Re: Police prepare stunning end for high-speed car chases
At 4:46 PM 8/12/96, snow wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, Gary Howland wrote:
Will old fashioned engines be outlawed? Will the "stun guns" be outlawed? Will susceptible electronic systems become mandatory? (and if so, why not just put a remote control switch in all cars?)
One word: Pacemakers.
Not just pacemakers, but also cars losing steering control (but not forward speed, obviously) and thus plow into crowds. And airbags that perhaps get triggered in all the ruckus, breaking the necks of infants (as has happened). Think of the liablility issues! Deliberately causing a car to lose control. Mon Dieu! I'm skeptical that this EM cannon will get deployed anytime soon. (And I'm not ignorant of such technologies, having attended several of the Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conferences. I also played around with this as a minor plot element in a novel I was working on several years ago, namely, a character killed in Los Alamos when the Electronic Engine Control circuitry of his BMW was zapped while on a mountain road. This, by the way, is a "side effect" of widely deploying such EM cannon technologies--people using them on twisty mountain roads. I can think of some places near Big Sur and around Devil's Slide where such a gizmo would produce real interesting effects!) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Timothy C. May wrote:
At 4:46 PM 8/12/96, snow wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, Gary Howland wrote:
Will old fashioned engines be outlawed? Will the "stun guns" be outlawed? Will susceptible electronic systems become mandatory? (and if so, why not just put a remote control switch in all cars?)
One word: Pacemakers.
Not just pacemakers, but also cars losing steering control (but not forward speed, obviously) and thus plow into crowds. And airbags that perhaps get triggered in all the ruckus, breaking the necks of infants (as has happened).
Think of the liablility issues! Deliberately causing a car to lose control. Mon Dieu!
Somehow I don't think they'll give a damn about killing passengers and/or pedestrians (after all, they'd shoot them if they were in range, wouldn't they?) Gary -- pub 1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22 Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com> Key fingerprint = 0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D 1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06 ^S ^A^Aoft FAT filesytem is extremely robust, ^Mrarely suffering from^T^T
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