| In a free country, yes, anyone has the right to do so. Not my place to judge if I'm going to continue watching Jackass movies. But I'm not a fan of people like this guy vaguely shaming those who don't like to take lots of risks. I'm not a daredevil, if I got on a plane I would expect it to be safer than the trip to the airport. The FAA, and the elevator industry, are two of the groups that actually do things the way I like to see them done. If there is one single crash, they will train pilots and update firmware or even retrofit hardware to stop that one specific scenario. If there's a near miss, and someone could have crashes, they might do the same. Anywhere else, we just say "Yeah, we know this kills X people a year, but if ya wanna be safe don't get up". Innovation is largely overrated. A lot of the useful stuff seems to be held up on the basic science rather than willingness to do hands on experiments. If there's tech to save fuel, they'll do it because it's cheap. If there's tech to make it safer, the FAA will probably require it. If there's some really clever trick that does neither but makes it simple and cheap and interesting, I'm quite happy for it to just remain in the experimental stuff. Whenever people talk about innovation being more important than safety it always sounds like typical hacker ethos "I want a world full of lots of different random technical ideas that are simple and can be understood"..... "love of ideas" more than love of engineering progress in the modern sense. |