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> they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs

Suburbs more crowded than a city? Is this for real?


Traffic cameras identify the owner, the person who registered the vehicle, not the driver meaning there's no license to put points on. There is no points system (At least in NY) for registration to my knowledge.

In the UK, the owner is liable for identifying the driver at the time of the incident. This is how it works with e.g. rental cars. If the owner doesn't identify the driver, they get the points

In the US, you have the right to face your accuser. Since that's not possible with a camera, photo-based enforcement becomes a non-moving violation.

You can still point the finger at someone else when you get the ticket in the mail. Or just put a bunch of question marks in reply as it is on the State to prove their case, not for you to snitch on your own bad driving habits.

At least that is how it works in the state I live in.


That's obviously not true. Camera evidence is used as evidence of crimes all the time. Security cameras would be utterly worthless if they couldn't.

Right to face your accuser in that context means that you have the right to cross-examine relevant witnesses about how that camera evidence was collected and applied.


Please read the remainder of the thread. Context matters. Pedantry, not so much.

That sounds like guilty until proven innocent.

Not really, you are asked who was driving.

If you are driving:

You say "Me", then they give you the points

You lie, say it "Bob", then you're guilty of perverting the course of justice. They then write to Bob,

If Bob agrees, then he's also guilty of perverting the course of justice, but most of the time you'll both get away with it.

If Bob disagrees, then they look more into it.

If you refuse to answer then you're guilty of not saying who was driving the car, a completely separate offence to the original speeding one, and one which is typically more serious

In the US you can mow down a child, drive away, and despite people having your plates and giving them to the cops, they can't actually arrest you because it was only your car which was used to kill someone?


They could arrest you, because probable cause, but you would not have to plead guilty, which is what paying a ticket is. If speeding was an arrestable offense, they could arrest you but unless they could prove beyond reasonable doubt that you were driving they should not find you guilty. Plus what other commenter said about you can not force some one to incriminate themselves.

That would run afoul of the right against self-incrimination in the US[1]. The government can't compel someone to admit they were driving, and can't punish people for refusing. The government has to provide proof they were driving.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/self-incrimination


Courts have held that people have less rights while driving then they do in other settings (such as walking down the street or as a passenger in a vehicle). For example, the doctrine of implied consent allows the government to compel you to submit to a blood alcohol test without a warrant. I wonder if something similar could be applied here.

I certainly support civil liberties, but they need to be balanced against the government's strong interest in preventing the bloodshed that comes from the reckless operation of vehicles.


I think there are many ways you could address this issue that don't involve circumventing constitutional rights.

Most of these systems take a photo of the car, which you can often use to verify who the driver was. For serious offenses you could chose to investigate who was driving and issue a normal ticket rather than an administrative fine. You can create laws about window tinting levels (where they don't already exist), and if you can't identify the driver because the car is violating those laws you can revoke the registration.

You could also institute a point system for vehicle registrations, where if an offense cannot be assigned to a person, it is assigned to the vehicle, and after points exceeded a certain limit the registration is revoked.

I don't know about NYC in particular, but in many jurisdictions a major reason that red-light cameras are treated like administrative fines rather than civil or criminal offenses is to avoid full due-process rights, making it harder to contest the fine, and saving money by making everything automated. Our safety is more important than that.


>In the US you can mow down a child, drive away, and despite people having your plates and giving them to the cops, they can't actually arrest you because it was only your car which was used to kill someone?

Not quite. In the US you get in trouble for driving off, but drivers that wait for the police to show up and then blame the child that they mowed down have a decent shot at having zero consequences, especially if the child was riding a bicycle.

https://nextcity.org/features/how-much-is-a-cyclists-life-wo...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-oe-schultz-p...

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/opinion/why-drivers-get-a...


Seems like one solution could be that after a certain number of violations the registration is revoked. And it can only be re-registered under special registration that allows use by a single driver.

> Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.

The future black markets are going to be filled with all sorts of illegal "private comms" devices to give us our privacy back. I am sure there are sci-fi novels with this theme.


Maybe, but they may very well stand out as the only 'unapproved' encryption on the wire and bring you more attention.

Who said anything about "wires"?

> compare that to one with colors:

The colors make it worse as I'm red-green colorblind. Looking at that mess is eye strain.

Honestly I mostly prefer syntax highlighting turned off as it causes eye strain. I have found the black on light yellow theme of the Acme editor to be a very comfortable monochrome color scheme.


Can you post an example of what you are talking about?

There’s some of this in https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/ There are also his videos and speeches, for example when explaining the magic behind computers, and the way he simplifies everything in a delightful way.

> If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

Why would an encrypted app broadcast your messages to notifications? That sounds like a failure of the messenger service vendor to secure their app. My banking app requires me to log in to read messages and my account statement EVERY TIME. I get a notification that is just that, notifies me of some pending information, not the information itself.


> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts,

Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes. You called a computer as if it were a telephone (or maybe that was Datakit?) and ATM handed the user a byte stream like TCP. Imagine never needing an IP stack or setting traffic priority because the network already handles the QoS. Was it simple to deploy? No. Was it cheap? Nooohooohooohooo. Was Ethernet any of those? YES AND YES. ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.) but good enough.

The funny part is this has the unintended consequences of needing to reinvent the wheel once you get to the point where you need telecom sized/like infrastructure. Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs so various hacks and standards have been developed to paper over these deficiencies which is what TSN is - reinventing ATM's determinism. In addition we also now have OTN, yet another protocol to further paper over the various other protocols to mux everything down a big fat pipe to the other end which allows Ethernet (and IP/ATM/etc) to ride deterministically between data-centers.


> Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs

Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed. People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord.

It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, better, more versatile and higher bandwidth system that ends up meeting the property anyway.


ATM was superior in the context of a bill-by-the-byte telco-style network where oversubscribed links could be carefully planned. The "impedance mismatch" IP's of unreliable datagram delivery with ATM's guaranteed cell delivery created situations where ATM switches could effectively need unlimited buffer RAM to make their delivery guarantees even if the cells were containing IP datagrams that could just be discarded with no ill consequences.

There's likely an element of the "layering TCP on TCP" problem going on, too.

The classic popular treatment of the subject is: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/


Pretty sure TSN is unrelated to ATM determinism, and comes from a completely separate area (replacing custom field buses where timing and contention is more important than bandwidth). Some of ATM complexity came from wanting to deliver the same quality of experience as plesiosynchronous networks provided for voice (that's how it got the weird cell size).

Once those requirements dropped down (partially because people just started to accept weird echo) the replacement became MPLS and whatever you can send IP over where Ethernet sometimes shows as package around the IP frame but has little relation to Ethernet otherwise.


Not directly related but a consequence.

ATM semantics and TSN semantics are quite different, the closest overlap would be in AFDX (avionics full duplex ethernet) except AFDX creates static circuits

I started my career at France Telecom's R&D lab in Caen, Normandy. They had their own home-grown X.400 email client, and even though they could have set up a SMTP server for free, they deliberately chose to MX to a paid SMTP to X.400 gateway out of OSI ideology.

It was complete garbage.

Another lab of theirs proudly made a Winsock that would use ATM SVCs instead of TCP and proudly made a brochure extolling their achievement "Web protocol without having to use TCP". Because clearly it was TCP hindering adoption of the Web /s

The Bellhead vs. Nethead was a real thing back then. To paraphrase an old saying about IBM, Telcos think if they piss on something, it improves the flavor.

One of the jobs I had applied out of college was to lead Schengen's central police database (think stolen car reports, arrest warrants etc) which would federate national databases. For some unfathomable reason, they chose X.400 as messaging bus for that replication, and endured massive delays and cost overruns for that reason. I guess I dodged a bullet by not going there.


Wasn't there an article years ago about how there was so much PV in Hawaii the power grid went negative causing problems for its operators?

Even a smallish Tesla coil easily produces voltages north of 160kV. I built one using 4" PVC for the secondary with a wound length of maybe ~2 feet of secondary? From memory of the calculations I did at the time I think it was around 350 kV peak? Might have been higher. Threw 24 inch sparks quite easily.

The faint red glow is actual red light as many IR LED's (esp the ones used in cameras for night illumination) are close to the visible spectrum and have some visible light emission.

850nm is easily visible, but most remotes are 940nm, which is also visible as a faint purple glow but the source needs to be really bright.

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