Princess Diana Murdered?

Scotland Yard hasn't revealed what kind of information they're looking into, but Sky News reports it includes an allegation that the late Princess of Wales was murdered. The tip reportedly came from military sources.

Yes - they used the little known mind control techniques at Britain's Area 51 to persuade her to not use her seatbelt.




Clunk Click, every Trip.

You may want to google "Boston Brakes"

http://news.sky.com/story/1129902/dianas-death-police-passed-new-information

YAWN

Do you prefer Bacofoil or do find Tesco own brand is perfectly adequate for your millinery needs?

+1

No I tend to just think that "If" and I do stress "If" this is true then it may just be something worth discussing, however I see that just mentioning something on here lately seems to get sarcastic comments, maybe this forum would be better if people were more polite?

I will place my silver foil back on my head and leave you all to it.

+1

The daily Express may well go into meltdown. They may have to go full sheet to fit enough Diana photos on the page

Now that was funny, thanks.

I'm impressed by the way people with *no idea* about how car electronics and mechanics work postulate this kind of idiocy... I mean, surely it's obvious that the servo assist systems applied to brakes and steering *and controlled by mechanical inputs from the driver*, both of which are designed to fail safe and required by law to have mechanical linkages *cannot* steer and brake the car?

Let's see what you'd need to change and/or develop for this idiocy to work:

1) Steering:
a) Unassisted steering: requires application of a servo drive with sufficient force to override the driver inputs or alternatively, to match the inputs and somehow separate the top and bottom end of the steering column and just drive the bottom end. Observing the size of current 'electric assist' motors you'd need something at least as large, probably half as big again, and you'd need to find somewhere to fit it. Have you looked under the dash or around the steering rack of a nineties car?
b) Power assisted, hydraulic: see above; it's the input to the system that matters, not the power assist. You'd need an equally large motor to drive the column, and have the same packaging problems.
c) Power assisted, electric: not common in the nineties but might have been around. A little easier since you have access to a motor already fitted though the driver can override the power of the default motor; you'd need to increase the power of the motor significantly with all the packaging problems noted above.
d) Autonomous vehicles (e.g. Google Car) - for comparison: most autonomous vehicles drive an existing steering wheel via a reduction gearing belt onto something approaching the size of the wheel itself, purely for mechanical advantage. It works well, but it's hardly unobtrusive...

2) Brakes:
Actually, this is easier. Most cars of that vintage and later had ABS systems and that has the interesting property of being able to release pressure from the brake system while the driver is trying to apply it... a useful property if you're trying to stop someone braking. Nonetheless, there's been, oh, thirty or forty years of development in making these things *safe*. If they detect a fault in themselves, they default to pass-through. You would need to hack the ABS controller to release pressure on command: not impossible, but it would have to work well enough the rest of the time so that the driver would notice no fault... tricky, but not impossible. Might be simpler just to put blow-off valves in the output side.

3) Control systems
Which leaves the issue of doing all this naughtiness on command. You'd need some external control method, presumably, since you'd want everything to happen on command and not at some random time. Radio control is the most logical and probably the most debugged over time - but you'd need to find a system which wasn't susceptible to external accidental interference, which could work over some reasonable distance, which could work in tunnels... ah. There's a snag... Model radio controllers will give you respectable range - particularly with 2.4GHz - but won't work underground unless you're *very* close to the receiver; multipath distortion messes things up quite nicely thank-you. Lower frequencies - the traditional 27MHz or 35MHz - might work but again you have issues with range and interference (ask any RC modeller). Of course, you have all the resources of the state, so perhaps you could get some data streamed onto broadcast radio. Oh wait, that doesn't work underground... and perhaps someone might notice when their programme is replaced with static or control pulse noise?
The second part of control is feedback: you're going to find it a much easier job to control if you have a car's eye view of what's going on, rather than say tracking from a chase car. All the issues of radio mentioned above still apply, with further complications because of the increased bandwidth required for video.

4) Safety systems:
You have no guarantee that a crash will be fatal. Most aren't. So you need to control people not putting their safety belts on and disable the airbags at the very least. One of these is easy; the other much less so.

And finally... when the wreckage is recovered, particularly for a high-visibility target, it's going to be investigated by experts, both from the accident investigation authority and perhaps from the maker. All your modifications have to be so discreet that the manfacturer doesn't find them (see packaging issues above).

So which is more likely: someone goes to all this trouble to crash a car on command when it could be done much more easily (e.g. stinger deployed, shoot the driver, nudge at the right time from a following car...), or that the driver was drunk and going too fast?

She's dead, let's not resurrect this shizzle again - it wasn't that interesting first time round, i only ever felt sorry for the boys

She's not dead!!!

She is living with Dodi on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

Listening to Elvis singing live!

Among a colony of Dodos no doubt.

Spot on Proccy. I don't comment very much these days on such trivialities as people dragging up the past like this, but I reckon you're the only one who made any sense.

Careful Jim you'll ruin my reputation

More press driven royal sensationalism. Just what folk need....

Just what her kids need too.

I still have yet to figure out what the fascination with Diana stems from.

and now the Police are being criticised for reviewing this.

Damned if they do.....