Not News: There’s been a call for an ethics committee to investigate the conduct U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull, who circulated a racist e-mail making fun of Barack Obama. News: It was Judge Cebull who asked for the investigation.
”gunman be at west hall today” What happens when Autocorrect goes terribly wrong
No Tags: Why Danny White got more than $20,000 in tickets, and no sympathy from me
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A man is on trial for puncturing another man’s eye with a key during a fight outside a Philadelphia bar. The victim is on the stand, testifying, when his prosthetic eye suddenly pops out and falls into his hand. (What the judge decided) For links to CJA posts as soon … Continue reading →
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Jennifer O’Brien, a New Jersey first grade teacher, has been fired for writing on her Facebook page “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals,” and that her students should take part in a “scared straight” program. She’d intended the posts to be read only by her … Continue reading →
“I think that when a child is trying to save the world, I don’t think he should be punished for it” -Mandy Watkins, mother of Colorado second-grader Alex Evans During recess, Alex threw an imaginary hand grenade into a box full of “pretend evil forces.” You’d think school officials would … Continue reading →
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Looks like autocorrect got you too, Bill. Cebull corrects to Cahill.
Since he insists on holding on to his silly tag joke, Danny White clearly doesn’t deserve any sympathy, however, the people actually at fault here are the dimwitted programmers who neglected to provide a simple setting to indicate missing vehicle tags, rather than requiring DMV employees to type an error-prone character string into a data field.
‘The newspaper said the judge was “surprised the recipients of the email passed it along with his name still on it.” ‘
That makes him doubly dim. I’m glad not too many of my correspondents practice the one-button forwarding of jokey emails, but it does seem to be the usual habit. This just compounds his bad taste.
Kilby: I bet it’s not so much the programmers’ fault as it is a legacy of how it was handled when it was done by hand. If you don’t have a license plate, you have a specific code that you enter for the license plate field to determine that, and it makes sense that said code would be human-readable and human-writable.
Logically, and from a computer-science point of view, it makes more sense to have your error codes include characters that are disallowed from standard entry, but that’s not as human-friendly. From a human point of view, it makes sense to have a standard phrase that means “this guy has no tags”, and “no tags” is a good choice for that. And, indeed, I’ve heard of people doing this since before tickets were computerized. At that point, of course, the damage was more limited: when a person with a “NO TAGS” or “NO PLATE” or “NONE” (depending on how the local police handled these things) got a ticket for some other infraction, then they got the “no plate” ticket as well. Having ALL the “no plate” infractions from EVERYBODY being shipped to your house, THAT requires computers. But the general error predates them.
Yes, this is, effectively, a SQL injection attack (aka a Bobby Tables attack), but, given that the guy is attacking HIMSELF, it’s hard to feel THAT much sympathy for him. I get why it’s fun to see how systems break, but, once you’ve done it once, why KEEP doing it, when you are making your own life more difficult by doing so? Do it once, prove the exploit/hack is possible, report it, then move on.
I like how their “fix” is to revoke his license plate, along with other “confusing” vanity plates… completely ignoring the flaw is in THEIR system. Eliminate all the legal plates and continue with the things CAUSING the errors, human or computer.
Well, it’s the cheapest fix. Everyone is always complaining about overspending. I’d bet you that if they hired a programmer to fix the system, the public would call for the responsible people to be fired for not doing the obvious thing and cancelling the plates. (Incidentally, there was talk of changing are plate format here in Denmark when the numbers were about to run out. For some reason the police hadn’t thought about just restarting from the other end with numbers that haven’t been used in decades.)
You defeat your own objection, though, by referring to “legal plates”. It’s up the authority to decide what’s legal (“fuck” isn’t, I’m sure), so this is well within their right.
And WordPress doesn’t tag that for moderation…
Cebull’s joke seems more a “$lut” joke about Obama’s White mother than a racist joke.
Implying that the best explanation for a mixed-race child is a party that involved bestiality is pretty racist.
Well, you say “racist”, I say “sexist”, but I think we can agree these belong around the water-cooler not as E-mails.
The “no tags” thing illustrates the problem with “in-band signalling”. There should be one box to write in the license plate number and another one to mark if there is no license plate.
Danny White got his “NO TAGS” vanity plate 25 tears ago as a joke. Yeah. I seriously doubt the Washington D.C. systems were anywhere close to being totally computerized, much less fully integrated back then. Mr. White’s “joke” was his counting on human interaction at some point in the process interpreting “NO TAGS” literally and possibly short circuiting any attempt to track him down for a parking violation. Karma’s a bitch.
Agreed. The vanity plate NO TAG is a double-edged sword.
And even if we want to say of the NO TAGS guy that it is to a large extent a problem of his own making, it’s hard to similarly fault the guy in another state who just took his own initials NV which turned out to be another such in-band signal. He seems just a victim, not a joker caught in his own cleverness.
The judge says he’s not racist, but he sent it out because he’s anti-Obama. Ignoring the whole racist issue, since when has it been appropriate to spread nasty emails about the family of people you don’t like? Making rude jokes about the person is much more appropriate; even better is if you can keep your discussion to the issues.
Seriously, calling people sluts shouldn’t be part of our national political discussion, particularly people like Obama’s mother who never chose to be part of the public eye.
I saw the Obama email as misogynist as well as racist.
I think the government of DC needs a little proofreading instruction. That guy’s plate clearly says, “No-tags.”
And that guy should also, imho, get down on his knees and thank whatever higher power he believes in that he has a job that will *let* him take time off every month to go down to the courthouse for this nonsense.
The “NO TAGS” thing is actually a very old issue. For instance, there’s this article on snopes about a guy whose license plate read “NOPLATE”. (He didn’t choose it out of malice: it was his third choice for a customized plate and he intended it to mean he didn’t want a custom plate if his first and second choices weren’t available. It turned out they weren’t and the DMV took the “NO PLATE” at face value — and the guy was amused enough to keep it.)
All this could be avoided by having officers write something that could not possibly be a valid license plate (like a simple elongated dash) when there is no plate or the plate is not visible, or by the DMV refusing to issue plates that can be interpreted as having a special meaning. It’s the system that’s at fault here. When you design a plug for and a socket, and the plug has to go in a certain way, instead of saying “this way up” you design the plug so that it cannot possibly be plugged in the wrong way. Same idea here: just design the system so that the wrong thing can never happen.