<font color=green>FAST WWeb and Why driving fast is a good idea [and why HDR and WWeb at 10 megabits per second will be popular].
1 death per 100 million miles.
If a person drives 10,000 miles per year, for 50 years, that's 500,000 miles. So there are odds of 1:200 people dying in their driving. That fits other statistics I've seen, so 1 death per 100 million miles makes sense. I suppose there are two people per vehicle and stuff like that which skews the person-mile death rate a bit.
If speeds go up from 50 mph average to 55 mph average, the death rate would probably go up to maybe 1.1 per 100 million miles. But everyone would save 10% of their time.
At 50 mph, 100 million miles would take 2 million hours and 200,000 hours would be saved by doing 55 mph.
If people save 10% of their time, their 500,000 miles would take 1,000 hours less. Since there is a 1:200 death rate, their statistical savings are 200,000 hours.
People live 6,000 hours a year, [awake and having fun as against sleeping] 16 hours a day x 365 days a year x 50 years = 300,000 hours.
Since the deaths are predominantly of people who are drunk and otherwise self-selected for death, the 'safe, fast driver' saves themselves heaps by speeding. Drunk and incompetent drivers are about 5 x as likely to die as safe drivers [they speed anyway]. So 200,000 x 5 = 1 million hours saved for the good guys versus 300,000 hours extra risk from speeding [assuming the increased accident rate really does go up to 1.1 per 100 million miles from 1 per 100 million].
Stopping people speeding is costing a LOT more lives than it saves. People who are safe and fast are having their lives forfeited by incompetents who crash and die, causing authorities to slow everyone down.
No wonder there is such pressure to speed! People can intuitively do the maths and know they are better off to go faster [even with the cost of the infrequent speeding tickets and higher fuel consumption, which they will also have calculated, intuitively, into their speeding patterns].
For the same reasons, people are going to want FAST WWeb access! They will NOT accept i-mode, DS-CDMA, Bleeding EDGE, GPRS, 1Xtreme, 1X-EV or anything else. They will want speed!!! And lots of it. Of course, the cost will be relevant, but as Irwin Jacobs knows, speed is of the essence. If they are prepared to pay for a certain amount of bits, they'll want high speed delivery - that speed won't cost more money.
HDR is very smart and getting faster.
Mqurice
PS: I know it would be unfashionable to say it, but not only is there a digital divide, there is a road-safety divide. Like the digital divide, it will not close. That's because it is based on intelligence which correlates with being able to drive a car without dying in the attempt [that's my theory anyway]. I bet a graph of road deaths versus IQ shows evolutionary pressure for higher IQ!
Males die at the rate of 1:100 [females don't die so fast as they are more sensible = another correlating variable] and half of them do it before reproducing [their full reproductive quota anyway]. We can guess that IQs will rise at the rate of 1 IQ point per decade thanks to road accidents.
Okay, maybe that's inaccurate, but you'll get the point.
Maybe traps should be built into roads [sharp curves with cliffs] so that careless or incompetent people fall into the trap and are removed from the road, thus saving their victims. That would be more effective than speeding tickets for reducing innocent victims of incompetent fast drivers.
Go Q Go |
