Slashdot Mirror
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."
If your GPS unit told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?
it's much easier to blame someone/something else than take personal responsibility for your actions. Is this really a surprise to anyone?
~/.sig: No such file or directory
... if you don't know how to drive, get the fuck off the road.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Technology is a supplement, it is not meant to replace common sense.
At least if you copy and paste flame material be sure to select "Plain Text" from the scroll down box. That way you get nice paragraphs :D
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Must be technologies way of thinning the herd.
I work for a company that makes software that is used for navigation, and there are a good amount of tech support calls complaining about how the "program sent us down an unmarked dirt road!" They don't seem to realize that they drove themselves down the dirt road, on the suggestion of a computer. I think we've all seen our GPS's be off by a bit, some people are missing the fact that nothing is perfect, especially not a box with a tiny screen.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that we have an innate ability to shift blame. No "technology" is required. (Or rather, maybe blame shifting is a technology.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Yeah... It's the e-mail that's stupid, not you, huh?
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.
I have a friend whose partner was driving down a motorway (equivalent to a freeway) in Britain. Unlike California where lanes are de-facto equivalent, in the UK it's customary to have faster lanes towards the "outside" (more to the right) of the road; she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The article makes it sound as if people are suspending their (previously) impeccable judgment when turning on their GPS unit... Certainly that's not the reality. The only thing new here is people blaming the GPS, instead of any other little thing that came to mind, like street lighting, road signs, other cars/pedestrians/animals, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Attention: This machine has no brain, use your own!"
-hps
once tripped onto a chair (she was around 3 years old) and hurt her knee.
After crying a lot... she yelled: "TUPID CHAIR!" and kicked the chair.
Somehow by reading the article summary this scene came to my mind.
Trigger lock? There's a key, somewhere around here... (there's actually a whole host of issues around these keys: five year olds understand locks and keys, so either they're with you or they're available to the kids.) I earnestly hope I don't have to figure out how to silently remove a trigger lock in the dark while an intruder is in the hall between me and my children.
Magic ring that enables the electronic trigger? Hope the battery didn't die (in the ring and/or in the gun), hope the gunpowder residue and the cleaning fluid from the last time I was at the range didn't corrode or short out the circuitry. Hope the electronic components are able to handle the shock of firing the gun as durably as a mechanical trigger (unlikely, but possible).
Personally, I like gun safes and pistol vaults. The pistol vault I like the best is the one with the touch combination that with a little practice, is very simple to get right, even in the dark, even under stress. Still an extra step, but it's a mighty small obstacle to me and a much bigger obstacle to the kids or to a thief (assuming I installed the pistol vault correctly and they can't just take the whole thing).
Back to the point: there's nothing the gun manufacturer can do to the gun to make it harder for someone else to shoot that doesn't also make it less reliable or less available to me. But there are ways for gun owners to responsibly keep firearms, which leads the discussion to where the responsibility really lies: with the gun owner. If a kid takes one of my guns and accidentally kills another kid, I'm going to feel responsible for the tragedy. So I do what I can to minimize the chances of that happening while still keeping responsibility for my own self defense. And IMHO, that's how it should be.
Regards,
Ross
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Repairman: [pointing to a Good/Evil switch on the back of the doll] Yup, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to ``Evil''.
/simpsons
FairTax baby!
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The coffee as-poured by McDonalds is ~82 degrees C. I boil a kettle, immediately pour the water into the cup, add creamer and server. It's likely to be far hotter (close to 100 degrees C) than the coffee at McDonalds. I drink (well, sip) it pretty much straight-away as well. So does everyone I know.
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one would have much sympathy for you though. As no-one has much sympathy for the woman who puts not-even-boiling-hot coffee between her thighs and (get this!) does so while she's driving.
- From an earlier post on Digg -
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just sick of this "defence" of stupidity, in the case of the McDonald's coffee case.
Coffee is *made* with boiling-hot water. It is *supposed* to be scalding-hot. I don't care whether it's plus or minus a few degrees of the average scalding-hot water that coffee is usually made with - that shouldn't be the issue, it'll still hurt like hell. The issue ought to be "did the defendent do something unbelievably stupid or was the company negligent". The answer is that *yes*, she did something stupid; she put a frail paper-cup of scalding-hot water between her thighs and then (presumably involuntarily) squeezed her legs together.
Yes, she was hurt, badly. Yes, McDonalds could have made the coffee at a lower temperature, and they were making it hotter for commercial reasons. Both of those are true and neither ought to be relevant. The decision ought to have been based on whether what she did was a reasonable thing to do with *any* fresh cup of coffee - basically whether she should have expected to have been able to pour said cup of coffee over her without injury. I invite anyone defending her to make *themselves* a cup of coffee and pour it over their thighs (at your own risk, of course) - it'll scald you just as badly.
That is in fact what the McDonalds lawyer ought to have done. Simply made a fresh cup of coffee in the court, and asked for volunteers (judge, jury if it was a jury trial ?) to have scalding-hot coffee poured over them. Anyone defending her case would presumably consider *normal* scalding-hot coffee to be non-injurious to human skin.
McDonalds only have a "reasonable" burden of care - if the coffee-cup had dissolved and the contents scalded her, I think we'd all be behind her, but it didn't. People have too little sense of personal responsibility these days, it's easier to sue and "donate" the blame to someone else. It's a sad day for society in general when gross stupidity is defended against common sense.
None of this means I don't feel sorry for her, by the way - I do. I just also think it was her fault, and given that she's become the poster-child for incongruous lawsuits, 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.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Actually, in the McDonalds case it was not the issue of spilling coffee that was in question. The woman admitted she spilt the coffee, and it was a stupid thing to do.
The issue was that McDonalds like to keep their coffee at about 98C because it lasts longer that way. Most people drink coffee at about 60C, any more and it burns you. Most people do not expect to be severly burned by coffee, because it is usually not hot enough. McDonalds, in an attempt to save money by brewing fewer pots, handed her a cup of dangerous liquid without any warning. Even if she had sipped the coffee, it would have burnt her mouth.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
She was a passenger in the car that her grandson was driving. He had stopped the vehicle specifically so she could remove the lid for adding cream and sugar.
Let me repeat myself. Stella Liebeck was sitting in a motionless car when she spilled coffee that was so hot that she required skin grafts.
Stop making assertions about how stupid people are based on made-up "facts".
But then again, I could be wrong.
Stella Liebeck was not driving. She was a passenger in a vehicle stopped specifically so she could safely remove the lid.
But then again, I could be wrong.