Don't just pull numbers out of your ass.

1) The amount of energy at 55mph is roughly 5 times higher than at 30mph, given that brakes dissipate a fairly constant amount of energy at all speeds, that means your braking time at 55 is 5 times that at 30.
2) Thankfully, that doesn't mean your braking time at 55 is 9 seconds for an emergency stop. That's because your figure for 30mph is bullshit. The actual braking time for an emergency stop from 30mph is 0.8 seconds, and at 55, roughly 4 seconds.

All this put together means that when you're presented with a 4 second orange at 30mph, and you have to do an emergency stop, that basically means you fucked around for 2.8 seconds. That is, the 4 seconds is made up of 0.5 seconds of reaction time, 2.8 seconds of fucking around doing nothing at all, and then 0.8 seconds of actually stopping. As I said before - if you're failing to stop for a red when given a warning with an orange, you're driving dangerously.

Note, this can be observed in every day life. It's trivial to test, you approach some lights at the speed limit. When they turn orange, you start to gently brake for the lights. Observe that you come to a stop before the lights even turn red.

If you spend 3 seconds not looking in front of you in a car, you're driving dangerously to start with. Count out 3 seconds in your head, and consider closing your eyes for that long while driving - you'll realise it's a really long time. In reality, people glance away at instruments/mirrors for 100ms at a time, not 3 seconds at a time.

Are you suggesting that we simply list the professions that are allowed to have a genuine focused laser? If so, what happens when a spargeborgler (some new profession that critically relies on focused lasers) comes along? These laws always take years to get updated, leave horrible loop holes, and leave some people with genuine need out on the cold. If you can't express a general way to separate the groups, and have to revert to listing specifics, you're probably doing it wrong.

The problem is, by making systems where software is the last line of defence against damage, you typically can make much more efficient systems. Note car engines that use variable valve timing can damage themselves (e.g. by opening the valve during combustion, and allowing exhaust/plasma to back flow into the injectors), but they're much much more efficient than engines with a cam rod.

Actually, it's not "bad enough", it's an important part of speech. A pause, with a confused look on your face, and an "uhhh" noise conveys information, in fact, often, more than a whole sentence. I don't see any reason why conveying that sort of information concisely in one word should not be part of written english too.

You make this comment in jest, but seriously, I genuinely have had a conversation on a phone that started pretty much with "Hi there, I'm Barry and I'm calling from inside your Windows. I'm trapped in here and I need your password to get out."

That's the point - if you're going so fast that you need to slam the brakes on, then you were already driving dangerously. Stop that, now.

If your decision to brake or not was based on "I'm 2.5 seconds away from the junction, and that yellow has to show for 3", then you're driving dangerously.

To continue on my above comment (which I shouldn't have clicked submit on so quickly)... What could change to give you more leeway is that you could stop the opposing flow going green the very moment that one flow of traffic goes red. In the UK, the sequence for current, and opposing traffic in pairs goes (green, red), (yellow, red), (red, red), (red, yellow), (red, green) - that extra gap where neither direction has even a yellow, and then where the traffic that's about to start is shown yellow, allows people to relax and stop barging through so much.

Speaking as someone coming from the UK, the idea that the federal guidelines for yellows are too short is laughable. You guys get roughly twice as long on yellow as we do in the UK. I'd actually argue that the guidelines are too long . The very long yellow light times encourage people to think "it's okay, I can make it through". Meanwhile, yellow merely being a warning "red is coming, you'd better stop" makes things much safer.

What are you talking about? No one forced you to slam your brakes on at the last second. There's no victim here, there's no person forcing you into it. In order to be victimised you need to have someone making you a victim, and that person doesn't exist.

All OP is doing is blaming the person at fault - that is, the person who's taken longer than 4 seconds to make the decision to gently brake for a red light, when given plenty of warning by a yellow.

Given that you have 4-5 (depending on speed) seconds of yellow, there's absolutely no excuse to slam on the brakes. As OP said - the dangerous driving is entirely independent of the lights.

Huh? Are you asserting that there's some causal link between being poor and running red lights?

You would complain to Microsoft because the scammers introduce themselves as "calling from Windows" or "calling from Microsoft".

No, stop being an idiot.

"regular users" click on files in a list or 2-d grid. They would not even notice if the filesystem allowed more than one file with the same name, and the certainly do not give a damn about case insensitivity. Even if they type at a terminal they use filename-completion and do not care either.

It is also clear that it has nothing to do with user-friendliness or they would map more common errors, such as multiple spaces to single ones, removing leading and trailing whitespace, or mapping equivalent unicode to the same files. They don't do this because they realize that such complex details of the encoding do not belong in the file system api.

Case-insensitivity is a throwback to ancient ASCII-only systems. If you live in the stone age you may think it is a good idea. If you have been exposed to it all your life you may think it is a good idea. But if you were actually intelligent you would know it is wrong.