Since you mention Trucks, what about Trains?

Somehow their drivers seem to be content with blowing the horn, instead of at least trying to brake.

... and ringing the bell.

Trains at speed can take up to two miles to stop. By the time the engineer knows there's an obstruction, it's far too late to do anything but blow the horn and hope the idiot on the track moves in time.

In any case, the engineer is obliged to blow the horn in a specific way while approaching a crossing. There's a sign marking the crossing for the engineer a half-mile back or so, depending on the speed limit there. That's where he/she starts sounding the horn (and turns on the bell) in the prescribed pattern. Odds are, the engineer doesn't know about the obstruction on the track at this point.

Many engineers burn out and retire after hitting one or two fools who thought they could "beat the train" across, or down a bridge.

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[Dr. Horrible]___________________________[Penny]
Listen close to everybody's heart________And you believe there's good in everybody's heart
And hear that breaking sound_____________Keep it safe and sound
Hopes and dreams are shattering apart____With hope you can do your part
And crashing to the ground_______________To turn a life around

I saw that for the first time the other day, it's great stuff

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There is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark - Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon

Not those movies, characters in those movies have the combined IQ of a fruitcake and I'm probably insulting the fruitcake.

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Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, people want to be entertained.

No - that was a completely different Mboto Gorge. Cup of coffee??

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

True of course, but I was thinking of slow trains
(i.e. in Back to the Future III).

Wasn't that slow, forty kph or so. The driver had, what? a couple hundred meter warning, at best. Cargo trains have *a lot* of kinetic energy.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

as do 200KPH passenger trains.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

The one I really hate is the 'Intellectual Humbled'

For example, in Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks goes to get his translator, the intellectual of the piece. Translator guy (He was called Upham I think) tries to take his typewriter with him, Tom Hanks just smiles smugly and holds up a pencil.

The attitude is that intellectuals are just nerds who think up absurdly complicated solutions to problems that Average Joe could solve with just a little common sense. Its an attitude that nobody over the age of 11 should possess.

In the same film, notice how the intellectual is automatically a coward. He also tries to stop the rest of the soldiers killing a POW (which, of course, only a coward/intellectual would do). Then at the end of the film, he is 'redeemed' by killing the same guy when they take him prisoner again. He becomes a Real Man (tm) by murdereing an unarmed POW. How nice.

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

I found that disgusting. There was some of that same mentality in the otherwise great show Band of Brothers. It made it near impossible for me to identify with the lead characters.

It's a whole lot easier for the viewer to accept the shooting of an unarmed POW if it's suffiently established that the POW is "evil" and "deservers" his fate. A justified killing in a time honoured Hollywood way. If you shoot a random Wehrmacht soldier just for the sake of it, well that's a different thing.

War movies were a whole lot easier in the days of John Wayne and Errol Flynn, if a tad unrealistic...

how about, the omniscient main character? Rick Marshall deducing the life cycle of the Sleestak after a quick glance, Magnum P.I. being the expert at whatever is needed for the plot every time, Bond being the expert at everything, etc.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I don't think it's so much of a "Look I'm manly now because I killed someone finally" thing as a "this is what war does to you" kinda thing. Look at the villages in Korea and moreso in 'Nam where US soldiers rounded up and killed all the men, women, and children. Or, more common, where they killed just the men but made the women and children watch/bury them. You can't tell me that every one of those soldiers was a bad person; a born psycopathic killer. But watch enough of your friends heads explode next to you, and you sorta lose your grip on reasoning.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

I was referring to how people and their actions are portraited in a movie, not how people act in a real war. It's about how events such as you describe are shown in fiction. And in my view, in Saving Private Ryan it was exactly about "look I'm a man, I killed someone."(maybe the problem in that movie was Tom Hanks. You immediately expect him to play a bright eyed hero). And I'm not targeting American war veterans or anything, I'm talking generally.

The time-dependent peril: someone's losing their grip while hanging over a cliff, the tree branch on the side of the cliff they're hanging onto is slowly breaking, the rope is slowly fraying, or my all time least favorite: the elevator cable is slowly popping before it snaps and sends the elevator plummeting--which is an ironic threat since in real life the reason elevators can even be safely employed in buildings in the first place is because Elisha Otis invented a simple braking mechanism that should the cable break the elevator cannot fall down the shaft.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

A mechanism like that falls foul of the safety system is the first thing that breaks, (well it does in Star trek anyway, how many times did that Core jettison mechanism go pop?)

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Yes like probably the most stupid film I ever saw (watched it on TV because there was nothing better at that time to see & and I wanted to see how bad it got) was about some woman driving her car which became a runaway - everything she tried would not work - burnt out the brakes - could not take it out of gear - could not turn off the engine - even somehow magically putting a slower moving large vehicle in front of it did not work. I just kept thinking what more engineering and physical absurdities are they going to come up with.

That is what I liked about Dr Strangelove - the technology by and large did what it was designed to do - even the safeguards that were designed to stop "human meddling" generally worked - but if humans are really determined to mess things up they will find a way and they did.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

That actually happened in New Orleans a few years ago. A woman was driving her Toyota on the interstate when it spend-up and wouldn't slow down. The ignition wouldn't turn off, the brakes wouldn't work, and the car couldn't be taken out of gear. The car made it all the way from N.O. into Mississippi where a brave State Trooper pulled his car infront of her's and carefully slowed down to stop the car. That worked. Once the speed was lowered, then the brakes started working, and the car could be taken out of gear. The Toyota people said that it was some kind of computer malfunction.

David.

source?

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'