Mr_N

Mind you, I wouldn't call a friend polite who laughs about someone behind their back, nor a friend, for that matter. I tend to trust people on face value, and I've seen that these sorts of blind studies apparently vary in their success depending on whether the person implementing them claims to have or not have this magical "coffee pallet" as I'll put it. Long and short of things, I don't expect people to be QUITE as backhanded as you suggest, I also don't trust people to do "good science", and I'd need to see a properly empirical study before I made up my mind in either case.

Perhaps my mistake was working for academia (support staff, not academic) but I make a bare fraction of that. (and for comparable work to what I've done elsewhere in industry.)

This does two things that I don't agree with though. One, assumes that people can accurately judge -anything- appropriately about what is safe in their surroundings. I'll trust someone so far as to not be too afraid to go outside lest someone decide to run me over with a crop thresher, but I've seen enough "No officer I'm not too drunk to drive" (with car wedged in a tree) to trust that judgement carte-blanche.

Secondly, it seems to ignore two things, first, you say that with limits, people game the system. I don't disagree. But without limits, I expect the exact same gaming, "I feel comfortable driving at 100mph on this road", but far more unbounded. Combined with some pretty reasonable evidence towards higher speeds increasing the risk of accidents (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/97.835.PDF), one can see the outcome this would lead to.

Sorry if I was unclear; I meant to express that I had indeed quite some time ago come to the realization, but due to placement as I said and not due to any solid proof as is cited in the article.

Secondly; I'm not sure I completely see you as disagreeing with my stated end goal. We want people to realize they are driving a potential weapon, and I think that's a change that'll have to come in far more areas than just traffic enforcement (better education, assessment of readiness, etc), but even in this dream world where we've made those changes, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume we will still find places in which if drivers tend to exceed a certain speed, there comes a higher likelihood of said harm. And if someone is putting others at risk by violating this, it comes down to a question of how you respond to that, and I at least would pen a reasonable solution at trying to proactively influence their behavior patterns. (unless I totally misunderstood how you were approaching my statement and this just went off in a random direction...)

To provide a small anecdote; on my 10 minute commute to work each morning, I pass no fewer than 6 speeding cameras, potentially more that I haven't noticed, and frankly, the sheer prevalence and "sneakyness" by which they are deployed convinced me long ago that the goal here was to rack up tickets rather than to prevent speeding. (Cameras hidden in bushes/behind trees, 2 cameras on the same block, within ~20 seconds of each other, both hidden behind shrubbery on the right hand side of a right hand turn). In writing this I admit I have second guesses of whether I'm being too tin foil hat with the suspicions, but it's basically a checklist of "where would I put cameras if I wanted to accumulate the maximum # of violations", with no regard to where the most dangerous roads on this commute are.

Let's even take a step back here and look at the program itself. It's not really "news" that behavioral modification (which, in a perfect world, is the end goal of ticketing, getting speeders to stop speeding) doesn't really work well when the punishment is long after the action that it is reinforcing. One could make a very hand wavy argument about the flash, but it's a weak reinforcer (the monetary punishment being very delayed), and the swapping with infrared is the nail in the coffin of that argument.

You say that; but then you realize that a non empty set of nagios plugins monitor other monitoring systems...

Who monitors the monitoring systems?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2030420/Meet-...

We're well on our way. And I wouldn't expect the paranoia to not sully this advance as well.