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CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red-Light Cameras
TechDirt is running a piece on Corona, CA, where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras — cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take — in order to increase the city's revenue. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued for "California stops" before a right turn on red, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes the apparent unconstitutionality of what Corona proposes to do: "The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal."
That slashdot outage was terrible. I almost got some work done..
Anyone else ever do any development on the Inmos Transputer?
The ones I used had four relatively high-speed serial links for message-passing between CPUs.
I suppose that something similar could be done with AMD CPUs on their high speed bus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
This is an open source project, and just from some brief looks at the source they are using grub as the boot loader. This might be a new beginning for microsoft research.
It's WM_PAINT all over again.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Finally, an OS that wont slow down when it's been completely compromised.
So MS has a whole prototype OS for something Apple threw into their $30 maintenance update almost as an after-thought? Great. Wake me up when they do something interesting. Also if you RTFA it looks like its basically just a MS-funded research project for a few peoples' master thesis. Even more yawn. Get this story out of here.
I'm so happy /. is back up again, i will even positively comment on microsoft articles! Now after more than an hour i can finally pretend to work again, instead of having to do the real thing.
3 "New Architechture" operating systems.
Microsoft is getting more like the old Xerox and IBM every day.
Xerox PARC: Create industry changing new technology that we hear about but never see. Never release.
IBM of the 1980's: Fat, lethargic, bureaucracy driven.
Microsoft right now: Both.
I'm still waiting for Cairo.
--
BMO
...but still can't handle modern web standards.
Making jokes for this OS should be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I'm at loss for words... I want to thank my mom, the cat, the postman, my cousin Gill - all those wonderful persons/animals/entities that made this possible. 'Cept Frank. Screw you, Frank.
that's a surprise. http://www.barrelfish.org/barrelfish_sosp09.pdf
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.
This is an important problem area for future software systems, great that alternative approaches are being looked at. More power to them.
.: Max Romantschuk
"...specifically for multicore environments."
Mr.Gates, this is what we expected from Windows 7.
Microsoft is far to big to change direction. They are a marketing company trying to wring every last penny out of windows and related tools. They have never been a technology company and trying to change now will do nothing but burn vast sums of money. Windows is obsolete and they know they have to replace it but they will never be able to come up with anything better.
They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects. Sadly they can't think like that.
Please tell me I'm not the only one amused by the whole "best built on Debian or Ubuntu, 'cos thats what we use" part of the README...
QNX has pretty much all of this and has had it for quite awhile, I think I heard most of these buzzwords from QNX's hype campaign back in the 80s...
It was more of a programming language than an Operating System, but ERLANG has the stuff to do multi-core, well. Using ERLANG, they've actually achieved nine nines of uptime. That works out to well under a SECOND of downtime in a year. It scales (near) linearly as the number of cores go up, IO is the limitation.
You can read all about it here. Concepts like message passing and immutability is what makes it work.
Erlang actually lets you update the program while it's running. It has extensive error recovery. It's lack of shared state means you can not only go multi-core, but multi-system over networks - invisibly.
Seriously, It's the cat's meow for ultra-high-end high-performance, industrial-grade software solutions. If I were writing a stock exchange management system, I would probably consider ERLANG.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's a little hard to determine whether this is actually about discrete multicore systems, or heterogenous clusters. Sure, a single conventional machine is likely to have both CPU and GPU, but it's less likely to have x86_64, x86 and CPUs. So to some extent, I suspect heterogenous clusters. In the case of a single box, this would come across as a massive prototyping effort simply to avoid supporting an open-tracked standard (OpenCL).
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
When Microsoft wonders why Mac is perceived and cool and Windows isn't take a clue from their naming conventions. Barrelfish vs Snow Leopard. Can you spot the cooler name? After Vista flopped the marketing department went out and got drunk and said "aw fuck it, we'll just call the next one Windows 7". Just kind of feels like they really aren't even trying.
I would like something that is a combination of Inferno/Plan9(styx is nice) and Erlang as a stand-alone OS. Throw in any other cool features for good multiprocessor and high performance clustering and fault tolerance. (Although if Erlang-like, I would like some better syntax, it's a little hairy). The idea of being able to scale to 20 million threads on one system efficiently with Erlang is intriguing, although I estimated that it would take about 48GiB of RAM to just have the stack data. But that's not so bad, it's pretty easy to find an affordable server motherboard that can accept 64GiB of RAM. (installing all that RAM is moderately expensive though)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Anybody remember connection machine LISP? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=319870
Isn't it a shame that after all the hard work the devs put into great ideas like this at MS, once the accountants and marketers get their hands on it it comes out the doors like Vista! There's something seriously wrong with the workflow in that company...
six years of development and a console to show....
Does it run Photoshop?
In the build notes... it points that they're building it not in Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) but in recent Debian/Ubuntu distros...
What makes me think... why didn't they choose the Windows OS?
Any idea?
PD: This' not a flamewar post, it's just curious about if building 64 bits apps (OS in this case) is harder in a Windows machine rathen than in a Linux one.
Vista in my eyes brought about the changes to Windows that needed to happen. It was the adolescence stage of Windows IMO, and the result is a matured Windows 7 that's hit the ground running. Sure Vista was painful at the beginning, but it shaped up and turned into a respectable OS in the end, and now W7 is bearing the fruit of that as pretty much all the reviews have stated.
Before Vista; Windows really was quite immature (and I refer more to the "Windows way" of doing things more than the tech capability) .
-Admin by default
-Firewall barely a consideration
-AV a bonus
-Automatic updates a nicety
-32bit mandatory (64bit XP was a joke)
-No DEP/ASLR/Kernel protection
Admittedly most of those were tweaked with SP2; but Vista was the first OS to have all these fixes baked in from RTM, and surprise....it broke stuff
throw new NoSignatureException();
At last a TFA which is actually hosted on the system it's talking about, and it refuses to break so we can make "It must be running Barrelfish" jokes. Maybe it really is efficient.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Will the screen still be blue?
...all too easy to mock. I'm not sure why, but I get the distinct impression that it will be easy to shoot...
This sounds a lot like a Mach 3.0 uK variant I worked on that ran on the Intel Hypercube. Before Intel canned that project. The interesting thing about that project was that in order to simulate the Hypercube we ran the OS on clusters of i386 machines. To me, this was the real application of the technology, exploiting the power of commodity boxes with a single OS.
Interestingly a lot of the original Mach 3.0 team got hired by Microsoft never to be be seen again (they were sent to some gulag somewhere cold and wet near alaska... Seattle I think they call it).
It wants its multicore ideas back.
So they wrote code that uses a distributed memory model as opposed to shared model? And they spent money on this? And they reported it as news? And ./ put it on its frontpage?!
Seriously, this is insane. These types of systems have been around for *years*. In fact a lot of us have one sitting in our living room, namely the PS3.
but i cant shake the feeling alot of what microsoft does in the realm of "research" operating systems is in some font a duplication of work done by other operating systems...
virtually every *nix and BSD variant currently supports multicore functionality quite well, and if a program is compiled properly and written properly it can benefit from multicore architectures through these OS's. for microsoft to "research and develop" applications of technology theyve historically restricted and taxed in their own operating systems is perplexing. regardless of advances, im willing to continue associating redmond with price gouging cores.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I though it was interesting that one of the requirements for building the barrelfish-thing is GHC v6.8.2 (Glasgow Haskell). Although, from a quick look at it, I got the impression that the Haskell-stuff is used for various tools, and maybe not for the kernel itself. Using Haskell to write kernel modules is of course already a possibility for us Linux users (http://tommd.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/kernel-modules-in-haskell/) ;)
Can be used to do this as well as sync caches and allowing cross DRAM controller access.
But latency is as important as raw speed for many partially parallelizable applications
for more read the Berkeley Parallel Computing papers.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html
Okay guys, who though it would be funny to prefill the story with comments from other story. damn you kdawson!
Or is recession so bad that now slashdot is recycling our comments?
How did I end up in the Windows 7 thread from the "CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red Light Cameras" article? It even shows that in the address bar, so I'm not crazy here...
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I don't see any exceptions in the constitution for "administrative violations".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What the hell is going here? I see a story about Corona CA evading the law on red-light cameras and comments (and tags) are about some MS story?
In my humble opinion, the cameras should not be citing a violation for right turns at red lights. The cameras don't do this where I live. They are taking it too far.
Here we have "green arrow" traffic lights. Next to the green in a standard set of three lights, is a green arrow. If it lights, while red is lit, you can turn right, providing that you:
- stop before the lights (unconditionally)
- let all the traffic on the other lanes pass
- let the pedestrians pass.
It means you drive as from the lowest priority road, yielding to all other traffic - but if there is none, you don't have to wait for nothing.
Somehow I think this is more citizen-friendly than the cameras.
Of course it provides less revenue...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Oh, goody, my account thinks that my previous comment is attached to the Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish story. Brilliant!
I think that somehow /. just got rebooted into single-article mode. All the comments and all the stories are merged together. Maybe it's a cost-saving measure, cutting down on use of electrons and such...
coding is life
I don't know what the outage was, but why am I reading comments about open source code, routing, and marshaling in the comments about a constitutional overstep by a local municipality in CA?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This is not unique. Houston, TX did that over 1 yr ago. It is blackmail, pure and simple.
Slashdot breaks comments.
Oh, great. The Barrelfish article isn't on the front page anymore, and the url for it just redirects to the red-light-cameras url.
Maybe the barrelfish article was supposed to be secret and CmdrTaco just got visited by the suits in black helicopters. This breakdown on /. is probably his subtle way of cluing us in to the shadowy government conspiracy.
Or, you know, some kind of computer failed somewhere. But the conspiracy thing is so much sexier.
coding is life
This thread is about red light cameras, why are everybody talking about Microsoft and programming?
The lack of a moving violation has an advantage for the motorist. Here in Illinois, red-light tickets do not affect your driving record or insurance rates.
As a bicyclist in a city where red lights mean "four more cars!", I was happy to see the red light cameras arrive. Even after getting a ticket as a driver. The on-line video of my violation was educational - it looked like an audition for "Cops". I'm a lot more careful now.
As in the Phoenix area, this seems to be as much about revenue as it is about safety and enforcement.
I don't begrudge them the revenue (after all, you get caught speeding, you be speeding generally) but the process doesn't allow for any meaningful appeal. And here in Phoenix, process servers that go out to actually serve those drivers that ignore the mail sometimes don't do a good job of service, like giving the papers to the 12-year-old, or even the wrong address. And that speaks to the general attitude that this system is just abusive.
Then again, we are speeding. If it's important, it's important enough to do right.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We, who live here endure things similar to this on a daily basis. The stats charges the highest taxes and you get nothing in return for that. The worst roads, some of the worst schools, terrible health care. But we do have a multi millionaire, movie star for a govenor. He doesn't have any of those issues!
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Well, this is getting interesting. It's like madlibs, Slashdot edition!
Or they will frack up your server links .
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
OK so Im not an American, can someone explain how is it a single city can just arbitrarily breach state laws and constitution and legally enforce their own rules instead? It seems exactly like the wost kid of banana-republic dictatorship.
Why aren't the State gov and feds already arresting and firing the city morons who are blatantly acting illegally?
I understood that the constitution was the highest authority? Surely if a citizen gets caught by this camera they can just ignore it and sue the police and city for illegal arrest or whatever and automatically win in any court?
I've seen many spectacular Slashdot screwups over the years, but this is a new one. Well done, guys!
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.
NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
my brain booting into blinding, skull-rattling hangover mode
Did you have an oktoberfest party last night, too?
coding is life
Where in this country does someone have a right to a jury for a moving violation? Right to a jury is guaranteed only for criminal cases. Traffic infractions are not criminal infractions unless they rise to a misdemeanor level.
Why did http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/24/238251/CA-City-Mulls-Evading-the-Law-On-Red-Light-Cameras come to this comment chain apparently about coding and Microsoft??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In my feed reader at the moment is a story titled 'Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish"'. Following the link leads here, which is very noticeably not that story, which appears to be this instead. Presumably somewhere along the way that story got replaced with this story and the comments were kept (also the tags too it seems). As for exactly how this happened, I don't have a clue, but perhaps it has something to do with the aforementioned downtime (Slashdot was 503ing for a significant amount of time last night).
"Look, if you wanted to talk about pet care, you should've called two weeks ago when our show on racism was airing. Okay, I'm doing a show about the elderly right now, which of course, to people watching means: call in about cooking..."
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Maybe it's the large amount of caffeine I have in my system today but wth? Why is this news for nerds? Why should this matter to me? wtf is the point? More articles about tech such as SANs, Virtual Machines, Coding etc...etc... plz
Alarmist headline? Maybe?
"California City Mulls Evading the Law!"
So...there's apparently a law that "authorizes" cities to install red light cameras, and one city is thinking that's not the way to go. How is that "evading the law?"
TechDirt is running a piece on Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, where officials are considering researchers released a prototype for another OS, code-named Barrelfish -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase an OS written specifically for multicore environments. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes such systems tend to share resources like apparent unconstitutionality:
This just goes to show, you can't count on big companies to do what's right. If there were more freedom and openness, we'd be a lot better off. Between Microsoft's FUD and Apple's fanboys, it's a wonder anything gets done.
Hopefully, once people realize what's going on and the Pirate Party gains ground and push back the anti-evolution religious nuts, everything will be much better.
There, that should milk a few karma points no matter what Slashdot article this comment ends up under.
I never drive through revenue camera intersections. There are a bunch of them cropping up in my hometown of Seattle, but so far there are ways around all of them along my normal routes.
average backseat moderation. i'd give you a +1 insightful for throwing up a little. was it mostly coffee? you sound a little jittery.
"The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. T
Could someone send a copy of the applicable amendments and supporting court decisions to Washington State? Moving violations have been considered "administrative violations" here for years. WA state does things a little differently; they don't require you to admit guilt. Guilt has nothing to to with paying/not paying a fine. They also employ someone who is nominally a judge to handle contested violations. But at the outset of the "trial" they state that it is not a trail, rules of evidence do not apply including the municipalities need to prove a case. Other than the semantics, it sounds just like Corona's system.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hooray for broken slashcode!
I click the link for the comments of the Your Rights Online: CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red-Light Cameras story and what do I get?
I get the comments of Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish".
Way to fucking go!
Of course there's no guarantee that this comment will end up on the Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish" page. If it ends up somewhere else then the slashcode is even more broken.
view laws as a way of generating revenue (tax laws when they are not confiscatory and equally applied to all, being the exception), we are all doomed.
Ummmm...... ok. Since when has a moving violation - a rolling stop - that's been around around since the stop light and stop sign were invented suddenly been classified as a "California stop". Talk about ego.
Well, that's odd.
But anyway, concerning Corona, CA, it should be noted that some blogger linked to by TechDirt is no better a legal scholar than... anyone else, apparently. There's no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to "shred" for traffic violations, or any misdemeanor involving less than six months or so of jail.
TFS notes that the politicians seem more annoyed that they are being cut out of the money, not how it affects the citizens.
They tried this in Springfield MO (sorry pay access to the local paper I read daily) http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/news_leader/access/1691011761.html?FMT=ABS&date=Jan+13,+2009
They don't even have to prove that you were driving to be ticketed, just the owner is ticketed... So there goes old fashion habeas corpus out the door. There is no reasonable means of redress if there is any issue, since it is just an administrational issue, not a criminal one. They also claimed that it was for "safety", except that they put them on the intersections with the most traffic, not the most accidents per intersection, or accidents per unit of traffic.
If you could contest it like any other ticket in court, then it might stop being an illegal attack of a government on it's citizens.
Also, I entirely agree that everyone does it. Coming to a complete stop is stupid and, frankly, less safe than the "rolling stop". Coming to a complete stop causes more traffic ripples via the brake jam effect and increases traffic density due to the fact that barely anyone can make it through the light.
"where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase the city's revenue."
If this doesn't convince you that it's NOT "all about safety" then I don't know what will...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
You are incorrect. In the State of New York, you are arraigned, a pre-trial counsel is held with the ADA, and you still have the right after that to a jury trial. If a municipality cites you for a non-moving violation under municipal code, you will have to pay the fine, but only so that you can appeal the case to a "real" court where you will be guarenteed a trial-by-jury.
If you want to appeal ANY camera ticket in CA, you HAVE to pay bail in the amount of the ticket-BEFORE you go to court. Se either way they still have your $$.
The fact that the city of Corona is trying to cut the county and the state out of revenue is the real story here. Red lights come and go. But revenue wars such as this are pretty interesting.
The only question in my mind left is whether they are following the 3-second rule on yellow lights.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious.
I know it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but at least here in Atlanta and all surrounding areas, this holds true of pretty much any traffic violation as far as I know. I have tried to get a trial by jury several times when I felt my case was such utter BS that no twelve sane people would bother with it -- only to be told that I can't do that because it's not a criminal matter, it's an "administrative infraction". Every single time.
It's convenient how they can just make up this random nonsense to avoid allowing you to exercise your rights, but I'm sure part of the reason is because they know that so many traffic violations are utter BS that they'd lose cases in huge numbers if normal people had any say in it -- unlike the current system where simply being charged (getting a ticket) is enough to presume your guilt.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Administrative or judicial, a "California stop" is called a "California" stop because... it's not a stop. If you follow (a quite reasonable) law, then there's no problem. Most countries you cannot turn on a red light at all, some you can only turn on a red light if there is a flashing orange light nearby, or some other indication that you can turn on a red. It's like speed cameras. Everyone hates them, and if you're caught, you whine, but at the end of the day, you broke a clear and long-standing law, and you have to accept the consequences.
The patriotic thing to do here is; when you are sent the ticket for the picture of your "crime", you are asked to send in your sin tax. Just take a picture of the amount and send it to them. It is just and fitting for their crime.
Everyday I see a world more and more ready to revolt and overthrow every government. It should happen.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Since May, the red light cameras in the city of The involvement with Redflex is interesting.
"Corona, California have issued a total of 6511 citations worth $2,903,906. This money has been split between Corona, Redflex Traffic Systems of Australia, the state and Riverside County. On Wednesday, the Corona City Council discussed the possibility of cutting the state and county out of the program entirely. This would allow Corona to keep more money while giving the city a chance to claim it is lowering the pricey $446 automated ticket."
Cities in Texas and other states have been trying to get Red Light offenses to Administrative to usher the cashflow rather than have points deducted from a license. That way nobody will want to .. $4M over two years in one area.. http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0909/659937.html
appeal the case rather than just pay the fine. It's wrong and if you look at how much speeding cameras are generating for Maryland
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"