There is a very easy way around this issue, have the cameras centrally connected. Each day they download the current list of "valid" plates. If a valid plate is scanned, ignore it, that means no storage of time of scan, or location of the camera that did the scan etc... If however an "invalid" plate is scanned, upload all informaton about the plate.

If further investigation finds that the "invalid" plate is infact a "valid" plate then discard all info about the scan.

You could speed up the frequency of the database updates, but I doubt that it would improve the hit rate much, the only difference would be a priority update when a car is reported stoled or involved in some other crime...

There is no need to store data on people driving to work and home, picking up their kids and generally going about their daily lives. This is a massive invasion of privacy, and should not be accepted as "normal".

Disclaimer, I live in New Zealand, I hope my government hasn't slipped this far down the police state slope.

Not every system is so simple, but this is great in principal.....a machine should not be able to damage itself if something goes wrong, such as a failed limit switch or someone bypassing said limit switch to get the machine to overrun. Human safety is a whole other mess.

How is it right that the current generation has to pay for the crimes of a past generation?

If you steal something should your brother pay for it? How about someone you don't know but has the same colour skin? Or someone whos ansestors came from the same country as you did?

As for your last line "Morally and legally, Aotearoa belongs to the Maori. My culture is not Maori, it's European. So I left and came home to Europe." I call bullshit, as a 2nd gen Kiwi I am a native of New Zealand as were my parents. My grandparents were born in the UK, but that doesn't make England home.

But.....but we are riding the train already and don't know how to get off.....

Not sure, is it on the back of a truck or being dropped from a height?

Are we considering an "ideal" situation or should air resistance be factored in?

As both a Dilbert and XKCD fan, I appricaite them both for different reasons.

DIlbert often highlights the funny / depressing work side of my life. (Control systems engineer) e.g. http://dilbert.com/strips/comi... recienlt just about made me choke on my coffee.

Where as XKCD appeals to my geeky nature, though also applicable to work situations sometimes e.g. https://xkcd.com/927/ but there are so many others that come up in ever day life for those of us that are geeky

Deoderant is for smelly people, I don't smell so therefore no need for deoderant. Pure logic.

This happened where my partner worked (geothermal power station in NZ). She was hired as an electrical engineer about 5 years ago at 22 and was the youngest engineer, along with a group of seven other recient grads. But outside this the next youngest guys are in there mid 50's (some now in their 60's), basically what happened was that the company was privatised from govt control in the 1980's the company decided to stop the practice of hiring new people and training them, and suddenly realised that shit soon all their engineers were going to retire soon so they better get on to that....

To add salt to the wound, the company restructured reciently and my partner was made redundant, not because she wasn't any good but because the company didn't want to pay out the guys with massive retirement/redundancy packages that had been there 35+ years.

As soon as here redundancy was confirmed she rang an old boss from a summer job and had a job offer the next day.

If engineered correctly, the total force applied at ground level could be "up" rather then "down".

Lizard poisons Spock

I have always found the difference is time, "vine ripened" in a store is always until x% are red and therefore can be harvested. Home grown you just pick the ripest 1 or 2 that you want at the time, ripening the rest further. The longer you leave them on the vine the better the taste gets...until they drop off by themselves.

Where as I saw it and thought it was Kung-Fu Panda 10...

The problem with Vista was XP, XP was waaaay to popular and in use too long.

I'm not saying XP was awesome, but with a billion+ daily users there was a lot of momnetum......then they changed where all the things were that people knew that required special ways of doing things to get to work....they renamed things that didn't need renaming.....and there was no option to go back and have a "XP look and feel" with similar/same names etc...

It was at that point I looked at other options....been using linux ever since. Still don't know my way properly around Win7 though I am learning as I sometimes need it for work, Win8 is a mystery to me. I had a new computer with Win 8 on...it lasted 4 days till I was frustrated and changed it to Ubuntu.

Wanted to mod this funny....but unsure if post is serrious? I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law but this is more of the reverse situation where I am unsure if the original post is serrious....

On a related note what is the name of the law for this situation? I'm sure slashdot can help me out with this.

Biophysics?