Welcome to Tiburon. Click. Your presence has been noted. The posh and picturesque town that juts into San Francisco Bay is poised to do something unprecedented: use cameras to record the license plate number of every vehicle that crosses city limits.
The East Hampton Town Police Department will acquire a license plate reader (LPR), which will allow cameras on a passing patrol car to read the license plates of nearby cars and check them against Motor Vehicle Department records automatically, within the next few months. Funded through a grant from the district attorneys office, East Hampton Town Chief of Police Todd Sarris said he is waiting for the equipment to arrive. ... Cameras on the LPR system can read the license plates of parked or moving vehicles. According to Chief Sarris, the LPR system will be an effective enforcement tool and a deterrent to those who drive with suspended registrations.
Police in Grand Forks are testing a new system that scans license plates of passing vehicles. Police say the device reads an average of 3,500 license plates daily to see if any are stolen or if the owners are wanted by authorities. The license numbers are checked through the FBI's National Crime Information Center and other databases.
The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, has prosecutors and judges shaking their heads in disgust and defense lawyers nodding with satisfaction at the notion that the Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantee that defendants "shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him" is not satisfied by a sheet of paper.
The Smart electric drive can plug directly into a domestic power outlet for recharging, has no engine oil, oil filter, spark plugs or exhaust. In fact there are only a handful of moving parts in the driveline, resulting in significantly lower servicing and maintenance costs compared to a petrol driven smart. Apart from regular charging the high tech battery is maintenance free and depending on use can last up to 10 years.
The researchers extracted oils from Starbuck's spent coffee grounds, and went on to perform a standard transesterification process to convert the oil to biodiesel using methanol (a type of alcohol) and potassium hydroxide (a base for catalyzing the reaction).
What Nocera was demonstrating was a reaction that generates oxygen from water much as green plants do during photosynthesis--an achievement that could have profound implications for the energy debate. Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there's no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.
When Andrew Carter saw a police van ignore no-entry signs to reverse up a one-way street to reach a chip shop, he was understandably moved to protest to the driver.
Particularly as he lives on the road and always goes out of his way to obey the signs.
But his complaint brought a volley of abuse from PC Aqil Farooq.
According to the DOT, Americans drove 12.2 billion miles less in June than they did in June 2007, a drop of 4.7 percent. That’s the largest monthly drop since the decline began in November.
A press release from the DOT says that, since November, Americans have driven 53.2 billion fewer miles than they did over the same period a year earlier, a drop that is more pronounced than the drop that occurred during the 1970s, a era marked by severe gas shortages.
Some predict the tough economic times will take a heavier toll on family-run surfboard workshops _ once the mainstay of the industry _ than on the large, national board makers such as Channel Islands, Lost Enterprises, Dewey Weber Surfboards and Surftech.
For several years, U.S. officials have been searching and seizing laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and other electronic devices at the border with few publicly released details. Complaints from travelers and privacy advocates have spurred some lawmakers to question the U.S. Customs and Border Protection policy.
