Even if you change it to driver error, 80% is far too low still, I just was kind of making fun of the language they used;)
In the case of stuff falling off a truck, I prefer just to stay well back from the truck, or overtake it to minimise risk. If you drive so close to a truck that you can't see and react safely to stuff falling off of it, it's your own fault!
Driving a high sided vehicle in high wind is a human choice. Even my little sports car is noticeably affected by strong winds. If I were driving a flat sided vehicle I'd be going very carefully, or just stop somewhere sheltered, especially if it was a vehicle large enough to flatten other people's cars or cause a blockage on the road.
The animal running across the road isn't human choice of course, though there is often a choice to either hit the animal or swerve off the road. The safest choice is just to hit the animal.
Of course not driving would reduce the error down to nil, but there are ways to reduce your likelihood of crashing down to almost nil just by using 1) common sense (mixed with a truckload of observation), 2) learning from experienced drivers via reading or taking an advanced driving course.
True, I was being a bit pedantic, but there is still a human driver leading the whole bunch anyway!
Driving behind a vehicle carrying stuff is probably human error too. I get fidgety behind large vehicles with loads. Especially if it's gravel/sand falling sporadically onto the road, or it's a bunch of piping or wood that's only been secured over the top. It only takes one piece working itself loose for the rest to be free too..
There is still a human driving the train too, and you'd have to know when the trains are coming along, or race to catch up to them, etc. I think it's pretty dumb idea overall. Technically it would probably reduce the number of accidents, though when an accident does happen, it is likely to be a big one, for example if the lead driver has a heart attack and ploughs off the road+.
+ obiously I don't know what other safety systems they have in place to avoid this kind of thing, but I'm not sure there could be any. If the cars behind are trained to also pay attention to road markings, yet the road markings appear altered via debris/snow/whatever on the road, that might mean that they could ignore the lead car in certain conditions and have an accident anyway.
The point is that it's not predictable, so if there is fairly strong wind, then you should probably just stop the truck somewhere sheltered and wait until the stormy weather passes, rather than risk there being sudden gusts when driving through open areas, across bridges, etc. I'm sure lorry drivers are taught such things, but I also expect that due to human nature, a lot of them ignore such things.
In this country at least, the chance of the weather going from calm to insane stormy weather is pretty much non existent. In some places it might happen (New Zealand for example has weather that can change incredibly quick due to a warm and cold front that meet each other right over the island), but even so I still think in most places, drivers would have a chance to stop before any damage is done.
Of course it is up to you to decide what level of risk you want to take. I am happy to drive at 50mph on snow and ice as long as I am on a wide open road with no pedestrians and a lot of visibility.
checked now in a calculator and I couldn't have stopped on 15 meters of ice with with 30 km/h (20 mph) and one second reaction time.
It does sound like an avoidable mistake if you could see the tracks clearly. If the road was that difficult to make out, and there was ice under the snow, then I do think you should have been going slower, but maybe that's just me.
As for the bus thing, then of course, if someone is suicidal then you can't avoid it, but that's a pretty stupid example. And there is still a human at fault there, even if it's not the driver.
My first post was in response to the point that "old/obscure games are not notable", which I think is a matter of opinion. If the majority of people decide in 200 years that old and obscure video games are notable, yet nobody has preserved information on them, then it would be a shame. Wikipedia's resources are finite of course, but just because something is old or obscure is not a reason to delete it. There has to be some more compelling reason IMO.
Any driver that has accidents that they could have avoided is a bad driver. People can learn, of course. I had a couple of accidents in my first year of driving, but have improved plenty since then.
The fact is that both of those groups are bad drivers. It just so happens that there are a lot more bad women drivers.
What does that have to do with anything? I was 1 year old when it was brought out, so it's both old and obscure to me, yet I still think it has value and a place in Wikipedia.
In 100 years, very few people will have ever seen an original Karate Champ arcade. Does that mean it should be deleted from Wikipedia or a similar resource? Or is it all the more reason to keep a record of it?
Oops, that's what I get for going by memory. The Karate Champ article does say it's only "has been believed to be" the first side view beat'em up, but somehow it still stuck in my head as that.
I even read the HeavyWeight champ stub last week too, but I guess this part caused me to kind of mentally discard it, especially since it was controlled by boxing gloves rather than a controller, so the characters probably couldn't move and therefore it wasn't what we'd think of as a modern beat'em up, it it sounds more akin to Wii Boxing than Streetfighter II Turbo Mega Star Wars Remix HD Edition Hyper Alpha Centauri.
Critics have since identified it as the first game to feature hand to hand fighting, although it had no real influence on subsequent fighting games.[1][2]
Why not? Do they have to be both old and obscure to not be notable, or simply one or the other? There are many obscure games that have notable qualities for things like being the first in some genre, or first to implement some now well known concept.
What about this article on "Computer Space". I'd never even heard of this game until right now, but it was the world's first coin operated video game. I think that's pretty notable. What about Karate Champ? I found it on Wikipedia last week after someone mentioned the developer here on Slashdot. I'd never heard of this game, but it was the first ever side view beat'em up. Again, I think that's pretty notable.
You might not be interested in gaming history, but a lot of people are, and will be.
True. I don't think those count as driver error, but you could still say it's human error for not keeping the roads clean and in good condition! Also it helps to keep a cool head if the conditions go downhill. Sudden control inputs are much more likely to make you skid than smooth ones. That's much easier said than done when you're not expecting it though obviously. I'm gradually improving, so if the car ever skids when I brake these days, I'm getting the confidence to lift off and re-apply since it often allows you to regain directional control (even if your car has ABS this can still be useful..). When I was 19 I was driving down a dirt track and went straight off by panic braking before a corner:P
This is true, but it's still frustrating for those of us that are attentive and efficient in our driving, to be stuck behind some guy that is being far, far too cautious. There are times when you need to be cautious, and there are times when it's basically completely safe to be doing 100mph (outside of an "act of God" like an unforeseeable mechanical failure), and so for someone not to even be doing the posted limit is just needlessly frustrating those behind. The driver behind may have too short a temper, and these days I try hard to just chill if there is no opportunity to pass - but the fact remains that slow drivers do agitate people, and this results in accidents. We need a higher standard of driving from everybody.
I especially dislike when people break the speed limit on a straight road, but then take 5 times longer than I would on a junction. This is often because they approach it too fast, so don't have time to accurately judge which gaps they can enter, either that or they don't even check for gaps until their car has come to a complete stop. Even when I'm obeying the speed limit, I often overtake these speeders just because I'm more attentive at roundabouts, crawling up to them at 5-10mph and taking gaps as soon as I see them, while the other guys are stuck at a standstill and so would take too long to get moving to be able to take the gap. Then of course the speeders blast past me on the next straight, and the cycle repeats.
Another one that really makes me facepalm is people who say do 50 in a 60 limit, and then when they enter a 30 limit they're doing 40. If they're worried about doing 60, how in hell do they think they are going to be able to react to a pedestrian stepping out in front of them at 40?
For high speed accidents then unexpected failures would probably count for more (though I still think that 1 in 5 is giving people too much credit). Even at lower speeds though, there's still serious danger of maiming or killing pedestrians, so even those women on their cell phones are a danger.
I was taught that basically all accidents are human error. This page claims it's at least 95%. Too many people try to blame external factors when in fact the accident was avoidable. I really don't like to hear that someone crashed "because it was raining/icy/snowy". They crashed because they were driving too fast for the conditions.
Freak gusts no, but I've never experienced such things here in the UK. Maybe in other climates that's more likely, but it's still not going to account for a lot of accidents.
My car used to give an ice warning when temperatures reached 4 degrees C (yes, above zero). Presumably that was to account for microclimates in dips in the road, etc. It doesn't make too much difference on straights, but you obviously have to be careful at corners, and if there are cars in front of you. You should at least be driving as if it were raining.
Okay this is true, but do you really think that failures on well maintained cars is the cause of 1 in 5 accidents, or even 1 in 10? I'd think it was more like 1 in 1000.
That figure seems a bit low. Unless an animal runs across the road or similar, other problems are all IMO human error.
If something falls off a truck, that's human error for not securing the load properly. If high winds knock over your truck, that's human error for driving in dangerous conditions. If you skid on an ice patch, that's your error for driving too fast for the conditions, etc.
Thanks. I've skimmed the reading material just now, and am going to finish it properly after this comment. It's already bringing back good memories of my first few years learning to program:)
I got into programming through my interest in games (I suspect that's pretty common), wrote many little games in basic when I was 12-13, wrote bots (AI, not hacks) for Counter-Strike, mods for Quake III and messed around a bit with OpenGL when I was 15/16. I definitely was more motivated with that stuff than my Uni and current work stuff just because it was something that I really enjoyed thinking about and playing with the end result. I still enjoy the programming aspect of what I do, I just am not quite so thrilled about the end product that I play with it all night like I used to do with the bots!
This has been a great thread with everyone throwing around ideas about keeping current/active, and so I am considering getting into some new stuff just for the hell of it. It's been too long. I ponder from time to time whether there's any personal projects that would interest me, though usually other things end up taking my attention and I just drift on with the rest of life. The most I've done at home in the last couple of years was write a little Japanese<->English vocab quiz script in PERL, not exactly very challenging.
Something I was thinking about in the last few weeks was making a Tetris AI. Writing a Tetris clone and then some AI with perhaps Ruby and QT could be a fun little project to get back into things, seeing as I've not done anything with either of them:) I can definitely spare at least one night a week right now to do that kind of thing, and by Jove I think I'll do it.
Thanks for the food for thought, and the indirect insult. I felt pretty crappy today thinking about the time I've wasted just feeling sorry for myself etc the last few years, but your comment and others have been the kick up the butt that I needed to realise that I might as well just get on with things, I've probably still got a good few years ahead of me and I might as well try out a few new things, and who knows what interesting opportunities that could open up:)
I don't think the ribbon interface looks very pleasant or logical, but it varies from employee to employee how well they handle the change. The people that ask questions tend to be the ones that would be asking questions no matter the interface. People in more technical jobs just seem to adapt.
I agree with what you're saying. The fact that people are brought up thinking Microsoft is the gold standard is the problem. If it's not Microsoft, they have an excuse to not want to change.
Generally the company doesn't have to invest in training employees though, because most people are taught MS systems in school, and some even at University. I purposely didn't take "IT" classes in high school because they were just "how to use MS Office". Then I ended up being required to do basically the same course at University as part of my CS degree. It was pretty disappointing.
Disable your WiFi adapter. I wondered if it was something like that. If you are browsing from a phone at least it sounds like you can switch that option off, not sure about from PC though.
(when I say a machine on the VPN, I mean of course one on the same local network as the VPN server, or the VPN server itself.. or just skip VPN altogether and connect in directly)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is [...] Being old and/or obscure has no bearing on whether or not something is notable or not.
Yes, that was in fact exactly my point.
Even if you change it to driver error, 80% is far too low still, I just was kind of making fun of the language they used ;)
In the case of stuff falling off a truck, I prefer just to stay well back from the truck, or overtake it to minimise risk. If you drive so close to a truck that you can't see and react safely to stuff falling off of it, it's your own fault!
Driving a high sided vehicle in high wind is a human choice. Even my little sports car is noticeably affected by strong winds. If I were driving a flat sided vehicle I'd be going very carefully, or just stop somewhere sheltered, especially if it was a vehicle large enough to flatten other people's cars or cause a blockage on the road.
The animal running across the road isn't human choice of course, though there is often a choice to either hit the animal or swerve off the road. The safest choice is just to hit the animal.
Of course not driving would reduce the error down to nil, but there are ways to reduce your likelihood of crashing down to almost nil just by using 1) common sense (mixed with a truckload of observation), 2) learning from experienced drivers via reading or taking an advanced driving course.
True, I was being a bit pedantic, but there is still a human driver leading the whole bunch anyway!
Driving behind a vehicle carrying stuff is probably human error too. I get fidgety behind large vehicles with loads. Especially if it's gravel/sand falling sporadically onto the road, or it's a bunch of piping or wood that's only been secured over the top. It only takes one piece working itself loose for the rest to be free too..
There is still a human driving the train too, and you'd have to know when the trains are coming along, or race to catch up to them, etc. I think it's pretty dumb idea overall. Technically it would probably reduce the number of accidents, though when an accident does happen, it is likely to be a big one, for example if the lead driver has a heart attack and ploughs off the road+.
+ obiously I don't know what other safety systems they have in place to avoid this kind of thing, but I'm not sure there could be any. If the cars behind are trained to also pay attention to road markings, yet the road markings appear altered via debris/snow/whatever on the road, that might mean that they could ignore the lead car in certain conditions and have an accident anyway.
The point is that it's not predictable, so if there is fairly strong wind, then you should probably just stop the truck somewhere sheltered and wait until the stormy weather passes, rather than risk there being sudden gusts when driving through open areas, across bridges, etc. I'm sure lorry drivers are taught such things, but I also expect that due to human nature, a lot of them ignore such things.
In this country at least, the chance of the weather going from calm to insane stormy weather is pretty much non existent. In some places it might happen (New Zealand for example has weather that can change incredibly quick due to a warm and cold front that meet each other right over the island), but even so I still think in most places, drivers would have a chance to stop before any damage is done.
Of course it is up to you to decide what level of risk you want to take. I am happy to drive at 50mph on snow and ice as long as I am on a wide open road with no pedestrians and a lot of visibility.
checked now in a calculator and I couldn't have stopped on 15 meters of ice with with 30 km/h (20 mph) and one second reaction time.
It does sound like an avoidable mistake if you could see the tracks clearly. If the road was that difficult to make out, and there was ice under the snow, then I do think you should have been going slower, but maybe that's just me.
As for the bus thing, then of course, if someone is suicidal then you can't avoid it, but that's a pretty stupid example. And there is still a human at fault there, even if it's not the driver.
My first post was in response to the point that "old/obscure games are not notable", which I think is a matter of opinion. If the majority of people decide in 200 years that old and obscure video games are notable, yet nobody has preserved information on them, then it would be a shame. Wikipedia's resources are finite of course, but just because something is old or obscure is not a reason to delete it. There has to be some more compelling reason IMO.
Any driver that has accidents that they could have avoided is a bad driver. People can learn, of course. I had a couple of accidents in my first year of driving, but have improved plenty since then.
The fact is that both of those groups are bad drivers. It just so happens that there are a lot more bad women drivers.
That's why I said "Wikipedia or a similar resource" ;)
What does that have to do with anything? I was 1 year old when it was brought out, so it's both old and obscure to me, yet I still think it has value and a place in Wikipedia.
In 100 years, very few people will have ever seen an original Karate Champ arcade. Does that mean it should be deleted from Wikipedia or a similar resource? Or is it all the more reason to keep a record of it?
Oops, that's what I get for going by memory. The Karate Champ article does say it's only "has been believed to be" the first side view beat'em up, but somehow it still stuck in my head as that.
I even read the HeavyWeight champ stub last week too, but I guess this part caused me to kind of mentally discard it, especially since it was controlled by boxing gloves rather than a controller, so the characters probably couldn't move and therefore it wasn't what we'd think of as a modern beat'em up, it it sounds more akin to Wii Boxing than Streetfighter II Turbo Mega Star Wars Remix HD Edition Hyper Alpha Centauri.
Critics have since identified it as the first game to feature hand to hand fighting, although it had no real influence on subsequent fighting games.[1][2]
old/obscure games are not notable
Why not? Do they have to be both old and obscure to not be notable, or simply one or the other? There are many obscure games that have notable qualities for things like being the first in some genre, or first to implement some now well known concept.
What about this article on "Computer Space". I'd never even heard of this game until right now, but it was the world's first coin operated video game. I think that's pretty notable. What about Karate Champ? I found it on Wikipedia last week after someone mentioned the developer here on Slashdot. I'd never heard of this game, but it was the first ever side view beat'em up. Again, I think that's pretty notable.
You might not be interested in gaming history, but a lot of people are, and will be.
True. I don't think those count as driver error, but you could still say it's human error for not keeping the roads clean and in good condition! Also it helps to keep a cool head if the conditions go downhill. Sudden control inputs are much more likely to make you skid than smooth ones. That's much easier said than done when you're not expecting it though obviously. I'm gradually improving, so if the car ever skids when I brake these days, I'm getting the confidence to lift off and re-apply since it often allows you to regain directional control (even if your car has ABS this can still be useful..). When I was 19 I was driving down a dirt track and went straight off by panic braking before a corner :P
This is true, but it's still frustrating for those of us that are attentive and efficient in our driving, to be stuck behind some guy that is being far, far too cautious. There are times when you need to be cautious, and there are times when it's basically completely safe to be doing 100mph (outside of an "act of God" like an unforeseeable mechanical failure), and so for someone not to even be doing the posted limit is just needlessly frustrating those behind. The driver behind may have too short a temper, and these days I try hard to just chill if there is no opportunity to pass - but the fact remains that slow drivers do agitate people, and this results in accidents. We need a higher standard of driving from everybody.
I especially dislike when people break the speed limit on a straight road, but then take 5 times longer than I would on a junction. This is often because they approach it too fast, so don't have time to accurately judge which gaps they can enter, either that or they don't even check for gaps until their car has come to a complete stop. Even when I'm obeying the speed limit, I often overtake these speeders just because I'm more attentive at roundabouts, crawling up to them at 5-10mph and taking gaps as soon as I see them, while the other guys are stuck at a standstill and so would take too long to get moving to be able to take the gap. Then of course the speeders blast past me on the next straight, and the cycle repeats.
Another one that really makes me facepalm is people who say do 50 in a 60 limit, and then when they enter a 30 limit they're doing 40. If they're worried about doing 60, how in hell do they think they are going to be able to react to a pedestrian stepping out in front of them at 40?
For high speed accidents then unexpected failures would probably count for more (though I still think that 1 in 5 is giving people too much credit). Even at lower speeds though, there's still serious danger of maiming or killing pedestrians, so even those women on their cell phones are a danger.
I was taught that basically all accidents are human error. This page claims it's at least 95%. Too many people try to blame external factors when in fact the accident was avoidable. I really don't like to hear that someone crashed "because it was raining/icy/snowy". They crashed because they were driving too fast for the conditions.
Freak gusts no, but I've never experienced such things here in the UK. Maybe in other climates that's more likely, but it's still not going to account for a lot of accidents.
My car used to give an ice warning when temperatures reached 4 degrees C (yes, above zero). Presumably that was to account for microclimates in dips in the road, etc. It doesn't make too much difference on straights, but you obviously have to be careful at corners, and if there are cars in front of you. You should at least be driving as if it were raining.
Okay this is true, but do you really think that failures on well maintained cars is the cause of 1 in 5 accidents, or even 1 in 10? I'd think it was more like 1 in 1000.
That figure seems a bit low. Unless an animal runs across the road or similar, other problems are all IMO human error.
If something falls off a truck, that's human error for not securing the load properly. If high winds knock over your truck, that's human error for driving in dangerous conditions. If you skid on an ice patch, that's your error for driving too fast for the conditions, etc.
Thanks. I've skimmed the reading material just now, and am going to finish it properly after this comment. It's already bringing back good memories of my first few years learning to program :)
I got into programming through my interest in games (I suspect that's pretty common), wrote many little games in basic when I was 12-13, wrote bots (AI, not hacks) for Counter-Strike, mods for Quake III and messed around a bit with OpenGL when I was 15/16. I definitely was more motivated with that stuff than my Uni and current work stuff just because it was something that I really enjoyed thinking about and playing with the end result. I still enjoy the programming aspect of what I do, I just am not quite so thrilled about the end product that I play with it all night like I used to do with the bots!
This has been a great thread with everyone throwing around ideas about keeping current/active, and so I am considering getting into some new stuff just for the hell of it. It's been too long. I ponder from time to time whether there's any personal projects that would interest me, though usually other things end up taking my attention and I just drift on with the rest of life. The most I've done at home in the last couple of years was write a little Japanese<->English vocab quiz script in PERL, not exactly very challenging.
Something I was thinking about in the last few weeks was making a Tetris AI. Writing a Tetris clone and then some AI with perhaps Ruby and QT could be a fun little project to get back into things, seeing as I've not done anything with either of them :) I can definitely spare at least one night a week right now to do that kind of thing, and by Jove I think I'll do it.
Thanks for the food for thought, and the indirect insult. I felt pretty crappy today thinking about the time I've wasted just feeling sorry for myself etc the last few years, but your comment and others have been the kick up the butt that I needed to realise that I might as well just get on with things, I've probably still got a good few years ahead of me and I might as well try out a few new things, and who knows what interesting opportunities that could open up :)
An excellent idea :)
I don't think the ribbon interface looks very pleasant or logical, but it varies from employee to employee how well they handle the change. The people that ask questions tend to be the ones that would be asking questions no matter the interface. People in more technical jobs just seem to adapt.
I agree with what you're saying. The fact that people are brought up thinking Microsoft is the gold standard is the problem. If it's not Microsoft, they have an excuse to not want to change.
Generally the company doesn't have to invest in training employees though, because most people are taught MS systems in school, and some even at University. I purposely didn't take "IT" classes in high school because they were just "how to use MS Office". Then I ended up being required to do basically the same course at University as part of my CS degree. It was pretty disappointing.
Disable your WiFi adapter. I wondered if it was something like that. If you are browsing from a phone at least it sounds like you can switch that option off, not sure about from PC though.
(when I say a machine on the VPN, I mean of course one on the same local network as the VPN server, or the VPN server itself.. or just skip VPN altogether and connect in directly)