California woman who drove with Google Glass beats traffic ticket

I think you're giving the officer a very generous amount of "benefit of the doubt".

He didn't say "I wasn't sure about the legality, so I referred it to a judge", rather saying he cited her because she got argumentative.

ie., "Don't challenge me if you disagree, otherwise I'll treat you as though you've broken the law."

That's pretty crappy behaviour on the officer's behalf IMHO.

I'm going to say that it is entirely unreasonable for the police to be ignorant of the law.

Giving our office's Glass to people to test, they're so distracted that they'll walk into things. Sometimes these things are pillars clearly visible at eye level.

I personally hate the idea of drivers wearing these things. My undergraduate was in psychology, neurophysiology, and hence I've been formally trained in attention and perception - I've got a better idea than layfolk on how these are compromised, though I'm not a professional in the field. In my opinion, the Glass is a significant attentional split - which is bad for driving. One example: say voice control is working fine (it doesn't always). You still have to take your eyes off the road, target a small reticle, make sure the glass is responding correctly. Even after that, there's still issues like just having a phone call in the car, which regardless of the device is a driving-performance-reducing attentional split.

Glass really, really impresses me as a technological feat; as a product I think it's a solution looking for a problem; and as a social phenomenon, I think it's quite dangerous when mixed with common activities like driving.

If you're using Glass for navigation, it generally stays out of the way. If you're approaching a turn you're due to make, it will beep at you and a voice will tell you what to do. Only at that point does the screen come on, and displays a fairly simple map drawing. Once you take the turn, the screen fades off.

If you're wearing Glass properly, the screen is also up at an angle above your eye. If you're sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle and looking forward, the display would be about at the area where your sun visor would be if it were flipped down over the top of your windshield.

Here's some research from Thad Starner, who is actually the person in charge of the Glass project over at Google: Citation: http://dmrussell.net/CHI2010/docs/p1695.pdf. He studied the performance of people doing a warehouse box-filling task using orders given on paper in a couple of forms, spoken, or presented through a head-mounted display like Glass. Summary was that workers using HDMs are more focused, work faster, and commit fewer errors overall, mostly because they spend less time switching contexts and have the information much more available.

Anecdotal evidence for you. I've tried driving in it a few times and wearing Glass wile driving is very distracting during the night time. Even when the glass was switched off every light was reflecting on the sides, it was distracting me from driving and in around twenty minutes (I was driving to Tahoe) I've started getting a headache and felt slightly nauseated (not normal for me, I can read in the car fine, without feeling any nausea). It all right during daytime, you barely notice when Glass is off and using navigation during daytime is also Ok (better than looking at a cellphone, worse than having voice-guided navigation).

Similar situation happened to me 2 years ago and I was dismissed in part because of the lack of evidence to back the calibration of a radar gun.

Link: http://skatter.com/2011/02/how-my-smart-phone-got-me-out-of-...

Most people just pay regardless, so it's not really a priority for them to keep calibrations up to date, or to show up for court. It's pretty easy to win a speeding ticket case this way.

"Woz gets $700 speeding ticket for doing 104 MPH in Toyota Prius" (http://macdailynews.com/2007/08/21/woz_gets_700_speeding_tic...)

Google says that the top speed for a Prius is 112.

There are few if any cars that can't reach 85 mph sold in the last decade in California.

I've been lectured by the wife for driving her pod car...err...prius at speeds she doesn't appreciate. That speed was somewhere between said post and what Woz was cited for. It it possible, though in general they prefer to stay in the #1 lane at below the posted speed limit.

No. You can easily do over 100mph.

Glass will play, amongst other things, video. It doesn't have the built in protections that video-playing car stereos have for not showing video while the vehicle is in motion.

Glass does not provide a HUD. It is more like gluing a smartphone to your rear view mirror.

Seriously. That is an interesting application of bitcoin. Does that work with Bitcoin, or would it be neccessary to construct another "Coin" specifically for that purpose?

I'm highly sceptical of Bitcoin as currency, since there are so many conflicts between the technical properties of Bitcoin and the economics of currencies, but de-centralized verification of events and dates? _That_ sounds interesting.

Because if you are holding a phone to your ear you are by definition using it. Glasses could be just hanging out on your head though. Perhaps if you drove around with your phone strapped to your head with a sweat band you could make the same argument.

You can see that there's an image on the glass if you're facing the user, but you have to be fairly close.