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Court Orders Breathalyzer Code Opened, Reveals Mess
Death Metal writes with an excerpt from the website of defense attorney Evan Levow: "After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc. By making itself a party to the litigation after the oral arguments in April, Draeger subjected itself to the Supreme Court's directive that Draeger ultimately provide the source code to the defendants' software analysis house, Base One. ... Draeger reviewed the code, as well, through its software house, SysTest Labs, which agreed with Base One, that the patchwork code that makes up the 7110 is not written well, nor is it written to any defined coding standard. SysTest said, 'The Alcotest NJ3.11 source code appears to have evolved over numerous transitions and versioning, which is responsible for cyclomatic complexity.'" Bruce Schneier comments on the same report and neatly summarizes the take-away lesson: "'You can't look at our code because we don't want you to' simply isn't good enough."
I work on embedded system stuff every day. At the end of the day, there are NO lint warnings in my code. First, I tend to avoid coding practices and designs that generate lint warnings. By and large, lint warns for a good reason most of the time. Second, in the limited number of situations where lint flags something incorrectly, there are methods for silencing the warnings via special comments. I'm currently working on a 50000 line project, and there are about 70 places in the entire code base were we had to tell lint to ignore a warning. Each warning suppression is documented as to why lint is incorrect.
Lint isn't a perfect tool by any means but in my opinion, anyone developing C code without it is not acting in a professional manner.
This seems to make sense to me. The breathalizer is supposed to measure the blood alcohol content, and this is done by measuring the alcohol content in air expelled by the *lungs* (with a knowlege of partial pressures).
But if you equally weight beginning readings with ending readings, then you can be skewed by the first reading, which comes from the air in the mouth, instead of the lungs (giving low scores for people with time since their last drink, and people high scores with a recent last drink).
I would think that this method would give a more accurate reading by filtering out the readings from 'mouth air' and giving preference to 'lung air'.
But regardles, tests should have been done using both methods, and comparing to blood test to see which returns more consistantly accurate results. I wonder if those tests need to be made public as well.
Don't always assume the judge will, in fact, look at the evidence and arguments. In their eyes, it doesn't look good to overturn a DUI conviction. Period.
.07 and got arrested per the usual.
Had a buddy of mine leave a night club and he got pulled over for supposedly making an illegal left turn. Blew over the state's
However, the judge didn't care that there was no reason to be pulled over (with photos of the left-turn sign) since the cop explicitly said it wasn't due to erratic driving, *only* the 'illegal' left turn. Examples must be made. DUI upheld.
Hell, even I got pulled over once for simply driving at 2am, but my breathalyzer revealed a stunning 0.00% BAC. After chatting with the cop for a bit, turns out they were just looking for easy DUI targets, and I happened to be driving on the same road as them.