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Comment by jjindev | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)

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In 1986, Robert Barbour applied for a personalized plate. The DMV gives you three choices: he picked SAILING, BOATING. If he couldn't get those, he didn't want a personalized plate, so he put NO PLATE. Of course, he ended up with NO PLATE. Since that's what the police put as the license if a car doesn't have a plate, he ended up with 2500 tickets. Eventually the DMV told the police to write "NONE" instead of "NO PLATE" and said "We're just hoping that no one will come up with plates that say NONE." (Which would be ironic if the parent comment is accurate.)

The article is pretty entertaining - it talks about him becoming semi-famous and getting pulled over because cops wanted their picture taken with him: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-06-23/news/vw-20054_1_licen...

The comp.risks article (where I originally read about this) is also amusing: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6.45.html

Second only to Mr Prawo Jazdy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7899171.stm

Reminds me of "the Phantom of Heilbronn", and alleged female serial killer the German police used DNA to link to more than 40 crimes. It baffled the investigators for more than two years until they found out that the DNA was from pollutions in the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn

If it's the same one I remember the plate was "NO TAGS"[1].

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/no-tags-meet-sauced...

What do you know, there's an xkcd for that too: http://xkcd.com/1105/

If I could change one thing about human history, I'd remake the 0 and O's (# and letter) and the I, l, and 1 (letter i, letter L, and #) so you could never confuse them in hard to read CAPATCHs.

Depending on the font sometimes even 5 and S and 8 and B too.

Having 0 and o next to each other on a keyboard is great too.

There's a relevant XKCD for every situation.

Similar to the Florida plate, A55 RGY

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/florida/assorgy-story

For some reason Florida plates use 2 oranges now...

License plate was X and it had to do with parking tickets.

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