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DUI Defendant Wins Source Code to Breathalyzer
MyrddinBach writes "CNet's Police Blotter column looks into a Minnesota drunk driving defendant case with a twist. The defendant says he needs the source code to the Intoxilyzer 5000EN to fight the charges in court. Apparently the company has agreed to turn over the code to the defense. 'A judge granted the defendant's request, but Michael Campion, Minnesota's commissioner in charge of public safety, opposed it. Minnesota quickly asked an appeals court to intervene, which it declined to do. Then the state appealed a second time. What became central to the dispute was whether the source code was owned by the state or CMI, the maker of the Intoxilyzer.'"
grep it for "Boris Yeltsin"
If it's owned by the state isn't it public domain?
Thus if the state's call to block it was predicated on their claim to ownership, it would fall through.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
What a bitch. Just take the punishment - no matter how sober you think you are, those things are damn near never wrong. If it's above .08, just pony up for the fines already...
Intoxilyzer? Really? That sounds like the name of a Judas Priest album or something...Painkiller, Turbo Lover, Juggulator, Intoxilyzer...
It's not like you can cheat the device when you saw the source.
Does the defendant work for SCO?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
How about the hardware schematics? You'd think he'd need those even more. He's just being an ass.
10 print "U R DRUNK!!!"
20 GOTO 10
...if they completely refused the defense access to the source code. There's more reasonable doubt to be had when there are "ominous secrets" from which to draw doubt. But now their only hope is to find reasonable doubt in the form of bugs in the source... a lot less likely.
I should try this defense with everything. "Sorry officer, but unless you can produce the source code for all those kittens I drowned in my cousin tim's baby pool, I haven't done anything wrong."
The code is owned by the company that makes the equipment. So what? Information which matters in a court case gets subpoenaed all the time. What makes software any different then private mail, bank account records, or anything else?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Not to question his motives in this case but what the hell do you need the source code for a breathalizer for.
if ($input > $limit)
{
execute(arrest);
}
else
{
execute(warning);
}
I guess maybe there is more to it but does he really think he is going to get his case dismissed because he finds a unrelated flaw in the code.
This post is going to go in the dictionary under "begging the question".
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
He's innocent until proven guilty.
TFA doesn't say what level he tested at, but it's certainly possible that he was tested above the legal limit while well within the ability to drive decently. He may be a piece of shit for driving drunk, or he may be an unfortunate victim of the jerks who think that lowering the legal limit to an indecent level will make the roads safer.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
(his attorney, Jeffrey Sheridan, as saying) the source code was necessary because otherwise "for all we know, it's a random number generator."
What's it written in? Double Visional Basic? Lishp?
Brainf**k maybe...
Now, I understand that it is just default to keep source code for no good reason, and it also seems like the default for the state to fight defense evidence gathering even though that is wholly unethical, but this seems ridiculous. If he thinks he's going to prove something, let him try. Fighting it makes it look like he will, which means you'll just look stupid when he doesn't. Because he can't, because that makes no fucking sense.
/. editor of course, but it's not going to fly in the court, and the prosecution is going to look retarded for trying to stop him.
I mean seriously, what the fuck is the source code going to show? There is not going to be shit in there for intentional false positives. There wouldn't be any reason for that on the part of the maker. I also don't see how there could be accidental false positives related to the source as opposed to mechanical failure. I mean, it's a simple num>X check. He probably thinks he can technobabble his way out of it, but that shit is not going to work. There's a chance it could fool the average
I am all for lowering the limit even below 0.08, not because I want more "gubermint" in by business, but because it's just safer for everyone.
Now bring on all the people who say, "but..but...but, it's the same thing with cell phones."
Yep - ban them too! :-)
I was about to say the same thing, but then when I saw you were modded insightful, it sort of pissed me off.
If the conviction comes down to the breathalyzer being slightly off, I think you are a boob for jumping to conclusions. If he was stopped in a random traffic stop/check point, and the breathalyzer was wrong, then he may be a perfectly stand up guy, and you just slandered him. you don't know, and that is what courts are for.
If he was pulled over because it was obvious he was intoxicated, well then... Who th F cares!!! You only need the officers testimony technically (and a willing jury). The breathalyzer is just icing on the cake. (Check you local laws, but in my state over the legal limit is an automatic charge, but even under the limit, if you can't control your vehicle is a violation of the law)
The defendant would have been even better off if he had refused to take the breathalyzer test altogether.
You lose your license for a year under the dubious assertion that driving is a "privilege", despite the protection of the 5th Amendment, but you do NOT get a criminal conviction on your record and your insurance does not balloon.
The toxylizer that was used to mark him needs to be confiscated and reverse-engineered to see if the code running on it, is effectively produced by the source code in question (It could be modded, youknow). If it can't be found, then we can safely assume that the evidence has been altered.
Voila, reasonable doubt.
What a bitch. Just take the punishment - no matter how sober you think you are, those things are damn near never wrong. If it's above .08, just pony up for the fines already...
I agree. He is hoping they don't want to give up the code. Give it to him. After a week, give him the maximum sentence. Drunks kill people. And I would bet he was drunk.
Before you hang the guy, perhaps we should consider he may be on a low-carbohydrate diet and the unit fails to distinguish acetone from alcohol.
Just four months ago a Virgin Atlantic pilot was arrested and taken off the aircraft he was the pilot of for a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Several days later, all charges were dropped when the results of the blood tests proved him innocent.
Pilot arrested on drink charge
Diet clears drinking-arrest pilot
If all breathalyzers work in the same manner it would throw DUI law enforcement for a loop.
C'mon. We shouldn't rely on such devices as evidence anyway. IMO devices are useful for detection, but not conclusive. In my country electronic devices are used to detect alcamahol all the time, but these are not used as evidence. The defendant must immediately give a blood sample - or be prosecuted for not supplying blood.
When early electronic breathalizers first came out here years ago they either didn't detect the alcohol at all, or they false alarmed by detecting toothpaste and aftershave. The blood test is conclusive. Why should we trust these new tech devices? I mean people here successfully challenged the accuracy of speedcameras and other such devices. We want to be sure.
is two terms... what part makes it "reasonable"?
Don't get me wrong, but if "the possibility, however remote, that a device, at the time at which it was used, did not operate according to specification" makes for 'reasonable doubt', then you would never see another speeding ticket, DUI ticket, etc.
Back on-topic.. don't people who get caught with a breathalyzer (is what they're more known as over here) get taken to the station for a more thorough and accurate, possibly blood, test to determine the blood alcohol level, before going through the steps of fining? As far as I know, the breathalyzers for that exact reason are set up to be moderately lax, as false positives would just be a giant waste of time + money on both the part of the government -and- the person who got tested, causing collateral damages everywhere.
"Wetzel was arrested at his home on Feb. 25 after allegedly rear-ending a car with his pickup truck and then driving off. He faces five gross misdemeanor charges, including causing bodily harm and driving while intoxicated." FREDERICK MELO Pioneer Press
If some "testimony" of a machine can be used to take away my freedom, I would need access to any mechanical plans or source code that forms that testimony.
Seems only fair even if it feels like a technicality to some and the source code will reveal nothing exculpatory.
Seems to me this will be more common as this sensor technology becomes more ubiquitous and used for drugs, explosives, performance enhancers, etc.
The argument he is making come from the contract that the breathalyser company made with the state. The contract says that (from the article:) "all right, title, and interest in all copyrightable material" that CMI creates as part of the contract "will be the property of the state." => The state owns the source code, and the company needs a better contract manager, so ha ha to the company for losing it's source code due to dumb legal mistakes! Muhahahaha
To get drunk, get caught, demand the breathalyser source, so he can rip off it and create his own competing product! Muhaha! It's genius!
"I am all for lowering the limit even below 0.08, not because I want more "gubermint" in by business, but because it's just safer for everyone."
It would be "just safer for everyone" to require that you don't drive for a week after drinking alcohol, and to wear a helmet whenever you do, and yet it's not a law.
Doing things in the name of safety while ignoring the cost is a bad way to do anything.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
..has nothing to do with this case, and little to do with who holds the copyright. What if he does find flaws, and others have already been convicted using output from the same machine? Suddenly, all those past cases come back up.
I guess the lesson here is: the source should already have been public and heavily scrutinized. I don't want my government spending my tax money and wasting time in court, to get convictions based on evidence from mysterious unaudited machines. Why? Because sooner or later, some defendant is going to want the mystery peeled back. Some defendant is eventually going to want a fair trial. Might as well give that fair trial to the first one, so that a bunch of expensive shit doesn't have to get re-done (or so that a bunch of guilty people don't end up walking free, simply because the cops used a defective machine that ended up collecting untrustworthy "evidence").
Keep mysteries out of court, from the start. Don't let a big list of convictions that depend on them, build up. The chances of the device being defective are probably pretty low, but you know there's gotta be some prosecutors with pits in their stomachs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
LOL, a very US-centric, M.A.D.D brainwashed view... (wash "Won't someone think of the CHILDREN!!" rinse repeat)
Why don't we just bring back prohibition while we're at it?
Having spent time in North Italy (Lots of mountain roads), I can say that I saw many people out to lunch split a bottle of wine between 2 or 3 people, and drive back to work. In all my time there, I didn't see one wreck. Not one.
I come back stateside and in one day see 10 obviously fatal wrecks on one road. Flat dry pavement.
Speed doesn't kill. Some alcohol doesn't kill. An extremely lax drivers education/training/licensing policy coupled with general distraction and self-ceneredness (I'm the king of the road get the hell out of my way so I can get my snot-nosed brats to soccer practice) absolutely does. Speed and alcohol can make that worse, but they are far far from the boogieman many idiots in the US make them out to be.
I say fix the real problems, and roll back the levels to where they were in the 70s, enforce those levels effectively, and shut the hell up and stop harassing relatively innocent tax payers.
My $0.02US.
The previous machine, the Breathalyzer, went out of use when it was proven (by defense attorneys) that it was susceptible to RFI. The "new" machine, the Intoxilyzer5000 (and this was 25 years ago) was microprocessor based. It had an RFI detection circuit which was supposed to invalidate results if RFI was present. Other known issues are burping and chewing tobacco. Trouble is, the RFI detector was a comparator driving a login input. Without the software, you can't prove the box's performance from a white box perspective. That's trouble when you're relying on a machine vs. videotaped evidence of impairment.
What's the cost in this case? Someone is going to have to take a cab home and pick up their car the next day. Boo fucking hoo.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From reading the article you can see that getting the source code is not about proving it accurate or not, but that cases have been thrown out previously because the company refused to release the source code. In this case the defendant is probably very unhappy that the source code was released. This is a pretty clear case of a defense backfiring. Hopefully he will find any bugs in the software so they can be corrected, but that probably won't stop him from being convicted.
I wonder if he had his own 'buffer overflow' right in front of the officer? Maybe some wayward output streams?
The lowest legal limit I know of is .08. That's enough to impair. Honestly, I think it should be, one strike and lose your license for a year. More than once and you never drive again. Drunk driving is one of the most dangerously irresponsible things anyone can do. I can't understand why anyone would try to defend it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A low-carb diet (e.g. Atkins diet) can indeed make you "ketotic" and raise your breath acetone level.
e vels_produce_inaccurate_Breathalyzer_results
From your college chemistry course acetone has a C=O bond, while alcohol is a C-OH bond.
Cheap breathalyzers will use a chemical reaction to detect the alcohol in your breath -- often potassium dichromate (these are the ones that go from red to green with alcohol).
More advanced models (such as the ones the police would use, would use essentially spectroscopy to try to measure the resonant absorbance of the C-OH bond. This would not be fooled by acetone, which has a much different absorbance of the C=O (approximately 1700 cm-1 IIRC). There are also variants of this method.
If you are ever innocent and accused, get a blood test, which really is a quantitative direct measurement and can be confirmed, with very little chance of being fooled.
If you are not innocent, **IN THEORY** the easiest way to lower your reading is to silently hyperventilate prior to blowing. This would prevent equilibration of the alcohol in your bloodstream with the air in your lungs that you just breathed in and out. It is far from perfect, and I would strongly advise to never drive drunk, nor rely on this method.
Additional references: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Could_elevated_ketone_l
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
The problem with your argument is this.
The people who are killing or injuring or severely maiming others are not people who had two beers and hopped in a car to go home. It's being done by the people that HAVE a PROBLEM and are downing a case of beer and covering one eye to make it to the next bar.
Lowering the legal limit from .1 to .08 and further down to .06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM. The difference in human beings with a BAC of .06 and .08 is impossible to distinguish and measure. All it does is increase government revenue and keep good people down.
This country needs to come to grips with is that Americans DRINK. Drinking is a part of our society and is not going away. The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at .09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes. But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me. I went to a bar in Windsor, Ontario and was blown away by the greatest invention. They had a freakin 25 cent breathalyzer that told you exactly how drunk you were! That's BRILLIANT!
Furthermore, if you live in a city with public transportation, you are fine. But what happens if you live in an urban area, where there is no reliable or cost effective transportation. I invite anyone to come to the Detroit Metro area and try and find a cab ride home. You are going to pay 30 - 50 dollars. Forget about the bus. Forget about the train.
Sure, if you live in downtown New York, this argument doesn't hold water. But how many drunk driving accidents do you have in New York? I wonder how much of that is due to the subway system? Hmm....
So what are doing with all the extra cash we get from persecuting people who had one beer too many? Certainly not building up our infrastructure to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
1;
I judge by your username that other substances may be in use while driving, and other things are being done ....
Well, at least you're going out in style when that mother of all car accidents occurs.
You're way overgeneralizing. There are good and bad devices. Just because "early electronic breathalizers" were supposedly faulty, or speed cameras have been successfully challenged, does not impugn all other technology. That's just absurd.
Each device and/or technology has to be evaluated on a case by case basis to determine its accuracy and reliability. I would guess that even within the "breathalizers" category, there is a wide range of devices with varying accuracy. There are probably a few stinkers that are habitually inaccurate and/or constantly breaking, and there are probably a few that are absolutely rock solid and dead-on accurate.
To suggest that "we shouldn't rely on such devices" just because others have failed in the past is just being a Luddite.
I just can't understand what is so bad about alcohol testers and why so called old fashioned sobriety test would be better than that. At least here in Finland, and other parts of Europe too that I know, police use only alcohol testers and they are widely accepted and seen as the best way to get the job done. To me sobriety test seems just so very random way to measure is the driver under too much alcohol or not, I would image that with that kind of test a cop can use his/her judgment and either let the driver of the hook or book him, at least in the borderline cases. With testers its easy, you just blow and the tester will tell what your score is, and the score is what it is. And if for some instance you don't want to blow or you think that there is some wrong with the device or there are some other things to be noted, you can always demand to be taken to a local hospital for a blood test.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
We need responsibility in DUI Laws. Drunk driving is a terrible problem, but the way the states are dealing with it is not good. The BAC limits have been creeping ever so lower, as to raise the revenue from someone having a glass of wine after dinner when stopped at a roadblock. This is not actually helpful in impacting road safety.
.02 BAC margin of error, so they are set to legal_limit - 0.02, so in a 0.05BAC state, they are set to 0.03. Go on a date and take the girl home on a bus. This is why you should not support mandatory ignition interlocks.
Also, breathalyzers have a +/- 20% error, which is rather unfortunate.
Ignition interlocks have a
We need to deal with the drunk driving problem responsibly: provide good public transportation options (Boston, extend trains until after 2am, you listening?), encourage designated drivers, and provide massive roaming police enforcement, looking for erratic driving and dangerous behavior (substantially more effective than roadblocks).
It helps that the US has basically made having a valid driver's license mandatory.
Want to buy alcohol?
Buy cigarettes?
Fly on a plane?
Rent a car?
Vote?
You need a license. Actually, you need a state-issued ID, but that really adds "or a passport" to my previous statement. And passports cost a lot of money.
So since licenses are practically mandatory, the barriers to getting and keeping one are stupidly low.
We're already seeing a ton of people with absolutely no legal background commenting on legal things. Here's a tip: the law doesn't work like you probably think it does. The law is rational or reasonable. It's a jumbled mess of subjective orders and expressions that lawyers can mold into defense or complaint.
Looking at the source code could very well be the basis for a very solid defense that beats whatever state statues and ordinances the defendant is suspected of violating. We have no idea what's in the code so why not? Crappy programmers probably wrote the software and it probably wouldn't be hard to find something that doesn't function right or doesn't map just right to a state issued requirement for the system.
If this gun reading is the states main piece of leverage it's because this device conforms to some strict requirements defined by the state. So maybe looking at the code will show that it doesn't and that the machine is in fact illegal.
Lastly, if you ever get pulled over for something like this, don't talk. That is when they ask if you've been drinking, always say no. What does "drinking" mean? Well, it's not up to you to define this at that time. Let your lawyer handle it. Never tell a cop you might be breaking the law. Because once you've admitted that you have been drinking, they can ask you a whole bunch of other questions that can only hurt you. How much? For how long? Where at? Where are you going? With who?
Here's a sample:
Officer: Have you been drinking?
You: No.
Officer: I smell alcohol.
You: I haven't been drinking, officer.
He'll still ask you to get out and do his little tests. But you've never admitted to anything. This can help a lot down the road. In short, never say anything you don't have to.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Yeah, but if that source code were to get "leaked" then somebody would probably truly pick it apart...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I had to attend driving school thanks to a speeding ticket (they forgive your first ticket if you take a class, making the class a really good idea) and they told us that they could get a subpoena for your blood.
In other words, yes, they can forcibly take a blood sample from you although they have to have a judge approve it.
Not true, states will issue an ID card that looks like a driver's license and is good for all of these purposes, except that it is not valid for driving. In Minnesota, a driver's license costs $22.25 and an ID card costs $16.25. I have friends that don't drive and have never had a problem in any of the above situations with their ID cards. Well, everything except renting a car -- I can see why they would want a valid driver's license in that case!
Have you ever been to a place that sells alcohol? There's almost never overnight parking, so the real cost is a (potentially hefty) cab ride home + a parking ticket. It's just another part of this country's attitude of "make hard rules" but don't really provide the means for anyone to follow them easily. If you ask me, there should be mandatory overnight parking near any place that sells alcohol so that a cab ride home is actually a decent option that won't cost you at least 50 bucks.
:p
That said, a little planning also can go a long way
I know more than you drink.
I work as a law clerk for a judge in Minnesota, and have written opinions regarding this very matter. Luckily, my judge agrees with me that people's liberty's should not be dependent on the financial interests of private businesses, and we have forced the state to disclose the source code when we get the motions. Of course, the state has not yet done so. As the Asst. Attorney General said in court just a couple days ago, "CMI simply will not give the source code to us. We're supposed to own it, but they just won't give it to us. I'm not sure what to do at this point."
This will probably lead to hundreds of implied consent motions being decided in favor of the driver (which means he gets his license back, and doesn't relate to the criminal charges) and it remains to be seen how courts will hold in criminal matters, but I'm guessing many of them will follow the Underdahl court in forcing the state to disclose it.
As I've explained to my judge: essentially, states needs to learn that it is a very bad idea to sign contracts to acquire closed source devices to which they will have no access or ability to test. The same goes for voting machines.
Personally, I'm VERY conservative when it comes to DUI cases, and I very, very rarely side with the driver. But in this case, I've decided it's worth it to throw out a few of them if it means fixing "the system", not just for the intoxilyzer code, but for more important things like the voting machines.
On another note, I'll be writing a more thorough order requiring the use of the source code, and as one of the few law clerks around that has a CS degree, it'll get used by plenty of other judges. So if anyone has any suggestions on good, succinct public-policy based rationale, I would certainly like to read them.
So let's say the cost is $20 and 1 hour for the drinker. Multiply that by a hundred million drinkers and multiply that by 20 times a year and what do you get? $40 billion dollars and 2 billion hours. Now how many lives does that save? It might be negative, might be zero, might be positive. Lets say it is positive. Lets say 1000 lives are saved every year, which I find highly doubtful. Remember that most traffic accidents are caused by sober drivers crashing into other sober drivers, and that drunk drivers are already breaking the law. You're willing to spend 40 million dollars and 2 million hours to save a single life. That's idiotic. If you want to spend money and time to save lives, you can save a lot more while spending a lot less in a myriad of ways.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In Texas it it is $10 I believe for a state issued ID, which is basically a drivers license, but it states that it is not a drivers license, only for ID purposes.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
I meant it should be mandatory to have parking which allows for a vehicle to be left there overnight.
I know more than you drink.
As someone who has been railroaded through the DUI "presumption of guilt" gulag, I had mentioned this to my attorney. However, I didn't have the money to pay a software engineer (code monkey) to grep the code looking for flaws. When I blew into the machine it printed out the results along with the last firmware update done in 1999! I had questioned the reliability of the results but the state just blew it off and said they were satisfied the results were forensically accurate.
As far as the DOL is concerned, you are GUILTY based on some arbitrary number the machine spits out. Your right to "due process" is bypassed at that point, a person who works for the DOL then becomes prosecutor and judge and inevitably suspends your license. When you have little or no money, you just flat out get fucked in the ass with a un-lubricated utility pole. DUI law today has NOTHING to do with curbing drunk driving, it has everything to with nothing but raking in revenue. duiblog
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Get the radar gun code and their hardware specs, too. :-)
Those things definitely have a large error margin.
Maybe we can get money back from unlawful tickets issued by cops.
Why don't we just bring back prohibition while we're at it?
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation would do exactly that, if it could. (And one day it might).
Scary thought.
That being said, driving drunk is highly irresponsible, so please don't.
I haven't seen anyone point this out yet, but there is a very interesting piece of information that matters here that he can get from the code. That is the assumptions about the blood-gas partition constant in use. What the machine is measuring is alcohol content in his breath (actually, content of a number of organics, but alcohol is usually the only relevant one). What it is reporting is the alcohol content of his blood. To get from one to the other requires a number of assumptions, most importantly about a number called the blood-gas partition coefficient -- which relates to how much of the alcohol evaporates out of blood in the lungs. The problem is that this number varies significantly from person to person, and even in one person over time. It is entirely possible he has a reasonable argument to make that the machine's assumptions about his partition constant are not correct. IIRC, the constant can ary over a factor of 2, occasionally more. So the question is, how conservative are the assumptions? How well do they match him?
It's a question of measurement accuracy, not just software bugs, and the software can inform greatly about how the measurement is taken.
There may be uncertified code, bug fixes (which may or may not have been installed by the time the defendant took the test), etc. You may be right that there could be little exonerating the defendant, but it's not right to withhold the information. Secret machines that can declare you guilty of a serious offense are not good things, because false positives are unacceptable. After all, a guilty man who gets the source code will still be found guilty. But an innocent man denied the opportunity to prove it may well be found guilty.
Besides, did you know that you can be found guilty of a DUI without ever actually driving? My instructor told me about a drunk, sitting in the passenger's seat of the car who was cited for DUI. His friend, the designated driver, had left the AC on while he went back for his other drunk friend. The guy in the passenger's seat, who never attempted or intended to drive was charged with DUI because he "could" have taken control of the car by scooting over a seat. He'd have been okay if his friend hadn't left the AC on for him.
So don't be too quick to assume that people are guilty without hearing the whole story.
To avoid these kind of discussions, there is something called "TÜV" http://www.tuev-sued.de/technical_installations and "Eichamt" http://www.eichamt.de/ in Germany.
.01 g!) - and you are not at the chemist's shop.
Have you ever seen someone from a good old german "Eichamt" turn up in your grocery store and check alle the balances? It's really fun, when he pulls out all those gauged weights and then tells you your balance is wrong (by
Are you sure you buy 500g of strawberries, if that's what it says on the sticker? - Really?
Yes, but then theres the little detail that
no driving == no working == no money == no food == your dead.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
XXX#######
When I say this, I know Im not a lawyer. I dont know how accurate my point of view is, this is just my interpretation of what Im seeing of this case.
Ignoring the reason for the case, drunk driving, Im looking at what they wish to use as evidence. In this case the testing equipment used, IE the breath tester. If a test, breath test, blood test, etc, is to be used in a court case, the equipment used for said teast could also be called into question and itself be on trial. How the equipment is handled or mishandled, manufactured, operates, used, etc, can all be called into question, in whole or part.
What if this turned out to be a physical component that was in question? Would the state have the same objections to the defence wanting to review the product in question?
For an example, say this was a car, not a breath tester, that was in question, and this car was known to have a faulty gas tank. Would the state say "No you can not get this information from the manufacturer, becase the state owns that car and it is all ours now." or would they let it through?
The way I see it, the software a device runs on is just as much a part of said device as a bolt or a battery. If they can give legal reasons for questioning a screw that holds something together, or a gear that turns a part, then they can question the software that runs it also. Copyright does not factor into this at all, which is what the state is trying to say.
This is not being done to illegaly reproduce the code, this is not being done to copy the work done into another product, this is being done to anaylise its effectiveness, see where bugs are, etc, for a case already in a court of law. If they were trying to copy the code, resell it illegaly, or use it as part of another product, I could see copyright applying. Not in this case.
Just my point of view in this case.
Belunar
video of it here, judge for yourself http://break.com/index/itchy-nuts-dui.html
(yes i'm joking, that's not the video, but still funny)
What does it have to do with anything? Even if he is wrong, I still think someone should have a right to see and contest (if they can) _all_ the evidence and logic used against him. That's the whole point of a trial by a jury of your peers.
Was he drunk? Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't change the fact that you can't sentence someone based on a complete black box, where noone knows what went inside and exactly what data it used and how.
The point is that if I (or the state) accuse you of a wrongdoing, you're entitled to see what I base that on. Witnesses, evidence, how I measured and calculated if any numbers are involved, etc. And if it's in front of a jury, those should see the complete picture too, and use their own brains. I shouldn't be able to just come and say "ok, this program on my laptop says he's wrong and I'm right, but you're not allowed to know what the program does and exactly what data it used."
Plus, frankly, as a programmer and a consultant, I find the notion outright laughable that _any_ program can be taken a priori to be 100% correct and more infaillible than the Pope. And that the humanly entered data is a priori 100% correct and beyond any questioning, before even knowing what it is.
Even software modules for more critical stuff like avionics, space exploration or banking are known to occasionally fail. And that's stuff that's reviewed and tested beyond what you'd ever dream of in a more mundane job. But shit happens.
E.g., take the infamous Ariane V control module on its first flight. Now that was one of the most expensive computer bugs ever. And the funny thing is, it's the same module that worked before in the Ariane IV rockets. Just someone didn't realize that, tested and reviewed as it was already, it was originally designed for a less powerful rocket. A type conversion to 16 bit was OK on the old rocket, but it caused an overflow on the new one. Good algorith, but used cluelessly on data outside the domain it was supposed to work on.
How can you be so sure that a breath analyzer gizmo can't possibly run into a problem like that?
Plus, proclaiming any gadget a priori 100% infaillible, is proclaiming that (A) the science behind it is 100% rock solid, (B) that the guys who made the mathematical model are 100% world-class experts, and (C) that the sensors were 100% accurate and infaillible, and (D) there's absolutely no room for user error in using it. Not only that is against common sense, it's against experience. Plenty of other devices (e.g., hand-held laser speed meters) were faulty in more than one of those categories.
At any rate, until you see what's going on in there, how would you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Almost everybody here knows the issues involved with closed source e-voting machines. How is this any different? It should be a fundamental right that you or your attorney should have access to any and all evidence used against you, which in this case includes schematics and source code of the device in question. Think about it - is it really any different to say that candidate X won the election because the magic black box said so, versus you being convicted of something because the magic black box said you are guilty - never mind how it works?
BTW, I develop embedded systems software for a living, I have run across strange and subtle bugs before, and I have no objection to having somebody reviewing my work for correctness.
My rights don't need management.
Source Code == Money!
Source Code == $$$!
No Money == No Source Code!!!
The source code of the intoxilyzer in the market costs 1 billion of $$$!!!
Has not money judge? No Source Code!!!
Judge, the reason is that Microsoft never did release its source code.
I am all for lowering the limit even below 0.08, not because I want more "gubermint" in by business, but because it's just safer for everyone.
Where I live in Canada, the legal limit has been lowered to 0.05 for quite a few years now. Also, you don't actually have to be driving a vehicle at the time of the breathalyzer examination, you only have to have had access to the vehicle and the keys and blow over 0.05. In this situation, you can actually be charged with "Care and Control". It's used if they really want to charge you with something.
Fucking "gobermint"
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some idea balls to remove from a manatee tank.
But what happens when that little machine becomes the newest novelty bar game?
"Hey Joe, betcha I can get wasted before you can..."
Then you end up with someone who would have probably been drinking and driving anyway, but they have now consumed much more than they may have planned, in a much shorted timeframe. That's just asking for problems, and it is actually viewed as a liability by a lot of bars.
No need for probably cause here...
Here in New South Wales, Australia, we have random breath testing (RBT), where the police set up a testing station with a group of HWP cars (usually on a busy arterial road) and pull over groups of cars at a time for licence and breath testing. There is no prior observation of the vehicles, the officers just walk out into the traffic and direct the cars to pull over. Drug testing in this manner is on the agenda too. At first I was opposed to this RBT idea, but now that I am older and wiser and have been hit by a couple of drunks, I think it is actually a good idea. Despite the cries of civil libertarians at the time, I haven't see any abuse of this system. They pull you over, sometimes check your licence, get you to blow in the machine and you drive off. A stop rarely takes more than a minute.
Now, I don't have exact data close to hand, but I do recall this was introduced with a huge media campaign back in the late 80's and whilst we do still get some drunk drivers, there was a significant reduction in the number of drunks on the road. The limits here are 0.05 for regular drivers, 0.02 if you drive a heavy vehicle and zero if you are a provisional (new) driver.
Don't tailgate - the end is near!
Thanks to my friend that did work there.
I'm going to assume you're trolling, but I can't help it on this one:
A five second google search found the following:
There were 16,885 alcohol-related fatalities in 2005 - 39 percent of the total traffic fatalities for the year.
I'm going to argue the other extreme (since you're only talking absolute change) So I'll borrow your pulled from thin air "$20 and 1 hour" per drinker statistic. I'll even borrow your "$40 billion dollars"[sic] figure as well.
That means each life is worth.... wait for it:
$2,368,966.54 Or.... 4,935.35 days
in your world of Drunk driving.
That doesn't seem like all that much money, given the fact that a person who doesn't get killed in a drunk driving accident will likely live more than 13 years taken to save their life. Hell they'd probably make more than the $2.36Mil over the course of their life...
It's worth a google to see what people are saying about these machines, in terms of their inability to distinguish alcohol from other substances, margin of error, how the results can be manipulated, proper calibration etc. It really is quite fascinating. Of course any more it doesn't seem to matter what the reading is, there have been examples of 0.00 readings where the driver was still charged and had to fight to clear his name.
Alcohol related is a world away from alcohol caused - most of those stats refer to accidents where somebody present had had a drink in the last 24 hours.
Lowering the limit is an example of going at the problem from the wrong side. If you lower the limit to .05 for example, suddenly you'll be prosecuting people who blow between .05 and .08, you'll be nabbing no more drivers at .08 and up (in fact maybe fewer due to the time spend bringing mr .06 down to the station). How does this get any more of the real dangerous drivers behind bars? I think during relevant hours, cops on the beat should be looking for drunks, period, sure they can pull over someone going 100, but sitting around and pulling over someone doing 80 in a 65 is really going after the low-hanging fruit. You're only going to see someone weaving in and out of lanes if your out looking for it. You might even stop some tired/destracted drivers while you're at it (a traffic stop will wake you right up)
All those people who got tickets for doing 80 arent going to kill anyone, the one guy who crosses that centerline will, that's the side of the problem that should be worked on, not the threshold number (especially when devices aren't perfect)
Suppose that a breathalyser was subjected to lots and lots of testing, and was shown that 99.999% of the time, it got a correct answer within +/-20% of the person's actual blood alcohol level.
Then do we really need to know whether it's filled with good source code, bad source code, or yarn? I mean, we accept this kind of opacity for lots of kinds of machine learning systems that can be trained to be very good predictors for their data sets.
The only real argument against what I'm saying is some other poster's point about acetone registering as alcohol. That kind of thing might be hard to notice unless you can review the design and assumptions built into such a device.
The 'Interview" is nothing but a delaying tactic to allow more alcohol to enter the blood.
That will give higher test results. Perhaps you were shitfaced, but still able to drive
the mile to your house at the time you got into your car, but after a 30 minute 'interview'
you would not be able to negotiate the trip.
Say the alphabet backwards is a ruse used to detect drunkeness, to that I say "You first officer"
or "which alphabet?".
90 percent og the officers themselves cannot say the alphabet backwards, even with a printed card.
According to the article,
he's got this guy. Looks expensive.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
How can you verify that the source code supplied is exactly the same code that was used to create the actual device that was used to test the defendant ?
If the manufacturer is unable to produce a log of the files that were used to manufacture the product in question, then they have no case any longer.
I also suspect that if the electronics used in this device has not been carefully designed to deal with component tolerances there is another cause for dispute. You would need to track the manufacturing of the circuitry and device calibration logs.
Unless the manufacturer has done a very careful monitoring and logging of the manufacturing process, I doubt that I can stand up in a court of law and say there is no reasonable doubt.
"Hey Joe, betcha I can get wasted before you can..."
Then you end up with someone who would have probably been drinking and driving anyway, but they have now consumed much more than they may have planned, in a much shorted timeframe. That's just asking for problems, and it is actually viewed as a liability by a lot of bars.
Then the bartenders, bouncers, and owners should do their job and refuse service to those individuals? Remember, being able to go to the bars is a privilege, not a right. All bars have the right to refuse service.
I must have missed the part that said, he was found GUILTY. Then again, convicting before a trial would take care of all those overused and unnecessary technicalities like, evidence, right to a defense, and presumption of innocence.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
What do you think this is, America?
WTF does a driver 3 times over the legal limit have to do with lowering the limit? How is that going to help? You're stupid.
In California at least, establishments with liquor licenses are required to refuse service to anyone who is drunk or appears drunk. I think that having a device which provides a definitive "they're drunk" indication would tend to reduce the amount of liquor sold in these establishments. The status quo lets them say "they don't seem/look/act drunk" and keep selling.
What gripes me is that if this guys does get acquitted, all the court costs will get passed onto the taxpayers (and they'll also get another DUI offender back on the road).
What locals, at least in North Italy, will tell you that most of that accident rate is due to drivers (mostly truck drivers) not slowing down in the fog... Large wrecks due to fog seem to be common going north on the autostrada toward Turin... Not having seen any wrecks on the mountain roads mentioned actually would be reasonable...
What? That's ridiculus, I have my car keys in my pocket [i]all the time[/i], even when I'm drinking. I just don't use them if I'm drunk. (although I usually leave my car at home if I'm going somewhere where I know I'll get drunk, but that's beside the point).
meh
That's going to happen anyway if you blow over the ludicrously low number of 0.08, so what's your point.
When in doubt, do as the cops do. Spend a few minutes googling, and you'll find that cops ALWAYS refuse the test.
guilty until proven innocent my friend... remember.... WE MUST remember. oh wait... its the other way around.
[citation needed]
I don't drink. I have a driver's license but don't drive regularly. But I have a part-time job. Did you forget bicycles and buses where appropriate?
Personal breathalyzers. I have the AL6000, which is +/- 0.010%, compared to law enforcement models which are +/- 0.008%.
.02, and I can usually get from .05 to .000.
$100 or so is a lot cheaper than a DUI. You can use it for parties if you want to convince someone not to drive (or conversely, so they can demonstrate that it really is "all good"). Also, you can practice getting the lowest BAC possible. Hyperventilating works well. Breathe quick shallow breaths with most of the air already expelled from your lungs, for about 30 seconds until your lungs feel "dry", then take a very large breath and blow. I've never had it knock off less than
And don't forget to wait 15 minutes before testing. Blow immediately after just 1 sip with residual alcohol in your mouth, and you'll easily surpass the legal limit.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Even though the source code has been released to the defense he still has to be very careful with copyright. If he gets some experts to look at it without getting appropriate nondisclosure agreements signed /first/ he'll get screwed for copyright violation.
I'm not the one that's stupid if you think splitting a bottle of wine between two wouldn't place you well over the limit.
I'm just an ignorant non-lawyer type, but if you have a contract that says that you own the code and they won't turn it over, can't you simply sue them and make them do it? They're the government, and it's hard to believe they're just that helpless.
I can't believe I am seeing "begging the question" used correctly.
Even Isaac Newton got it wrong.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
That link was not him.
But I know I read something by him when talking about mass being measure of inertia, and it begs the question of what causes inertia. I couldn't find it in book search, and then jumped the gun on being link eager with another quote, in a book that came up with author as Isaac Newton.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
SCO's influence has spread to regular Joe's. I'm sure a few bugs could be found in the code, which just may be enough to introduce FUD to the jury, regardless of whether they are significant. One could argue that it would be hard to know whether or not a given bug was triggered in a particular road run without a CPU trace. Veeeery clever.
Table-ized A.I.
I would put this on about the same level as challanging the arresting officer's ability to discern impaired behavior because he has not received sufficient training in physiology and other disciplines to be able to accurately determine the level of impairment.
Couple that with the inability to determine precisely the amount of alcohol consumed by the defendant. Without knowing to the mililiter the amount consumed it would be very easy to dispute the findings of blood alcohol level - such levels could be normal for the individual and the state would be incapable of proving otherwise.
What happens when you go down this road is very simple. If you have a stupid and greedy attorney, he will take your case and present your defense all the while spending your money like it is water. A slightly smarter and less greedy attorney will tell you up front that all of these points are irrelevent to the case.
I suspect this guy is grabbing at straws and this isn't the first offense.
"Do you feel happy that you may have helped this murdering swine smile and walk away?"
Stop the emotional garbage and face the facts. MADD is completely out of control; it's time for them to be disbanded. The laws in place already take care of the bulk of drunk drivers.
And anyway, life is full of risks. Deal with it.
You do realize by your argument you should also ban tired people, stupid people, old people and pretty much majority of the driving population of the US. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's unrealistic. Not to mention the fact that breathalyser does NOT provide accurate measurement of blood alcohol level. So banning everyone whose breath gives out 0.09 is akin to banning all red car drivers - some of them may be bad drivers! Either completely disallow any alcohol, or don't use inaccurate tools to differentiate between innocent and guilty.
Thank you, actually very insightful, and I knew what you meant. Out here we have a cab service that brings 2 drivers... the second driver drives your vehicle home for you. It doesn't cost that much more than the regular cab ride so it's a great deal.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Speed doesn't kill.
No, it's the sudden deceleration that kills.
Actually, speed can be relevant to the cause of the accident. Different cars, with different tires, can safely handle different speeds under different conditions. At some point, the speed is higher than the car is capable of handling.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
BAC can and does continue to rise for a period of time after you STOP drinking. IIRC, it is at least 20 minutes. Also, as a body may metabolize one drink/hr, and that one drink may represent 0.02 BAC, then fifteen minutes only drops you to 0.085. Even that assumes BAC curve is sloping down at that point. You could test at 0.10 after waiting 15 minutes. If the law were 0.08, and I blew a 0.09, I would wait at least two hours.*
*I rarely ever drink and never when I will be driving so this mainly hypothetical.
I now provide you with this conclusive evidence to the contrary : http://www.lifeinitaly.com/flash/
That said, if you have a machine that can put somebody in jail, the public has a right to know how it functions. You might extend that idea to include voting machines.
For the record, many places also deny passports as a valid ID, only accepting state issued ID's from THAT STATE...especially in the shit-hole state of arizona...idiots in fear of the harsh penalties of accepting a fake ID, and having NO IDEA what real one looks like.
"Hey Joe, betcha I can get wasted before you can..."
Twenty years ago, on my 30th birthday, a friend took me out. They had a breath machine at the bar. I blew .34; my friend was "only" .26, so he drove home. (It
was about 2 miles in a small town; yes, it was irresponsible..)
To me, the funny thing is I signed up that night for the bar's golf tournament
which was held the next day (at 7:00 am!), and I shot a 76 to win the damn thing.
Who'da thunk being hungover was good for your golf game?!
What was once true, is no longer so
I agree - was his driving impaired? We need a Gage R&R test to see if BAC has impact on his ability to drive.
Further ridiculous note: if your car keys can be found within 30 feet of the vehicle, you can still be charged with "Care and control while impaired", even though the keys are not in the car.
What was once true, is no longer so
If the guy was arrested in his home for DUI, why does he even need the source code? ..."yes officer, I've been drinking. I was so upset about rear ending that car I went right to the bottle of vodka in my fridge and started chugging it when I got home." It provides reasonable doubt and the state cannot prove the alcohol was consumed prior to the accident.
It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
I'm fairly sure that wearing a helmet would reduce your field of vision, so that would make things less safe for others.
.08 is above or below this floor number, but I suspect it is above.
We make motorcyclists wear helmets because the average cost of fixing them up after an accident without a helmet greatly exceeds the average cost of the damage they do when they have accidents because of something they didn't see.
For alcohol, there's going to be a bal level below which floor effects mean that any decrease in driving ability is not measurable. We should simply require your bal to be below the level for which this is true for the average person (since we cannot afford to measure this on a person by person basis). I have no idea if
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
IANAL, but I believe the problem with this issue is that in the US of A, I do not think they can put you in jail for not giving up blood.
I'm not sure which law this would fall under, but I believe at the VERY least it would be under the 5th amendment of not giving evidence against yourself. Maybe there's an exception. If anyone knows i'd love to be corrected, as with all the privacy laws, and antilaws, that we have, it's hard telling what's illegal nowadays, and if a cop says do something, most people assume it's a crime not to, such as car searches.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
So who here thinks that the US 0.08 limit is even accurate for "drunk driving"
According to the weight charts, if I drink 4 beers in an hour, I'm over the limit. Sorry, but 4 beers doesn't make me drunk or even really buzzed. If they decide I'm drunk, it should be because I can't walk a straight line or because I can't stand on one leg for more than 10 seconds or so, not because some percentage of the population that weighs 150 can't drive after less than a 6 pack!
Make the device cheap, and start holding the bartenders responsible for accidents caused by the people they served. You'll fix the problem instantly. No one will serve anyone over the limit, and they'll have video proof that they didn't.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
How the hell does this tripe get modded up? "The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!" Well...There are these things called responsibility and foresight. You can go to the bar with friends and have a designated driver. Or you and your friends can drink at your place and everyone can crash there. Or you could actually pay the $30-50 for a cab ride. Or, you know, you could just NOT DRINK THAT NIGHT. Maybe this concept is really difficult to understand but drunk driving kills people. You don't have a right risk other peoples lives just so you can have a good time drinking. And if a cab ride is $30-$50, well, then thats just part of the cost of going out drinking. It certainly not fair to go risking other peoples lives just so you can save $50. "The people who are killing or injuring or severely maiming others are not people who had two beers and hopped in a car to go home. It's being done by the people that HAVE a PROBLEM and are downing a case of beer and covering one eye to make it to the next bar." Actually, both groups are killing and maiming people. Maybe the people that are extremely drunk are doing it a higher rate than those who've "only had a couple beers" but the people who've "only had a couple" are killing people at a significantly higher rate than people who haven't had anything to drink. This mindset that if you're not stumbling drunk then you're fine to drive kills so many people. Lowering the legal BAC level from .10 .08 has had a measurable effect on lowering drunk driving injuries, as had further lowering of the limit from .08 to point .05. Drinking, even a little, lowers your reaction times. When you're driving a freak'n car thats dangerous and it gets people killed. You don't have the right to risk other peoples lives.
Greg
>and this does differ in many states, but, if I got pulled over, and knew I'd blow more than the ridiculously low 0.08, I'd do what a lawyer told me. Not say a word, not take any field tests, just hold my hands out for the cuffs and refuse to take any tests.
In California, you're cool with that strategy since they will process you very fast and efficienctly into jail, but look for them to take your license for an extra year and give you a strike (or life in prison if it's your third strike).
But in Nevada they would verbally asault you and then physically restrain you while they forcibly extact your blood, by Law, but you could try bleeding out your nose alot and tell them they need to "get gloves quick 'cuz you don't want anyone else to die", or giving them a great deal of cash (not promises of cash) and compliment them on the size of their genitals relative to California cops, or just downshift and floor it if you can take a Chevy Comaro being driven by an idiot (their fastest car) and are far from their radio tower and traffic jams (ie, out in the boonies). You know last year they actually shot a guy to death for having his stereo up too loud in traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and their kangaroo court ruled it justifiable homicide because they said the black California evil-doer resisted being pulled out of his running car by the bicycle cop.
Yup. My brother spent 2 days in jail (with no record of it or the infraction--that's why he did it) for having ONE PINT which he drank over the course of 30 minutes and then drove home. He was pulled over for speeding, was breathalyzed, blew a .07, and was taken in for DWAI (DUI Jr.). When he went to his punitive alcohol class, he found that that was absolutely expected given his weight. If he'd waited like 15 minutes, he would have been fine.
But come ON. Who is impaired after ONE BEER? That's now my personal limit if I'm driving anywhere, though, and I wait an hour. Not because I'm too drunk to drive, but because the US is a police state.
I live in Japan now, where the limit is... anything over 0. This seems really draconian, until you see that there really is no reason to even worry about driving if you're going to be drinking. There are buses, there are trains, there are cabs, and there is even this really great service where if a night out for dinner "accidentally" becomes a night out drinking, 2 guys in a little tiny car come to where you've parked and one gets out and drives you home in your car while the other guy follows. It costs about the same as a cab ride (cabs here are expensive), but you AND your car get home safely! I have never really felt inconvenienced by the law here, even though it is much stricter than it is in the US, where I OFTEN feel inconvenienced, if not terrified.
The thing is; people that get into accidents because they're drunk are DRUNK. There's almost never an accident because someone had two beers, and might be over the legal limit, but still NOT DRUNK. Not more then normal accidents, anyways.
Setting the legal limit so that you can't breath in the fumes from Hair Spray without being over the legal limit does nothing to prevent drunk driving - all it does is get more people to pay fines and promote the careers of politicians.
The things that always comes to mind about these types of things are: Some people are bad drivers anyways, some people are slow to respond without any alcohol, and the vast majority of car accidents don't have alcohol involved.
It's not the same thing with Cell Phones - you can put down the phone in a crisis; you can't stop being drunk. Unfortunately, people abuse cell phones so much on the road that even though I hate more regulations and laws, I'm not against a law banning cell phones on the road completely. I wouldn't actively support such a law, but if it passed, I wouldn't be upset.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Sure you can, just as long as the car is sitting perfectly still in the parking lot.
For my weight I can legally drink around 7 beers/drinks before I hit the .08 limit.
According to this chart you weigh, oh, about 600 pounds. Or you drink very slowly and don't seem to do much else besides hang around in bars and post on slashdot. Either way, I'd suggest professional help.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article says that if a DUI is brought up in court using Breathalyzer evidence, the source code must be disclosed. When elections are brought up in court, the source code for any electronic balloting software can remain closed. What am I missing?
Or maybe was drunk enough not to notice the 17 car pile up are he swerved on by :)
...Lowering the legal limit from .1 to .08 and further down to .06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM. The difference in human beings with a BAC of .06 and .08 is impossible to distinguish and measure. All it does is increase government revenue and keep good people down.
This country needs to come to grips with is that Americans DRINK. Drinking is a part of our society and is not going away. The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!
I have to fully agree with you there. Its a Think of the Children!!!1!1! response to terrible accidents caused by people that are almost always over the pre-existing limits. How many horrendous fatality accidents do you hear about on the evening new that say the driver had a BAC that was within legal limits? I cant remember any. You always hear about the ones where the BAC was well over the limit, sometimes at near fatal levels. Its those people that Should be taken away.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at .09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes. But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me. I went to a bar in Windsor, Ontario and was blown away by the greatest invention. They had a freakin 25 cent breathalyzer that told you exactly how drunk you were! That's BRILLIANT!
Actually, there are a few out there, but agreed, they generally are not very accurate. One in particular I got to play with at a party stopped working, and was giving obviously incorrect readings. It did succeed in turning itself into a game of "how high can I blow", and we managed to get it to register 2x the fatal limit, by taking a shot of golden grain and immediately blowing into the device. Furthermore, if you live in a city with public transportation, you are fine. But what happens if you live in an urban area, where there is no reliable or cost effective transportation. I invite anyone to come to the Detroit Metro area and try and find a cab ride home. You are going to pay 30 - 50 dollars. Forget about the bus. Forget about the train. Yes! I live in Atlanta, where transit is non-existant. If you dont have buddies to drive you home, you gotta take a cab, which will cost big$$ thanks to this thing called sprawl. Even in the cities that have good transit systems, alot of them shutdown at midnight, leaving people there also looking for a cab ride home. At least there are some charatable organizations that will drive you and your car home for you, if you remember to keep their number handy, and can tolerate the sometimes religous or "drinking is evil" preaching that some also offer as part of the deal.Sure, if you live in downtown New York, this argument doesn't hold water. But how many drunk driving accidents do you have in New York? I wonder how much of that is due to the subway system? Hmm....
So what are doing with all the extra cash we get from persecuting people who had one beer too many? Certainly not building up our infrastructure to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
But transit brings the poor and homeless people to our uppermiddleclass neighborhoods to steal our bigscreen tvs!!! We need more roads, BIGGER roads to funnel more drunk drivers through more police checkpoints so we can raise more funds for more roads and BIGGER roads so we can...!!!! </sarcasticrant>
T
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
You say that as if drinking until you've hit the legal limit has a point.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I keep a spare set of keys in one of those magnetic things in my wheel well just in case I accidentally lock my keys in my car. Remind me not to go drinking in Canada. (Not that I do much drinking, and never if I'm going to be behind a wheel. My friend's dad got killed by a drunk driver, and that really puts a hell of a damper on things.)
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
I can't remember who it was--perhaps George Carlin--who made the following analogy:
Imagine if speed limits were strictly enforced by police, but cars didn't have speedometers. You only know you are speeding when the police pull you over with their fancy radar guns.
That's how drunk driving laws work.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
wahhhhhh i got hit by a drunk driver
This could be really huge, the source should be public. I hope he knows what to do with it.
It would only make it better.
Interesting. So how about finger prints and DNA samples? In the US is one ever required to allow samples to be taken if they are going to incriminate one's self? In my country, when arrested by the police, fingerprints are taken. No choice given. These can be used to pin you to the crime if there's a match. They can also be put through a database of historic crimes see find a match. If you were initially falsely arrested on a charge (i.e innocent), but guilty of a historical charge where they obtained fingerprint samples and stored them - you are pretty much screwed I guess when there's a match.
The truth is actually one step further: Courts have ruled that it is illegal to administer a test randomly.
Presumably, this is because there's no way to detect if something is actually random. "Why yes your honor, this was a random test. It's not my fault that the randomness happened to fall on all black people..."
Even at the "random police checkpoints," when they are waving people aside it is not random. It is done at a fixed interval. I don't believe there's anything stopping them from making that interval "every car," but that's not random either.
I think so ... you mentioned some people are slow to respond sober. The problem with cell phones -- even hands-free devices with voice dialing -- is that the conversation is a proven distraction which affects reaction time. So by the time your brain recognizes the crisis, it may be too late.
Me, I'm all in favor of stringent reaction-time testing for drivers. I'm also in favor of some kind of test to determine a potential driver's ability to look ahead to avoid accidents. I'm tired of dealing with morons who swoop across three lanes to fill an opening, then jam on their brakes to avoid rear-ending someone.
My mom was a juror for a drunk driving case. The defendant (who had only came into town that day) met someone who invited him to a party. He went, and after he drank some alcohol, the others there assaulted him. He went outside, but they followed him.
Being in immediate physical danger, and there not being anyone sober around who wasn't threatening him, he had no choice but to drive.
Was he foolish? Yes. Criminally so? No. He could not have anticipated the urgent need to drive by himself, and the risk of causing death or injury by driving wasn't nearly as high as the risk would have been if he had stayed and let them pummel him.
BTW, I've never drunk alcohol and never will, so don't write me off as someone carelessly excusing his own foolish hobbies.
This is not a signature.
He probably wrote it in Latin.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
... In Whitespace.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
It's intellectual, and therefore NOT property. :)
The is an interview process that should always takes place before a breathalyzer test. These interviews are to judge a persons current cognitive state.
There, fixed that for you.
There are better ways to enjoy yourselves than by imbibing a dangerous psychoactive chemical.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Lowering the legal limit from .1 to .08 and further down to .06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM.
By this logic, no law solves any problem.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at .09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes.
If your BAC is at .09, 15 minutes is going to make fuck all difference. As will all the coffee and water you try to drink in that 15 minutes.
Now, wait an hour or two for your body to have metabolised a meaningful amount of alcohol (down to the 0.05 - 0.07 range), and you're getting a bit closer to being responsible.
But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me.
You exercise common sense. If you've averaged much more than a drink an hour, you've had too much to be driving.
Or the highest, as the case may be.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I would like to believe your statistics so some of these self-victimizing DUIers would shut up, but without references it's all rhetoric, even if it gets modded up.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
In a court of law this is true. However slashdot isn't a court of law and as such the level of burden is significantly lower.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Defendant: In order to defend myself from the prosecutions alleged evidence, I need the source code to the breathalizer. If I can't defend myself from it, you would have to dismiss that evidence.
Judge: OK. Here's the source code.
Defendant: Crap!
* I wasn't actually there. But I imagine it went something like that.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Any trace of alcohol (I.e. let's say anything above trace levels) should result in an instant, lifetime, ban from driving.
Drink drivers, and drink driving apologists for yourself, all think you're fucking Superman and then you kill someone. Fuck you.
In the UK, things are a little different. We already know that a handheld breathalyser isn't foolproof - what it provides is enough evidence to arrest someone and take them down to the police station.
Once there, a number of other, more accurate testing systems are available - be it urine, blood or a more sophisticated breath test. It's the evidence taken at the police station which gets you convicted - and to ensure that you can't get clever with "I refuse to let you take a urine sample", we've made it illegal to refuse, with penalties identical to if you had given a sample and it showed you to be over the limit. I don't know if anyone's ever demanded the source code, but even if they did get it they'd then have to prove that there was a problem with both the breathalyser and the more sophisticated test at the police station.
I'm surprised that the US - the "land of the free" - will take someone to court over a simple handheld breathalyser.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
> The people who are killing or injuring or severely maiming others are not people who had two beers and hopped in a car to go home. It's being done by the people that HAVE a PROBLEM and are downing a case of beer and covering one eye to make it to the next bar.
.08, the ones downing a case are.
And the people who had two beers are probably not the ones over
> This country needs to come to grips with is that Americans DRINK. Drinking is a part of our society and is not going away.
Drunk-driving laws != prohibition.
> The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are
How about that tool you tout a little later in your post:
> I went to a bar in Windsor, Ontario and was blown away by the greatest invention. They had a freakin 25 cent breathalyzer that told you exactly how drunk you were!
> and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!
And that's the real problem- people and cars need to get home. How about, I dunno, having a designated driver if you know you're going to drink?
> So what are doing with all the extra cash we get from persecuting people who had one beer too many? Certainly not building up our infrastructure to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Serious question- what infrastructure to build? Government (ie public) funded shuttle services, but I can't imagine that gaining nationwide traction.
I am not a sig.
We encountered this on campus when we tried to buy campus wide firewalls. Finding a firewall that on paper did what we needed was easy. After all there were firewalls rated to a GIGABIT of traffic, when at the time we only had like 200mbps of total bandwidth to the Internet. Ok no problem right? Wrong. We'd put them in the network (or rather a mirror of the network they got to play with) and they'd fall flat on their face. We are talking lagging out at best, and just crashing at worst. But how could that be? They'd been tested in labs and shown to work! Well, the kind of traffic you generate on a network simulator isn't nearly as tough as the traffic of a bunch of undergraduates screwing around on the Internet. So while these worked fine for many companies, they couldn't take a situation like ours (Cisco blade firewalls for their 6500s worked in the end, if you are wondering).
Testing it great and all but the real proof is when the shit is actually in the field. Doesn't always work like you planned.
For more on this phenomena, see Mythbusters and the number of times they've had something that should work perfectly that didn't.
Do we ban all other impairments, and to what point? For example driving while tired is a severe problem that has a lot of the same effects as driving drunk: Your reaction time is slower, you don't pay attention as well, you have trouble focusing, etc. So do we make it illegal to drive while tired? If so do we take the same hardline attitude and say "There's no compelling reason why anyone should have to drive with any fatigue, if you haven't gotten a minimum of 8 hours of sleep not less than 10 hours before hitting the road, you've got no business driving."
I mean hell, all you have to do is play twitch video games to know the significance of sleep on accuracy and reaction time. Back when I played Team Fortress and then Action Quake 2 competitively online I'd actually make sure to nap before important matches, be well fed, etc. Reason is I showed a measurable increase in performance. When I was really exhausted I didn't do so well.
Significant isn't a weasel word, it's an important term. Your driving WILL be impaired by a number of different things at any given time. It is rare that you are in peek condition to drive. So the question becomes what amount of impairment is acceptable? You can't say "none" or you essentially ban almost all driving all of the time. You have to be reasonable about what amount of what kinds of impairment really make it more dangerous to drive.
1) It's more expensive (and slower). With a blood test they have to send the sample to a qualified lab (could be their own) and have a technician do the work on it. With a breathalyzer you just blow in it, it gives results. Not hard to see which is cheaper.
2) You'd have problems making it mandatory. A blood test is highly invasive, and in fact is against some religions. Thus generally to get a blood test the state requires either the consent of the person giving it, or a court order. The whole "implied consent" probably wouldn't cut it for a blood test. You'd get people who would sue for a violation of civil rights of various kinds and probably win.
What if the device had a hardware bug or malfunction ?
What sort of implication does this have on other automated system in the legal system?
My neck of the woods often have cameras that snap shots of people who run red lights, there's an automated toll highway, etc.
This could get interesting.
To all those good ole boys posting about how they are completely OK to drive after a few beers and what's all the fuss... Would you be happy to have your surgeon operate on you after necking a few? "I'm fine!!! Really! (hic) Where that bonesaw?"
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
What the hell does Duke Nukem Forever have to do with it?!?
Remove all the bugs.
It's not like there's a general-purpose script here: it has to do only a few things.
A well specified, simple task is PROVABLY bug free. How many bugs are in the "hello world" program? This is the basis of the UNIX philosophy. Do one thing and do it well.
It is certainly no flight-control system, and they are provably bug free in most of their operations.
Out here we have a cab service that brings 2 drivers... the second driver drives your vehicle home for you. It doesn't cost that much more than the regular cab ride so it's a great deal.
That's brilliant. I wish all cab companies had that service. Although, seeing the condition of most cabs, I'm not entirely sure I would entrust a cabbie to drive my car...
People can drive with any dose of coughsyrup in their system. We're making arbitrary differentiations between different intoxicants when we make DUI laws so punative.
The law is broken and biased so I lobby against them. It's an uphill climb, but I'm game.
I hope that you, for cowardly suggesting that we give up even more rights in the name of 'safety', get hit by a drunk driver.
Ta-ta asshole!
Blar.
shared amongst two people = 3 units. Legal limit = 4 units
(3>>4) = FALSE.
You are an idiot.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 17 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
I'm fairly sure there are helmets that don't reduce your field of vision, or don't reduce it in significant way. We don't make motorcyclist wear helmets at all. But this varies depending on your location.
Hope you don't want to drive to church and take communion.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Its a question of degree. At one extreme one could make the argument that
.15 alcohol level - not happy with that.. fine, make
since driving at all is dangerous driving should be banned altogether except
for licensed professionals like bus/ambulance drivers. Assuming one doesnt agree
with that you have to accept that some level of risk is accepable.
Someone driving a regular car who crashes into an SUV is far
more likely to get killed than when colliding with another car.
Maybe we should ban SUVs too. That would be unamerican, but
being puritanical, moralistic and unrealistic about about alcohol
is part of a proud tradition. Claiming any risk is unacceptable
is nonsense. We need a fair cost-benefit analysis and a myriad
of ways to combat the problem, maybe including subsidised shuttle services,
laws encouraging bars to provide overnight parking etc.
[Personally, I think people should be allowed to take their driving
test under various levels of inebriation. That way I could get qualified to
drive with a
driving tests harder until I can't and keep a million other morons
off the road at the same time].
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
"I keep a spare set of keys in one of those magnetic things in my wheel well just in case I accidentally lock my keys in my car. Remind me not to go drinking in Canada."
Most of the US is the same way....
Sorry to kill the buzz.
What exactly does this guy need from the source code? I'm having a hard time believing that this kind of thing can help him get out of this charge.
The job of the court, the judicial system, and society in general is order.
Not Justice, not truth, not fact.
Consistently defining "Justice" is about as feasible as defining "Fair"--both depends on who you ask. So, any expectation that a court might manufacture some of it is delusion.
Justice is whatever the guys with the most guns say it is.
If they say the intoxilizer is infallible, it is.
We have order, and some of us call it justice if that helps us sleep.
We don't care about the guy in jail, though; we've defined what happened to him as just.
Defendant got busted for drunk driving; throw him in jail, end of story.
His search for "justice" is likely motivated by the fact he doesn't want to go to jail.
Nothing to do with "justice" per se. Where was he when the rest of the drunks were getting busted?
So he gets the source code? Great. Now he screws with the order in the system.
Distraction. Loss of productivity. Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensue.
The rest of us go to work satisfied we are safe from drunks and dictators.
Jobs get done, and society functions.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
This whole thing begs the question. What if the Intoxilyzer is created to the same quality as the Diebold voting machines? As far as I'm concerned there's no reason that those machines shouldn't be open to the public. If people can find a way to cheat the system, then the problem isn't the cheaters. You just fix the system. I want to know for certain that my crime was legit if I was brought in and a black box read out the answer guilty.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
When I turned 18, Minnesota had just made 18 the legal drinking age. When my bud and me went a bar-hopping, we always chose one designated driver. No booze for you! That way, the rest of us could get plastered in safety. If a bunch of high school seniors can figure that out in 1974 (I'm OLD), I see no reason to have sympathy for idiots who can't today.
Urban planning which forces higher population density so mass transit makes sense? Please. While we're at it, why not force everyone to wear see-through plastic clothes to prevent concealed weapons? Because many consider the cure worse than the disease. So you like high density life. Fine. Enjoy! I don't.
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
Given the same other circumstances (eg. driver education and attitude), the scientific literature is pretty clear that having a BAC of 0.05 approximately doubles your chance of having a fatal crash, and beyond that the probability of crashing increases quickly.
There are also plenty of research papers showing that for every 5km/h (~3mi/h) faster you travel (above some relatively low lower bound - less than the speed limit on pretty much all roads) your risk of crashing also doubles.
No one who starts a reply with "LOL," especially an Anonymous Coward, should be modded insightful. Ever.
In fact, it just depends where you get your propoganda.
http://www.insure.com/articles/carinsurance/blood
There, a 150lb man has a BAC of
There's a chart at wikipedia, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_conten
Hmm...that one agrees with insure.com. Maybe I really can have four drinks within an hour and then drive legally.
Anyway, people pushing the agenda of lowering the limit so often provide examples and statistics that are made up mainly of drivers who were way over the existing limit. Better enforcement is what's necessary, and that doesn't mean roadblocks and checkpoints; it means responding quickly to complaints (I've called in drivers who appear to be DUI a few times), going after obvious DUIs instead of the guy who was driving well but doing 5mph over the speed limit, and (as distasteful as this is) heavier enforcement around bar areas.
I also like the idea, further up the thread, of making breathalyzers (personal or in the bar) available to everyone who's not sure if they're allowed to drive or not; it wouldn't be hard to add social engineering of peer pressure to get people to test and then others to disallow them from driving...and call the cops if they drive anyway.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
If a cop looks you in the eyes and sees they are a little bloodshot and you look a little tired, says "You are drunk!" and slaps you in handcuffs, that's improper procedure. If the cop goes thru the motions, gets you out of the car, makes you stand on one foot, makes you walk a straight line, touch your nose, and all that crap, and you fail the test, he's followed a method of testing your impairment that's well documented and defended in court and is well within the law to not let you drive anywhere. I compare the reviewing code in this case the same as reviewing the procedure the officer performed to determine if the driver was impaired.
He has the right to look at it and try to prove if it's returning false positives. The state should be 100% willing to allow them to look at the code, and the fact that it isn't means it's trying to save money by not going down that road. The state has to give up information about radar detectors and their maintenance as well as allow users to inspect the equipment, if you are accused of speeding.
I do not drive drunk, so I welcome this challenge, so that if I ever get pulled over and have to use this machine, I don't get a false positive. Don't trust a machine just because the government says so.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"No, you're guilty when a jury determines that you were impaired."
No, you're guilty if you did it. The jury only decides if the state has enough evidence to demonstrate such beyond a reasonable doubt.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Eh?
My username is short for The Holy Cow. I came up with it, and the abbreviation "THC", when I was a child before I even knew what "THC" is.
Granted, I thought it was a funny coincidence when I found out, and then I thought it was eerily appropriate when I was 17 and going on high rides, but ten years later I don't do that anymore...and in about 30,000 miles of that, I never did have an accident.
My signature on the local BBS was:
___ _
-- \ \-\ \_--
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
the same thing with cell phones.
YES. The death penalty for DUICP!
Well maybe at least a "bitch slap".
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
Which begs the question, what was he doing in South America? Attending a conference?
which is totally what she said
your family coughs up cash
You homeless idiot, you forget that many people are perfectly capable of hiring their own good legal representation.
"that it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".
t ion/
First expression in the practice of English Law dates to 1470, but it tends to go by the name "Blackstone's Formulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formula
We make motorcyclists wear helmets because as a society we like to make others do as we believe they should.
There is a law that says you MUST be insured to drive a motor vehicle, thus no public cost in an accident.
The whole campaign to force people to wear helmets was based on a lie.
More laws simply employ more bureaucrats to take money in the name of promoting the welfare of we the sheeple.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
It's not the role of government to "provide" any such thing. You are saying that the government ought to provide us with a consequence-free environment for the sole purpose of driving a car to a place where we intend to become intoxicated, with no alternate plan of getting home that doesn't involve abandoning our car for the night?
How, exactly, would government "provide" us our "right" to enjoy consequence-free irresponsibility when we don't plan ahead before we go out? I assume you have some combination of legislation, enforced weird zoning, taxation, etc in mind. So what is it?
You hit the nail on the head with your last comment: "A little planning can go a long way." What's so hard about that? Why do you consider "this country's attitude" that we expect people to behave responsibly so unreasonable that you're willing to pass more laws, levy more taxes, and overall create a burden on the citizenry in order to permit irresponsible behavior? I don't get it.
Most likely all he's managed to do is annoy a judge who probably already hates him because he was pulled over drunk. The chances that this guy is going to find anything are next to nil. He probably lacks the equipment and background needed to thorough test things. The device is certified to be used, and has been calibrated to meet specifications set by the state. I'm sure those specifications and the use of the device have already been defended in many other cases.
What he's managed to do is take what should be a fairly simple DUI case for a judge and made it into a headache for no reason other than this guy who was caught driving drunk thinks he is smarter than the system. Breathalizers have been questioned and successfully defended so many times in the past that their use is pretty rock solid.
That's just untrue. Monetary costs for hospitalization regularly exceed the maximum insurance coverage most people carry. When the hospital takes those losses, they raise bills for the rest of us.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I don't think rolling the levels back to what they were in the 70's is even what needs to be done. I think the real issue is the breathalizer test itself. If I have 5 or 6 beers, I'm not drunk and can operate machinery without any noticable impairement. If my female friend who is much smaller than me has 2 beers she can barely walk, yet, we both blow about the same on a breathalizer. I think we either need to go back to just common-sense sobriety tests or possibly move to a more effective/accurate way of testing blood alcohol content, possibly based on the same principle as the insulin level testers diabetics use.
Considering that it is one's insurance that pays to "fix one up" rather than the rest of the population, who cares if a biker decides to not wear a helmet. It's a stupid decision, but it doesn't make the roads any "safer" for anyone else. It is similar for driving drunk. Those who know it's a bad decision don't do it. Those who don't care will still do it. It is not acceptable to penalize those who do make good decisions because there are some (many?) who don't. Government regulation is not the same as a kindergarten classroom.
They may be the worst in Western Europe, but I agree with the GP. They are still better than the US. For one, they pay attention when driving. They may drive fast and close, but for the most part, Italians (and other Europeans) focus just on the driving. That's probably why they are so impatent at lights. I actually missed their drivers coming back home to the US.
... thought Athens was in Italy ... and had a box Franzia.
Note: In typical Slashdot fashion, this is just anecdotal evidence with nothing to back it up. I probably drived around Athens, GA
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I'm not trolling. Our priorities are weird.
We could save way more lives by giving out free annual checkups or something. Try losing your insurance and needing $2m worth of health care and see how much your life is worth. Hell, try needing $20k worth. You'll find your life is worth very little. We constantly place a value on human life, and the value is extremely low. Life is full of cost/benefit tradeoffs and I truly don't understand why some of these are so insanely tilted. We're prepared to throw away trillions in certain areas for little to no benefit while adamantly refusing to spend enough on the huge bang-for-your-buck things.
That 16k/year statistic is bogus. Most of those accidents would have happened anyway. Obviously alcohol is not necessary for an accident, and nobody has proved that further lowering the BAC saves lives. Besides, most of the drunk driver related deaths were already against the law. Lowering the BAC further won't stop any of those deaths. Those drivers were already willing to break the law. Tweaking the law won't make them more responsible.
I really don't get your attitude. You act as if it is wrong to place a dollar amount on human life. Well it is done all the time. The dollar amount is quite low, too. When designing roads, cars, traffic rules, etc. a tradeoff must be made.
We could save 50k lives/year if we banned cars, but we as a society have decided that a human life isn't worth that much. We could probably save 40k lives/year is the speed limit was 25. Society has decided that that much lost time isn't worth a human life. We could give everyone a free safety upgrade to their car complete with 5-point restraint, interior crash protection cage, and so forth and probably save 30k lives/year but it just isn't worth it.
People get stupid about certain risks. They are prepared to spend unlimited amounts of money and lost time for zero demonstrable gain if it is about terrorists, child molesters, drunk drivers, violent video games, many other things. Yet many other greater risks are ignored or given low priority.
So many times I hear "You can't place a value on human life" or "If it saves even one life." That is so untrue and dishonest it makes my teeth hurt.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Why not just have 1 driver there just taking a bunch of drivers around to locations, and that way you get a ride home in your own car. Not sure how much better it will work out since the drivers need to be picked up, but it may make things slightly more efficient if there are multiple calls to the nearby regions.
That is only true if you include all injuries. Helmets do not protect legs, arms...
If you only consider the head injuries then most un-helmeted riders die. The cost to us argument is BS.
It is simply one group legislating what another group should do.
Using the same kind of logic:
California has mandatory helmet laws, Oklahoma does not. The public cost of medical for head injuries is greater in California. Faulty logic.
Hey, computer users have more carpal-tunnel. Lets legislate finger exercise breaks and use of hand exercise tools made by my company.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
The law provides guidance for those who may not be capable of reasoning the right path for themselves. Driving drunk clearly imperils others, yet many people don't realize just how little drinking it takes to become impaired enough to greatly increase your likelyhood of killing someone. So we have laws, because people aren't capable of figuring it out for themselves. We make the penalties harsh, so that people will plan (while they are sober) not to get themselves into the situation that will lead to those penalties being applied to them.
Drunk driving law enforcement works. The harsher the DUI penalties, the lower the drunk accident rates drop.
As to the biker, I think you have a very poor understanding of insurance. Insurance payments max out very quickly for extensive hospital stays, and bikers who suffer head trauma almost inevitably wind up costing the public when their insurance stops paying for their hospital bills. Then we (the public) pick up the slack, because the doctors don't stop working on those patients! So we pay, through higher taxes and higher health care premiums.
Making bikers wear a helmet makes the world less costly for the rest of us. It's either that, or we all pay the 'don't make bikers wear helmets tax', or we have hospitals refuse service to bikers. Which would you choose: make other people wear helmets, pay a tax, or let bikers die if they get in an accident?
Finally, DUI laws don't penalize those who make good decisions. If you make the good decisions, you won't be in violation of the DUI laws, because you weren't driving under the influence. The worst 'penalty' I can imagine in this situation is the one where you pay a little extra for cab service? Is that what you're talking about? That's just part of the real cost of drinking safely in public. Claiming otherwise is just ignoring the hidden costs.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Fraudulent statistics!
This is commonplace for road safety campaigners to lie and decieve in this way - I presume they justify it to themselves on the grounds that they're doing it for the greater good or some such bullshit.
The implication is that these accidents are all drunk drivers mowing down pedestrians or crashing into station wagons full of children but in reality that's not the case at all. The statistics include *any* accident in which *anybody* involved had *any* blood alcohol (even if under the limit).
Obviously that will include many accidents where no normal (honest) preson would consider alcohol a contributary factor.
Please, go do more research on the topic.o torcycle/kentuky-la03/LawChgKy.html#Anchor-FATALIT IE-53804o torcycle/kentuky-la03/LawChgLa.html#Anchor-FATALIT IE-17701
http://www.saferoads.org/issues/fs-helmets.htm
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/injury/pedbimot/m
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/injury/pedbimot/m
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
About 2/3 of drunk driving accidents involve a BAC of .14 or higher, and that most fatal accidents involve .17 or higher. It might surprise you that eating bread can make you appear to be over the legal limit according to the same breathalyzer referred to in the article, and lowering the limit will just make this sort of thing more common.
Having one beer, then driving somewhere 2 hours later does NOT make someone a threat to other drivers. Threat to others is the only justification for drunk driving laws.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
- I would like to see how it rounds. .01294568423764 does it show .013 or .012 .008327, not legally drunk here but does it round to .01
.01 and he is able to show .0099999999999
.01 you go to jail
-
If he is able to prove that the Court/Officer says his BAC was
that the device rounded and he was actually
or more importantly, the potential of that rounding.
x = round(.00979999998,3)
x =
x = round(.00979999998,4)
x = 0.0098 you don't go to jail
They call that a reasonable doubt.
The device did not report the "Actual" BAC
Now don't get me wrong, I HATE drunk drivers
But if the court can not prove its case 100% then he goes free
If he can raise the question in the juries mind that the device "May" report an inaccurate
number then they have to let him go plane and simple.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Yea, well, its a very capable as a micro-controller available in both 8 and 16 bit models and is rock solid. That really shouldn't be what they are basing their case on...but of course in court they will probably win on that due to sheer ignorance.
On the helmet question;
Which would you choose: make other people wear helmets, pay a tax, or let bikers die if they get in an accident?
What would I have? Those are not all of the choices. You left out many options including, treat till insurance quits paying. Make the Auto driver who hit him pay.
But, more laws will not help.
We have too many laws.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
I have seen maybe 10 obviously fatal wrecks in my 10 year driving career. I know driving is dangerous, but to see 10 obviously fatal wrecks in one day would seriously worry me. Please let me know where this was so I could avoid that stretch of road.
You need to look at both sides of the argument.p .html
http://www.bikersrights.com/statistics/statsdatah
For each argument there is a counter.
Helmets might save you $0.02. Outlaw cars and that would be way more!
That would also save more lives than outlawing guns, and helmet-less riders.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
It might work during peak hours in cities where the bars are fairly close together and residences are fairly well clustered. My only thoughts are that the cost waiting time of drivers at residences waiting to be picked up again might exceed the cost of additional taxis. It could work very well, though, in the right markets.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Mod this up!!!!
Accurate and insightful.
Outlaw cars. Everyone can walk or use public transportation. Then you will be safe using your cell phone. The highways will last longer with less traffic. There is another savings.
But totally unrealistic. Life is a risk.
Some drunks drive better than most phone users.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
Bar owners are in the business of selling drinks. They will not put something in that could effectively stop the sale of drinks. Specially if they have to pay for it.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There's a bar that charges to use it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=265759&cid=20
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
So are you saying that "begging the question" meaning "raising the question" is am improper usage if Newton used it commonly 400 years ago? (your link does not seem to prove he did, by the way) If so, how many centuries or eons must something be in common usage before it is accepted as proper?
And the phrase "begging the question" as a logic argument comes from an ancient Latin translation. Can you accept that translations are often imperfect? Perhaps the phrase "begging the question" begs the translation.
Can you also not accept that the word "begs" can indeed also mean "compels to notice" which fits nicely with "raising the question?" The phrase has at least as many meanings as the individual words contain.
Language is liquid. Name your context and fix it down to converse, but don't nail others for not using YOUR context. "Begging the question," has specific meanings in logic and law, as it does in common dialect. They are simply not the same meaning.
What does the phrase "fly by night" mean to you? Do you know what context in which I intend to use it?
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Most likely the only reason against this would be to ensure that the fare paid is correct. Since cabs have meters that monitor cost over time and mileage, the only way for the cab company to prove they took you the distance they did would be using a verified and tested meter. Since most consumer cars don't come standard with those, there'd likely be many arguments over just how far they took you, and just how long they waited. It's a good idea at first glance, but once you dig into the details it makes sense why they would want to use the taxi.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
We decide together? Really? No, actually, we don't decide together. The lobbyists with the most money decide. See how MADD pushed through the absurd .08 BAC levels and the DUI check points. It is my responsibility as an American Citizen to ignore unjust laws, and DUI laws are unjust. The fact that you support current DUI laws (which allow for check points where a piggie can examine you with no probable cause) makes you an authorotarian coward with boundry issues.
Blar.
Whoa ! How strong is the beer where you live, or is it served in kegs instead of glasses ? 0.08 is two or three beers where I live.
In the state of CALIFORNIA, you sign a contract stating that you WILL submit to a field sobriety test or lose your license for 1 year, including fines. Also, if you think you are going to get out of a DUI charge simply by declining the test, well, think again. If you appear drunk, smell like booze, or say something incriminating they will forcibly take blood from you at the booking station. There is a nurse there and they will take your blood. You will be charged and you will lose your license. And because you refused the test the first time you will now be hit with the maximum sentence/penalty. Having fun yet? Well, you have the next 5 years of informal probation to think about it and the next 10 years before the charge is off your DMV record. Weee!
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
I'm certainly not advocating having a few beers then trying to go all Mario Andretti on your local freeway... but the point should be made that differening amounts of alcohol intake or BAC levels may have drastically different affects on different people. I've seen 200 lb people go to sleep after 2 beers, a 100 lb person hardly able to stand up after 1, and a 140 lb guy absolutely run a counterstrike server 6 beers into the evening.
The problem is, "impairment" is a highly qualitative assessment (no, I can't say my ABCs backwards stone sober)... and the state needs something quantitative to help make easy convictions. The BAC and legal limits is how they do this, conveniently ignoring that BACs will affect people differently.
Do I have a perfect system to suggest? Nope. When someone gets pulled over, maybe they should be able to challenge the officer to an on-the-spot Counterstrike match... and if I win I'm free to go. (substitute Gran Turismo if you think the impairment test should be more relevant)
Do I smell desperation? .....Nah. It's just booze.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
It would be interesting to see a study on this. In reality, it might be that small amounts of alcohol actually make you a safer driver, simply because you are more careful when you drive. You slow down and take a lot fewer risks on the road.
You might want to add function calls where it corrects that reading for ambient measurement factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) and inherent measurement errors (calibration coefficients for the sensors). Also, you probably want to seed that rand() with current time, or heart rate, or phase of the moon.
At what point to we question the system of transportation as a whole? A completely sober person with no distractions can still cause an accident. That coupled with the fact that the modern lifestyle demands people do things like not get enough sleep, be on their phones constantly, not stay home when sick (and therefore be at the wheel drowsy), etc. makes for a completely idiotic system of transport.
Studies have shown driving fatigued is a major problem too: One of many articles you can find on google.
Do we ban people not sleeping enough?
Granted, most people on the road are good enough drivers that we don't constantly have complete chaos on the roads. But cars are not inherently safe, efficient, or anything really that great.
The fact that we are so enamored with them is as sick as mine and others' addictions to cigarettes.
When I see articles about drunk driving accidents or drunk drivers (heh: Paris, Lindsay, Bush, Cheney, etc.) my first reaction isn't "that person is a stain," but "I've never seen a major study about what percentage of people who drove regularly for any period of their lives and are not teetotalers drove drunk at least once."
I'm guessing that it's at least in the high 60% range, but that's a completely blind guess. There's never been a study. Nobody knows.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
The roads would be safer if we just didn't let stupid people drive.
...
I don't mean to downplay the negatives of DUI, but in a world where it's dangerous to drive completely sober, I think we're focusing our attention in the wrong places. There are too many cars on the road, and too many busy/stressed/airheaded people driving those cars. I would argue that one little Honda-racing subwoofer-destrorying yo-yo kid is far more deadly than a drunk driver. Just because the Honda kids are involves in less reported accidents than drunks, doesn't mean they actually cause less accidents. One asshole cutting someone off at high speed can cause an accident way back as everyone panics to avoid the ricer.
So should we arrest anyone driving an import car with more bass than treble ? I say YES! Who's with me ?
See ? People would think I'm crazy for suggesting that. So why is it less crazy to arrest people who've had a drink or two ? 0.08 may as well be a random number, some people are still straight at 0.15, and some people are still idiots at 0.00.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Found the answer to my question. It appears that accident rates actually go down if you've had one drink. Chart is here: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/PEOPLE/injury/research/Al coholHighway/images/figure2-6.gif It doesn't start rising significantly until about .09 or so. That chart, as well as other alcohol stats, are at http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/PEOPLE/injury/research/Al coholHighway/2__overview.htm
Heheh, good point. I don't actually know how low they can detect, but they have stops where they just breathalyze everyone. You never see traps here (my license is currently suspended due to a speed trap) because they all hide out of sight. Then suddenly a bunch of police on foot come out of the bushes or an obscured side road and wave you over.
In the case of a sobriety check, they seem to do them in town a lot. You'll be driving up to a blind intersection on a Saturday night, and as you reach it, 5 guys come out of each side street and surround your car. One guy comes to your window, puts some weird microphone-looking thing in your face, asks you politely to breathe on it, and then tells you to have a nice evening.
I gotta say. The police here have a totally different strategy, and I suspect it works better than their US counterparts'. Here these guys absolutely kill you with kindness. Smother you with concern. The older guys act like concerned fathers; the younger guys like your mates who are just looking out for you. Granted, they're still cops trying to take away your money and your freedom for violating arbitrary rules, but at least they aren't dicks about it.
I was mostly commenting on all the "tough laws" to "keep the population safe" without really considering all of the factors, such as overnight parking, etc. It seems to me that if you want to crack down on people driving drunk, you're going to need to make sure they have other options readily available, instead of just making the penalties harsher.
It's kind of like when someone complains but can't offer a reasonable alternative to whatever it is they're complaining about.
I know more than you drink.
Well, I'm man enough to say one beer definitely affects me. Heck, half a beer does. I can drink a lot more. I don't, by habit, but I can. But I won't pretend one beer has no effect; it does. The effect on driving is subtle at that level; not drunk driving, but a slight change in reaction times and risk prediction.
I don't know about you, but if 5 guys surrounded my car and tried to stick some weird looking thing through my window, I'd be out of there very quickly without much concern for how many of them ended up run over.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
There are plenty of options that don't involve legislation, taxation, or additional government bureaucracy. These can all be done by the individuals who like to go out and drink.
1) Don't drive your car to the club.
2) Have a designated driver.
3) Identify, and use, the closest possible public parking facility and leave your car overnight.
4) Take a cab.
5) Use public transportation (to the club, and probably a cab on the way back).
6) Walk.
7) Get a hotel room nearby.
In addition, without any legal requirement, bars and clubs can provide solutions as an incentive for customers:
1) Offer 2-way cab service (for free!) - one ride home, and another ride back to your car in the morning.
2) Hire a shuttle
3) Work out a deal with a nearby hotel for discount rooms for drunk-folk.
4) Provide said overnight parking.
All of these things are actually being done right now, without big-gubmint telling people what to do. I can probably come up with a lot more alternatives that are economically beneficial that would allow more people to come to my bar/club without the risk of driving drunk.
It's kind of like when someone complains but can't offer a reasonable alternative to whatever it is they're complaining about.
I think that all the things I proposed above are quite reasonable. They just, as you wisely put it in your first post, require a little planning. In addition, there are market-driven solutions that exist today, that provide exactly the sort of solution you propose.
What's not reasonable is to force business owners, taxpayers, and all citizens in general to provide those who choose to go out to the club without properly thinking ahead with ready-made solutions for their irresponsible behavior. More Government is usually the worst of all possible solutions for a given problem.
...You'd run five guys in police uniforms and reflective vests over for trying to breathalyze you? Um. Please don't come to Japan. They already think we foreigners are dangerous scofflaws without us killing unarmed police officers.
If 5 guys came out of the dark and surrounded my car and shoved something in my face, you better believe I'd get the hell out of there without pausing to notice the insignias on their clothes.
Seriously? They come out of the dark and surround cars, and don't get run over on a regular basis? Do the Japanese calmly hang around to see how potentially dangerous situations play out?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Good point. I've read a lot of accounts of a bunch of guys dressing up in police-style uniforms, reflective vests, and glowing red traffic batons jumping out of the dark and killing people who are foolhardy enough to stop. It's an epidemic. I recommend you gun it if that ever happens to you. Kill as many as possible. I'm sure the judge will understand when you explain that you did it because even though they LOOKED like police and IDENTIFIED THEMSELVES as police, you have a habit of running over pedestrians who startle you.
Now that I think about it, this is probably an issue of geography and population density. When I think of an intersections that I stop at frequently, where people might come out, it is in a rural area with thick trees on both sides of the road, and no light other than from my own headlights and the stars. In that situation, I would never notice that they were cops, regardless of how reflective their clothes were. The ones on the sides would look black, and the ones in front would be all white. Were I in a large city with streetlights and the nighttime orange glow, it would be pretty obvious that they are cops.
In the US, there _have_ been cases of people dressing up as police that have used the sense of fear they inspire in people to take advantage of them.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Having spent some time in the French Alps, i'll add my £0.02/E0.02 The attitude of the French police in the mountains is very different with regards to drink driving than it is in the French cities. The mountain police generally seem to take the attitude that drink driving in the Alps is a direct test of Darwin. In other words, if you are too drunk to drive home, you will end up missing a hairpin turn and plunge off the mountain to your death. From speaking to people who had lived in the Alps for many years, the police seemed to be of the opinion that the problem was self-correcting, and no-one I spoke to had ever been stopped or breathalysed on the mountain roads.
It would not surprise me to learn that the Italian mountain police take the same attitude as their French colleagues. Nor would it surprise me that the attitude of the Italian police in the cities is less lenient than those of the mountains.