There was a similar story in comp.risks (anyone remember that?) back in 1986. When ordering a custom plate, you could put down three choices. The guy applying could only think of two choices ("SAILING" and "BOATING"). If he couldn't get one of those, he didn't want a custom plate, so he put "NO PLATE" as the third choice. Of course that was the plate he got. He ended up getting 2500 parking tickets, since any car with no plate was marked on the ticket as "NO PLATE".
A journalist here in Australia just named her baby "Methamphetamine Rules" because she assumed it would be rejected and was writing a story trying to find out what the default assigned name was. Only it wasn't rejected and she received a birth certificate with that name.
> Surely this person is just some sort of attention seeker. Nobody is this dumb.
In some countries it does work this way.
Luckily for the kid, when you change your name in Australia you are issued an entirely new birth certificate (I know because I changed my name!) so this child won't go through life with this name on its birth certificate and then a "change of name" certificate like in some countries.
More generally though, dome countries have a list of permitted names and whatever the registrar writes down (which might not be what you asked for) is the child's name.
Most of the European countries that had such rules have relaxed or given them up, though they sometimes remain on the books to keep parents from doing this kind of thing, but they remain in some countries in other regions of the globe.
This "whatever the registrar writes down is authoritative" applied to immigrants to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century which is why there are many common names spelled differently (Schmidt, Shmitt, and so forth). Also applied to family names when they were made mandatory (Prussia in mid 19th century, Turkey in the 1920s). In this case they often simply made the decisions with no option to appeal, which you can see Jewish family names that are joke names made up and assigned by antisemitic officials. Most of those people's descendants now live in other countries where the meaning is thankfully lost.
Do you mean "they choose one for you" happens to be true? Does depending on that, or hoping what they choose is okay make her not dumb and not attention-seeking?
I used to think that way. Decades of experience have led me to conclude that there really are an incredibly large number of people who are that <pick your descriptor from among clueless, dumb, self-centered, delusional, …>
No joke, the mother of one of my friends changed her name to...just her first name. She eliminated her last name. This is also in Australia.
Not having a last name has caused her all kinds of problems. Australia may not officially require you to have a last name, but passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, utilities, etc., still require there to be something in that space. She kinda-sorta gets by using "[first name] [firstname]" or "[first name] NoLastName", but it is still a bureaucratic nightmare -- as I think anyone but her could have predicted.
Many countries don’t allow name changes at all, so if you are a named- hanged foreigner living in that country, a lot of systems won’t be able to handle you, and you’ll be asking for exceptions for your entire stay (not to mention needing to carry around your birth certificate, proof of name change, and translations).
And I think changing your maiden name in marriage is still common in the west, so many foreigners run into this in a country like China.
Many Indonesians don’t have last names, I wonder how immigration is handled. Wiki has a whole section on how other countries handle this, since Indonesia isn’t a small country:
In southern India it's common for the last name to simply be the father's name (but I do know one guy whose last name is his mother's name).
Like, my name could be "Foo", my father's name could be "Baz" so the given name field of the passport could be "Foo Baz", and the last name would be blank.
But the visa form for certain countries don't accept that, so they put in "LNU".
Anyway, these days people are more aware, so when applying for passport they specify the given name as "Foo", and the surname as "Baz" (parent's name), even though that's really not the surname.
I changed one of my cards to have just my surname on it, 'cuz I thought it looked cool, and there are a _lot_ of CC forms on the internet that don't like it.
> Under the rules, the registrar will not approve a name if it is offensive and not in the public interest. It also will not approve given names that are more than 50 characters, include symbols, or an official title or rank such as princess, Queen, or goddess.
Shame, it doesn't seem to violate policy. They should have been forced to do a full legal name change, and a welfare check on the other kids wouldn't be out of line either.
The articles I read about it suggested she had tried that. Agencies indicated that the registrar would provide a name in the event that the chosen one was rejected, but wouldn't tell her what that might be.
Do they only regulate names of children or of adults too? I don't it is limited to children. What business does the state have in deciding how they will address me?
RISKS-Digest is a valuable and venerable resource. I find it somewhat ironic that it seems not to have any specific preparation for transition or continuity.
That's a challenge for numerous projects, and I can think of several examples of projects, services, or other institutions which failed on the death, disability, or retirement of their founders. It's a highly foreseable risk.
My license plate is very similar to this, intended as a joke [I had to fight DMV for approval]. It has the additional advantage that no information about me pulls up when scanned/run through DMV records... intending to confuse [and often succeeding].
The occassional tow notice always elicits a chuckle — I no longer even respond to them. Citations/notices are few-and-far, as the authorities have made note to not use my lawful license plate as a default "no plate on vehicle" descriptor.
This is secretly about Types and misuse of values.
"NV" is a valid value for a plate. The officers were using that value to indicate an error, thus the chaos of error handling for a non-error.
When programming error cases, you should return something that cannot be a valid value. Excellent patterns exist in some languages where a sum type of either a return value or an error can be returned. Optional/Maybe monads to indicate something or nothing. Even, god forgive me for saying this, throwing an Exception is a good way to say "No, not a valid return value".
The traffic wardens paperwork/app needs an explicit field for "Not visible"- ideally one easier to use than writing "NV", rather than a free-form text field that lets them write a value that only they know means something other than a real value.
Wouldn't an escape character still be in-band signaling? It should either be something other than a string, like a NULL value, a separate field that says there's no valid plate (and to ignore the string), or have a different type altogether for tickets without valid plates.
An escape character would still be in-band, but in this context any string containing the escape character wouldn't be a valid plate (In New York any non-alphanumeric character except @ and space would work.)
Back in the 90's I moved to one side of Australia to the other, and to a different state, but I didn't change my drivers licence or car registration as required, because I figured the authorities had no way of catching me, and it was 10 times more expensive in my new state.
When I got a ticket nothing happened because the two state authorities didn't exchange information about car ownership for parking and traffic violations. I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly, given I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible or super expensive (central Sydney). Also various speeding tickets.
Then I got a contract with the local driver licensing authority. My job: facilitate exchange of information between states for penalties associated with out of state plates.
I know what you're thinking: just filter out anything to do with my licence plates. But that would be unethical (cough). And I'd get caught.
As it happened, the first task was to apply it to trucks who were the worst offenders since they routinely travelled between states and there were obvious safety issues.
So I asked my boss about when the same would be done for out of state cars, "out of curiosity".
He said "20 years to never. It's too hard [for bureaucratic reasons]".
> I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly, given I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible or super expensive (central Sydney). Also various speeding tickets.
Hey, man. Cool hack. I’m sure everyone appreciated the dangerous driving and parking in handicap spots and bus lanes and what-have-you…
"I could park with impunity in a place where parking was impossible" -- I.e., parking where he should've have been in the first place regardless of expense.
"Also various speeding tickets." -- The opposite of parking.
"I ran up probably $20,000 dollars worth of tickets pretty quickly" -- I read this as "within a year or so I got fines totaling around $20k," which is fucking nuts.
- mostly street parking over the 2 hour limit. I couldn't get a residency parking permit and I had no off street parking.
- not paying or overstaying parking meters
- loading zones, mostly on the weekend, I worked during the week
- sometimes 'no parking' zones, but I wasn't stupid about it because you'd get towed
- exclusively speed camera fines, I never got pulled over for speeding.
- using high occupancy lanes with just the driver
Keep in mind that a single parking ticket was up to $375 at the time. Speeding fines were minimum $300 (they're like $2000 now).
The $20,000 is an estimate, since I never got the fines, that's over a couple of years. I later did register a car in state and ended up not paying fines again (somehow) which ran to about $15,000 over a year (At the time there was no effective punishment. They used to lock you up until you paid, but then some poor guy who refused to pay was put in prison and beaten to within an inch of his life, consequently becoming disabled for life, so they got rid of that. There is another funny story about how I narrowly avoided arrest a decade later for all these fines when walking into a police station to get the required police check for getting my Diversity Visa approval).
Obviously there is a difference between not paying your fines and blocking buses or traffic. Besides it being stupid, if you get towed, are in a serious accident, or the police attends and they run your plates, then the jig is up, they've found you and you're toast. There was an element of risk involved at all times.
Sorry for insinuating one of your ~100 tickets (~$35k/~$350) over three years involved blocking a bus when in reality you were just being a constant low-grade nuisance.
Aside from taking a government job, the man is practically a hero. If more people had his courage, the state would dissolve and people could actually live their lives according to their beliefs.
Never say never: Where I'm from, in 2019 a truck driver killed seven motoryclists[1] while driving on what should have been a suspended license because of inter-state inefficiencies, which were quickly fixed after public outrage. They actually even sort of fixed it too much while clearing out the backlog. [2]
This happens today with various state-hired contract firms that do ANPR reading of plates to automatically bill people for toll roads. They give zero shits about how accurate their readers are. So, someone with a plate of "3EE 432" gets a bill for a car with an actual plate of "8EE 432". And it's now on that person to solve the problem...which often involves a long wait on the phone, or complex website userid registration, etc.
I'm amazed there's not at least a system where you can quickly say "have a human verify this, this isn't me" via a text or button click.
Ontario built highway 407 in the early 2000s (late 90s?) with tolls that use license plate readers - no slowing down or stopping at all. Still a bit controversial, that, and especially controversial when the Conservative government sold it off to a private entity just to balance the budget for one year.
But in all that time, I literally do not know anyone who has gotten a bill from them for a bad plate read. We have blizzards here, torrential downpour rain, all kinds of weather that might make it hard. Still, nothing.
I wonder if the regulations on bad reads were simply made serious enough that the company handling it takes a very conservative approach to potential mistakes.
I imagine some companies do it right. I know some don't. Maybe Canada has better laws around it than the US? Or more context...like you could probably do some amount of matching registered make/model to a plate/picture with sufficiently good software and trigger human intervention when matches are low confidence.
Every incorrect reading should result in you recieving the cost of the ticket. If that was so, I would be 500$ richer. Would provide a nice incentive for contractors and governments to fix their shitty systems.
Great story. So in the end the tickets got dropped?
Also, why get an entire domain to host a short blog post? Based on the copyright of 2004 and a .com tld registration of $10 per year someone has spent $190 to put this story out there.
it wasn't $10/year from 04 on, it was actually more initally then lower and now that. also where would you put the blog post? Facebook? Tumblr? Myspace? Medium? Geocities? Blogspot? Which of those would have kept this blog around that long? and reachable?
I think I read this a while back, maybe even on hacker news lol, it's a classic. Just like the 500 mile email story on the front page, though that one is _far_ more popular, hahahaha. :'))))
Terrible story! Where’s the middle? Where’s the end? The authors describes some kafkaesque problem they encounter, with no obvious solution, and then they just abruptly end the story, signing off with a lighthearted joke.
What happened?… I’m irritated that I got tricked into reading this.
The author definitely did something about the problem, and the problem was definitely resolved in some manner (whether the resolution was good or bad for him). This story definitely has a middle and an end, the author simply chose to get us interested in his story, and then drop it on the ground.
The article already states this. The person you were replying to is asking about a different - but similar - case where an employee's last name is "Null".
I don't know if this would be practical, but a nice curtesy would be for the authorising agency to verify that there aren't any outstanding parking tickets against a newly registered plate, and to at least advise the purchaser, or refuse to issue the plate.
I can imagine human ingenuity is such that there are a huge number of possible 'bad', placeholder number plates used - in addition to the 'NV', 'NULL' and 'NO PLATE' listed in comments, imagine we could have 'NONE', 'NA' (i.e. N/A), 'BROKEN', 'ABSENT', etc.
I had a friend that would rack up a couple thousand in parking tickets every few years. We'd write funny notes on the tickets and mail them back to the courthouse, would have loved to been in that office.
It's easy to do. Go to the bar almost every day after work, and leave your car either on the street or in the city parking lots and come back and get it the next day. The late fees and penalties really add up!
The funny part is the local newspaper would do a story on the highest amounts owed for parking tickets and she was only ever in third or fourth place.
I'm gearing up to make political and legal war on my local city government over the issue of parking. See it was one thing when they had a two-hour parking - it stinks, but at least it was published and everyone knew the rules. But, that wasn't punishing enough to citizens and they wanted to up their revenues. Or said another way, they got tired of chalking tires and decided to upgrade to geofencing technology. So now the deal is, a sensor on the parking enforcement vehicle reads your license plate and determines if you've been parked in the same block within a two hour time frame. The problem with this is, a) the only way you know about this is after you've been ticketed and are presented with the municipal code, b) the definition of "a block" is quite loose, and c) This means you could have moved your vehicle or left for 1 hour and 59 minutes, but if you are found to have even been in the same general area, they will ticket you. To make it even worse, they only enforce parking Monday-Friday, 8-5. So they are deliberately extorting local business people and avoiding upsetting the tourists who roll into town each weekend. Am livid not only at the city, but also at the state Attorney General's office for not being able to help me call out an absolutely extortionist city government.
So they are deliberately extorting local business people
lol, no.
Free parking is a great example of tragedy of the commons. Without time limits people will abuse it. Case in point: California. A handicap tag out here will grant you an exemption to whatever time limits are posted regardless of whether or not the spot is reserved for handicapped drivers. What ends up happening is people with handicap tags will just take up all the spots all day, leaving nothing for anyone else.
Or said another way, they got tired of chalking tires
Having worked in the smart parking meter industry I got to talk to city folks and, while it may be painful to hear the actual enforcement rate is pretty darn low with a few exceptions (typically time of day based ones like street cleaning and rush hour traffic). It's extremely labor intensive to monitor every spot, so enforcement is pretty haphazard.
the definition of "a block" is quite loose
This is, in California, defined on a city by city basis as far as I can tell. San Francisco defines the minimum distance as 1/10 mile (or 1 block), Pismo Beach specifies 100 ft or 1/10 mile on the odometer. Both of which seem pretty specific.
Here in London targeted use of parking enforcement is an infamous money-spinner for local authorities - in instances where they know they can clean up: case in point, our local hospital has basically no on-site parking, only metered parking on local roads. The problem of course is that people going to a hospital appointment have no accurate idea how long the wait plus appointment time will be. Hence, there is a bloke on a scooter on permanent patrols looking for anyone who is a few minutes over so he can do them.
Highly contagious disease with symptoms mild enough for you for it to be safe to drive. Like COVID in early 2020.
Or, for example, if kid had accident at home that's fairly serious but not serious enough that you actually need ambulance. You want to get them to hospital quickly with minimal walking required but you also likely need parent to stay with them.
The law requires you to move one block away or at least one-tenth (1/10)
of a mile—about 500 feet. Do not drive around and then park in the same
block, or you can be ticketed!
They're not defining the length of a block, rather they're giving you two options. The end goal is to encourage vehicle turnover and prevent people from monopolizing all the spots in a given area.
Two hour parking (I'm guessing it's free, but it doesn't really matter) is the result of such a mind-numbingly obvious market inefficiency. Street parking is being given away for free, or at incredibly cheap prices, so of course demand is high and drivers visiting businesses can't find spots. So the city tries to disrupt demand by placing these artificial time limits, in the hope that it will allow visitors to park more easily. The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available. And anybody willing to pay market rate for 8 hours of street parking is welcome to.
To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.
edit: and same applies for weekends: charge market rate then too!
> The obvious answer is to just charge market rate for street parking, and there will almost always be a few spots available
So only the rich can drive and park? FWIW, my city charges £6.70/hour for parking and it's still impossible to find a spot.
> To top it off, time limits are so stupid to enforce, as you say. It's easy to enforce meters, or paid parking with plates on a block. "If paid and not in red zone, ok, else, ticket." But instead cities have to come up with these "creative" (read: broken) systems for catching people who park too long.
The limits on parking in many places are to encourage/force other means of transport for work.
>So only the rich can drive and park? FWIW, my city charges £6.70/hour for parking and it's still impossible to find a spot.
Are you arguing that cars (along with all associated costs like fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc) be provided free of charge to every person?
If there's no spots available at the current price, then the current price is too low. There are costs associated with vehicle ownership and usage, and you are welcome to find alternatives if you do not want to pay them.
I work at a hospital and people always lament that they wish the on-site parking was free so they didn't have to park several blocks away. I don't know why they don't realize that if the parking was free, it would be packed full 24/7.
> Are you arguing that cars (along with all associated costs like fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc) be provided free of charge to every person?
You're putting words in my mouth here, nowhere have I suggested anything like that. Please at least argue in good faith.
> If there's no spots available at the current price, then the current price is too low
You're making an assumption that the only variable is the cost of parking, and that the desire of the system is to ensure maximum utilisation. It's not. The desire of the system is to stop people driving into city centres and parking their cars there while they work
> So only the rich can drive and park? FWIW, my city charges £6.70/hour for parking and it's still impossible to find a spot.
I definitely understand that parking can be a major expense, but I do believe that if the cost of parking is the tipping point (and not the cost of fuel, insurance, registration, repairs/maintenance, and likely regular car payments w/ interest...), then it's a symptom of a larger problem. Car ownership is by definition expensive, and the better approach is to work on making it unnecessary for people to own a car, rather than deciding that we have to further subsidize the car and fossil fuel industry by giving away/underpricing parking.
And yes, I'm definitely sympathetic to the fact that in many places, it's just necessary to own the car in order to live life. But market priced parking is actually part of the incremental solution to change that: it is cheaper to enforce and brings in more revenue which can be directly used to solve those problems, by improving public transit and infrastructure for alternatives to cars. Or it can go to tax rebates/incentives to use these alternatives.
I got a ticket due to a poorly designed "smart" parking meter.
I parked and put change in the meter and it didn't seem to register. I was a little confused, and put it in the meter for the adjacent car and a coin would register and increment the time.
Ugh. So I put a post-it note on the windshield describing the problem and went to eat.
Came back, and you guessed it: post-it gone, replaced by parking ticket.
It wasn't obvious what was happening, and I kind of put it all together afterwards.
The parking meter seems to have some sort of occupancy sensor. I suspect it might reset your time to zero if you leave the spot. reading your comment, it might be a max time in spot sensor? who knows.
I think it needed my car to be detected to add time to the meter. Because it was too far away or not reflective, or whatever, the coins were not accepted to add time. But it did keep the quarters. geez.
I complained on the ticket when it came. Had to pre-pay, but went in and pled my case at the parking authority court. Took two witnesses. They filed something to talk to engineers and said they'd let me know.
And then they denied it. I had the ability to appeal, but by then it was several hours of my time taking off in the middle of the day and I just let them keep the $40.
Depending on where you live it could be as simple as you're not allowed to park at a broken meter. It's possible but unlikely that there's any sort of occupancy sensor.
Yeah that's almost certainly not an occupancy sensor. Out here the single space meters have green LEDs for when it's legal to park (e.g. non-metered hours, or metered hours and the meter has been paid) and red for when the it's not legal to park there. This is so that someone passing by can quickly identify which meters to focus on.
Of all the ways you could detect the presence of a car most would be easily obstructed if they're looking from the POV of the meter. Maybe a camera would work, but even if you ignore the ease with which it's obstructed you still run into issues processing the photos. Sure you could also probably fit a small SBC into there, but you'd have no room for a battery powerful enough to run for any meaningful amount of time.
When I was doing that sort of thing professionally we kept the stuff in the meter very simple and our whole thing was built on super low power comms (think lower power consumption than Zigbee). While batteries are easy enough to change out in a meter, having to change them out frequently adds to the operational cost. The costs of trying to determine occupancy outweigh the benefits.
Typically what I've seen is that adding money to the meter just resets the session. Dollars to donuts you just came across a busted meter.
Bend, OR has this system (or did, a few years ago). I called up the phone number on the ticket and the guy was able to look up the photos and see that I had moved my car across the street and threw the ticket out for me without a hassle.
Dumb system, but they at least handled its failure pretty well.
That's the second half of my beef with the city - you can only fight these tickets on Thursday afternoons between 2-4 by going in to "traffic court." Bull crap.
I have a similar story - a local strip mall allows parking for 2 hours, no return within 4 hours.
They enforce this with ANPR cameras - only - sometimes you're inching out of the strip mall and bumper to bumper ... so it doesn't register you leaving.
Got a ticket, but luckily my Nest camera showed the time I returned, and the time I went back (needed something else) and they were more than 4 hours apart, and I'd only parked there for 20 minutes each time. Ticket was waived.
I am so glad I no longer live in areas where the parking enforcement is more strict than "we noticed that you have a burning tractor trailer on the street for the last month, need some help with it?"
NV is kind of a sentinel value to signal "not visible" and to differentiate it from actual plates isn't it? Only that it comes from external (the officer) and the systems involved are not aware of its special meaning which causes all the trouble.
Really would love to see a state allow non-alphanumeric characters as part of plate. Just to watch the chaos when they travel out of state and get a ticket or parking infraction.
Would love to have a smiley or thumbs up character in my plate. Until I tried to pay for parking at a smart meter.
California has had this for decades. You can see the symbols allowed on the application form under "Kids plates" (the fees support child health and welfare programs in the state).
I swear I've seen pictures with hearts, stars, smiley faces on plates. I thought it was California. though they might not be an actual integral part of the plate (real number is sans-wingdings)
For anyone interested, here is the donate button[1] that saved Nissan.com for about 2 years.[2] It appears to still be open? Uzi Nissan was providing for his family, that inherited the domain after his death in 2020. [3] Understandably, they're doing what they have to do to get by. I personally wouldn't mind if they sold to Nissan, the car company, as long as they get a generationally life changing amount of money. The domain is still registered to Nissan Computer Corp. until 2029.
Mr Prawo Jazdy has the most tickets in Ireland, because it means “Driving License” in Polish and cops just copied the wrong words off driving licenses.
This event makes me smile and cry at the same time. We live in such a sick [computer says "no"] world "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts[1]"
People interested in Parking might enjoy the High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup. https://www.shoupdogg.com/
Among other ideas he shares his view that there shouldn't even be "parking tickets", you just pay for the use of the land at the prevailing market rate.
As a total aside, I started to notice that folks most vehement about cars/parking being bad have a pattern: white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young and in Twitter, funny to see the pattern hold for this older professor (no evidence of family in bio/Wikipedia)
Seems like a correlation between this demographic and being a sort of male Karen that's really bothered about how other people get around.
Obviously urban planning is an important thing with tradeoffs to consider, I am just talking about the most vehement car haters.
Only when I started biking did I realize how much space a bike took vs how much space a car took, how much resources and money was spent for bikes and how much for cars, how much negative externalities bikes cause vs how much cars cause. Many people I know tried to commute by bike but stopped because of how dangerous biking is (due to modern city planning). People like me who are young, single and male are more willing to take risks. So people like me continue to bike and continue to be annoyed by how much resources are given to cars vs bikes. If you want to see a diverse group of bikes, look at the Netherlands. There or is much safer to bike, so you will see more diversity. You'll see bikers who are old and young, male and female (not too many Indians, Chinese, Native Americans, or middle easterns, but that's more for geopolitical reasons).
> white male, no family/kids, bicycle in the profile picture. Usually they are young
My wife with 2 kids that has no twitter account also hates cars. You just don't hear from her because you don't go to the same places she does. The same probably goes for everyone else outside the demographic you're describing.
I'm in my 40's and have two children. And I don't care how you get around, I just want to be able to bike places with my kids and not die. Cars (drivers, really) are the leading killers of children in the US, and I don't think being upset about that makes me a "Karen".
The full story with references: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3/12#subj1