Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I eventually felt marginally well enough to force myself to drive (which I wouldn't have done except that I needed to pick up enlargement orders and reprint instructions for wedding photos). On the way home I observed things that aren't unusual but ought to be. And since I'm thinking of it right now...

Driving up I95 I saw a Morningside police car tailgating (not just following a little too closely -- riding the bloody bumper of the car ahead); it then proceeded to cut me off at a seriously unsafe distance without signalling. All this in significant rain. (And yeah, this was a fair distance from Morningside, being a ways north of the Capitol Beltway, so I'm pretty sure the officer wasn't in the middle of a call.). I saw an additional unsafe lane change before the cruiser got too far ahead to track through the rain.

And a Maryland state trooper spent a good long while following too closely (not as badly as the Morningside officer, but still too close) and made several improper lane changes (at least seven lane changes, if you count going from lane-4 to lane-1 over the course of half a mile as three changes, but I may have forgotten a couple -- and never ever signalled any of them). In addition to failing to signal, the State Trooper also changed lanes too close behind another car a couple of times, but I don't think he or she cut anyone off. Most of the Trooper's maneuvers were in lighter rain than what I saw the Morningside officer do, but the following too closely was consistent through varying amount of rain.

Okay, maybe the Statie was pacing people to check their speed (do they follow more closely than the normal two-seconds (or one-car-length-per-ten-MPH, depending on when you were taught) to do that?), but the ... whatever the automotive equivalent of "body language" ... how and when he/she moved relative to the other cars ... looked a lot more like someone just impatient to pass.

No, I'm not surprised. I've seen enough lazy and/or stupid and/or dangerous behaviour by cops behind the wheel -- mostly on the Interstates -- that I expect it. You almost never see a cop signal a lange change, for example. But this sort of thing should be surprising. That is, it ought to be uncommon enough to be surprising when we see it, instead of being the norm. Yeah, I understand that All The Rules are different when the lights and siren go on, and that sometimes they're in a hurry but need to run quiet. This, and countless other examples, looked like normal driving, just without much regard to the safety precautions most of us are supposed to follow.

Okay, allegedly supposed to follow. Because despite the very real danger most of these behaviours bring to our highways (I lost count of the number of times I was nearly killed by improper lane changes coming out of the 3rd St. tunnel onto I395 in DC back when I was driving that route a lot, for example), it's rare that anyone ever gets written up for this stuff.[1] We get ticketed for speeding, which a) is easy to measure with a device (i.e. very straightforward to present evidence/testimony of in court), but b) is not a major safety threat on its own (that is, if you're on a completely empty four-lane highway in good weather, how much difference does it make safety-wise whether you travel 65MPH or 80MPH? But mix speeding with tailgating and unsafe lane changes, or dicey conditions, and then the difference between 65 and 80 means a bit more), and c) something that cops, just like the rest of us, do most of the time, not just when they're officially in a hurry. I'd rather see tailgating ticketed. ("Oh look, I'm being followed by the SUV of Damocles!") But I bet wonder how many officers really notice tailgating and failure-to-signal, given that they've got the exact same habits?

And just as a lot of people seem to think, "I wasn't going any faster than the cop in front of me," is a valid excuse for speeding (judges don't think so, but that seems to frequently come as a surprise to folks), how many people are going to take the safety advice to behave, when they see the police disregaring the same advice nearly constantly? (Again, I'm not talking about lights&sirens situations; I mean in normal driving.)

The police should be setting a good example for the rest of us. If the police don't take the laws of physics seriously, why should the civilian idiot in the next lane over?

I'm not advocating a Big Administrative Crackdown on officers' driving habits, but I do feel that each police officer ought to have the sense to realize on his or her own that his or her driving sets an example, and the example ought to be a proper one. As I said, I'm not at all surprised, but the fact that stupidly dangerous driving by cops is so unsurprising is pretty darned discouraging.

[1] Ironically, I did recently receive a ticket for "failure to stay in lane". The officer did not see the event -- he arrived twenty minutes after a collision and wrote the ticket based on skid marks. The thing is, the only reason I left my lane was in an attempt to avoid a collision the other driver was attempting to cause. (Obviously, he succeeded anyhow.) So the one citation I've heard about for "this kind of thing" was issued to a victim, who was acting in the interest of safety, not carelessness! I've heard about some sort of "crackdown" on "aggressive driving", but I never see anyone being pulled over for it.

From In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson:

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

This started as a parenthetical aside in a followup to a comment that jarodrussell left to an entry in theferrett's journal, but then I remembered that it was something I'd been planning to babble about here eventually anyhow, so...

I get tired of hearing the word "cyberterrorism" thrown about casually.

I think that most -- maybe, probably all -- of the cyberattacks we've ever seen are more "cybervandalism" than "cyberterrorism". Not that vandalism isn't a Bad Thing, just that the word "cyberterrorism" seems designed to either spread FUD or to inflate the significance of events to justify disproportionate reactions to them. The potential for real cyber-terrorism exists (though it'd be harder to pull off than a lot of people think), and ifwhen it happens, it's going to make everything else we've called cyberterrorism look silly. We shouldn't need to invoke the "terrorist" meme to make our points. In meatspace vandalism, armed robbery, breaking and entering, and reckless driving all matter without having to be compared to terrorism to make preventing/punishing them seem valid; nor should we have to call vandalism terrorism in cyberspace.

Knowing from the URL that it's a Dr. Fun cartoon, and seeing the subject line, "The brave new world of IPV6," were not enough to prepare me for this. I keep getting giggle-aftershocks.