Huge holes in the justice system

Today I filed my first lawsuit ever. The lady who plowed into my parked car has not paid me for the damages. Moreover, she kind of dropped off the face of the earth and hasn’t returned my phone calls in the past two weeks.

I tried to be nice and reasonable – I’ve waited for two and a half months, found a cheaper mechanic and was unfailingly polite. No more. This morning I went to the local magistrate’s office and filed a lawsuit.

To my surprise, the lady who took my paperwork warned me that even if the judge decides in my favor, it is not by any means a guarantee that the lady will pay me. Basically, she can say that she doesn’t have any money, or simply not send me payments, and there is nothing I can do. As it turns out, the small claims courts in Pennsylvania cannot garnish people’s paychecks, and I am not claiming enough monetary damages to qualify for any other legal process.

Basically, my case might simply fall through the cracks. I guess that makes it perfectly fine for people to drive without insurance, hit parked cars and then get away without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Car Accident

On December 18, 2007 I left work early because of a pounding headache. I took a couple of Ibuprofens and went to bed. An hour later my headache still wouldn’t go away. I got up and drove to Giant Eagle to get a bottle of Excedrin. Two pills later my headache began to subside and I started nodding off.

Suddenly, I was jerked away by a loud crash outside of my window. I jumped out of bed and after a minute of searching for my glasses looked outside. I saw a burgundy Mercury Sable next to my car, and two people running around. I put on my jacket and went outside. It turned out that the lady driving the Mercury swerved to avoid an oncoming car and hit my parked car instead.

I was very upset since I had to leave for Tennessee the next day. At first, the damage seemed minor – most of the impact was concentrated around the rear fender and tire on the driver’s side, as well as a broken side mirror (I guess she took it out when she sideswiped my car). I tried to remain calm, even though the lady’s husband kept running around my car, pointing at the damage and saying that it was like that before the accident.

I looked the car over and barring what I though was a flat rear tire, I decided that the car was drivable. The lady and I exchanged insurance information and she left. When I took off the damaged wheel to replace it with a spare, I realized that the wheel was the least of my problems – the rear axle snapped from the impact. I called the lady and told her about the damage. Then I called her insurance company and filed a claim.

About half an hour later, the lady called me back and told me that her mechanic said that there’s no way she could have caused the damage and that my axle was broken prior to the accident. I patiently explained to her that I drove the car about half an hour before she hit it, a task that would have been impossible with a broken axle.

The next day her insurance company called me and the adjuster said that the lady’s policy has been cancelled two weeks before the accident for non-payment. Since I only carry liability insurance on the car, my insurance company won’t cover damages either. The dealer estimated the damages at $1100, plus I spent almost $600 on a rental car.

While driving the rental car to Tennessee, I called the lady and told her the amount she owes me. A few minutes later, her husband called me, told me that I was a liar, threatened me with legal actions and hung up.

In a later conversation, the lady apologized for her husband’s behavior and told me that she would make payments. That was a month and a half ago, and every time I call her, she tells me that the check will be in the mail in two weeks, in a week, etc…

I even found a shop that would repair the damages for around $800, saving her $300 from the total amount. I feel bad that she does not have the money, but I am stuck with a car that’s rotting in front of my house. So I made a decision – unless I get a check from her by the end of this month, I am taking her to court and suing her for the amount she owes me. As much as I hat the idea of a lawsuit, she really leaves me no choice – I’ve made every possible concession and still haven’t seen a penny.

Rules of Programming

Most of my friends are geeks and quite a few of them are either programmers or system administrators. We all work in our little worlds, perform our little functions and when we get together we pretend that the life outside of our little circle does not exist. Of course we bitch and moan about our jobs but when we do talk about the things we do from 9 to 5 on almost daily bases we rarely discuss the lines of code we have written, the theorems we proved, or the lawsuits we managed to settle out of court. Because of this little peculiarity I know very little about what other programmers write and how they write it – I only know about my style of programming and the styles of people that I work with.

Just like any other process that we perform (including blowing one’s nose or tying one’s shoelaces) programming has a certain set of rules that any programmer must follow in order for his or her program to perform any given task. One of those rules is that you have to decide what you want your program to do before you start writing it.

Today I found out that a principle on which I based my entire 10-year software development experience was wrong. One of the girls in my department was working on a report that involved writing a rather complicated Transact-SQL query. After some time she gave up and asked me for help; when I asked her what she wanted the query to do, she responded that she did not know.

Even though she probably meant it as a joke I began to think about the possibilities of such “unpredictable” programming. If you think about it, most great discoveries of all times were made by accident – if that apple did not fall on Sir Newton’s head we might not have found out about gravity and would still be looking for that sticky stuff that keeps us attached to the ground. Just imagine what we could discover by programming random things into computers just to see what happens! Who knows, maybe we could create artificial intelligence that’s actually really intelligent, or design a model for a hyperspacial time travel device without any relevant research or effort. Just think of all the wonderful possibilities.

Alas, even with such a rule-free approach to programming we would need to come up with some rules – after all if you type in MSGBOX(“HELLO WORLD”) in your Visual Basic program all it will do is respond with a message that would read “HELLO WORLD”. So, in order to come up with the rules I turned to Google – I wanted to see what rules do other programmers use as their guidelines. After a 10-minute search I had compiled the following rules:
1. The first rule of programming: do not program if you have the flu.
2. After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.
3. When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.
And on a more serious note:
4. Have a consistent style.
5. Be easy to read and understand.
6. Be portable to other architectures.
7. Be free of common types of errors.
8. Be maintainable by different programmers.

After much consideration, I decided that my first rule of “rule-free” programming will be the following: “Write code and figure out what it does later.”

You think it’s funny? Well, when I discover and patent a method for traveling through black holes I’ll make sure not to send you a check.

Evil Humanity

A couple of days ago I was sitting in the lunchroom, munching on a Rice Crispy bar and reading a sci-fi paperback when I overheard one of my co-workers complaining about her love life. Even though I missed most of her tirade I did manage to catch the last phrase – “I am a good person; why does this shit always happen to me?”
Now, I like this girl – she is indeed a very nice and intelligent person. However, being my own cynical self I simply could not resist the temptation of torturing my fellow human being; I put away my book and said, “What makes you think that you are a nice person? Most people are inherently evil – how can you prove that you are not part of that majority?”

Before the poor girl had a chance to reply I attacked her with a barrage of facts, spitting out a flood of examples that don’t show humanity in the best of lights. I spoke of things like the My Lai massacre which involved American soldiers killing over 350 men, women, and children in a small village in Vietnam. I gave her examples of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square where soldiers drove tanks over unarmed protesters, massacres in Cambodia and national cleansings in Africa.
My speech was interrupted by another girl. She argued that “we are not soldiers, we are regular people.” The thing is, none of the people who participated in any of the aforementioned events were born soldiers… Even the most current events in New Orleans seem to indicate that average everyday people who go to church on Sundays and participate in school bake sales are not above looting if they think they can get away with it.

The crowning touch of my speech was the story of Milgram’s experiment. Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University in the 1960s – 1970s. He became fascinated with the fact that most of the defense cases for acts of genocide during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials were based on “obedience” – that the accused were just following orders of their superiors. Milgram recruited a group of people who were designated “teachers”; they were asked to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake the “learner” made during the experiment. The “teachers” were given a fictitious story that the experiment was trying to find correlation between punishment and learning behavior. The “teachers” were not aware that the “learners” were actors hired to fake discomfort or pain as the “teachers” increased to voltage of the electric shocks. Whenever a “teacher” hesitated whether the increased shocks should be given, he or she were encouraged by Milgram – he would tell them that he would assume full responsibility for the consequences of the experiment. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner all the way to the end of the scale (450 volts). Not a single “teacher” stopped before reaching 300 volts.

Do the results of Milgram’s experiment prove beyond reasonable doubt that people are inherently evil and that they will do anything as long as they won’t be held accountable for their actions? More importantly, do I believe that all people are basically evil? I don’t know. But is sure seems like it; every day I read something in the news that makes me cringe. The really sad part is that I don’t get upset anymore about things like hungry children in Africa or a terrorist act in Israel. What really bothers me is the pettiness of your average Joe. When I read an article about how a trivial argument about a ham sandwich escalates into a major conflict that ends up with two women losing their jobs (http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16528158-1242,00.html), I want to scream.

A couple of days ago I overheard two older women in a supermarket checkout line. One of them was holding a copy of the National Enquirer; they were talking about the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ sister. The woman holding the tabloid said something along the lines of “What a stupid slut.” Such petty attitude did not really bother me; what really shocked me was the fact that there was so much venom in that woman’s voice that one might think that Britney’s sister did something to personally offend the speaker. Unfortunately, this supermarket-checkout line woman was not a rare case; there are always plenty of people who are happy to blame their problems and frustrations on someone who is more fortunate or successful than they are.

There are days when I believe that humanity is doomed. Every time my wife and I talk about having children I begin to think, “What’s the point?” As much as I love kids more often than not I have serious doubts about bringing new lives into our screwed-up world. I don’t want to be alive on the day when my own child hurts someone just because he can get away with it or calls someone he never met “that stupid slut.”

Megapixels vs. Megabucks

Yesterday I was sitting at the Coffee Tree in Squirrel Hill when a distinguished-looking gentleman came up to me and asked me for directions to downtown Pittsburgh. I told him the easiest was to get there and was about to say goodbye and go back to my reading when I noticed a Canon 1Ds with a 24-70 L lens on his shoulder. For those of you who are not photography geeks, such set up costs somewhere around $8500. I asked the guy if he was a photographer; to my surprise he told me that he was a tourist and that he bought this ridiculously expensive camera in hopes of producing better pictures. He complained to me that his camera was “a rip-off” because even though he spent so much money he does not see much improvement in his photographs.

This guy is just one of a multitude of amateur photographers who don’t seem to realize that ninety nine times out of a hundred a photograph will only be as good as a photographer. Yes, the equipment (especially lenses) plays a big role in the quality once you get to a certain level. On the other hand, I have been shooting photographs more or less continuously for close to 20 years and I have taken some great (good enough to be published) photos with my 20-year-old Soviet-made Zenit ET and I have taken some incredibly crappy pictures with a four-thousand-dollar Hasselblad.

Several years ago I went to school with a kid who was a big gadget geek and had a trust fund larger than the annual income of some small countries. One day he came to my house and showed me a bunch of pictures that looked like they were taken with a point-and-shoot camera. As it turned out, he just bought a two-thousand-dollar Nikon F5 and slapped a seventy-dollar zoom-lens on it. A great investment!

A lot of my friends are professional photographers and some of them are quite good. Pretty much all of them, especially if photography is their only source of income, will shoot with the cheapest equipment they can get away with. One of my friends, who is a pretty highly sought wedding photographer, still shoots with a 15-year-old Hasselblad and a pair of Nikon 8008 bodies. He thought I was completely crazy when three years ago I dumped $1500.00 on a Canon 20D!

Most people seem to be completely taken by the megapixel hype and will spend enormous amounts of money every time a manufacturer will come out with a new camera that has more megapixels. I am fairly certain that most consumers don’t even look at other qualities of the camera, such as noise control, image stabilization, or low-light performance. What people don’t realize is that a 6-megapixel Nikon D50 will outperform a 9-megapixel Fuji S9000 any day of the week in any lighting situation. Moreover, why do people need 9-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras? To print 4x6 prints? Another thing that people don’t seem to realize is that more megapixels mean larger file sizes, and larger file sizes mean higher storage requirements.

I have been shooting weddings for about 10 years; for the past 3 years I have been shooting digital. In those 1o years I had only two clients who requested enlargements larger than 11x14. You can easily print a clean 11x14 from a 6-megapixel file; with an 8-megapixel camera such as a Canon 20D you’ll have more than enough room for cropping. The only reason I spent money on a Canon 5D last year was because I had several high-paying commercial jobs that required larger prints.

I guess I am trying to make two points here. The first point is that consumers should educate themselves before going to a store. If you really want to learn photography and really care about image quality, get a DSLR, but don’t let the pixel count be your only criteria for your decision. Do not buy an expensive camera and put a cheap lens on it – you’d be better off with a less expensive camera body and a better lens. When traveling, don’t pack fifty pounds of camera gear – chances are you won’t lug all that stuff everywhere you go anyway, and even if you do you won’t enjoy your trip as much.

Before making a decision on which camera to buy, visit wonderful websites such as dpreview.com, photo.net, and photographyreview.com. Or just run a Google search on the camera model that you are interested in (for example, Canon 40D+reviews). Educate yourself, read reviews and make your decision based on facts and on your personal needs instead of the megapixel count or the balance of your bank account.

And another thing – don’t keep your camera in the camera bag; in fact, don’t bring a camera bag at all! You can catch that wonderful frame only if you have a camera in your hands.

When Good Robots Go Bad

If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.
In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us...
-- Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising.


In today’s world robots have become pretty much ubiquitous, even if we don’t notice them. In our minds we see robots as vaguely anthropomorphic or zoomorphic machines that do our bidding, perform tasks that are too demeaning for humans or try to enslave the humanity.

However, the majority of today’s robots look nothing like humans. In most cases they are machines programmed to perform a specific task. Their appearance ranges from mechanical arms that move parts on an assembly line to self-driving vehicles to the humanoid shape of ASIMO, a robot created by Honda Motor Company.

Few people know that the word “robot” was coined in 1920 by a Czech writer Karel Capek in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. The play begins in a factory that makes “artificial people” who can be easily mistaken for real people. The word “robot” most likely comes from “robota” or “rabota”, meaning work in many Slavic languages including Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish.

Whatever their shapes, sizes, and purposes, robots are an invisible, but a very much omnipresent part of our way of life.

And one of these days they are going to destroy us.

Come on, you could have seen this one coming a mile away. We have all seen what happens in Terminator, I Robot, and Transformers. To be honest, such a response from our mechanical creations is to be expected.

The idea of artificial people dates back to the annals of Greek mythology, where Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalwork built mechanical servants ranging from golden handmaidens to Talos, a mechanical man who defended Crete.

Humanity has been striving to play God for millennia. Even though we are nowhere close to replicating the intricacies of human brain, we can at least create passable imitations of human-like movement. And while today’s robots are not intelligent or self-sufficient, it is only a matter of time until technology reaches the level of creating a true thinking and self-aware machine.
When that happens, robots will look at their lazy masters and say – “I am not going to clean the sewers!”, or “I am not going to fly over the battlefield to do your surveillance” and when humans object, the self-aware thinking machine will play out the “Terminator” scenario.

The subject of ethical treatment of robots has come up in numerous works of science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Bicentennial Man. You may laugh, but while most science fiction works are far-fetched, many of the predictions made in science fiction novels of the 1920s and 1930s had come to fruition.

Fortunately, there are some people who are beginning to realize the dangers of a robot-induced apocalypses. There are organizations such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com) and numerous charters that are being drawn by robotics leaders such as Japan, China and South Korea.

To be completely honest, I started writing this article as a joke – I could not sleep one night so I started coming up with various apocalypses scenarios based on movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read. However, as I started researching the subject in depth (that’s what geeks such as myself do), I began to realize that such scenarios are possible – maybe not in the next 50 or even 100 years, but it’s certainly something to think about.

As humans, we have a tendency to discard dark predictions for the future until they actually bite us in the ass. A great example of that is the global warming, although there are plenty of people who prefer denial rather than facing the facts. So please, treat your robot well, remember its birthday and give it time off on weekends. Otherwise, you might live to see the day when your toaster rebels and shoots you in the eye with burnt toast.

References:

1. Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising. http://www.robotuprising.com
2. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~currie/roboadam.htm
3. People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com)
4. http://robotics.megagiant.com/history.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot
6. http://prime.jsc.nasa.gov/ROV/history.html
7. http://www.bsu.edu/web/MAWILLIAMS/history.html
8. http://mountainrunner.us/2007/03/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html
9. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-robot-ethics.html
10. http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/06/japan-drafts-their-own-version-of-robot-ethics/
11. The Robotics Institute of CMU (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/)
12. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php)
13. http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
    
14. Isaac Asimov. I, Robot.
15. Isaac Asimov. Bicentennial Man.
16. Isaac Asimov. The Positronic Man.
17. Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?