Licensed to Bill
snopes.com
snopes.com
In trying to come up with a suitable name, I had decided that I wanted it to be "$something Ventures" but I wasn't sure about the $something part. Finally, "null" popped into my head and it seemed like a good fit since the company didn't really have much of a "real purpose". Thus, Null Ventures LLC was born.
Since that time, I've received countless pieces of snail mail where the company name appears as " VENTURES LLC" -- note the space at the beginning.
I still giggle every time I see one and I often wonder if I've just screwed up some application somewhere and, if so, how bad.
Yeah... they were tech conferences.
Anyone who speaks Polish will understand why, for the rest of us: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
And of course, she then thought this was tons more awesome than the submitted article.
Guess it never hurts to try. Our previous most-involved technical discussion revolved around the topic of how to copy a photo from one folder to another.
There was a "data warehouse" piece of the overall system and I was often tasked with writing batch jobs to pull various data out of it. The resulting files were in either fixed-width or CSV format and so we "massaged" them a bit before writing them out to .xls files that the end-user could work with.
The purpose of most of these was to build a mailing list so that something could be sent out (via snail mail). The criteria were often along the lines of "I need a list of all <PROGRAM> students who haven't registered for the next semester" and such.
In each and every resulting data file that was downloaded after the job completed, we had to filter out records for the name "ERROR, ERROR" (last, first). I never found out why but apparently the registrar's office had for years been putting names in as "ERROR, ERROR" when it was illegible/unavailable/whatever. Thousands of these had accumulated over the couple of decades they'd been doing this.
(Side note: they really regretted it once a new upgraded system was being set up. They had to manually review each and every one of the "ERROR, ERROR" records.)
Here in Virginia we have many special thematic plates to choose from. One of them is a colorful, fingerpaint-themed plate that says "kids first" at the bottom. Some guy ordered one of these as a vanity plate that said "Eat the".
He had the plate for years, but last year someone at the DMV somehow got clued in and took his plate back, claiming that it had potentially obscene connotations.
EDIT: See the picture of the kids theme in bentcorner's reply.
Anyone with a correct understanding of the problem domain would know you have to cope with missing plates by indicating they are missing and not by using (many) different sentinel values. The fact each city/county/state uses a different value indicates the whole ticket processing system is a screwed up mess.
The North American system of plates essentially identifying a person and not a vehicle is weird. The UK still allows vanity plates but they are bound to the vehicle (and to a current keeper - when you sell it the plates go with the vehicle to the new keeper unless you make special arrangements). I still find it odd to take the plates off a vehicle being sold and to have to get them put on to the new one.
A vehicle without plates in violation of traffic/parking laws should be towed (or in some places it could be blown up as a security threat - Northern Ireland that used to be a regular event and a joy-riders post-drive fun to remove the plates and wait for the fireworks).
At least if it is towed, the fines can be sorted out before the return of the vehicle rather than wasting time (and money) on a no-hope chase of some unidentifiable owner unless some schmuck happens to have a vanity plate matching your chosen sentinel value [in which case you then have the extra expense of wasting time cancelling the ticket or even wasting court time before it gets dismissed].
And sentinel values aren't just a problem of the system, but there would also be a human element. Even if you had a "no plate" option some would likely continue to write noplate. The current system might even support null values for all we know.
I just figured this is how people end up with license plates on their wall from their first vehicle etc.
However this is another aspect of my point - there is no clear uniformity on the relationship and handling of vehicle registration, plates, ticketing and enforcement. When things are poorly defined, you get inconsistent implementation and Bad Things(tm) happen as a result.
Considering just the wasted postage alone, thousands of dollars of public funds were wasted sending out obviously stupid and invalid tickets - totally avoidable if someone had stopped and thought about what they were doing.
Enforcement systems like this are always in danger of running away as a result and some schmuck being bankrupted or jailed (if states allow that) despite being able to demonstrate conclusively that they have done nothing wrong and are not responsible for any of the tickets. Public bodies are not good at admitting they are operating a fundamentally flawed system and it is always easier to ignore the small numbers of victims of their failure and hope no-one else notices. It does not take a lot of research to find examples of flagrant miscarriages of justice in these sorts of situations.
I always assumed other people ended up with a plate on the wall in the same way I did; by removing them from the car after your X drove it into a cliff-face and wrote the vehicle off.
> Well, they can just leave the number blank and we will allow NULL on the database.
> No can't have that. Staff are lazy and won't bother entering the number. We must make it mandatory and force them to enter a number.
> Okay, how about a tickbox they can tick to indicate that no number was present.
> Nope. We'd have to re-design the form. And that means re-designing the OCR system. Costs too much.
> Ehmm. We could have them enter a special, 'NOPLATE' code. Of course, you'd have to choose a code that isn't currently used, and inform your colleagues that it is reserved, so it isn't assigned to some joker. Ha.
> Oh that would never happen. Okay, we'll put it down on the Project Risk Register. Someone remember to do that.
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