LASER + PHOTO RADAR License plate cover

I HAVE NOT tried this, nor has anyone else to my knowledge.

Portrait photographers sometimes use "slave" strobes. These are
flashes that fire when the flash attached to the camera fires by
just detecting the primary flash. At night, the strobes from the
stoplight cameras are certainly bright--bright enough to trip a
properly set slave strobe, I believe. So mount one or more
really close to the license plate.

I don't think this will work in daylight, as all the light from the
strobes will be overwhelmed by sunlight. Even if you had a
seriously powerful flash on your car, it would be hard to
get it to detect the flash (if there even is one) from the camera.

So... maybe the 30-.06 idea is better.

Or perhaps, now that there are ridiculously cheap R/C aircraft,
just buy one for Kamikaze use. Try mounting a dart tip on the
front of it to ensure penetration. Just remember that I'm only
joking, and the Secretary will disavow knowledge of your
activities.

DD

"DG" > wrote in message
oups.com...
> Can someone tell me if there is anything that defeats the red light
> cameras or speed cameras. I am getting fed up with these stupid camera
> tickets that are absolutely unfair. I got one the other day for
> driving 4mph above the speed limit. What do they call this safety or
> ripping off? I need help.
>

y_p_w wrote:
> Scott en Aztl=E1n wrote:
>
> > On 24 Jan 2005 10:08:24 -0800, "DG" >
wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Can someone tell me if there is anything that defeats the red light
> >>cameras or speed cameras.
> >
> >

Here's what works in Maryland as long as you do not have a loan on your
car. (This won't work if you have a loan because most lenders won't
let you title a car in the name of a trust.)

First, create a Revocable Living Trust with the Nolo Willmaker Plus
software (www.nolo.com). For the name of the trust, use something
obscure, like "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust". Don't use your own
name as part of the trust name. (It is perfectly legal to name your
living trust anything that you want; you don't have to name it using
your name.) Make yourself the trustee. Make your wife or best friend
the beneficiary (that's the person who gets the car if you die.) The
Nolo software explains all this in simple terms. List your cars as
being owned by the living trust. Then go to the MVA and have your cars
retitled and reregistered under the name of the living trust. Take the
title for your car with you. Be sure to take the trust document with
you, as the MVA clerk will need to copy a few pages of the trust. The
cost to put a car in the trust is $27 per car. There is no transfer
tax, since you are transferring the cars to a trust for which you are
the trustee. Creating the living trust and putting just your cars in
it is not really that difficult. Total time including waiting at the
MVA office for this part of the project is about 3 hours.

Now you are protected, but you need to use the protection when your car
gets a red light ticket.

When you get a red light ticket, the defendent will be listed as the
name of the trust, for example, "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust".
(By the way, the ticket won't be associated with your driver's license
number because you'll get a "Z" ID code for your license number which
won't correlate with your driver's license number, but that's not even
that important.) When you go to court to defend the ticket, the judge
will ask you to plead. Don't plead, but instead, simply make the
following pretrial motion:

"Your honor, I wish to make a pretrial motion. The red light citation
is the charging document, and the party listed as the defendent is the
Gamma Revocable Living Trust. There is no such person as the Gamma
Revocable Living Trust, so I make a motion that the case be dismissed
as only a person can be charged."

If the judge asks who was driving, just say that you don't know, and
you are just appearing because you are the trustee of the trust that
owns the car.

The judge will then dismiss the case.

This works perfectly every time in Maryland. I suspect that it will
work virtually everywhere. If enough people do this, they might
enhance the system so that the MVA puts the name of the trustee in the
registration system so that the trustee can be charged, but that's
probably a very, very long way off. =20

Enjoy!

One more thing. This technique has a bonus. If you die in a car crash
because you went through a red light, (or, for that matter, if you die
due to anything at all), then anything that you listed in the trust
(and properly retitled, for those items that are titled, such as cars,
bank accounts, and real estate) does not go through probate, which
saves your heirs a bunch of money and trouble.

I know this sounds like I'm trying to sell the Nolo software, but I'm
not, and I don't have anything to do with the Nolo folks. If you want,
you can borrow the Nolo trust book from many libraries and write the
trust documents yourself based on the samples in the Nolo trust book,
but the software really makes creating a trust much easier and faster.
You absolutely must have the trust document with you when you go to the
MVA in order to prove that the trust exists. Also, you'll need to get
the trust notorized after you create it, but that's a simple matter
that most banks will do for free for account holders.

Also, I've never gotten a camera-based speeding ticket, but I'm pretty
sure that camera-based speed tickets will also be addressed to the name
of the trust, and you can beat them in court the same way that you can
beat red light camera tickets. I suspect this might work for parking
tickets, too, but I haven't had any parking tickets since putting my
cars in a trust, so I haven't been able to test it. I guess I could
get a parking ticket intentionally, but I'll let someone do the testing
and post their results.

One more item again. Don't show the judge the trust. Don't even take
it to court. A trust is a confidential document. Theoretically, the
judge could create a court order to make you show the trust, but
there's no way that a judge is going to have someone go home and get
the trust document. The fact that your car is titled in the name of
the trust is enough proof that it is owned by the trust. However,
there might be some judge somewhere with too much time on her hands
that would take a look at the trust document if you happened to have it
with you in court and then let the prosecutor or cop change the charged
party to the name of the trustee. I've never heard of this happening,
though.

On a few occasions, I've seen judges become momentarily stunned when
they get a case where the defendent is a trust, but as long as you
continue to insist that the charged party is a trust and there is no
such person as "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust" (or whatever), the
charges will be promptly dismissed.

"Drive Dog" > wrote in message
...
> I HAVE NOT tried this, nor has anyone else to my knowledge.
>
> Portrait photographers sometimes use "slave" strobes.

That's really a good idea if the film speed used in the cameras was slower.
But they are expecting to take a picture of a car speeding along at 50Mph
or whatever with absolutely no blurring of the numbers of the license plate,
so they are probably using 1000ASA or even faster, along with a massively
cranked up strobe flash lamp. By the time the slave strobe fires the
shutter
is going to be closed.

If you ever do get one of these tickets you will note that they aren't
color film and they are extremely grainy. Even more evidence of a massively
fast film speed, as photos get more grainy the faster the film speed, and
you
can maufacture black and white film even faster than color.

Ted

The authorities in the UK have got around a couple of the snags here.

The cameras don't use film, they're digital, so never run out of film and
the captured info is transmitted back to a central server and the fine
posted out. No human intervention needed. Markings on the road show up in
the photo and therefore prove the speed of the vehicle and whether the
camera is working properly or not.

The cameras face the front of the vehicle, not the rear, so they can see who
is driving at the time of the offence. The camera doesn't use a regular
flash it uses infra red.

It's a total ball ache. no fun.

Use GPS to locate the things (roadangel) and go slower as appropriate, and
stop at red lights.

m

pottsy wrote:
>
> The authorities in the UK have got around a couple of the snags here.
>
> The cameras don't use film, they're digital, so never run out of film and
> the captured info is transmitted back to a central server and the fine
> posted out. No human intervention needed. Markings on the road show up in
> the photo and therefore prove the speed of the vehicle and whether the
> camera is working properly or not.
>
> The cameras face the front of the vehicle, not the rear, so they can see who
> is driving at the time of the offence. The camera doesn't use a regular
> flash it uses infra red.
>
> It's a total ball ache. no fun.
>
> Use GPS to locate the things (roadangel) and go slower as appropriate, and
> stop at red lights.
>
> m


I think that the main contention that many people have with
red light camera systems isn't the camera, it's the fact that
universally the light timing is set up on the intersection to
maximize the chance of catching someone running a red light.
Turning the yellow time down to the absolute legal minimum
duration does not serve any safety purpose whatsoever. In fact,
it actually increases the chance of an accident happening at
an intersection, yet cities that install these camera systems
shorten the light so much as to make almost every yellow into
a cause for a panic stop. This is dangerous, as well as being
ethically and morally wrong, and only goes to prove that the
cities using these systems are only interested in revenue
enhancement.

JazzMan
--
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In article >,
pottsy > wrote:
>The authorities in the UK have got around a couple of the snags here.
>
>The cameras don't use film, they're digital, so never run out of film and
>the captured info is transmitted back to a central server and the fine
>posted out. No human intervention needed. Markings on the road show up in
>the photo and therefore prove the speed of the vehicle and whether the
>camera is working properly or not.
>
>The cameras face the front of the vehicle, not the rear, so they can see who
>is driving at the time of the offence. The camera doesn't use a regular
>flash it uses infra red.
>
>It's a total ball ache. no fun.

Sure it is. You've just suggested a number of methods of defeating it.

1) Markings on the road can be obscured.

2) Plates and windshields can be made to reflect and absorb infrared.
The infrared is actually a big help here because you can choose a
material which is clear in the visible range and therefore doesn't
arouse cops' ire.

3) The slave-flash technique can be used (you just need an IR
photosensor instead of a normal one). Since it's taking multiple
pictures, you could put in a delay which ruins the second picture
even if the flash is too fast for the first.

4) A clear IR filter can be stuck directly on the camera. This will
confuse the hell out of the authorities.

It's man vs machine gentleman.

I have one question though, if the license plate is sufficient evidence to
mail the owner a ticket, then why take a picture of our face? oh wait let
me guess...so possible terrorists can be weeded out...

seriously, why take a picture of the driver?

In article . com>,
says...
>
>
>y_p_w wrote:
>> Scott en Aztlán wrote:
>>
>> > On 24 Jan 2005 10:08:24 -0800, "DG" >
>wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >>Can someone tell me if there is anything that defeats the red light
>> >>cameras or speed cameras.
>> >
>> >
>
>Here's what works in Maryland as long as you do not have a loan on your
>car. (This won't work if you have a loan because most lenders won't
>let you title a car in the name of a trust.)
>
>First, create a Revocable Living Trust with the Nolo Willmaker Plus
>software (www.nolo.com). For the name of the trust, use something
>obscure, like "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust". Don't use your own
>name as part of the trust name. (It is perfectly legal to name your
>living trust anything that you want; you don't have to name it using
>your name.) Make yourself the trustee. Make your wife or best friend
>the beneficiary (that's the person who gets the car if you die.) The
>Nolo software explains all this in simple terms. List your cars as
>being owned by the living trust. Then go to the MVA and have your cars
>retitled and reregistered under the name of the living trust. Take the
>title for your car with you. Be sure to take the trust document with
>you, as the MVA clerk will need to copy a few pages of the trust. The
>cost to put a car in the trust is $27 per car. There is no transfer
>tax, since you are transferring the cars to a trust for which you are
>the trustee. Creating the living trust and putting just your cars in
>it is not really that difficult. Total time including waiting at the
>MVA office for this part of the project is about 3 hours.
>
>Now you are protected, but you need to use the protection when your car
>gets a red light ticket.
>
>When you get a red light ticket, the defendent will be listed as the
>name of the trust, for example, "The Gamma Revocable Living Trust".
>(By the way, the ticket won't be associated with your driver's license
>number because you'll get a "Z" ID code for your license number which
>won't correlate with your driver's license number, but that's not even
>that important.) When you go to court to defend the ticket, the judge
>will ask you to plead. Don't plead, but instead, simply make the
>following pretrial motion:
>
>"Your honor, I wish to make a pretrial motion. The red light citation
>is the charging document, and the party listed as the defendent is the
>Gamma Revocable Living Trust. There is no such person as the Gamma
>Revocable Living Trust, so I make a motion that the case be dismissed
>as only a person can be charged."
>
>If the judge asks who was driving, just say that you don't know, and
>you are just appearing because you are the trustee of the trust that
>owns the car.
>
>The judge will then dismiss the case.
>
>This works perfectly every time in Maryland. I suspect that it will
>work virtually everywhere. If enough people do this, they might
>enhance the system so that the MVA puts the name of the trustee in the
>registration system so that the trustee can be charged, but that's
>probably a very, very long way off.

In many places this won't work. The reason is that camera tickets are like
parking tickets, so a person is not charged. The owner of the vehicle is
repsonsible. So in this case the trust would be required to pay the fine.
--------------
Alex