The Drone Zone
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If they WANT to write you a ticket, all they'll have to do is track you from home to work, as long as it takes and it will be perfectly legal, completely warrantless.
I'm not saying I'm down with the idea of a government robot following me everywhere to see if I'm breaking the law, but I'm not very sympathetic to the idea that we have some sort of right to violate traffic regulations without consequence.
And I often find myself on empty highways in the early morning. With good tires and brakes, and a rested driver, why _shouldn't_ I go 100 miles an hour? Especially since I am off the gas well before anything that looks slightly sketchy.
Cruise control has made most drivers far stupider, as they surrender speed to the car and stop making the subtle adjustments to maintain or create buffers needed to be safe. Worse, they camp out in the left hand lane simply to avoid the necessity of those adjustments to accomodate merging traffic.
In theory, "autonomous" vehicles could drive faster and maintain those same buffers better than any set of human drivers. In practice, I expect those autonomies to be programmed to fit the preferences of a bunch of safety nannies and police departments determined to maintain ticketing revenues.
I recently saw a half-dozen police cars on that trip, all in a 200 mile stretch, on a fine early Saturday morning. They weren't out to ensure the safety of the traffic.
The essence of safety is situational judgment. And traffic law is already a matter of discretionary enforcement, on US highways police routinely ignore speeds up to 10mph over the limit. That discretion should be further deployed to spot and cite unsafe drivers: weavers, passing-lane congesters, bad-weather speeders, right-lane passers. But there is more work and less revenue in that, isn't there?
I'm not trying to say all the rules are right. Some of them should be changed (and consistent enforcement is a great first step toward that). But this idea that you have some right to not have them enforced because you find them inconvenient is absurd.
Say, when you decided to write in English, you agreed to obey the rules of grammar, which state that every sentence should have a subject, an object and a verb. Constructions such as "Not some of the rules . . . " etc break that rule.
And when you decided to pick a fight with me, you agreed to not put words in my mouth. Suggestions that I assert some right to not have the laws enforced upon me, when I made no such statement, or any statement of any kind about my rights, break that rule.
I'm not saying all these rules are right. But this idea (that is, that while lecturing others, you have some right to break those rules because you them inconvenient) is absurd.
Heh. Protip: When criticizing style as a point of argument, make sure you don't accidentally a word.
I'd actually recommend against criticizing style at all, unless someone's paying you to do it for them. It's hard to do in good faith. But thanks for the help, anyway.
And I'm not criticizing style "in good faith" but to make a point: the spirit of a rule is more important than its letter. Your agreement is obvious in the annotated violations of common rules of usage and argument.
I don't really care about your grammar. But putting words in my mouth irritated me enough to craft a snarky response.
I say "few" because I'm sure there are some people who like this setup. Like maybe you for example.
You have the same right to the roads as anyone else. You pass the test, you follow the rules, you're free to drive. Not wanting to follow the rules doesn't exempt you from them. Ever. I mean in what part of your life is that how it works?
(And pretending you don't benefit from public roads because you don't drive on them is crazy too. Where does your food come from? Your mail? Leave aside the craziness of the idea that you shouldn't have to pay taxes for things which don't directly affect you, which completely misses the point of taxation... An issue for another time, perhaps.)
Sorry, I don't have time to put in the requisite political theory, but in short, what gives the "public" the right to claim the entire continent, or indeed if you look at the issue correctly, THE ENTIRE PLANET unto their driving rules?
Follow the rabbit hole Alice.
The public paid for the roads.
That's _expensive_
What if because of extra accurate military gps precision and laser "radar" they can ticket you for going 5mph over? How many times a day do you do that? Will you accept a $100 ticket for that? Your insurance rates going up every time you go 5mph over?
What if they aren't generating enough tickets so they decide to vary the speed limit up and down the same stretch of road or highway? Perfectly legal.
Then you develop two classes of citizens, those who don't care about $100 tickets so they speed all they want, and those who reach a point where they cannot afford to drive.
The current system of semi-arbitrary rules with extraordinarily selective enforcement is utterly inane, and has nothing to recommend it except that it may be somewhat safer than having no rules at all. But, again, I cannot comprehend where people get the idea that they have a right to ignore the rules when it suits them.
One of the main reasons cities use red light cameras is to increase revenue. They aren't doing it to make the road safer.
That said, I think most current speed limits are too low, so I wouldn't like having to drive 5mph over instead of 10mph over, but I'm not terribly worried about it: I doubt that technological changes will be perfectly handled by legislation initially, but I expect things to work out to a serviceable state eventually.
Can't the law be used to target dissent now? If the law were enforced more strictly, like Cushman wants, wouldn't that have the opposite effect?
Society does not believe that it's reasonable to expect your speed to be private on a public highway, and so a "search" never takes place. (You're not being charged for a misdemeanor or felony anyway, so the Constitution is even less applicable.)
Personally, I think that stricter enforcement of speeding laws would be great. Eventually enough people will complain to get freeway speeds bumped up to something reasonable (how about 75?), and people driving fast on surface streets deserve what they get anyway. (Cities are extremely car-friendly with respect to speed limits; you're allowed to drive 35 on my tiny little side street in Brooklyn! 35!)
Both look like they will be rolled out at nearly the same time, at least in the scheme of things.
Driving across the New Forest in the UK last summer I was "stalked" for half an hour by a couple of Apache helicopters. Every few minutes they'd pop up from behind cover or on the horizon somewhere, always pointing directly at my car.
I see no problem with it at all.
You certainly feel you have their undivided attention. It helps if you pretend they aren't carrying live ammunition.
I've also noticed (from seeing the pre-change link-bait title and the post-change original title) that I would probably miss out on some interesting articles if it wasn't for link bait titles. (ie I agree with sibling DevX101)
So now I don't really see anything wrong with changing the title, as long as its done prudently. What's worse is blog authors that give their uninteresting articles link-bait names, then making it to the front page based not on the content of the essay but on the effectiveness of the title.
>within a year or so, the number of Air Force pilots flying unmanned planes could be higher than the number who actually leave the ground
is true because the pilots being trained to fly drones already outnumber conventional pilots in training.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
2) http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/crime/north-dakota-po...
Not saying the military should be directly involved, but I can see some org dedicated to finding rustlers using this technique as an option, if it's effective.
The military is not supposed to be directly involved in civilian law enforcement. Effective is not a consideration at that point. It would cut crime a lot to have troops on every corner of Detroit, but that is not something that is good long term for the citizens of the US.
Thankfully, that won't happen: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-hackedwith-....
What does that mean exactly? Well, it seems to me that there are some people (authorities) in the US who would like to use drones for domestic policing and surveillance. While that may not be a bad thing in and of itself, it could be abused by someone who has a desire to abuse others.
So my takeaway is that transparency into domestic drone programs is a good thing. And I, for one, will not trust any domestic agency that wants to use drones without being truly transparent about what they want to use drones for.
Um. Is there evidence that Afghan and Iraqi insurgents use anything but civilian vehicles?