The Glade 4.0

That's really your argument?

For why safety purposes are not the prevailing reason for a driver's license? It's an argument, why?

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You are essentially saying that for licensing to be related to safety, the process for getting a license has to be exactly the same difficulty, regardless of the difficulty of the thing the license is for. Then you try and claim that flying is not more difficult than driving.

I learned to drive by getting in my grandfather's truck and just driving on his farm. There are things that need to be learned to be a safe driver, but the base level stuff is fairly intrinsic. Flying is not the same thing at all. I'm reminded of a mythbusters episode where they were in a 747 simulator and tried to land it. They both crashed. Flying is more difficult.

Secondly, it isn't all about difficulty. It is a combination between difficulty, and the consequenses of a mistake. Someone inexperienced driver runs a stop sign, 9 times out of 10 nothing happens. Some inexperience pilot forgets to put the landing gear down before landing, 9.9 times out of 10 the people on the plane are in big trouble.

No, I am saying that for the claim that a driver's license is for safety to hold up to scrutiny, the licensing requirements should be roughly analogous to that for another license that is more apparently for that purpose.

Landing an airplane is one of the trickier maneuvers. I would hazard to guess that unless you are a commercial driver, you would do about as well landing an airplane as you would backing up a tractor-trailer to a loading dock. Also, a Boeing 747 is much less common than a Cessna 172, much like a tractor-trailer is much less common than a mid-size sedan, and of a greater complexity in the same fashion.

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There's just no reason why that should be the case.



I'm fairly certain I could back a tractor-trailer to a loading dock without killing myself or anyone else. I'm not so certain I could land a plane without killing myself.

Gee, you think? Tautology isn't much of an argument.



You've got to be kidding me. You think that the weight of the most common aircraft and most common car somehow demonstrate that flight and driving are similar?

Ok, first, the motor skills needed for flight are greater simply by virtue of its 3 dimensional nature (and no, the fact that the ground is not perfectly flat does not disprove this; there is no freedom of moement in the 3rd dimension while drivng on the ground). Then there's navigation, which is more complex and requires different skills since you ren't confined to strips of pavement and don't ahve nice aids like road signs. Then there's the fact that the instrumentation of even a simple plane like a Cessna is significantly more complex than that of a car:

Cessna 172 dashboard

Toyota Camry dashboard

Yeah, those are completely similar! Where did I ever get the idea that one was more complex than the other?

Then of course there's the significantly greater effect of weather and visibility on flight, especially for a VFR airplane like a Cessna, and of course the little matter of airplanes setting off NORAD warnings as opposed to simply the local police department when they start doing things they shouldn't, and NORAD sends jet fighters carrying missiles and cannons as opposed to cops carrying pistols and rifles. I needn't remind you why either; there was an incident about 8 years ago I'm sure you're aware of, and there have been incidents since, such as the kid flying the Cessna 172 that wanted to get shot down as a way to commit suicide and almost did. How much do you suppose it cost to intercept him? The incident is on the Cessna 172 page at Wikipedia.

Then there's all this nonsense about weight. You completely ignored speed, of course, and not just the difference in speed between a Cessna which flies around 100-120 mph versus that Ford F150 that cruises at 60-70 mph (need I remind you that E=mv^2), but alsot he fact that the fastest vehicles on the road have a maximum possible speed of around 190mph, or less than 3 times that of a Ford F-150, and reaching that speed is very rare, while Cessnas are often in the air and sharing airports with aircraft that cruise at more than 4 times their speed, and can mass as much as 900,000 pounds for a 747, or over 360 times that of a Cessna. How much does a tractor trailer outweigh a Ford F150? Even a smaller jetliner like a 737 can weigh in at about 180,000 pounds at takeoff, or about 70 times what a Cessna does. How frequently do we find trucks outweighing a Cessna by 70 times? Not frequently; even if it's hauling a main battle tank, and oh by the way that 737 can easily exceed the Cessna's speed by a factor of 3-4, and while Cessnas may be the most common airplane owned, small recreational aircraft are not necessarily operated int he same proportion to airliners as passanger cars and trucks are to tractor trailors, since few people fly to work every day but huge numebrs drive, while both the truck and the airliner must operte to make profit.

As to skids, stalls and accidents, a skid in a car may or may not result in an accident and that accident may or may not be serious, but a stall uncorrected in an aircraft will definitely result in an accident, and it will almost always be serious. Indeed, stalls and accidents in aviation in general occur most frequently during takeoff and landing where the pilot has little altitude and therefore time to recover, and where other aircraft and hazardous materials are very likely to be present.

Seriously, the argument that flight is similar to driving and should ahve similar license requirements is spurious, and based only on the most trivial similarities which you cited. It's patently absurd, as is your assertion that a commercial truck driver could just as easily land an airplance. He might be equally able to learn basic VFR landing, but backing up a trailer is completely different from landing an airplane.



Interesting that you define making your paragraph clear and giving it an understandable point "writing to the lowest common denominator".



Since it isn't pertinent to my argument, I don't intend to go looking. Wh don't you find it for yourself?


Gee, maybe from the fact that I use a computer daily and the worst accident I ever had was a raid wipe? Maybe the fact that I never see reports about computer accidents on the news, or hear about them anecdotally? Come on, people have accidents all the time where they click the wrong thing. They aren't serious enough to be newsworthy, much less merit regulation.



Allowing for the fact that links don't get created accidentally (although vertainly someone might link without understanding the issues involved with this effect) now it'd be nice to see how this accident is in any way comparable to vehicle accidents. A little over 41,000 traffic fatalities in 2007, and just under 2.5 million injuries injuries. How many fatalities and injuries fromt he slashdot effect? Ever?

Really, I have no idea where you're going with any of this. Are you trying to show that computers are as dangerous vehicles? That vehicles are as dangerous as airplanes? That all are equally dangerous? That driver's license requirements are too easy or too hard? Or that pilots' licenses are? Or that computers should require the same licensing as airplanes?

I don't know what you're trying to show, but since it appears to have something to do with airplanes and/or computers and vehicles being somehow similar in terms of danger, I'm not seeing much evidence for it. You've made spurious assertions and guesses about stalls, weights, controls, and the difficulty of alnding but they don't hold up to much scrutiny.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'd like Diamondeye and Aegnor to point out any advocacy for relaxed licensing standards for pilots on Shuyung's part.

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Why? I haven't said that he's advocating that.

He is, however, making the claim that similar things shoudl ahve simialr license requirements and tried to show similarity between driving and flying. That means he must be advocating either increasing driving standards, lowering flying, or both until they're similar. This is further complicated by the fact that he's trying to show similarity between driving and computing. At this point I don't know what he's trying to take as a position other than just disputing things for the sake of disputing them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

I'd point out that Shuyung gives ample opportunity to discern his position in his posts.
"Roughly analogous" might be a bit vague for your taste, but the argument is simple: Driving Licensing is insufficient in most cases to produce any sort of basic safety competence when operating the vehicle. Because Drivers are not required to demonstrate ample ability to handle the various common conditions of driving to receive licensing, it stands to reason that the test and licensing procedure does nothing actually improve driving safety. The correlation of accidents to drivers likely substantiates that claim.

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I believe I've already pointed out at least once in this thread that I agree that standards for regular drivers' licenses are insufficient as well.

That said, the fact of the matter is that driver's testing does, in fact, test safety-oriented matters, even if it does so in a completely insufficient manner. The failure of testing to adequately address common conditions of driving also does not mean it does nothing to reduce accidents, only that it does not do enough within a reasonable cost-benefit window.

Moreover, the quote you provided does not adequately indicate that he thinks driver standards are too low, because A) "another license more apparently for that purpose" is very confusing since there genreally aren't 2 different licenses for the same activity and B) since he goes on to make the comparison to flight which is really not similar beyond the fact that both involve operating a vehicle of some sort. It also does not address why we're discussing accidents on the internet.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Always remember, half the people on the road have below-average driving skills.

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But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
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Diamondeye:

Pronoun phrases have antecedents, just like pronouns themselves. Curiously enough, the antecedent for "that purpose" is "for safety."

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In which case he's arguing that all licenses that are for safety ought to have the same standards. Like I said, that indicates he's arguing that either flight standards should be lowered, driving raised, or both until they are equal. All this based on the dubious assertion that all licenses issued for safety reasons should have the same standards without regard to the fact that all activities are not equally dangerous or difficult.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

No, he's not. Stop inventing a straw-man to validate your own ego. Shuyung's claim that the licensing standards for driving are insufficient in no way means any of the things you're claiming.

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Why don't you stop attributing motivations to people? I seem to recall you finding this irritating when other people do it to you.



Yes it does. He's making a direct comparison to pilot's licenses and claimed that they should be roughly analogous. While you are correct that "roughly analogous" is rather vague, he posted a fairly long paragraph citing suppsoed similarities betweent he two activities. Disregarding the triviality of the similarities themselves, that pretty clearly establishes that he thinks that the activities are similar. He goes on to mention other things like comparing skids to stalls and claiming that backing up a tractor trailer is similar to landing an airplane in terms of difficulty, completely disregarding that the average driver does not back up tractor trailers, and the requirements for a license to drive them are more stringent.

If what he's claiming is that driving requirements should compare to conditions of actual driving in the same way that pilot requirements compare to actual conditions while flying, fine, I already agreed with that anyhow when I pointed out that I also think driver's licenses are too easy to get. That, however, is not what I get from "roughly analogous" when he goes on to try to demonstrate the similarities between the activities.

So de-bunch your underwear. He may indeed be claiming what you say, but it sure as hell isn't clear from where he's taking the argument or from how he's phrasing it. I already pointed out once that I didn't understand what this poorly-written paragraph meant:



and rather than clarification I got tautology and a lot of rambling about the weights of various aircraft and behicles and some nonsense about not writing to the lowest common denominator. Maybe instead of lecturing me on my presumed motivations you could ask Shuyung to clarify his argument.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

I've read every post in the thread. Shuyung's claim is simple: "Licensing standards for driver's licenses are insufficient." You could possibly qualify that with the phrase "to validate safety as their primary purpose." It does not mean he advocates relaxing standards on any other sort of vehicular or mechanical operation license at all. It means he finds the claim that driver's licensing exists for public safety dubious. Any further claims you make about his posts are the same as me attributing your straw-mans to your ego.

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Khross, if you've read every post in the thread, and then settled on that one line as evident of what his claim is, you're ignoring mountains of posting that don't serve to advance that claim at all, and in fact create the appearance that he's making another claim altogether.

In fact, his initial claim was that there are accidents on the internet as well, and took issue with the idea that there are not. If his claim is what you say, he's taken a long, roundabout route to finally say it. In fact, I made it perfectly clear that I didn't understand where he was going with it all, and Aegenor was also apparently not clear on it.

How you get from "I can't tell what you're tying to get at here but it appears to be X" to "you're creating a strawman" is beyond me. Did you just choose to ignore that part, or what?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I didn't get that that was his argument at all Khross. I was thinking that his argument was that drivers licenses aren't really about safety, cause if they were, they'd be as hard to get as pilot's licenses (which apparently are about safety), because driving and flying are at roughly the same level of difficulty.

That is how I interpreted his argument. If I'm incorrect, so be it, but don't see how you are coming up with your interpretation of his argument.

Its also appears to be a genetic trait... bad driver gene

Two X chromosomes?



/ducks

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine