I find the combination of a backup camera (with its 180 degree view) plus ultrasonic bumper sensors that face left and right provide an excellent amount of awareness. The camera shows a clear view of the path and the area directly behind the car, while the rear mounted beepers let me know that something is approaching from the side, even if it's not visible in the highly distorted edges of the camera's field of view.

It's the front of the car that has the mm wave radar. :-)

Seriously? Go back and read what you just wrote. Is there a reason for your deep-seated irrational hatred of safety equipment? Or are you just parroting a ridiculously untenable political position from some bigmouth on the TV?

A backup camera gives the driver the best possible chance of avoiding tragedy. I find the backup camera to provide an excellent view, and have never had a problem stopping when I see a pedestrian. Ultrasonic sensors help detect fast moving cross traffic, too, especially when the side views are obstructed by parked vans or trucks; but they give lots of false positives, especially when the bumper is slightly ahead of a wall or pillar. The combination of both, along with an attentive driver, works like three layers of defense.

We have this problem called "Misguided Conservatism" which is a group of people who believe that anything that costs them one fraction of one penny that provides any benefit to anyone besides themselves, that they should complain loudly and utter phrases like "nanny state", "obamacare", "liberals", "socialists", or "communists".

The reason these people are misguided is the voice of Rupert Murdoch echoes through the Fox News Network talking heads. Because a handful of billionaires wants to hang on to every penny they've ever stolen, they pay pink-faced fat white men to host "news" shows and yell about every millimeter of progress. These people, in turn, align themselves with fundamentalist religions, and drag in a large number of cultists who can be counted on to vote Republican regardless of the issues or the harm they may cause the environment, the economy, or even themselves. They also cater to other fringe loonies, such as anti-vaccination people, global climate change deniers, people who need anti-aircraft missiles to hunt squirrels, and the believers in the imminent apocalypse of mankind.

They used to have considered positions, rational arguments, and it was once possible to have an intelligent discussion with them based on facts. But the yellow journalists have gained unbalanced power over a lot of these unquestioning followers. Because they get their entire world view from a single unbalanced source, yet consider themselves well-informed, they can't be convinced of anything that isn't spoon-fed to them over the cable.

The tiniest amount of progress comes only after a protracted fight, and people are exhausted from the fighting just to get something as simple as a backup camera law passed. You can see plenty of evidence of this right here in these Slashdot comments. I don't even think they understand how stupid they sound. And I certainly can't imagine what would go through their minds if such an easily preventable disaster befell their family.

Even so, it's still America. We can occasionally get shit done despite the large number of idiots.

Good point about the number of deaths prevented. But the summary's figure is far short of the figures of preventable deaths I heard, which was over 50% (I seem to recall the estimate at being over 90% preventable). If we set it at 150 per year, it's closer to the range. That figure also completely ignores injuries, which are much more numerous than deaths, but far less expensive; I don't have any idea what those would cost.

And all the talk of numbers still ignores the trauma caused by parents backing over small children, which are the majority of fatalities. We can't deny that there is a large component of "but what about the children?" to this.

Umm... this law is a direct result of that testing process you referred to in the phrase "time-tested". Time has shown that there are about 300 deaths per year due to backing over people. Time has also shown backup cameras to be highly effective at preventing these deaths. Backup cameras fix the "bug" (the blind spot behind and below the trunk of the car.)

If you think this makes a car too expensive, what price do you put on accidentally running over a human being? Let's say a dead person costs $6 million. (That was the price a few years ago from my state, who figured out the amount they'd spend on an unsafe road to fix the problem after a fatality.) If you were to spread the price of 300 dead people (6*300 = 1.8 billion dollars) and divide by the number of cars sold in the US per year (estimating 20 million) that works out to $90 per car sold. Multiply that by an average 10 year lifetime of a car and it works out to $900 per car. If a camera costs less than that, it's cheaper for society to require them to fix the problem.

Mathematically, it's cheaper to require the cameras than to live with the deaths they could prevent.

My company had a security policy that required iPhones to have PINs that met certain conditions, such as: no repeated digits, no consecutive digits can be an increment or decrement by one. The goal was to prevent people from picking 1111, 1234, etc. These rules were so restrictive that what they really did was reduce the number of potential PINs by about 33%.

Research on leaked PINs (at least here in America) has shown that over 50% of user-selected 4 digit PINs follow the pattern of dates, with the first two digits being 01-12 and the last two being 01-31. The silly rules eliminated months of 01, 10, 11, 12, and days of 01, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, and 23. Given the additional factors that if a phone locks itself after 5 tries, and if a user has a 50% chance of having selected a date for their PIN, a thief would have to steal relatively few phones from employees (perhaps a couple dozen or so) before finding one that he could unlock just by trying random dates. He would improve that dramatically if he could learn the victim's birthdate, or other significant dates such as family birthdates, anniversaries, etc.

I'm not saying that the limiting rules you are opposed to are on the same level of broken as a poorly thought out corporate policy, but I do know that limiting rules have a significant compounding impact on the overall security of a system.