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."

Comments

As if any of this will see the light of day.

[bmo]

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

Re:As if any of this will see the light of day.

[GreatBunzinni]

If you believe that barrelfish, midori and singularity are "new technology" then you don't have a clue about what has been done in the tech world. Microkernels? Done. OSs based/written in managed code? Done. Capabilities-based OSs? Done. What Microsoft is doing is reimplementing old concepts on Microsoft's own technology (C#, CIL, etc) and then using the test code that has been produced by those projects as a marketing tool. So when Windows is known to be plagued with security bugs and, therefore, viruses... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new singularity project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to security. Very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. So when Windows is known to have lacklustre support for multi-processor/multi-core systems... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new barrelfish project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to multi-core systems. Once again, very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. After all, although they announce so many of these research projects, all Microsoft is able to dump into the market is a series of Windows NT clones. So why is this even news?

Genuine innovation

[Max Romantschuk]

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.

Re:Genuine innovation

[1s44c]

Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.

I don't think so. I'll give them credit for trying really hard and for having a huge budget though.

Can you give a few examples of really original research? Everything I've seen was either trivial or a rehash of old mainframe ideas. Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with old mainframe ideas but it's hardly 'genuine innovation'.

Re:Genuine innovation

[1s44c]

By Genuine Innovation you mean "doing stuff Sun was doing well over a decade ago?" Sounds pretty innovative to me.

I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.

Re:Genuine innovation

[1s44c]

.net is their only real innovation that comes to mind.

In what way is .net an innovation? It's not an innovation without being new in some way.

MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.

No. Their real strength is marketing, sales, strongarming hardware suppliers, and consumer ignorance. Their software isn't easier to use or more consistent than anything else and it certainly isn't more reliable. Actually it is shockingly unreliable.

Ever had to deal with active directory? Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong. In big environments bugs like that cost a few million a day and they happen every day. Companies pay a fortune just to cover things like that up, it happens everywhere.

Ever seen a virus wipe out over a thousand production servers in a day? I have on windows but never on anything unix based.

Big companies CAN'T change direction

[1s44c]

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.

Re:Big companies CAN'T change direction

[7 digits]

I am always amazed that people can be both assertive and utterly wrong. I despise Microsoft, for a variety of reason, but that isn't a reason to be blind at their qualities:

> Microsoft is far to big to change direction.

Internet, WindowsNT, XBox are counter examples. Microsoft is one of the most agile company out there. A lot of dead / moribond companies and a lot of products are there to serve as a warning to others.

> They have never been a technology company

I beg to differ. It is possible to argue that their are not a technology company anymore, but not that they never were

> 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

To build an OS that they would get no benefits of ? Wtf? And why does MS would need a new OS ? What is wrong with the current OS model ? They need better apps, they need better subsystems, they need to remove cruft and to clean up stuff, but the core OS is still fine for its uses and can be improved by evolutions.

They just need Microsoft Research for a few things, mainly:
* To prevent people working here from working elsewhere, where they could create and apply disruptive technology.
* To get ideas that may or may not integrated into products (given the origins of the talking paperclip, the latter may be better)
* To have a better time-to-market IF they needed to produce something due to some disruptive tech appearing from competitors

Giving cash to university and keeping their hands off the projects obviously wouldn't make any sense

Re:weird

[node 3]

MS Research is like a research university for all intents and purposes; they basically have academic latitude. Of course by the time the product reaches market it will be made, um..."better".

That's exactly it. MS Research is very much like a university except that their projects rarely make it out into the public in any meaningful and open way.

I'm not begrudging MS keeping their projects to themselves, just pointing out that there is a fairly key distinction to be made here.

Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer?

[Haxamanish]

I've seen an ATW at work in the late 80s. My Archimedes could calculate a mandlebrot set in about 30 seconds, a PC needed several minutes for that. The ATW could zoom in and out mandlebrots _in real time_ and one fly through them like through a 3D-world, I was really stunned when I saw that.

Re:prefilled comments

[Kell Bengal]

Just be glad they aren't outsourcing them to Digg.