BC has automatic roadside suspensions for drivers with a blood alcohol content over 0.05. These suspensions are in addition to penalties under the Criminal Code for drivers with a BAC over 0.08. The BC Supreme Court just found the extra penalties for BACs over 0.08 to be unconstitutional.

The judge framed the roadside suspensions as a case where the police act as judge, jury and corrections officer. Obviously the Charter protects people against this kind of informal trial. But I’d argue that it’s not the police officer acting as a judge, it’s the breathalyzer. The police are stopping motorists and administering breathalyzers as they would normally, but then instead of the breathalyzer telling the police officer to recommend charges, the breathalyzer runs the trial and tells the police officer to administer punishment.

If breathalyzers are accurate beyond a reasonable doubt, there’s no reason why their ruling would be less just than that of a jury. For other crimes, our justice system is designed so that bias can only be applied into letting people go free, but that’s still unfair to society. A police officer can decide not to recommend charges, a Crown prosecutor can decide not to recommend a trial and a judge or jury can decide that there is insufficient evidence. Automated justice is juster justice.

It’s also worth pointing out that the reason BC had to use administrative penalties rather than a normal criminal charge is that the federal government has jurisdiction over the Criminal Code. Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, does a lot of things, but fighting drunk driving isn’t one of them. And it’s better to let BC experiment rather than immediately roll it out over the whole country. Which is why provinces should get jurisdiction over the Criminal Code or separate from Confederation.

Blogged from the iPad demo @ Restart!

Awesome!!!

I need hard-drive space over here in Europe so I’m digging through my archives for stuff to delete. Here’s a quick photo series I shot on disassembling the ChampionChip race timer. It’s basically a simple plastic case around a wire coil and an RFID chip:

It works by induction. As you’re running you pass over magnetic plates (usually at the start and end, but they can be used for checkpoints as well). The field induces current in the wire coil which powers the tiny radio transmitter (no batteries) and causes it to emit a unique identification number. The receiving computer logs your start and end transmission times. Subtracting the former from the latter gives your race time.

Simple! Their cost-per-unit is pennies so the chips are given away free and are designed-for-dumpsters. Really, they’re trivial to recycle — good business opportunity! You’d have to go bulk, but you could beat even the pennies-per-unit price from the manufacturers (pennies-per-every-other-unit, eg).

This also implies a small optimization: runners should try to cross the line with their chipped foot forward, and with the chip attached as far forward as possible on their shoe. It also implies a hack: get your chip early, copy the unique ID, write it to another chip, and have someone cross the finish just after you cross the start — run a sub-second 10k!

Kotaku has videos of Sony’s new Playstation Move interface in action. It’s like a Wiimote (and includes lots of the crazy new research going into those), but it understands depth.

Via BB, Jane McGonigal — game design theorist extraordinaire — talks about the gamer mentality of “the epic win” and how we need to harness it as a culture:

There is no unemployment in World of Warcraft.

We need continuing epic wins in environmenalism, education, health, economics, and multidimensionally wrt policy. Games can deliver.

Z links to a Facebook data analysis of the top-level social groupings of the United States and assigns them goofy politically-motivated names.

The author was surprised at the prevalence being a Twilight fan held within “Mormonia”, but shouldn’t have been: It’s a celibate LDS fantasia.

And Cascadia — “Pacifica” — is culturally discrete. His roughly-shaded map indicates that we should make a friendship-play for Oregon. I wonder how strong a Facebook barrier the border is?

People are saying Palm is worthless. First, that’s an absurd statement — stocks can’t really go to $0, it’s not how the market works.

But that said, here’s a snip from a fresh-as-last-week business strategy email wherein I discuss the low end of the smartphone market in the context of what platforms to target:

I think Palm and Microsoft are being left in the dust, but I’m staying open-minded.

My reasoning ran thusly: I don’t know anyone who has a Palm smartphone, or wants one, and the only person I know with a Microsoft smartphone is an artcriminal who knows nothing about technology. Microsoft smartphones were hot shit back in ’02… And I haven’t heard anything impressive about them since.

Palm is trying to market their way out of this problem, when right now the smartphone market seems technology-bound — they should fire 50% of their SGA expense people (Selling, General, and Administrative) and double their R&D. At least. Given that they have $500 million in cash on-hand (which they seem to have got by issuing stock — HUGE WARNING SIGN) they should spend ALL OF IT trying to build a better burrito (proverbially).

And, as Warren Buffett says, if you can’t beat ‘em then start looking to sell off your IP and return that money to the shareholders.

MSNBC sez that Google has dropped the “Great Firewall” censorship filters imposed by China en route to pulling out of the country entirely. The infamous Tiananmen Square search, for example, now works correctly.

Meanwhile in the West, WikiLeaks reports, via a leak, that the US DoD conspired to shut them down by running the proverbial tank over any whistleblower-protesters.

On the bright side: Governments the world over seem to have a common bond — hating freedom.

Via Julian — a “phone” that transcribes and translates between languages live:

There’s an “English-only” rule on the big online poker sites in order to stop open collusion. I yelled at some Russians once for breaking the rule and they switched to English: “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to speak? The site should autotranslate everything to a user-specified language.”

Being an effing good idea I had to agree to that — but I still made them speak English. Good idea or no, there was real money on the table.

I recently drove a Lexus. It was the “grey” model, I believe. I’m cautious when driving an unfamiliar car, so I can’t tell you how fast it goes from 0 to 100. I guess it was nice to drive. But what blew me away was the keyless ignition system:

I put a key fob in my pocket. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I pushed the start button to turn the car on. When I got to the parking lot I pushed the button again to turn the car off. Walking away, I had to touch the fob again to lock the car.

Half an hour latter I trudge toward the car, loaded down with groceries. The door automatically unlock as I approach. I still have to open the door, but depositing the groceries is easy. I’m back on the road without once having to squeeze my fingers into my tight jeans.

Since I bike to work I’m always having to fiddle with locks: bike locks, house doors, storage locker codes, office radio cards, etc. If I could have keyless entry to all of them it would be like a dream.