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Automatic speeding cameras sound good on paper — automatically catch the speeders and send them a ticket via mail, without tying up police officers. But even with people in the loop, you get problems like this hatchback “driver” in South Africa who was ticketed for exceeding the 60 km/h limit:

You can read more at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Traffic-Enfarcement-Camera.aspx

One commenter said the “speeder” should consider himself lucky that he was not also ticketed for tailgating.

A common misconception about the challenges of electronic voting goes like this:

If we can secure all-electronic financial transactions worth millions of dollars, why can’t we secure all-electronic voting?

The problem with voting is that everything needs to be anonymous, but still fraud-proof. Electronic financial transactions are secure because names are attached to all transactions. If fraud is suspected, the banks can track down the customers. When customers use false IDs, the banks go after the merchants for not doing enough to verify the customers name. Unless you are willing to give up anonymity when you vote, electronic voting will always be much harder than financial transactions.

Security guru Bruce Schneier talked about these differences in more depth in 2001.

Below is funny 15 minute segment by Demetri Martin (no relation).  He reminds me of a cross between Steven Wright, the late Mitch Hedberg, and Jack Handy.  The video portion was created by some other guy, who put some pictures to Demetri’s audio. It’s mostly the audio that’s funny, but some of the pictures help, too.

(Props to Bryan for forwarding this to me)

Did I mention that I’ve recently moved to Longmont, CO (near Boulder)? Anyway, I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t find any online bike maps that cover Longmont. I quickly found the official City of Longmont Maps page — although they talk about bike maps, none are available online from the city website.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I found a Feb 2007 cached version of the City of Longmont page, which had links for bike maps as of 2006. Even better, the Wayback Machine actually cached both these PDFs:

As for other Boulder-area bike maps, the ones I like the best are the 2006 Highway 36 West corridor map (pdf), from the Bicycle or Walk section at 36commutingSolutions.org site, and the maps at the City of Boulder’s bike section.

We’ve been seeing this commercial a bunch lately. Just try to watch it without sniggering on the last line of the voice over.

[Update] The linked video is much bettery quality than my original post.

While driving through Port Angeles on our Olympic loop day-trip, we did a double-take as we passed this restaurant:

The restaurant’s name is actually Dynasty Chinese Restaurant. And it’s not just this one angle. There were so many signs along this street, that many of views were equally nasty.

We are not the first to notice the unfortunate street signs in front of this restaurant. Robert Lee, hantonmckenzie, Richard Friedman, and Greefus Groink all have similar pictures.

I just uploaded pics to the gallery from a day-trip drive around the Olympic Peninsula the weekend of July 4th. We drove through Port Angles, then to the Hoh Rain Forest, and down the Pacific coastline. Along the way, the logged clearcuts were full of foxglove in bloom.

Herb Sutter writes on C++ closures, which have been accepted as part of the next C++0x standard.  This means C++ is joining Java in supporting closures.  My first introduction to closures was Javascript, and I think it will be great for the other mainstream languages to support them.  Of course, it will probably be a few years until closures are widely used, as was the case for C++ and Java templates/generics.

If you are interested in more details, be sure to read the comments at the end of Herb’s blog post — there’s some good examples and discussion.

Crazy, but true:

In 1994, 16-year-old Jeremy Brenno of Gloversville, New York, was killed when he struck a bench with a golf club, and the shaft broke, bounced back at him, and pierced his heart. Brenno had missed a shot on the sixth hole at the Kingsboro Golf Club and looked to vent his frustration by giving the nearby bench a good whack in retaliation. The fatal club was a No. 3 wood.

Snopes.com specializes in debunking urban legends, so if they say it’s true, then it probably is. The article also talks about 3 other known killed-by-own-club fatalities (in 1951, 2005, and 2005), but they are not quite as dramatic as poor Jeremy.

Walking from my bus stop to work, I saw a Volkswagen Beetle (aka Bug) pull up to the drycleaners, with a personalized plate Y2KBUG. Of course it was one of the new Bugs.