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Europe Now Has Its Own "Most Wanted Fugitives" Web Page (eumostwanted.eu)

Posted by timothy on from the needs-to-merge-with-tumblr dept.

New submitter ffkom writes: European police organization Europol was probably jealous of the fame and popularity of the FBI's Most Wanted site, so they finally launched their own, European version. And if you want to know what a peaceful place Europe is, just consider this: You don't even have to kill anyone to get on the current "Most Wanted Fugitives" list. A mere fraud worth 12€ is currently enough to get you into this "Hall of questionable fame."

10 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Not 12 euros... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...but 12,563 euros. Some European countries use "." instead of ",".

    Still not much in the grand scheme of things though!

    1. Re:Not 12 euros... by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Informative

      Notice that the submitted story had it right: http://slashdot.org/submission...

      A mere fraud worth 12 k€

      After edited by timothy it changed to:

      A mere fraud worth 12€

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    2. Re:Not 12 euros... by arth1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      They propose "m EUR or bn EUR may only be used when space is insufficent for spelling out", which is outright stupid because there is a SI prefix "M" for "million" already, and "m" is also an existing SI prefix meaning "milli" - 1/1000.

      And also stupid because the EU countries are split on what "bn" or billion would mean. In most of the EU, a billion means a million million, but then there are a few countries that use the short scale like the US, and a billion means a thousand million.

    3. Re:Not 12 euros... by ericloewe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ISO 31 specifically states that both "," and "." are valid separators.

      If one cannot infer what the number is in this particular case, they have no business writing anything at all. Confusing 12€ with 12 523€ is a new level of stupidity.

    4. Re:Not 12 euros... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've never understood the rationale for the non-US billion. Both 10^6 and 10^9 (and to a lesser extent 10^12) are numbers that come up all the time, why not have explicit names for them?

      Um, that is the rationale. There are names.

      Million = 10^6
      Milliard = 10^9
      Billion = 10^12 = million^2
      Billiard = 10^15 (and a game)
      Trillion - 10^18 = million^3 ... and so on

      It also makes it easier to figure out that a septillion is a million^7. Likewise, to go the other way, 10^30=10^6^5, i.e. a pentillion.

      The US short scale system has no good relation between the names and the actual numbers. A septillion in US terminology is 10^24 - where does the seven come in?

  2. Ah, Slashdot. by aix+tom · · Score: 3, Funny

    The place where the editors don't know the "." is the thousands separator in several European languages. ;-P

  3. Gee learn to read by aepervius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It was 12K euro not 12 euro.

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  4. Re:Which region you mean ? by iTrawl · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your point doesn't take one aspect into account: most of Europe doesn't use English as the primary language. The decimal point is pretty much an English language feature these days (although Mexico appear to use it too, in distinction from all the other countries that use Spanish, and China and India probably do so because of English language influence). Canada seems to do it right: decimal point when the text is in English, decimal comma when it's in French. Europol should be following this convention too, as the editors weren't the only ones confused.

    Too many times I have to second guess numbers written by non-English folks in English texts because of this variation, but it usually ends up like this: if there are three digits after the point, they made a mistake and meant "thousands separator". If there are two digits, they meant "decimal separator". Ditto for when the use the comma. What I hate about it is the "garden path" I have to take when parsing the numbers.

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  5. Re:12k€ not 12€ by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 5, Interesting

    TFA says "12.523 EUR".

    Of course the fixation of (continental?) Europe to use decimal points as thousands separators is a bit stupid (saying that as someone from there).

    Except that Europe doesn't use the decimal point as thousands separators, you use the period character. The traditional anglophone decimal separator is a mid-height dot, which I'd demonstrate for you, but it doesn't seem to be available in the default iOS keyboard. What happened is that it was missed off some mechanical typewriters and was left off the keyboards and character sets for most computers. Computer programmers cheated and used a period instead of a decimal point, and as publishing moved to digital formats, it was easier for people to use the period in place of the point. By the time Unicode finally introduced the decimal point into computing, it was already dead.

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  6. Re:12k€ not 12€ by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Funny

    We'll stop using the comma when you stop celebrating the bombing of the world trade centre November 9/11/2001 instead of September when it actually happened.