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Florida DUI Law and Open Source
pete314 writes "A Florida court this Friday will hear arguments in a case where the accuracy of a breathalyzer is being scrutinized because the manufacturer refuses to release the source code. A state court ruling last year said that accused drunk drivers are entitled to receive details about the inner workings of the "mystical machine" that determined their guilt, and defense attorneys are now using that ruling to open up the device's source code.Is this part of a larger trend? With software bugs being a fact of life, consumers and organizations could claim that they need to be able to verify an application's source code before they accept that their calculations are accurate. Think credit card transactions, speed detecting radar guns, electronic voting machines..." Here is our previous story when this first became an issue in Florida.
This has nothing to do with the accuracy of the breathalyzer and everything to do with the sleazy practices of DUI defense attorneys. Like all good ambulance chasers, they will use every tactic in the book to get their clients off. I've had far too many dealings with them as a volunteer for MADD to ever think again that they belong to the same species as I do.
Napalm is nature's toothpaste
There's one way to find out. If this guy kills somebody while driving drunk anytime in the future then execute his lawyer.
Seems like we find ourselves a long way from making sure people are only punished for the crimes they've committed and their sentences are just.
We've got a huge problem here in New Mexico where we have some folks (both men and women) with anywhere from 14 to 20 convictions of driving while intoxicated. All the politicians talk tough, but the drunks are still out there driving. One lady decided she was too drunk to drive so she let her 10 year old daughter drive her home. The daughter was doing great until she drove the car through a brick wall fence.
I say cane the SOB until he cries like a school girl.
It's unfortunate that the Open Source movement has to be advocated by homocidal users of a dangerous drug.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.