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Blame Your Mistakes on Technology
Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."
Douglas Adams had talked a lot about technology guiding our life. His posthumous book Salmon of Doubt talks about the intermediate phase between the current world of dumb electronics and the time when we have truly intelligent machines. The brief period when the machines are dumber than the average human, yet the human has too much confidence in the machine to trust his/her own judgment will be really bad.
I'm afraid that is the world of Today. We trust our inanimate companions over humans because they are bereft of intent (and malice). But I suspect people are less likely to change than machines are likely to become more reliable. So ... ++CARRIER ERROR
I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Mr AndersonQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The way I usually navigate to places I don't know well is to consult an online map first, which provides good overall context to the route, plan the trip myself, then use the GPS only as a reminder. The only time I would use the GPS by itself is if I don't have a way to get the full context of my route. If you go to Google maps, for instance, and make a plan, then try to do the same on the GPS, you'll see the difference immediately - with the GPS it is nearly impossible to have a good sense of the whole route, so you might not even be able to tell if it sends down some bizarre route. As a pilot in training, I see warnings against relying on the instruments too much all the time. In spite of the fact that a lot of effort has gone into making everything accurate and useful, it is taught that it is critical you have as much awareness of what is going on around you at all times - and this means actually looking out of the airplane to confirm what your instruments are telling you. Relying on the GPS by itself to plan your route is equivalent to flying with your windows blacked out. If your instruments are wrong - and it does happen - you'll never know it, and who knows where you'll end up.
The woman that won against mcdonalds suffered severe burns (more than you'd get from normal coffee) and sued for medical costs (they'd settled hundreds of times for the same issue). The jury fined them one day's coffee sales, as a symbolic way of punishing mcdonalds. This about was later reduced by the judge. All told, this isn't a frivolous suit.
IMO, the suit was basically frivolous, at least in proportion to the damages that were awarded. What McDonalds did wrong was really, really piss off the jury.
What they got punished for really wasn't the action itself, but the assertion after the fact, that they wouldn't pay for cosmetic/reconstructive surgery on that particular woman, because she was fairly old. (It was on her inner thighs and one assumes genitals.) I don't know what the exact remark or statement was, but there were a lot of people on the jury who thought McDonald's position boiled down to "hey, she's old and basically ugly, she's not getting any except from her fat hubby anyway, she's not going on America's Next Top Model; why the hell should we pay to fix up her thighs?" (Or at least, this was the implication given by the woman's lawyers regarding McDonalds -- this is a lawsuit we're talking about; perception is everything.)
The jury was pretty pissed at McDonalds' attitude throughout the whole business, and they decided to stick it to them.
I suspect if McDonalds had played the situation better, they probably could have gotten out of it for a lot less. But when you piss off the jury or look like the 'bad guy,' that's kinda what happens.
I don't buy for a minute that the case was really decided based on the merits of negligence; it was pretty much a referendum on McDonalds' treatment of that woman after the fact and their legal team's attitude generally.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As a board-trained draftsman since the late seventies I've noticed this more and more. Not once were our pencils ever "upgraded" causing confusion or work shutdown. When the pencil lead broke, you'd just re-sharpen it and keep on working. Nowadays, producing a technical document is much more complicated, and while I enjoy the power of 3D CAD I do wonder about the latest generations who are often helpless without a computer and hopeless with a pencil.
While I whole heartedly agree that it is unwise to put nearly boiling liguids between one's legs and the lawsuit was frivolous, it did have a positive, much better coffee cups. You can pratically drop a full one and that lid isn't comming off. Now if someone would just sue the Taco Bell over their soda cups...
I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Thank God we don't adopt UK methods for dealing with things. I've been living in the UK for the past year and all I can say is WOW! Do you know you people have been driving on the wrong side of the road all this time? I can't imagine what your court system is like. ;)
My brain (and, I suspect, others') are wired to expect the variable to be first, so it doesn't conform to the pattern I'm expecting. It's like I read "if 3 equals..." and my brain thinks "3? 3 is always going to equal 3. What else would it equal?"
That's not so bad though, because it's there to work around the problem in C-type languages where you accidentally type this:
if (a = 3)
because you forgot to type == instead of =. This will assign the value. If you do that with (3 == a), you get a compiler error.
I don't like (3 >= a) because it's not like you'll type = instead of >= because you thought = was a greater-than-or-equal test. Besides, the actual solution is to turn the compiler warnings up and don't deliberately write assignments in conditional expressions.
When you get inequalities and try to put the constant first, you invariably make the expression less intuitive, thus requires more work to understand. And as we all (should) know, you write your code assuming it is going to be read by a novice (for various real-world reasons - not all of which are that it is going to be read by a novice).
We have one of these at like one of the 3rd busiest intersection in Orange County, CA. The problem is that when you turn left at the signal and have a big-rig in front of you while turning you cannot see the light; I would say not to tailgate but since we are at a stand still and than start to move forward to turn it does not become obvious that it is changing until your front tires are at the first line and by that time it is too late.
This is not really a joke. Here in Oregon USA we have large tracts of land that are, politely said, undeveloped. In southern Oregon, in the area north of the California border and south of Eugene, there is one superhighway and three major roads that go the rough 150 kilometers between the superhighway and the coast. Off those major roads there are many very rough dirt roads used mainly by special trucks to haul out logged trees. These roads are not maintained or paved or used after the logging is finished.
However they are listed on GPS maps as 'roads'. They're also listed in the big DeLorme map books as roads. So your map may show a hundred roads covering an area of a thousand square kilometers, but they are all overgrown and washed-out dirt paths that may not have had any vehicle activity on them in thirty years.
Occasionally someone in an SUV with a GPS will get the notion that they are going to take a short-cut between the superhighway I-5 and the coast on one of these roads listed on the GPS and confirmed by the big DeLorme map book. They will start driving on a dirt road that gets rougher every mile. If they're smart, they'll stop and back-up when they start scraping the bottom of their SUV on the 'road'. If they're not smart, they'll put on their headphones, slip the latest Norah Jones into the CD player, continue on and ignore the fact that the tree branches are scraping the side mirrors. If they're luckly, they'll get stuck in a rut and have to walk back no more than ten kilometers to get a tow. If they're not lucky, they'll be doing this in the winter, take side roads and blind turns into unknown directions and get lost in deep woods. Or they'll marvel at the ability of their $30000 SUV to climb thousands of feet on snow covered paths, get lost, get stuck and immobile in the snow, and realize that (1) they're completly lost, (2) the car is hopelessly stuck, (3) they're low on gas, (4) it's rather cold outside, (5) they're wearing Los Angeles clothes with no coats, (6) they didn't tell anyone that they were going to be taking this 'shortcut to the beach', and finally (7) the cell phone doesn't work.
Now the local people know that the stupid tourists can get into a jam like this and will try to warn people with out-of-state license plates driving in the deep woods. But if your GPS says that you're on a major road, but your on a rutted dirt path and tree branches have been scraping your windows for the past ten minutes and you still drive on, well there isn't much that they can do for you.
Eventually someone will find your vehicle and body, probably next summer after the mud dries and people start exploring the woods in their mini-monster trucks again.
This exact thing happened last winter. The family lucked out when the people that they were going to visit reported them missing and credit card records showed them to have bought gas at a station near the roadless areas. The authorities called out a major search-and-rescue and was able to save most of the people in the SUV after five days of being stuck in the snow. The next people may not be so lucky
So trust your instincts. Don't trust the GPS. Pay attention to reality.
I remember a story my dad told me (Air Force Sargent) - An Air Force meteorologist was briefing his new asssitant fresh out of school: "So after you finish looking at all the meteorlogical data and weather maps ... I want you to walk over and look outside before you issue the forecast"
...
Technology is your aide - not you master. Then again - maybe all these GPS "accidents" is a form of Skynet for dumb people
Its not the years, its the mileage
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
There are some areas of the country where the "I need to generally be going X direction" does not work. Let's take Pittsburgh, for example. There are many areas in and around Pittsburgh that you can only get to if you take the correct roads. Not if you go the correct way--but take the right roads. Otherwise, you will be passing over, or under, or parallel to where you need to be, but you can't get there.
The old saying "You can't get there from here" is used a lot in this area. It doesn't mean you can't get there at all, just that you have to do some finagling to do so.
The geography of the area with its 3 rivers (and a bunch of other tributaries) and a ton of hills did strange things to the travel patterns. Most people I know who moved here (me included) have stories about trying to navigate by "I'm here and need to be there, so I go this way" which at some point include them turning around on dirt road dead ends or watching the road they need go above them, then under them, then away from them... but never TO them.
So your best bet in Pittsburgh is to get directions, learn to read a map, take the map with you, and be open for stopping and asking someone how to get somewhere. Hopefully they'll give you some landmarks that still exist (rather than "turn right where the old ice cream place used to be" or some such...)
Sat navs are pretty cool here, since they give exact routes, but they're not going to be much help if roads are flooded (did I mention the rivers? how about rockslides?). Like any good tool, they should merely be your accessory. They're certainly not going to help you avoid trains. *boggles*
That said... if you get turned off the road you want in Pittsburgh, stop and check your map for another way to where you're going.
"If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
I supplement maps by printing Google Maps of the area I need in Hybrid view. I get decent photos with road overlay, and toss them into my truckers atlas. A scout compass in the glovebox is handy but I don't use it much.
Pics are a huge help when doing things like hunting junk vehicles. I can pull them up while on the phone, ask the seller where the vehicle is
are in relation to structures/landmarks, and find the site much quicker.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I feel great about it. That is natural selection at its finest.