He's talking about someone *standing over their shoulder*
That already applies to postal voting, and so as a replacement for postal voting isn't an issue.
Right. But internet voting is still much less secure than postal voting. For instance if you vote by mail from Germany then someone in China has no way to change your vote because they have no physical access to it. But anyone in the world can hack the internet server like these researchers did and change not only your vote but all the other ballots for that election.
But WHY would it be so expensive? See here is what I've never gotten
It's not expensive like a luxury car is expensive. It's expensive because despite decades of research verifiable anonymous electronic voting, and even more so internet voting, is an unsolved problem.
and maybe I'm missing something but we've had smart cards for a pretty damned long time, so why not use them? Put a 512bit key, one for each person in America and hand them out with a USB reader, one per household.
What could go wrong you ask?
First distributing hundreds of millions of keys is no small undertaking. The government would have to keep a database of the public keys assigned to every voter. It would have to handle lost keys: invalidate them and reassign a new one. If it's a per-state affair then they would have to handle people moving out of state, and back in, etc.
The government would obviously use your public key so they can decode and tally your encrypted vote. That also means the government computer would know exactly how you voted (and have cryptographic proof of it). At that point you have absolutely no proof that they wouldn't store that information elsewhere. It also means anyone hacking the system like these researchers did would also know how you voted (and could resell that information or your public key).
With the kind of access these researchers had, another attack would be to decode your ballot and discard it before it's even been tallied if you voted the wrong way.
Someone could impersonate you and claim to have lost their voting key. Your key would then be invalidated thus making you unable to vote. But with access to the server another attack would be to change your public key in the government database. You would then be unable to vote until the database has been restored from backup (likely after the election). A variant would allow them to replace your ballot with a new one signed by the corresponding private key. Given that you would not be allowed to verify your vote anyway (to prevent the sale of votes), you would have no way to know this happened and no chance to complain. Even if you did you would have no proof of the hack.
If someone gets hold of the smart card, USB key or CD containing your private key, then they would be able to vote in your place. They could also simply steal or confiscate it to prevent you from voting.
Heck, you present generating secure keys as if it was something trivial. But even that can easily go wrong: you suggest a 512 bit key but a 768 bit RSA key has already been broken, just see the Debian SSL/SSH key debacle, the recent discovery that about 2 out of 1000 RSA keys is a dud. Then there's all the encryption systems that have been cracked over the years like WEP, CSS, etc. What makes you think the encryption used for your vote will fare any better. And more to the point, how will a layman be able to verify by himself that it will?
Anyway, I dislike any system where it is not mandatory to enforce the privacy of the voter.
Why would an electronic system not be able to enforce privacy? The problem is auditing while keeping privacy.
Seems like you know the answer already. So you should also know that currently there's no known solution. We can either have unverifiable electronic elections where your vote remains secret, or verifiable electronic elections where your vote is public.
One possible solution is to issue everyone strong security keys at random so that no one knows who actually received a specific key.
As a voter how do you verify that the security key you were issued was assigned at random? How do you do so without wither compromising the security key generation, or going back to a polling booth style distribution of security keys on paper? At least with paper ballots every voter can verify and does actively protect the privacy of his own ballot.
Furthermore the parent was concerned with the family patriarch supervising the family members while they were voting on the family computer (you can replace patriarch with boss, spouse, etc). Your security keys do strictly nothing to solve that problem.
Which is irrelevant to what I said (besides rail != subway). Taking the car in the Paris area and most large French cities is a nightmare and travel times using public transportation are often competitive (and yes, I do take into account the time it takes to get to and from the subway). But yes, I'd also like to see a real PRT system put in place (it may not make sense in Paris but could probably work in the suburbs).
They are brand new on the market but I recommend Free Mobile.
With their basic plan you get 60 minutes voice, 5cents/minute after that, 60 SMS, 1cent/SMS after, 0 MMS and 0 MB of data, and no contract. You only pay for outgoing calls and SMS. This for only 2€/month, or 0€/month if you already have ADSL service with them! Yep, that's my new mobile phone plan.
Their unlimited plan is not for you but here goes anyway: unlimited calls to 40 international destinations, unlimited SMS, unlimited MMS, 3GB fair use for Internet, reduced bandwidth after that; unlimited access to their 3 million FreeWifi hotspots; tethering, VoIP and Peer-to-Peer are explicitly allowed, and no contract and this will set you back 20€/month, or 16€/month if you're already an ADSL customer with them.
Oh. You're not in France? Damn that must suck! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required.
You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of building both the nanotech scanner and assembler. Very basic things in fact like how long does it take to scan an entire body at atomic scale and what do you do with nerve influx and blood cells that move around while you're doing the scanning. And at the assembler side what do you do with all the speed vectors you have to restore on each atom in what is yet only a partially rebuilt body? In fact, how do you get past the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Solving each of these will require new physics. I just think you've taking Star Trek too literally.
Then there's the issue of sending that nanotech assembly machine at the destination in the first place.
The problem... well stated. The fundamental maths of current public transport technologies mean that they can physically never replace the car in terms of performance. You could spend trillions on it and it would still suck so badly that nobody uses it. (This is what Europe does)
Come take the subway in Paris and you will find it so packed you will wish nobody used it. Take a car instead and an hour and a handful of miles later you will wish you had taken the subway instead.
So no. There are public transportation systems that are both widely used and competitive with cars.
I had the same problem when I tried renting a tape at Hollywood Video in 1997. They refused my French passport. A French passport and a French driving license is all I needed to buy a car and drive away with it. But renting a VHS tape? No. That's serious business. That absolutely requires a California driving license!
It's a pretty simple argument: You can not have two projects that are both the top most must be done now items. One MUST be more important than the other. They (management) can yell and fuss and scream all they want but, until they commit to changing the stack order, it's just hot air and can be completely ignored.
It's actually possible to have more than one top priority if you have more than one specialized development team. It just means you may need to manage more than one stack. So you'd have a priority stack for the client application development team, another for the backend server coders, and yet another for the web frontend ones. And yes, some features will require developments in two or more of these stacks and they will have to happen in the right order...
[...] On the other hand... it just shifts the problem around. I'd rather have the gang of feral youths stood menacingly inside the brightly lit CCTV-infested shopping centre than in the unlit, unguarded car park outside.
And maybe that's the solution: instead of playing classical music to chase away the 'feral youths', attract them to an area under video camera surveillance with gansta rap. Then if anything happens, immediately dispatch the police car that was just out of sight nearby.
Ok, as is that plan won't really work<g>. What about creating places where they would listen to music and do interesting stuff? Maybe you could call them youth centers?
"Could you install Office on my Mac for me?"
"No."
"Come on. Here's my discs and..."
"These discs are for a Windows computer."
"But the guy at the Apple store told me the Mac could run Windows..."
"Yes, if you use Boot Camp, and obtain a licensed copy of Windows, sure. Same as any other computer."
"So, I can't run Office on my Mac?"
Oh, and more seriously: Cheshire, Shropshire, Wensleydale, Stilton, Caerphilly, Y-fenwi, Yarg, and of course Brie (most of which is made in Somerset).
I know this humorous but that's still a pretty short list compared to the ~50 AOC french cheeses, not to say compared to a more complete list. And in France it's normal for a supermarket to have a selection of at least 30 different kinds.
Oh, and although you can get some Brie produced in Somerset, it's a French cheese.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
While I generally agree with you, weren't MegaUpload's servers located in Virginia? That would make them fall under the DMCA jurisdiction no matter where the company is headquartered or where its officers actually live. Then the real question is: why the heck did MegaUpload put their servers in the US?
One might think so but that's not what the cameras here do since their primary purpose is to collect revenue as cheaply as possible rather than to be a legally justifiable enhancement to safety. To oppose them is to oppose corruption.
That's your mistake. Being inanimate the cameras are not corrupt. The people making the rules are but since you're not opposing them, you're not opposing corruption.
The onus isn't on the driver to prove they are innocent. The onus is on the state to prove they are guilty.
If your car is matched to a crime scene, you'll have to tell the police who was using it at the time (or face the consequences). So that's not unprecedented. The law extends that to the red light (and speed trap) cameras. Now you can debate whether that's crossing a line.
You are implying that, if we had to choose, we would keep the corruption than the red light cameras. That is just factually wrong.
All I'm saying is that people in this thread fight the red light cameras but not the corruption. And that's a fact.
He can at most say he sees a car with xyz tag number ion the intersection while the light is red (not always a traffic violation). He himself must rely on the 'word' of the red light camera and so a detectives testimony is properly considered hearsay in this case.
In France the system takes at least two photos: one that shows the light is red and the car has not yet entered the intersection, and another a second later showing the car in the intersection. Seems like a pretty simple software-only change could achieve the same thing in the US.
Have the camera take a photo of the front of the car.
Then what? If the picture doesn't look like the driver, shred the ticket?
Require the owner to indicate who was driving at the time like it is done in France. It's strange, it does not seem to be much of an issue here. You seem to be making a mountain out of molehill.
If you cannot contest a red light camera fine in court then that's a problem with your justice system or traffic laws. Advocate for these to be fixed.
I said face my accuser. Why don't you tell me, just how do you put a camera on the witness stand?
So what? Do you mean that any video, audio or paper evidence must be discarded because 'how would a piece of paper take the stand?' You're just being ridiculous. The video evidence can be reviewed and analyzed by all parties.
You're right! Where is my toolbox? OK, got it, now to work. OH! Look! They're carting me off to jail!
Or, I could use the simple and easy fix to 100% of those problems: Ban the damned things.
Banning red light cameras won't solve anything, if your government / police force is corrupt they can find a hundred other ways to make you pay. Again, I have never heard of the yellow light time being shortened in France despite the numerous red light cameras that we now have. Would it be that some countries manage to have no corruption despite the red light cameras? Why can't it work in the US? Oh, right, in the US people like you prefer to oppose the red light cameras rather than the corruption.
The perverse incentives for the corruption come from the cameras in this case. They need the ticket revenue to pay for the camera.
So by this argument you oppose anything that provides incentive for corruption? So for instance you oppose the government having a budget because that provides an incentive for corruption of the elected officials who handle these funds.
It's just one more reason to oppose the cameras though, others include their inability to attach the fine to the driver rather than the owner,
Have the camera take a photo of the front of the car.
the impossibility of facing one's accuser in court,
If you cannot contest a red light camera fine in court then that's a problem with your justice system or traffic laws. Advocate for these to be fixed.
and a complete lack of confidence that a fault resulting in false positives will be addressed any time this century.
If you only count on yourself to fix the issues then your lack of confidence is warranted indeed. The situation will not improve unless you recognize and attack the real problems.
The law is that you cannot enter the intersection on a red. If you are already there, you must clear the intersection.
Actually there's also the case where you're going straight but there's a traffic jam on the other side of the intersection that will prevent you from clearing it. I believe it is illegal to enter the intersection in such a case. People often don't respect this, in Paris for instance, so that we end up with a situation where the traffic jam goes straight through the intersection and cross traffic is completely blocked. Quite often both roads are actually backed up and take turns blocking each other, thus creating massive traffic jams that then propagate to nearby intersections. This gets nightmarish quick and provides a good incentive to avoid taking the car at all.
This is well understood by traffic engineers and so there are guidelines for the minimum safe length of a yellow. Cities with red light cameras almost always end up with yellows shorter than that.
Then oppose the corruption, not the red light cameras!
You know, everyday minor driving errors that happen to all of us and rarely hurt anybody
Oh, and you also seem to consider driving through a red light to be a minor driving error when it's one of the most dangerous things you can do. Clearly the world would be a safer place with you off the roads.
All these fines do is hit people who guess incorrectly about the length of the yellow or (correctly or incorrectly) think they won't be able to stop before it turns red.
You appear to be under the impression that it's ok to go through a yellow light if you think it will be long enough. You are wrong and clearly your driving license should be revoked. The length of the yellow light is totally irrelevant. The second the yellow light is on the only thing that matters is whether you can stop before the intersection or not. Either you can and you do, or you cannot and you go through.
Primarily the mode of delivery. It made sense that the internet would piggyback on existing infrastructure (cable and telephone) but the tables have now turned, and it would make more sense to piggyback TV on a line specifically meant for Internet (fiber).
Quite true. But you don't need fiber for that. ADSL is sufficient. That's how a lot of people watch TV in France: all ADSL ISPs offer triple play service : Internet+Phone+TV for around 40$.
Slashdot Mirror
He's talking about someone *standing over their shoulder*
That already applies to postal voting, and so as a replacement for postal voting isn't an issue.
Right. But internet voting is still much less secure than postal voting. For instance if you vote by mail from Germany then someone in China has no way to change your vote because they have no physical access to it. But anyone in the world can hack the internet server like these researchers did and change not only your vote but all the other ballots for that election.
But WHY would it be so expensive? See here is what I've never gotten
It's not expensive like a luxury car is expensive. It's expensive because despite decades of research verifiable anonymous electronic voting, and even more so internet voting, is an unsolved problem.
and maybe I'm missing something but we've had smart cards for a pretty damned long time, so why not use them? Put a 512bit key, one for each person in America and hand them out with a USB reader, one per household.
What could go wrong you ask?
First distributing hundreds of millions of keys is no small undertaking. The government would have to keep a database of the public keys assigned to every voter. It would have to handle lost keys: invalidate them and reassign a new one. If it's a per-state affair then they would have to handle people moving out of state, and back in, etc.
The government would obviously use your public key so they can decode and tally your encrypted vote. That also means the government computer would know exactly how you voted (and have cryptographic proof of it). At that point you have absolutely no proof that they wouldn't store that information elsewhere. It also means anyone hacking the system like these researchers did would also know how you voted (and could resell that information or your public key).
With the kind of access these researchers had, another attack would be to decode your ballot and discard it before it's even been tallied if you voted the wrong way.
Someone could impersonate you and claim to have lost their voting key. Your key would then be invalidated thus making you unable to vote. But with access to the server another attack would be to change your public key in the government database. You would then be unable to vote until the database has been restored from backup (likely after the election). A variant would allow them to replace your ballot with a new one signed by the corresponding private key. Given that you would not be allowed to verify your vote anyway (to prevent the sale of votes), you would have no way to know this happened and no chance to complain. Even if you did you would have no proof of the hack.
If someone gets hold of the smart card, USB key or CD containing your private key, then they would be able to vote in your place. They could also simply steal or confiscate it to prevent you from voting.
Heck, you present generating secure keys as if it was something trivial. But even that can easily go wrong: you suggest a 512 bit key but a 768 bit RSA key has already been broken, just see the Debian SSL/SSH key debacle, the recent discovery that about 2 out of 1000 RSA keys is a dud. Then there's all the encryption systems that have been cracked over the years like WEP, CSS, etc. What makes you think the encryption used for your vote will fare any better. And more to the point, how will a layman be able to verify by himself that it will?
Anyway, I dislike any system where it is not mandatory to enforce the privacy of the voter.
Why would an electronic system not be able to enforce privacy? The problem is auditing while keeping privacy.
Seems like you know the answer already. So you should also know that currently there's no known solution. We can either have unverifiable electronic elections where your vote remains secret, or verifiable electronic elections where your vote is public.
One possible solution is to issue everyone strong security keys at random so that no one knows who actually received a specific key.
As a voter how do you verify that the security key you were issued was assigned at random? How do you do so without wither compromising the security key generation, or going back to a polling booth style distribution of security keys on paper? At least with paper ballots every voter can verify and does actively protect the privacy of his own ballot.
Furthermore the parent was concerned with the family patriarch supervising the family members while they were voting on the family computer (you can replace patriarch with boss, spouse, etc). Your security keys do strictly nothing to solve that problem.
Which is irrelevant to what I said (besides rail != subway). Taking the car in the Paris area and most large French cities is a nightmare and travel times using public transportation are often competitive (and yes, I do take into account the time it takes to get to and from the subway). But yes, I'd also like to see a real PRT system put in place (it may not make sense in Paris but could probably work in the suburbs).
They are brand new on the market but I recommend Free Mobile.
With their basic plan you get 60 minutes voice, 5cents/minute after that, 60 SMS, 1cent/SMS after, 0 MMS and 0 MB of data, and no contract. You only pay for outgoing calls and SMS. This for only 2€/month, or 0€/month if you already have ADSL service with them! Yep, that's my new mobile phone plan.
Their unlimited plan is not for you but here goes anyway: unlimited calls to 40 international destinations, unlimited SMS, unlimited MMS, 3GB fair use for Internet, reduced bandwidth after that; unlimited access to their 3 million FreeWifi hotspots; tethering, VoIP and Peer-to-Peer are explicitly allowed, and no contract and this will set you back 20€/month, or 16€/month if you're already an ADSL customer with them.
Oh. You're not in France? Damn that must suck! (sorry, couldn't resist)
Third, nanotechnology has the promise of travel to other stars at zero effective time delay to the traveller, and speed of light actual speed. Here is how: you scan a person at atomic resolution. Then you send a *description* of their body, atom for atom via powerful laser. At the destination, a nanotech assembler builds a copy atom for atom. There are large practical challenges to doing this, but no new physics required.
You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of building both the nanotech scanner and assembler. Very basic things in fact like how long does it take to scan an entire body at atomic scale and what do you do with nerve influx and blood cells that move around while you're doing the scanning. And at the assembler side what do you do with all the speed vectors you have to restore on each atom in what is yet only a partially rebuilt body? In fact, how do you get past the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Solving each of these will require new physics. I just think you've taking Star Trek too literally.
Then there's the issue of sending that nanotech assembly machine at the destination in the first place.
The problem... well stated. The fundamental maths of current public transport technologies mean that they can physically never replace the car in terms of performance. You could spend trillions on it and it would still suck so badly that nobody uses it. (This is what Europe does)
Come take the subway in Paris and you will find it so packed you will wish nobody used it. Take a car instead and an hour and a handful of miles later you will wish you had taken the subway instead.
So no. There are public transportation systems that are both widely used and competitive with cars.
I had the same problem when I tried renting a tape at Hollywood Video in 1997. They refused my French passport. A French passport and a French driving license is all I needed to buy a car and drive away with it. But renting a VHS tape? No. That's serious business. That absolutely requires a California driving license!
It's a pretty simple argument: You can not have two projects that are both the top most must be done now items. One MUST be more important than the other. They (management) can yell and fuss and scream all they want but, until they commit to changing the stack order, it's just hot air and can be completely ignored.
It's actually possible to have more than one top priority if you have more than one specialized development team. It just means you may need to manage more than one stack. So you'd have a priority stack for the client application development team, another for the backend server coders, and yet another for the web frontend ones. And yes, some features will require developments in two or more of these stacks and they will have to happen in the right order...
[...] On the other hand... it just shifts the problem around. I'd rather have the gang of feral youths stood menacingly inside the brightly lit CCTV-infested shopping centre than in the unlit, unguarded car park outside.
And maybe that's the solution: instead of playing classical music to chase away the 'feral youths', attract them to an area under video camera surveillance with gansta rap. Then if anything happens, immediately dispatch the police car that was just out of sight nearby.
Ok, as is that plan won't really work<g>. What about creating places where they would listen to music and do interesting stuff? Maybe you could call them youth centers?
"Could you install Office on my Mac for me?" "No."
"Come on. Here's my discs and..."
"These discs are for a Windows computer."
"But the guy at the Apple store told me the Mac could run Windows..."
"Yes, if you use Boot Camp, and obtain a licensed copy of Windows, sure. Same as any other computer."
"So, I can't run Office on my Mac?"
Actually you can using CrossOver.
4. Our boss hated the idea that our competitors could get a leg up by using software that he paid for being developed.
This cuts both ways. He should love getting a leg up on his competition by using open-source code he did not have to pay for.
Oh, and more seriously: Cheshire, Shropshire, Wensleydale, Stilton, Caerphilly, Y-fenwi, Yarg, and of course Brie (most of which is made in Somerset).
I know this humorous but that's still a pretty short list compared to the ~50 AOC french cheeses, not to say compared to a more complete list. And in France it's normal for a supermarket to have a selection of at least 30 different kinds.
Oh, and although you can get some Brie produced in Somerset, it's a French cheese.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
While I generally agree with you, weren't MegaUpload's servers located in Virginia? That would make them fall under the DMCA jurisdiction no matter where the company is headquartered or where its officers actually live. Then the real question is: why the heck did MegaUpload put their servers in the US?
One might think so but that's not what the cameras here do since their primary purpose is to collect revenue as cheaply as possible rather than to be a legally justifiable enhancement to safety. To oppose them is to oppose corruption.
That's your mistake. Being inanimate the cameras are not corrupt. The people making the rules are but since you're not opposing them, you're not opposing corruption.
The onus isn't on the driver to prove they are innocent. The onus is on the state to prove they are guilty.
If your car is matched to a crime scene, you'll have to tell the police who was using it at the time (or face the consequences). So that's not unprecedented. The law extends that to the red light (and speed trap) cameras. Now you can debate whether that's crossing a line.
You are implying that, if we had to choose, we would keep the corruption than the red light cameras. That is just factually wrong.
All I'm saying is that people in this thread fight the red light cameras but not the corruption. And that's a fact.
He can at most say he sees a car with xyz tag number ion the intersection while the light is red (not always a traffic violation). He himself must rely on the 'word' of the red light camera and so a detectives testimony is properly considered hearsay in this case.
In France the system takes at least two photos: one that shows the light is red and the car has not yet entered the intersection, and another a second later showing the car in the intersection. Seems like a pretty simple software-only change could achieve the same thing in the US.
Have the camera take a photo of the front of the car.
Then what? If the picture doesn't look like the driver, shred the ticket?
Require the owner to indicate who was driving at the time like it is done in France. It's strange, it does not seem to be much of an issue here. You seem to be making a mountain out of molehill.
If you cannot contest a red light camera fine in court then that's a problem with your justice system or traffic laws. Advocate for these to be fixed.
I said face my accuser. Why don't you tell me, just how do you put a camera on the witness stand?
So what? Do you mean that any video, audio or paper evidence must be discarded because 'how would a piece of paper take the stand?' You're just being ridiculous. The video evidence can be reviewed and analyzed by all parties.
You're right! Where is my toolbox? OK, got it, now to work. OH! Look! They're carting me off to jail!
Or, I could use the simple and easy fix to 100% of those problems: Ban the damned things.
Banning red light cameras won't solve anything, if your government / police force is corrupt they can find a hundred other ways to make you pay. Again, I have never heard of the yellow light time being shortened in France despite the numerous red light cameras that we now have. Would it be that some countries manage to have no corruption despite the red light cameras? Why can't it work in the US? Oh, right, in the US people like you prefer to oppose the red light cameras rather than the corruption.
The perverse incentives for the corruption come from the cameras in this case. They need the ticket revenue to pay for the camera.
So by this argument you oppose anything that provides incentive for corruption? So for instance you oppose the government having a budget because that provides an incentive for corruption of the elected officials who handle these funds.
It's just one more reason to oppose the cameras though, others include their inability to attach the fine to the driver rather than the owner,
Have the camera take a photo of the front of the car.
the impossibility of facing one's accuser in court,
If you cannot contest a red light camera fine in court then that's a problem with your justice system or traffic laws. Advocate for these to be fixed.
and a complete lack of confidence that a fault resulting in false positives will be addressed any time this century.
If you only count on yourself to fix the issues then your lack of confidence is warranted indeed. The situation will not improve unless you recognize and attack the real problems.
The law is that you cannot enter the intersection on a red. If you are already there, you must clear the intersection.
Actually there's also the case where you're going straight but there's a traffic jam on the other side of the intersection that will prevent you from clearing it. I believe it is illegal to enter the intersection in such a case. People often don't respect this, in Paris for instance, so that we end up with a situation where the traffic jam goes straight through the intersection and cross traffic is completely blocked. Quite often both roads are actually backed up and take turns blocking each other, thus creating massive traffic jams that then propagate to nearby intersections. This gets nightmarish quick and provides a good incentive to avoid taking the car at all.
This is well understood by traffic engineers and so there are guidelines for the minimum safe length of a yellow. Cities with red light cameras almost always end up with yellows shorter than that.
Then oppose the corruption, not the red light cameras!
You know, everyday minor driving errors that happen to all of us and rarely hurt anybody
Oh, and you also seem to consider driving through a red light to be a minor driving error when it's one of the most dangerous things you can do. Clearly the world would be a safer place with you off the roads.
All these fines do is hit people who guess incorrectly about the length of the yellow or (correctly or incorrectly) think they won't be able to stop before it turns red.
You appear to be under the impression that it's ok to go through a yellow light if you think it will be long enough. You are wrong and clearly your driving license should be revoked. The length of the yellow light is totally irrelevant. The second the yellow light is on the only thing that matters is whether you can stop before the intersection or not. Either you can and you do, or you cannot and you go through.
I wonder what advantages a disc-rotor helicopter has over a slowed-rotor helicopter.
Primarily the mode of delivery. It made sense that the internet would piggyback on existing infrastructure (cable and telephone) but the tables have now turned, and it would make more sense to piggyback TV on a line specifically meant for Internet (fiber).
Quite true. But you don't need fiber for that. ADSL is sufficient. That's how a lot of people watch TV in France: all ADSL ISPs offer triple play service : Internet+Phone+TV for around 40$.