A guy in California has racked up thousands in tickets due to using NULL as his license plate, thus matching the interpreted non-entry if cops/LEOs don’t input a license plate on an issued ticket.
He’s still not out of the woods, but it’s an important lesson in using keywords for just about anything official.
It also reminds me of Chet’s old donotreply.com domain and all the crap he went through with it.
Hmm. I wonder if “EXEMPT” is taken?
I wondered about things like NOBODY or OTHER. It seems the guy in the article was going for a fun theme with NULL and his wife having VOID.
With any of them, I’m also wondering if the same kinds of things might be an issue. What a strange problem he created for himself.
I wonder what would happen if a lot more people did that…
There would be a lot of grumbling coders changing things, I’m sure.
Jesus, it’s an epidemic.
We should all change our last name to NONE.
Null is a real human name, you have to support it. Theres no “special strings” or “special characters”, thats lousy programming.
You don’t have to support it as a vanity plate option though.
The system should be more robust and not break because someone used NULL as a custom plate, but also they should’ve just never allowed NULL to be chosen as a custom plate in the first place.
Reminds me of the little boy who said “Common sense is not putting glue in your hair.”
Why not? It has no special meaning in human language. Cop or FBI should be banned strings, but the only bad implication of null is lousy programming.
It will be like banning O’Neil because you dont know how to escape the character.
The wolrd cant change to addapt itself to bad programmers. Bad programmers must improve.
More likely to be bad UI design or bad data entry.
There are all sorts of banned things for custom license plates—mostly around potentially offensive or religious subjects. My point is that they’ve always been heavily and somewhat arbitrarily restricted. In high school a friend with the last name Flickinger wanted “Flick” as a custom tag but it wasn’t allowed because in all caps “FLICK” looks too much like “FUCK” from a distance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No reason not to forbid NULL as well, and it’s probably a faster solution than finding a way to address the underlying problems with their system.
If we were talking about a problem actually recording someone’s name in some necessary infrastructure, sure, you can’t and shouldn’t prevent someone from having “Null” as some part of their name. Vanity plates are a luxury, and I favor the expedient solution. No one’s rights are being infringed.
Imagine if he went with NOT_NULL…
You post makes a lot of sense and is reasonable.
Damn you
Bring it …
But everyone loves Null the Gull in COH, right?
