Hindsight really has nothing to do with it. If they didn't know for sure what the cause was, there was no need to call it at all. You can mark an issue not reproducible in a bug tracker without actively blaming someone else for a mistake they never made.
Your general point is reasonable. It is also completely undermined by the fact that the police and government do have detailed data available, including the exact locations of all violent crimes they know about, and in many cases also the usage levels of public facilities like roads and paths. And based on that data, they have long advised that sticking to well-lit and well-travelled areas is preferable to isolation in dark areas. This isn't an assumption based on our lizard brains, it's an assumption based on decades of hard data.
If you're in the UK and light pollution from street lighting is affecting your ability to sleep, your local council can probably provide a baffle for the light outside your window that is doing that. There are procedures for these things.
Unfortunately the same procedures will not protect you from a light your neighbour installed rather than the council, nor will they stop that light blinking on and off all night because of the cat chasing its prey near your neighbour's porch.
Where I live, it's a one. Check my photos out.
Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much.
Actually, no. City glow is a huge impediment to astronomy for an area hundreds of times the size of the city.
There's a middle ground here. Lighting can be designed so it primarily lights the ground, instead of going every which way. Goes a long way towards reducing problems optical telescope use faces.
Unfortunately the original paper has quite severe limitations. The original authors were reasonably honest about noting them, too, but of course as with all too many research papers the media has mostly picked up on the headline and ignored the accompanying notes. I wrote another post earlier with some specific examples, if you're interested.
With the greatest respect, I don't think you quite understand what life is like for an octogenarian. A torch being held in a shaky hand while the other hand holds a walking stick isn't going to help them with slipping down a kerb they didn't realise was right next to them. And slipping down a kerb is a potential fatal event for someone that age.
They probably aren't going to be walking somewhere that has concerns about areas not covered by a lightsource, because they want to be walking where there is plenty of lighting the whole way from the house to the car they're being driven home in.
You don't need to publish a new paper to introduce reasonable doubt about the conclusions of one observational study that contradicts long-standing policy in numerous areas. Just look at the limitations of the paper itself, which is freely available, as are the well-known primary data sets on which it is based.
Unlike most of the media reporting over the past few days, the original authors do acknowledge numerous factors for which they could not or did not control right there on the front page of the paper under "Introduction" and further in an extensive "Limitations" section later on. Some of those limitations are quite fundamental; here are a few things this study didn't or couldn't take into account:
1. The crime data set they were working from did not distinguish between day-time and night-time crimes.
2. The crime data set they were working from did not provide precise location data so it was only analysed within larger areas. Those areas could have had multiple street lighting policies in effect in different locations within them.
3. The STATS19 data set they were working from is primarily about motor traffic and only covers reported incidents. It provides limited insight into the causes of injuries to pedestrians or cyclists unless they directly involved a motor vehicle and resulted in police action. It appears that the study also considered only fatal and serious injury incidents, not minor injury incidents or those causing only damage to property.
4. Neither data set controls for confounding factors, even obvious potential distortions like general improvements to road safety being implemented at the same time. During the periods when lights have been switched off near us, for example, we've also seen speed limits in residential areas widely reduced to 20mph and various safe cycling schemes affecting local road layouts. It is not possible to separate the effects of those different schemes based only on the STATS19 data that appears to have been considered in this study.
5. Both data sets provide only absolute statistics. Neither data set accounts for relative effects like fewer people going out late at night if the lights are off, meaning fewer people to be the victims of certain types of crime or involved in road accidents.
If you genuinely want to know more about this issue, I encourage you to start by reading the original paper. Here it is. Also read some of the opposing commentary by councils that have reversed decisions on this policy after trying it and then seeing their own specific data, and road safety groups like the AA that also analyse STATS19 and other experimental data and have previously reached very different conclusions about the effects of changing street lighting. Many of these sources are also publicly available and yours for the price of a few minutes with your web browser and search engine of choice.
I'm in Cambridge, UK. If you go down to London for the evening to, say, meet friends for dinner or see a show in the West End, then chances are your train home is arriving after midnight. That's when a lot of councils are now turning the lights out. At the 10pm cut-off you're suggesting, even going to play sport a bit after work and then going for drinks or a meal afterwards would have you coming home in darkness.
This is also a university town, and at certain times of year you'll have a lot of foot and cycle traffic between places like university labs and libraries and residential areas. Cycling a whole extra problem of course, because unlike motor vehicles, bike lights are basically worthless for seeing the road ahead and only useful for other people to see the cyclist. So turning off the street lights is pretty hostile to cycle use as well.
Yes, bugs happen, and yes, sometimes diagnosing hardware compatibility issues is tricky. But if I see a potential data loss bug in software I develop, I don't start making judgements about where it comes from -- and I definitely don't start pointing the finger at other people and denying anything is wrong with my own code -- until I've identified the root cause of the problem.
The issue here isn't really that a bug happened, even though the bug was serious. It's the way it was handled that is the greater cause for concern.
A pro-Linux bias on Slashdot is not exactly a surprise, but an equally accurate headline on another forum might have read "Critical bug in Linux corrupts data on SSDs", and the subtitle "Linux maintainers deny serious fault, blame innocent parties for data loss" would probably have been fair too.
Is that really the point, though?
Vendors of products affected by bugs in closed source software collaborate all the time. It's usually in their mutual interests, and it has been going on forever. Just look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft used to go to in order to maintain compatibility of Windows with older applications.
On the other hand, the existence of this issue in the first place, the fact that other vendors whose products may also have been affected did not act as Samsung did, and particularly the denial and active yet unjustified blacklisting of Samsung products by the people running the project with the real fault are indictments of that project, no matter how open it claims to be or how big and famous it is.
This whole affair does not look good for Linux, and more importantly, it does not reflect well on the people currently running development of Linux.
Unfortunately the places where they have been reducing the lighting in the UK recently are mostly either within large residential areas or on motorways. Our rural lanes are mostly unlit anyway, other than locally around junctions or specific places.
It's not just road accidents, either. I have family and friends near where that article is talking about, so I've seen the results directly.
For the younger generations we are seeing some people, particularly females, not wanting to go out late as they'll have to find their way home alone and no longer feel safe. Alternative: Everyone now drives everywhere after dark. Yay for being environmentally friendly.
For older generations, they are actually leaving early even when just visiting friends' homes for the evening, simply because once it's dark they can no longer see well enough to find their way back to the car parked down the street without risking an accident. Alternative: Everyone now installs their own lighting, so all we've done is turn the efficient, relatively cost-effective lighting supplied by councils into less efficient, almost always brighter and/or intermittent, relatively expensive lighting supplied by residents. Yay for... Well, council bean-counters, I suppose, but not really anyone else.
In connection with the latter point, and to the people in this thread arguing that natural moon and star light is sufficient, please remember that older people tend to get much less useful vision from the same light levels as younger people. Just because some people here can see well enough at 25 to walk home across the park by starlight alone, that doesn't mean everyone else can too.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
