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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..
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.
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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
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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.
Firstly, this is a collaboration with ETH Zurich, not exclusively a Microsoft project, and secondly, the OS isn't available under any existing license. to quote:
Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the following license (also included in the download):
Copyright (c) 2007, 2008, 2009, ETH Zurich and Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
It's great that this source will be open for study, at least at this early stage, but it's very likely to be locked away under copyright and/or patents by the time it becomes useful.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
"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
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.
If it's a criminal case, Amendment VI provides a right to a jury.
If it isn't, and the amount at stake is over $20, Amendment VII provides it.
The bolded portion is wrong. Amendment VII only provides the right to a jury in civil suits, not in all non-criminal trials.
The distinction is important because at the time the Constitution was written there was a difference between petty crimes and so-called criminal offenses--the former were not afforded a jury trial under common law, while the latter were.
While petty crimes are, today, lumped in with criminal offenses in many ways, the distinction still remains when it comes to determining whether a jury trial is required or not.
See Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv.L.Rev. 917, 922-965, 983-1019, or the summary of the law visible in Google books here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=pkb9HLOzeTcC&lpg=PT396&ots=chYy4WR8ii&dq=Petty%20Federal%20Offenses%20and%20the%20Constitutional%20Guarantee%20of%20Trial%20by%20Jury&pg=PT395#v=onepage&q=&f=false
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
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.........