I want to agree with you, I really do. As I noted in other posts, I held a similar principled view for a long time, and obviously you've noticed from my sig that I have strong reservations about overstretched government authority.
But in the end, pragmatism won. Laws do not exist in a vacuum. Laws may not be intended to send a message, but as a practical reality, they do. This is demonstrated very clearly by the campaigns to use hands-free kits here in the UK that I mentioned earlier in this discussion. Advertisers latched on to the fact that an exception had been made and only hand-held devices were banned, even though the very same research that the government used to justify that ban also showed that using a hands-free was almost as dangerous. Since that time, it's not only people who don't care about safe driving who have been using them, it's also a whole generation of young drivers who've been convinced that it actually is safe, because look, the government said so!
Crucially, from an ethical point of view, we are also talking about activities that are reasonable to prohibit anyway. There is no doubt that driving while distracted by a phone is dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming. Almost everyone who uses a phone while in the driver's seat with the engine running really is a dangerous fool and really does deserve to be punished, whether you get them for a technical offence or you prosecute them under some blanket safety/consideration for others law. Laws banning things like driving while on a phone or drinking and driving are evidence-based and they are about genuinely dangerous and inconsiderate behaviour, and that is why I don't have a problem with them despite my concerns about overreaching government. (Technical offences that aren't based on clear evidence are a different matter, but that's a discussion for another day.)
Of course there will always be edge cases where you could argue that it does no harm to call from the driver's seat, like if you're stuck in a queue behind an accident and obviously not going anywhere for a while. That's always going to be a difficulty on some level with any law that restricts a general behaviour, and maybe it would be in the interests of justice to have an absolute defence against any technical driving offence that the behaviour was not unsafe/inconsiderate/insert other principle here. But please be honest, that's not really what people who object to these laws are talking about most of the time, any more than people who used to object to drunk driving laws were worried that they might get caught sitting in the driver's seat of their parked car with a cigarette at the end of the night.
In an ideal world, I really would prefer, as I'm fairly sure you would, that we had a much simpler set of laws on the books, based on principles and common sense, and then allowed courts to make decisions on merit in each individual case. But that requires an enforcement system that is very likely to catch offenders and deal with them efficiently, and just as importantly, very unlikely to catch anyone else and cause them extensive stress and disruption they don't deserve. That in turn relies on having many front-line police officers who all have perfect judgement. While I do have a lot of respect for most police officers I've met, that's a heavy burden to put on one individual making a decision in the heat of the moment, and given the burden that simply being pulled over or arrested carries in modern society even if no further action is taken, there are real ethical/legal concerns over allowing too much discretion to officers about what is and isn't worth imposing that burden on a member of the public.
So at this point, I'm not convinced that on balance such a situation would really be an improvement on an explicit prohibition for something that is, under most circumstances, very dangerous. The law isn't, and never can be, perfect, because there is always a cost to enforcement. I've been a witness in court, in a case where someone was trie
Back in the day, I used to find that treating a requirement to send a CV only in.doc form was a pretty good self-filtering exercise to remove employers I probably didn't want to work for. Then again, the whole employment and recruitment game turned out not to be for me, and I got out a long time ago to go freelance. Even then, it already seemed that many employers were being taken over by automated systems and the stereotype incompetent HR people running them, and lawyers were writing all the contracts to be so increasingly one-sided they were a joke. None of that sounds like a recipe for smart people I'd want to work with hiring other smart people I'd want to work with.:-(
I have never worked 40+ hour weeks for extended periods in my whole career, as an employee, freelance contractor/consultant, or running my own "real business". I think I can honestly say that my contribution was still valued everywhere I've ever worked, I've never suffered for not putting in a bunch of unpaid overtime on a regular basis just to be seen, and the businesses I started are doing OK so far. Of course, I was also lucky in the sense that the guys I worked for and with as an employee were all decent people and more interested in getting a good job done than stereotypical poor middle management.
Then again, if you're any good as a coder then you can choose not to work for silly people, at least not for long. It's just a shame how many professionals in the field don't realise that and allow themselves to be exploited for years until hopefully they learn better. Listening to an enthusiastic 25-year-old talking about how great it is that he works 60 hour weeks writing code because his employer brings in pizza if they're still there at 19:30 and buys lunch as well on weekends is like listening to a documentary about Stockholm syndrome.
I'm genuinely curious to know whether that has ever been formally challenged.
I'm no expert on Australian law, but for employment law and tax purposes here in the UK, the actual working arrangements can be at least as relevant as any theoretical employment arrangement set out in a contract.
I don't know what Google Glass is really for either, except possibly furthering the universal surveillance of everything in the universe by another unwelcome step -- or not, because even people who normally don't think about or ignore this kind of privacy issue still tend to react with hostility when the creepiness is overt.
Your logic is completely flawed. If children are more distracting than using a smartphone, then children are a safety risk.
Of course. I don't know which part of my logic you think was flawed, because I said exactly that in the GP post.
You are trying to make a value judgment to excuse unsafe behavior. Specifically, somebody has to take children somewhere. That's fine, but, see, I don't have kids. I don't value your values.
And you're entitled to your opinion, and to disagree with me. But laws are, in general, about reconciling the different positions of two parties. There is no logical flaw in a law that says in some cases one party's rights take precedence and in other cases the other party's rights take precedence, because the relative costs are different in the two cases.
In this case, the cost of not being able to use distracting new technologies while driving is that if you're a relatively poor driver and can't follow a route without being distracted by navigation aids then you have to pull over for a few seconds to check your directions. This is hardly a great burden! For one thing, we did this before the gadgets were available, and as it turned out, most people did just fine without the modern gadgetry almost all of the time. And in any case, as we've discussed at length through this Slashdot discussion, there are plenty of ways to design modern navigation aids that don't require the level of distraction we're talking about. I don't see anyone arguing that modern technologies shouldn't be used, just that they should be used responsibly and not in ways that dramatically increase the risk of killing someone just to save a few seconds of the driver's time.
Meanwhile, the cost of not allowing children in cars if they might get upset would be that having a family and taking part in modern society would become very difficult for many people. That doesn't automatically change the argument, and I've never said it does, but it's a much higher cost than just pulling over for a few seconds if you're following a new route and don't have navigation aids that are safe to use while driving.
BTW, you do realize that entering and leaving traffic are inherently dangerous too, right? Very dangerous, in fact. So exiting traffic and re-entering it constantly actually increases your risk of getting in an accident too. Again, if we're quantifying, quantify. All of it. Not just the parts that some people like to whine about.
You know that traffic engineers and road safety researchers spend a lot of time investigating how to make junctions safer for precisely that reason, right?
You seem to be arguing against a position that distracting devices are the only problem. But no-one is actually taking that position, so you're just attacking a straw man. What we are saying is that distracting devices are a problem, and one we can trivially do something about.
OK, we can definitely agree that working with TeX can be tedious. It's like the edit-compile-test cycle with some programming languages: you know why it's done, but it feels horribly slow if you've ever used a language with an interactive REPL that gives immediate feedback.
I don't know which "serious charting and drawing packages" you're referring to or what your criteria for "professional-looking illustrations" are though.
My criteria would start with showing information clearly and accurately. For things like mathematical papers, I'm more interested in having, say, charts with clearly marked axes and distinctive symbols than in multi-coloured gradients and 3D effects.
But again, I agree with you completely on the placement issue and how much attention to detail can be required to get good results. Indeed, I asked in another recent post whether there was a market out there for a "serious" writing and DTP tool that would offer TeX-like precision but with a more modern approach to its UI and WYSIWYG presentation.
So, by that logic, we should ban car stereos since they encourage people to take their eyes off the road and their mind off driving.
Messing around with the stereo while you should be driving is dangerous and does cause accidents.
Banning stereos seems excessive, as there is little evidence that they create the same kind of distraction effect as talking on a mobile phone. However, requiring that car stereos must have easily accessible controls that can be operated by touch alone would probably be a reasonable step.
Better yet, there are both wheel-mounted controls and voice command systems today that can do things like changing the channel without requiring either hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. You could also probably make a fair case on safety grounds for any touch controls that don't fit that criteria to be disabled while the vehicle is travelling above a very low speed, except perhaps for turning the thing off entirely if it's distracting.
And we would also have to ban GPS units since that map they show can only be seen if you look at it.
Again, that's not an absurd idea on safety grounds. Sat-nav systems already provide audible directions so you don't have to take your eyes off the road while using them. If you want visual aids, perhaps they should be projected HUD-style onto the windscreen where the driver doesn't have to shift their vision much to see them; this technology already exists. Alternatively, there could be some sort of certification requirement for visual navigation systems involving a practical, controlled demonstration that driver performance is not impaired when they are in use.
If you ban GPS units, then people will use paper based maps they printed from online map services. This is far more dangerous than using your phone.
Well, I'm not convinced that is actually true on either count. Some of us learned to drive before modern gadgets were available, yet remarkably we still managed to find our way from A to B without getting lost or waving vast amounts of paper all over the place. As I said, if you were following a tricky route or got lost, you would just pull over and quickly check the map. And of course there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do that using whatever better alternatives modern technology can offer, once you're no longer trying to drive at the same time.
It sounds like the campaign you're talking about is a great example of excessive signage causing problems, which ought to be removed as I mentioned in my previous post.
I have a lot of sympathy with your position; I used to hold it myself. Please see my other post about why I changed my mind.
(In a nutshell, if the law is too generic or bans some cases but not others just because it would be hard to enforce the others, it seems that through some combination of ignorance and arrogance the kind of people who are most likely to have an accident in the first place often then believe highly dangerous behaviours are acceptable because "there's no law against it".)
If it's legal where you are to mess around with a large format paper map while driving instead of paying attention to what's happening on the road, then I suggest that your law is broken.
If we should ban looking at a map, maybe we need to ban street signs also, since reading those distracts you from driving.
Actually, while I suspect you were being facetious, there is a real point there. Excessive street furniture and signage is now well known to increase the risk of accidents. As a result, highway planning authorities in various countries have been increasingly interested in this issue in recent years, and we're starting to see official guidelines explicitly consider the problem of street clutter and advocate reducing signage and prioritising essential information only.
However, the situations of using an electronic map vs. reading a road sign are not directly comparable. Most road signs give information that you act on immediately. By their nature, road signs also don't tend to take your eyes completely off the road ahead, and certainly not for several seconds.
Let's ban driving. That'll decrease car accident risk.
There's always someone who says that. And then there's usually someone else who says, "But children are far more distracting than calling/texting/browsing Facebook while I'm driving!"
Both claims are correct, and both are irrelevant.
There are good reasons to allow driving in the first place, even though it carries risks. The total cost to society from banning driving would be horrendous.
However, there really aren't a lot of good reasons to accept people doing things while driving that increase the inherent risk several times over. If you passed your test, you know how to pull over somewhere safe for maybe 20 seconds to check a map or reconfigure your sat-nav, and you really ought to know how dangerous it is to unnecessarily take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, or your mind off your driving. The fact that some people can pass their test apparently without knowing these things is why sometimes laws are needed to correct that oversight by revoking their licence.
I used to have a similar view: there ought to be only a handful of traffic laws, covering general offences like driving dangerously or inconsiderately, and it ought to be up to a court to consider each case on its merits.
The thing that convinced me otherwise was the reaction to our mobile phone law in the UK, which basically prohibits handheld but not hands-free phone use while driving. I've seen way too many arrogant people, many of them young and inexperienced drivers who are at higher risk of having an accident already, claim quite seriously that using a hands-free is safe and that's why the law only bans hand-helds. I even saw blatant, person-sized adverts in major stores right after the law was introduced, saying things like "Stay safe on the road!" while selling hands-free kits.
After seeing that sort of things for an extended period, I came to realise that legislation is important not only for its ability to prosecute in practice but also for the message it sends about what is considered acceptable behaviour. Specifically, if you have some laws but don't explicitly prohibit something else, a certain type of person will use that as an excuse to do the other things even if those things are well known to be horribly dangerous. Personally, I'd rather people like that weren't encouraged, even if actually getting them off the road is difficult in practice.
That's not to say that blanket bans and technical offences shouldn't be assessed critically and can't have downsides. The one I struggle with personally is the idea that by law I should wait at a red light even if an emergency vehicle is blocked behind me and I can see that it is definitely safe to advance; I understand the reasoning, and why the emergency services tend to support it too, but I suspect that if I were ever in that situation I'd find it hard to just sit there. But that sort of consideration doesn't tend to apply with using devices while driving; there is basically never a safe way to do that on the evidence to date, and there is already an exception in the law at least here in the UK if you really do need to make an emergency call but it would be dangerous to stop, which is the only time I can think of that the extra risk might be justified. That's a long way from getting lost but then taking your eyes off the road to read an electronic map, though.
So because some bad things happened before, we should just ignore entirely avoidable bad things that have become possible with the introduction of new technologies?
Apparently so. Given the overwhelming evidence that many of the activities mentioned in this thread do dramatically increase the risk of having an accident, it appears that a lot more things should be prohibited than actually are.
If anyone has a good solution to this problem, I'm very very interested to hear it!
I've been wondering for a long time whether there's a market for a "serious" writing and DTP tool, with a TeX-like approach to precision/quality/flexibility, but with a modern editing suite and WYSIWYG presentation.
When you've used tools like the TeX family or even modern HTML+CSS, the limitations of templates/styling/structured content in any word processor or DTP tool that I know of today are painful, particularly when you're often paying hundreds for the latter while the former are free. On the other hand, the tools for large-scale layout in the TeX family and CSS are also painful, and defining a complete new document template or LaTeX class file using TeX-based tools is black magic at best.
But we know how to write much better basic text editors for creating the original content quickly. Different people will prefer Emacs or Vim or TextMate or Sublime Text or various programming IDEs or maybe something else, but all of these are far beyond the trivial editing functionality in the likes of Word or InDesign. And we know how to work with documents with some basic structure and separate out formatting/layout details, because TeX and HTML have shown us the possibilities here. And there's no reason we shouldn't design a flexible, elegant system for specifying page layouts and large-scale formatting the way that the good parts of modern CSS or the kinds of GUI toolkits used by programmers can do.
So I have to wonder why no-one has been disrupting the industry a bit by actually doing this. Is it just too much of a barrier to entry to be compatible with everything these days? Have we descended so far into doing everything in 140 characters or fewer that no-one really wants a traditional long-form text editor any more and a new tool would be aiming at a niche market?
Yeah, it looks great, but typing that amount of markup for a few lines of equations is hardly efficient.
Really? What is more efficient? If you're thinking of something like the toolbar-based equation editors in Word and the like, please try typing your next paper using nothing but a point-and-click keyboard, and you'll soon figure out why they haven't taken off.
And the only condolence with the layout of graphics is that people almost expect them to look shit.
That's another little irony, because the serious charting and drawing packages for TeX also produce more practical and professional-looking illustrations than a lot of supposedly high-end drawing packages today.
Compatibility is fine where it makes sense. But this particular thing was a major refactor.
Then perhaps it was unwise to push it out to millions of users?
This is the first problem I see with your whole analogy with the Linux kernel: when the Linux kernel is updated, nothing automatically pushes breaking changes out to every Linux machine. In fact, doing so would be crazy, as you'd compromise half the servers on the Internet and sysadmins would storm your building and do very unpleasant things to you for trying.
Come to think of it, your whole Linux kernel parallel is rather a bad example anyway, because submitting a change that breaks user space is probably the fastest way possible to get Linux Torvalds to explode (short of mentioning that you're a C++ programmer, of course).
Not only that it, it was related to security and privacy.
Right. And for many of those users, the result will have been a reduction in privacy, and possibly one they weren't aware of. It's rather like all the other reductions in privacy that users wouldn't be aware of that have been mentioned by me and others throughout this Slashdot discussion.
You appear to be suggesting that Firefox should maintain two APIs or some quirks mode just to keep a handful of extensions like Lazarus happy.
No, I'm suggesting that pushing frequent updates with no indication of the scope or scale of changes simply doesn't work in the long run if you also want to build a productive ecosystem on top of your platform. Lazarus is the extension where I happened to notice this problem first, but it's hardly the only one to offer that sort of functionality or that might be interested in disabling some features in privacy mode.
You can have a platform that provides good stability for people to build things on it. You can have a platform that tries to advance the state of the art as fast as possible, at the expense of breaking things at a moment's notice. But you can't have your cake and eat it, by having a platform that is both fast-moving and stable at the same time.
I hope you can see that from a security perspective what a disastrously bad idea that is,
If an essential security patch also changes an API, you're doing it wrong.
especially when the extension could just be updated.
Right, it could. And who is going to do that update? Your scheme has turned contributing a useful update to Firefox from a one-time effort if you've got something to share that others might find useful into an ongoing maintenance commitment or seeing your effort stagnate within a matter of weeks. As I said, that kind of policy just isn't compatible with encouraging a productive plug-in/extension ecosystem, especially when so many of those extensions are contributed by volunteers and probably written in their spare time.
The Linux kernel offers no guarantee to modules that they'll work with a new point release. You know what happens if your module doesn't work with a new kernel? Tough, fix it.
Well, no, you're ignoring the other possibility: users don't get to have both a newer kernel and a useful module at the same time. Coincidentally, I spent much of today in a meeting about a development team in very much that position, where an entire project is potentially being delayed because sorting out basic Linux functionality is now the critical path. So you're really trying that argument on the wrong guy today.:-)
You're also glossing over the inconvenient truth that most people don't build their own kernel and modules, they install a specific version of a recognised distribution. Despite often having software that is several years behind the latest and greatest, platforms like Debian Stable remain popular because at least you know what you're getting and don't have to worry about the rug being pulled out from under you every time you install a couple of security patches.
Second, perhaps Microsoft can afford to write backwards compatible APIs or workaround brain damaged apps but that doesn't mean its a smart thing to do especially for open source software.
Yes, Microsoft has invested a staggering amount of effort over the years maintaining compatibility for their operating systems for extended periods, and even gone as far as to reproduce specific behaviours that popular third party applications relied on even if they had no responsibility or obligation to do so. If there's one thing they know how to do well, it's building a sustainable development platform, and that's why for all the shiny new gadgets around, the overwhelming majority of us are still running Windows.
I'm puzzled by your idea that paying so much attention to compatibility might not be a smart idea for open source software. If you're relying significantly on the community or at least on voluntary contributions from other businesses because of common interest, making it easier for everyone to contribute and maintaining the value of those contributions over time seems to me like it would be even more important. I think one could make a very strong argument that the practical difficulty of making a lasting contribution to so many open source projects is the biggest single factor holding the movement back.
It's up to extension writers to ensure their product works with the new releases, not the other way around.
Sorry, but that policy is just plain daft if you're going to push out automatic updates every five minutes.
Firefox is a good browser primarily because of its support for extensions. Many of the most useful extensions aren't written by professionals and aren't going to be actively maintained every few days on the off chance that Mozilla will push a breaking change in the next update.
If you kill that ecosystem, you kill Firefox. It probably is as simple as that.
Expecting the browser to hold up just on the off chance it might break [random-extension] is ludicrous and impractical.
Nonsense.
The rest of the software industry has been successfully using major-minor-point release or version-service pack-patch strategies for decades. Among other things, this tiered approach has clear advantages for developers, who know when APIs can be relied on to be stable and when they might break. It also tends to limit breaking changes to major versions, which means they don't happen too frequently to keep up.
Similarly, it means users know when to expect a consistent experience, including compatibility with extensions they already use, and when there are likely to be major new features or things might move around in the UI. This kind of stability is good for everyone, except maybe trendy web design bloggers and browser developers with adequacy issues.
Mozilla have chosen to move to much more frequent releases and to remove any distinction between a major update and an essential security patch. They have deliberately sacrificed that stability. Doing so was a foolish and short-sighted decision at the time, as numerous people have said all along. Now, unfortunately, they are reaping what they sowed. Or, to be more accurate, their users are.
It looks OK, yes. I did a bit of Googling about this recently, and quite a few people seemed to be reporting silly regressions in SVG from IE9 to IE10.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to agree with you, I really do. As I noted in other posts, I held a similar principled view for a long time, and obviously you've noticed from my sig that I have strong reservations about overstretched government authority.
But in the end, pragmatism won. Laws do not exist in a vacuum. Laws may not be intended to send a message, but as a practical reality, they do. This is demonstrated very clearly by the campaigns to use hands-free kits here in the UK that I mentioned earlier in this discussion. Advertisers latched on to the fact that an exception had been made and only hand-held devices were banned, even though the very same research that the government used to justify that ban also showed that using a hands-free was almost as dangerous. Since that time, it's not only people who don't care about safe driving who have been using them, it's also a whole generation of young drivers who've been convinced that it actually is safe, because look, the government said so!
Crucially, from an ethical point of view, we are also talking about activities that are reasonable to prohibit anyway. There is no doubt that driving while distracted by a phone is dangerous. The evidence is overwhelming. Almost everyone who uses a phone while in the driver's seat with the engine running really is a dangerous fool and really does deserve to be punished, whether you get them for a technical offence or you prosecute them under some blanket safety/consideration for others law. Laws banning things like driving while on a phone or drinking and driving are evidence-based and they are about genuinely dangerous and inconsiderate behaviour, and that is why I don't have a problem with them despite my concerns about overreaching government. (Technical offences that aren't based on clear evidence are a different matter, but that's a discussion for another day.)
Of course there will always be edge cases where you could argue that it does no harm to call from the driver's seat, like if you're stuck in a queue behind an accident and obviously not going anywhere for a while. That's always going to be a difficulty on some level with any law that restricts a general behaviour, and maybe it would be in the interests of justice to have an absolute defence against any technical driving offence that the behaviour was not unsafe/inconsiderate/insert other principle here. But please be honest, that's not really what people who object to these laws are talking about most of the time, any more than people who used to object to drunk driving laws were worried that they might get caught sitting in the driver's seat of their parked car with a cigarette at the end of the night.
In an ideal world, I really would prefer, as I'm fairly sure you would, that we had a much simpler set of laws on the books, based on principles and common sense, and then allowed courts to make decisions on merit in each individual case. But that requires an enforcement system that is very likely to catch offenders and deal with them efficiently, and just as importantly, very unlikely to catch anyone else and cause them extensive stress and disruption they don't deserve. That in turn relies on having many front-line police officers who all have perfect judgement. While I do have a lot of respect for most police officers I've met, that's a heavy burden to put on one individual making a decision in the heat of the moment, and given the burden that simply being pulled over or arrested carries in modern society even if no further action is taken, there are real ethical/legal concerns over allowing too much discretion to officers about what is and isn't worth imposing that burden on a member of the public.
So at this point, I'm not convinced that on balance such a situation would really be an improvement on an explicit prohibition for something that is, under most circumstances, very dangerous. The law isn't, and never can be, perfect, because there is always a cost to enforcement. I've been a witness in court, in a case where someone was trie
Back in the day, I used to find that treating a requirement to send a CV only in .doc form was a pretty good self-filtering exercise to remove employers I probably didn't want to work for. Then again, the whole employment and recruitment game turned out not to be for me, and I got out a long time ago to go freelance. Even then, it already seemed that many employers were being taken over by automated systems and the stereotype incompetent HR people running them, and lawyers were writing all the contracts to be so increasingly one-sided they were a joke. None of that sounds like a recipe for smart people I'd want to work with hiring other smart people I'd want to work with. :-(
I bet you still have to submit your resume as a .doc file, though.
I have never worked 40+ hour weeks for extended periods in my whole career, as an employee, freelance contractor/consultant, or running my own "real business". I think I can honestly say that my contribution was still valued everywhere I've ever worked, I've never suffered for not putting in a bunch of unpaid overtime on a regular basis just to be seen, and the businesses I started are doing OK so far. Of course, I was also lucky in the sense that the guys I worked for and with as an employee were all decent people and more interested in getting a good job done than stereotypical poor middle management.
Then again, if you're any good as a coder then you can choose not to work for silly people, at least not for long. It's just a shame how many professionals in the field don't realise that and allow themselves to be exploited for years until hopefully they learn better. Listening to an enthusiastic 25-year-old talking about how great it is that he works 60 hour weeks writing code because his employer brings in pizza if they're still there at 19:30 and buys lunch as well on weekends is like listening to a documentary about Stockholm syndrome.
...do what I did, go where the money is.
I would, but I'm not sure I could ever make enough working in the financial markets to buy back my soul...
I'm genuinely curious to know whether that has ever been formally challenged.
I'm no expert on Australian law, but for employment law and tax purposes here in the UK, the actual working arrangements can be at least as relevant as any theoretical employment arrangement set out in a contract.
OK, but who's going to buy the next five?
I don't know what Google Glass is really for either, except possibly furthering the universal surveillance of everything in the universe by another unwelcome step -- or not, because even people who normally don't think about or ignore this kind of privacy issue still tend to react with hostility when the creepiness is overt.
Your logic is completely flawed. If children are more distracting than using a smartphone, then children are a safety risk.
Of course. I don't know which part of my logic you think was flawed, because I said exactly that in the GP post.
You are trying to make a value judgment to excuse unsafe behavior. Specifically, somebody has to take children somewhere. That's fine, but, see, I don't have kids. I don't value your values.
And you're entitled to your opinion, and to disagree with me. But laws are, in general, about reconciling the different positions of two parties. There is no logical flaw in a law that says in some cases one party's rights take precedence and in other cases the other party's rights take precedence, because the relative costs are different in the two cases.
In this case, the cost of not being able to use distracting new technologies while driving is that if you're a relatively poor driver and can't follow a route without being distracted by navigation aids then you have to pull over for a few seconds to check your directions. This is hardly a great burden! For one thing, we did this before the gadgets were available, and as it turned out, most people did just fine without the modern gadgetry almost all of the time. And in any case, as we've discussed at length through this Slashdot discussion, there are plenty of ways to design modern navigation aids that don't require the level of distraction we're talking about. I don't see anyone arguing that modern technologies shouldn't be used, just that they should be used responsibly and not in ways that dramatically increase the risk of killing someone just to save a few seconds of the driver's time.
Meanwhile, the cost of not allowing children in cars if they might get upset would be that having a family and taking part in modern society would become very difficult for many people. That doesn't automatically change the argument, and I've never said it does, but it's a much higher cost than just pulling over for a few seconds if you're following a new route and don't have navigation aids that are safe to use while driving.
BTW, you do realize that entering and leaving traffic are inherently dangerous too, right? Very dangerous, in fact. So exiting traffic and re-entering it constantly actually increases your risk of getting in an accident too. Again, if we're quantifying, quantify. All of it. Not just the parts that some people like to whine about.
You know that traffic engineers and road safety researchers spend a lot of time investigating how to make junctions safer for precisely that reason, right?
You seem to be arguing against a position that distracting devices are the only problem. But no-one is actually taking that position, so you're just attacking a straw man. What we are saying is that distracting devices are a problem, and one we can trivially do something about.
OK, we can definitely agree that working with TeX can be tedious. It's like the edit-compile-test cycle with some programming languages: you know why it's done, but it feels horribly slow if you've ever used a language with an interactive REPL that gives immediate feedback.
I don't know which "serious charting and drawing packages" you're referring to or what your criteria for "professional-looking illustrations" are though.
My criteria would start with showing information clearly and accurately. For things like mathematical papers, I'm more interested in having, say, charts with clearly marked axes and distinctive symbols than in multi-coloured gradients and 3D effects.
But again, I agree with you completely on the placement issue and how much attention to detail can be required to get good results. Indeed, I asked in another recent post whether there was a market out there for a "serious" writing and DTP tool that would offer TeX-like precision but with a more modern approach to its UI and WYSIWYG presentation.
So, by that logic, we should ban car stereos since they encourage people to take their eyes off the road and their mind off driving.
Messing around with the stereo while you should be driving is dangerous and does cause accidents.
Banning stereos seems excessive, as there is little evidence that they create the same kind of distraction effect as talking on a mobile phone. However, requiring that car stereos must have easily accessible controls that can be operated by touch alone would probably be a reasonable step.
Better yet, there are both wheel-mounted controls and voice command systems today that can do things like changing the channel without requiring either hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. You could also probably make a fair case on safety grounds for any touch controls that don't fit that criteria to be disabled while the vehicle is travelling above a very low speed, except perhaps for turning the thing off entirely if it's distracting.
And we would also have to ban GPS units since that map they show can only be seen if you look at it.
Again, that's not an absurd idea on safety grounds. Sat-nav systems already provide audible directions so you don't have to take your eyes off the road while using them. If you want visual aids, perhaps they should be projected HUD-style onto the windscreen where the driver doesn't have to shift their vision much to see them; this technology already exists. Alternatively, there could be some sort of certification requirement for visual navigation systems involving a practical, controlled demonstration that driver performance is not impaired when they are in use.
If you ban GPS units, then people will use paper based maps they printed from online map services. This is far more dangerous than using your phone.
Well, I'm not convinced that is actually true on either count. Some of us learned to drive before modern gadgets were available, yet remarkably we still managed to find our way from A to B without getting lost or waving vast amounts of paper all over the place. As I said, if you were following a tricky route or got lost, you would just pull over and quickly check the map. And of course there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do that using whatever better alternatives modern technology can offer, once you're no longer trying to drive at the same time.
It sounds like the campaign you're talking about is a great example of excessive signage causing problems, which ought to be removed as I mentioned in my previous post.
I have a lot of sympathy with your position; I used to hold it myself. Please see my other post about why I changed my mind.
(In a nutshell, if the law is too generic or bans some cases but not others just because it would be hard to enforce the others, it seems that through some combination of ignorance and arrogance the kind of people who are most likely to have an accident in the first place often then believe highly dangerous behaviours are acceptable because "there's no law against it".)
If it's legal where you are to mess around with a large format paper map while driving instead of paying attention to what's happening on the road, then I suggest that your law is broken.
If we should ban looking at a map, maybe we need to ban street signs also, since reading those distracts you from driving.
Actually, while I suspect you were being facetious, there is a real point there. Excessive street furniture and signage is now well known to increase the risk of accidents. As a result, highway planning authorities in various countries have been increasingly interested in this issue in recent years, and we're starting to see official guidelines explicitly consider the problem of street clutter and advocate reducing signage and prioritising essential information only.
However, the situations of using an electronic map vs. reading a road sign are not directly comparable. Most road signs give information that you act on immediately. By their nature, road signs also don't tend to take your eyes completely off the road ahead, and certainly not for several seconds.
plain and simple, we should not outlaw "darwin awards", if people want to kill themselves by doing something stupid, good for them
Sadly, in many accidents, it's not the idiot driving without paying attention who dies.
Let's ban driving. That'll decrease car accident risk.
There's always someone who says that. And then there's usually someone else who says, "But children are far more distracting than calling/texting/browsing Facebook while I'm driving!"
Both claims are correct, and both are irrelevant.
There are good reasons to allow driving in the first place, even though it carries risks. The total cost to society from banning driving would be horrendous.
However, there really aren't a lot of good reasons to accept people doing things while driving that increase the inherent risk several times over. If you passed your test, you know how to pull over somewhere safe for maybe 20 seconds to check a map or reconfigure your sat-nav, and you really ought to know how dangerous it is to unnecessarily take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, or your mind off your driving. The fact that some people can pass their test apparently without knowing these things is why sometimes laws are needed to correct that oversight by revoking their licence.
I used to have a similar view: there ought to be only a handful of traffic laws, covering general offences like driving dangerously or inconsiderately, and it ought to be up to a court to consider each case on its merits.
The thing that convinced me otherwise was the reaction to our mobile phone law in the UK, which basically prohibits handheld but not hands-free phone use while driving. I've seen way too many arrogant people, many of them young and inexperienced drivers who are at higher risk of having an accident already, claim quite seriously that using a hands-free is safe and that's why the law only bans hand-helds. I even saw blatant, person-sized adverts in major stores right after the law was introduced, saying things like "Stay safe on the road!" while selling hands-free kits.
After seeing that sort of things for an extended period, I came to realise that legislation is important not only for its ability to prosecute in practice but also for the message it sends about what is considered acceptable behaviour. Specifically, if you have some laws but don't explicitly prohibit something else, a certain type of person will use that as an excuse to do the other things even if those things are well known to be horribly dangerous. Personally, I'd rather people like that weren't encouraged, even if actually getting them off the road is difficult in practice.
That's not to say that blanket bans and technical offences shouldn't be assessed critically and can't have downsides. The one I struggle with personally is the idea that by law I should wait at a red light even if an emergency vehicle is blocked behind me and I can see that it is definitely safe to advance; I understand the reasoning, and why the emergency services tend to support it too, but I suspect that if I were ever in that situation I'd find it hard to just sit there. But that sort of consideration doesn't tend to apply with using devices while driving; there is basically never a safe way to do that on the evidence to date, and there is already an exception in the law at least here in the UK if you really do need to make an emergency call but it would be dangerous to stop, which is the only time I can think of that the extra risk might be justified. That's a long way from getting lost but then taking your eyes off the road to read an electronic map, though.
So because some bad things happened before, we should just ignore entirely avoidable bad things that have become possible with the introduction of new technologies?
The law is out of date
Apparently so. Given the overwhelming evidence that many of the activities mentioned in this thread do dramatically increase the risk of having an accident, it appears that a lot more things should be prohibited than actually are.
If anyone has a good solution to this problem, I'm very very interested to hear it!
I've been wondering for a long time whether there's a market for a "serious" writing and DTP tool, with a TeX-like approach to precision/quality/flexibility, but with a modern editing suite and WYSIWYG presentation.
When you've used tools like the TeX family or even modern HTML+CSS, the limitations of templates/styling/structured content in any word processor or DTP tool that I know of today are painful, particularly when you're often paying hundreds for the latter while the former are free. On the other hand, the tools for large-scale layout in the TeX family and CSS are also painful, and defining a complete new document template or LaTeX class file using TeX-based tools is black magic at best.
But we know how to write much better basic text editors for creating the original content quickly. Different people will prefer Emacs or Vim or TextMate or Sublime Text or various programming IDEs or maybe something else, but all of these are far beyond the trivial editing functionality in the likes of Word or InDesign. And we know how to work with documents with some basic structure and separate out formatting/layout details, because TeX and HTML have shown us the possibilities here. And there's no reason we shouldn't design a flexible, elegant system for specifying page layouts and large-scale formatting the way that the good parts of modern CSS or the kinds of GUI toolkits used by programmers can do.
So I have to wonder why no-one has been disrupting the industry a bit by actually doing this. Is it just too much of a barrier to entry to be compatible with everything these days? Have we descended so far into doing everything in 140 characters or fewer that no-one really wants a traditional long-form text editor any more and a new tool would be aiming at a niche market?
Yeah, it looks great, but typing that amount of markup for a few lines of equations is hardly efficient.
Really? What is more efficient? If you're thinking of something like the toolbar-based equation editors in Word and the like, please try typing your next paper using nothing but a point-and-click keyboard, and you'll soon figure out why they haven't taken off.
And the only condolence with the layout of graphics is that people almost expect them to look shit.
That's another little irony, because the serious charting and drawing packages for TeX also produce more practical and professional-looking illustrations than a lot of supposedly high-end drawing packages today.
Compatibility is fine where it makes sense. But this particular thing was a major refactor.
Then perhaps it was unwise to push it out to millions of users?
This is the first problem I see with your whole analogy with the Linux kernel: when the Linux kernel is updated, nothing automatically pushes breaking changes out to every Linux machine. In fact, doing so would be crazy, as you'd compromise half the servers on the Internet and sysadmins would storm your building and do very unpleasant things to you for trying.
Come to think of it, your whole Linux kernel parallel is rather a bad example anyway, because submitting a change that breaks user space is probably the fastest way possible to get Linux Torvalds to explode (short of mentioning that you're a C++ programmer, of course).
Not only that it, it was related to security and privacy.
Right. And for many of those users, the result will have been a reduction in privacy, and possibly one they weren't aware of. It's rather like all the other reductions in privacy that users wouldn't be aware of that have been mentioned by me and others throughout this Slashdot discussion.
You appear to be suggesting that Firefox should maintain two APIs or some quirks mode just to keep a handful of extensions like Lazarus happy.
No, I'm suggesting that pushing frequent updates with no indication of the scope or scale of changes simply doesn't work in the long run if you also want to build a productive ecosystem on top of your platform. Lazarus is the extension where I happened to notice this problem first, but it's hardly the only one to offer that sort of functionality or that might be interested in disabling some features in privacy mode.
You can have a platform that provides good stability for people to build things on it. You can have a platform that tries to advance the state of the art as fast as possible, at the expense of breaking things at a moment's notice. But you can't have your cake and eat it, by having a platform that is both fast-moving and stable at the same time.
I hope you can see that from a security perspective what a disastrously bad idea that is,
If an essential security patch also changes an API, you're doing it wrong.
especially when the extension could just be updated.
Right, it could. And who is going to do that update? Your scheme has turned contributing a useful update to Firefox from a one-time effort if you've got something to share that others might find useful into an ongoing maintenance commitment or seeing your effort stagnate within a matter of weeks. As I said, that kind of policy just isn't compatible with encouraging a productive plug-in/extension ecosystem, especially when so many of those extensions are contributed by volunteers and probably written in their spare time.
The Linux kernel offers no guarantee to modules that they'll work with a new point release. You know what happens if your module doesn't work with a new kernel? Tough, fix it.
Well, no, you're ignoring the other possibility: users don't get to have both a newer kernel and a useful module at the same time. Coincidentally, I spent much of today in a meeting about a development team in very much that position, where an entire project is potentially being delayed because sorting out basic Linux functionality is now the critical path. So you're really trying that argument on the wrong guy today. :-)
You're also glossing over the inconvenient truth that most people don't build their own kernel and modules, they install a specific version of a recognised distribution. Despite often having software that is several years behind the latest and greatest, platforms like Debian Stable remain popular because at least you know what you're getting and don't have to worry about the rug being pulled out from under you every time you install a couple of security patches.
Second, perhaps Microsoft can afford to write backwards compatible APIs or workaround brain damaged apps but that doesn't mean its a smart thing to do especially for open source software.
Yes, Microsoft has invested a staggering amount of effort over the years maintaining compatibility for their operating systems for extended periods, and even gone as far as to reproduce specific behaviours that popular third party applications relied on even if they had no responsibility or obligation to do so. If there's one thing they know how to do well, it's building a sustainable development platform, and that's why for all the shiny new gadgets around, the overwhelming majority of us are still running Windows.
I'm puzzled by your idea that paying so much attention to compatibility might not be a smart idea for open source software. If you're relying significantly on the community or at least on voluntary contributions from other businesses because of common interest, making it easier for everyone to contribute and maintaining the value of those contributions over time seems to me like it would be even more important. I think one could make a very strong argument that the practical difficulty of making a lasting contribution to so many open source projects is the biggest single factor holding the movement back.
It's up to extension writers to ensure their product works with the new releases, not the other way around.
Sorry, but that policy is just plain daft if you're going to push out automatic updates every five minutes.
Firefox is a good browser primarily because of its support for extensions. Many of the most useful extensions aren't written by professionals and aren't going to be actively maintained every few days on the off chance that Mozilla will push a breaking change in the next update.
If you kill that ecosystem, you kill Firefox. It probably is as simple as that.
Expecting the browser to hold up just on the off chance it might break [random-extension] is ludicrous and impractical.
Nonsense.
The rest of the software industry has been successfully using major-minor-point release or version-service pack-patch strategies for decades. Among other things, this tiered approach has clear advantages for developers, who know when APIs can be relied on to be stable and when they might break. It also tends to limit breaking changes to major versions, which means they don't happen too frequently to keep up.
Similarly, it means users know when to expect a consistent experience, including compatibility with extensions they already use, and when there are likely to be major new features or things might move around in the UI. This kind of stability is good for everyone, except maybe trendy web design bloggers and browser developers with adequacy issues.
Mozilla have chosen to move to much more frequent releases and to remove any distinction between a major update and an essential security patch. They have deliberately sacrificed that stability. Doing so was a foolish and short-sighted decision at the time, as numerous people have said all along. Now, unfortunately, they are reaping what they sowed. Or, to be more accurate, their users are.
It looks OK, yes. I did a bit of Googling about this recently, and quite a few people seemed to be reporting silly regressions in SVG from IE9 to IE10.