What color should a red light camera be triggered on? Mauve? Chartreuse?
You have a point that running into a red intersection just a split second after it turned red (let's call that a "cold red") is not actually as dangerous as flat-out bolting through a red light when it's already green for the other stream of traffic ("hot red").
The infraction has actual degrees of severity.
But bolting through a hot red should be grounds for a length driving suspension and a $1000 fine.
In other words, if the red light camera system were to take into account the severity of the infraction, the penalties would become more severe, not more reduced.
Your poorly-informed reasoning about this will change when you're old enough to have a driver's license, and have a few years in traffic under your belt.
A tail-gating bad driver could rear-end you, so... run red lights?
Since a bad driver could kill you at any time by suddenly crossing the divider line on a two-way road, the logical conclusion is to drive on the sidewalk, or stay home.
Anyway, you should pay attention to your rear-view mirror, so you should know whether you are actually being tail-gated. If there is a belligerent tail-gater in your rear-view mirror, then sure, run the red. That car will likely cover your license plate from the view of the camera, right? If it doesn't, the car will likely appear in the snapshot, and you can fight the ticket. Show the judge the picture where there is a car a couple feet behind you and claim that you were too scared to stop.
Maybe it will work.
You can't use the tailgater excuse to run lights when there isn't actually a tailgater.
You have plenty of time to stop on yellow before it turns red. The yellow warning covers the situation that you're too close to the intersection at the speed you are going to make it possible to stop without doing a brake stand. The light simply cannot abruptly turn from red to green, making a criminal out of every driver who is unable to prevent his vehicle from entering the intersection.
Drivers invariably brake stand on yellow because they were not paying attention. They did not see the light turn yellow, do not know how long it has been yellow, and so make a panic stop.
If you stop on a yellow, and it causes a rear-ender, the root cause is tail-gating, which is another dangerous driving activity.
Then change the timing of the lights to prevent it, rather than just catch the people as they do it.
Timing of yellow lights will not prevent some drivers from running red. They will just take the extra time into account. Long yellow lights will encourage those drivers to treat yellow as a "quasi green".
I don't know about New York, but in sane places, you are allowed to complete your passage through the intersection on a red, if you're already in the intersection before it turns red. Running a red light means entering the intersection on a red.
A two or three second yellow light warning is good enough to prevent this, other than for bad drivers.
There is also enough time slack after the light turns red, before it turns green for another stream of traffic, that someone sneaking through just a moment late will probably not cause an accident. Where I live, it's about one second.
Some drivers treat this brief "red in all directions" delay as yet another extension on their green light. They should be fined.
Especially awful is running a red while left-turning cars are waiting to complete their turns from the opposite direction. That should call for a six month driving suspension.
A red light camera could help catch someone who bolts through an intersection that has been red for some time. Someone doing that could cause an accident without being involved in it (cross-traffic swerves and collides). Without a witness to jot down the license plate, or a camera to snap a picture, the twit who caused the accident is gone without a trace.
Cars are already stamped with an ID known as a license plate.
Red light cameras don't "track" anything; they simply click a picture of the license plate of a vehicle doing something stupid and illegal that endangers others: running a red.
Are you also opposed to transponders that charge you for crossing a toll road? That's "tracking also". Oooh, spooky!
Roads turn grey on their own. Only brand new roads are black. White roads will also turn gray anyway. For instance a heavily used concrete road does not stay white.
Anyway, what percentage of the surface area of, say, the USA is road? Would you even see a difference from a satellite view if roads were whitened?
In attacking problems, you have to make a list of the important things you can do and work your way down.
For instance, if you want to fix broken finances, you don't do that by pinching pennies while continuing to do big things wrong. (``Penny wise, pound foolish'').
If you want to lose weight, you don't do that by parking a few feet further from the building or taking a few flights of stairs, while you continue to stuff yourself.
Etc.
The adage "Every little thing adds up" is true, but it poorly translates to action.
I agree. I skimmed through that long-winded article right to the punchline: you might need to decipher a datasheet in Chinese. Gasp!
It so happens that yesterday I was googling some op-amp chip that appears in an amplifier that I have here.
It's a Japanese IC, and the only document I could find was in Japanese. I know a bit of Japanese, including reading, but even if I did not, I could still figure out the datasheet.
The schematics are familiar, and the table of various parameters uses standard acronyms in addition to Japanese, like CMRR (common mode rejection ratio) et cetera. I could easily rip out that chip and with the help of that datasheet, use it for something else.
And anyway, suppose you do have some kind of manufacturing business and need to read Chinese documents. It takes just one employee to translate.
Lisp isn't functional, but supports functional programming approaches. If you want some pocket of your program to be purely functional, you can do that.
Functional-only languages are going to be brain-damaging to newbies, who require a broad exposure to what computing is about.
In Lisp you can use normal data structures and flip bits inside them, assign to variables and perform goto.
Moreover, there is regular, non-propeller-head I/O without any bizarre cruft like monads.
Order of evaluation is strictly left to right, without nasty surprises or annoying hacking to coax order when it's required.
Also, the overall environment is destructive. You can re-define functions, change global variables, etc. You can save your work to an image, and load it later.
Functional, haha. Gee, let's teach students music using perfect ratio intervals on a plywood box with one string...
Lisp doesn't require beginners to know recursion. You are confusing Lisp and Scheme, likely. Or maybe you learned Lisp using some one-weekend implementation put together by your professor way back when, rather than Common Lisp. Some wrongheaded teachers also use only a subset of the language for teaching that they consider "pure" and require students to use only those features for their assignments.
Lisp has looping and goto; furthermore, it has no requirement in the standard (unlike Scheme) that compilers must optimize tail calls, so recursion is not guaranteed to yield efficient solutions.
Find the maximum in a list iteratively:
(loop for x in '(1 3 2) maximizing x) ==> 3
more "manually":
(loop for x in '(1 3 2) with max = nil when (or (null max) (< x max)) do (setf max x) finally (return max))
factorial of 7:
(loop for x from 1 to 7 for f = 1 then (* f x) finally (return f)) ==> 5040
Using GO, Lisp's goto:
(prog ((x 1) (f 1)) again ;; arbitrary label (when (<= x 7) (setf f (* f x)) (incf x) (go again)) (return f))
==> 5040
But there is nothing wrong with introducing programming newbies to recursion too. After all, to iterate may be human, but to recurse is divine.
Exception handling is only beneficial for learning/debugging if, when an exception is not handled, the run-time will stop at the point where the exception is thrown (without doing any unwinding!)
The approach implemented in C++ compilers is an epic fail in this regard. The entire call stack is thrown away, and a function called unhandled() is then called which will abort the program. At that point you get a core dump or debugger attach, etc. There is no info!
A log of the unwinding would be better, but the best is not to do any unwinding at all. The search for the handler should be completely decoupled from the unwinding, which should not proceed until the target is identified. I don't care about a 19 frame backtrace between the top level and where the exception went off.
One language that gets this right is Common Lisp. A condition handler (if found) is invoked in a new activation frame. Unwinding takes place when a handler performs a dynamic non-local return (usually by invoking a restart). If a condition is not handled, you can break into the debugger.
This is very similar to how Windows structured exception handling works, which in turn is similar to CPU exception handling or POSIX signal handling. (When your CPU takes an exception, it is in a new frame; everything about the situation is saved to be able to restart the process from that point.)
Stopping the program exactly at the point where it went wrong is best for newbies, coupled with an environment where you can inspect the neighborhood of where that problem happened (function arguments and other locals, contents of data structures...).
I started with machine language and BASIC at the same time. It was beneficial to attack computing from different angles.
I wrote a routine in machine language and also wrote a BASIC program to do the same thing. I was amazed at how much faster the machine language routine was.
Slashdot Mirror
What color should a red light camera be triggered on? Mauve? Chartreuse?
You have a point that running into a red intersection just a split second after it turned red (let's call that a "cold red") is not actually as dangerous as flat-out bolting through a red light when it's already green for the other stream of traffic ("hot red").
The infraction has actual degrees of severity.
But bolting through a hot red should be grounds for a length driving suspension and a $1000 fine.
In other words, if the red light camera system were to take into account the severity of the infraction, the penalties would become more severe, not more reduced.
Sure, right after you agree to a live camera installed inside your car, and workplace.
I think you're confused about what red-light cameras do.
They are still-picture cameras that capture the license plate of a vehicle that has entered the intersection on a red.
Your poorly-informed reasoning about this will change when you're old enough to have a driver's license, and have a few years in traffic under your belt.
A tail-gating bad driver could rear-end you, so ... run red lights?
Since a bad driver could kill you at any time by suddenly crossing the divider line on a two-way road, the logical conclusion is to drive on the sidewalk, or stay home.
Anyway, you should pay attention to your rear-view mirror, so you should know whether you are actually being tail-gated. If there is a belligerent tail-gater in your rear-view mirror, then sure, run the red. That car will likely cover your license plate from the view of the camera, right? If it doesn't, the car will likely appear in the snapshot, and you can fight the ticket. Show the judge the picture where there is a car a couple feet behind you and claim that you were too scared to stop.
Maybe it will work.
You can't use the tailgater excuse to run lights when there isn't actually a tailgater.
You have plenty of time to stop on yellow before it turns red. The yellow warning covers the situation that you're too close to the intersection at the speed you are going to make it possible to stop without doing a brake stand. The light simply cannot abruptly turn from red to green, making a criminal out of every driver who is unable to prevent his vehicle from entering the intersection.
Drivers invariably brake stand on yellow because they were not paying attention. They did not see the light turn yellow, do not know how long it has been yellow, and so make a panic stop.
If you stop on a yellow, and it causes a rear-ender, the root cause is tail-gating, which is another dangerous driving activity.
How many seconds are yellows in New York?
Then change the timing of the lights to prevent it, rather than just catch the people as they do it.
Timing of yellow lights will not prevent some drivers from running red. They will just take the extra time into account.
Long yellow lights will encourage those drivers to treat yellow as a "quasi green".
I don't know about New York, but in sane places, you are allowed to complete your passage through the intersection on a red, if you're already in the intersection before it turns red. Running a red light means entering the intersection on a red.
A two or three second yellow light warning is good enough to prevent this, other than for bad drivers.
There is also enough time slack after the light turns red, before it turns green for another stream of traffic, that someone sneaking through just a moment late will probably not cause an accident. Where I live, it's about one second.
Some drivers treat this brief "red in all directions" delay as yet another extension on their green light. They should be fined.
Especially awful is running a red while left-turning cars are waiting to complete their turns from the opposite direction. That should call for a six month driving suspension.
A red light camera could help catch someone who bolts through an intersection that has been red for some time. Someone doing that could cause an accident without being involved in it (cross-traffic swerves and collides). Without a witness to jot down the license plate, or a camera to snap a picture, the twit who caused the accident is gone without a trace.
Cars are already stamped with an ID known as a license plate.
Red light cameras don't "track" anything; they simply click a picture of the license plate of a vehicle doing something stupid and illegal that endangers others: running a red.
Are you also opposed to transponders that charge you for crossing a toll road? That's "tracking also". Oooh, spooky!
Red light running morons kill people.
in twenty years?
Important question.
FireFox is a platform where we have these things called addons.
NoScript prompts you before running any piece of Javascript, classified by the site it came from.
Not until you can take a barrel of oil and make a million pirated copies of it, at negligible cost.
Thanks.
In Ruritania we had better policy. We banned decryption.
You could encrypt as you like.
The question "should someone care" is meaningless.
The question is, should they take action.
The effect of caring without doing is the same as that of not caring.
So, what is it that prospering hi-tech startups should actually do about unemployment such that it is in their interest, and not merely charity?
I can't think of it.
I mean, why did he get this idea suddenly? Why not last year, or ten years ago?
He must have just learned about white versus black objects and radiation.
I would not go so far as to posit that he may have read a book, or even a pamphlet.
Maybe he accidentally clicked on some wrong URL while surfing for porn?
Roads turn grey on their own. Only brand new roads are black. White roads will also turn gray anyway. For instance a heavily used concrete road does not stay white.
Anyway, what percentage of the surface area of, say, the USA is road? Would you even see a difference from a satellite view if roads were whitened?
In attacking problems, you have to make a list of the important things you can do and work your way down.
For instance, if you want to fix broken finances, you don't do that by pinching pennies while continuing to do big things wrong. (``Penny wise, pound foolish'').
If you want to lose weight, you don't do that by parking a few feet further from the building or taking a few flights of stairs, while you continue to stuff yourself.
Etc.
The adage "Every little thing adds up" is true, but it poorly translates to action.
But not as much as it is to be, say, a *woman* in Afghanistan.
Some freshly ground perspective on your steak, sir?
I agree. I skimmed through that long-winded article right to the punchline: you might need to decipher a datasheet in Chinese. Gasp!
It so happens that yesterday I was googling some op-amp chip that appears in an amplifier that I have here.
It's a Japanese IC, and the only document I could find was in Japanese. I know a bit of Japanese, including reading, but even if I did not, I could still figure out the datasheet.
The schematics are familiar, and the table of various parameters uses standard acronyms in addition to Japanese, like CMRR (common mode rejection ratio) et cetera. I could easily rip out that chip and with the help of that datasheet, use it for something else.
And anyway, suppose you do have some kind of manufacturing business and need to read Chinese documents. It takes just one employee to translate.
The information that was removed might have been a spam link.
It's not the purpose of Wikipedia to promote businesses.
A Wikipedia page does not owe you free advertising.
If I find that my competitor is abusing Wikipedia to boost their search engine ranking, of course I will remove it.
That's why we have to resort to WHO is making a claim and how it's paid for, instead of WHAT is being said.
Climate change? Of course there is climate change. Never in Earth's history, as far as we know, has there ever been a pause in climate change!
This has been done for decades.
Why don't you check some old 1960's Popular Mechanics on Google before embarrassing yourselves?
Lisp isn't functional, but supports functional programming approaches. If you want some pocket of your program to be purely functional, you can do that.
Functional-only languages are going to be brain-damaging to newbies, who require a broad exposure to what computing is about.
In Lisp you can use normal data structures and flip bits inside them, assign to variables and perform goto.
Moreover, there is regular, non-propeller-head I/O without any bizarre cruft like monads.
Order of evaluation is strictly left to right, without nasty surprises or annoying hacking to coax order when it's required.
Also, the overall environment is destructive. You can re-define functions, change global variables, etc. You can save your work to an image, and load it later.
Functional, haha. Gee, let's teach students music using perfect ratio intervals on a plywood box with one string ...
Lisp doesn't require beginners to know recursion. You are confusing Lisp and Scheme, likely. Or maybe you learned Lisp using some one-weekend implementation put together by your professor way back when, rather than Common Lisp. Some wrongheaded teachers also use only a subset of the language for teaching that they consider "pure" and require students to use only those features for their assignments.
;; arbitrary label
Lisp has looping and goto; furthermore, it has no requirement in the standard (unlike Scheme) that compilers must optimize tail calls, so recursion is not guaranteed to yield efficient solutions.
Find the maximum in a list iteratively:
(loop for x in '(1 3 2) maximizing x)
==> 3
more "manually":
(loop for x in '(1 3 2)
with max = nil
when (or (null max) (< x max)) do
(setf max x)
finally (return max))
factorial of 7:
(loop
for x from 1 to 7
for f = 1 then (* f x)
finally (return f))
==> 5040
Using GO, Lisp's goto:
(prog ((x 1) (f 1))
again
(when (<= x 7)
(setf f (* f x))
(incf x)
(go again))
(return f))
==> 5040
But there is nothing wrong with introducing programming newbies to recursion too. After all, to iterate may be human, but to recurse is divine.
Exception handling is only beneficial for learning/debugging if, when an exception is not handled, the run-time will stop at the point where the exception is thrown (without doing any unwinding!)
The approach implemented in C++ compilers is an epic fail in this regard. The entire call stack is thrown away, and a function called unhandled() is then called which will abort the program. At that point you get a core dump or debugger attach, etc. There is no info!
A log of the unwinding would be better, but the best is not to do any unwinding at all. The search for the handler should be completely decoupled from the unwinding, which should not proceed until the target is identified. I don't care about a 19 frame backtrace between the top level and where the exception went off.
One language that gets this right is Common Lisp. A condition handler (if found) is invoked in a new activation frame. Unwinding takes place when a handler performs a dynamic non-local return (usually by invoking a restart). If a condition is not handled, you can break into the debugger.
This is very similar to how Windows structured exception handling works, which in turn is similar to CPU exception handling or POSIX signal handling. (When your CPU takes an exception, it is in a new frame; everything about the situation is saved to be able to restart the process from that point.)
Stopping the program exactly at the point where it went wrong is best for newbies, coupled with an environment where you can inspect the neighborhood of where that problem happened (function arguments and other locals, contents of data structures ...).
I started with machine language and BASIC at the same time. It was beneficial to attack computing from different angles.
I wrote a routine in machine language and also wrote a BASIC program to do the same thing. I was amazed at how much faster the machine language routine was.