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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..
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
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
Imagine what might have happened if this actually got momentum behind it and we never went through the stagnation that is DOS/Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation
--
BMO
Transputers had 4 HW links -- those are probably the easiest part to replicate in current processors.
The difficult part is the threading model: Transputers had their own thread model. Scheduler was hardwired in silicon, together with a couple of dedicated instructions. SW could not tell the difference between a local and a remote communication. Efficient, but not very flexible in terms of OS architecture.
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
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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
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...
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
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...
have you ever written anything in CUDA?
Yeah turns out this problem is really hard and, depending on how you formalize it, uncomputable. What it boils down to is that the system needs to know how long it will take to run a program on itself and how long it will take to spin it off into another thread.
Sound familiar? It should; that's halt.
Of course, approximating it well is an interesting research problem in language theory, but I wouldn't expect a general purpose system in actual production use any time soon. Even doing it in a pure, strongly typed language will be extremely difficult; implementing one for something like Java/C[++] will be far harder. And of course the ultimate win is doing it to machine code.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
Clearly you have no idea what GCD is.
Imagine what might have happened if this actually got momentum behind it and we never went through the stagnation that is DOS/Windows.
I think i just came a little.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
"Marshalling" means converting data structures into byte streams. No, you didn't have to do that multiple times. The term you're looking for is "routing". Routing can be abstracted into libraries and the OS; no need for every application to worry about it. It was just that the Transputer (as well as a lot of other system software development) was killed when Microsoft monopolized the market.
No, but as an Apple fanboy, he's automatically +5.
What does the global cooldown have to do with anything? We're not casting spells here.
The IBM-PC may have been a turd in comparison, but it was a turd that cost a tenth of the price while still doing most of what people needed a computer to do. So, it was a cost-efficient turd. That meant that companies could afford to computerize much more of their workforce, sooner, and that more families could get a computer, earlier. And I don't think that's sad at all.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
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?
Just be glad they aren't outsourcing them to Digg.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
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
The "exception" is that they are pretending that this is not a fine for a crime, but instead is a fee for a non-crime interaction with the govt. You don't need a jury trial to tell you that [any non-criminal interaction with the DMV or court clerk or registrar] is going to have a fee attached to it. They are trying to put this "fee" for keeping your driver's license after a violation in the same category as the fee for getting your driver's license in the first place.
In the US (not all the state I think), there is turn-on-red which means you can always turn right (provided you are on the most right lane) but you must yield if the traffic light is red. Turn on red is the common thing and it is specified when it is forbidden. Whereas in France, the opposite is used : you can not turn unless the right green arrow is lit.
I believe the rule is turn on red in the US because the roads are new and built with good visibility. When there is no visibility turn on red is forbidden. Whereas in France at most intersections turn on red would be dangerous due to the lack of visibility. Therefore turn on red is the exception.
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.
We have green right turn arrows here. They mean it is safe to turn right on red without stopping. They only light if there should not be any on-coming traffic and the pedestrian light is "Don't walk". Otherwise, unless posted, one can turn right on red, provided one follows the same rules you have listed.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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
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.
"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
The problem is that only by an extremely strict interpretation to red-light cameras violate the constitution. What people aren't saying here is that under the Sixth Amendment theory, all red-light cameras, speed cameras, photo radar, doppler radar and LIDAR systems violate the Sixth Amendment because you can't cross-examine a radar gun. Or a red-light camera. If that is the device that is actually accusing you of speeding, what are you supposed to do?
Well, nobody in the government actually believes in that interpretation. Try to defend yourself against a speeding ticket using this defense and you will be laughed out of court.
The problem is that if we allow the police to use any tools other than their eyes to enforce the law we will be subject to these tools having significant, if not sole, input into a prosecution. I would say you have the same problem when a mass spectrometer is used and the results clearly identify a person has having been in contact with a murder weapon. Can you cross-examine the mass spectrometer? No? Then obviously the case must be thrown out. Might as well pass a law against technology in law enforcement.
Obviously the Sixth Amendment argument is pointless.
Now, evidently in this case California state law insists on revenue sharing for red light cameras and this city wants to ignore the revenue sharing and keep all the money. This is hardly a legal matter but a state administrative issue and isn't going to affect anything except how the money is disbursed from red light camera fines. Some hearing panel in Sacramento will have to deal with this.
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.
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.
"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.
A better question is: Is not having to choose between getting a ticket or slamming on your breaks at a newly shortened yellow light cycle and being rear-ended really that important to you?
Or how about Is it really so important to you that the city/state (and by extension, insurance companies) raise more money that you are willing to take measures that have been shown to INCREASE the number of traffic accidents? Is it really worth it to burden people with hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of tickets for maneuvers like "california stops" that have been shown to not actually impact safety?
Those seem like far better questions.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
1. Right turn on red is not a yield in the US. The driver must come to a full stop before turning red, whereas for a yield the full stop is not necessary.
2. The "california stop" mentioned in the original article is also called a rolling stop and is where the driver replaces stop and then go behavior with the yield and then go behavior of coasting to a low speed before going through the intersection. This is technically running the red light since the driver didn't stop before deciding it was safe to go and turning right.
3. More obscure, but at least in California it's ok to do a right on red if a) it's not probited by a sign at the intersection, and b) you're either in the right most lane or all lanes further right are right turn only. So it's possible to do a right-on-red from lanes other than the right-most lane legally.
4. Also obscure, but in California if there's an island separating the forward lanes from the right turn lanes, then the red light for the straight ahead lanes does not require a stop for the right turn lane, unless there's a separate stop light on the right turn lane. In this case the right turn lane often has a Yield sign though it's still o.k. to yield in this case even when the straight lanes have a red light. There are cases where this law is not understood even by police and by the folks who administer driving tests, so use this one at your own peril.
Captcha is "pothole"
In California, home of the rolling stop, we also have many double right turn lanes at the end of freeway offramps, where the the two rightmost lanes are for right turns. Californians have come to behave (erroneously) as if a right on red is legal from either lane. Rather than educate the drivers, cities have begun installing NO RIGHT ON RED signage at these intersections.
Where is such a turn prohibited in the vehicle code?
You come to the light at either of the right-turn lanes, you stop, and if it is safe to do so you may make a right turn.
The overuse of stop signs in southern California is unbelievable. Even on streets that one would naturally expect to flow through there are many 3- and 4-way stops. Having grown up with Australian traffic infrastructure and driven extensively in Europe the multitude of unnecessary stops in California is maddening -- not to mention environmentally unfriendly and inefficient. It may be ego but by sheer numbers of rolling stops being done here the title is not undeserved.
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.
That is how they are trying to get away with the red light cams in the New Orleans/Metairie area..the administrative approach.
I had heard one person recently, had done what you suggested, and did not pay...and is suing to get out of them.
I need to check back in on this, but, last I heard, there was a lawsuit to have the cameras removed as being (state) unconstitutional, in that every traffic law is supposed to be enforced equally, and since they don't have these cameras on EVERY redlight in the state...they are illegal to have in the few they do have.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Turn-on-red", as far as I know, does not require you to yield (ie, slow, and stop only if there's opposing traffic of higher priority), but to actually stop first, and proceed with the turn only if it's safe to do so.
"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