On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:50:18 +0100, "Tim Roll-Pickering"
wrote:

Isn't there an actual law that allows retailers the ability to refuse
payment if offered in too high a denomination?

A retailer can refuse to accept any form of payment, as a debt doesn't
normally exist to pay off. As can a bus driver. The difference is
that the former are in my experience a lot more reasonable over
changing notes than the latter.

Neil

--
Neil Williams
Put my first name before the at to reply.

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, MIG wrote:

On Sep 16, 4:52*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, MIG wrote:
On Sep 16, 1:41*am, (Colin Rosenstiel) wrote:
In article ,

(Tom Anderson) wrote:
The problem is that
cash comes in doses of 10 or 20 pounds, as notes. You cannot get
money from a cash machine in any smaller quantity.

Er, I regularly get cash in £5 notes from a cash machine (in Cambridge).

There's one in Russell Square that gives fivers as well. *It's been
suggested that it has something to do with proximity to students, but if
so it's not consistent.

Is that the Travelex one, near the post office? Could it be because it's a
funky non-bank machine?

No, it's the Barclays one on the Hotel Russell side that I'm thinking
of.

Hmm. I'd love to know how they make decisions like that!

Maybe i'll write to them ...

tom

--
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of
indirection. -- David Wheeler

Tom Anderson wrote:

It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night,
though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having
some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the
outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours.

Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the tube
is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge Oysters
that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does.

On Sep 16, 8:28*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, MIG wrote:
On Sep 16, 4:52*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, MIG wrote:
On Sep 16, 1:41*am, (Colin Rosenstiel) wrote:
In article ,

(Tom Anderson) wrote:
The problem is that
cash comes in doses of 10 or 20 pounds, as notes. You cannot get
money from a cash machine in any smaller quantity.

Er, I regularly get cash in £5 notes from a cash machine (in Cambridge).

There's one in Russell Square that gives fivers as well. *It's been
suggested that it has something to do with proximity to students, but if
so it's not consistent.

Is that the Travelex one, near the post office? Could it be because it's a
funky non-bank machine?

No, it's the Barclays one on the Hotel Russell side that I'm thinking
of.

Hmm. I'd love to know how they make decisions like that!

Maybe i'll write to them ...

Yeah, but don't make them stop. Maybe they've just forgotten to
change it for fifteen years and you'll spoil it for everyone ...

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 02:20:39AM -0700, Boltar wrote:

(though to be honest
how many people knowing they're going to catch a bus later wouldn't
make sure they had some pound coins on them?)

I wouldn't. It's just not something I'd think about because every
other place in the entire country* that sells things takes notes.
And what about people who *don't* know that they're going to catch a bus
later?

and the bus driver has
no change he should have the option to issue tickets for however many
journeys the note would pay for. The passenger can then either hand
over the whole note or get off and walk.

The driver should have the option to give the passenger a receipt for
the whole amount so he can get his change on another bus, or at a
"ticket stop", or at a station (ANY station in London, not just
Underground stations).

* I'll just take it as read that some annoying **** of a pedant is
going to point out a shop in some ghastly rural ****-hole whose
owner thinks that twenties are a commie paedo plot. I don't care.

--
David Cantrell | Cake Smuggler Extraordinaire

There are many different types of sausages. The best are
from the north of England. The wurst are from Germany.
-- seen in alt.2eggs...

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 02:18:07AM -0700, Boltar wrote:

I'm not saying buses should never give change but expecting a driver
to have enough change for 20 quid is perhaps optimistic. besides
which , its bloody annoying for the other passengers waiting trying to
board if the driver has to root around for loads of shrapnel because
some wally wants to pay with a large denomination note. If you think
I'm being unreasonable then go into a corner shop and see the reaction
you get if you try and buy a mars bar with a 50 quid note.

I quite often pay for my cup morning cup of tea with a twenty. That
cuppa costs less than a bus ticket. What's the problem? Now, if the
bus ticket cost something like 63p, or GBP1.63 then I could understand
that it's a bit annoying cos the driver would need to find several coins
of different denominations. But he doesn't. Bus tickets are an integer
number of pounds. Therefore he needs one denomination. No rooting
around for loads of shrapnel required.

--
David Cantrell | top google result for "internet beard fetish club"

23.5 degrees of axial tilt is the reason for the season

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night,
though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having
some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the
outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours.

Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the
tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge
Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does.

True.

The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a
night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots
of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority
of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all.

I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you
describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a
chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a
non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the
place, taking either notes or cards, and dispensing either a fistful of
tickets (or a ticket and a chit) or oyster charge. Basically, the same as
the machines i want to put outside tube stations. You couldn't put those
at every bus stop, or even as many bus stops as have ticket-for-coin
machines, as they'd be too expensive (i assume). You could probably put
them at railway stations and key bus nodes (places like Clapton Pond,
say). Would that do?

One day, we might see oyster chargers as part of every cash machine. That
might largely solve the problem.

How about a mobile phone scheme? You text a special number, it charges you
two quid or whatever (as mobile phones sometimes do, i don't know how) and
sends you a code. The driver taps the code into a special gizmo on the
bus, checks to see if it flashes a green light saying the code valid, and
then prints you a ticket. The special gizmo could work in one of two ways.
Either it's in touch with a central server, in which case it just calls in
and checks your code, with the server then crossing the code of its list
of valid codes, or else it's standalone, in which case it can verify the
code using some cryptography. The problem is then preventing replay
attacks, where someone uses the same code more than once. You could
perhaps do this with a combination of time and space - codes could be
valid for 15 minutes after issuing, with the time being embedded in the
code, and only valid in the area from where the message was sent. You
could detect unused codes at end-of-day data reconciliation, and refund
the buyer, so people whose codes expired before they could use them
wouldn't be punished. To speed things up, the code could be in the form of
an image, ie a 2D barcode [1], which could then be read by a cheap little
webcam sat next to the driver.

tom

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode#2D_barcodes

--
On Question Time last night, Tony Benn was saying that the way to solve
the low turnout at elections was to make voting compulsory. I think the
solution is for someone to start a political party that doesn't contain
wall-to-wall *******s. -- John Rowland

On 18 Sep, 14:46, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote:

It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night,
though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having
some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the
outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours.

Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the
tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge
Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does.

True.

The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a
night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots
of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority
of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all.

I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you
describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a
chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a
non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the

As part of the upgrade process for Oystercard readers to accept ITSO
cards, the readers will be upgraded to accept Visa Wave and
Mastercard Paypass cards.

https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs...ail.cfm?id=448

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Matthew Dickinson wrote:

On 18 Sep, 14:46, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote:

It doesn't address the problem with recharging your oyster at night,
though. I would have thought that could be done fairly simply by having
some oyster machines - which could be of the card-only type - on the
outside of tube stations, and so accessible outside opening hours.

Great for the tube areas but what about those parts of London where the
tube is not within walking distance? Virtually all the shops that charge
Oysters that I know of close at least two hours before the tube does.

True.

The situation i was primarily thinking of is trying to get home after a
night out, where generally, i'm in the middle of town where there are lots
of tube stations. I would imagine this pattern accounts for the majority
of post-closing-time bus use, although of course not all.

I'm stumped as to how you could deal with the problem in the situation you
describe, though. Night buses don't take cash, so no solution involving a
chit is going to work. Putting chip-and-pin on buses seems like a
non-starter. I think that means you have to put fixed machines around the

As part of the upgrade process for Oystercard readers to accept ITSO
cards, the readers will be upgraded to accept Visa Wave and
Mastercard Paypass cards.

https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs...ail.cfm?id=448

Cool!

tom

--
got EXPERTISE in BADASS BRAIN FREEZE