what the speed limit is? You really think they are that afraid of speeding tickets. It's not like they are going to be summarily executed or something. The drunks are going to be more afraid of getting pulled over for drunk driving than for speeding. The penalties are far worse. Someone who isn't extremely drunk and has half a brain is likely to be driving at less than the speed limit. Not more. If I were a cop on the lookout for drunk drivers I'd be looking for people that are driving suspiciously slow. Not fast.
We are also known for our painfully slow drivers.
At 100mph, you will see a lot more wrecks.
If that's a law of physics then please cite it. I have 3 different undergraduate physics books sitting right here. So I can look it up. It is true that the kinetic energy released in a collision with a fixed object increases at the square of the velocity (1/2mv^2), but at some point it doesn't matter how much more energy is released. You will just be more dead.
I'll wait for that citation of yours. Meanwhile, here are some for you:
http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety-paradox
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/effects-raising-lowering
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/lave-65-mph
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/55-mph-study.pdf
even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
The article, which was mostly fluff, does not state that. Tapeworms most definitely exist in the US as well. In fact they are very common. Perhaps you can cite your source.
Don't walk around bare foot.
Aren't you thinking of hookworms?
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Dogs? Because only dogs can have tapeworm infections? If you want to be safe you should avoid eating any raw vegetables that weren't grown somewhere protected from wild animals. Like hydroponic or greenhouse vegetables.
Don't eat raw meat.
Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
Blood tests are not considered reliable
Eosinophil counts are not diagnostically reliable. Eosinophilia is sporadically present and does not correlate with the severity of the infection. Eosinophil counts also do not help in monitoring treatment modalities.
But you can only read those ebooks on a Kindle.
Is it not trivial to convert a .mobi file to .epub? I think they are both html formats. I have done that very thing many times with Calibre. I have never actually purchased an ebook on Amazon, but I think Amazon's ebook DRM was cracked long ago.
Amazon could give its own authors an advance. I don't think editors themselves are useless. They will always be needed even if they eventually all work for some giant online megacorp that distributes most written works. Amazon could also have a department of professionals that rates manuscript 'quality'.
I'm also not convinced that Amazon really is "dumping". I might be willing to believe that they might occasionally have a sale that sells a book at cost, but I would need some pretty strong evidence that they were losing money on most of the books they sell because they will "make up for it" with their other merchandise. No one makes money by selling at a loss. It is not an economically viable strategy and even if it were Amazon is the 800 lb gorilla. Whatever competition they have they have no reason to worry about.
Then maybe ebooks just don't make much sense economically. There are always going to be people like me who value a physical object like a real book far more than an html file. Sell them at the same price, and I might buy the paper book, but I will never buy the html version. I do have an extensive collection of ebooks, but they were all downloaded for free. I have never and will never actually buy an ebook for anywhere near the same price as the paper version.
You mention editing. When I buy an ebook I'd also want a 100% money back guarantee that there will not even be a single misspelled word or typo or layout problem when compared to the paper version. There are far too many ebooks being sold with all kinds of errors that the paper version doesn't have.
If I were an author I would sell my ebooks directly on Amazon and on my own web site for a fraction of the price that publishers are asking. I'd use a good spell checker and then hire an English major (or two) to read it over for obvious errors. Printing a physical book is one thing, but for ebooks there is just no reason for a middleman.
There's only one juror 'ability' you need to know about: jury nullification. If you think the law is unjust then the accused is not guilty by definition.
You argue that 75 mph is 'reasonable'. Someone else argues that 100 is reasonable. I might argue that 25 is reasonable. Someone else might argue that anything faster than walking speed is too dangerous. In a free country there would be no speed limits at all on other people. Of course you are always free to limit your own speed as you see fit. Or just walk if that makes you feel safer.
Where was that blowout? In your driveway? On the highways where I live, near a major US city, at least 50% of the drivers are driving at 80-85 mph already.
I've got news for you. People already drive 90-100 mph regardless of the speed limit when the conditions warrant it. And yes, we do it because we know we can get away with it most of the time. Especially in the desert. Neither raising not lowering speed limits will have any affect on this because we are gambling that we won't get caught.
One thing I have noticed about slow drivers is that they don't pay attention to speed limits either. Their natural driving speed, the speed they feel most comfortable at, is already so slow that they are used to not paying attention to the posted limits. Let's say they naturally like to drive at 30 mph most of the time. When they pass a 15mph sign most of them do not slow down.
I have passed cars who were driving under the speed limit on winding back roads. It is pure chance that I did not crash into an oncoming car. Slow drivers would just claim that it is their right to drive slow and the deaths from head-on collisions in the other lane are 100% the fault of the driver passing them, ignoring the fact that if they had either been driving a more reasonable speed or had been willing to pull over to let the faster drive pass them none of those people would have died.
Occassionally, after passing such a slow driver, I slow down significantly slower than they were driving before to give them a taste of their own medicine. It would be interesting to see how slow I would have to go to get that slow cautious driver to pass me on a blind curve. And what would they do if I just parked? Right there in front of them, leaned back and started reading a novel for an hour or so.
You realize that your whole post is indistinguishable from ad copy, right?
I don't own a Mac or Hackentosh, but I believe you can remove the dock at least. I also hate it.
What drug? It must be a serious hallucinogen. Was he tripping on DXM?
I think I'm still misunderstanding you. If the reference frame is Earth and you are not considering time dilation or the elapsed time from the POV of the space traveler then the total elapsed time would just depend on the average speed of the ship and the amount of time he spent "puttering around".
Or perhaps you want to consider time dilation. I've always like the Lorentz time dilation equation: T = To / sqrt(1 - (v^2/c^2)) where T is the elapsed time for a fixed reference frame observer on Earth, To is the elapsed time for the moving clock or person, and v is the constant or (roughly) average velocity of the ship (or the clock that is in motion wrt the fixed reference frame).
Assume that you have a ship that quickly accelerates to 0.93c (so that the acceleration time is negligible) with an average velocity of 0.9c. It would take a photon 40.6 years to make a round trip to Gliese 581. The ship is traveling 10% slower and will take 10% longer for a trip time of 44.66 years. That is how much time will have elapsed for clocks on Earth. That's T. So what is the elapsed time To for the traveler? You could use this time dilation calculator or just plug and chug.
So T = 44.66 years and v=0.9(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.43589. So 44.66 = To / 0.43589 or To = 44.66 * 0.43589 = 19.466 years or around 19 years and 6 months.
At a more realistic average speed for current abilities with a nuclear pulse propulsion system of .05c the trip would take 20 times longer than a photon or 812 years from earth clocks. So T = 812 years and v=(.05)(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.99875. So 812 = To / 0.99875. To = 812(.99875) = 810.984 years. Just one year less time will have elapsed for the astronaut's ship in that case.
I guess I should have added a disclaimer about not actually being able to reach the speed of light itself. The point was that it would take about a year at 1 G if you could reach it and that it would still take about the same amount of time to reach .93c or whatever the highest practical speed is with a hypothetical ideal energy source. And before you point out that the energy source would have to output larger and larger amounts of energy in a non-linear fashion in order to maintain a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 of an increasingly massive object I am aware of that. Now I want to calculate how low your acceleration would have to be in order to actually accelerate/decelerate continuously for a travel time of 5 years to Alpha Centauri A. Another good calculus problem. If you assume an ideal energy source the increasing power necessary to generate the increasing force to propel an increasingly massive object can be ignored.