Flutterby™! : Two notes on UI

Two notes on UI. The first is that we went and test drove the Volkswagen Jetta TDI this evening, and I was reminded about German cars and red lit controls. Why does anyone do anything else? Red is the obvious color for things that are lit up that need to be read at night, the greenish white that my Nissan Stanza has is just silly.

The second is that you may have heard about this shooting that happened early New Years morning in a BART station. There's several videos floating around of a BART police officer pulling his pistol and shooting a restrained suspect in the back, killing him. One of the theories is that the officer mistook his pistol for a taser.

I'm actually sympathetic, it seems like the cop is the victim of systemic problems. For one thing, the Taser has always been sold to us civilians as an alternative to deadly force, after all they do kill people. That the police officer thought deadly force was the only other alternative in the videos I've seen shows that he had some really bad training.

However, the latest Sonoma ACLU newsletter has a picture of a Taser. I had always pictured them as something with roughly the same form-factor as a hair trimmer, but I was woefully misinformed. You can see some pictures at the Taser page of products for corrections and law enforcement, and who the hell thought that a holstered pistol was a good form factor for a Taser? 2AM on BART, the guy probably wasn't used to working night shifts, of course that's going to get confused eventually. This isn't just a criminal matter, this is product liability issue that needs to go all the way up the supply chain, from acquisitions to the manufacturer.