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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
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.
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.
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
On the other hand, what if he finds a bug? I'd let this guy off the hook in exchange for improving the software so that it works better in the future. And if he can't find a bug, he still gets convicted.
Really this seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
He's innocent until proven guilty.
He might have gotten the evidence dismissed if the state failed to provide the source code....
paintball
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...
That's the source code for the cops. The breathalizer is probably more complicated. ;)
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
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! :-)
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
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.
Which is precisely why the diminution of old-fashioned sobriety tests in favor of technology is a bad thing. In the olden days, if you stank of liquor and were driving erratically, that was often enough to get your ass kicked. The cops, however, are an incredibly lazy bunch who just want a magic blackbox that's absolutely right. Now they're being faced with the dangers of that argument. If this breathalyzer is hokey, then it's not the defendant's fault, but the fault of the manufacturer and a lazy-ass government and law enforcement types.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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
Nonsense. You could take your argument to the next level and say there's something different about the hardware in the machine. Black-box testing of this thing should prove that it works (and ultimately is a better test than looking at source code).
I can't believe this thing is all that complicated as far as inputs go (like a guy blowing in a tube). To prove it works you'd only need to test it against a series of knowns. That'll easily prove it's not a "random number generator".
This case is just about someone with a chunk of money that's trying to get out of drunk driving. While I think it's a good thing that you can get the source code to something that's effectively testifying against you, I think this case is hardly anything approaching a miscarriage of justice.
AccountKiller
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.
Most states have a law that states a BAC. A breathalyzer estimates your BAC based on the light absorbtion to determine the amount of alchol in your breath. The amount of alchol in your breath is an estimate of your BAC based on an everage person's metabolism. The source could is the only way to tell how they correlate the measured amount of light absorbtion to the estimated BAC of that specific person. Breathalyzers were intended to be a quick way of determining if someone was suspected of being intoxicated. Think about the revenue that is gained for the departments that have made the decision to use a breatalyzer as the defacto standard instead of running an actual BAC test from a blood sample before accepting that their decision was based on the accuracy of the measurement.
This is before factoring in that many organic compounds contain an alchol group that will absorb the same light spectrum. There have been cases of people reading over the limit that have witnesses to confirm that they were not drinking. The one that always comes to mind first, is the person that did fire breathing for a living. The lighter fluid that he used spiked the detector. This was only on his breath, it would have made him sick if he drank enough to raise his BAC, but they refused to draw an actual blood sample for testing. I have also had police officers tell me to always refuse the breathalyzer because they are not accurate. The fine and penalties for refusing are nothing compared to a false posative.
Would you please give some insite on why you have determined that these machines are accurate enough to ruin someones life without giving them the chance to even verify that there was not an error made in the mathmatical conversion or even a software bug? Do you even understand the full consequences of "just take the punishment" A DWI is one of the most serious offenses you can be convicted of. Would you expect someone that killed someone in self defense to just take the murder wrap instead of using evidenance that they were being attacked to prove it was self defense? The mere fact that this person is now in a position that he has to prove his innocence based on what a machine said should grant him the right to all evidence that might prove him innocent.
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.
That's exactly what the state is worried about. If he does find a bug and is acquitted, suddenly every DUI conviction using data provided this device has to be thrown out. The state doesn't really care about releasing the source code, it cares about maintaining the convictions.
:(
If they were convicted by evidence from defective equipment, it SHOULD be thrown out. That is a founding principle of our system of justice. We as a society prefer that the guilty walk rather than imprison the innocent; or at least we as a society used to think that... and I still do... but I don't think I speak for society anymore.
That said, even I don't think a found bug should be an automatic acquittal. After all it could be reading lower than it should have been! But yeah, if they find a bug that caused it to read double the actual amount under various circumstances then I would have no qualms about throwing out any DUI convictions it caused.
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.
Read this before you think you can be sure about that. They can be wrong, especially the older ones.
Link
Or the the machines may not have been tested properly:
Link
Agreed, the outcome of the case itself is petty. Provided the breathalyser is functioning correctly (easy enough to test with a simple double blind survey with a number of devices of the same function). But it would be nice to see a precedence set that affirms the right of a person to review the code of a digital object being used to "testify" against them.
And in the over all "good" side of this argument, more eyes can make better software. Even if this guy gets off with nothing due to the source, it can only drive to make the source better.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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;
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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?
Never wrong? BAC and the breathelizer estimate aren't the same thing.
.8 result could actually be a .65 or .96), and make a number of assumptions which may or may not be true:
.09. This significant gap could be all the difference in a DUI case since a reading of 0.65 would also require evidence of impairment, often in the form of field sobriety tests.
l erance.html there have been studies showning that alcoholic with BAC levels in the leathal range not showing any signs of impairment. So anyone charged with driving in excess of a level doesn't mean that they are actually impaired.
They have on average a 20% margin of error (a
lung capacity
got diabetes, you are far more likely to create acetone which breathilzers may read as alcohol. Further a low blood sugar reaction may produce impairment results outwardly similar to driving drunk.
physical activty. get the blood pumping right before the test and the levels drop.
Many breathalyzers assume that the tested individual is an average person and do not take into account sex, height, weight, metabolism and whether that person has just eaten. Furthermore, many breathalyzer tests assume a specific ratio (2100:1) between BAC and breath alcohol content in order to make its conversions. As this actual ratio for a particular individual may vary between 1700:1 and 2400:1, a reading of 0.08 could actually mean a blood alcohol content of between 0.65 and
Submit evidence that you don't fit to those norms and you may get off. Anyways defendants in drunk driving cases are charged with two offenses: (1) driving under the influence of alcohol and (2) driving with a blood-alcohol level in excess of a given level. They aren't actually charged with poor driving, though it may be a symptom of the impairment. Per http://www.california-drunkdriving.org/alcohol_to
Law enforcement tends to charge people with easy crimes, such as speeding or having a high BAC, while ignoring people with truley reckless behaviour: large differentals in speed, failure to signal, aggressive lane changes, and following too closely. I'm not defending those who drive after drinking, but feel it is important to note that the typical way that evidence is collected is flawed.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
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
There are always going to be borderline cases, and machines do a shit job at resolving them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.
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)
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 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
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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
Hope you don't want to drive to church and take communion.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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!