There is a very simple system - country-wide in Israel - in which you pay parking by calling a cellphone number to start and finish parking. In addition there are pre-paid in car meters (highly unreliable) and boxes (like in Chicago). I found the cellphone convenient and very practical. You are billed directly to the credit card. Even if you forget to "close" you parking you pay for the maximum for on street parking (in Israel it is mostly 2 hours). You can even recharge, subscribing to an SMS service that reminds you about expiration (over the 2 hours).

What a memory. I used an Elliot 803b (8kwords - 2 instructions and a modifier per word!). The Library was handwritten (really a manual) by Hoare. A great start in CS. Had a nice Algol68 compiler and it played music! (AFAICR the MSB of a word was fed into a speaker - the fetch rate had to be sonic! - the machine could run almost 2000 instructions/second). BTW some micros popular in Europe - such as Sinclair based on Z80 ages after Elliot and far from it's style - - are completely forgotten?

The bad thing about the usage of this "new Ethernet" is not so much in the new link level congestion control (presumably for the sake of SCSI) but in "bypassing TCP/IP" - and with it all it's services (naming, routing, service discovery, zero-config, security etc.) and recreating them over Ethernet in proprietary form (at least for now) and not have them widely available. It is also doubtful that the new schemes are as the well thought through and "scale in time and network size" as the layered protocols we have in place now i.e., if they can survive transition to faster and larger network or they are a palliative for a perceived weakness of TCP/IP and a way to extend the life of the highly profitable market for Fiber Channel.