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

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]

.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: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?