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from the big-brother's-private-sector-sibling? dept.
If the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a San Diego-based Republican state senator have their way, it will soon become legal for Californians to cover their license plates while parked as a way to thwart automated license plate readers.
Those devices, now commonly in use by law enforcement nationwide, can capture license plate numbers at a very high rate of speed, as well as record the GPS location, date, and time that a particular plate is seen. Those plates are then run against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted cars, and a cop is then alerted to the presence of any vehicle with a match on that list.
As written, the new senate bill would allow for law enforcement to manually lift a cover, or flap, as a way to manually inspect a plate number. The idea is not only to prevent dragnet license plate data collection by law enforcement, but also by private companies. A California company, Vigilant Solutions, is believed to have the largest private ALPR database in America, with billions of records.
Do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:47PM (2 children)
Is the author a complete idiot who doesn't know speed is already a rate, so he's effectively saying rate of rate of speed, i.e. acceleration?
No, because that's NOT how the word is EVER used. I never was aware of this before, but after reading your post, I searched for "rate of speed" in a search engine, which immediately turns up a number of pedantic discussions complaining about its usage.
Huh. I'll completely agree that it is REDUNDANT, but so are many other examples of English idioms, so I'm not sure why this one causes such concern. But the assertion that you (and a number of other internet folks) are making is simply not how the word works. For example, if you type "at a rate of 60 words/minute," it doesn't mean that you accelerate your typing at 60 words/minute per something else. Words/minute is a "speed" as is 60 miles/hour or km/hour or whatever. What exactly is the usage difference between saying driving "at a rate of 90 miles/hour" and "driving at a high rate of speed"?
I think the confusion comes in because SOMETIMES the word "rate" is used with the time units implied. For example, when we speak of the "rate of inflation," it's almost always assumed that we mean inflation per year. But that only works in specific contexts where the time unit is clear by English usage convention. On the other hand, saying "a rate of 60 words" is ambiguous. Yes, the most likely time unit is probably minutes (whether we're measuring typing speed or speaking speed or whatever), but generally we'd clarify by saying "a rate of 60 words per minute" or whatever.
Also, please note that the very first definition of "rate" at Merriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com] is "reckoned value," i.e., a deliberate measurement. That seems to be why it gets used by police and legal statutes and such -- "I observed him travelling at a rate of 90 miles per hour" implies a measurement. I'll agree it's still redundant, but again it's hardly the only place English does that. And note that such measurements do not have to CHANGE over time. We can measure a "rate of crime" which is not a measure of how much crime is changing, but simply the amount of crime (generally measured as a crimes per X people). It's true that such "rates" often have an implicit time element too, often "per year," but that's not actually required.
In any case, even when these implicit "per years" are assumed in English usage (as in "rate of inflation"), it is NEVER assumed that one is invoking a second-order time derivative. So, sorry internet ranters, but there's absolutely no justification in any other English usage for assuming that "rate of speed" should mean "acceleration."
Seriously, do you united stateans never auto-correct these phrases brought in to common circulation by your brain-dead media?
The term "rate of speed" is quite common in English and particularly in legal statutes. Note that despite your association of this as an Americanism, it has been common usage in both American and British English since at least the 1800s, as a quick Google Books [google.com] search can show). Google Ngram viewer does indicate [google.com] that its frequency as a phrase has declined somewhat since it was most popular in the early 1900s.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:29PM (1 child)
I think the worst thing about the word in this usage is redundancy. Every or virtually every text* where it occurs can be improved by removing it, and without any sort of drawback.
She types at a rate of 80wpm NO! ====> She types at 80wpm.
travelling at a rate of 90 miles per hour NO! ====> traveling at 90 miles per hour
the interest rate is 18 percent (yearly) NO! ====> the interest is 18 percent (yearly)
*I say text specifically because while redundancy is a bad thing in text, it's not always a bad thing in spoken communication. Some redundancy is good there, as it helps to minimize the need to backtrack and repeat or clarify things that are somehow garbled in transmission.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:50PM
Absolutely agree. But, as I said, it's hardly the only English idiom where redundancy is common [grammarist.com].
What I find amusing is how rather than realizing this is just another example of redundancy, so many folks have apparently tried to read a physics analogy into it that doesn't agree with any other English usage. (Even in "physics speak," "rate" isn't used that way. "Rate of position" doesn't mean speed, if it means anything at all. "Rate of acceleration" even appears in many physics textbooks and doesn't mean a third-order derivative. Etc.)