On 6/10/2013 11:37 PM, Jean-David Beyer wrote: > Of course he did not seriously propose the idea as a real course of > action. But it is interesting to think about.
I drive a Mustang GT with enough engine work to make it genuinely dangerous to unprepared drivers. When I was taking a couple of advanced driving classes (because I don't want to be a hazard on the road behind such a vehicle), one of my instructors -- a police driving instructor -- told me about a collision he recently saw with a tricked-out Mustang GT like mine. 17-year-old drives an econobox to high school. One day he gets to borrow somebody else's tricked-out Mustang GT, and in order to impress his friends with the noise of the engine, briefly floors the pedal. He's expecting the engine to make a howling noise but of course he'll take his foot off the pedal before the car goes out of control. Except the car doesn't make a howling noise. It howls *and lunges*, and the G-forces were something this young man had never before experienced. The new experience left him cognitively paralyzed for a good part of a second... with his foot still on the gas pedal. At the last moment he snapped out of it. He thought he didn't have enough room to successfully brake, so instead he whipped the wheel around -- -- and discovered that due to the car's lunging acceleration, virtually all of the weight was on the rear wheels. The front wheels didn't have enough weight on them to allow them to keep traction with the road. The car didn't veer. His response was to turn the wheel harder, not recognizing that *his foot was still on the accelerator*. His cognitive process was something like, "braking is pointless right now so I'm not going to move my foot I'll just worry about steering out of it." Whoops. He crashed into another parked car at about 45. Wasn't wearing a seatbelt, but the airbags deployed and saved his life. He got to walk away from the collision after doing over $10,000 of damage to the vehicles involved. Although an anecdote is not the same thing as hard data and NTSB crash statistics, I respectfully suggest there's a third option Fitch was overlooking: 3. A lot of people are just going to kill themselves by doing stupid things they think can't possibly hurt them. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users