Gregory's ServerThis paper starts out amazing and just keeps getting better
 36 comments
@michaelgemar @nev Doesn't need to be convincing - the paper cites The Association of Commercial Banknote Issuers: "banks will only reimburse you with the face value of a damaged banknote if you still have at least half of the banknote and visible serial number". They might be real mad about it though.  @michaelgemar @jonty @nev The government would have to proof that. It's not the citizen's job to know whether a note was governmentally shredded before.  The real question is, are enough pieces of any single note included to reconstruct a complete serial number? @jonty @michaelgemar @nev  @jonty @michaelgemar @nev in this context, "half of the banknote" usually means "half of the banknote in one piece" (and also that's a weird wording because in practice usually a bit more than 50% is required). @GHabiger That was my guess too! A nice little profit - even the "full" ones were missing 56 notes, which means they were making off with a minimum of $56,000 HKD ($7000 USD) per cylinder!  @jonty This suggests some else came up with this idea first and has been stealing 40% of the notes and making up the weight with stones. @TomF Given they show that complete notes are in the shreddings it's more likely that the person who shredded them *also* packed the cylinders and just made off with complete notes tucked into their underpants  @jonty I read the full paper. This us very funny. Looking forward to seeing the machine assemble the bills back together!  @jonty dammit- i could’ve used the shredded cash for a project i’ve been working on for over a decade >.<  @Necrofancy @jonty There has to be more to this story. I demand the third episode! Maybe with invoices for pebbles bought by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.  @jonty In Rainbows End (2006), by Vernor Vinge, one plot arc is about the digitization of a library *by shredding the books* and venting the shreds through an air tunnel surrounded by cameras, which photograph the shreds hundreds of times, to reconstruct the pages kind of like this. At the time, his concept was based on how DNA was sequenced.   That reminds me of the machine used to reconstruct the files shredded by the former East German Stasi as the Berlin Wall fell. 'E-Puzzler' ends painstaking manual restoration of torn secret police documents @EricLawton @jonty @szescstopni actually, according to the guardian, that e-puzzler machine had already in 2007 been put to use to reconstruct banknotes : "the machine was put to a wide range of uses - [...], and to piece together hundreds of thousands of bank notes shredded by a mother in an attempt to block her estranged daughter from her inheritance".  @jonty I’m reminded of Vernor Vinge’s novel “Rainbow’s End” where they decided the most efficient way to digitize books was to run them through shredders and scan the pieces as they tumbled through the air on the other side.      |
@jonty @nev I’m guessing that sticking the pieces together would *not* result in a convincing bill…