Live Free or Die: The Origins of the Geek License Plate | Hacker News Reader

Live Free or Die: The Origins of the Geek License Plate

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49 pointsCrankyBear43 comments

> Connecticut introduced [vanity license plates] in 1937 as a perk for drivers with five years of accident free driving

1937 gamification, nice.

I always wondered why more countries didn't offer vanity license plates. It's a trivial service to offer in the internet age, and has the potential to bring in a nice additional lump of money every year for the government. Plus, it's just fun.

Maybe other countries have larger numbers of conformists and squares in charge...

my state (in a different country) does - https://www.vplates.com.au/

> has the potential to bring in a nice additional lump of money every year for the government

If there is a fee for these plates, it makes people more unequal than they already are in their relation to the state for no other reason than allowing the rich to show they are rich.

Many places take the approach that the state should never provide different classes of services depending on who can afford them or not.

Well, rich and (perhaps) vain: they are called vanity tags. I don't think that I could infer the relative wealth of the people I see by the tags on their cars.

In your view are turnpikes and toll bridges OK?

> In your view are turnpikes and toll bridges OK?

For private owned roads (or conceded to a private company for maintenance) they are OK of course, but not for state-maintained roads. Bridges are a bit different as they usually are much more expensive to build, but once the initial investment is recovered they should become toll-free IMO (once again, unless privately maintained).

However, I think your question has little to do with what I was talking about: a better comparison would be having a second set of publicly-built parallel roads with higher tolls for those who can afford them, or offering higher toll fees allowing a higher speed limit. I personally wouldn't be OK with this.

The situation exists throughout the US. One can, as far as I know, get anywhere in Pennsylvania that the turnpike will take you without using the turnpike. It will just take a fair bit longer to do so.

If vanity plates cost more per year than a large pizza, which has been roughly the case in every state I've lived in, I'd worry more about some sort of wealth signalling effect. And if I didn't see so many wrecks rolling down the road held together with bondo and baling wire sporting vanity plates...

There's also often a whole suite of charity plates, where you can proudly display your support of XYZ for an additional fee, some of which is donated to charity. Growing up, I remember many people in Maine who thought the old lobster plates[1] were ugly enough to opt for the loonie plates[2].

[1] http://www.15q.net/us2/me00b.jpg

[2] http://www.maine.gov/dacf/parks/get_involved/images/loonPlat...

That's a rather strange way of looking at it, since the custom plates aren't actually "better" in a functional sense. Just more desirable.

Sometimes, parts of the license numbers carry Information.

For instance, German license plate KA-WT 342 is from the City of Karlsruhe ("KA"), and is privately registered (letters after the dash).

KA-T 34H is a Karlsruhe privately-owned historic car (H at the end).

KA-4734 is a car owned by the Regierungsbezirk Karlsruhe (most likely a police car)

0 57-274 is a car owned by the embassy of Indonesia in Germany (0 for diplomatic, 57 for Indonesia)

BN-173-345H is a historic car owned by an UNHCR (173) employee with diplomatic immunity working from Bonn (BN). Cars owned by the UNHCR itself would be 0 173-788H...

This kind of quick-glance information gets lost when you introduce vanity plates.

We do have "Wunschkennzeichen", though, allowing you to choose the random letters and numbers from the pool of those combinations not yet used.

Does that also mean that Germans have to apply for new license plates when moving from one district to another, or does the license plate only refer to the district of original purchase?

From other places where this holds, it only refers to the district of the original purchase. And people don't move that much either, so 90% of the plates or such are accurate as to their owner's district too.

If you move, you used to get new license plates. There was talk about changing this, but I am not aware that it has.

In Poland you have to get a new license plate every time the car changes its owner, unless they happen to live in the same city. But the first 2-3 letters change depending on where you live, and it's quite granular, so even if you sell your car to a city not far away it might need a new license plate.

In Germany it depends on the city/region if you can keep your plate when changing cars.

Exactly. In Ireland the plate is made of [registration year]-[county]-[count of cars registered that year].

16-D-17891 : the 17891st car registered in Dublin, in the year 2016. They have recently introduced a third number in the year position to indicate 6 month sections (ie. 161 or 162).

Northern Ireland has a strange approach.

Generally they follow a pre-1963 county-based system in monotonic sequential order but occasionally a profitable prefix arises; recently BIG nnnn where nnnn is integer. So they can reserve the 'nice' ones in the sequence e.g. BIG 1 and sell those on the market. But they don't sell them in advance of sequence.

Live free or die is also the motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, who ironically mandated that it be placed on all licence plates and attempted to sue people who refused.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die

Although it's not clear from the title, the article is about the origins of fake license plates that were a copy of a NH license plate from the 1980's with the number "UNIX".

The article is about both real vanity plates and fake promotional ones.

Compaq later created similar promotional license plates with the number "LINUX," and yes, they still said "Live Free or Die" on them. I managed to wheedle one out of a trade show representative, knowing the history of the original "UNIX" promotional plates.

Besides the motto and the big number, the plates carry the Compaq logo, "1999" (the year they were made), and the statement "LINUX is a Registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds."

One of my favorite geek license plates is '4BSD755' on a California car, which happens to perfectly match the format for a generic license plate in that state. It could be a coincidence, but I suspect not.

California currently prohibits vanity plates which match the sequential plate patterns, although it's possible that was ordered before it was assigned and before they prohibited it. If it's a vehicle you see often, you can estimate the date of the plate based on its style and see if it was made earlier than it would have been if sequential.

Edit: It looks like if it's sequential, it would be a white plate, with California in cursive at the current (large) size, where the descender on the f almost touches the plate number, and it might have no subtitle or the sesquicentennial subtitle.

I assumed that too, but it doesn't appear to be prohibited.[1] Indeed, I tried 8BSD755 and 9BSD755 which were accepted. (The current sequential plates start with 7.)

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/wasapp/ipp2/initPers.do

On the (paper) order form[1] it says:

> DMV has the right to refuse any combination of letters and/or letters and numbers for any of the following reason(s): [...] it conficts with any regular license plate series issued.

My understanding is that all vanity plates are reviewed by at least one human, so it's possible they handle denying vanity plates that fit the sequential series that probably should have been denied in the online form.

[1] https://dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/6d97bdef-c5b1-46ee-a55...

My favorite was a VW Beetle with the plate "FEATURE". No, it's not a bug...

My neighbor had a plate EOF26Z in NJ. Surely I was the only one noticing patterns in a coincidence. EOF = #26 = Ctrl+Z in DOS.

My least favorite was a guy who worked at CompUSA in the mid 90s who had SBPNP32 (sound blaster 32 pnp)

I once knew a guy with an `ALT-F4` plate in Texas.

Might buy a minute if that's being radioed in....

In the Lisp Machine world in the early '80s, one guy's first car had HLRZ as his vanity plate, that's the PDP-10 instruction that implements the CAR (IBM 704 Contents of Address Register) operation, which gets you the first element in a list, and his second, or another's, was CADR, which gets you the second element, and was also the name of the 2nd generation, beyond the prototype Lisp Machine that was manufactured in small quantities by MIT and LMI.

Outside a Micro Center in central Ohio, on a nice lookin' Tesla, I saw the plate FSM 1337. I was convinced this was the geekiest geek around these parts, and when the guy walked up to the car to get in, I said "nice plate!". He had no idea what I was talking about. Zero. I had to explain the whole thing, and though I initially thought he was just pulling my leg, I then thought about it and realized that Ohio plates as given are three letters followed by four numbers. What are the chances???

Uh, to what does "FSM 1337" refer?

"Flying Spaghetti Monster", and '1337' is leet-speak for, well, 'leet'. Aka 'elite'.

This could happen in Georgia as well, which has the same license plate format. I'd like the plate CAB 1729, after the story Hardy told about Ramanujan. (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Hardy-RamanujanNumber.html) but I suspect that either someone out there already has it and doesn't know of its significance, or that they don't give out plates starting with CAB.

My favorite vanity licence plate is NULL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11361757

Driving up 280 one day I was overtaken by a hexadecimal-loving Shakespeare nerd with the license plate:

    2B OR D4

Knuth once wrote an article on mathematical vanity plates: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00283-010-9170-7

A new plate: https://twitter.com/barakkassar/status/788434103171284994

I had at various points in my life, "DAEMON" and "DEV NULL" (in FL).

I go with a standard issue plate now on a totally generic car.

Article is from 2012.

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