Re: Police prepare stunning end for high-speed car chases

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 4:46 PM 8/12/96, snow wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, Gary Howland wrote:

>>       Will old fashioned engines be outlawed?
>>       Will the "stun guns" be outlawed?
>>       Will susceptible electronic systems become mandatory?
>>       (and if so, why not just put a remote control switch in all cars?)
>
>    One word: Pacemakers.

Not just pacemakers, but also cars losing steering control (but not forward
speed, obviously) and thus plow into crowds. And airbags that perhaps get
triggered in all the ruckus, breaking the necks of infants (as has
happened).

Think of the liablility issues! Deliberately causing a car to lose control.
Mon Dieu!

I'm skeptical that this EM cannon will get deployed anytime soon.

(And I'm not ignorant of such technologies, having attended several of the
Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conferences. I also played around with
this as a minor plot element in a novel I was working on several years ago,
namely, a character killed in Los Alamos when the Electronic Engine Control
circuitry of his BMW was zapped while on a mountain road. This, by the way,
is a "side effect" of widely deploying such EM cannon technologies--people
using them on twisty mountain roads. I can think of some places near Big
Sur and around Devil's Slide where such a gizmo would produce real
interesting effects!)

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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