Who cares if your R&D department cant remember to pay their bills? If they are good enough it'll be cheaper to hire someone to handle all that tedious interfacing with the real world while they prove that P=NP and engrave the steps onto the back of an atom using a method they developed in the bath.
You know, when I read the headline I thought the same thing, but I've thought about it a little more...
Sure, why bother with the credit check on the R&D guys... But how is trusting somebody with a cash register in a busy store, or with a company credit card/check book any different than issuing them a personal credit card? Your credit history tells sombody if you take your credit as a responsibility or not. If you are going to have access to the company till, either directly or indirectly, it seems like it would be something that the company should care about.
Regardless, companies should be free to hire whomever they please for the most part. Sure, we disallow discrimination based on race, or sex, but discrimination based on behavior seems to me to be the whole point, isn't it?
My real concern here is more that requesting a credit check has some unknown impact on your credit score. So, does that mean that the act of looking for a job in one of the fields where you may need a credit check actually lessens your chances of getting the job?
And if Sony didn't want to launch the PS3 around the same time as the Xbox 360, why did they originally state a Spring 2006 launch?
See, I would ask that question differently:
If Sony wanted to launch the PS3 around the same time as the Xbox 360, why did they originally state a Spring 2006 launch?
The difference between Q3 2005 and Q2 2006 in the retail world is an eternity.
I would also argue that the PS2 is not obsolete, and won't be until the stream of new games for it dry to a trickle (which won't happen for a few years still). In my mind, this is the big factor that the pundits overlook. Consumers and investors are both quite aware though. There are plenty of annoyed Xbox owners that have a system with no new games coming out, and plenty of new-ish PS2 owners who know that Sony has their back at the end of their console's lifespan. The investors can see that Sony has the more diverse retail offering, as well.
If Sony doesn't cut the price of the PS3 as soon as availability ramps up, then you may be right. Until we know what happens in the second half of 2007, though, I think the jury is still out. Don't underestimate the number of people who are reading this saga in Playstation Magazine, and Sony friendly websites, and not on message boards like this one.
From my perspective, I would like to see both Sony and Microsoft fail this time around, as I don't want either of their DRM technologies to gain a strong foothold in the living room. It just seems to me that even dispite the blunders, Sony has the stronger position at this point.
An {electronic mail} message, {Usenet} posting or other
(electronic) communication which is intentionally incorrect,
but not overtly controversial (compare {flame bait}), or the
act of sending such a message. Trolling aims to elicit an
emotional reaction from those with a hair-trigger on the reply
key.
Unless saying something true, but anti-Microsoft in a pro-Microsoft forum counts, can somebody please explain to me how this was a troll?
it's estimated by Merrill Lynch that Sony's cost for a Blu Ray drive is $350 a unit
It is estimated by just about everybody that the lone Merril Lynch analyst that made that estimate has reached maximum shit capacity, and is now overflowing with shit.
Sony read the market correctly when they determined that the market wasn't read for a new console yet last christmas, and is presently eating Microsoft's lunch with last generation's hardware. What sane company kills a profitable product that is leading the market with sales, and replaces it with an unproven product that they expect to sell at a loss?
Even if you don't take into account that Sony had time to wait for Blu-Ray because the CPU wasn't ready either, I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. No matter what you think of Sony or the PS3 (personlly I have no current plans to buy one), given what has happened with the 360 so far it's not very difficult to figure out which company's console division is going to have a better cumulative bottom line at the end of Q2 2007. There is approximately zero chance that the PS3 isn't going to sell out this holiday season since there at least a million idiots that are willing to pay a premium on release day anyway, the PS2 is going to outsell everybody except maybe Nintendo again this Christmas (just like the PSOne outsold the PS2 the first season), Sony has one less year of losses on the books than Microsoft, and they're taking advantage of their competitior dropping the ball with the 360 to put some weight behind their other technologies. What's not sane about that?
It made sense when CDs cost over a buck, and burns took an hour. Now the damned delay before you burn is a signifigant percentage of the total burn time. There should at least be a flag to skip it.
Difficulty of backups is directly proportional to the quantity of data that changes during the backup interval, not the overall quantity of data.
There is no such thing as 'risking' losing your stuff without a backup. You are absolutely guaranteed to lose your stuff eventually without a backup.
Of course, it sounds to me like you're a data packrat archiving free-to-air content that you are never going to watch most of again for the hell of it, so you could 'solve' your problem by treating your data as transient. After all, you're doing that already. Better to delete the stuff on your own terms then waiting for your POS low-cost hard drive to do it for you.
Drop 6-8 of those in a vanilla budget box and use it as your backup, power it up only when needed.
Low cost drives in a box with a budget power supply sitting un-used 99.9% of the time? Yeah, that'll be sure to power up and emit data when you need it... You have a lot of faith in crap hardware.
I have a rough rule of responding to every email within 3 hours. If that's unreasonable I flag the email to start popping up notifications.
Having never met you, but having read that, I now know with 100% certainty that you either have both very little new incoming e-mail and very little else to do other than correspond, or that you're totally full of crap.
If everybody responded to every incoming message, after a very short period of time everybody would spend the entire day replying.
E-mail is a way to interrupt somebody that you'd normally have no business interrupting at no cost to you. In my experience, the bulk of it is broadcast information, or somebody trying to get you to do their job for them. Those types of e-mails should be ignored with prejudice.
People who correspond for a living and aren't in sales are both expendable and will be eliminated from their position eventually. The world needs very very few people that do nothing but make decisions and commentary for a living.
Personally I'd prefer that the game push the limits of fun, and not push the limits of my electric bill when I need a 200 watt GPU to play it. I don't care what the graphics look like (and if you ask me, Crysis looks like shit. Plastic shit to be more specific.).
Just another shooter + killer new shooter feature = Just another shooter
for sufficiently large values of shooter. We reached that value years ago.
EA doesn't seem to be stepping up to the plate in that category either though.
On another thought. I've got these wicked little LED flashlights which run for 130 hours on a battery the size of an aspirin. When will I see these in my house, rather than a fluorescent lamp?
As soon as they produce more light for the same amount of electricity as the flourescents.
Your LED can run that long on such a small battery because it doesn't emit very much light at all.
approximately equivalent images to raster graphics
Huh?
Current tech essentially adds up to the game of the day being a showcase for whatever the latest buzzword technology from the GPU makers is that month. Look at the games that are out in the last 6 months. We've got "HDR" lighting now, so everything is so damned fake-shiny it makes you want to puke. If you rate glitz as highly as realism, well, I still wouldn't rate them the same. The hacks we pull for high performance 3D graphics today result in plastic looking scenes even in the best game examples. Go look at screenshots for Crysis, the latest 3D accelerator poster child to see what I mean. There are plenty of raytraced animations out there that will fool you for a good long time before you figure out they aren't real. Crysis represents a best-of-breed, and the graphics wouldn't fool anybody into thinking they were actually real for even a second.
Yeah, I know. I've replied to this comment before, and I replied to you down below too. I want to reply to you again though, because reading your comment again revealed something absolutely moronic.
The flu kills more people that herpes EVER has, probably on a yearly basis.
The flu kills more people every year than self inflicted gunshot blasts to the head too. Guess how much meaning that little "statistic" has. Here's a hint. It's exactly the same amount of meaning that yours has. If I use the same logic as you did to come up with your point, clearly I should stop trying to avoid people with the flu to prevent getting infected because, after all, it's not as bad as getting shot in the head.
I suspect that you're just bitter because nobody bothers to try and find a cure for your herpes since pills to reduce the symptoms are more profitable, and every elegable partner that you meet and think you might want to settle down with won't touch your crotch with a 10 foot pole.
And just to batter your 'points' to smaller bits, using your example from a comment below... A genital herpes infection is a co-factor in the transmission of HIV, and a high percentage of people who contract HIV sexualy also have genital herpes. If all the other reasons aren't good enough for you, perhaps when you realize your potential partner has herpes you should be wondering what else you're going to catch from them too.
Incidentally, Herpes Simplex 2 *can* kill you, and kills many newborn children born to infected mothers every year. Not only is your flu 'statistic' stupid, but it's probably wrong too.
The only point that you've made is that you're an idiot.
Vague generalizations are the primary mechinism that people have for rapid decision making. Obviously, when you get to know somebody better, you can make a more nuanced decision, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In this case, those reasons are the same reasons that give genital herpes a greater stigma than cold sores.
Saying that you're right doesn't make you right. Go think you're brilliant though. Get yourself infected. Have fun with that. You'll have a gift that keeps on giving, and a hard time finding a steady relationship.
You are correct that it would improve improve latency, but it does so only slightly, and it exists primarily to prevent the checksum calculation from traversing the CPU bus/interconnect, thus reducing CPU load and increasing throughput. It was introduced because CPUs couldn't push gigabit ethernet to it's full potential. If all the data is being processed by the CPU anyway (all dynamic content, like in a game) the benefit would be negligible, or there could even be a performance hit...
The code that runs in the OS IP stack isn't any slower... It's probably faster because the system processor is faster. It's the bus utilisation and the cache clobbering that are the real reasons for TCP offload.
(Disclaimer: I have written ethernet drivers for a chip with TCP offload.... and SSL offload for that matter.)
Describing the benefits of a TCP offload engine as the answer to a question about how they can claim reduced UDP latency is fluff. It's like the magician getting you to look at his assistant's chest while he moves a hidden card to the top of the deck.
Besides, TCP offload is a technology to increase throughput, not to reduce latency.
This isn't a Fifth Amendment issue, which applies to testimony. This is straightforward evidence. Are you seriously arguing that it is somehow improper to execute search warrants against criminal suspects for directly relevant evidence for which probable cause exists? Seriously?
No, I'm saying it is a Fifth amendment issue to require somebody to maintain a physical record of their actions solely for the purpose of bypassing that individual's fifth amendment rights.
If you've been accident free for 30 years, it means that you either don't drive much, or that you're very lucky. It only takes one bad driver to cause an accident, yet many accidents involve more than one vehicle. When you do the math it adds up to even the best of drivers getting into an accident every several years on average. And that doesn't even take mechanical failures into account. What if you have a blow-out?
If you drive for long enough you will get into an accident. That means at some point in your life somebody will be interested in your black-box data.
Now, you may say, you don't break any traffic laws, so the box is still in your favor. Two words. Bull. Shit.
Traffic law is nebulous. There are laws against "Driving too fast for conditions" (Translation: you are always in violation of the speed limit law if you are in an accident for any reason), "Failure to drive in the established lane" (Translation: If you have a blowout and spin off the road, you broke the law. I personally have been ticketed for this, and it has taught me never to call a cop when I get a flat, even if I think I may be blocking traffic slightly), and "Driving recklessly" (Translation: You're gulity of a traffic violation if any traffic officer says you are, or if you get into an accident for any reason). It is technically impossible for these boxes to prove that you haven't broken the law. They can only be used against you.
You think the data will only be interesting in an accident? How long until insurance companies give a discount for showing them the data? And if the data isn't immaculate, what do you think will happen? If you live in a state where competition is regulated out of the system, I'm sure they're dying to get some dirt on you to raise your rates. Shortly thereafter, the discounted rate for showing your perfect blax-box data will increase to the old 'regular' rate anyway, and suddenly you will effectively be charged for your driving privacy, even if your driving is completely safe and your record is clean. I have a completely clean driving record, and my insurance rates are low enough, thank you. I don't need a device installed in my car that is a big excuse for my insurance company to rase my rates for no good reason.
Enforcement is a terrible way to influence behavior anyway. Look how well it is working on our roads already, or in the war on drugs, or... Well, take your pick. We would be better off making the driving test more difficult, and making people have more experience before allowing them onto the roads unaccompanied. Of course there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there, but it can be overcome. If people were better trained, our traffic laws coul be less arbitrary too. Of course that would cut off a big chunk of government revenue from traffic fines, but if you ask me, that's a good thing anyway. I don't think they should be allowed to keep those fines in the first place due to the obvious conflict of interest.
imagine if your child or family member was hit and injured by a guy who was street racing
If the world worked the way I think it should, you would be going straight to hell for attempting to use an emotional argument to trick somebody in to believing something unjust.
The prosecution needs to prove speeding or reckless driving to convict the defendant on the most serious charges. Would you say that getting data from a device in that case would be wrong?
The circumstances under which the incident occured have absolutely no bearing on whether it is right or wrong to force somebody to incriminate themselves. If some criminals need to go free in order to protect this right for innocent people, then so be it.
In this particular case, the argument "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" flies pretty well because the information on the device could exculpate the defendant as well.
The argument only flies because you left half of it out. Want to play with emotional circumstances? What if the street racer who injured your family member's insurance company refuses to pay due to some inane detail on your family member's black box, like that your family member was going 10mph over the speed limit? Clearly, the street racer is guilty of a crime regardless of how fast your family member was going...
If you think you have nothing to hide, you don't know what it is that you've got. What you've got are rights that protect you from being unjustly imprisoned through corecion. As soon as you exchange those rights for vengence, you may as well allow torture. It's cheaper than a black box and has the same end result.
Perhaps we need our society to degenerate to the way it was a few hundred years ago for a while. It seems that people have forgotten the lessons our founding fathers learned the hard way. They wrote that stuff into the US constitution and made it very difficult to change for a good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
If they don't stop these guys, they lose their trademark on 'Halo'. That's about as big a hit that a brand can take, don't you think?
Frankly, I was making a joke.
Who cares if your R&D department cant remember to pay their bills? If they are good enough it'll be cheaper to hire someone to handle all that tedious interfacing with the real world while they prove that P=NP and engrave the steps onto the back of an atom using a method they developed in the bath.
You know, when I read the headline I thought the same thing, but I've thought about it a little more...
Sure, why bother with the credit check on the R&D guys... But how is trusting somebody with a cash register in a busy store, or with a company credit card/check book any different than issuing them a personal credit card? Your credit history tells sombody if you take your credit as a responsibility or not. If you are going to have access to the company till, either directly or indirectly, it seems like it would be something that the company should care about.
Regardless, companies should be free to hire whomever they please for the most part. Sure, we disallow discrimination based on race, or sex, but discrimination based on behavior seems to me to be the whole point, isn't it?
My real concern here is more that requesting a credit check has some unknown impact on your credit score. So, does that mean that the act of looking for a job in one of the fields where you may need a credit check actually lessens your chances of getting the job?
It is ironic that you are willing to make such enormous logical leaps given your user name.
...cash.
And if Sony didn't want to launch the PS3 around the same time as the Xbox 360, why did they originally state a Spring 2006 launch?
See, I would ask that question differently:
If Sony wanted to launch the PS3 around the same time as the Xbox 360, why did they originally state a Spring 2006 launch?
The difference between Q3 2005 and Q2 2006 in the retail world is an eternity.
I would also argue that the PS2 is not obsolete, and won't be until the stream of new games for it dry to a trickle (which won't happen for a few years still). In my mind, this is the big factor that the pundits overlook. Consumers and investors are both quite aware though. There are plenty of annoyed Xbox owners that have a system with no new games coming out, and plenty of new-ish PS2 owners who know that Sony has their back at the end of their console's lifespan. The investors can see that Sony has the more diverse retail offering, as well.
If Sony doesn't cut the price of the PS3 as soon as availability ramps up, then you may be right. Until we know what happens in the second half of 2007, though, I think the jury is still out. Don't underestimate the number of people who are reading this saga in Playstation Magazine, and Sony friendly websites, and not on message boards like this one.
From my perspective, I would like to see both Sony and Microsoft fail this time around, as I don't want either of their DRM technologies to gain a strong foothold in the living room. It just seems to me that even dispite the blunders, Sony has the stronger position at this point.
Unless saying something true, but anti-Microsoft in a pro-Microsoft forum counts, can somebody please explain to me how this was a troll?
it's estimated by Merrill Lynch that Sony's cost for a Blu Ray drive is $350 a unit
It is estimated by just about everybody that the lone Merril Lynch analyst that made that estimate has reached maximum shit capacity, and is now overflowing with shit.
Sony read the market correctly when they determined that the market wasn't read for a new console yet last christmas, and is presently eating Microsoft's lunch with last generation's hardware. What sane company kills a profitable product that is leading the market with sales, and replaces it with an unproven product that they expect to sell at a loss?
Even if you don't take into account that Sony had time to wait for Blu-Ray because the CPU wasn't ready either, I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. No matter what you think of Sony or the PS3 (personlly I have no current plans to buy one), given what has happened with the 360 so far it's not very difficult to figure out which company's console division is going to have a better cumulative bottom line at the end of Q2 2007. There is approximately zero chance that the PS3 isn't going to sell out this holiday season since there at least a million idiots that are willing to pay a premium on release day anyway, the PS2 is going to outsell everybody except maybe Nintendo again this Christmas (just like the PSOne outsold the PS2 the first season), Sony has one less year of losses on the books than Microsoft, and they're taking advantage of their competitior dropping the ball with the 360 to put some weight behind their other technologies. What's not sane about that?
Admittedly, not in a very long time. However, 2 seconds is still a delay, so this parameter still doesn't solve the problem.
It made sense when CDs cost over a buck, and burns took an hour. Now the damned delay before you burn is a signifigant percentage of the total burn time. There should at least be a flag to skip it.
Verbs Proper Grammar Headline Still Missing!
Difficulty of backups is directly proportional to the quantity of data that changes during the backup interval, not the overall quantity of data.
There is no such thing as 'risking' losing your stuff without a backup. You are absolutely guaranteed to lose your stuff eventually without a backup.
Of course, it sounds to me like you're a data packrat archiving free-to-air content that you are never going to watch most of again for the hell of it, so you could 'solve' your problem by treating your data as transient. After all, you're doing that already. Better to delete the stuff on your own terms then waiting for your POS low-cost hard drive to do it for you.
Drop 6-8 of those in a vanilla budget box and use it as your backup, power it up only when needed.
Low cost drives in a box with a budget power supply sitting un-used 99.9% of the time? Yeah, that'll be sure to power up and emit data when you need it... You have a lot of faith in crap hardware.
I have a rough rule of responding to every email within 3 hours. If that's unreasonable I flag the email to start popping up notifications.
Having never met you, but having read that, I now know with 100% certainty that you either have both very little new incoming e-mail and very little else to do other than correspond, or that you're totally full of crap.
If everybody responded to every incoming message, after a very short period of time everybody would spend the entire day replying.
E-mail is a way to interrupt somebody that you'd normally have no business interrupting at no cost to you. In my experience, the bulk of it is broadcast information, or somebody trying to get you to do their job for them. Those types of e-mails should be ignored with prejudice.
People who correspond for a living and aren't in sales are both expendable and will be eliminated from their position eventually. The world needs very very few people that do nothing but make decisions and commentary for a living.
EA doesn't seem to be stepping up to the plate in that category either though.
On another thought. I've got these wicked little LED flashlights which run for 130 hours on a battery the size of an aspirin. When will I see these in my house, rather than a fluorescent lamp?
As soon as they produce more light for the same amount of electricity as the flourescents.
Your LED can run that long on such a small battery because it doesn't emit very much light at all.
Yeah, that's a trump card. Sure. Like it wasn't transparent or anything that you had a bias. It was clear that either you or an S.O. was infected.
You have now, helped validate my point. Thank you.
approximately equivalent images to raster graphics
Huh?
Current tech essentially adds up to the game of the day being a showcase for whatever the latest buzzword technology from the GPU makers is that month. Look at the games that are out in the last 6 months. We've got "HDR" lighting now, so everything is so damned fake-shiny it makes you want to puke. If you rate glitz as highly as realism, well, I still wouldn't rate them the same. The hacks we pull for high performance 3D graphics today result in plastic looking scenes even in the best game examples. Go look at screenshots for Crysis, the latest 3D accelerator poster child to see what I mean. There are plenty of raytraced animations out there that will fool you for a good long time before you figure out they aren't real. Crysis represents a best-of-breed, and the graphics wouldn't fool anybody into thinking they were actually real for even a second.
Yeah, I know. I've replied to this comment before, and I replied to you down below too. I want to reply to you again though, because reading your comment again revealed something absolutely moronic.
The flu kills more people that herpes EVER has, probably on a yearly basis.
The flu kills more people every year than self inflicted gunshot blasts to the head too. Guess how much meaning that little "statistic" has. Here's a hint. It's exactly the same amount of meaning that yours has. If I use the same logic as you did to come up with your point, clearly I should stop trying to avoid people with the flu to prevent getting infected because, after all, it's not as bad as getting shot in the head.
I suspect that you're just bitter because nobody bothers to try and find a cure for your herpes since pills to reduce the symptoms are more profitable, and every elegable partner that you meet and think you might want to settle down with won't touch your crotch with a 10 foot pole.
And just to batter your 'points' to smaller bits, using your example from a comment below... A genital herpes infection is a co-factor in the transmission of HIV, and a high percentage of people who contract HIV sexualy also have genital herpes. If all the other reasons aren't good enough for you, perhaps when you realize your potential partner has herpes you should be wondering what else you're going to catch from them too.
Incidentally, Herpes Simplex 2 *can* kill you, and kills many newborn children born to infected mothers every year. Not only is your flu 'statistic' stupid, but it's probably wrong too.
The only point that you've made is that you're an idiot.
Vague generalizations are the primary mechinism that people have for rapid decision making. Obviously, when you get to know somebody better, you can make a more nuanced decision, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In this case, those reasons are the same reasons that give genital herpes a greater stigma than cold sores.
Saying that you're right doesn't make you right. Go think you're brilliant though. Get yourself infected. Have fun with that. You'll have a gift that keeps on giving, and a hard time finding a steady relationship.
You are correct that it would improve improve latency, but it does so only slightly, and it exists primarily to prevent the checksum calculation from traversing the CPU bus/interconnect, thus reducing CPU load and increasing throughput. It was introduced because CPUs couldn't push gigabit ethernet to it's full potential. If all the data is being processed by the CPU anyway (all dynamic content, like in a game) the benefit would be negligible, or there could even be a performance hit...
The code that runs in the OS IP stack isn't any slower... It's probably faster because the system processor is faster. It's the bus utilisation and the cache clobbering that are the real reasons for TCP offload.
(Disclaimer: I have written ethernet drivers for a chip with TCP offload.... and SSL offload for that matter.)
*cough*
Describing the benefits of a TCP offload engine as the answer to a question about how they can claim reduced UDP latency is fluff. It's like the magician getting you to look at his assistant's chest while he moves a hidden card to the top of the deck.
Besides, TCP offload is a technology to increase throughput, not to reduce latency.
We are agreed that TCP is not UDP, right?
On a highway with a 65MPH limit, where the bulk of the traffic is going 80MPH, 10MPH is nothing.
Sure, if you're going 10 over in a 25, it's a major detail, but context needs to be taken into account.
This isn't a Fifth Amendment issue, which applies to testimony. This is straightforward evidence. Are you seriously arguing that it is somehow improper to execute search warrants against criminal suspects for directly relevant evidence for which probable cause exists? Seriously?
No, I'm saying it is a Fifth amendment issue to require somebody to maintain a physical record of their actions solely for the purpose of bypassing that individual's fifth amendment rights.
If you've been accident free for 30 years, it means that you either don't drive much, or that you're very lucky. It only takes one bad driver to cause an accident, yet many accidents involve more than one vehicle. When you do the math it adds up to even the best of drivers getting into an accident every several years on average. And that doesn't even take mechanical failures into account. What if you have a blow-out?
If you drive for long enough you will get into an accident. That means at some point in your life somebody will be interested in your black-box data.
Now, you may say, you don't break any traffic laws, so the box is still in your favor. Two words. Bull. Shit.
Traffic law is nebulous. There are laws against "Driving too fast for conditions" (Translation: you are always in violation of the speed limit law if you are in an accident for any reason), "Failure to drive in the established lane" (Translation: If you have a blowout and spin off the road, you broke the law. I personally have been ticketed for this, and it has taught me never to call a cop when I get a flat, even if I think I may be blocking traffic slightly), and "Driving recklessly" (Translation: You're gulity of a traffic violation if any traffic officer says you are, or if you get into an accident for any reason). It is technically impossible for these boxes to prove that you haven't broken the law. They can only be used against you.
You think the data will only be interesting in an accident? How long until insurance companies give a discount for showing them the data? And if the data isn't immaculate, what do you think will happen? If you live in a state where competition is regulated out of the system, I'm sure they're dying to get some dirt on you to raise your rates. Shortly thereafter, the discounted rate for showing your perfect blax-box data will increase to the old 'regular' rate anyway, and suddenly you will effectively be charged for your driving privacy, even if your driving is completely safe and your record is clean. I have a completely clean driving record, and my insurance rates are low enough, thank you. I don't need a device installed in my car that is a big excuse for my insurance company to rase my rates for no good reason.
Enforcement is a terrible way to influence behavior anyway. Look how well it is working on our roads already, or in the war on drugs, or... Well, take your pick. We would be better off making the driving test more difficult, and making people have more experience before allowing them onto the roads unaccompanied. Of course there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there, but it can be overcome. If people were better trained, our traffic laws coul be less arbitrary too. Of course that would cut off a big chunk of government revenue from traffic fines, but if you ask me, that's a good thing anyway. I don't think they should be allowed to keep those fines in the first place due to the obvious conflict of interest.
imagine if your child or family member was hit and injured by a guy who was street racing
If the world worked the way I think it should, you would be going straight to hell for attempting to use an emotional argument to trick somebody in to believing something unjust.
The prosecution needs to prove speeding or reckless driving to convict the defendant on the most serious charges. Would you say that getting data from a device in that case would be wrong?
The circumstances under which the incident occured have absolutely no bearing on whether it is right or wrong to force somebody to incriminate themselves. If some criminals need to go free in order to protect this right for innocent people, then so be it.
In this particular case, the argument "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" flies pretty well because the information on the device could exculpate the defendant as well.
The argument only flies because you left half of it out. Want to play with emotional circumstances? What if the street racer who injured your family member's insurance company refuses to pay due to some inane detail on your family member's black box, like that your family member was going 10mph over the speed limit? Clearly, the street racer is guilty of a crime regardless of how fast your family member was going...
If you think you have nothing to hide, you don't know what it is that you've got. What you've got are rights that protect you from being unjustly imprisoned through corecion. As soon as you exchange those rights for vengence, you may as well allow torture. It's cheaper than a black box and has the same end result.
Perhaps we need our society to degenerate to the way it was a few hundred years ago for a while. It seems that people have forgotten the lessons our founding fathers learned the hard way. They wrote that stuff into the US constitution and made it very difficult to change for a good reason.