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Using Speed Cameras To Send Tickets To Your Enemies
High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.
I've often thought if I got one of these tickets I would take it to court and ask for the right to see my accuser.
Duplicate plates? When I was in school, we used to actually swap the plates themselves lol.
Kids and technology these days.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
This is the inevitable result of the 'panopticon' model of legal harmony. A car does not positively identify a person, nor does a license plate or a blurry photo.
The authorities can cast a wider net by being lazy, but this is the real reason we shouldn't tolerate it: it's almost laughably exploitable.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
If we're lucky.
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...when they usually pay through the nose or get jailtime for counterfeiting an official document (which a license plate is).
It's interesting though that penalties are apparently tied to the car in the us, not the driver. I still remember the police showing up regularly at the door showing me a (usually bad) picture of my father and asking if I knew the person. Thank god^M^M^M the constitution for family privilege.
Fleur de Sel
Wow, so you personally commit fraud and forgery to get your "enemy" a $40 speeding ticket?
sounds like a great idea until the first time a cop is on scene to pull you over.
I hope those kids like jail time!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
...they could create a website listing the make, model and licenses of cars belonging to police and other public officials; with convenient license plate templates or maybe a PDF license plate generator. Don't host it the US or UK though.
But that would be wrong.
Well, yes... But to be fair, nobody wants to look like Jeremy Clarkson, not even Jeremy Clarkson.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
In Arizona, all tickets are reviewed by
the police or local municipality of which
the ticket was issued.
ie, if the car doesn't match the ticket,
no ticket gets sent. If the driver is
one sex and the vehicle is registered
to the opposite sex, a notice is sent,
not a ticket. I can drive my wife's
vehicle and speed all I want, she gets
a notice that says, "Do you know this
person".
I can't see any instance where this would
work except same vehicle, same sex driving.
So... Fail.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
This entirely new type of crime can only come about because of speed cameras! If we didn't try to punish people breaking the law this kind of thing would never happen!
This just shows again the problems with applying a digital measure to our analog world. Speeding is by no means a crime. A crime implies harm, and having an instantaneous velocity over a certain point on a road hardly qualifies as a crime. Here we have a case of the computer being judge, jury, and executioner. This means that gone are the *very* valid justification that "that's the speed limit because driving any slower was dangerous."
Before, real-life situations could trump an engineer's arbitrary classification of a road. Which is good, because in real life, the situation *is* more important than the simulation. Now, instead of a judge who makes an informed decision that can be understood and formally disagreed with, we have a contractor, who is completely removed from the job. No one to get mad at, and, most importantly, no one to feel guilty. Every person in the chain has no responsibility and no reason to feel bad.
No matter the efficiency advantages of doing otherwise, every penalty applied to a human should be applied by a human.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
The real problem, imho, is that speed limits are artificially low. In the US anyway, the only reason to follow the speed limit is to avoid fines. The numbers are unnecessarily conservative for most driving.
In fact, i can drive past a cop at the speed limit in the rain and not get a ticket though clearly I have a much lower margin of safety going 65 in the rain than I do going 65 on dry pavement.
Similarly, one is allowed to go the same speed at night as during the day even though visibility is definitely impaired.
(Yes, I know the limit is set as an upper limit and that cops can ticket you for going an unsafe speed for the conditions, etc, etc. but in practice it doesn't happen for up to moderate levels of inclement levels. And in fog or a downpour or blizzard, well most people slow down well below the speed limit anyway.)
I do like the "advised speed" that's attached to signs signaling curves ahead. That actually provides useful information about the road rather than info about the revenue generation and/or paranoia of the local residents.
I don't think anyone's really stupid enough to ...
Henry Mencken disagrees:
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." -- Henry Mencken
I know, he was talking about profit, but I think the sentiment applies more broadly.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Get ready for mandatory RFID license plates, and all the privacy and security problems that come with them.
Be excellent to each other.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
At least if you look at how things were actually done during the Cultural Revolution, or even today in Cuba and North Korea. Local party members inform on those whose political purity is questioned.
And what does the government do a little girl opens a lemonade stand and tries to keep the profits? Little handcuffs and off to the gulag!
There's a very scary scene depicting what these local committees were like in the movie The Red Violin. Go rent that and see how local government worked under Mao.
Of course, these elections never actually happened anyway, or any elections for that matter, local or national, under any Marxist regimes. Or a single, fixed election, like in Venezuela.
Sorry brother, but when I hear "Marx," I don't think "democracy."
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Wait 'till your neighbor paints his house purple. Or has 100 cats.
My neighbor has the right to paint his house any color he wishes, including purple. I welcome his creativity, and no I don't care if it devalues my home. My right to make a profit in my investment ends at his property.
As far as having 100 cats, as long as those cats are not coming into my property, not being mistreated, and as long as it's not violating any municipal/city/state/federal health codes, it's none of my business either.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.