Philadelphians: Want to make sure you’re not buying a stolen car?
Good luck.
I just got off the phone with the police department who essentially said “we really don’t care.”
The story:
Sunday, I see a listing on Craigslist for a 2000 Plymouth Neon with 60,000 miles on it. ”Fantastic,” I think, “this is a great deal.”
I take the subway then ride my bike out to meet this guy. He’s friendly, lets me drive the car around a bit, and I agree to buy the car if it checks out at the mechanic. He waffles a bit about going to the mechanic, but agrees to do so the next day. I call back two days later, as I didn’t get a call about how it went at the mechanic, and he says he’s been busy and hasn’t gotten the chance. He’ll take it that day.
Now this morning, he calls me. He’s sold the car to someone else for 150% of what I was going to pay. ”You can’t blame me.” he said. “But! I’ve got this other car, a 1998 Ford with 50,000 miles on it. You can’t beat that, it’s a nicer car than the Neon!”
I mention I’m disappointed about the fact that we had a verbal agreement that he backed out of, since I had stopped looking for other cars. I say I’ll think about the other car, and hang up.
My phone rings again 2 minutes later. It’s him again, but he doesn’t say hello. He must have sat on his phone, since he was having a conversation with his wife. He talked about a kid who they used to make fun by calling him Ratface behind his back, and then talked about how he picked up this cool Ford last night, and how he needs to fix the windshield, but it should sell soon.
I’m willing to admit that he might like to go to late night car auctions and pick up extremely low mileage ~10 year old cars, but my intuition suggests otherwise.
Due to my suspicions, I called district 2 of the Philadelphia police department, the district where I looked at this car.
I told the above story, and then asked if they could check if either of the above models had been reported stolen recently. They said they don’t run checks on cars unless they have them in their possession, and, when I asked if there’s any way I can make sure I’m not about to buy a stolen car, she responded “not that I know of.” She continued: “You listened to a conversation. How credible is that?”
Ah well. Is there anything else I should do, or just hope he gets caught by other means?
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana
By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”
Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.
A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.
There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it!
If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
This is what my wife will be working on this coming summer. Very very exciting research. We software engineers live in a different world than real engineers like her.
…and you can build a three-ringed security zone complete with layers of Cylons, Stormtroopers, and adorable labradoodles (or whatever your IT department requires).
