Hazard's stuff

Cyprus Press and Information Office has a released a 10-minute video about Cyprus environment, which Brian from www.cypenv.org was kind enough to rip and post on its video section.

Cyprus government has updated their facility for online road tax payment. Now, instead of the road tax disc being sent by post, you have to print it yourself. This approach has both cons and pros to the old way of online payment, where the disc was sent by post.

Pros:

• Don't have to wait for the road disc to arrive by post.
• You will get your disc even if your postal address in Road Department's system is wrong.

Cons:

• Less secure. The only way for an official to authenticate the disc is to read the bar-code on the disc. And for 100% authenticity, you have to login to the central database.
• Not everyone has printers, and the webpage does not warn that you need to have one until you have paid. The system let's you save the image as a PNG file, which means various software will print it in various size. A PDF would have been a much wiser choice.

My opinion is that the old way was better. Waiting for a few days for the road tax disc to arrive was not a problem for me. Now I have the hassle to go to work and print it from there, and potentially suspicious policemen.
If you want to get an idea how it looks like, here is a blurred up version: