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Comment by cobrausn | Hacker News Reader

This is the worst (although power tripping cops are also pretty bad). Imagine you are driving 5~10 mph over the limit for a long time, distracted by life and generally unaware. How many tickets do you think you would get? You were never stopped and corrected, how were you supposed to know?

Given the tendency of some courts in the SF area to make you pay the ticket before you can contest it (read this somewhere, not sure 100% on truthfulness of it), this sounds like a nightmare shakedown scenario.

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Where theres spy theres always counter spy. If ticket giving drones get more widespread it will make economic sense to launch a drone service to monitor the ticket giving drones.

It is cute that you think there's any chance in hell that such a service would be granted permission to fly drone-spotting drones by the FAA.

In any case, a single 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS can cover a huge amount of surveillance area and within a few years that technology could be commonplace, so the answer could easily always be "yes, of course there is a drone watching your car right now", making that information basically useless.

The FAA would prohibit amateur RC planes where drones are operational?

No, the FAA wouldn't prohibit amateur RC planes, but how exactly do you implement a drone-spotting operation using amateur RC planes? Even ignoring the complexity of coordinating such a thing, the short range such planes have and the need for constantly re-powering the planes, what sensor do you mount on amateur RC sized planes that is capable of spotting a drone flying at up to 30,000 feet?

> ...some courts in the SF area to make you pay the ticket before you can contest it (read this somewhere, not sure 100% on truthfulness of it)

Yea, that's false.

Not really. You have to pay the bail amount up front. Options are:

-Go to court and plead not guilty: send the bail amount, wait for your court date. If found not guilty, you get some $$ back. If guilty, pay the fine amount (less bail).

-Plead guilty/no contest via mail: send them the bail amount, they keep the $$ (bail forfeiture).

In some jurisdictions there is a discount if you pay before a certain date - but if you wish to contest then the time it takes to do that will expire the discount period.

It's cleverly and obviously intentional practice that plays on people's time to defend themselves being worth more than the discounted price.

And in some of these jurisdictions, the clock restarts when you are informed that your appeal was unsuccessful (even if the collecting agency likes to pretend otherwise.) So check the rules first.

If this became an issue then the laws would have to be changed to accommodate the new technology. We shouldn't reject new technology because our current laws aren't suited for it.

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