This link is also dead, but it appears that the same system was used to issue tickets, even when the vehicle could not be identified from the photogtraph.
D.C. police are playing a guessing game when reviewing images from their photo-radar camera program and sending tickets to drivers whose license plates are not clearly identifiable.
One Southwest resident received a $50 ticket in September issued to a vehicle that, according to the ticket, had her plate number. But the photograph included with the citation shows a white truck instead of her blue sedan.
"The first thing is, I don't own a pickup truck," said Angela Brock-Smith, 36. "The second is, my car has been broken down since July 11 of last year."
The license plate number on Miss Smith's 1996 Chevrolet Lumina is AR8049. The photograph of the truck shown on the ticket has a similar tag, with "AR" and "049" visible. The first digit is partially obscured by a rigger ball on the truck's bumper.
With the photo-radar technology, a vehicle enters a pinpoint radar beam, and if it is going above the speed limit, it sets off a camera that snaps a photo of the rear of the vehicle. Affiliated Computer Services, which operates the radar cameras and processes the tickets for the District, then reviews the photo with D.C. police officers present and obtains information about the vehicle from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The citation is sent to the owner of the vehicle.
The ticket issued to Miss Smith said she was going 45 mph in a 30-mph zone in the 2900 block of Southern Avenue on Sept. 5.
After receiving the ticket, Miss Smith was told by an employee at the Automated Traffic Enforcement Office on Sept. 26 that she should request a hearing by mail with the Bureau of Traffic Adjudication (BTA).
"I sent them a letter explaining the error and waited to receive a hearing date or a notice," Miss Smith said.
Kevin P. Morison, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said the automated traffic office received Miss Smith's letter Oct. 3 and sent it to traffic adjudication; the ticket was suspended for 90 days while the bureau evaluated her case.
"Our records do not indicate that BTA took any action within the 90 days," Mr. Morison said in an e-mail last week, responding to questions about Miss Smith's case.
Miss Smith received a late notice on Jan. 3. She went to the Bureau of Traffic Adjudication in Northeast on Jan. 11 and was told to call the Automated Traffic Office.
Before she called that office, Miss Smith received another late notice on Jan. 19 which said that a hold had been placed on her registration and the ticket had doubled to $100.
"I called automated traffic on January 22, and they told me at that time to disregard the notice," Miss Smith said. "I thought they took care of it."
Traffic adjudication has suspended the ticket another 30 days because automated traffic sent another mail adjudication request, Mr. Morison said.
Mr. Morison acknowledged that the ticket should have been thrown out during the review process.
"It is clear from looking at the photo that this ticket should not have been issued in the first place, and certainly not to Miss Brock-Smith," Mr. Morison said.
The rules on identifying license plates, he said, are very clear: "If the tag number on the vehicle is not crystal clear... no ticket is supposed to be issued."
D.C. police have reiterated to their data and entry technicians and ticket reviewers to follow those rules, Mr. Morison said.
He said the problem with Miss Smith's case stems from a change in procedures between D.C. police and Traffic Adjudication.
Initially, tickets issued incorrectly could be voided -- when there were obvious errors -- by the Automated Traffic office with approval from the D.C. police.
The procedure changed about two months ago, and now the only way a ticket can be voided is if the office of police Chief Charles H. Ramsey sends a letter requesting it. Mr. Morison said a letter will be sent to BTA from Chief Ramsey's office on Miss Smith's behalf.
But traffic adjudication said it still has the last word. The bureau can deny the chief's request if it is not satisfied with the evidence he presents.
"Bureau of Traffic Adjudication now insists that only it can rule on all photo-radar and red-light camera tickets," Mr. Morison said.
"Cops get speeding tickets from cameras" Washington Times November 29, 2001
Some D.C. police officers say they are slowing their response to emergencies because photo-radar cameras are ticketing them for speeding on Code One calls, and they are being forced to pay the fines.
At least three D.C. police officers told The Washington Times they were caught by the cameras and ticketed while on official police business. They said they and other officers have been forced to pay the fines, and are now on edge about speeding to a crime scene and running red lights in emergencies. Like area motorists, they have little chance of getting a reprieve from the D.C. Bureau of Traffic Adjudication without evidence to present in their defense.
"Officers are getting crazy tickets, in their cars on duty from the speed and red-light cameras," said Sgt. Gerald G. Neill Jr., chairman of the Metropolitan Police Department's union labor committee. "A lot of them have actually had to pay the fines," he said.
Some officers have paid so many tickets that they are no longer speeding or running red lights to get to their dispatched calls even in emergency situations, Sgt. Neill said.
"The threat of the flash is in their heads, but more so the $100 to $200 fines," Sgt. Neill said.
One detective, with 12 years on the force and currently working in the Fifth District, said he was flashed by the cameras once for speeding and once for running a red light -- all on dispatched calls. Two other officers said they also have received tickets while on emergency calls.
"I got two speeding tickets and one red-light ticket," said a detective who did not wish to be named. But he said he didn't remember to fill out a 775 form -- a log sheet used to keep track of officers using police vehicles. Without the form to back up his statement in traffic adjudication, he was forced to pay the fines.
D.C. police Lt. Patrick Burke, director of traffic safety, said the 775 form cannot be used as evidence to fight the tickets. He said the form is used only to track officers driving cars registered to the D.C. police so the citation can be issued to the right person.
"I empathize with the officers because I, too, have run lights and had to speed on emergency calls," Lt. Burke said.
He said the codes are in place to keep officers from breaking traffic laws. The only time an officer is allowed to run a red light or to speed is on Code One emergencies, which include robberies in progress, reports of gunfire, or any violent crimes committed on the street or in a residence, Lt. Burke said.
He added that undercover officers, who have to run red lights or have sped to keep up with a suspect, also are exempted from the citations.
"Sometimes you get an emergency call of a person in trouble and you fly to the scene. You don't have time to worry about filling out that form," the detective said.
But officers told The Times they are being fined for speeding on Code One calls.
Sgt. Neill said he had spoken with Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer about how the situation.
"Chief Gainer said the department would be able to keep track of the emergency call logs and find out whether or not officers driving the cars were on Code One calls when the tickets were issued," Sgt. Neill said. "But then we found out that wasn't the case."
D.C. police spokesman Kevin P. Morison said officers should have no fear of getting speed or red-light camera tickets while on official business. He said tickets are not issued in cases where D.C. police aren't sure who was driving the car at the time it was the caught by the cameras.
"We can tell from the pictures -- we see in color -- whether or not a car has the sirens on. If they are, those tickets are thrown out during the review process," Mr. Morison said.
He said a "handful of tickets" has been given to officers erroneously.
He urged that officers who feel a ticket was issued to them in error to report it and not just pay the fine.
"If an officer pays the ticket without alerting us, he has to know that is an admission of guilt," Mr. Morison said.
He said the enforcement applies to all city government agencies.
There have been no complaints thus far from the D.C. Fire Department and Emergency Medical Service personnel about getting tickets while on official business, said Lisa Bass, D.C. Fire and EMS spokeswoman.
That does not include other police agencies in the city such as the U.S. Park Police, FBI or any other federal police force.
The U.S. Park Police, FBI, and U.S. Capitol Police did not return calls from The Washington Times yesterday inquiring whether their officers are getting photo-radar and speed camera tickets.
Since the automated traffic program began Aug. 6, the District's cameras have generated 75,575 tickets and more than $1.4 million, with 20,625 motorists paying the fines. An estimated $848,000 in fines went to the city's general fund, and almost $600,000 went to Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) -- the company that maintains and operates the devices.
Tickets are checked for errors by D.C. police officers and ACS employees before they are mailed, Mr. Morison said.
"Spider-Man" To Cost Economy $300,000,000
on
Review: Spiderman
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· Score: 2, Funny
I skipped out early this morning and went to see the first showing of Spiderman in my local theater.
According to the following item by James P. Hogan, later MM type experiments -- using more accurate instruments -- showed that the Earth doesn't move through an "ether," as was originally thought, but does rotate in an local "ether" field that orbits the sun with the Earth.
I don't know if Michelson's 1925 results were ever reproduced by anyone else.
Hogan proposed that the MM experiment be conducted using spacecraft outside of the geosphere to settle the question, because conducting the experiment on Earth is like "trying to measure our airspeed with our pitot tube inside the cabin instead of outside in the atmosphere."
I've highlighted the relevant parts in bold, for those of you that want to skip the introduction.
SUGGESTED NASA EXPERIMENT Posted on August 17, 1997
RELATIVITY EXPERIMENT
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine at NASA invited me to submit any suggestions I might have for possible experiments to be carried out by future mission, involving advance physics. Since a few people have been in touch regarding the skepticism I've expressed in the past about the basis of Relativity, I thought my response might be of general interest, and so reproduce it below.
[To give credit where due, a virtually identical proposal was submitted to NASA some years ago by the late engineer and metallurgical consultant, Carl Zapffe. Nothing came of it. If anyone thinks I'm way off the mark, I'd be happy to hear from them.]
Dear Les,
Herewith the following, offered in response to your invitation.
INTERFEROMETRY BEYOND THE TERRESTRIAL MAGNETOPAUSE
The Einstein Special Relativity Theory (SRT), we all "know," forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Its predictions are utilized on a routine basis, and it has withstood every experimental test.
These predictions boil down, essentially, to applications of the principles of (i) mass-energy equivalence (E=mc*2), (ii) mass dependence on velocity, and (iii) time dilation. Experiments verifying these relationships have been performed with increasing precision in the course of the past century. These are the proofs that the textbooks cite in support of SRT, and which its defenders point to when questions are raised concerning Relativity basics.
But it turns out that _all_ of them can be derived by purely classical procedures, independently of any Relativistic considerations. They don't say anything unique about SRT at all. (i) follows from the principle of conservation of momentum and Maxwell's equations. Carl Zapffe gives three derivations in his book "A Reminder on E+mc*2 (sic)," with numerous references that show how it was implicit in the physics known at the end of the nineteenth century. Regarding (ii), Petr Beckmann, in his "Einstein Plus Two" (1987), shows how the increase of "mass" with velocity arises as a manifestation of the electrical inertia of charges moving through fields--analogous to aerodynamic drag.
Essentially, these are effects arising from the energy differences of relatively moving systems. The question they lead to is whether the results observed regarding (iii) (e.g. the extended lives of cosmic-ray muons) are in fact confirmation of "time" being dilated, as per SRT, or result from the physical slowing-down of clocklike processes in motion through a field. The only way to test this empirically would be to sit on an incoming muon and observe whether the laboratory clocks (at rest in the field) also slow down (as the observer-referred SRT holds) or speed up (as a field-referred theory would predict). This has never been done. (A whole literature exists on all this, but I don't think that here would be the place to elaborate further.)
So, the standard proofs turn out not to be proofs at all. All that's left, then, is the interpretation of the 1881 Michelson-Morley attempt to measure an "ether wind," and its many variations performed since.
The null results returned by these experiments have two possible interpretations: (1) There is no ether; (2) the ether local to the Earth is entrained in its orbit around the Sun. (1), of course, is the orthodox line. The constancy of the speed of light for all observers is a _postulate_ that follows from accepting this interpretation. Contrary to common belief, it has never been verified experimentally. (The claimed verifications all involve round-trip measurements that average out the c+/-v velocities that arise in field-referred theories.) Having thus conferred constancy on a velocity, it then becomes necessary to distort space and time in order to preserve it. This, in effect, is what the transformation equations of SRT do.
Treating the ether as a quasi-mechanical fluid was a natural consequence of the advances in materials sciences in the nineteenth century; the peculiar properties that followed from viewing it in this way make the readiness to go with interpretation (1), and abandon the ether altogether, understandable. The situation changes considerably, however, when reviewed in terms of today's ideas of fields (which isn't to say that the concept of fields was unknown then, of course). In particular, it has been shown (e.g. by Beckmann) that the results of all the experiments performed to date, normally taken as evidence supporting SRT, are equally consistent with an alternative interpretation in which the velocity of light is constant not with respect to the observer (as in SRT), but with respect to the field environment through which the light propagates. The difference is that the derivations follow more simply, without the distortions of space and time, and the accompanying mathematical complications of SRT; also, the field-referred theory has greater predictive power (e.g in enabling derivation of the spectral line spacings for the hydrogen atom). By the criteria normally claimed of science-- equally compatible with experimental results; simpler; more powerful predictively--this would become the preferred theory.
And, indeed, when thought of as the terrestrial electromagnetic field environment, the "ether" is indeed entrained and moves with the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The plots from NASA's own space probes show nothing clearer than the sharply defined boundary of the terrestrial magnetosphere ("geosphere"), extending out to about ten Earth radii, elongated like a teardrop pointing away from the Sun, forming a huge shock front around which the solar wind streams like the slipstream outside the hull of an airplane. And here, in our laboratories solidly nailed to our planet deep inside this bubble, is where, for a century, we have been attempting to measure our orbital slipstream. But, if the field-referred proposal is correct, that slipstream exists not in the vicinity of the Earth at all, but at the boundary where the embedded geosphere meets the magnetic "heliosphere" of the Sun (and very likely moves with it through a greater "galactosphere"). We've been trying to measure our airspeed with our pitot tube inside the cabin instead of outside in the atmosphere.
(The geosphere travels with the Earth but does not appear to rotate with it. Accordingly, a suitable Michelson-Morely type of experiment performed on the Earth's surface ought to be capable of detecting a "rotational wind"--although it would need to be far more sensitive than the 1881 experiment. Such an experiment was performed in 1925 by Michelson and Gale. Not only was a fringe shift observed, but it was possible to calculate the Earth's rotational velocity quite accurately from the results. Michelson himself was never enthusiastic about the orthodox interpretation, and continued to favor the entrained-ether alternative until his death.)
I would propose, therefore, an interferometry experiment designed along the lines of the Michelson-Morely prototype, but taking advantage of today's technologies, to be performed from a spacecraft _outside_ the geosphere boundary--preferably trailing the craft itself, to eliminate possible shielding effects within the structure. On emerging from the geosphere, the craft would be moving through the heliosphere with its shared orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun, direct measurement of which should be easily accomplished if the field-centered hypothesis is valid. Thus, for the first time ever, an experiment would have been performed to distinguish between the observer-referred theory (SRT) and the alternative.
Should the results prove positive, such methods of "astro- interferometry" should be of particular interest to an organization like NASA because of the potential usefulness of the techniques that could follow, especially with regard to longer-range space missions in the future. For example, the fringe behavior might offer the basis for a spacegoing _odometer_ and _speedometer_ for measuring displacements and velocities relative to local (solar, planetary, or other) embedding fields. Also, the transitions between field domains could provide a means of _cosmographic mapping_ of a field-structured Solar System, and maybe of the interstellar environment beyond.
Plus, I could totally see that going awry: Peter gets all hot 'n bothered by MJ, and, completely distracted, he shoots webbing all over the place, random-like. Of course, I've always thought that Wolverine would have similar problems with his lovers, except instead of accidentally getting everything sticky, he'd probably destroy everything.
Uh, why would some nerdy geek need the ability to shoot webbing to accidently get everything sticky when getting it on with a chick like Mary Jane?
I suspect that happens to most Slashdotters now...
Gaming is not the only thing affected by high latency, as Jerry Pournelle wrote on his website:
"View" Tuesday, October 2, 2001 . . . I am now willing to believe that Microsoft and Earthlink and the Hughes satellite people all worked together to create the most frustrating system possible, guaranteed to drive everyone insane.
There is no other explanation of why this imbecility works the way it does. Clearly no one really tried to make this work and did any testing. Why should they?
The MSN home page, for instance, is designed for maximum problems with high latency systems: it wants about 50 requests for little files, and since there is a delay for each one, it takes literally about 4 minutes to download the MSN home page. Updates are just as bad. I suppose there is going to be some magical fix for all this when things are adequately cached, but I wouldn't count on it.
I have no choice but to sit there and wait for Microsoft to deliver its stupid home page with all the stupid little files, but once I get my updates I can be certain I will not go THERE again. Ye gods!
All right. Once it works it works fine. But ye flipping gods , the contortions I have to go through to get it going.
I don't know if the problems are hardware or software so I am going to get an Intel D815 system to install this on and try again.
Mapping Gravity
Posted by michael on Thursday November 22, @01:22AM
from the slim-fast dept.
overThruster writes: "No, you don't need to drink the water... Gravity is less strong in India--enough so that you weigh almost 1% less there. See BBC story about NASA's gravity map." Here's another story about the mission, and the GRACE home page (or NASA's less-informative page).
Back in 1978, Arthur C. Clarke ended his book The View from Serendip by writing about a gravitational anomaly which was found off the coast of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) -- the small island near India where he lives.
I am able to visit my favorite spot (Chapter 13) for only a few days a year. But now, quite unexpectedly -- and literally since I wrote the preceding paragraph! -- Serendipity has struck again. While researching a totally different subject, I've discovered a good reason for spending more time on the south coast.
It concerns the greak Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. In this 2,200-year-old poem, the demon-king Ravanna kidnaps Sita, wife of Rama, and takes her to his island stronghold of Ceylon. Needless to say, she is ultimately released, after aerial battles involving what look suspiciously like atomic weapons and laser beams.
To heal the wounded, the heroic monkey-general Hanuman is later sent back to India to fetch a medicinal herb found only in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, when he gets to the right mountain he is unable to identify the herb. No problem; he brings the whole mountain back! However, one piece drops off, on the southern tip of Ceylon. The locals believe this fragment is in fact my favourite bay, for its name in Sinhalese means "there it fell down" (onna watuna).
There it fell down. Place names usually have a meaning, though it is often lost in the mists of time. Did something really fall down, centuries or millennia ago, at Unawatuna Bay? A meteorite would be the obvious explanation; it must have been a big one for the legend to have lasted down the ages.
And here's another weird coincidence. Little Unawatuna, believe it or not, is the closest point on dry land to the world's greatest gravitational anomaly, a few hundred kilometres out in the Indian Ocean. On the Goddard Space Flight Center's 3-D map of the Earth's Gravimetric Geoid, that strange phenomenon looks liek a deep pit [1] into which the whole island of Sri Lanka is about to slide.
Let's put two and two together. A few thousand years ago, a huge object of peculiar density plunged into the Indian Ocean, creating a tradition that is remembered to this day. And it's still there, distorting the earth's gravitational field -- Terran Gravitational Anomaly I.
That might make an opening for a pretty good science-fiction movie . . . and an even better ending for this book.
Ayu Bowan.
1. One hundred and ten metres below zero reference on the Goddard model (March & Vincent, 1974).
Of course, the Ramayana is "only" 2,200 years old, compared to an estimated age of 5,000 years for this discover. Since I don't have a map of the locations of either TGA-1, or the sunken city, I don't know how close they are.
Will scumbags like Gator, with their pop-up downloads (April 8, 2002), be held liable for any bandwidth costs incurred by the customer?
As was pointed out, it's bad enough what they're doing to people with dial up connections. What happens when people start getting billed for crap like that?
It's time to close the "book store loophole," where criminals can purchase "how to" books that contain instructional information on committing illegal acts without any type of background check.
Do it for the children.
Every time I excercise my second amendment rights by purchasing a firearm, I am required to fill out a government form with all sorts of personal information. The seller is then required to get permission from the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation to complete the transaction.
The government has illegally been keeping these records. After being conditioned that this is "reasonable," -- often by first amendment extremists -- why should I give a flying rat's ass if it happens to other people?
With Citrix MetaFrame, remote administrators can only see and control items within a user's Citrix session.
Things like the ICA Client configuration, printer drivers, and operating system settings, reside on the client PC. They cannot be manipulated remotely.
At least when I was working desktop support, I could get users to move out of my why while I fixed their problem. Dealing with Citrix users across the state, I am now dependent on them to be my "eyes" while trying to troubleshoot their problem.
Instructing users to check their settings, or even find the name of their printer driver, over the phone can be a very painful process.
Me: "OK, what operating system are you using?" User: "I don't know."
Me: "Is your printer connected to your PC, or is it a network printer?" User: "I don't know."
Even worse is that users -- and our brilliant help desk -- cannot distinguish between "Citrix" and "PeopleSoft," which is the only applicatioin we use Citrix for. Any problems with PeopleSoft, or its related databases, are routinely forwarded to the Citrix MetaFrame admins. We waste a lot of time routing calls to the proper people, which is what our help desk should be doing.
The same applies if the problem is with their local computer, because the users' desktop support people usually don't want, or know how, to do their jobs.
I don't know if Citrix Metaframe meets the orignal author's requirements for a remote desktop, but it certainly does not meet mine.
As though "environmental" groups don't have their own, self-serving agendas?
The Sacremento Bee did a five part report on the environmental movement back in April, 2001, called Environment, Inc. The Bee notes that "Five other major groups -- including household names such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club -- spend so much on fund raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards set by philanthropic watchdog groups."
I'm too ignorant to judge claims made by most environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They may be right. But the implication that their motives are above reproach is laughable.
For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as "The Bowditch."
The text reads "In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic."
Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little "ice cube" noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant.
So last week's iceberg was not so extraordinary -- except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.
(Also at http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/1998/oct19_25.html and http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/environment.shtml#030899 )
The right-wing publication Scientific American, in an article about rising ocean levels in the August 1998 issue, noted that there is "some evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet may, in fact, have melted at least once before. Between about 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, when the last shared ancestors of all humans probably fanned out of Africa into Asia and Europe, Earth experienced a climatic history strikingly similar to what has transpired in the past 20,000 years, warming abruptly from the chill of a great ice age."
(This is by the same author who wrote the cover story of the March 1997 issue about rising sea levels. That article is not available online, and I don't have it here at work with me).
Remember this Slashdot thread last year, about a Massachusetts court ruling which made it illegal for citizens to tape-record their interactions with the police?
You will never see transparent aluminum...
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Transparent Concrete
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· Score: 2, Funny
The reason you will never see transparent aluminum is not because of a lack of crystalline structure...
The real reason you will never see transparent aluminum is because it is, well, transparent.
Slashdot Mirror
This link is also dead, but it appears that the same system was used to issue tickets, even when the vehicle could not be identified from the photogtraph.
2 .h tm
... no ticket is supposed to be issued."
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20020128-8630280
Washington Times
28 January 2002
Police play swami, issue bogus ticket
By Brian DeBose
The Washington Times
D.C. police are playing a guessing game when reviewing images from their photo-radar camera program and sending tickets to drivers whose license plates are not clearly identifiable.
One Southwest resident received a $50 ticket in September issued to a vehicle that, according to the ticket, had her plate number. But the photograph included with the citation shows a white truck instead of her blue sedan.
"The first thing is, I don't own a pickup truck," said Angela Brock-Smith, 36. "The second is, my car has been broken down since July 11 of last year."
The license plate number on Miss Smith's 1996 Chevrolet Lumina is AR8049. The photograph of the truck shown on the ticket has a similar tag, with "AR" and "049" visible. The first digit is partially obscured by a rigger ball on the truck's bumper.
With the photo-radar technology, a vehicle enters a pinpoint radar beam, and if it is going above the speed limit, it sets off a camera that snaps a photo of the rear of the vehicle. Affiliated Computer Services, which operates the radar cameras and processes the tickets for the District, then reviews the photo with D.C. police officers present and obtains information about the vehicle from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The citation is sent to the owner of the vehicle.
The ticket issued to Miss Smith said she was going 45 mph in a 30-mph zone in the 2900 block of Southern Avenue on Sept. 5.
After receiving the ticket, Miss Smith was told by an employee at the Automated Traffic Enforcement Office on Sept. 26 that she should request a hearing by mail with the Bureau of Traffic Adjudication (BTA).
"I sent them a letter explaining the error and waited to receive a hearing date or a notice," Miss Smith said.
Kevin P. Morison, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department, said the automated traffic office received Miss Smith's letter Oct. 3 and sent it to traffic adjudication; the ticket was suspended for 90 days while the bureau evaluated her case.
"Our records do not indicate that BTA took any action within the 90 days," Mr. Morison said in an e-mail last week, responding to questions about Miss Smith's case.
Miss Smith received a late notice on Jan. 3. She went to the Bureau of Traffic Adjudication in Northeast on Jan. 11 and was told to call the Automated Traffic Office.
Before she called that office, Miss Smith received another late notice on Jan. 19 which said that a hold had been placed on her registration and the ticket had doubled to $100.
"I called automated traffic on January 22, and they told me at that time to disregard the notice," Miss Smith said. "I thought they took care of it."
Traffic adjudication has suspended the ticket another 30 days because automated traffic sent another mail adjudication request, Mr. Morison said.
Mr. Morison acknowledged that the ticket should have been thrown out during the review process.
"It is clear from looking at the photo that this ticket should not have been issued in the first place, and certainly not to Miss Brock-Smith," Mr. Morison said.
The rules on identifying license plates, he said, are very clear: "If the tag number on the vehicle is not crystal clear
D.C. police have reiterated to their data and entry technicians and ticket reviewers to follow those rules, Mr. Morison said.
He said the problem with Miss Smith's case stems from a change in procedures between D.C. police and Traffic Adjudication.
Initially, tickets issued incorrectly could be voided -- when there were obvious errors -- by the Automated Traffic office with approval from the D.C. police.
The procedure changed about two months ago, and now the only way a ticket can be voided is if the office of police Chief Charles H. Ramsey sends a letter requesting it. Mr. Morison said a letter will be sent to BTA from Chief Ramsey's office on Miss Smith's behalf.
But traffic adjudication said it still has the last word. The bureau can deny the chief's request if it is not satisfied with the evidence he presents.
"Bureau of Traffic Adjudication now insists that only it can rule on all photo-radar and red-light camera tickets," Mr. Morison said.
The link is now dead, but here's the story:
7 .h tm
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20011129-1334523
"Cops get speeding tickets from cameras"
Washington Times
November 29, 2001
Some D.C. police officers say they are slowing their response to emergencies because photo-radar cameras are ticketing them for speeding on Code One calls, and they are being forced to pay the fines.
At least three D.C. police officers told The Washington Times they were caught by the cameras and ticketed while on official police business. They said they and other officers have been forced to pay the fines, and are now on edge about speeding to a crime scene and running red lights in emergencies. Like area motorists, they have little chance of getting a reprieve from the D.C. Bureau of Traffic Adjudication without evidence to present in their defense.
"Officers are getting crazy tickets, in their cars on duty from the speed and red-light cameras," said Sgt. Gerald G. Neill Jr., chairman of the Metropolitan Police Department's union labor committee. "A lot of them have actually had to pay the fines," he said.
Some officers have paid so many tickets that they are no longer speeding or running red lights to get to their dispatched calls even in emergency situations, Sgt. Neill said.
"The threat of the flash is in their heads, but more so the $100 to $200 fines," Sgt. Neill said.
One detective, with 12 years on the force and currently working in the Fifth District, said he was flashed by the cameras once for speeding and once for running a red light -- all on dispatched calls. Two other officers said they also have received tickets while on emergency calls.
"I got two speeding tickets and one red-light ticket," said a detective who did not wish to be named. But he said he didn't remember to fill out a 775 form -- a log sheet used to keep track of officers using police vehicles. Without the form to back up his statement in traffic adjudication, he was forced to pay the fines.
D.C. police Lt. Patrick Burke, director of traffic safety, said the 775 form cannot be used as evidence to fight the tickets. He said the form is used only to track officers driving cars registered to the D.C. police so the citation can be issued to the right person.
"I empathize with the officers because I, too, have run lights and had to speed on emergency calls," Lt. Burke said.
He said the codes are in place to keep officers from breaking traffic laws. The only time an officer is allowed to run a red light or to speed is on Code One emergencies, which include robberies in progress, reports of gunfire, or any violent crimes committed on the street or in a residence, Lt. Burke said.
He added that undercover officers, who have to run red lights or have sped to keep up with a suspect, also are exempted from the citations.
"Sometimes you get an emergency call of a person in trouble and you fly to the scene. You don't have time to worry about filling out that form," the detective said.
But officers told The Times they are being fined for speeding on Code One calls.
Sgt. Neill said he had spoken with Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer about how the situation.
"Chief Gainer said the department would be able to keep track of the emergency call logs and find out whether or not officers driving the cars were on Code One calls when the tickets were issued," Sgt. Neill said. "But then we found out that wasn't the case."
D.C. police spokesman Kevin P. Morison said officers should have no fear of getting speed or red-light camera tickets while on official business. He said tickets are not issued in cases where D.C. police aren't sure who was driving the car at the time it was the caught by the cameras.
"We can tell from the pictures -- we see in color -- whether or not a car has the sirens on. If they are, those tickets are thrown out during the review process," Mr. Morison said.
He said a "handful of tickets" has been given to officers erroneously.
He urged that officers who feel a ticket was issued to them in error to report it and not just pay the fine.
"If an officer pays the ticket without alerting us, he has to know that is an admission of guilt," Mr. Morison said.
He said the enforcement applies to all city government agencies.
There have been no complaints thus far from the D.C. Fire Department and Emergency Medical Service personnel about getting tickets while on official business, said Lisa Bass, D.C. Fire and EMS spokeswoman.
That does not include other police agencies in the city such as the U.S. Park Police, FBI or any other federal police force.
The U.S. Park Police, FBI, and U.S. Capitol Police did not return calls from The Washington Times yesterday inquiring whether their officers are getting photo-radar and speed camera tickets.
Since the automated traffic program began Aug. 6, the District's cameras have generated 75,575 tickets and more than $1.4 million, with 20,625 motorists paying the fines. An estimated $848,000 in fines went to the city's general fund, and almost $600,000 went to Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) -- the company that maintains and operates the devices.
Tickets are checked for errors by D.C. police officers and ACS employees before they are mailed, Mr. Morison said.
I skipped out early this morning and went to see the first showing of Spiderman in my local theater.
How much did that cost the economy?
According to the following item by James P. Hogan, later MM type experiments -- using more accurate instruments -- showed that the Earth doesn't move through an "ether," as was originally thought, but does rotate in an local "ether" field that orbits the sun with the Earth.
. shtml#081797
I don't know if Michelson's 1925 results were ever reproduced by anyone else.
Hogan proposed that the MM experiment be conducted using spacecraft outside of the geosphere to settle the question, because conducting the experiment on Earth is like "trying to measure our airspeed with our pitot tube inside the cabin instead of outside in the atmosphere."
I've highlighted the relevant parts in bold, for those of you that want to skip the introduction.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/relativity
SUGGESTED NASA EXPERIMENT Posted on August 17, 1997
RELATIVITY EXPERIMENT
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine at NASA invited me to submit any suggestions I might have for possible experiments to be carried out by future mission, involving advance physics. Since a few people have been in touch regarding the skepticism I've expressed in the past about the basis of Relativity, I thought my response might be of general interest, and so reproduce it below.
[To give credit where due, a virtually identical proposal was submitted to NASA some years ago by the late engineer and metallurgical consultant, Carl Zapffe. Nothing came of it. If anyone thinks I'm way off the mark, I'd be happy to hear from them.]
Dear Les,
Herewith the following, offered in response to your invitation.
INTERFEROMETRY BEYOND THE TERRESTRIAL MAGNETOPAUSE
The Einstein Special Relativity Theory (SRT), we all "know," forms one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Its predictions are utilized on a routine basis, and it has withstood every experimental test.
These predictions boil down, essentially, to applications of the principles of (i) mass-energy equivalence (E=mc*2), (ii) mass dependence on velocity, and (iii) time dilation. Experiments verifying these relationships have been performed with increasing precision in the course of the past century. These are the proofs that the textbooks cite in support of SRT, and which its defenders point to when questions are raised concerning Relativity basics.
But it turns out that _all_ of them can be derived by purely classical procedures, independently of any Relativistic considerations. They don't say anything unique about SRT at all. (i) follows from the principle of conservation of momentum and Maxwell's equations. Carl Zapffe gives three derivations in his book "A Reminder on E+mc*2 (sic)," with numerous references that show how it was implicit in the physics known at the end of the nineteenth century. Regarding (ii), Petr Beckmann, in his "Einstein Plus Two" (1987), shows how the increase of "mass" with velocity arises as a manifestation of the electrical inertia of charges moving through fields--analogous to aerodynamic drag.
Essentially, these are effects arising from the energy differences of relatively moving systems. The question they lead to is whether the results observed regarding (iii) (e.g. the extended lives of cosmic-ray muons) are in fact confirmation of "time" being dilated, as per SRT, or result from the physical slowing-down of clocklike processes in motion through a field. The only way to test this empirically would be to sit on an incoming muon and observe whether the laboratory clocks (at rest in the field) also slow down (as the observer-referred SRT holds) or speed up (as a field-referred theory would predict). This has never been done. (A whole literature exists on all this, but I don't think that here would be the place to elaborate further.)
So, the standard proofs turn out not to be proofs at all. All that's left, then, is the interpretation of the 1881 Michelson-Morley attempt to measure an "ether wind," and its many variations performed since.
The null results returned by these experiments have two possible interpretations: (1) There is no ether; (2) the ether local to the Earth is entrained in its orbit around the Sun. (1), of course, is the orthodox line. The constancy of the speed of light for all observers is a _postulate_ that follows from accepting this interpretation. Contrary to common belief, it has never been verified experimentally. (The claimed verifications all involve round-trip measurements that average out the c+/-v velocities that arise in field-referred theories.) Having thus conferred constancy on a velocity, it then becomes necessary to distort space and time in order to preserve it. This, in effect, is what the transformation equations of SRT do.
Treating the ether as a quasi-mechanical fluid was a natural consequence of the advances in materials sciences in the nineteenth century; the peculiar properties that followed from viewing it in this way make the readiness to go with interpretation (1), and abandon the ether altogether, understandable. The situation changes considerably, however, when reviewed in terms of today's ideas of fields (which isn't to say that the concept of fields was unknown then, of course). In particular, it has been shown (e.g. by Beckmann) that the results of all the experiments performed to date, normally taken as evidence supporting SRT, are equally consistent with an alternative interpretation in which the velocity of light is constant not with respect to the observer (as in SRT), but with respect to the field environment through which the light propagates. The difference is that the derivations follow more simply, without the distortions of space and time, and the accompanying mathematical complications of SRT; also, the field-referred theory has greater predictive power (e.g in enabling derivation of the spectral line spacings for the hydrogen atom). By the criteria normally claimed of science-- equally compatible with experimental results; simpler; more powerful predictively--this would become the preferred theory.
And, indeed, when thought of as the terrestrial electromagnetic field environment, the "ether" is indeed entrained and moves with the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The plots from NASA's own space probes show nothing clearer than the sharply defined boundary of the terrestrial magnetosphere ("geosphere"), extending out to about ten Earth radii, elongated like a teardrop pointing away from the Sun, forming a huge shock front around which the solar wind streams like the slipstream outside the hull of an airplane. And here, in our laboratories solidly nailed to our planet deep inside this bubble, is where, for a century, we have been attempting to measure our orbital slipstream. But, if the field-referred proposal is correct, that slipstream exists not in the vicinity of the Earth at all, but at the boundary where the embedded geosphere meets the magnetic "heliosphere" of the Sun (and very likely moves with it through a greater "galactosphere"). We've been trying to measure our airspeed with our pitot tube inside the cabin instead of outside in the atmosphere.
(The geosphere travels with the Earth but does not appear to rotate with it. Accordingly, a suitable Michelson-Morely type of experiment performed on the Earth's surface ought to be capable of detecting a "rotational wind"--although it would need to be far more sensitive than the 1881 experiment. Such an experiment was performed in 1925 by Michelson and Gale. Not only was a fringe shift observed, but it was possible to calculate the Earth's rotational velocity quite accurately from the results. Michelson himself was never enthusiastic about the orthodox interpretation, and continued to favor the entrained-ether alternative until his death.)
I would propose, therefore, an interferometry experiment designed along the lines of the Michelson-Morely prototype, but taking advantage of today's technologies, to be performed from a spacecraft _outside_ the geosphere boundary--preferably trailing the craft itself, to eliminate possible shielding effects within the structure. On emerging from the geosphere, the craft would be moving through the heliosphere with its shared orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun, direct measurement of which should be easily accomplished if the field-centered hypothesis is valid. Thus, for the first time ever, an experiment would have been performed to distinguish between the observer-referred theory (SRT) and the alternative.
Should the results prove positive, such methods of "astro- interferometry" should be of particular interest to an organization like NASA because of the potential usefulness of the techniques that could follow, especially with regard to longer-range space missions in the future. For example, the fringe behavior might offer the basis for a spacegoing _odometer_ and _speedometer_ for measuring displacements and velocities relative to local (solar, planetary, or other) embedding fields. Also, the transitions between field domains could provide a means of _cosmographic mapping_ of a field-structured Solar System, and maybe of the interstellar environment beyond.
James P. Hogan
July 15, 1997
Plus, I could totally see that going awry: Peter gets all hot 'n bothered by MJ, and, completely distracted, he shoots webbing all over the place, random-like. Of course, I've always thought that Wolverine would have similar problems with his lovers, except instead of accidentally getting everything sticky, he'd probably destroy everything.
Uh, why would some nerdy geek need the ability to shoot webbing to accidently get everything sticky when getting it on with a chick like Mary Jane?
I suspect that happens to most Slashdotters now...
How much is this going to cost the economy if us techies take the day off to watch it?
I have friends in the IT business who haven't been to work for about a year.
Not because they're waiting in line for tickets, but because they're unemployed.
I wonder how much that's costing the economy.
Gaming is not the only thing affected by high latency, as Jerry Pournelle wrote on his website:
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"View" Tuesday, October 2, 2001
I am now willing to believe that Microsoft and Earthlink and the Hughes satellite people all worked together to create the most frustrating system possible, guaranteed to drive everyone insane.
There is no other explanation of why this imbecility works the way it does. Clearly no one really tried to make this work and did any testing. Why should they?
The MSN home page, for instance, is designed for maximum problems with high latency systems: it wants about 50 requests for little files, and since there is a delay for each one, it takes literally about 4 minutes to download the MSN home page. Updates are just as bad. I suppose there is going to be some magical fix for all this when things are adequately cached, but I wouldn't count on it.
I have no choice but to sit there and wait for Microsoft to deliver its stupid home page with all the stupid little files, but once I get my updates I can be certain I will not go THERE again. Ye gods!
All right. Once it works it works fine. But ye flipping gods , the contortions I have to go through to get it going.
I don't know if the problems are hardware or software so I am going to get an Intel D815 system to install this on and try again.
Glenn also posts on Slashdot as YIAAL.
.cum
Maybe everybody issued a national ID card, or scanned by facial recognition technology, will require a license from Oracle before they can be tracked?
Didn't anyone ever see "Aliens"?
Don't they know what one of those terraforming plants can do?
Not to mention the kind of business executives who own the plants, the space monsters attracted to them, and the fate of the people who work there.
No thank you. Not on my planet.
Coincidence? Probably.
Mapping Gravity
Posted by michael on Thursday November 22, @01:22AM
from the slim-fast dept.
overThruster writes: "No, you don't need to drink the water... Gravity is less strong in India--enough so that you weigh almost 1% less there. See BBC story about NASA's gravity map." Here's another story about the mission, and the GRACE home page (or NASA's less-informative page).
But this did make me wonder if there is any connection to what I posted back then:
Back in 1978, Arthur C. Clarke ended his book The View from Serendip by writing about a gravitational anomaly which was found off the coast of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) -- the small island near India where he lives.
I am able to visit my favorite spot (Chapter 13) for only a few days a year. But now, quite unexpectedly -- and literally since I wrote the preceding paragraph! -- Serendipity has struck again. While researching a totally different subject, I've discovered a good reason for spending more time on the south coast.
It concerns the greak Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. In this 2,200-year-old poem, the demon-king Ravanna kidnaps Sita, wife of Rama, and takes her to his island stronghold of Ceylon. Needless to say, she is ultimately released, after aerial battles involving what look suspiciously like atomic weapons and laser beams.
To heal the wounded, the heroic monkey-general Hanuman is later sent back to India to fetch a medicinal herb found only in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, when he gets to the right mountain he is unable to identify the herb. No problem; he brings the whole mountain back! However, one piece drops off, on the southern tip of Ceylon. The locals believe this fragment is in fact my favourite bay, for its name in Sinhalese means "there it fell down" (onna watuna).
There it fell down. Place names usually have a meaning, though it is often lost in the mists of time. Did something really fall down, centuries or millennia ago, at Unawatuna Bay? A meteorite would be the obvious explanation; it must have been a big one for the legend to have lasted down the ages.
And here's another weird coincidence. Little Unawatuna, believe it or not, is the closest point on dry land to the world's greatest gravitational anomaly, a few hundred kilometres out in the Indian Ocean. On the Goddard Space Flight Center's 3-D map of the Earth's Gravimetric Geoid, that strange phenomenon looks liek a deep pit [1] into which the whole island of Sri Lanka is about to slide.
Let's put two and two together. A few thousand years ago, a huge object of peculiar density plunged into the Indian Ocean, creating a tradition that is remembered to this day. And it's still there, distorting the earth's gravitational field -- Terran Gravitational Anomaly I.
That might make an opening for a pretty good science-fiction movie . . . and an even better ending for this book.
Ayu Bowan.
1. One hundred and ten metres below zero reference on the Goddard model (March & Vincent, 1974).
Of course, the Ramayana is "only" 2,200 years old, compared to an estimated age of 5,000 years for this discover. Since I don't have a map of the locations of either TGA-1, or the sunken city, I don't know how close they are.
"I know it doesn't sound right to send a bunch of Plutonium to Europa (the Monolith warned us...) but we could shield it reasonably well."
How does contamination by plutonium compare to the intense radiation belts that already exist around Jupiter?
Actually, the book "2010" (1982) didn't contain the part about "Use them together, use them in peace."
That was added in the movie (1984), along with the armed conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union in Central America.
For some reason, Peter Hyam cut out the part about the Chinese ship "Tsien" that did land on Europa, and added the political aspect.
He must have been smoking some good crack if he thought that was an improvement on the book.
Will scumbags like Gator, with their pop-up downloads (April 8, 2002), be held liable for any bandwidth costs incurred by the customer?
As was pointed out, it's bad enough what they're doing to people with dial up connections. What happens when people start getting billed for crap like that?
It's time to close the "book store loophole," where criminals can purchase "how to" books that contain instructional information on committing illegal acts without any type of background check.
Do it for the children.
Every time I excercise my second amendment rights by purchasing a firearm, I am required to fill out a government form with all sorts of personal information. The seller is then required to get permission from the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation to complete the transaction.
The government has illegally been keeping these records. After being conditioned that this is "reasonable," -- often by first amendment extremists -- why should I give a flying rat's ass if it happens to other people?
If the panic room is the safest place in the entire house, why didn't they build the entire house out of the panic room?
With Citrix MetaFrame, remote administrators can only see and control items within a user's Citrix session.
Things like the ICA Client configuration, printer drivers, and operating system settings, reside on the client PC. They cannot be manipulated remotely.
At least when I was working desktop support, I could get users to move out of my why while I fixed their problem. Dealing with Citrix users across the state, I am now dependent on them to be my "eyes" while trying to troubleshoot their problem.
Instructing users to check their settings, or even find the name of their printer driver, over the phone can be a very painful process.
Me: "OK, what operating system are you using?"
User: "I don't know."
Me: "Is your printer connected to your PC, or is it a network printer?"
User: "I don't know."
Even worse is that users -- and our brilliant help desk -- cannot distinguish between "Citrix" and "PeopleSoft," which is the only applicatioin we use Citrix for. Any problems with PeopleSoft, or its related databases, are routinely forwarded to the Citrix MetaFrame admins. We waste a lot of time routing calls to the proper people, which is what our help desk should be doing.
The same applies if the problem is with their local computer, because the users' desktop support people usually don't want, or know how, to do their jobs.
I don't know if Citrix Metaframe meets the orignal author's requirements for a remote desktop, but it certainly does not meet mine.
As though "environmental" groups don't have their own, self-serving agendas?
t .shtml#030899 )
The Sacremento Bee did a five part report on the environmental movement back in April, 2001, called Environment, Inc. The Bee notes that "Five other major groups -- including household names such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club -- spend so much on fund raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards set by philanthropic watchdog groups."
I'm too ignorant to judge claims made by most environmental groups, including Greenpeace. They may be right. But the implication that their motives are above reproach is laughable.
Junk Science reported big chunks of ice back in October 1998:
Large icebergs not new
Submitted by Paul Jensen
On October 16, it was reported that an iceberg the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica. Of course, this was attributed to global warming.
For a little perspective, we go to page 748 of the 1996 edition of The American Navigator, the prestigious Naval text updated continuously since 1799 (sometimes referred to as "The Bowditch."
The text reads "In 1854 and 1855, several ships in the South Atlantic reported a crescent-shaped iceberg with one horn 40 miles long, the other 60 miles long, and with an embayment 40 miles wide between the tips. In 1927 a berg 100 miles long, 100 miles wide, and 130 feet high above the water was reported. The largest iceberg ever reported was sighted in 1956 by the USS Glacier, a U. S. Navy icebreaker, about 150 miles west of Scott Island. This berg was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, more than twice the size of Connecticut. Icebergs ten miles or more in length have been seen on many occasions in the Antarctic."
Notice that this last iceberg was more than 4 times bigger than that little "ice cube" noted in the Washington Post story. And by some miracle, the world did not come to an end after the discovery of this giant.
So last week's iceberg was not so extraordinary -- except that it was perhaps the first linked to the dreaded global warming.
(Also at http://www.sepp.org/weekwas/1998/oct19_25.html and http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/archives/environmen
The right-wing publication Scientific American, in an article about rising ocean levels in the August 1998 issue, noted that there is "some evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet may, in fact, have melted at least once before. Between about 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, when the last shared ancestors of all humans probably fanned out of Africa into Asia and Europe, Earth experienced a climatic history strikingly similar to what has transpired in the past 20,000 years, warming abruptly from the chill of a great ice age."
(This is by the same author who wrote the cover story of the March 1997 issue about rising sea levels. That article is not available online, and I don't have it here at work with me).
Just imagine all the "download from Uranus" or "data dump from Uranus" jokes.
I don't even want to think about uploading...
I didn't realize that Starship Troopers (1960) or Predator (1987) were anime.
Remember this Slashdot thread last year, about a Massachusetts court ruling which made it illegal for citizens to tape-record their interactions with the police?
The reason you will never see transparent aluminum is not because of a lack of crystalline structure...
The real reason you will never see transparent aluminum is because it is, well, transparent.
It drives me absolutely nuts when people can't spell a simple word like "really."