atomwaffel

> It seems wrong, or at least very wasteful, to force people to pay for state-produced entertainment.

The entertainment isn't produced by the state though. The BBC is owned and funded by the British public, not the state. The government isn't directly involved in the BBC, although "BBC Trustees are appointed by the British monarch on advice of government ministers"[0]. Other European countries have similar models.

Besides, and I understand that this is a contentious issue, I think that there are certain services that all members of a society should pay for, even if not everybody uses them. My taxes pay for roads even though I don't own a car. Bear in mind that the BBC also produces news and a lot of other content, all without ads and independent of commercial interests.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Governance_and_Corporate_S...

It's that time of the year where I'm feeling altruistic, so I just registered boxbytelyte.com for one year. Just let me know where you want it to point, and then I'll transfer the ownership to you in a year's time (or sooner if you like).

Also, have you thought about open-sourcing the game? That would definitely relieve people's qualms about downloading an anonymous binary blob.

Edit: Forgot that there are no direct messages on HN. You can reach me at domainname@boxbytelyte.com

From what they write in their live demo[1], it's about the dimensions of the plate rather than what's on them:

> OpenALPR supports both North American style (12 inches by 6 inches) and European style (52 cm by 11 cm) license plates.

That makes a bit more sense. Then again, the "Country" field there gives a choice of North American, European, Australia, Great Britain, Singapore, Korea.

I wonder if accuracy couldn't be improved quite a bit if they included heuristics for individual countries. For instance, German licence plates should be really easy to read thanks to their "forgery-impeding typeface"[2] which has uniquely distinctive features for each letter.

It's also not guaranteed that all European licence plates have those dimensions. Motorcycles and tractors for instance have taller, narrower plates, and cars where regular plates wouldn't fit (like imported or antique cars) can get special plates as well.

And then of course there's Switzerland which has wildly different dimensions and has changed its mind every few years[3].

[1] http://www.openalpr.com/demo-image.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

Oh yes, but those are through coaches[1] and they're still fairly common, especially for sleeper trains. The whole fun with slip coaches is that they'd be detached while the train was moving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_coach

I'd say that English is easier to learn than most languages (precisely because of that ubiquity), but harder to master. The analogy to PHP holds: PHP is everywhere (a lot of websites run on it), learning material is easy to come by, and it's widely understood (most commodity web servers will just take your .php files and run them without any trouble on your part), but it will take years until you stop tripping over its quirks.

I'm not an expert, but yes, when you disable Wi-Fi, your device will stop scanning for networks and broadcasting your MAC address, so you can no longer be tracked that way. More recently, phones have also started randomising MAC addresses while scanning (starting in iOS 8, I don't know about others), so you can only be tracked for a short time as long as your Wi-Fi is on but not connected.

Very droll. That photo was taken in West Berlin and the car in question is a BMW 600[1], built between 1957 and 1959. (Oddly enough, I saw its little sister[2] not far from that spot a few days ago.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_600

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetta

Not the original poster, but when you sign into a Wi-Fi network, the router needs to know where to send the packets, so it needs to have a way to identify your device. That's why all devices that can connect to a network have what's called a MAC address[1] – a very long number that is unique to your device. Your device also broadcasts that address when it scans for networks, so just about all the time. When you control several access points and a few of them see the same device at the same time, you can triangulate the location of that device down to a few metres.

The company I used to work for did something similar[2] at a conference over the course of three days. (You can drag on the map to highlight individual devices.) It's really cool and really quite creepy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

[2]: https://apps.opendatacity.de/relog/

The GeoNames Country Information table has a "Postal Code Regex" column that you might find interesting: http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/countryInfo.txt

A bit, but not that much. Most of it is marketing blurb. I couldn't find a good photo, but here's one that should at least give you an idea: https://instagram.com/p/teDSx_zPG7/?taken-by=bierbier_org

I know, and you could set the timeout higher to prevent these (the button becomes a placebo button that's still clickable but doesn't do anything), but it gets hard to draw a line at which the request really might have failed and the button should be re-enabled. I feel like this is a different problem that needs to be addressed server-side, both with quicker response times and single-use tokens.

Sorry, you might want to re-read my comment. My solution will only disable the button or link that has been clicked on for half a second, which ought to be enough to both prevent accidental and allow intentional resubmissions.

While I agree that you should include a one-time token with all sensitive forms, I don't think that disabling links/submit buttons on the first click is a bad idea in general. It's an easy fix that will immediately prevent most accidental redundant server requests, but as it's a client-side fix it's inherently unreliable.

What's wrong though is the author's solution of disabling _all_ links and submit buttons on the page indefinitely. Here's an alternative solution that only disables whatever has been clicked on for half a second:

    (function() {
      function stopClickEvent (ev) {
        ev.preventDefault();
        ev.stopPropagation();
      }
      document.body.addEventListener('click', function (ev) {
        if (ev.target.tagName === 'A' || ev.target.getAttribute('type').toLowerCase() === 'submit') {
          setTimeout(function () {
            // Needs to happen _after_ the request goes through, hence the timeout
            ev.target.addEventListener('click', stopClickEvent);
          }, 0);
          setTimeout(function () {
            ev.target.removeEventListener('click', stopClickEvent);
          }, 500);
        }
      });
    })();

Unlike the author's solution, this really works for links (they don't support the `disabled` attribute), it doesn't change the appearance of the button, it only disables one element, and it will work for elements that have been added to the document after the DOM was loaded. You can try it here: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/xGKdLX

Stack Exchange has private offices for their developers, and it seems to work well enough for them. They wrote an interesting blog post about the how and why: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-i...