Cars and buses with LED tail lights are not running them at 60Hz. Nor are they being pulsed at any rate. The electrical system in a car is 12V DC. The LED assembly is either designed with enough LEDs in series such that the forward voltage drop over the set is 12V (roughly 10 LEDs) or they are in parallel with a buck-style switching power supply in front of it.

Now, before you go on about how the switching power supply causes flicker, you should research how they work. You will find that for cost and size reasons, it is better to run a buck topology as fast as possible. 250kHz, 500kHz, and 1MHz are common frequencies. Of course, the output from the switching portion is put through a LC filter such that the voltage ripple is reduced to a small percentage of the target output voltage. Besides, LED brightness is controlled by current. Even a 5% voltage ripple on a 2V output would trigger a few lumens of brightness difference.

So, if you are seeing flicker in car and bus tail lights, then you can see a 250kHz "flicker" with an average brightness delta of a few lumens. If you can, I'm sure there are plenty of researchers who would love to talk to you as you are the only person on the planet who can.

Of course, since cost is the driving factor in these types of devices, they probably aren't using the switcher at all and thus there is _no_ flicker due to electrical reasons. You are probably being more affected by the directionality of the LEDs and the lenses used being vibrated by the engine at idle speeds. You get the same effect watching a motorcycle headlamp on a rough road. The light isn't flickering, it is just vibrating enough that the beam is falling in and out of your eye.

The differentiating factor there is one of enforcement. In all four cases, a law has been violated. If said baby were to cry a lot and cause the neighbors to complain, the police would investigate and still find you neglegent.

Here you've outlined two separate infractions. In the first case, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder apply. In the second, conspiracy and murder both apply. The actual act committed changed, not the outcome.

While I doubt mariners will ever stop being taught compass and celestial navigation (tradition is important), I can't imagine either will be needed 100 years from now, much less a thousand."

This may be true, but our ships compasses won't stop working nor pointing to true north either! First answer this, do ships still use magnetic compasses? answer NO!
Ships are made of steel and other metals, thus causing deviation on a magnetic compass so we use gyro compasses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_compass
Also for you GPS folks a GPS compass that uses the phase angles of the signals to determine true north go look for a Furuno SC-60 or similar.

It was at the bottom of the page as a footnote:

  1It was the late 70s. I was working for New York Life Insurance Company at 51 Madison Avenue, programming in PL/I on an IBM 370 via TSO (Time Sharing Option) and an IBM 3278 terminal. I was using a new-fangled "full-screen editor" called FSE to edit my source code. At one point I pressed the Backspace key and instead of the cursor moving backwards as is normal, the entire screen moved left one character, including the frame of the editor, with the beginning of each line wrapping to the end of the preceding line. It was as if the entire frame buffer shifted. I pressed the Backspace key a couple more times, and it did the same thing. Then it started going by itself, with the lines circling around the screen and right up through the top until the screen was entirely clear. Then we called the IBM repair guy. I was very eager to tell him what happened and hear his diagnosis, but that's not they repaired 3278s. Instead, the repair guy had a box full of spare circuit boards. He swapped them in and out of the machine until the terminal worked again.