I have a /. RSS feed on my home page that generally doesn't do a whole lot for me, but sometimes it comes in handy. For example, this article talks about how a breathalyzer machine isn't being trusted because nobody can see its source code and confirm the accuracy if its formulas. I am really going to have to use that idea next time I get pulled over.
"I'm sorry, Officer, I can't accept this ticket until I can verify that the code contained within your radar gun returns an accurate representation of the speed I was travelling."
Of course, it's probably written in Fortran or Cobol and we'd probably have to bring in someone like my Machine & Assembly Languages professor from college who's been programming computers since they've been invented (he's a very old man who has been there and done that and could probably convince any judge -- or even some of us seasoned programmers -- that the code is horribly wrong even if it's not). Maybe my crazy physics professor, too. That man was nuts. The two of them together would probably make an awesome team. I'm getting pretty far off-topic here.
I'd never actually thought about that before. I don't know why, but I've just trusted the machines to be right at all times, and I know better than that. Honestly, I've used heavily tested third-party libraries in my code that didn't always work right. Who's to say that the code in those machines is infallible?!
tyler
Wed Oct 19th 22:03:47 2005
I think you're looking to deep into the problem.
How many times have we dealt with issues... and the software is fine.
Now if we could just convince the judge that the morons don't even know how to operate the machines in the first place.
I wish cops would fight crime not fill quotas.
Frequency
Sun Oct 23rd 22:09:33 2005
Haha! Just like a software engineer: "It's gotta be user error." ;-)
Seriously, it is possible that there are bugs in the code. I'm not saying I'd bet the farm that there are lots of problems in the code for such machines, but there may be one or two edge cases that haven't been covered.
Frequency
Tue Oct 25th 15:29:18 2005
While thinking about the enormous possibility of user error, I realized that there exists some sort of certification for nearly every type of technology. Maybe police officers should be required to be certified with the equipment they use, and the certification process audited periodically. In the Army, I have to be trained and certified on all of our equipment before I am allowed to use it in an official setting.