CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red-Light Cameras 366
TechDirt is running a piece on Corona, CA, where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras — cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take — in order to increase the city's revenue. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued for "California stops" before a right turn on red, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes the apparent unconstitutionality of what Corona proposes to do: "The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal."
As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:4, Insightful)
3 "New Architechture" operating systems.
Microsoft is getting more like the old Xerox and IBM every day.
Xerox PARC: Create industry changing new technology that we hear about but never see. Never release.
IBM of the 1980's: Fat, lethargic, bureaucracy driven.
Microsoft right now: Both.
I'm still waiting for Cairo.
--
BMO
efficient use of multicore hardware... (Score:1, Insightful)
...but still can't handle modern web standards.
Genuine innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.
This is an important problem area for future software systems, great that alternative approaches are being looked at. More power to them.
so... (Score:0, Insightful)
"...specifically for multicore environments."
Mr.Gates, this is what we expected from Windows 7.
Big companies CAN'T change direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is far to big to change direction. They are a marketing company trying to wring every last penny out of windows and related tools. They have never been a technology company and trying to change now will do nothing but burn vast sums of money. Windows is obsolete and they know they have to replace it but they will never be able to come up with anything better.
They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects. Sadly they can't think like that.
Re:Genuine innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.
I don't think so. I'll give them credit for trying really hard and for having a huge budget though.
Can you give a few examples of really original research? Everything I've seen was either trivial or a rehash of old mainframe ideas. Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with old mainframe ideas but it's hardly 'genuine innovation'.
Re:As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Genuine innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
By Genuine Innovation you mean "doing stuff Sun was doing well over a decade ago?" Sounds pretty innovative to me.
I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.
Re:Genuine innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
.net is their only real innovation that comes to mind.
In what way is .net an innovation? It's not an innovation without being new in some way.
MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.
No. Their real strength is marketing, sales, strongarming hardware suppliers, and consumer ignorance. Their software isn't easier to use or more consistent than anything else and it certainly isn't more reliable. Actually it is shockingly unreliable.
Ever had to deal with active directory? Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong. In big environments bugs like that cost a few million a day and they happen every day. Companies pay a fortune just to cover things like that up, it happens everywhere.
Ever seen a virus wipe out over a thousand production servers in a day? I have on windows but never on anything unix based.
Re:Grand Central Dispatch? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because... even OSX can't protect you from stupid. There's not a pill you can take.. or a book you can read.
Just wait till major linux distros start including one, if that market share ever perks up above the uber-geek demographic.
Re:weird (Score:3, Insightful)
MS Research is like a research university for all intents and purposes; they basically have academic latitude. Of course by the time the product reaches market it will be made, um..."better".
Re:weird (Score:4, Insightful)
MS Research is like a research university for all intents and purposes; they basically have academic latitude. Of course by the time the product reaches market it will be made, um..."better".
That's exactly it. MS Research is very much like a university except that their projects rarely make it out into the public in any meaningful and open way.
I'm not begrudging MS keeping their projects to themselves, just pointing out that there is a fairly key distinction to be made here.
Re:As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:2, Insightful)
What I was pointing out was what you're jumping down my throat about.
Indeed, didn't I say I was still waiting for Cairo? Yes, I believe I did.
Please take a fuckin' chill pill and say hello to your new status.
Burning karma because I have it to burn.
--
BMO
Re:Windows vs Mac (Score:1, Insightful)
That's hardly fair. Safari's new javascript engine was called Squirrelfish for example (before they renamed it Nitro). Squirrelfish, Barrelfish - not a big difference if you ask me.
Apple is considered cooler because they actually release new tech instead of just bragging about it and then quietly ditching it two years later.
For example while Microsoft make a big song and dance about their new theorectical OS with efficient multicore support that they may release one day, Apple built Grand Central Dispatch into Snow Leopard and are now selling it.
In less than a year there will be several actual shipping Mac apps using this technology, probably around about the same time that Microsoft quietly drop Barrelfish and move onto something else that looks shiny.
Re:Big companies CAN'T change direction (Score:4, Insightful)
I am always amazed that people can be both assertive and utterly wrong. I despise Microsoft, for a variety of reason, but that isn't a reason to be blind at their qualities:
> Microsoft is far to big to change direction.
Internet, WindowsNT, XBox are counter examples. Microsoft is one of the most agile company out there. A lot of dead [wikipedia.org] / moribond [wikipedia.org] companies [wikipedia.org] and a lot of [wikipedia.org] products [wikipedia.org] are there to serve as a warning to others [google.com].
> They have never been a technology company
I beg to differ [amazon.com]. It is possible to argue that their are not a technology company anymore, but not that they never were
> They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects
To build an OS that they would get no benefits of ? Wtf? And why does MS would need a new OS ? What is wrong with the current OS model ? They need better apps, they need better subsystems, they need to remove cruft and to clean up stuff, but the core OS is still fine for its uses and can be improved by evolutions.
They just need Microsoft Research for a few things, mainly:
* To prevent people working here from working elsewhere, where they could create and apply disruptive technology.
* To get ideas that may or may not integrated into products (given the origins of the talking paperclip, the latter may be better)
* To have a better time-to-market IF they needed to produce something due to some disruptive tech appearing from competitors
Giving cash to university and keeping their hands off the projects obviously wouldn't make any sense
Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:1, Insightful)
Um, so? Not everything in a research lab gets converted into a product. You're thinking on the level of a consumer,.. I thought this site was for technical people? You mean nobody even looked at the code to see if there is any cool tech in there? You mean people are just spouting anti-ms drivel without knowing the first thing about writing operating systems? Say it ain't so !
Re:As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if Microsoft's new OS can handle multi-core, multi-processor transparently for the applications
No more than current OS'es. This OS simply claims to be internally more efficient.
The thing I found quite elegant in Erlang is that it makes it so transparent
Erlang really does little that you can't do as easily in other languages. The real value of Erlang is in what it lacks: it prevents you from doing things that are hard to distribute across cores.
Imagine an OS with a "normal-looking" set of library that can handle all the hard works transparently. I'd say, bully to them.
That's wishful thinking. "Normal-looking" code is "normal-looking" because it uses constructs that are intrinsically hard to parallelize.
Re:Genuine innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
To answer your question i use AD daily at work - it's fine. i haven't ever had a single problem with it going back to 2000. it's always done exactly what it's supposed to. at the moment i run windows 2003 server and sql server 2005. while i'm not 100% satisfied with reporting services, it's still well ahead of anything OSS has to offer and cheaper then buying crystal reports. with the exception of service packs windows server 2003 hasn't ever needed a restart or crashed. the only issues i've ever had have been flaky 3rd party apps.
you retreat into the tired old fanboy nonsense of accusing me of having an MS pr play book - that's total bullshit, there are great OSS projects i have used and am a fan of. python, postgresql and apache to name some.
what i can't stand is OSS people who refuse point blank to consider MS has done anything right. for fucks sake, they are the market leader, they must be doing something right. i want better software, not your ideology.
Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer? (Score:2, Insightful)
The IBM-PC may have been a turd in comparison, but it was a turd that cost a tenth of the price while still doing most of what people needed a computer to do. So, it was a cost-efficient turd. That meant that companies could afford to computerize much more of their workforce, sooner, and that more families could get a computer, earlier. And I don't think that's sad at all.
Re:prefilled comments (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Administrative violations are unconstitutional (Score:3, Insightful)
The "exception" is that they are pretending that this is not a fine for a crime, but instead is a fee for a non-crime interaction with the govt. You don't need a jury trial to tell you that [any non-criminal interaction with the DMV or court clerk or registrar] is going to have a fee attached to it. They are trying to put this "fee" for keeping your driver's license after a violation in the same category as the fee for getting your driver's license in the first place.
Administrative violation as an advantage (Score:2, Insightful)
As a bicyclist in a city where red lights mean "four more cars!", I was happy to see the red light cameras arrive. Even after getting a ticket as a driver. The on-line video of my violation was educational - it looked like an audition for "Cops". I'm a lot more careful now.
Re:California Stops? (Score:2, Insightful)
All about REVENUE (Score:3, Insightful)
"where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase the city's revenue."
If this doesn't convince you that it's NOT "all about safety" then I don't know what will...
Re:I'm outraged! (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right!
What we need to do is surround the building and remind this town's legislators who gave them their job. This bullshit red-light ticketing without a trial needs to end.
Then once that's done, we'll surround the headquarters of RIAA and shoot anyone who tries to leave the building. (Or until the police show up.)