I admire what you're doing, and hope you can adhere to scientific integrity while developing and selling your product, but that simply isn't true. At least in Washington state. A few years ago Washington State purchased a whole bunch of Draeger 9510 (alcohol breathalyzer) units without ever having tested them. After two years of sitting unused, the warranties were going to expire and they finally got around to testing them, and purchasing extended warranties at that point. However their initial tests failed multiple accuracy tests to the point that the state's lab halted testing, since it was so off. A few months later Draeger patched the firmware and OS application (the breath/alcohol measurement firmware being written by a single contractor in Texas, and versioned as 0.7) and while testing looked better, it still wasn't accurate and they just pushed it out the door for deployment...they had already bought them, after all. I'll link the records below...they didn't even have the correct versions of the software and firmware accounted for and signed off, which led to other problems (and Draegar has had other problems of accuracy in other court cases, such as Florida, but that's a side tangent).

My point is, a lot of state governments (at least in the US) spend money first and verify later, and 'verify' can be a damnably loose term. Loose enough to violate WAC 448-15-020 (in Washington state's case) which requires a 'reasonable degree of scientific accuracy'.

EDIT: Apparently the original link (below) is no longer available in WSP's records, which is interesting. You can view the document via archive.org, here

https://web.archive.org/web/20170211114622/http://www.wsp.wa...

original (defunct) http://www.wsp.wa.gov/breathtest/docs/webdms/Draeger/Valid_D...

Thanks for the info. Definitely something we have not run into or considered yet. I guess we just naively assumed that all police precincts were as scrupulous as those we talked to :(.

There is some stuff we can do, however. For instance, we can directly build the QC schedule into the device so it does not work unless you get it calibrated. We can also have QC cartridges that have a barcode that the device reads to make sure you actually ran a calibration check properly and the device passed.

We were so focused on internal methods for making the device accurate, but maybe we should put some thought into how we can make sure the police use it properly.

>I guess we just naively assumed that all police precincts were as scrupulous as those we talked to :(.

Bless your heart.

Really, if you're producing something that is reliably accurate, I would expect that would be all anyone would expect, along with proper training, verified updates, and audited software/firmware, etc. In the case I cited above it was more an issue with the lack of accuracy of the product, and sloppy follow through from the vendor, with money and political pressure thrown at the problem - something which the police departments themselves likely have less influence on anyway.

If your product is at all worthwhile, it will constantly be tossed back and forth between lawyers, trying to uphold or disprove its validity. ("Well here's an independent study done on how arresting officers with shaky hands get inconsistent results when administering the SannTek Cannibus test" et al et al ad nauseum) While yes, this is a problem in any society that applies capitalism principles to the practice of law.... I don't think there's necessarily a better system, sadly. Don't feel responsible to fix it all yourself. Anyway, pursue the technology as well as possible, by all means work in as many checks and balances as possible for correct use, and constant calibration, BUT ALSO talk and document openly during your design phase and testing the ideology you develop to govern false positives versus false negatives. This is an extremely engaging technology ethics discussion. If you drive the error to be false negatives, at a rate of 5%, will you not be able to sell it, because your customer is most interested in an effective tool? What is the societal benefit of getting this device to be accepted and used by the police? If you can achieve FN=4% is it worth it, or is the societal benefit actually much higher, possibly at FN =20%. Can you just run the test 5 times in a row, or with 2 stand alone devices to reach the dependability rate you desire? If you drive the error to be false positives, at a rate of 1%, can you sleep at night with the lives your product will effect, or do you need a fall back like your device determining with 100% accuracy that cannibus is present in someone's system (just not a definitive, exact amount), PLUS a statement from an arresting officer stating erratic or dangerous driving or behavior in conjunction with your device's input. I'm very excited about what you're doing. I didn't know (still not yet convinced) that the science is solvent, but I've been asking about this device for years.

Everyone says they are ethical including the unethical I'm not sure how you possibly took this at face value.

reading HN as a woman is an exercise in managing fury

My apologies if I have caused offense. I have angered you here and this wasn't my intention.

One thing I will say is that the prefixes I gave are in general use as descriptive epithets by both men and women across much of the English speaking world, along with many others decribing the male genitalia, with much greater frequency than you will find on here. Personally, I'm with Alice Fraser on this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gioul9PW9B0 - but will cheerfully adapt the taxonomy in future, if I can find better words to use for the prefixes. Any ideas?

Why not just say what you mean? The prefixes you used are incomprehensible without the parentheticals following them ("(deliberate misuse)" etc.), so why not just use those?

I'm not convinced it breaks down into three clean categories anyway.

>The prefixes you used are incomprehensible without the parentheticals following them

I disagree. In the taxonomy of these things, being a twat is more impulsive misbehaviour, while being a cunt involves malicious aforethought and intent. There is a fairly clear meaning from that general usage.

>I'm not convinced it breaks down into three clean categories anyway.

I agree, but I didn't make it up and people tend to use the rule of three for stuff like this. I suppose a category of dickproof could be added between foolproof and twatproof, but I think it already has a lot of overlap with foolproof.

I think your "general usage" is actually fairly specific to particular places and people. Without the explanations, I wouldn't have gleaned the meanings you're assigning (I'm a native English speaker from NZ). It seems pointlessly obfuscated and offensive to me.

Thought I'd go find out if I was being particularly insensitive or if people were clutching their pearls a bit tightly. Couldn't find many examples, but here they are in the wild and not causing any noticable problems.

Firstly, twatproof, from reply #14 in the Festool owner's group to a question about dovetails:

>"I just had a go with the Festool jig and it's the most twatproof solution I've ever seen."

https://www.festoolownersgroup.com/hand-tools/advice-sought-...

and secondly, cuntproof, on twitter, with someone called Wiryjack describing the term to the award winning writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald:

>"A mechanic I used to know described things as 'cuntproof', which I took to mean foolproof but extra robust to deter the malicious as well as the stupid."

https://twitter.com/Wiryjack/status/938755264815271938

I may note that Helen Macdonald apparently considers cuntproof to be an excellent term, well worth adding to her vocabulary.

This seems like a very strange idea to triple down on. Take or leave the feedback, but I'm not sure you are helped by trying to debate the relative merit of these terms.

FWIW, as a native English speaker I also found your post both needlessly offensive and equally inscrutable.

Fair, I know I am digging a bit of a hole. Partly I am interested in the semantics and partly it is the first time that I have encountered people being particularly pissed off by the concept. Most people I have described it to in the past seemed to find it either funny or useful, so I was surprised by the pushback. I mean, you can say fuck on here and nobody gives a damn, hell, you can name an entire language brainfuck and everybody claps, but this use of language is way out and I am interested in why. I figured that if I dug a little deeper on an already flagged thread, it would not cause any particular harm. Anyone discussing this with me from then on in, is doing so after delving into something clearly marked with 'here be dragons'.

> In general, the police are hyper vigilant about buying only devices that are independently validated to be very accurate.

How do you reconcile that with the reality of the NIK tests which are notoriously unreliable and ubiquitous among police departments?

Like the lie detector?