Posted on 04/18/2002 5:13:59 AM PDT by zandtar
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:20 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Citation: A Severn resident finds himself on an unexpected odyssey through a maddening bureaucratic maze.
Charles Ricketts opened his mail two Saturdays ago to find a traffic citation with supposedly foolproof evidence that he had run a red light.
The enclosed photo, taken at 4:48 p.m. March 26 by an enforcement camera at Reisterstown Road and Menlo Drive, showed a dark purple Dodge Caravan with Maryland license plate M182782. Ricketts drives a dark green Plymouth Voyager with an almost identical Maryland plate - M182781.
(Excerpt) Read more at sunspot.net ...
In most, if not all, states a motorist has the right and duty to avoid accidents, other traffic regulations notwithstanding. If the motorist judged that stopping at the red light would have created a substantial risk of an accident--sigificantly above the risk imposed by proceeding through it--the motorist had the duty to go through the red light while doing whatever was possible to minimize the risk of collision (possibily sounding horn to alert other drivers, etc.)
That may be so but in admitting the above you have just got yourself a charge of Failure to control a vehicle, Reckless driving, or Driving at a speed that was not "Reasonable and Prudent" so pay your money and take your choice.
Hypocrates originated the physician's oath "First, do no harm....".
If you meant to say that Neil Boortz is a hypocrite, I would beg to differ with you.
I'm guessing that you and he may differ on something and you're letting it 'get to you'.
Not quite true. While things may vary somewhat with different types of cards, the normal format is, or used to be, IIRC, a twelve-digit account number (of which the first few digits indicate the issuer and the latter digits indicate the account), followed by three random digits, followed by a check digit. While there was a time when there were no random digits, having the card number consist only of the account number plus check digits allowed anyone who knew the check-digit algorithm to "guess" at valid account numbers.
There are, btw, a number of check-digit algorithms. One common method is to simply sum all the digits mod 10 or some other base. This is done (mod 16) on magstripe cards; they contain an unprinted check digit following the end-of-record indicator [it's unfortunate that they put it there, actually, since it makes reverse reading of cards much more difficult than it would be otherwise]. This method will detect any single-digit error, but will not detect any transposition errors.
To detect transposition errors, some schemes (I think credit cards do this, but I forget the details) multiply different digits by different amounts before summing them. For the scheme to still detect all single-bit errors, all multipliers must be relatively prime to the modulus. Detection of transposition of two digit positions requires that the difference between their multipliers also be relatively prime relative to the modulus.
Unfortunately, there is no way to meet both of those requirements in reasonable fashion with a base-10 checksum. The ISBN code gets around this limitation by using a base-11 checksum. That one is computed as (first+2*second+3*third+4*fourth...+10*tenth) mod 11. If the result is "10", it's printed as "X". Because 11 is prime relative to all multipliers or differences between them, and because all multipliers are unique, an ISBN code checksum will fail if any two digits--consecutive or not--are transposed.
Depends whether your situation was a foreseeable consequence of your earlier actions. If, e.g., you decided to push the light because another motorist was approaching very fast and you weren't certain of whether he would be able to avoid hitting you, your predicament would not be your fault since you cannot control his car; although any collision which might result from your stopping would be his 'fault', you still have a duty to prevent accidents.
One unfortunate feature of these red light scameras, BTW, is that they may encourage more dangerous behavior at intersections than would their absense. If one is being tailgated as one approaches a light that turns yellow, the prudent thing to do is to begin slowing down and observe both the tailgater and the cross traffic. If the tailgater does not quickly begin to slow down but there is no approaching car on the crossroad, then prudence may require accellerating through the intersection. Unfortunately, this most-prudent course of action is the one most likely to yield a scamera citation.
In some cases, that's true. But oftentimes, people are more prudent than the government would like. Things like speeding enforcement are often focused on places where the posted speed is well below the maximum safe speed, as opposed to places where it isn't, because most drivers realize that in the latter places the physical hazards of exceeding the speed limits are worse than the lost time resulting from obeying them. Thus, not enough people speed in the latter places to make ticketing efforts financially worthwhile, despite the danger posed to society by the few people who do speed there. By contrast, straight highways with unobstructed views constitute a goldmine for speed enforcement even when (especially when), absent such enforcement, a motorist could travel 25mph or more over the posted speed in perfect safety.
What a buffoon Boortz is, saying we ought to send tickets to the wrong people. It would be more efficient to send them to the right ones.
BTW, what's a hypocrate?
It's a hypocrite that is typed without coffee. 8)
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