Random Thought Of The Day #507

Day 507

So we've apparently invented another part of Skynet. A radar system that will track up to 32 cars in it's field of range at once while simultaneously monitoring the indivudual speeds of each vehicle & their license plate information. And when it tracks anyone speeding, can automatically pull up their vehicle registration information & issue a citation.

How long until PA decides we need to have the front-facing plates on our cars too so they can make use of this technology?

But this whole thing begs a NUMBER of questions.



He could be driving.

 One being... how do you know who to fine? How often are you driving a car that is not registered in your own name? Maybe you're married and swap cars fairly often for convenience or functionality. Maybe you have kids and they're driving one of the cars registered in your name? What about when your friend needs to borrow your truck to do some moving or their car is in the shop? What about when you have a rental car or a loaner from the dealership when yours is in for maintenance? What if you're a 1-car family that has 2 or 3 drivers?

What I'm saying is, how does this system compensate for that? It can't. It's a mindless machine gathering information on a vehicle & cross-referencing it to a database & issuing arbitrary fines.

What about the times when you're stuck behind the old lady that wants to do exactly 43 in a 45 zone & you just want to pass her. You change lanes, speed up to 50 or 55, get past her in a reasonable timeframe & then slow back down to a more reasonable speed. An actual cop will see this, yawn, and go back to his coffee while waiting for someone actually speeding to go by. A mindless computer sees you exceed the speed limit, tracks your information, and mails you a ticket for the 3 seconds you were 5-10 miles over the speed limit while passing someone driving like at one of those wildly irritating speeds.

The machine doesn't have any sort of ability to make a judgement call. It's a glorified adding machine. Actual speed - speed limit = X. If X < speed limit; then Fine = Y. It's a math machine. With no ability to think.

Then there's the issue of how often people with warrents or parole violations or anything are found durning routine traffic stops. People on the lam don't drive cars registered in their own names. Or have license plates that match their registration. You can pretty much throw out all those arrests.

What about the people that are driving straight but speeding while they're drunk that get picked up from a routine speeding stop. Or the people that the cops say "hey, that guy is driving wildly slow... we might wanna check that shit out & find out why".

Or the times when you're rushing to the emergency room with an injured person? It happened to me when I was a kid. Broke my head & got rushed to the hospital by my parents because they thought the ambulance would take too long. This system, after everything else is said & done, they'd have to go into court to fight the ticket that the computer would have given them automatically. Instead of just explaining to the cop that chases you to the hospital  and him having a brain to say "oh, yeah... you're ok. You should probably wait for the ambulance next time, but I understand, hope your kid is ok" and walking away.

But in addition to the thousands of ways that this glorified Atari can waste thousands of hours & exist as nothing more than a fine generation & collection machine, there's another question that I want to ask.

Who else is really in favor of all this Big Brother bullshit? I know I'm getting sick & fucking tired of it. Didn't we learning ANYTHING from 4 Terminator movies (and a tv show), a thousand Sci-Fi books & probably about a million other short stories, b-movies, comic books or whatever else about how badly this is all going to end for everyone? Well, everyone that doesn't have a lot of guns & lives in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, that is. With a bomb shelter for when all the bombs fall.

Using machines to monitor things? OK. I can kinda see that. As long as there is a set of human eyes actually looking at context. But when the machines monitor & make decisions on how to react... then we have problems.

And now that that rant is done... here's some Deadpool:



Even if you have all the guns, they'll just cut off your trigger finger(s)