I live in Chicago and have followed this story as it was happening. The yellow light time didn't decrease, just the time when the cameras went off. The government has a standard of 3 seconds for a yellow light, but it also has a legal limit do the variation due to hardware accuracy. That limit means that legally a yellow can go for 2.9 seconds (or something similar) to account for hardware that doesn't hit exactly 3 seconds every time.
The red light camera company began using this slightly lower limit as their standard, instead of 3 seconds. That is what caused the increase in the number of tickets. When they got caught they admitted that the city asked them to use the lower standard and then it was changed. I believe the courts upheld the tickets that were issued in the end, since technically they met the federal standards.
Actually, Facebook did the exact opposite. They specifically removed positive news from people's feeds to produce a negative affect. They were literally trying to make people unhappy.
Also, "facebook wants users to feel happy" is not true. There's already been research showing that Facebook tends to make people less happy, and that less happy people spend more time on Facebook. Knowing this, it's in Facebook's interested to ensure people are unhappy.
Seriously people, the truth is that this is too good to be true. It's a short term solution for the record companies to take pricing power away from Apple. All they had to do was do everything Apple wanted them to do but with Amazon, who doesn't have the pull to make long term contracts for specific pricing. Now everyone's jumping out of iTunes and the record companies have bargaining power that will allow them to charge whatever the hell they want to. I know that the prices are all lower now, but it's just the introductory rate and they are sure to go up given time. Hell, gain enough power back in the online music industry and they can even slip DRM back in. That leaves us with an end game of higher priced music heavily controlled by the record companies.
Also, for those saying competition here is a good thing, remember that these distributors are running at extremely low margins. What they are basically doing is competing against each other for how much the record companies will give them out of the profits. They aren't competing for the consumer's money so much as for the record companies' money. All this does is give the record companies the power that normal competition should give the consumer.
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I live in Chicago and have followed this story as it was happening. The yellow light time didn't decrease, just the time when the cameras went off. The government has a standard of 3 seconds for a yellow light, but it also has a legal limit do the variation due to hardware accuracy. That limit means that legally a yellow can go for 2.9 seconds (or something similar) to account for hardware that doesn't hit exactly 3 seconds every time. The red light camera company began using this slightly lower limit as their standard, instead of 3 seconds. That is what caused the increase in the number of tickets. When they got caught they admitted that the city asked them to use the lower standard and then it was changed. I believe the courts upheld the tickets that were issued in the end, since technically they met the federal standards.
Actually, Facebook did the exact opposite. They specifically removed positive news from people's feeds to produce a negative affect. They were literally trying to make people unhappy. Also, "facebook wants users to feel happy" is not true. There's already been research showing that Facebook tends to make people less happy, and that less happy people spend more time on Facebook. Knowing this, it's in Facebook's interested to ensure people are unhappy.
Seriously people, the truth is that this is too good to be true. It's a short term solution for the record companies to take pricing power away from Apple. All they had to do was do everything Apple wanted them to do but with Amazon, who doesn't have the pull to make long term contracts for specific pricing. Now everyone's jumping out of iTunes and the record companies have bargaining power that will allow them to charge whatever the hell they want to. I know that the prices are all lower now, but it's just the introductory rate and they are sure to go up given time. Hell, gain enough power back in the online music industry and they can even slip DRM back in. That leaves us with an end game of higher priced music heavily controlled by the record companies.
Also, for those saying competition here is a good thing, remember that these distributors are running at extremely low margins. What they are basically doing is competing against each other for how much the record companies will give them out of the profits. They aren't competing for the consumer's money so much as for the record companies' money. All this does is give the record companies the power that normal competition should give the consumer.