Again, you're making an assumption in the face of reasonable alternatives that a perfectly safe driver could have fallen victim to. This happened in Chicago, at an intersection. Driving in the shade of buildings, the view would have been just fine, and the person could have been behind their car. As you travel through the intersection, you get a blast of sunlight, and before you have time to slow down, the person walks out from behind their car and gets hit. The fact that the initial accident happened due to the sunlight lends credence to the possibility that it was difficult to avoid.
Besides which, suddenly slowing down in the middle of heavy city traffic is often not the safest maneuver, especially when there's a good chance that the people around you are just as visually impaired. And even noticing that there is an accident at all as little as 20' ahead of you can be difficult--if she was following a bus, it would be practically impossible.
Now, I'm not sure this happened in the tall building, heavy traffic part of the city. For all I know, she was head-down, typing away on Facebook. But without knowing either way, it's more than a little disturbing how many people are calling for blood, and willing to argue that they're right and she should hang for her crimes.
Given the exact same facts with more careful phasing, I bet a lot of you would be more reasonable. But, it seems to me that people had a knee-jerk reaction, and once they made their choice they'd rather see a potentially innocent person go to jail or be sued for a lifetime's worth of production than entertain the idea that they may have had the wrong knee-jerk reaction. It's extremely disappointing, both from the media and the individuals who can't or won't re-examine their thoughts.
Nice, personal insults. You must have a good argument.
Oh please, I responded in kind, just because I didn't choose to imitate your passive-aggressive snarkiness and instead had the cojones to directly insult you doesn't give you some sort of a moral high ground here. As for the rest of it, I was going to go through line-by-line again, but then I remembered that I'm not trying to prove she's innocent, I'm just trying to prove that you're a fool for thinking that you're at all justified in making the judgement you've made and sticking to it so tenaciously based on a less-than-careful reading of a single brief article, and that's self-evident so my work is already done.
So was she updating her Facebook page while she was driving, or was she not?
I don't know. Do you?
Is it legal to do that where she was?
No, but you should already know that if you want to get in such a huff about it. You aren't asking only tangentially related stupid questions to try to force me to agree with you, are you?
Does the fact that she had a fatal accident during the same minute she was updating her Facebook page in her car indicate that maybe she wasn't giving her full attention to driving?
That's not a fact, that's what's in question.
No one is saying that she hit the guy at the exact goddamn second. Look at the charges:
I never said hitting at the exact goddamn second was required, I said that hitting within 10 (which is being very generous to the plaintiff) is required to be distracted by using the phone.
Yes, using Facebook while driving is illegal. If that can be proved, she should be punished for it. However, I don't think that she should be charged with manslaughter just because she posted on Facebook two blocks before she hit somebody. At that distance, they're unrelated, and the mother said that the Facebook post occurred while she was sitting in her driveway.
Further, unless the 911 call's recording is less than a minute and ends with the sound of getting hit by a car, the two times could be exactly the same and wouldn't mean anything. He could call at 7:54, she could post at 7:54, he could still be on the phone at 8:00, get hit, and Facebook would have nothing to do with it. Hell, I didn't see anywhere in there that even said he was still on the phone when he was hit.
A "jury of your peers" usually doesn't include 12 pedants.
That's true, and a cause of a number of injustices.
It should be plenty of evidence to convict based on the fact that a Facebook update from her phone and a fatal accident occurred within seconds of each other.
You apparently don't know very much about computers. That is not a proven fact even based on the "evidence" in the article.
She is not being charged with striking the guy right at the exact same instant that she was looking at her phone, just that her phone was distracting her from driving, and she got in a fatal accident because of it.
So we're convicting based on thoughtcrime now? If she wasn't on the phone, how was it distracting her?
If you disagree, then maybe you should call her up and offer your legal services.
You shouldn't offer your legal services to anyone, because you are an idiot who makes unalterable decisions based on emotion and hearsay.
That's because most juries are idiots. I've personally seen my Facebook app sit there and retry over and over for more than a minute to post an update. You could hit submit, put your phone in your pocket, get in the car, drive 2 miles, and the whole time your phone is trying to submit the update. Hope it doesn't succeed at the wrong time!
No, I'm not missing that fact, you apparently are. How long does it take to accelerate from a full stop, when there is absolutely no danger in writing a novel on a typewriter if that's what you choose to do, to a speed that can rip an old man's leg off? In a 3-cylinder Geo Metro with a flat tire you can do it in probably less than 10 seconds.
I'm not saying the scenario is impossible, where she posted, looked up, and killed someone, but I do think it's unlikely, and there's a lot of more likely scenarios.
Why is it that those who are quickest to accuse others of poor reading comprehension often have the worst? Obviously I know she hit submit, I just question the timing. You would have to hit submit, look up, and be running somebody over. What are the odds? See my above comment for the unreliability of Facebook mobile--that's a pretty thin straw to convict somebody of manslaughter, even if it's only in your head.
Possible, sure, but what's more likely? That somebody did those exact sequence of events, which requires no more than about 10 seconds between hitting submit and hitting the person in order to not have time to react (and even that is stretching it pretty damn far, I'd put it more on the order of 1-2 seconds max), or that they hit submit somewhere in the other 50 seconds in that minute? Or maybe the sun in the eyes that caused the first accident, also caused the second?
And of course, this is supposing that the facebook app, over a cell phone connection, actually submits an update the instant you hit submit. In my experience, at least 1 in 4 times, I have to resubmit for it to work at all, and out of the other three, at least 1 will take almost a minute to post, and another will take up to an hour. It is spectacularly unreliable.
I don't think people should be allowed to post on Facebook while they're driving, that's just stupid, but there is an awful lot of supposition going on here, where people are saying "BAM! No question, I'd convict" without having anything more than the informal speculation of the aggrieved, when that means essentially ruining somebody's life.
Oh crap! I just hit somebody! Better submit this status update I was writing.
Please. If they were updating Facebook at the time of the accident, the text would still be on the phone, not on Facebook. You have to hit submit. How is this significant fact being missed?
Nothing means anything in the hands of Marketing. If they could string together a sequence of meaningless syllables that exploited a glitch in the human brain that made anything associated with it irresistable, like "Glunderflax", in a week you'd drive your Glunderflax to the Glunderflax, pick up some Glunderflax and maybe a Glunderflax, then sit down in your Glunderflax to watch Glunderflax 2: The Glunderflaxening on your Glunderflax HD.
Same in FF 4.0b9, and with a long username it makes the top 2/3s of the page pretty much useless. Turns out the first couple words of every sentence is important.
As someone who hates doing it but does it pretty well if I do say so myself (and I do), how are so many people so bad at writing HTML/CSS? Absolutely terrible resilience to anything outside the imagined uses is so common it's baffling. Here's a hint: if you have a box that things go in, it's a function. Stuff some edge cases in the domain and check the range. Here's a hint: Given what I know about username restrictions without looking at the source, WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW is a valid name, and it's just under twice as wide as mine. Try it out, see what happens. Of course, the name is annoyingly lowercased on the sidebar (form over function, yay!) so it would only be lowercase Ws, but you get the point. Every browser mentioned has developer tools that makes testing things like that ridiculously easy.
Also, like practically every single website these days, the minimum width is way too wide, and another common mistake, when the header is on top instead of being absolutely positioned, there's an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar. Usually caused by setting width to 100% with a margin/border, you can get around that on recent browsers by setting the box-model property. Also sometimes caused by sizing things with javascript and getting the timing wrong, but it doesn't look like that (scrollbar width tracks too well, content resizes too fast). Either way it screams of a slapped together layout.
Finally, the insistence on keeping every single comment rigidly expanded to the widest element on the page just so the pretty layout isn't spoiled by having misaligned right margins is incredibly annoying. You went to all the trouble to not use tables for layout, and then you broke your back to make them act just like tables. I know how much of a pain that can be, and frankly can't understand why anyone would do it. People don't read 9 comments at a time, they read one, and if the occasional comment has to break wider than the rest of them, whatever, but let the rest narrow at least to the point where it is about to get uncomfortable to read. I just counted a line with the window as narrow as it could go, and it was 114 characters. That's ridiculous. Not only is that annoying, but forcing horizontal scrolling just because a thread that I've scrolled 3 virtual yards off the top needs to be wide is brain dead. Go look up some typesetting books, it's well beyond the comfortable range. Let people make it wide if they want, but let it go down to ~40 at the most--this width is either purely arbitrary or based on keeping the header, which is scrolled off the top, pretty. If it's that important to you, make it able to collapse (gracefully! elements should wrap under each other! it's work, but you can make it pretty, flexible, and useful.) or something.
I could probably go on for days if I kept looking, god knows the amount of broken things on even the largest sites have kept me busy figuring out exactly how they made the mistakes they did (check out the facebook auto-expanding textboxes sometime, they fixed them up a little with the new layout but they're still pretty broken, you should be able to find at least a few bugs in 10 minutes), but I've written enough of a wall of text for now.
I find it very strange that these mistakes would be made on what is supposed to be a site for not just a group of technical readers, but a group who almost universally despise form-over-function goofiness. But, I guess that's what you get when you let someone who doesn't hate writing HTML enough write HTML for you.
The AJAX (heh) comment posting is massively, massively improved though, good work on that. The look is decent, if a little too conservative. Next time, dare to not have blasted-out white backgrounds that make the words grind their way into your eyes, even a tiny shade of off-white helps a lot, just at least use one of the thousands of free color-matching tools out there so your off-white doesn't clash with the rest of the colors.
Well, yes. I'm no visual expert or neuro-anything, but I do know that one of the things our brains do extremely well is filter out useless noise, and the doubled objects are just that. With the reduced resolution of peripheral vision (or anything outside that tiny area where we have detail vision), and given how rarely we look at something far away with some other object directly in the detail area in front, and that peripheral vision is more about motion than anything--hold a fork at arm's length to your side while you stare at a fixed point at roughly the same focal length, slowly move it toward where you're staring, and prepare to be surprised at how close to the direction your eyes are pointing it has to get before you can count the tines. Further, your brain fills in the gaps, your periphery is much worse than you think it is, anyone who's done the blind spot trick has experienced this but few think about how that's by far not the only gap you fill in.
I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg, but even with just that it's no surprise that you don't notice the doubled stuff.
Had it exploded, that guy might have been the only survivor around him. Dropping flat to the ground when pieces of jagged metal are likely to be moving toward you through at high speed is a good reflex to have.
That's just not true. I have 1,200 pixels of vertical resolution, and I'm still happy for the extra space from having it gone.
That said, I can't imagine that it'd be a significant development burden to have the option to turn it back on, and if they really wanted to do it right they'd do it like chrome--the navigation bar's horizontal space is too overloaded as it is with search and everything else stuffed up there unless you want a mostly-empty additional bar to show everything that isn't the address. A small bar in the lower part of the window that's only visible when there's information to put there seems perfect.
Tying the penalty to how hard something is to do is simply foolish, I could go end somebody's life with a couple pounds of pressure on a trigger, and hacking the private communications of a political candidate is something that can easily subvert the election process. It should carry extremely stiff penalties.
If Palin was wrong in any illegal way she should be punished also. Two wrongs don't make a right, remember?
Slashdot Mirror
Again, you're making an assumption in the face of reasonable alternatives that a perfectly safe driver could have fallen victim to. This happened in Chicago, at an intersection. Driving in the shade of buildings, the view would have been just fine, and the person could have been behind their car. As you travel through the intersection, you get a blast of sunlight, and before you have time to slow down, the person walks out from behind their car and gets hit. The fact that the initial accident happened due to the sunlight lends credence to the possibility that it was difficult to avoid.
Besides which, suddenly slowing down in the middle of heavy city traffic is often not the safest maneuver, especially when there's a good chance that the people around you are just as visually impaired. And even noticing that there is an accident at all as little as 20' ahead of you can be difficult--if she was following a bus, it would be practically impossible.
Now, I'm not sure this happened in the tall building, heavy traffic part of the city. For all I know, she was head-down, typing away on Facebook. But without knowing either way, it's more than a little disturbing how many people are calling for blood, and willing to argue that they're right and she should hang for her crimes.
Given the exact same facts with more careful phasing, I bet a lot of you would be more reasonable. But, it seems to me that people had a knee-jerk reaction, and once they made their choice they'd rather see a potentially innocent person go to jail or be sued for a lifetime's worth of production than entertain the idea that they may have had the wrong knee-jerk reaction. It's extremely disappointing, both from the media and the individuals who can't or won't re-examine their thoughts.
Nice, personal insults. You must have a good argument.
Oh please, I responded in kind, just because I didn't choose to imitate your passive-aggressive snarkiness and instead had the cojones to directly insult you doesn't give you some sort of a moral high ground here. As for the rest of it, I was going to go through line-by-line again, but then I remembered that I'm not trying to prove she's innocent, I'm just trying to prove that you're a fool for thinking that you're at all justified in making the judgement you've made and sticking to it so tenaciously based on a less-than-careful reading of a single brief article, and that's self-evident so my work is already done.
I'm pretty good at Internet.
Ahahaha oh man, I can't believe you kept a straight face.
So was she updating her Facebook page while she was driving, or was she not?
I don't know. Do you?
Is it legal to do that where she was?
No, but you should already know that if you want to get in such a huff about it. You aren't asking only tangentially related stupid questions to try to force me to agree with you, are you?
Does the fact that she had a fatal accident during the same minute she was updating her Facebook page in her car indicate that maybe she wasn't giving her full attention to driving?
That's not a fact, that's what's in question.
No one is saying that she hit the guy at the exact goddamn second. Look at the charges:
A "jury of your peers" usually doesn't include 12 pedants.
That's true, and a cause of a number of injustices.
It should be plenty of evidence to convict based on the fact that a Facebook update from her phone and a fatal accident occurred within seconds of each other.
You apparently don't know very much about computers. That is not a proven fact even based on the "evidence" in the article.
She is not being charged with striking the guy right at the exact same instant that she was looking at her phone, just that her phone was distracting her from driving, and she got in a fatal accident because of it.
So we're convicting based on thoughtcrime now? If she wasn't on the phone, how was it distracting her?
If you disagree, then maybe you should call her up and offer your legal services.
You shouldn't offer your legal services to anyone, because you are an idiot who makes unalterable decisions based on emotion and hearsay.
That's because most juries are idiots. I've personally seen my Facebook app sit there and retry over and over for more than a minute to post an update. You could hit submit, put your phone in your pocket, get in the car, drive 2 miles, and the whole time your phone is trying to submit the update. Hope it doesn't succeed at the wrong time!
No, I'm not missing that fact, you apparently are. How long does it take to accelerate from a full stop, when there is absolutely no danger in writing a novel on a typewriter if that's what you choose to do, to a speed that can rip an old man's leg off? In a 3-cylinder Geo Metro with a flat tire you can do it in probably less than 10 seconds.
I'm not saying the scenario is impossible, where she posted, looked up, and killed someone, but I do think it's unlikely, and there's a lot of more likely scenarios.
Why is it that those who are quickest to accuse others of poor reading comprehension often have the worst? Obviously I know she hit submit, I just question the timing. You would have to hit submit, look up, and be running somebody over. What are the odds? See my above comment for the unreliability of Facebook mobile--that's a pretty thin straw to convict somebody of manslaughter, even if it's only in your head.
Possible, sure, but what's more likely? That somebody did those exact sequence of events, which requires no more than about 10 seconds between hitting submit and hitting the person in order to not have time to react (and even that is stretching it pretty damn far, I'd put it more on the order of 1-2 seconds max), or that they hit submit somewhere in the other 50 seconds in that minute? Or maybe the sun in the eyes that caused the first accident, also caused the second?
And of course, this is supposing that the facebook app, over a cell phone connection, actually submits an update the instant you hit submit. In my experience, at least 1 in 4 times, I have to resubmit for it to work at all, and out of the other three, at least 1 will take almost a minute to post, and another will take up to an hour. It is spectacularly unreliable.
I don't think people should be allowed to post on Facebook while they're driving, that's just stupid, but there is an awful lot of supposition going on here, where people are saying "BAM! No question, I'd convict" without having anything more than the informal speculation of the aggrieved, when that means essentially ruining somebody's life.
Oh crap! I just hit somebody! Better submit this status update I was writing.
Please. If they were updating Facebook at the time of the accident, the text would still be on the phone, not on Facebook. You have to hit submit. How is this significant fact being missed?
Eh, close enough.
The truly enlightened split the difference and "sudo su -". Your actions are logged, you're accountable, and you still get your freedom.
Nothing means anything in the hands of Marketing. If they could string together a sequence of meaningless syllables that exploited a glitch in the human brain that made anything associated with it irresistable, like "Glunderflax", in a week you'd drive your Glunderflax to the Glunderflax, pick up some Glunderflax and maybe a Glunderflax, then sit down in your Glunderflax to watch Glunderflax 2: The Glunderflaxening on your Glunderflax HD.
I think you mean a 56,958,650,000 routable IPs for every gram of matter on and in the earth.
I want to put you inside my body.
Yikes, still need massive optimization work on the server-side for the comment posting though.
Same in FF 4.0b9, and with a long username it makes the top 2/3s of the page pretty much useless. Turns out the first couple words of every sentence is important.
As someone who hates doing it but does it pretty well if I do say so myself (and I do), how are so many people so bad at writing HTML/CSS? Absolutely terrible resilience to anything outside the imagined uses is so common it's baffling. Here's a hint: if you have a box that things go in, it's a function. Stuff some edge cases in the domain and check the range. Here's a hint: Given what I know about username restrictions without looking at the source, WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW is a valid name, and it's just under twice as wide as mine. Try it out, see what happens. Of course, the name is annoyingly lowercased on the sidebar (form over function, yay!) so it would only be lowercase Ws, but you get the point. Every browser mentioned has developer tools that makes testing things like that ridiculously easy.
Also, like practically every single website these days, the minimum width is way too wide, and another common mistake, when the header is on top instead of being absolutely positioned, there's an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar. Usually caused by setting width to 100% with a margin/border, you can get around that on recent browsers by setting the box-model property. Also sometimes caused by sizing things with javascript and getting the timing wrong, but it doesn't look like that (scrollbar width tracks too well, content resizes too fast). Either way it screams of a slapped together layout.
Finally, the insistence on keeping every single comment rigidly expanded to the widest element on the page just so the pretty layout isn't spoiled by having misaligned right margins is incredibly annoying. You went to all the trouble to not use tables for layout, and then you broke your back to make them act just like tables. I know how much of a pain that can be, and frankly can't understand why anyone would do it. People don't read 9 comments at a time, they read one, and if the occasional comment has to break wider than the rest of them, whatever, but let the rest narrow at least to the point where it is about to get uncomfortable to read. I just counted a line with the window as narrow as it could go, and it was 114 characters. That's ridiculous. Not only is that annoying, but forcing horizontal scrolling just because a thread that I've scrolled 3 virtual yards off the top needs to be wide is brain dead. Go look up some typesetting books, it's well beyond the comfortable range. Let people make it wide if they want, but let it go down to ~40 at the most--this width is either purely arbitrary or based on keeping the header, which is scrolled off the top, pretty. If it's that important to you, make it able to collapse (gracefully! elements should wrap under each other! it's work, but you can make it pretty, flexible, and useful.) or something.
I could probably go on for days if I kept looking, god knows the amount of broken things on even the largest sites have kept me busy figuring out exactly how they made the mistakes they did (check out the facebook auto-expanding textboxes sometime, they fixed them up a little with the new layout but they're still pretty broken, you should be able to find at least a few bugs in 10 minutes), but I've written enough of a wall of text for now.
I find it very strange that these mistakes would be made on what is supposed to be a site for not just a group of technical readers, but a group who almost universally despise form-over-function goofiness. But, I guess that's what you get when you let someone who doesn't hate writing HTML enough write HTML for you.
The AJAX (heh) comment posting is massively, massively improved though, good work on that. The look is decent, if a little too conservative. Next time, dare to not have blasted-out white backgrounds that make the words grind their way into your eyes, even a tiny shade of off-white helps a lot, just at least use one of the thousands of free color-matching tools out there so your off-white doesn't clash with the rest of the colors.
Well, yes. I'm no visual expert or neuro-anything, but I do know that one of the things our brains do extremely well is filter out useless noise, and the doubled objects are just that. With the reduced resolution of peripheral vision (or anything outside that tiny area where we have detail vision), and given how rarely we look at something far away with some other object directly in the detail area in front, and that peripheral vision is more about motion than anything--hold a fork at arm's length to your side while you stare at a fixed point at roughly the same focal length, slowly move it toward where you're staring, and prepare to be surprised at how close to the direction your eyes are pointing it has to get before you can count the tines. Further, your brain fills in the gaps, your periphery is much worse than you think it is, anyone who's done the blind spot trick has experienced this but few think about how that's by far not the only gap you fill in.
I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg, but even with just that it's no surprise that you don't notice the doubled stuff.
Had it exploded, that guy might have been the only survivor around him. Dropping flat to the ground when pieces of jagged metal are likely to be moving toward you through at high speed is a good reflex to have.
Fuck that, I can't wait until one of these things goes nuts and starts goring the fuck out of everything.
If it's not visible, you're not hovering over a link.
That's just not true. I have 1,200 pixels of vertical resolution, and I'm still happy for the extra space from having it gone.
That said, I can't imagine that it'd be a significant development burden to have the option to turn it back on, and if they really wanted to do it right they'd do it like chrome--the navigation bar's horizontal space is too overloaded as it is with search and everything else stuffed up there unless you want a mostly-empty additional bar to show everything that isn't the address. A small bar in the lower part of the window that's only visible when there's information to put there seems perfect.
Tying the penalty to how hard something is to do is simply foolish, I could go end somebody's life with a couple pounds of pressure on a trigger, and hacking the private communications of a political candidate is something that can easily subvert the election process. It should carry extremely stiff penalties.
If Palin was wrong in any illegal way she should be punished also. Two wrongs don't make a right, remember?
Who would have thought somebody who calls themselves "HelloKitty2" wouldn't get ironic use of internet grammar?
That's p fuckin creepy dude.