Except the question comes down to intent to kill.
While Deputy Wood obviously *intended* to utilize his computer, he could not have through that action have *intend* to specifically ram his vehicle at high speed into Mr. Olin, a man he would not have seen at the time when he took his eyes off the road.

That's where your particular argument breaks down. There is no disputing that the Deputy was stupid, and that he should have known better, and that there are countless examples in the media and in his own training to tell him that this was an extraordinarily bad thing to do. Let's give a different scenario that I sat in on one time... Names changed and all that...

Let's say that the Deputy instead discharging is firearm. Rather than wasting the time to climb the fence, he was being stupid and fired it at a padlock as he's no doubt seen done in countless movies. The bullet ricochets and hits Mr. Olin puncturing his carotid artery, leaving him to die before help can arrive. The Deputy did not see Mr. Olin, and there was not an intent for Mr. Olin to die, but regardless Mr. Olin is dead through an action conducted solely by the Deputy. Did the deputy commit an act of negligent homicide, or was there malice involved due to his stupidity and the fact that he "should have known better"?

Now this seems like a much more plausible source of the fappening pictures that are making their way to the interwebs than repeated, undetected brute force attempts going on for months strait... Just a thought.

A relative perspective argument? That is cute, and I like that... Congratulations, you've won the argument because yes, no one can dispute that from his perspective he would have seen something that would have looked like the whole world swerved into him! It's officially entered philosophical territory of "what is real" versus "what is perceived", and "what does perception even mean" solely in the mind of Deputy Wood territory?

But Deputy Wood knowingly misled his colleagues about other details including that he applied the brakes and swerved to avoid Mr. Olin and that Mr. Olin corrected his path to make contact with the Deputy's Patrol Vehicle anyways, that he was being attentive and did everything right. Deputy Wood only acknowledged them a week later when confronted with irrefutable evidence that he did not apply his breaks, swerve, and was in fact using his MDC and Cell Phone moments before the incident did his story changed from this elaborate and complex narrative to "I don't recall".

He made a conscious choice to send 9 text messages back and forth with his wife while driving 4 miles per hour over the posted speed limit on a windy road with reduced visibility, IM with his "Bud" on his Department issued, vehicle installed computer, and in the process not even notice the human being that died through his inattention. If he had, he would have been able to swerve or apply his brakes prior to impact rather than after the fact, as the findings had shown.

The concern is that Deputy Wood killed someone and as "the People can not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Wood's momentary distraction in the performance of his duties constituted a failure to use reasonable care to prevent reasonably foreseeable harm", he will receive no punishment, including a reprimand from his place of employment. That is ultimately the problem, where making his lunch plans with 'Unit 224T2' is now classified as the performance of his duties! (I speak from personal experience from working with a Sheriff's Office, and at 1:00pm if someone is asking if you're Code 4, they're asking if you're able to go Code 7.)

Plus, they'd probably be pretty happy about the mass ETFs that they receive due to said cancelations, followed shortly thereafter by a mass influx of the same customers returning to say "I am so sorry, baby... I'll never leave you again!" when they realize that there are no other options or that said options are in fact worse (Sold 20Mbps, got 12Mbps service on a "sorry, it's not available, here's this instead" that is usually only 3).

Actually, they *don't yet* do that. It's one of those features that Apple's talking about doing with Yosemite.

Presently it is default behavior to have anything on an iDevice goes to PhotoStream if it's saved though. If the photos were texted to someone with an iPhone or whatever and they pressed Save, then they can immediately show up on their PhotoStream accounts.

I have to disagree with you here.

If I were a police officer, and members of the community *knew* that I were a police officer, and I were forced through my job to arrest, detain, cite, and otherwise ruin people's days as a police officer, and someone broke into my home in the middle of the night at a time when there is the expectation that I would be home, there is the expectation that the person doing the breaking and entering would be there to do me or my family harm rather than to steal stuff.

Even if I weren't a police officer and someone were to break into my home in the middle of the night, through my garage where they would have no option but to know that I was home and *still* proceed to enter my home regardless, I would expect that they would be there to do me harm rather than steal stuff.

If it was the middle of the day, or a back door, or a window, or any other location for that matter than the garage where you'd have irrefutable proof that people are home, I might agree with you. As is, I just can't find a way to agree with you.

What happened was tragic; it shouldn't have happened, but at the same point it is understandable how it would have taken place and more importantly understandable how said action was believed to be an appropriate course of action given what little is known of that particular situation.

Actually...
The deputy "chose" to text with his wife via his personal cell phone while driving.
The deputy "chose" to converse with a fellow deputy using the department's internal instant messaging system to read "U C4 BRO" (You Free, Bro?) and respond "YES I" at the time that he was exceeding the posted speed limit on a road with poor visibility and a curve ahead.
The deputy "chose" to tell the investigating officer that Mr. Olin intentionally swerved into his patrol vehicle and that he was in fact operating his vehicle safely.
The deputy "chose" to tell the investigating officer that he was not using his MDC at the time of the accident.
The deputy "chose" to tell the investigating officer that he was not utilizing his personal cell phone to converse with his wife at the time of the incident.

These things all came out afterwards through analysis of the vehicle's GPS, his phone records, and the MDC itself, and said data corroborated witness statements.
Here is a copy of the Police Report.

Check out the police report and count for yourself how many made the official report... I count him lying about the text messages with his wife on his personal cell phone were taking place, that he was conversing with a fellow deputy, and that Mr. Olin swerved into him. http://bikinginla.com/wp-conte...

For what it's worth, the case didn't get to court so there was in fact no perjury taking place so this was just simple, honest to god lying.

Radios are public. People can listen in.
Their private, text messages to each other saying (U C4 BRO) aren't broadcast to whomever happens to be listening over the internet, or with a scanner. Duh!
Since the message in question was at 1:05pm, odds are the follow-up would have been something like "Burger?"

Completely agree with your sentiment though. Quite simply, Deputy Wood should face punishment for his actions. If not for the negligent homicide itself, than his lying to a Law Enforcement Officer, obstruction of justice, and interfering with a police investigation. But, that would imply that "we go after our own."

You may want to give a read over the police report itself. It paints a quite interesting narrative, including the officer continually texting his wife from his personal cell phone and lying about it, the officer lying about Mr. Olin swerving from the bicycle lane into his patrol vehicle and causing the accident, and that he was in no way at fault. In fact, the officer received an "instant message" from another officer asking if he was free (U C4 BRO) when the accident occurred. He made the choice to type a response when rounding a corner where there was poor visibility, and most importantly lie about it. http://bikinginla.com/wp-conte...

The irony of the situation is that Mr. Olin was the former COO of Napster during it's "incitement of copyright infringement" days of 2000 - 2002, yet his killer receives no penalty or even an acknowledgment that a crime took place.

How about by fixing this??? - Sept 2000: Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops

Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?
Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

I'm an epileptic. When I need to go somewhere, I need to rely on friends, the bus, or when I am in a hurry a cab. None of these are ultimately a great option and they require a significant cost and loss of independence versus what a typical person enjoys. Me getting to the grocery store is a 45 minute affair despite only being a couple miles away. Getting to a friends house takes a couple hours. Tasks that would normally be extremely simple if I would be allowed to drive become the height of absurdity out of the off chance that something might happen. Self driving automobiles would offer me a level of independence that I simply can't have while otherwise being in compliance with state and federal laws that consider me a worse threat to the safety of others than a drunk driver, person texting behind the wheel, or elderly person with glaucoma and slowed reflexes. The thought that there "might" be fringe outlying cases that have yet to be considered safety wise, of course there are. There always is. GM recalled every car they made not that long ago! Until there is the opportunity for expanded testing with a level playing field, then we will never know what those fringe cases are and whether there is cause to e concerned. For now, it just seems like a bunch of people spouting off about the worst thing that could possibly happen ever, and how if even one of these is allowed on the road, the world will come to an end.

A large part of that is because recent improvements in computing have come in terms of efficiency rather than raw number crunching ability. Being able to have a Xeon machine with dual GPUs run well with a 450w power supply versus a 1500w power supply is a prime example. Desktops that run in 25w versus 450w is another such example. Yes, there certainly have been GREAT advancements over the past few years and those shouldn't be overlooked, but the emphasis has been around smaller, lighter and more efficient, with a 5% YoY gain in performance while you're at it.

Gone are the days of once every 18 months a computer being twice as fast.
Instead we have the days of a computer with a battery that runs twice as long, boot in half the time, and faster wireless connections (some that even outperform their wired counterparts).

The reason why people *needed* to upgrade historically on such a rapid cadence was because technology was evolving at such a rapid pace. Those who would build the tools that everyone else wanted to use were geeks themselves and wanted to be on the latest and greatest, exploiting the advantages that the rapidly advancing technology would provide for them. Advances like MMX or SSE, or for that matter the move from 16-bit to 32-bit instruction sets gave some excellent benefits to those early developers as it allowed for programmers to design complex operations more easily as well as simply do certain things faster, letting applications like Excel deal with much larger data sets and perform comparisons instantaneously instead of the previous "Calculating, please wait." prompts that users would experience. Then, somewhere along the way these hardware architecture improvements no longer were a requirement for the vast majority of applications to run effectively, or even for developers to specifically target applications against. It became more of a minimum being "on this hardware, this runs 'well enough'" as opposed to "it just won't run".

At present, GPGPU acceleration does much the same thing for us today as the architectural changes did for us during the late 90's and early 2000's. When someone says "I need more raw power", that's usually where they turn to in computing space any more. There is certainly the case for x86, PowerPC, ARM and other conventional architectures and they remain at the core of every computer, but the large scale deployments that need massive number crunching capabilities are moving GPGPU. (See scientific computing, clustering, high performance computing, ...)