Ordinary Nothing

I have a friend who is studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Pol-Sci at TAU.

And one of their courses, passed by a lecturer who is not too good at teaching, introduces a new grading system. Nothing which isn’t widely used in some other types of degrees, but new for them. And the reactions of the students do not inspire too much confidence in the system.

This is from an IM chat with my friend, stripped of names and of interjected sentences that are not relevant to the subject, but not edited apart from that:

Yaron: How technical do they expect you to get?
Friend: very. Plus, since they are marking us on a curve as opposed to on the actual basis of merit, whoever gets the most intelligent person to do their homework for them gets the best mark!
Yaron: Youch!
Yaron: Don’t let the faculty dean or academic board catch you with that quote…
Friend: meaning???
Yaron: Grading on a curve is stupid. IMNSHO
Friend: yeah well, its their stupid system…. they have to take responsibility
Friend: and all people keep saying is:"I’m paying a PHD student to do mine, that way I definitely wont be in the bottom Part of the estimate…"
Yaron: That’s insane.
Friend: so….guess how much chance I have of getting a decent grade on my own…
Friend: but thats what happens when you add that element of competition to a bunch of deranged politics students
Yaron: Right. I forgot. PolSci. Where the subject material is used to bribe people…
Friend: see, i just figure its not fair if I try my best but get a 50 (or less) cause the rest of the class is paying a PHD student to do it for them. The exam is at least fair cause they cant cheat much on that
Yaron: If they know people are going THAT far out, they may decide to take the papers that don’t look like their students made, and disqualify them.
Yaron: It’s possible to differentiate between work made by BA students and work made by a PHD…
Friend: they wont. They cant prove it
Friend: plus, the lecturer would be flattered on his apparent teaching skills
Friend: This is why I hate political science this year…
Yaron: I can understand you, if this is the way things are going.
Yaron: Did I mention I think it’s insane?
Friend: I just dont feel confident in my ability to do a work that measures up to the "standard" if its going to be marked that way

We tried to figure out what may be good about the new system, but didn’t came up with much:

Yaron: There’s always the anonymous note option. Tell the lecturer, or someone higher up.
Friend: they dont care…
Friend: they just want money and jobs….
Friend: plus, the PHD students could do with the money at the moment….what with the taxes and all
Yaron: Trust you to find the moral justification. ;-)
Friend: ;)
Friend: its not their fault that people are taking advantage of the system!
Yaron: Maybe the university is doing it on purpose, as a community service.
Friend: exactly…

And in case it isn’t clear, a single student grumbling about paying someone to do a paper for them can usually be safely ignored, but when several start to exhibit this attitude it means they’re actually going to do it, and so are several more with enough intelligence to keep quiet about it.

That’s one way to show that even B.A. students serve mid-term papers at a level which wouldn’t shame a Ph.D. student elsewhere. It must be very impressive to show professors from other universities random sample papers from a B.A. class.

Oh, and just for the record, my friend did not pay anyone else to do the work. No one with, or studying for, a Ph.D. was involved.
I’ll know more about the actual grades in a couple of weeks.

Like almost anyone with an email address these days, I’m quite used to getting the general Nigerians needing help to smuggle money, or offers to enlarge my… err… mortgage. These are all non targeted. The senders got the email address from someplace or tried it randomly.

Today I got a new message, offering me to help promote my website. They had the real website address on the subject line and message body. It was even a website I know. Only it wasn’t mine.

Sans images and other HTML bits:

Hi,

I visited http://stupidsecurity.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I would like to introduce to you an affordable service where we can help enhance your online presence globally.

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It takes only minutes to sign up for our service. We’ll do the rest! You’ll be surprised how simple it is to now reach out to an international market and increase the visibility of your website.

Do let me know how I may assist you better with workmiracle.com!

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Not interested in our www.workmiracle.com service? To be taken off our mailing list, please follow the instructions here.

Now Stupid Security is an excellent and most interesting site, but it’s hardly mine. It is on my blog-roll here, and I have a link to it on some post, but it doesn’t justify deciding it’s mine. And I didn’t get other copies of these message regarding other sites I link to from this blog.

The other option is that they got my email address from there, which is possible since I do have an account there. This seems even more silly, though. Someone should harvest email addresses from a website about security, and then go to all the posters there and offer them to promote the site ?

Yet I find it very hard to believe this was random. The likelihood is too small…

It’s a very targeted message, only targeted at the wrong person, and they had to know that by the way they got the addresses. That would make them both clever and extremely stupid.

Or was this the brainless human engineering trick where I’m supposed to think I got it by mistake, and why not take advantage of the wonderful offer myself? Some people are dumb enough for this, but how many of the people that post on Stupid Security are?
It would take more than a miracle to work…  ;-)

The offer of being indexed in no less than 300,000 search engines is very tempting, though. Especially since an alt tag on an image linked to from the message (not posted here) reads "Guaranteed search engine submission promotion optimixation services".
Who can resist being optimixed on so many search engines, by such professionals, eh?

The governor of Sicily is to stand trial for assisting the Mafia.
Although quite naturally he denies the charges:

"In the trial we will show that Cuffaro is not involved with assisting
the Mafia", defence lawyer Claudio Gallina Montana was quoted as saying
by the Apcom news agency

Clearly, innocent until proven guilty, and so on and so forth. And I assume proving connections to the Mafia can prove a bit… err… difficult.

Well, a TV crew for an Italian news program recorded him on his way to the trial. When out of the blue a nicely dressed person appears, notices him walking, comes over hurriedly, makes a very polite and deep bow of obeisance, and kiss his hand. All this while the governor tries to shoo him away, since he is aware he is being filmed.

Anyone who have seen any Mafia movie would have recognized something quite similar to a proper show of respect to a Mafia Don.

So did the Italian reporters, who supposedly don’t have to rely on American movies. They tried to speculate about the other reasons that there surely must be to explain the behaviour of the passerby. Because, noooo, surely the governor cannot be a Don, or involved in the Mafia. No way.
They would have sounded almost convincing if the overtones of sarcasm were not so obvious…

All in all, Italian TV news are surely fun for the whole family.

Either Ask Jeeves have some bored new employees, or they officially have some serious concerns about they way people see them (Nice, but not too good in relevancy) and believe that their blog indexing abilities are somewhat lacking.

During the last day this not particularly popular blog of mine has gotten two hits from the ask.com domain. Both from a Bloglines subscriber running a search (a subscribed, repeated search. Not a one time search) there (and not in Ask Jeeves). Says something about how well they believe they index blogs.

One search was for "Ask Jeeves" and one for "Jeeves".
Since I have one entry (Hey, that’s two now) that mentioned Ask Jeeves, it was shown in both their search results. And despite it being very obviously not relevant (but then again, we did say that Jeeves had a relevancy problems with searches, no? Maybe it starts with the real humans and propagate to the engine from there?) they clicked through to read the full post.
And yes, the excerpt is enough to ascertain that the post does not talk about the search engine, but only mentioned in passing that it’s about the question that got into my referrer log.

Is this a good thing, that they show an interest about what people think about them? Or is that an indication that there are problems over there and they’re desperate for something to help?
And what should it mean that the team of a large search engine uses a different search engine to constantly monitor themselves? Is it OK since they don’t index blogs purposefully? Is it an indication that they just now decided blogs are important and are in fact working on it?

Or was it all just a bored employee that wants to know what people think about their company, and picked what they thought to be the best tool for the job? Still says something…

I find it amusing, in any case. Maybe Jeeves won’t.
At least this post is somewhat relevant, if they get here.

What a truly appalling idea. Sending ads to people’s cellphones when they come near a store, and charging a fee if the person (or at least their phone) enters the store.

Personally, receiving ads on my cellular phone would actually strongly discourage me from buying anything from the ad sponsor. I might, however, go in and out of the store repeatedly, just to make them pay (pun intended).

More than that, this idea has some serious technical problems which I don’t quite see as solvable.

If people receive the ad when they come close to a store, then any person intending in advance to shop there will receive it too. And when they get into the store, the store must then pay for a supposed ad-induced entry… Unlike a web click-through, there’s no good way to separate people that entered because of the ad from people that entered regardless (or despite) of it.

Just brilliant.

The comparison to web advertising would be more like placing an ad at the home page of a site, promoting that selfsame site, and having the owners pay for every viewer of the ad.
Or more realistically (if I must), it’s like tracking who saw an ad, and making a site owner pay when they go there, even if not by a click. Hey, since large ad provider actually track ad viewing today, they could implement it right now. Whenever you see an ad, they can check their cookie to see if you saw a previous ad for the site you’re browsing now. And if so, make the site owner pay. It’s the exact same model. Yet somehow I don’t see people paying for it… So why should it work better with brick-and-mortar?
Paying for anyone who shopped at your place, and who have also seen an ad, is not a good idea. The connection is too tenuous.

Not to mention, since some people are like me in the great love for being spammed with ads on their phone, would the ad service also offer a refund for people getting the ad and not going into the store? After all, the ad sponsor could claim that it was a potential customer who was lost due to the ad… The connection between seeing the ad and not going in, and seeing the ad and going in, is of about the same strength. If you accept one, you should accept the other, no?
Hmmm… This actually could catch up on the web. Anyone buying ads would love to get paid for ads that people saw without ever going into their site afterward. If an ad provider offered this, I’d consider buying ads from them myself…

I was looking at my referrer logs (currently not yet a time consuming task, if anyone wonders), and saw that someone decided to ask Jeeves how to "stop customers switching from margarine to butter".

I guess the reference was due to this entry re trans fats (although as usually happens they got to the home page, much after the relevant post was no longer there).

Margarine is bad and unhealthy. It’s to be expected that customer who switched to it from butter, mistakenly believing it’s the healthier alternative, will go back to the better tasting (and healthier) original. And yet there are those who want them to stay… I assume margarine sellers, since apart from greed there’s really no reason for anyone to so…
If this was before the US elections, it would have been worth checking whether the margarine industry supports Bush or Kerry…

Unless… Hmmm… There is another option for people who will want to keep everyone on the health-hazard alternative… Terrorists!
This must be it! I’m not sure if it should fall under bio-terrorism or under usage of chemical weapons. Maybe both.
Osama must be eating fresh butter, and laughing gleefully of all the westerns killing themselves with their margarine.
Listen customers! Switch from margarine to butter, or the terrorists win!

It’s somewhat old news, but I only recently went over the two latest issues of World Wide Words, and saw this lovely bit. I probably wouldn’t have picked on this one if it didn’t involve the Marines, but having a friend who’s a JAG addict, and so turning from a sporadic to a regular viewer myself, I tend to pick on anything amusing involving the US Navy or Marines…

This is an official Marine Corps release announcing a training mission on Wake Island.
And there are several problems with it…

According to the Marines, Wake island is uninhibited. Although maybe they got confused and meant uninhabited. Could be. If you want to run training with missiles and explosives, and choose a small island with nothing much but and old and abandoned military base, it makes sense. Except that the island have about 200 residents¹, civilian contractors for the US military. That doesn’t quite fit the definition of uninhabited. I’m sure if during training a Stinger missile kills some of these people, a claim of "They weren’t there. The island is uninhabited." won’t convince anyone…
But then again, they couldn’t have meant uninhibited as well. It’s not as if the people there run around naked and have wild orgies all day, or whatever. It’s not even some indigenous tribe. They’re Americans brought there by the USAF years ago. And have reportedly not descended into barbarism…

And if this poor choice of words isn’t bad enough, according to one Maj. Tracy L. Peacock “The importance of this training cannot be understated”. Which should make about anyone wonder why bother, no?

Maybe the Marines should supply their forces a few less Stingers and a few more dictionaries. At least to those who are expected to interact with the media…

¹. Which is agreed upon not only by those residents, but also by the official CIA world factbook, and the Wikipedia entry. Which I only bother mentioning because, well, if you’re the sort of person who really doesn’t trust governments, but do trust "the people", don’t bother, as the relevant part from Wikipedia seems directly copied from the CIA. Or at least I assume it’s not the other way around ;-)

Driving to work today, stopping at a traffic light, I looked a bit at the cars around…
Directly on my left there was a car with a 50+ years old driver, with tattoos on his arms and back, lots of body hair, a major pot belly, serious lack of muscles, and a more serious lack of shirt.

If I were going to the beach, I’d expect to see these things. But on the road ?! On a highway ?! Not something I ever saw or expect to. I guess there really is a first time for everything.

I only hope the only thing he was missing was a shirt (and a diet, and some physical workout, but that’s beside the point). I couldn’t, and did not try to, see more.

I’ve recently made another order of several CDs from CD Baby.

This latest order arrived with a few problems: one of the CDs was missing¹, and two were cracked.
The missing CD was clearly their fault, so I wouldn’t have expected problems from anyone. But in this case they also made no problem at all about sending replacements for the cracked CDs.
They didn’t demand that I’ll mail them the defective CDs back. They didn’t say it was a problem in shipment, or my own fault for asking the CDs without the plastic jewel-box. They just emailed back that they’re sorry, and shipped a new package straight off.

This is the proper way to do it.
I can get the stores that demand returning the original, they’re probably worried about fraud. But from the consumer POV it would create a very bad experience, and anyone demanding I’ll ship something back internationally would have probably lost a customer, especially considering it’s not a repeated occurrence.

While I’m at it, some other (good) things about CD Baby:

1. They have a very wide selection of artists, some extremely good, and all from RIAA-free independent labels (So if you care, there’s no need to go check the RIAA Radar before purchasing).
2. The you-may-also-like recommendations made overall much more sense than what I’m used to in other places like Amazon. I’m not sure why, since I suppose both are based on purchase statistics and recommendation of real people, but that’s the way it is.
3. For returning customers, they send an extra surprise CD in each shipment. From my experience (In the cases where it wasn’t a collection, of course) the match for my taste wasn’t perfect, but still good. And they might have done better if I’d bought in smaller batches, since the obvious matches they had – I already saw and bought.
4. They are willing to send CDs without the plastic boxes. This both reduces the original shipment charges (less weight/volume), and drastically reduces the chances that someone in border customs will open the package (it being small. You can fit about 10 CDs in the volume of one plastic CD box)). Of course it can result in cases where rough handling will damage the CDs, but this is the only case it happened to me so far, over several purchases. And I’m still not sure this is why these CDs were cracked, considering the cracked ones were inside the package surrounded by perfectly whole CDs.
5. Samples for audio tracks are usually available for most tracks, are long, and are in MP3.

Certainly, unless I want a specific artist which they don’t sell, they remain my preferred audio CDs store.

¹ For which I noticed they have a sort of an excuse. The band changed the name, and reissued the CD with a new cover and track order. Possibly there was someone that didn’t find the requested CD, and another person that knew there is no problem and they have it in stock…

[update: Also sent the story to Stupid Security, considering that this blog have a very small amount of readers so far... In addition, there's a slight followup with my boss]

My building at work has a burglar alarm system. The alarm is controlled by a keypad, and when the office doors are opened (when the alarm was set and is working) a numerical code has to be entered in order to prevent it from going off.
So far so good, pretty ordinary and pretty much like what I have at home.

Another part of the burglar alarm service I have at home is that if the alarm goes off, but the code is entered to shut it down a few second afterward, we get a phone call by someone at the service to verify that it’s really us, and that we were just slightly delayed or mistyped the number by accident. In order to make sure it’s really us we are asked to provide a secret code word that we supplied the service in advance, and which no one else knows.
That’s also normal. As long as we keep this code word secret, and it’s not something easily guessable, we can trigger the alarm by mistake without causing too much havoc.

The service at the office is somewhat similar, but there’s another feature that my boss decided to use. They also call in case the doors are opened and the alarm is turned off properly using the numerical code, if the time is suspect. The idea is that while it’s expected for someone to turn off the alarm in the morning of a workday, and set it at night, it’s not normal to turn it off at night or during the weekend, so they should make sure it’s not a burglar that waited until the office is empty.
Makes sense. The burglar is not supposed to know the numerical code, but the keypad is probably not too sophisticated, so this makes it complicated to just bypass it or hack it in some way.

The problem is that this service apparently does not quite get the idea of a secret code. A few months ago I left the office last, set the alarm, locked the doors, and then remembered that I forgot something in the office. I went back, opened the door, entered the alarm code, took whatever it was I forgot, and as I was ready to go out again, the phone rang.
A lady on the line identified herself as calling from the security company, and asked for the secret code. I was not aware of any secret code, and told her that. I then added that if she can wait a moment I’ll get my boss on his cellular and ask him.
To which she replied that it’s alright, the code is his cellular phone number, so I can just give her that. I gave her the number, and that was that. Seemed very silly, since it’s basically security by obscurity (You need to know that the code is the number). And security by obscurity as a rule doesn’t work. In the time it took me to search for his cellular phone number, anyone else could have found it either. There are various business cards, and papers with company stationary, in the office.
I assumed, however, that I was only told that I need to provide the number since I already said I knew it.

Until today. I left the office, and then noticed I forgot my cellular phone inside. So I got back, opened the building, and turned off the alarm. About a minute and a half later the phone rang. The delay itself was a problem, since if I didn’t expect the call, I could have easily picked my cell and lock everything out again before they called, causing them to believe there was an illegal entry. But I waited for the phone this time, so this was not a problem.
There was another problem, though. The girl on the phone asked for the code. I mumbled something like "sure… give me a sec…" and searched my phone book. She apparently understood that I wasn’t sure what the password is, and decided to be helpful. She told me I need to give the phone number of my boss (By his name, of course, not by saying he’s my boss). And this time I didn’t give any previous indication I knew it, or him. I could have just been stalling, or panicking, or whatever.
Naturally, after being told that I need the number, there was no problem to find it in the office. Not for me, but also not for anyone else

So we have a secret code which is a phone number easily found on the premise. The only hindrance to finding it is protection by obscurity, namely that one needs to know that the code is this phone number. But the nice and helpful people from the security service tell the unknown person answering them that it is so, thereby removing any last bit of obscurity. (which is also why I feel comfortable stating it here. It’s not a secret apparently).

I don’t quite get how is this supposed to do anything beside rendering the alarm moot… Surely that can’t be the desired effect, right? Unless they use this as a way to avoid work, knowing they can claim the person answering knew the code so it’s not their fault… Hmm…

Update: I’ve spoken with my boss about this, telling him how bad the whole cellphone number as code idea is. He was surprised. It turns out that actually there is a secret code word. Which is not the phone number. The security company apparently decided the phone is good enough without agreeing on it with him, or letting him know. I expect there will be some very loud phone calls between him and them ;-)

I was driving quietly in my car with the radio on to provide background music. The channel I was listening to switched to commercials, so I switched channels.

And dropped right into this incredible conversation bit.



Mind you, this is much more amusing when you consider that the discussion was in Hebrew, except for the words I’ll italic (can I use this as a verb? Italic something? Never mind) which were in English.

Putting English words into Hebrew speech during an interview will usually be done either when referring to a technical/professional term, or when wanting to preserve some exact nuances which are not there in the Hebrew equivalent. I suppose it’s the same in most cases of inserting any individual words from a foreign language (those which are not so mainstreamed they’re practically co-opted into the base language).

This mean that I’d expect the words to be used in a most exact and clear manner, right? Well, not this time.



Also worth mentioning is that the interviewee is PolSci Professor Avraham Ben-Zvi, who (among other things) published a myriad of works regarding American policy in the middle east and Israel-America relations. The quote starts in the middle of his sentence, just when I tuned in:

“… must also pay attention to the undercurrents and to the subtext of the issue.”

“Just to be certain I understand this, by subtext you mean John Kerry, right?”

“Exactly. He has a lot of support in…”

I’m very grateful I was standing waiting for a traffic light to change. If I were actually driving the results might have been disastrous.

Nice to know a possible candidate for the presidency of the US is best described as subtext…

There’s a lot of merriment, and many a chuckle, about the very unhelpful assessment presented by the Israeli chief of Military Intelligence (BTW, as a totally unrelated side note, but from personal experience, it is an oxymoron usually) about the health of Yasser Arafat.



Like this article:

Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, did little to clear things up. He told a Cabinet meeting Sunday that Arafat’s “situation is between full recovery and death,” said an Israeli official who briefed reporters on the meeting.

Or this one:

“According to our intelligence assessment, Arafat’s chances of recovery range between full recovery and death. All options are open, General Aaaron Zeevi said in a Sunday briefing on the ailing Palestinian leader’s health.

His comments were greeted on Monday with derisory headlines, with the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper declaring: “They haven’t a clue”.

“With all due respect, we don’t need an IDF (army) intelligence branch director for that,” one unnamed minister said after the meeting.

But here’s the thing. It’s not as silly as it sounds. I mean, of course it’s not very informative. And of course you don’t need a full fledged intelligence branch to get this answer. But so what?

That’s the answer he had to give. I’m certain he didn’t volunteer the info of his own accord. He didn’t came over saying “Listen ye’all, we have just gotten some new and very important news!” and then went on with that statement.

Rather, he was specifically asked to give an assessment about the chances of recovery. Not being able to provide any exact assessment, but being forced to provide some answer, he said what he could. He could have said “We don’t know”, or he could have stated that all the options are possible. He chose the latter. It’s not that bad. A tad ass-covering I-did-provide-for-all-the-possibilities one, but a legitimate answer all the same.



Making that statement was not a problem.



Was not having a good assessment a problem? Maybe, but maybe not. There are actually several options here.



The first, and the obvious one, is that he didn’t know. If he didn’t, and was supposed to, then it’s a problem. But was he supposed to? Was it so expected that he, that our intelligence branch, know this, that not knowing it is a reason for ridicule?

Consider that the amount of people who had actual certain knowledge about the exact condition of Arafat was extremely small, if at all. It’s possible even the doctors didn’t know. Even if they did, the list was then limited to a very small percentage of the hospital personal. And possibly a few high ranking Palestinian officials who were notified. Not a lot of people, and not a lot of places to get the info. It’s not rational to expect an intelligence service to be able to very quickly gain that information. So if they didn’t, that’s nothing to deride them about.

Then there is the other option. That he did know. Assume the Israeli intelligence branch has managed to get exact details about the condition of Arafat. Details which are known to very few people, are written in very few places, and were transmitted on very few channels. Should he actually admit that?



When you get right down to classification of information, there are two things which are really secret, all the rest is people having fun playing cloak and dagger games. The important things are Capabilities and Sources.

You don’t expose a source, because if someone notices, you’ll lose it.

You don’t expose a capability (where applicable, obviously this is not usually a HumInt issue, but quite a serious SigInt one), because then you’ll lose all sources that rely on the capability.

If he provided the information, then it would have been easy to deduce we obtained it (genius level reasoning, surely). If we obtained it, we obtained it from someplace. And there was a very small number of places to get it from. Ergo, providing the detail would have nearly certainly burnt a source (An agent in the hospital? Someone high up on the Palestinian hierarchy? A microphone at a strategic office?) or exposed a capability (Tapping to the phone lines / satellite channel / whatever it was the information was relayed from the hospital on). You don’t do that. He didn’t.

And the beauty is that no one can be sure he’s actually protecting anything, since it’s even more possible he really didn’t know.



Claims that he shouldn’t have secrets from government and ministers are of course silly. You can see how what he reported did come out nice-’n-quick to the media, right? There’s no reason whatsoever to assume that exact information would have been kept secret.



So either he didn’t know, in which case the response was honest and legitimate, or he did know, in which case the response was necessary and legitimate.

I don’t see the problem here.



Unless someone just takes for granted that Israeli intelligence branch is so good, that we have to know everything anyway without anyone having a chance of finding out why. If you accept that premise, then indeed there was no point to keep a secret, so he really didn’t know, and no tknowing it’s so unlikely that it surely indicates someone have majorly screwed up… Personally, I can assure everyone that we are not that good. Nobody is.



So there.

As of today it’s mandatory to turn on car headlights during the daytime. The days didn’t become any more cloudy, and visibility isn’t actually reduced, but then again it’s been a long time since I expected these sort of laws to make sense.

It was interesting, when driving to work this morning, to see how many people didn’t hear. A somewhat larger percentage of cars than I expected did not turn on their lights.



Not that enforcement is too serious just yet. I also saw two police cars on the way. One was MP, and their lights were on. The other was Traffic Police. Anyone wants to hazard a guess? That’s right, no headlights.

Which legally doesn’t stop them from stopping anyone else on this, naturally. But still amusing to notice.



Oh, well, it’s also been a long time since I expected our traffic cops to lead by example…



Fine, another traffic cops story to justify this derogatory claim.



An acquaintance of mine was driving along a straight out-of-city road at an extremely high speed. Much faster than allowed by law. Frankly, much faster than was safe. I usually file these things as Evolution in Action, but he survived the experience well enough to tell me about it later.

In any case, during this wild drive, a traffic police car gets behind him, turns on the flashing lights and sirens, and starts to blink with the headlights. Quite naturally he made the assumption that they wanted him to pull over to the side of the road and write him a ticket. So he switched lanes, slowed down, and started to mentally prepare for a hefty fine… Only to see the police car turn off the lights and siren, and speed along into the sunset (literally, I think, but it works either way ;-) ).

You see, they didn’t want him to stop and get a ticket for driving too fast. They wanted him to get out of the way since he was slowing them down.

Also not surprisingly, the guy did not see the error of his ways, and did not alter his usual driving speeds downwards. Why should he with that example?



Not of course that they’re all like that. I suppose most traffic cops take their jobs seriously, and pay attention to the rules. But you only ever hear about that ones that don’t, since those are the interesting case. Nobody would much care to hear about, or bother to notice themselves, a police car driving at normal speed, stopping at red lights, signaling before switching lanes, and so on.

But still…