Blame Your Mistakes on Technology 419
Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
no, your unit is possessed! (Score:2)
Well there's your problem... (Score:5, Funny)
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You might not believe it... (Score:2)
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Some people would do that [abc.net.au]
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
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I supplement maps by printing Google Maps of the area I need in Hybrid view. I get decent photos with road overlay, and toss them into my truckers atlas. A scout compass in the glovebox is handy but I don't use it much.
Pics are a huge help when doing things like hunting junk vehicles. I can pull them up while on the phone, ask the seller where the vehicle is
are in rela
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Sergeant Oakes says it took police two-and-a-half hours to find her.
You would think that someone who was guided by a sat nav and got stuck would be able to pinpoint their position quite accurately.
When it took two-and-a-half hours to find her, there must be not-so-clever people involved, either in the stuck car or the police.
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Maybe I'm just cynical, but that's probably how they got into such trouble.
People are stupid.
People's instincts will win a Darwin Award.
Common sense, isn't.
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personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:personal responsibility (Score:4, Funny)
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I blame slashdot for my inabilty to reply to provide a witty retort to your comment.
I blame slashdot for my inabilty to provide for my family.
Ugg and Ogg just had less opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you can blame electricity, computers, and needing to meet deadlines for international customers. You can roll out a new excuse every day and never get to the end.
Re:personal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case the percieved authority is a little electronic box.
they are just idiots... (Score:3, Insightful)
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;)
Go right ahead and blame the technology! (Score:5, Funny)
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Idiots don't need GPS.
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(Hint: look at the color of her hands. If there's any makeup left in the barrel, she should put some on there, too!)
Common Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Common Sense (Score:4, Informative)
Brackets
Indices
Division
Multiplication
Addition
Subtraction
Seems to be how everything works over here in the UK, and all US devices I've come across follow that order as well.
Re:Common Sense (Score:4, Interesting)
My brain (and, I suspect, others') are wired to expect the variable to be first, so it doesn't conform to the pattern I'm expecting. It's like I read "if 3 equals..." and my brain thinks "3? 3 is always going to equal 3. What else would it equal?"
That's not so bad though, because it's there to work around the problem in C-type languages where you accidentally type this:
if (a = 3)
because you forgot to type == instead of =. This will assign the value. If you do that with (3 == a), you get a compiler error.
I don't like (3 >= a) because it's not like you'll type = instead of >= because you thought = was a greater-than-or-equal test. Besides, the actual solution is to turn the compiler warnings up and don't deliberately write assignments in conditional expressions.
When you get inequalities and try to put the constant first, you invariably make the expression less intuitive, thus requires more work to understand. And as we all (should) know, you write your code assuming it is going to be read by a novice (for various real-world reasons - not all of which are that it is going to be read by a novice).
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (Score:3, Informative)
The Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction order has worked for me in all situations - I'm curious which situations it fails in.
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Re:Common Sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Blame (Score:5, Funny)
The trouble with your argument is (Score:2)
No matter what the laws are, people will attempt to circumvent them, litigate for whatever they can get. This is how it works. The woman that won against McD's won because the court sided with her. The rest of us know that hot coffee is hot coffee. The real problem is that the law will allow such unless specifically forbidden to do so. This not only allows for absurd law suits, it allows for freedom of speech and the other liberties that we in t
Re:The trouble with your argument is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The trouble with your argument is (Score:5, Informative)
The issue was that McDonalds like to keep their coffee at about 98C because it lasts longer that way. Most people drink coffee at about 60C, any more and it burns you. Most people do not expect to be severly burned by coffee, because it is usually not hot enough. McDonalds, in an attempt to save money by brewing fewer pots, handed her a cup of dangerous liquid without any warning. Even if she had sipped the coffee, it would have burnt her mouth.
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I would assume that most people would assume it will give them a damn nasty burn. Combined with the fact that hot liquids that are kept pressed to the skin (i.e. via clothing) and not allowed to ventalate steam (i.e. in the crotch) will cause extremely severe burns. 3rd degree would not suprise me at all. But then, I don't go sticking cups of boiling liquid in my crotch.
To that end:
The car was not moving during the coffee incident (Score:5, Informative)
She was a passenger in the car that her grandson was driving. He had stopped the vehicle specifically so she could remove the lid for adding cream and sugar.
Let me repeat myself. Stella Liebeck was sitting in a motionless car when she spilled coffee that was so hot that she required skin grafts.
Stop making assertions about how stupid people are based on made-up "facts".
[insert deity] help you, if you come to my house (Score:3, Insightful)
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one woul
Re:[insert deity] help you, if you come to my hous (Score:5, Informative)
Stella Liebeck was not driving. She was a passenger in a vehicle stopped specifically so she could safely remove the lid.
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Re:[insert deity] help you, if you come to my hous (Score:3, Informative)
I get 190F = 87C from the source below.
so while she's driving.
She wasn't driving. You know nothing.
The basic summary of the case is this:
"in the ten years prior to Stella's accident, over 700 men, women, and children had been burned by the unsafe McDonald's coffee. For years, McDonald's sold coffee that was "unfit for human consumption", and made $1.3 million dollars a day in profit doing so. Information such as this wasn't really reported by the media. Wha
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Actually, it was really hard to type that [grin] my fingers automatically put spaces in at the end of words!
Simon
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For example, in the sex education case from your post, the girl probably tried to sue the football player first. The football player's lawyer came up with a great argument: "How can you prove my client is guilty? You haven't tried this other party (the school) first, and it appears that they're really to blame." This claim casts doubt on the the player's guilt. The trial cannot move forward until this question is examined (i.e. another trial). Only if th
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Re:Blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Trigger lock? There's a key, somewhere around here... (there's actually a whole host of issues around these keys: five year olds understand locks and keys, so either they're with you or they're available to the kids.) I earnestly hope I don't have to figure out how to silently remove a trigger lock in the dark while an intruder is in the hall between me and my children.
Magic ring that enables the electronic trigger? Hope the battery didn't die (in the ring and/or in the gun), hope the gunpowder residue and the cleaning fluid from the last time I was at the range didn't corrode or short out the circuitry. Hope the electronic components are able to handle the shock of firing the gun as durably as a mechanical trigger (unlikely, but possible).
Personally, I like gun safes and pistol vaults. The pistol vault I like the best is the one with the touch combination that with a little practice, is very simple to get right, even in the dark, even under stress. Still an extra step, but it's a mighty small obstacle to me and a much bigger obstacle to the kids or to a thief (assuming I installed the pistol vault correctly and they can't just take the whole thing).
Back to the point: there's nothing the gun manufacturer can do to the gun to make it harder for someone else to shoot that doesn't also make it less reliable or less available to me. But there are ways for gun owners to responsibly keep firearms, which leads the discussion to where the responsibility really lies: with the gun owner. If a kid takes one of my guns and accidentally kills another kid, I'm going to feel responsible for the tragedy. So I do what I can to minimize the chances of that happening while still keeping responsibility for my own self defense. And IMHO, that's how it should be.
Regards,
Ross
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Actually I've seen a good safety design lately that requires you to hold the grip fully, i.e. four fingers curling around the pistol have to lie in the usual place to make the gun fire. That's a good safety procedure, and I wonder why no other manufacturer ever had that idea.
First of all, it's foolproof. You take your gun into your hand and it is automatically enabled. No
Off Topic (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that sounds about right (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, I still won't ever get directions the old way ever again (unless they build a new city somewhere or something and I don't have the maps for it).
Re:Yeah, that sounds about right (Score:5, Interesting)
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Generally, I will program the route in my GPS and look it over before I do the drive - that gives me an idea of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, that doesn't give me a full idea of what's going on, as if you don't know the area, you don't know what lane you have to be in at a given time. California is no
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Oh, I haven't actually used the map services directions in years now. The only times they are useful is when you are looking at the map and trying to determine where their line is really going. Often as not though their written directions are confounded by suprise street name changes or minor course corrections which result in three or four lines of 0.0 mile maneuvers that just make the list aggrivating.
What I have personally found useful is to look at those maps, then WRITE the directions I see on t
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However, you're using more than just one instrument, and one of the aspects of learning instrument flight is learning how to cross check the different instruments in case one or more of them start lying to you (eg if the static pressure port gets plugged it's going to affe
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I too have one of those devices and I love it, however I do not trust it to navigate for me, only to provide me some additional information to help me navigate.
as an example, I have yet to find any way to convince it to take the only reasonable route from Calgary to Vancouver, it always goes a minimum of about 4-5 hours out of the way instead of taking the main highway that connects the 2 cities. that's only one of many errors I have
Natural Selection (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Douglas Adams had talked a lot about technology guiding our life. His posthumous book Salmon of Doubt talks about the intermediate phase between the current world of dumb electronics and the time when we have truly intelligent machines. The brief period when the machines are dumber than the average human, yet the human has too much confidence in the machine to trust his/her own judgment will be really bad.
I'm afraid that is the world of Today. We trust our inanimate companions over humans because they are bereft of intent (and malice). But I suspect people are less likely to change than machines are likely to become more reliable. So ... ++CARRIER ERROR
I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Mr AndersonCommon Tech Support Nightmares (Score:5, Informative)
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Right - and the person/company that writes software stupid enough to include such routes bears none of blame? Bovine exhaust. I know it's popular on Slashdot to blame the sheeple - but this isn't a case of using
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Maybe I missed something but I didn't see "unmarked" mentioned anywhere. GPS units can't just make up or auto-detect roads, their maps come from other sources and are keyed in by individuals sitting in a desk somewhere, not people looking at the roads. Perhaps they do check some roads, but I very, very much doubt they go and look at every road to see what kind of road it is. If a map gives no indication that a particular road is d
Just more whining? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, the moral of the story is that we have an innate ability to shift blame. No "technology" is required. (Or rather, maybe blame shifting is a technology.)
Obligatory Nick Burns... (Score:4, Funny)
poorly marked railroad crossing (Score:2, Insightful)
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This is in England! She had to open a huge great gate paitend white with red markings, weighing nearly half a ton to get on the tracks. This style of gate gates appear nowhere in England except at level crossings. If she did not know that, then she had clearly never taken a driving test.
She is not only stupid, but also criminally insane.
However, the British newspapers have it in for GPS because their staff are
Unthinking obedience to the technical gizmo (Score:5, Insightful)
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Simon.
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At many of the places I have worked, a lot of the employees (especially older ones who grew up before personal computers) show no willingness to learn how the system works, they simply memorize the keystrokes or menu combinations for what they need to get done. If there is any deviation, then they will disturb somebody else for the answer. This in itself is not bad, but they just don't learn - after trying
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For example, computers are supposed to be perfect calculating machines. Frequently, they tell you to do something or other, and they won't do anything until you obey. To be suspicious of your GPS, you have to know that computer systems are inherently flawed. Nobody ever trys to sell you one on this, you just have to know it by ye
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I am very sorry to hear that. I ride a bike to and from work and the most dangerours drivers I have seen are people who call up a friend, usually the person they are meeting, to help navigate.
Pilots have had to deal with technology for much longer than drivers. They are
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I see the opposite happening. Right now when one of us geeks has to fix a tech problem for somebody, we're considered a guru. When the rest of the world doesn't know how to walk on their own two feet without their "holistic neural interfaces" an we're the only ones that don't need a Cray to replace our brains
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I think there's room enough for both. :)
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I'm failing to see the "pressure-situation" in your story. It sounds more like your friend is reactionary which is a *very* dangerous trait for someone who's driving on a motorway even at posted speeds let alone 100mph.
"public spy cameras", er not so much... (Score:2)
The rest are mainly traffic cameras, mounted on junctions - I'm not sure if speed-cameras (automated, but only snapshots, not video) are counted in there as well.
There are *some* (I know of some on Oxfor
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It's not gene, it's a results of having to take a decision in a stress situation. And the stress was caused by her nto being experienced what "stop the car" might mean and how she should react.
If this happens to her again 3-4 more times, she won't likely stop the car on the middle of the road. Did she "lose a gene"? Because if this is so, you may win a Nobel prize.
Also thew GPS is slightly to blame in this one case (unlike the "jump off the cliff" and "hit b
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Strongly disagree. If she was so keyed up and stressed out so as to unthinkingly obey any instruction issued out of a machine on the dashboard, then she probably shouldn't have been driving. Certainly she shouldn't have been speeding well in excess of the limit, in the fast lane, on an unfamiliar motorway, on a route
New Excuse, old problems... (Score:4, Insightful)
Suggested warning label for gadgets (Score:5, Funny)
-hps
Re:Suggested warning label for gadgets (Score:5, Funny)
"Warning: You might not have one either"
Blame it on the rain, blame it on the weatherman.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's actually quite common, and I think it has to do with the way many people are brought up. And it translates into our everyday life and actually corporate life.
In many companies, it does not matter when anything goes wrong, as long as you got someone else to blame. It's funny. Should you happen to work in a large company and something goes wrong, take a close look around you. The only person or people who get(s) very nervous, no matter how trivial or bancrupcy-threatening it is, is the one who can't find anything or anyone to blame but himself.
That's how our education and business system works. It starts with the homework-eating dog and doesn't even end at the report-shredding Xerox. It's never you. It's someone else or, and that's more comfortable, something. Something is better than someone, because something rarely objects.
And technology is better than pets. First of all, the pet excuse gets old. And second, and that's more important, many people don't have the foggiest idea just what computers or gadgets can do. They will readily believe you. Not to mention that some things might have even happened to themselves already. Your report's not ready in time? Sorry, boss, computer BSODed on me, JUST before I could save.
He'll understand. Take my word for it.
Ohhh... I almost forgot lawsuits! (Score:2)
Let's not forget that something is usually made by someone. And this something must have been obviously broken, because you, of course, didn't do anything out of the ordinary. And since companies usually have some money, people get the big dollar-signs into their eyes and sue for some insane amount of money.
Fortunately our courts started to see the difference between faulty products and pure stupidity. And, people, some of the accidents that happen, even gadget-related, ARE purely based on user
Re:Blame it on the rain, blame it on the weatherma (Score:2)
If you reply otherwise, you may often find yourself in a lot more trouble than just accepting the blame for the situation - even if there IS a good reason.
A friend's daughter... (Score:5, Insightful)
After crying a lot... she yelled: "TUPID CHAIR!" and kicked the chair.
Somehow by reading the article summary this scene came to my mind.
just fix it - regadless of blame (Score:2)
On a technical standpoint, the GPS makers need to fix their bugs regardless of the legal blame game (in the long run it will result in a better system for all). Whether it tells people to "look up and make sure not to sit on any nearby railroad tracks" or something else I think it is an issue that needs to
It's all part of Skynet! (Score:2, Funny)
Here's your proof (Score:2)
Apparently working with a plethora of devices in your car isn't the best way to concentrate on what's right on front of you on the road.
Here's your proof that p
Well It Almost Makes Sense (Score:2)
Just technology? (Score:4, Insightful)
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
Big Surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Haven't we all... (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing is that people are stupid enough to follow such directions, another is that the map technology clearly isn't up to par. Imagine a car with 'auto-drive' that blindly follows directions just like people do, but without the little bit of sanity that made those ambulance drivers stop after 200 miles and realize that they were a bit off course... A computerized driver would just have kept on going, possibly attempting to reach the goal going 'the other way', i.e. around the globe, which includes a fair amount of undersea driving...
Google tells you to swim across the Atlantic (Score:3, Informative)
As such, it will give driving directions to any western European country from any Continential state.
The wierd part is, it will not give directions to get to Brazil from New York, even though it IS driveable
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That said, the biggest problem with AJAX is the same as with frames: They screw up the idea of bookmarking a page.