Cell Phone Laws

[wildhorses]

Originally Posted by spot

There's the difference between an evidence-led policy on mobile phones and one which relies on opinion. You're setting your opinion up against the UK's national traffic research unit. The national traffic research unit relies on peer review for its reputation. if it had no reputation it would be dead in the water and nobody would pay its bills much less quote its results.

If you can produce any evidence which contradicts their findings then great, that would be perfect, I'd be delighted. Fire away. That's all we need, a way of assessing the reputation of the people making the statements.

If I may summarise Christine's added list from her first post of the thread, there's a currently a ban on hand-held cellphone use in vehicles with the engine running in six states, California, Connecticut, D.C., New Jersey, New York and the Virgin Islands. Jurisdictions are allowed to impose bands on hand-held use in a further five states, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The other thirty nine states allow the driver to hold mobile phone voice calls, hand-held and hands-free, while the vehicle's engine is running and even if the vehicle's in motion.

Nobody anywhere has a ban on hands-free systems. In my opinion the reason for that is an inability to stop people and book them for doing it because it's undetectable at the time they're doing it. In the UK, if someone's been in a lethal crash and the phone company records show the surviving driver was on his hands-free phone at the time, I guarantee they'll go to jail for it because the crash is going to be put forward as evidence of their dangerous behaviour. People here are in jail just for changing radio stations while crashing.

How in the hec would they know if someone was trying to change the radio station when they crashed? LOL. What do they use for evidence in court?

[spot]

Originally Posted by wildhorses

Remember that respected scholars once thought the world was flat.

Name one? I think that's untrue but I'm quite prepared to be shown I'm wrong.

[spot]

Originally Posted by wildhorses

It makes no sense that a conversation on a hands free cell phone would be more of a distraction than the exact same conversation with a passenger. You are talking and listening. The only difference is that the other end of the conversation is coming from a bud in your ear as opposed to from another passenger. You are still going to use the same amount of attention to engage in the conversation.

You may be perfectly correct. All I asked from you was a publication I could read that agrees with you. That way I can test your opinion. The people who conducted the tests I referred to wrote their conclusions on the basis of experiment, not logic. They described what they observed.

[wildhorses]

Originally Posted by spot

You may be perfectly correct. All I asked from you was a publication I could read that agrees with you. That way I can test your opinion. The people who conducted the tests I referred to wrote their conclusions on the basis of experiment, not logic. They described what they observed.

Look. Saying that a conversation coming from an ear bud is more distracting that one coming from a person is the same as saying a 5 gallon barrel can catch more rain water than a 5 gallon tub. You need a study to figure that one out? And to answer your previous post....ALL scholars thought the earth was flat. All of them, pick one.

[spot]

Originally Posted by wildhorses

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How in the hec would they know if someone was trying to change the radio station when they crashed? LOL. What do they use for evidence in court?

Here's the story I had in mind. The man jailed was reaching for a mint from his pocket, not changing the radio channel, my memory of what he did wasn't perfect. I'd read about it a long time ago in the context of distracted behaviour while driving.

DRIVERS who eat and drink at the wheel are twice as likely to have a crash, a study has indicated. They try to compensate for the distractions of eating and drinking by driving more slowly and carefully, but they are often unable to brake in time to avoid a collision. The risk is similar to using a handheld mobile phone while driving

[...] The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said it advised people to stop in a safe place if they wanted a snack. The dangers had been demonstrated by two fatal crashes in recent years caused by drivers eating or drinking, it said. In 2001 Thomas Munch-Petersen, a lecturer at University College London, was jailed for 90 days for killing three people on the M1 after swerving while searching for a mint in his jacket pocket. In 2003 Andrew Suffolk was jailed for 30 months for killing a pregnant woman in a crash on the M1. He admitted taking his eyes off the road for a moment to drink some water.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article612647.ece

[wildhorses]

Originally Posted by spot

Here's the story I had in mind. The man jailed was reaching for a mint from his pocket, not changing the radio channel, my memory of what he did wasn't perfect. I'd read about it a long time ago in the context of distracted behaviour while driving.

DRIVERS who eat and drink at the wheel are twice as likely to have a crash, a study has indicated. They try to compensate for the distractions of eating and drinking by driving more slowly and carefully, but they are often unable to brake in time to avoid a collision. The risk is similar to using a handheld mobile phone while driving

[...] The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said it advised people to stop in a safe place if they wanted a snack. The dangers had been demonstrated by two fatal crashes in recent years caused by drivers eating or drinking, it said. In 2001 Thomas Munch-Petersen, a lecturer at University College London, was jailed for 90 days for killing three people on the M1 after swerving while searching for a mint in his jacket pocket. In 2003 Andrew Suffolk was jailed for 30 months for killing a pregnant woman in a crash on the M1. He admitted taking his eyes off the road for a moment to drink some water.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article612647.ece

Now...this makes sense. Anytime you take one hand off the wheel you will not be able to control the car as effectively as with both hands. To make matters worse most people are right handed and they tend to use their dominant hand to reach or eat....using their left hand to control the car....LOL. I am not sure it is a matter of being distracted, but using one hand to control the car. In an emergency or urgent need to change lanes or stop, they just wont be able to control the vehicle as effectively.

[spot]

Originally Posted by wildhorses

Look. Saying that a conversation coming from an ear bud is more distracting that one coming from a person is the same as saying a 5 gallon barrel can catch more rain water than a 5 gallon tub. You need a study to figure that one out? And to answer your previous post....ALL scholars thought the earth was flat. All of them, pick one.

You do come out with some strange ideas. Look, every pope since Christianity took over the Roman Empire in 310AD has been handed an Orb to represent his governorship of the Earth. It's a ball, not a plate. It's spherical, not flat. Even back in 300AD no intelligent person thought the planet was anything but spherical.

Have a quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology." David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers also write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."

In 1945 the Historical Association listed "Columbus and the Flat Earth Conception" second of twenty in its first-published pamphlet on common errors in history.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about the logic of your earbud, I'm not in a position to. I haven't experimented. For one thing I don't have a car, I don't drive. What I do ask is that you produce even a single respectable study that agrees with what you're telling me is a fact. It's all down to experiment, someone has to have gone and checked. Logic just isn't sufficient. I don't have an opinion about this. I only have an opinion about things I've read about or experienced and even then it's only ever a provisional opinion. I definitely don't have any fixed opinions, they're a sign of senility.

[spot]

Originally Posted by wildhorses

Now...this makes sense. Anytime you take one hand off the wheel you will not be able to control the car as effectively as with both hands. To make matters worse most people are right handed and they tend to use their dominant hand to reach or eat....using their left hand to control the car....LOL. I am not sure it is a matter of being distracted, but using one hand to control the car. In an emergency or urgent need to change lanes or stop, they just wont be able to control the vehicle as effectively.

It makes sense if it's driving one-handed while getting a mint from a pocket but not if driving one-handed while changing a radio channel? Ah. I get it. You're thinking of steering wheels that have radio channel changers built in and I'm thinking of radios you reach out to twist the frequency dial on.

The LOL's finally penetrated my mind - you're the one from the other day insistently trying to win points rather than intelligently trying to hold a conversation. I'd forgotten the username. What's wrong with just trying to uncover the facts rather than optimistically shouting your claim to be alpha-male?

[wildhorses]

Originally Posted by spot

You do come out with some strange ideas. Look, every pope since they took over the Roman Empire in 300AD has been handed an Orb to represent his governorship of the Earth. It's a ball, not a plate. It's spherical, not flat. Even back in 300AD no intelligent person thought the planet was anything but spherical.

Have a quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology." David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers also write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference."

In 1945 the Historical Association listed "Columbus and the Flat Earth Conception" second of twenty in its first-published pamphlet on common errors in history.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about the logic of your earbud, I'm not in a position to. I haven't experimented. For one thing I don't have a car, I don't drive. What I do ask is that you produce even a single respectable study that agrees with what you're telling me is a fact. It's all down to experiment, someone has to have gone and checked. Logic just isn't sufficient.

Ah yes...they do a pretty good job of rewriting history when it suits them. Now there was no "Flat Earth" era. So where did the "flat earth" era concept come from? A scholar? A study? Has a study been done on the flat earth concept? How could they do that? Could they interview the scholars of that time? If scholars did not believe in "flat earth" as you suggest...then where did the concept come from? Now it was the "public" that believed in flat earth...not scholars? LOL. They just want to save face...because the fact is that their current "studies" mean nothing if their past "studies" were so flawed. So how did the public get the idea that the world was flat? From scholars thats where. They would like to camoflage this major error that THEY made.

[spot]

Go and look at the Orbs a bit, and consider what they imply and how widespread their use has been, and then come back and tell me what you make of them.