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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 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.)