Are American houses so big that you can't shout to the other people in them ?
I'm not sure the articles idea of a wicked sense of humour is quite the same as mine:
"What do you want for tea ?"
"A pizza and a beer mom."
"What do you want for tea ?"
"I dunno, my mate Hellbastard just brought round some sherbet, it was very nice but we've finished it all off now, can you get us more - bitch ?"
How many people do you see on Motorways observing sensible stopping distances and how many people do you see doing 90Mph + tail-gating cars in front of them ?
If everyone did drive safely and within their limits under the road conditions at the time then there wouldn't be any need for speed limits or any other road rules, the trouble is that they don't and in not doing so accidents happen and people die.
If someone is doing 70Mph in a built up residential area with school crossings etc dotted around the place would you think that was acceptable behaviour ?
Probably you wouldn't and you'd expect the police to stop anyone doing that and charge them with dangerous driving, the reason they were driving dangerously is because they were driving far too fast under road conditions which are not safe for driving on at that speed. That being the case it's perfectly sensible to enforce a speed limit which is suited to the road layout.
I have spoken to some policemen about this kind of thing and most of them tell me that they don't have any problem with the situation you are describing above, their concern is to make sure people behave responsibly on the road and not harass people over points of law.
If there was no speed limit and you were doing 85 when there was a lot more traffic on the road then it would be hard for the police to stop you unless you did actually hit anyone.
If the law is enforced sensibly it will help police educate road users about what is expected of them when they are driving a car, if it's not enforced sensibly then that's a problem with the way the police operate rather than anything else.
That wasn't very clear from your original post but it's a fair point, there is a trend at the moment to coerce things like law enforcement into money making opportunities for local councils.
We have seen the same thing here in the UK with the totally uneccesary "warden controlled parking schemes" - i.e. you pay the council to park your car outside your own house and in return they spend the money on rebranding their literature to read "Winterval" rather than Christmas.
However I don't think that's a problem with the actual law in this case, because I think the law is a good thing, but a problem with it's enforcement.
In an ideal world the police should be able to use this law at their discretion if they think doing so will improve road safety and they shouldn't be told to "bust as many of these people as you can" in order to generate some extra money, that is the problem and that it's that culture you should be addressing.
well yeah, if you just take any old law and then extend it randomly with the paronoid mutterings of your subconcious then it probably will end up being a bad thing.
I'm not saying that it would but if you are in the habit of using computers etc whilst driving you are going to be doing it for a lot longer than the split second it takes for them to distract you and for you to crash.
Laws like this allow the police to pull over anyone they see in breach of this law, you may well be driving quite safely when they do this but they will still fine you and you will think twice before using the laptop or whatever again which means that there is much less chance you will be involved in an accident to begin with.
I don't think this law is a way of penalising anyone after an accident has occured, although it will make it easier to blame you for it but it's a way of cutting down on undesirable and potentially dangerous activity whilst driving.
Unless you have a list somewhere of "things which can contribute to accidents" it's probably quite hard for police to get convictions for things like dangerous driving, this kind of law makes it a lot easier for them to do that.
I'd also say it's actually a lot better to stop people doing things than simply wait for them to cause an accident and then do something about it. If you kill someone in your car then you can quite easily find yourself up for man slaughter in which case laws like this are irrelevant because all aspects of what you were doing at the time will be considered anyway, this is purely designed to help police clamp down on bad behaviour.
The parent really should have pointed out that you are still allowed to breathe and operate you limbs and other body parts pertinent to driving whilst in a car.
I apologise if anyone has died as a result of his omissions.
I don't know how it goes in California, if you just stick a badge on someone and say "Hey, you're a cop now and here's your car" then there would be no assumption they are better drivers than other people.
On the other hand if you have made sure any cops driving cars have had advanced driving instruction and are well versed in when and when it's not OK to use the computers and other jiggery pokery then you should be confident that they are capable of operting safley and effectivley. If you aren't confident of that then they shouldn't be driving.
"If anything, because they are vested with more power than Average Joe, they should be distrusted more."
That's just amusing, you certainly shouldn't trust them with badges, or guns, or cars at all - just let them wander around in a bright yellow suit so everyone can see what they are doing !
I think what you might mean though that their actions are subject to more scrutiny than the average Joe, the only way you can trust them to be doing their job effectivley is after all is make sure you test them and train them enough so you are sure about their competence.
Again I don't know about US police forces ( although I have seen them in action on "The 100 most violent car chases in the world" often enough to be sure I don't ever want to be arrested by them ) but I would certainly hope that they are highly trained and well managed.
"Why on earth to legislators think you need a new law to deal with every permutation of idiocy. Just enforce the !#$#% laws on the books for the new situation."
Because laws like this one make it easier to enforce laws like dangerous driving laws, if you have already classified using a computer on the front seat as driving dangerously then it's very easy to enforce the law.
Secondly when new methods of driving dangerously are invented e.g. cell phones, laptop computers it's a good idea to update legislation to recognise these new developments.
I really can see anything bad about this law at all, no privacy issues, no pandering to corporations, no dilution of rights etc.
I think people just resent being told what to do because everyone almost automatically considers themselves to be "probably the safest driver on the road" so when they are eating their breakfast, grooming their dog, practicing their golf swings etc whilst driving they are sure that they are "doing it responsibly and safely"
The problem is of course that in reality they are no where near as perfect as they like to think they are and even if they are perfect 99.9% of the time they spend driving it's the 0.1% when they aren't concentrating that they end up crashing.
That's why laws like this one are so important, it's a way of impressing on people the actual definition of responsible driving as opposed to their perceived definition of responsible driving e.g. "it's me doing playing quake on my laptop and I sure don't want to kill anyone on the road so I must be playing quake responsibly".
The fact is that cars and driving are a part of almost everyones daily routine and it's also a fact that it's very easy to kill a lot of people through a lapse of concentration in a car so any law which helps promote the idea that when driving a car you should be concentrating properly on the job in hand is a good thing in my opinion.
Who cares if pollsters can't get accurate results, although newspapers, TV seem to love polls I'm sure that most people couldn't care less what the polls say and are happy to wait until the results of ( whatever ) are announced offically.
A couple of years ago a new pedestrian bridge was opened in London over the Thames but had be shut again almost immediatley after the grand opening because of the alarming way it swinging.
Subsequent investigation discovered that there were a couple of bands playing on the opening day and everyone on the bridge had unconciously fallen into step with the beat.
How many people are killed in police pursuits each year, do you know ? Since you also know for sure that all the people the police are chasing are drug addicts escaping from burgaled houses to fund their habits you probably do.
You don't actually specify the soloution you've seen but judging from your post I expect you'd like to suggest the police parked their cars formed a ceremonial salute to the thieves as they kick the crap out of their victims and speed off, later the police would no doubt award some kind of prize for whichever criminal drove the safest during their escape.
Regardless of whether you think drugs should be legalised or not you must realise that burglary, theiving, car jacking and armed robbery are crimes and that the police have a role to play in society preventing criminal and anti social behaviour.
The police aren't 'killing' the people they are pursuing they are chasing them, if the 'unfortunate victims' stopped their cars and gave themselves up they wouldn't run the risk of dying, if however the police simply gave up the chase and let them drive off into the sunset then you can bet that sooner or later an innocent member of the public will end up getting run over and killed by some maniac who is able to behave how he likes on the road.
Finally most police forces will not allow untrained officers to chase anyone and they will call off the chase if it is endangering members of the public. Last year there were 91 deaths during police chases in the UK, 90% of those were caused by the criminal and not the police.
In this case it's not NASA involved but even ESA and the Beagle team haven't managed to employ any psychics so far as I am aware.
It's perfectly predictable that the probe might not phone home and that's why there are dozens of options available for contacting the probe and trying to get some communication from it. Clearly they have considered this, and probably many other, forms of failure.
The fact of life is though that however much you plan in advance you can never see into the future and plan for everything.
I think they can manage around 1.5 - 2 Metres per pixel, I'm not sure how big the Beagle is but I don't think it's much more than a metre diameter so it may not be big enough to show up at all.
Sadly the Beagle team didn't have access to bottomless pits of money and didn't have any choice about the launch date.
They had a hard enough time raising the money ( themselves ) as it was. I am sure they tested the probe as thoroughly as they possibly could before it was launched.
That being the case it was a case of either give it a go with what they had or not give it a go at all.
Maybe with a high profile person such as yourself ( anonymous coward ) in charge this the whole thing would have been a roaring success, I guess we'll never know will we ?
I'm not sure about that, Beagle is able to sense when it's daylight and charge it's batteries whenever it spots it's light enough to do so.
At some point over the next few days it's programmed to check whether it's received any communciations from Mars Odyssey etc and if not to begin transmitting a constant signal whenever it has enough to do so, I would guess it would need specific instructions to start doing it's surveying of rocks etc so right now it's just sitting there recharging it's batteries and waiting for someone to talk to it.
It wouldn't immediatley kill them in one spectacular bang ( so to speak ) but it would be responsible for an awful lot more deaths than would have occured had the Gulf Stream not turned off.
For example were this to happen the UK would experience weather conditions similar to those in Canada and Moscow which, initially, we'd be unprepared for so a lot of people would probably die as a result of colder weather, icier roads, being caught in blizzards etc.
Someone made the point earlier that it's not the Earth it's self which is going to damaged by any nasty climate changes it's going to be us which suffer, this a fact many weak vegetarian eco warrior types fail to stress often enough.
"350 years out of about 4 billion is kind of a small sample"
Well it would be if we were trying to use it to predict the next 4 billion years of the Earths weather but Is suspect that that's not what is intended.
It would be much more useful to get a better idea of the next 50 - 100 years climatic changes and having an extra 100 years of data to help us predict that is surely a big help ?
I'm actually from the UK and haven't been to the US more than a couple times so I can't really comment on what's going on over there. I think you live in Argentina ( ? ) so you probably have seen a good demonstration of how it can all go wrong and if you can see the same thing happening the US then I'm not going to argue with you.
I'm not sure the situation I'm seeing the UK or Europe is quite as worrying though, the UK's main manufacturing industry now is already based on outsourcing jobs from Japan and the US to build cars etc and we've also seen a lot of British companies outsourcing jobs to China so what goes around comes around.
Slashdot Mirror
Are American houses so big that you can't shout to the other people in them ? I'm not sure the articles idea of a wicked sense of humour is quite the same as mine: "What do you want for tea ?" "A pizza and a beer mom." "What do you want for tea ?" "I dunno, my mate Hellbastard just brought round some sherbet, it was very nice but we've finished it all off now, can you get us more - bitch ?"
How on earth is that a Troll ?
How many people do you see on Motorways observing sensible stopping distances and how many people do you see doing 90Mph + tail-gating cars in front of them ?
If everyone did drive safely and within their limits under the road conditions at the time then there wouldn't be any need for speed limits or any other road rules, the trouble is that they don't and in not doing so accidents happen and people die.
If someone is doing 70Mph in a built up residential area with school crossings etc dotted around the place would you think that was acceptable behaviour ?
Probably you wouldn't and you'd expect the police to stop anyone doing that and charge them with dangerous driving, the reason they were driving dangerously is because they were driving far too fast under road conditions which are not safe for driving on at that speed. That being the case it's perfectly sensible to enforce a speed limit which is suited to the road layout.
I have spoken to some policemen about this kind of thing and most of them tell me that they don't have any problem with the situation you are describing above, their concern is to make sure people behave responsibly on the road and not harass people over points of law.
If there was no speed limit and you were doing 85 when there was a lot more traffic on the road then it would be hard for the police to stop you unless you did actually hit anyone.
If the law is enforced sensibly it will help police educate road users about what is expected of them when they are driving a car, if it's not enforced sensibly then that's a problem with the way the police operate rather than anything else.
That wasn't very clear from your original post but it's a fair point, there is a trend at the moment to coerce things like law enforcement into money making opportunities for local councils.
We have seen the same thing here in the UK with the totally uneccesary "warden controlled parking schemes" - i.e. you pay the council to park your car outside your own house and in return they spend the money on rebranding their literature to read "Winterval" rather than Christmas.
However I don't think that's a problem with the actual law in this case, because I think the law is a good thing, but a problem with it's enforcement.
In an ideal world the police should be able to use this law at their discretion if they think doing so will improve road safety and they shouldn't be told to "bust as many of these people as you can" in order to generate some extra money, that is the problem and that it's that culture you should be addressing.
well yeah, if you just take any old law and then extend it randomly with the paronoid mutterings of your subconcious then it probably will end up being a bad thing.
I'm not saying that it would but if you are in the habit of using computers etc whilst driving you are going to be doing it for a lot longer than the split second it takes for them to distract you and for you to crash.
Laws like this allow the police to pull over anyone they see in breach of this law, you may well be driving quite safely when they do this but they will still fine you and you will think twice before using the laptop or whatever again which means that there is much less chance you will be involved in an accident to begin with.
I don't think this law is a way of penalising anyone after an accident has occured, although it will make it easier to blame you for it but it's a way of cutting down on undesirable and potentially dangerous activity whilst driving.
Unless you have a list somewhere of "things which can contribute to accidents" it's probably quite hard for police to get convictions for things like dangerous driving, this kind of law makes it a lot easier for them to do that.
I'd also say it's actually a lot better to stop people doing things than simply wait for them to cause an accident and then do something about it. If you kill someone in your car then you can quite easily find yourself up for man slaughter in which case laws like this are irrelevant because all aspects of what you were doing at the time will be considered anyway, this is purely designed to help police clamp down on bad behaviour.
The parent really should have pointed out that you are still allowed to breathe and operate you limbs and other body parts pertinent to driving whilst in a car.
I apologise if anyone has died as a result of his omissions.
I don't know how it goes in California, if you just stick a badge on someone and say "Hey, you're a cop now and here's your car" then there would be no assumption they are better drivers than other people.
On the other hand if you have made sure any cops driving cars have had advanced driving instruction and are well versed in when and when it's not OK to use the computers and other jiggery pokery then you should be confident that they are capable of operting safley and effectivley. If you aren't confident of that then they shouldn't be driving.
"If anything, because they are vested with more power than Average Joe, they should be distrusted more."
That's just amusing, you certainly shouldn't trust them with badges, or guns, or cars at all - just let them wander around in a bright yellow suit so everyone can see what they are doing !
I think what you might mean though that their actions are subject to more scrutiny than the average Joe, the only way you can trust them to be doing their job effectivley is after all is make sure you test them and train them enough so you are sure about their competence.
Again I don't know about US police forces ( although I have seen them in action on "The 100 most violent car chases in the world" often enough to be sure I don't ever want to be arrested by them ) but I would certainly hope that they are highly trained and well managed.
"Why on earth to legislators think you need a new law to deal with every permutation of idiocy. Just enforce the !#$#% laws on the books for the new situation."
Because laws like this one make it easier to enforce laws like dangerous driving laws, if you have already classified using a computer on the front seat as driving dangerously then it's very easy to enforce the law.
Secondly when new methods of driving dangerously are invented e.g. cell phones, laptop computers it's a good idea to update legislation to recognise these new developments.
I really can see anything bad about this law at all, no privacy issues, no pandering to corporations, no dilution of rights etc.
I think people just resent being told what to do because everyone almost automatically considers themselves to be "probably the safest driver on the road" so when they are eating their breakfast, grooming their dog, practicing their golf swings etc whilst driving they are sure that they are "doing it responsibly and safely"
The problem is of course that in reality they are no where near as perfect as they like to think they are and even if they are perfect 99.9% of the time they spend driving it's the 0.1% when they aren't concentrating that they end up crashing.
That's why laws like this one are so important, it's a way of impressing on people the actual definition of responsible driving as opposed to their perceived definition of responsible driving e.g. "it's me doing playing quake on my laptop and I sure don't want to kill anyone on the road so I must be playing quake responsibly".
The fact is that cars and driving are a part of almost everyones daily routine and it's also a fact that it's very easy to kill a lot of people through a lapse of concentration in a car so any law which helps promote the idea that when driving a car you should be concentrating properly on the job in hand is a good thing in my opinion.
Who cares if pollsters can't get accurate results, although newspapers, TV seem to love polls I'm sure that most people couldn't care less what the polls say and are happy to wait until the results of ( whatever ) are announced offically.
A couple of years ago a new pedestrian bridge was opened in London over the Thames but had be shut again almost immediatley after the grand opening because of the alarming way it swinging.
Subsequent investigation discovered that there were a couple of bands playing on the opening day and everyone on the bridge had unconciously fallen into step with the beat.
That poll doesn't seem to have been affected much by the hordes of /.ers voting no:
Would you trust your vote to the Internet? * 27808 responses
Yes.
25%
Not today, but maybe soon.
40%
Never.
32%
None of the above.
3%
There is a rise of 1% for the no's from 6 hours ago
How many people are killed in police pursuits each year, do you know ? Since you also know for sure that all the people the police are chasing are drug addicts escaping from burgaled houses to fund their habits you probably do.
You don't actually specify the soloution you've seen but judging from your post I expect you'd like to suggest the police parked their cars formed a ceremonial salute to the thieves as they kick the crap out of their victims and speed off, later the police would no doubt award some kind of prize for whichever criminal drove the safest during their escape.
Regardless of whether you think drugs should be legalised or not you must realise that burglary, theiving, car jacking and armed robbery are crimes and that the police have a role to play in society preventing criminal and anti social behaviour.
The police aren't 'killing' the people they are pursuing they are chasing them, if the 'unfortunate victims' stopped their cars and gave themselves up they wouldn't run the risk of dying, if however the police simply gave up the chase and let them drive off into the sunset then you can bet that sooner or later an innocent member of the public will end up getting run over and killed by some maniac who is able to behave how he likes on the road.
Finally most police forces will not allow untrained officers to chase anyone and they will call off the chase if it is endangering members of the public. Last year there were 91 deaths during police chases in the UK, 90% of those were caused by the criminal and not the police.
I don't know what Windows XP is like booting up but I have 2 pretty much identical machines one of which runs Win2k and one of which runs Mandrake 9.2
Quite often I turn them both on at the same time and I can always log into Gnome around 30-40 seconds faster than I can log into Win2K.
That's total rubbish, Police Pursuit drivers in the UK have to undergo very rigourous training before they are allowed to actually pursue anyone.
In this case it's not NASA involved but even ESA and the Beagle team haven't managed to employ any psychics so far as I am aware.
It's perfectly predictable that the probe might not phone home and that's why there are dozens of options available for contacting the probe and trying to get some communication from it. Clearly they have considered this, and probably many other, forms of failure.
The fact of life is though that however much you plan in advance you can never see into the future and plan for everything.
I think they can manage around 1.5 - 2 Metres per pixel, I'm not sure how big the Beagle is but I don't think it's much more than a metre diameter so it may not be big enough to show up at all.
Sadly the Beagle team didn't have access to bottomless pits of money and didn't have any choice about the launch date.
They had a hard enough time raising the money ( themselves ) as it was. I am sure they tested the probe as thoroughly as they possibly could before it was launched.
That being the case it was a case of either give it a go with what they had or not give it a go at all.
Maybe with a high profile person such as yourself ( anonymous coward ) in charge this the whole thing would have been a roaring success, I guess we'll never know will we ?
I'm not sure about that, Beagle is able to sense when it's daylight and charge it's batteries whenever it spots it's light enough to do so.
At some point over the next few days it's programmed to check whether it's received any communciations from Mars Odyssey etc and if not to begin transmitting a constant signal whenever it has enough to do so, I would guess it would need specific instructions to start doing it's surveying of rocks etc so right now it's just sitting there recharging it's batteries and waiting for someone to talk to it.
The Mars Global surveyor passed over the landing site 20mins after the Beagle2 landed, the picture of the landing site is here here
It wouldn't immediatley kill them in one spectacular bang ( so to speak ) but it would be responsible for an awful lot more deaths than would have occured had the Gulf Stream not turned off.
For example were this to happen the UK would experience weather conditions similar to those in Canada and Moscow which, initially, we'd be unprepared for so a lot of people would probably die as a result of colder weather, icier roads, being caught in blizzards etc.
Someone made the point earlier that it's not the Earth it's self which is going to damaged by any nasty climate changes it's going to be us which suffer, this a fact many weak vegetarian eco warrior types fail to stress often enough.
Well it would be if we were trying to use it to predict the next 4 billion years of the Earths weather but Is suspect that that's not what is intended.
It would be much more useful to get a better idea of the next 50 - 100 years climatic changes and having an extra 100 years of data to help us predict that is surely a big help ?
I'm actually from the UK and haven't been to the US more than a couple times so I can't really comment on what's going on over there. I think you live in Argentina ( ? ) so you probably have seen a good demonstration of how it can all go wrong and if you can see the same thing happening the US then I'm not going to argue with you.
I'm not sure the situation I'm seeing the UK or Europe is quite as worrying though, the UK's main manufacturing industry now is already based on outsourcing jobs from Japan and the US to build cars etc and we've also seen a lot of British companies outsourcing jobs to China so what goes around comes around.