In theory, yes, but that's not how policing works.
From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
>There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the provision of information to the police or other relevant authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial provision, something similar exists in practically every jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.
The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4) provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an individual who's vehicle was cloned:
>A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.
And regarding the disclosure issue
> The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed to return the form rather than returning the form with a note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant because you need to explain why you did not bother to furnish the information rather than police not believing that your vehicle had been cloned.
> This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
"Obliged"?
I immediately thought the case of the Guildford Four, and the scene in the biographical film In The Name Of The Father.
IIRC in the film the note in police files said "not to be shown to the defence"... :/
>Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan to use it in court.
> Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK.
Evidence of number plate cloning would reduce revenue from fines. If the government wants to fine you for not paying your vehicle tax, evidence that someone cloned your plate would be exculpatory, so it's in the government's best interest to not collect that evidence in the first place.
That's literally not how government works. If they explicitly discarded data because it was exculpatory then not only would they not be able to fine you based on that data, they would have to refund every fine they issued while that discard rule was in place.
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx safety factor of the driving distance from that hit, because it has to be a false positive."
or
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."
I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60 days? A year?
Entirely contrived. The point of the system is that you want all the hits everywhere, if your system is using any discard rules at all then it is unreliable for a prosecution.
Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the various localities. The localities are all storing the data. Then there is a central system that can query all the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the data.
The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The report isn't automatically generated if the average speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report is requested by the department issuing speeding citations rather than the one (if any) investigating data irregularities.
Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH. You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but that's a possible speed, because the automated report didn't include the impossible speeds.
There may have also been sightings that would have implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own reports that don't already exist. You could request the raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then you have to make a thousand requests to each individual locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a location that would have produced an impossibly high speed.
><The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The problem with that is that isn't how average speed cameras work, and where speeds are ludicrously high then there is a human operator looking at it.
So why isn’t the system already working as Gigachad suggested up the thread? Why is cloning plates feasible at all and not immediately discovered and prosecuted? Is this perhaps in the works? Or are the incentives not there?
Because ANPR data isn't routinely monitored. If your car is up to date on tax and insurance it doesn't generate an alert, the presence is recorded and ignored.
People make journeys that are illogical all the time and ANPR misreads are common, so there is no justification for having a system that says "this plate has pinged simultaneously 200 miles apart", because what are you going to with that information?
When you trigger a speed camera, the police send a notice to the registered keeper. They don't search ANPR for other hits, because why would they? They're dealing with the single traffic offence in front of them.
ANPR is an intelligence tool. It is an extremely valuable one, but it isn't definitive and no prosecution would stand alone on ANPR data without other corroborative evidence.
The "revenue generation" argument works for the US but cannot be imported directly over, because cameras work differently here. The revenue goes into the consolidated fund. Rule changes removed them from revenue-maxing spots and made them bright yellow with advanced signage.
(also, the court case if you take it to court should include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)
The decision to site a speed camera (and costs of maintaining the camera) and revenue from the camera end up at very different points in the system. The fixed cameras in my city have been off since 2012, because the local council won't pay for them. The "revenue generation" argument is very much overblown.
Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.
Respectfully, this is naive and doesn't consider defacto judicial process. Basically, defendants are getting railroaded unless they have resources to mount a defense, and charges are inflated to incentivize plea bargaining.
I'm not sure how a system would work that didn't auto issue the absolute maximum number of tickets possible. Random lottery to auto discard tickets? A max quota leading to a lawless time in the late evening?
But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
> But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
and when this happens, it is proof of an illegitimate regime, not for the people, and as such it becomes morally and ethically justifiable to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING one deem required to demolish it, and bring the responsible parties to justice
We're talking about speed cameras here, not deporting people to illegal prisons in El Salvador.
Or even more basic civil liberties stuff like the use of face recognition against protestors. No, there's always a huge number of people that come out for the right to drive illegally fast instead.
Face recognition is constitutionally allowed in the USA, and the flip side is that protestors, or anyone, can also face-recognize the police, track then with ALPR, etc
Is this company asking you to do things for them by any chance? The only time I've seen anything like this was when they were leeching free consultancy for a problem they were unable to solve. They compartmentalized the problem into different sub-components and under the guise of advancement in the process, held an 'interview' on them separately and a follow-up for the feedback (i.e. find out the answers). Once they had all the parts they needed, they said the person had not got the job.
Find different opportunities - this one sounds no good. If they treat you like this in the play nice phase, they will treat you much, much worse if they ever employ you.
I worked on air quality monitoring about 30 years ago and the equipment used a Kalman filter to remove measurement noise and give stability; it had been added to the software a number of years earlier by a mathematics student who was working as a summer job with the company. No-one in the team had heard of it before but it solved lots of the stability issues and was core to the system ever after.
> It is hard for me to articulate how much peps like this reinforce my desire to never start another python project
I completely understand this sentiment. Recent python events have made me wonder if there are some people intent on sabotaging the management of the language.
I loved the incremental improvements and thoughtful process involved up until a couple of years ago but it feels like python will become brittle and break badly if things continue the way they are. It feels like the adults have been driven out the room when it comes to stewardship. I'm not sure how recoverable the situation is.
It wasn't recent by Internet time but when the debate on walrus operator drove out the BDFL that was the obvious break. Python has been circling the drain ever since. A lot of motion, yes, but to what end?
- - - -
Oh! How could I forget!? The creeps actually banned Tim Peters!
Yes? and as GP said, he stepped down because (as explained in the first line of his email) "Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions."
A lot of the time, people say things like "Python has been circling the drain ever since." referring to the implementation of the "walrus operator", to imply that they don't like the feature and that it was the first of a series of changes to the language that have made it progressively worse; and they often further imply that if only we still had the original leadership then we could avoid such damage to the language.
I was, in a sense, in that camp at the time, before I looked it up. I felt that the operator went against the spirit of the language by trampling on what was previously a strong, and clearly very conscious, separation between statements and expressions. And I misguidedly imagined, and lamented, that GvR was unable to keep it out of the language, being overruled by consensus.
I just want to make sure it's clear that things are not like that. Rather, the Python envisioned (nowadays, though not originally) by the original leadership includes PEP 572 - and probably also the large majority of what's been added since.
It's not the "walrus operator" per se that's the problem, it's the change in project governance.
Python has been captured by bureaucracy and corporate interests. The way it's being improved-to-death is a symptom. The unceremonious eviction of Tim Peters indicates to me that the take-over is complete: the new guard feels comfortable throwing out the old guard, they expect that their power is such that no one will blink, and no one did. (No corporation withdrew support for them, the blow-back was all hot air.)
It would be interesting to know GvR's opinions of some of the new cruft, but it's not really relevant.
Using "|" to merge dictionaries (which was possible in other ways before) instead of offering pipes as in bash and Elixir (a feature that's actually useful).
The “|” operator was already used for set unions and binary OR, so it’s a little late to reserve it for control flow. Personally I don’t mind having a “dict union” operator at all.
On the Python side, though, at least you can build your own pipes! You can define various helper classes that have, say, an `__rrshift__` method, to let you do the following with full type-checking support:
Like all of python, `a | b` operator is just `a.__or__(b)`. If you want that operator to do something different in a different context, just override __or__.
Nothing prevents you from defining the | operator for other user-defined types where that would actually make sense. A dictionary doesn't represent an ongoing process or stream. Lots of things are possible; that isn't a reason not to find better ways to do them (cf. Raymond Hettinger).
Any Lisp-ness comes from Elixir being a skin on Erlang, and so comes almost anything else good to say about Elixir. (And my comment was explicitly comparing Elixir to Erlang.)
The 'pipe' is hacky, for example, because it's just syntactic sugar that only works in one specific case, and not in general.
I feel like as a scripting language Python excels. Glad to have this PEP, but it would be more pythonic have except be optional.
The reason I pick up Python for projects is because it grows with the application; opportunities to add typing etc. Who knows maybe in a few years Python will enforce all the types and it will be as verbose as Java. Personally I’d like to see how they handle declaring a method or function throws exceptions.
Pretty narly we have compiled Python apps with poetry, it’s starting to punch out of its weight class.
My experience is that invariably results in "development by veto". Each prototype they say that's not what I want, give me something else (that I'll fail to describe just like the last time) and I'll tell you that is wrong too after you've worked on it for a few weeks.
Occasionally, you'll randomly get something they accept - but only for a few weeks until they come across some missing capability for some other thing they never told you about.
> My experience is that invariably results in "development by veto".
Yes, I wasn't entirely serious.
Though you can get pretty far by doing some roleplay, where you pretend to be the computer/system (perhaps put up paper screen to make it easier to roleplay, and pass messages written on paper) and have the expert interact.
You still have to actually listen to the complaints. "That's not what I want" does not mean try again, it means they have no interest in what you are trying to offer in even the most basic sense. The lesson from that type of complaint is that you are barking up the wrong tree. Time to move on to something else.
When you are solving a real problem, you will still receive complaints, but they will be much more constructive.
Just 1 or 2 transistors you say? Link to a circuit diagram (or even an ASCII art reply) greatly appreciated - sounds like a fun way to spend an afternoon or an evening.
Plenty of examples to choose from, just search for images of "super-regenerative transistor receiver schematic" (with no quotes) on your favorite search engine. This also works well when looking for examples or data about circuits or parts, for example "audio compressor schematic" or "LM13700 data sheet" (again, no quotes). Swapping "data sheet" with "pdf" is often more effective to find the actual document.
Really reads like US employment practice meets EU (IE) employment law. In this particular case, the EU employee won despite the huge power asymmetry that normally ensure things go the opposite way.
But I note other comments on collect-ability of the judgement - ignoring it completely is the other US approach and make collection impossible through all sorts of devious delay tactics or even frivolous counter-suits in far off jurisdictions.
I'd like to know how this actually works out and whether collection of any actual money ever takes place.
But Wikipedia has a long article on Hepatotoxicity[0] and that suggests discontinuation of the drugs involved can allow the liver to heal (if discontinued early enough).
As a patient, you need to be conscious to ask questions and retain at least some control over your treatment whenever you can. If you're overwhelmed by what you are being told or concerned about the planned course of treatment, always ask questions, especially about long term implications and risks and how those are addressed. Generally doctors like being asked about medical things and are willing to answer when they are able. [Individual experiences may vary etc.]
From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.