I'm all for identifying risks and reducing them. I am not in favor of making existing legal behavior illegal with out some very strong evidence on the behavior's impact on society.

Some states have bans, lets see how they play out for a few years before we go to the national level. And if it turns out that we're not seeing any meaningful reduction in accidents per mile driven, then the laws are NOT reducing accidents, they were just creating a new means of revenue.

-Rick

Banning 'all' phone use while driving is a reasonable solution in search of a problem.

As the use of cell phones has exploded we are seeing less and less accidents per mile driven.

More cell phones correlates with LESS accidents.

That isn't to say that using cell phones is safe, by any means. But it doesn't correlate to, let alone imply, any between increased cell phone usage and an increase in fatal* accidents. (I haven't seen any non-fatal accident data)

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

In 2009 there were 114 traffic fatalities per million miles driven. In 1994 there were 174 per mil. A 1/3rd reduction at the same time that cell phone use was growing exponentially.

Point being: Distracted drivers are distracted drivers, whether it's cell phones, texting, eating, signing, etc... Some drivers are just going to be bad drivers. And while I'm far from Libertarian, I don't see the value in creating laws as a solution when the problem isn't clearly defined.

IF cell phones presented the huge risk to society that some articles are claiming they do, why is it that the fatality rate is dropping (as I expect the accident trend line is as well, but I haven't found the quality of data to back that up that I would like). And if the fatality/accident rate is dropping, with out the creation of a new law, why create the new law?

-Rick

So because it MIGHT be beneficial for YOU to stop eating burgers for the current time, we should make it illegal for ALL people to EVER eat burgers?

-Rick

I am curious if the Judge would feel the same way if a software update prevented his car from going over 45 MPH.

-Rick

Seeing how 2010 had the lowest number of fatalities, and most of the data I've seen has shown a droping trendline of reduced accidents per vehicle mile driven (your link only shows total fatalities, not fatalities per miles driven), wouldn't that be an indicator that current advances are working and what should be done is minor incremental improvement as needed as opposed to sweeping huge changes?

I mean, if we saw a huge spike coming out of the 90's and a trendline pointing north through the 2000's, I'd be fully behind the efforts to ban all cell phone usage in cars.

But what we see is that the vast majority of people using electronics while driving are doing so in a responsible and safe manner. Sure, we should continue to hammer down on people who are not doing so, but I don't see the need for sweeping changes when things are already going in the right direction.

-Rick

Having been in the military myself (USMC 97-01) I would agree that you are instructed to be impartial, but that the juror selection is limited to such a tiny segment of society with such a specific subset of the political spectrum, which for the most part has a significantly limited exposure to other points of view, the guy is pretty much hosed.

The odds of him getting a jury with 1 sympathetic juror, and that juror being willing to lose his career over it, is slim to nil.

-Rick

There's one rub - He commited his crime in Iraq.

Thus the reason this is a military trial, not a civilian court trial. He enjoys the rights provided by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which differ significantly from the Bill of Rights.

That is to say... he's screwed.

-Rick

In the civilian world, yes. In the military world, he could stand before a general, or a tribunal, or a jury of his peers, which is to say, a bunch of active duty military guys who have been told over and over for the last year that this guy is evil.

-Rick

You own the content you have posted to the internet.

The "right" is an extention of the rights described in the 1st amendment. These are inallienable rights. You are born with them. You are born with the inallienable right to peacably assemble and the freedom of speech.

This petition is just asking for the 1st amendment to be copied and appended with "On the Internet" like so many of those crappy patents from the 90's.

Just take the 1st amendment, and any place you see a coma or semicolon, inject "on the internet".

-Rick

This isn't just a "Video Game", it's an intelligence platform. It's coming from IARPA, cousin of DARPA, you know that wasteful part of the government that blew all that money on some stupid thing called "the internet". I hear it turned out to be nothing more than a series of tubes that dumptrucks get stuck on.

-Rick

At a high level, absolutely!

I don't know how many project charters have come across my desk that have the project goal as "To create software that..."

I work at a food company. A multibillion dollar food company. We do food research. We sell food. We do NOT turn a profit writting software. So no project should ever come to me with a goal of creating software.

You are correct in that the only metric that matters to the business is the profit. But in order to determine individual contribution, you can't just look at the 50,000 foot view. You'll wind up with some rather irate folks if the people who did all the work get the same bonus as the ones who contributed nothing, or negative value.

There are Objectives, and then there are Enabling Objectives. Enabling objectives are were you can start to compare individual contributions to the outcome of the overall Objective.

-Rick

That's really the key to it. Focusing on objectives.

Are outputs matching estimates for time? Are programs being deployed/shipped on schedule? Are bug report rates with in acceptable ranges? etc...

And once you get good at that, start looking for ways to improve on the metrics. Reducing bug counts, getting more accurate estimates, and pushing for shorter (but still reasonable) estimates.

I knew a programmer who once solved a problem that was going to be addressed with a $100,000 inventory management system, with a piece of cardboard and a black magic marker. No code metric could show that performance. But outcome based metrics were all maxed out for that job.

-Rick

Writing for reuse can be excessive, but there are a number of reasons to move in that direction even if you don't intend to reuse that specific code block:

1) Unit Tests. If you abstract your functionality in a way that allows reuse, it also abstracts in for extremely easy unit testing. And unit testing will save you an incredible amount of effort in code maintenance.

2) Consistency. If you follow the same design pattern for all of your abstractions, all of your developers should be familiar with it. This makes it significantly easier for different developers to step into projects as the hopefully don't have to learn another person's style for abstraction.

3) Replacement and isolation. Need to implement a functional change? If your code is abstracted, like it would be for reuse, the functional change is limited to a single block, which is easily identifiable and if you're doing it right, unit-testable.

4) Just in case. Most of the time abstracted code doesn't get reused, and event when it does get reused it's usually a copy and paste job instead of a reference. Even so, if anyone ever does need the same functionality, it allows them to quickly rip off the exact piece they are looking for as opposed to trying to strip out your programs logic to get the tiny bit they want.

-Rick

The current implementation is based on a legal briefing from Reagan's AG in 1987 that basically said that if the government felt that the information was too sensitive, or was part of any on-going opperation or investigation, that they could lie about the existance of that record.

That loophole has been in place for the last 24 years. The rule amendment that just got shot down would have taken that implied hole in the law and made it an explicit hole in the law.

Now that the rule has been shot down, and the practice is getting some much needed sunlight, it opens up the option of lawsuits to challenge the "it's okay to lie" brief and to try to uncover abuses of that brief.

I'm not saying that the Obama Administration is all farts and roses here. They've done plenty enough to leave me fairly apathetic towards them. But the GP was implying that this issue was some how created by the Obama administration, when it was in fact created by the Reagan administration.

Yeah, it would have been great if Obama had walked in (on water) on day 1 and fixed every problem we have with the consolidation of power to the executive branch, but honestly, unless we have another huge Watergate that the press gets seriously pissed off about, that isn't going to happen.

-Rick

This practice was originally sanctioned un the Reagan administration. This rules change would have formalized the practice that was developed by the Feds under Reagan's AG. By removing the rule change (under the Obama administration) they are effectively barred from covering up the previous lies.

So clearly, Obama is to blame....

-Rick