The FasTrak scanners above the lane flash the occupancy setting (1, 2, or 3+) on the driver's transponder. It's easy to observe cheating single-occupant vehicles because the flashed number is 3 (a toll-free rate).
For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.
In California, Senator Eggman et al. have introduced SB-244 Right to Repair Act [1].
It's currently sitting in the suspense file in the Assembly's Appropriations Committee [2], where it could die unless the committee decides to pull it out so that it can be put to a vote.
It currently only has a few exemptions for video game consoles, alarms, and select other equipment.
If you live in California, I recommend calling the Assembly Appropriations Committee at (916) 319-2081 and asking them to pull SB-244 from the suspense file and pass it so it can go to the floor for a vote.
We're sysadmins/developers using our backgrounds in computer security and network research to automate the management of cloud servers and the web applications running on them.
"HeartFlow is looking for programmers to help in the design and development of a comprehensive test automation platform for HeartFlow’s products. Applicants should have a good understanding and hands on knowledge of Java, Javascript, Python, HTML/CSS, XML/XSLT, and SQL."
That official list of skills is more of a wishlist.
A few parts of our product are written in C++, so it'd be nice if you could understand it enough for testing. I've spent a good lot of time in C, but have no C++ experience myself. Most everything else in that skill list doesn't require an in-depth expertise, other than Java. Day-to-day, most of your time will be spent in Java.
I see your point, but there's a significance that shouldn't be entirely overlooked.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but is Lodsys not just a collector of intellectual property? There's something to say about the difference between a corporation buying intellectual property rights related to its business and a corporation seeking only to sponge off others labor, profits and wit, contributing neither economic activity nor social involvement.
I'm having a hard time imagining how there could be a general way to introduce an inexpensive defense process. Do you suggest a public defender system? Would it be subsidized by additional patent application fees?
Additionally, keep in mind that road goes both ways. Suppose you devise something that is arguably worth a patent and suppose you later find one or many people infringing on your patent, far over the line of fair use. If legal defense is now cheap (dollars/time-wise), you may be stalled in the courts trying to legitimately defend your patent.
There is the approach of increasing punitive fines for unworthy suits or false claims. But patent law is messy. How do you prove the other party intentionally made false claims, wasting the courts time? Or what is an unworthy suit? Somewhat related to punitive enforcement measures, in one of our states a government official is automatically jailed for 1 or 2 nights if they close off an open-meeting no matter the reason. I personally think this is an appropriate punitive measure, but others may think it harsh.
I don't think either approach would work -- both would likely make the system worse. What we need are both a court system and patent office that are sufficiently staffed and have a minimum competence. (I don't mean to insult -- I say this in the context where an official is utterly out of their realm of expertise).
IIRC, BlackBerry phones can be managed remotely. A nice use case for this feature is to shut down and wipe a stolen/lost phone with confidential information on it. I also believe that data (call log, text messages) can be retrieved remotely. I'm going out on a limb here in saying this, so I'll go look for something to cite.
EDIT: BlackBerry Enterprise Service is what I was thinking of. There's a least one tool that you can use with BES, Retain by GWAVA, that will track and store your employee's text message.
Down here in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, we've been nothing but plagued with problems using this service. I hope the city of San Francisco has a better experience and receives more support than we have.
I don't remember when the migration to the cloud platform started (the university was/is running their own Exchange install), but the deadline to switch over for all staff was early March. The migration process was afflicted with many problems: it was slow (you hoped it finished overnight), buggy (multiple attempts were necessary), there was often data loss and there were mis-deliveries or message loss for a few days after. That March deadline was postponed more than once and currently, the whole process has been halted leaving us with part of the staff on the cloud system and the other on our IT-managed install.
A month or so ago (probably more), there was a town-hall meeting here with representatives and developers from Microsoft to apologize and to try and resolve some issues in person. The university gave them a two dozen item list of requirements before we proceeded any further with the service. Within the last three to four weeks there have been numerous outages, leaving those already angered here surely even more furious.
If the Microsoft team can't meet our requirements and do it relatively soon, it's very possible that we'll drop this service. (A good chunk of the requirements are for legal compliance).
Meanwhile in my department, we've started the move from a self-hosted Zimbra install to Google Apps for our domain a couple days ago as we can't use the Microsoft solution. Only problems so far are two administrators who use some features in Outlook that we can't replicate with Gmail without shoving a cylinder into a square hole. We might keep the open source version of Zimbra around just for them. What I do love about Google Apps is the ability to script it. I've already written code so that when a given Google Form is submitted, it creates other documents that would've had to have been done by hand, emails people and other things. Over time, this ability to script between Google Apps is going to invaluable for my department.
Was just about to post this myself. I was quite frustrated that not only did writer not provide a link to the source, but didn't even mention the report by name.
Assuming no other available build toolchain (e.g. Xcode 3), you won't have macports installed. How will you compile gcc, ruby if you don't already have a compiler?
Have you considered showing a button in the center of a document when it's selected? If it appears quick enough, you might be able to retrain users to expect to be able to double-click documents to open.
Another possibility would be replace the browser's right-click context menu. But it's likely not a good solution. It might slow down the interface, take away a feature that users expect, and more problematic: users will initially expect to open documents with a right-click as little as they would with a double-click.
An example of this though would be the Google Docs extension for Chrome.
I was prodding to see if there was any interest in creating such a general dumping ground for public records (separate from DocumentCloud). I've been mulling over such an idea for a time, and seeing this today is convincing me that it could be workable.
You're right about that fine line.
re: else
I agree with another point of nathan82's about the 'log in' button.
Anyway, I'm glad you guys are putting the Knight Foundation's money to good use. Keep up the great work!
Also, any chance you guys are looking for summer interns?
For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.