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"The new authority will only be used to go after terrorists..."

• Emergency Law in Egypt
  
• 30,000 political detainees
  
• BBC
  
• Washington Post
  
• Egyptian law
  

Besides I would *pay* to see 1000 people win on the same suite of numbers, it's be a real life "Bruce Almighty" moment and really quite funny.

The American forces have not been effective in preventing violence in Iraq, and are now seen as just another faction in the civil war. It doesn't help that they occasionally play the role of "hooded thugs" themselves.

What do you call "supernatural"? Something you don't understand?

"of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena".

The idea that personality or "mind" being in and of itself not physical is not that far fetched. We do this "resurrection" thing all the time with computers.

Are you suggesting that computers are not physical?

Nothing material, that is anything having mass, is transferred from a backup into the new computer.

Energy has mass. The transfer of information involves the moment of some form of mass or energy - tapes, disks, punch-cards, electrical signals, radio waves, whatever - and then physical changes at the destination.

Can your "soul" be backed up somewhere

It might be possible to capture enough information about the brain to create a device or simulation capable of functioning in the same way. It's an SF classic. So what? We're still not dealing with anything supernatural.

There is evidence from the article and others about near death experiences, that the physical dimensions we normally experience is not all there is.

NDEs are evidence of nothing except that the chemistry of a brain near death can sometimes generate similar experiences to the chemistry of a brain on ketamine. Interesting, but hardly evidence for metaphysical propositions.

How is it possible to walk on water? I BELIEVE that Jesus did. Did He arise from death, after three days, without refrigeration or other modern medical technology? I believe He did and many have died for that belief.

Well, I hate to tell you, but these things that you BELIEVE are irrational conclusions with no worthwhile evidence to support them. You didn't see Jesus walk on water or come up out of the grave; you're selecting ancient unreliable reports, at odds with our best knowledge about the objective universe, that tell you what you want to hear - while rejecting other ancient reports, no less (or more) reliable, about other gods and heroes. Indeed, if you saw someone walk on water today you'd assume it was a magic trick. (Actually, walking on water is easy. Just wait for it to freeze.)

The fact that people have died for a belief says jack shit about whether it's true. People have died believing that their Ghost Shirts would protect them from bullets, that U.S. troops wouldn't shoot peaceful American citizens, that they will go to heaven for suicide bombing, or that they should participate in the Iraq invasion because Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, all this senseless killing and dying is real good evidence against the existance of some sort of omnipotent and omniscient superbeing who's emotionally attached to Homo sapiens.

The Security Fix Blog

Why not mention Slashdot's favorite Congressman, Rick Boucher, co-sponsored legislation to make it legal for corporations to pass off spyware. Yeah, the story actually got covered but the hit piece on Boucher was missing. kdawson posted that story as well. Was Boucher given a pass because kdawson was hired despite not reading Slashdot and thus not knowing it's history (I mean, he posted a story about whether people should have a right to broadband under the Enlightenment topic (since been changed corrected)). Is it because, before slashdot, he had a fairly partisan liberal blog and thus gets to use slashdot as a much larger soapbox to push his political agenda?

Why isn't Al Gore covered more given his connection with the nerd community if that is the standard? Where is the story on the indictment Congressman Jefferson's bribes involving telecommunications in Nigeria if the standard is hit pieces on Congressmen who've said/done something regarding technology?

Is this really what Slashdot wants to become, just another group think site that promotes the propaganda of one political party? The National Enquirer of tech news? I stopped going to kuroshin when it turned more into a political group think site than a site about technology. I've never used digg or reddit but I've heard they've gone that route as well. How I miss the old Slashdot way, way back before it was sold to Andover and then passed to VA Research. It actually used to be a site about computers, technology, Linux and the internet. Kdawson even makes me miss Jon Katz, michael, etc.

This guy? Does he have a name? Or did his parents just put an unappealing hyperlink on his birth certificate?

He calls himself the "taxpayers' best friend," and this has led him to controversial stands, such as voting against federal farming subsidies despite the wide swaths of agricultural land in his district.

I wonder if the head of the EPA(Stephen L. Johnson) has anything to say about this, and if he was interfered with by the Bush administration or if he even knows about it. Does the EPA do anything or are they a waste of 8 billion dollars?

No, the problem really is that big. Even now, smoking was the leading cause of preventable death in the United State (2004 article talking about obesity approaching tobacco).

And that's the point, and the problem - when there's enough money to be made my glossing over such a large public health issue, the money always wins. They're assisted by the fact that too many people will believe their intuitions when the science says otherwise, especially when believing otherwise would force them to change their behavior.

They're just following the Homeland Security model, as demonstrated earlier this week by FUD czar Michael Chertoff.

Where webcasters and the recording industry do agree is on the unfairness of making tiny Web stations pay for performance rights while huge radio companies pay nothing. Congress decided that Web stations must pay royalties to the composers of each song and to the performers and record labels, even as traditional AM and FM broadcasters continue paying only the composers -- a quirk in the law that gives broadcast radio a huge advantage.

Simson agrees that "there's really no justification for broadcast radio not paying, and we're going to try to address that."

So, Bush is going to blame the troops now? Pathetic. This stuff endangers the troops and so this is a big error, but I really doubt it was on purpose. As is clear, the torture violated the UCMJ and had to come out. It seems clear now that Rumsfeld and the President were well aware of it long before it came out and if they wanted it suppressed they were conspiring to obstruct justice. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/ 2007/06/18/BL2007061800791.html

Haha. You mean like it's the job of the head of the EPA to advocate for the environment? Or the job of the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered species? Or the job of the US Attorneys to prosecute cases in a fair and nonpartisan manner? Or the job of the director of FEMA to respond to emergencies? (I'm not even going to bother linking to that one.)

I agree with you 100%--in fact, 120--but c'mon! Where was the outrage six years ago? This wolf-in-sheep's-clothes act has been going on since literally day one. It's partly gratifying to see people finally waking, but mostly just depressing and scary. Should things really have to sink this low before we start asking more from our leaders?

It could have something to do with how rising temperatures can cause death.

Or it could be related to fears that rising temperatures may cause higher rates of mosquito born illnesses.

There is also evidence pointing to more potent and prevalent poison ivy.

Let's not forget rising rates of asthma, food supply problems, increasing number and severity of natural disasters, mass extinction and global economic collapse.

All of those are related to our health in one way or another--even the extinction of species. Consider it the global equivalent of the canaries in mine shafts.

It is currently busy depopulating much of sub-Saharan Africa

You might be interested in this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/05/AR2006040502517.html

How AIDS in Africa Was Overstated

Reliance on Data From Urban Prenatal Clinics Skewed Early Projections

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, April 6, 2006; Page A01

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.

But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.

Well, first, joining slashdot to "merely" get your two cents in about a particular article is nothing to be proud of.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A191 81-2005Jan18.html

"...he has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from 'innate' differences between men and women."

Yes this particular quote is about elite scientists but in general he was discussing reasons for why men excel more than women at math and science. Yes it was off-topic but I was merely saying that I disagree with the assessment that a difference in innate ability explains the gender gap and enjoying a little joke at the expense of women who stop enrolling in math in order to become more attractive to men. Lighten up.

When I read through some of the replies I get the feeling that people may perceive this competition as a pointless little toy problem. And you are partly right - it is a toy problem. But it is far from being pointless one.

To me (and I assume most of the other participants), RoboCup is about something else entirely. It is about developing new technologies on a complete systems level. Apart from finding some neat hardware solutions ranging from simple wheels to dynamic humanoid gaits the more interesting overarching theme is the advance of technology on AI aspects - such as goal oriented behavior and agent cooperation.

Sure, it is a lot about hardware and toys. You start tinkering with the hardware platform of your choice - be it some shop-bought Aibo doggy or your own awesome little humanoid creation. There is no limit but costs and human resources. And even if you are just a student with not many resources at hand you can always bring your ball-pushing Lego creation.

And it is true that a large part of the competition seems to consist of robots miserably standing and wiggling in place or randomly tipping over every other minute. But to be fair, the participants are trying to catch up on a few billion years of good old-fashioned evolution while unfortunately fighting with rather pathetic problems such as bad network connectivity and random power outages (see the comment by Spearhawk).

My point is that for most of us it is often very hard to get the proper funding and benchmarking environment for research on autonomous and self-sufficient agents exhibiting semi-intelligent behavior.

Personally, I do not care all that much about soccer. But similar to the DARPA Grand Challenge everybody understands the game and more importantly it is a good way to gain public interest in and acceptance of robotics. From a roboticist's perspective soccer is just the right mix of a fairly simple rule-based environment and open-end multi-agent complexity. The real fun starts once you have teams competing on the field - since now you have the whole real-time adaptivity thing going.

I guess my point is that you can go on and develop robots from a complete-agent perspective by solving the perfect toy problem without worrying too much about when and how the technology will benefit society and why anybody would pay for it right now.

Personally I have absolutely no doubts that the solutions found by working on a toy problem such as soccer will more or less directly benefit society in the near future. We for example are a Swiss team from ETH Zurich participating in the brand new "Nanogram League". We are able to fully control robots with sizes of only a few times the width of a human hair - and not many people in the world can do that. In about 6 months we have developed an entirely new technology just to compete in this event. And yes, it is still "simple" tasks in a two-dimensional environment.

Sure, at this point we are talking mere speculation... but there is no reason why this technology does not scale into 3D fluidic environments... in clear text: you can potentially propel tiny agents that go and find that hidden tumor somewhere in your body and destroy it... how useful would that be?

Here some illustrating movies of our robots and links to other fun stuff that might be of interest to you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnLGpl1N7Ns
http://www.iris.ethz.ch/msrl/research/special/nano gram/

some media coverage:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/07/AR2007070700774.html
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/07/07/s chneider.robocup.competition.cnn

oddly enough, when the batteries get changed on a military GPS, it defaults to displaying your current position.

resulted in at least one incident.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8853-200 2Mar23?language=printer

If the Geek thinks mass-market pricing of Vista is going to be a turn-off, he is delusional.

You're delusional if you think the US experience applies to the 95% of the world's population that don't live in the US.

---

Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies' back door to every network connected country and business on earth.

Some details are mentioned in this article: Secret Court's Judges Were Warned About NSA Spy Data

"Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."

Do you see what happened here? Information from a NSA wire tapping program (that can only tap international communications) was used to obtain further warrants. This was a big no-no pre-9/11. NSA wiretaps could never be used to obtain a warrant for criminal prosecution. Here we have a judge complaining about how they were asked for a warrant. Ask yourself why? Why did the government want a warrant? Why did they need a warrant?

The NSA *cannot*, itself, get a warrant. They can only pass on the information to others to get a warrant. It was decided that domestic law enforcement could get a warrant if they were not solely dependent on NSA tap information. In other words they had to do some field work before they could get a warrant.

"So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said."

"According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge."

This is what has changed. NSA tap information *can* be used this way now. Nothing has changed with regards to what the NSA has been doing for years. What has changed is what happens with the information.

Democrat's Shade Truth On FISA-NSA

Didn't you know? There are no classes in the US. /sarcasm

Um, the 150,000 is not an exaggeration, or satirical in any way - it's an estimate by the World Health Organization, published in the journal Nature: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/11/16/AR2005111602197.html

"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.

Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) -- a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction -- and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."

Nope.
not true.
real simple now, please pay attention....

*******PLAME WAS A COVERT AGENT, WHEN OUTED, ACCORDING TO THE CIA *************

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18924679/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/06/08/AR2007060802478.html

(why can't I help myself?)

The freaking WP editors think it was a boneheaded move:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/02/AR2007070201611.html?hpid=opinionsbo x1

25 year diabetic vet doesn't get a lighter sentence for pretty much the same thing as libby:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=33 02407

The entire investigation is by republicans for republicans (yet it's a liberal witch hunt party!)
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_01-2007 _07_07.shtml#1183437010

Dick's fingers are all over this one (eww!)... Justice Department Guidelines? Go F___ yourself!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/02/AR2007070202060.html?hpid=topnews

(why can't I help myself?)

The freaking WP editors think it was a boneheaded move:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/02/AR2007070201611.html?hpid=opinionsbo x1

25 year diabetic vet doesn't get a lighter sentence for pretty much the same thing as libby:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=33 02407

The entire investigation is by republicans for republicans (yet it's a liberal witch hunt party!)
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_01-2007 _07_07.shtml#1183437010

Dick's fingers are all over this one (eww!)... Justice Department Guidelines? Go F___ yourself!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/07/02/AR2007070202060.html?hpid=topnews

The probation office, as the president noted, recommended less time -- 15 to 21 months. But Mr. Bush, while claiming to "respect the jury's verdict," failed to explain why he moved from "excessive" to zero.

And it really is so apropos on this day of forgiving acts against the country. Is 200 so far from 205. And let us not forget that it is better to lie, knowing full well that the letter was phony, but also knowing that your fanbois will defend you to the end. And one can also take solace that one can just become incompetent during the presidency, and not recall any matter of importanct, and people will just forgive you for anything, even dooming a generation to drug addiction.

So kids, take it from your national leaders, when you lie, lie big. If Bill had said he had never taken drugs after a certain date, a lie that your current president made, he would have been off the hook. But he decided to only make little lies, which is why he got into trouble.

Yeah ... see The Post article from the trial. Relevant quotes:

"[...] Libby told her [Miller] in a confidential conversation on June 23, 2003, that the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war worked at the CIA [...] [h]e then mentioned that the wife of the ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, worked at a bureau of the CIA."

"Libby told investigators he first learned Plame's name in a July 10, 2003, telephone conversation with NBC's Tim Russert. Miller testified [on 29 January] that Libby discussed the topic with her twice before that date: on June 23 and on July 8, when Libby invited Miller to a breakfast meeting at the St. Regis Hotel."

How does Richard Armitage leaking a covert CIA operative's identity to Robert Novak in July 2003 exculpate Scooter Libby from leaking the same operative's identity to Judith Miller on June 23, 2003?

As I pointed out in another comment above, she was indeed covert. That has been well established at this point. Why do you insist on still claiming otherwise? Your whole premise is wrong.

Info in this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/06/08/AR2007060802478.html

Nice try with the right-wing spin.

1. There could have been more than one leaker.

2. Plame was indeed covert. Read this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/06/08/AR2007060802478.html

The thing with google is that it is, at present, one of the most liberating constructs ever created. It allows the access to relatively unfiltered information, and allows the reader to infer what is real and what is not. However, google is primarily a advertising egent, and therefore has the power to influence reality. If every ad for the search Sicko is an attack on the movie, then the reality will be shifted to the idea that the movie has no basis in reality. And this is why what google is doing is evil. If what the industry is saying is valid, then people will point to those finding and those finding will move up in rank. By offering to package ads, google is no better than the link farms that are increasingly making the search engine useless.

Except that the idea that 150K deaths are being caused by so-called "climate-shift" (I notice they don't like to call it global warming after all the SNOW storms last winter) is a bunch of crap.

From the above mentioned Washington Post link:

The data, being published today in the journal Nature, indicate that climate change is driving up rates of malaria, malnutrition and diarrhea throughout the world.

No...what's causing rates of malaria to rise is the banning of the use of chemicals that WORKED when it came to killing mosquitoes. Some places in the US are even banning the spraying of mosquitoes at all.

Malnutrition and diarrhea has more to do with poor drinking water and oppressive governments. The idea that every hurricane, flood or snowstorm is a sign of climate change is bad science. It's like the Greeks thinking Zeus was responsible for thunderbolts and Poseidon controlled the ocean!

The Darfur conflict is largely fueled by desertification brought on partly by climate change. Here are some 2005 estimates: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A124 85-2005Apr23.html. Things have not gotten any better since then, but the deaths have become harder to count.

Their are deaths that can be even more directly tied to warming: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/04/doom.html as well. You should look into things a little more closely I think.
--
Get affordable solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

We're talking about an economic boon that will last decades. Of course people are going to fight over it. Any (fictional) "oil running out, world in panic" scenario would only make it all the more valuable.

Your argument is like saying, "Well, there's a gigantic diamond buried under the fence between me and my neighbor. I'll just let them have it because diamonds are going to run out anyways."

From a more practical standpoint, Russia is grasping at straws. They went from superpower to "not that impressive except for all the nukes." Their GDP is, what, a bit over a trillion dollars per year compared to our 11 trillion? Yet, they still have the pride of a superpower. Just like how if America fell from the top of the world stage, we'd still see ourselves as deserving that status, they too tend to see this as just a setback. Natural resource exploitation seems a good way to bring in money to their economy that could help resurrect their backwards industrial base. It also has geopolitical significance; "take my side or I shut off the taps" makes a nice threat, even when not spoken.

Of course, the resource you're threatening over better *actually* be a big deal. Let's not forget Sudan's threat to devastate the world by stopping sales of acacia gum. I love the terrifying wording:

What's more, the good and peaceful leaders of Sudan were prepared to retaliate massively: They would cut off shipments of the emulsifier gum arabic, thereby depriving the world of cola.

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

As diplomatic threats go, that one gets high points for creativity: Try to stop the killings in Darfur, and we'll take away your Coca-Cola.

All of these nasty things you describe, have happened already — without "Real ID". The standardized federal identification card will not significantly contribute to the problem...

Yet, for some reason, it is the card, that raises the "papers, please" fear-mongering, rather than those "lists", you are justly complaining about.

Come to think of it, the Real ID might help alleviate those problems — listing more than a person's name and race makes little sense, because anything else is harder to verify (and employers can't ask for age either). Thus to deny the right Antonio Romero a job or an opportunity to open a bank account, the government denies these things to all Antonio Romeros.

A properly implemented Real ID could be used to simply check an applicant against all government databases in one go, without the would-be employer or banker even knowing, what they don't need to know.

The grave "Papers, please" fear-mongering is a bit overdone

Is it? When you can be placed on a "no fly" list for any reason, can't get off it, and can't even see it?

Is it? When you can be placed on a list that forbids anyone to sell you a car, open a bank account, hire you, and more, without any sort of judicial oversight or other legal process?

Is it? When your personal choices about what you can do to yourself, and with consenting partners, are the subject of draconian laws designed to make you comply with the personal opinions of others? When the use of a sex toy can land you jail? When the display of a banner at a parade can get you sanctioned?

I don't think so. I think privacy has become the last bastion of freedom, and there isn't a lot of it left as is. RealID is even worse than the "papers please" people think it is, because the country's treatment of free, law-abiding citizens - not to mention its treatment of those who have paid their debt to society for previous transgressions - has descended nearly to the level of the mid 20th century Soviet Union, and it is getting worse.

Oh, yeah, it's all no big deal. Right.

Let me remind you that "anti-Clinton hysteria" has remained the #1 product of the Bush administration and its apologists, whose motto is "But Clinton...".

And let me further remind you that Bush Jr's signing statements have already been documented to have set policy for probably at least 30% of the laws he's subverted with them to be violated by the agencies he controls.

And under Bush, we're looking at our country is the worst shape since Vietnam & Watergate, and probably worse.

And on the topic at hand, Bush has not actually managed to divide the country into the adult vs embryonic stemcells camps, despite drying up funding so they become competition. I'm not in any one camp, despite your baseless assertions. But you are so firmly in the Bush apologist camp that now you're winding down with "they could impeach him, but so what?"

You talk about repugnant. But your attitude towards therapies that could save lives, and the crimes of an unprecedented tyrant president stopping those therapies while killing so many more directly around the world, are so callous that you're like a serial killer. Or, more precisely, you're a serial killer's apologist. Subhuman in your inability to empathize, or have any sense of proportion of evil, or any remorse.

You've got the government you deserve. But I deserve better than either of you.

americans... duh they can build a power plant?

Well, given the treatment of your own citizens, as a foreigner who would get their fingerprint tossed into a huge database alongside criminals and terrorists and analyzed by the same process which has failed in the past, I don't much like the idea of being subjected to mistaken identity simply because my fingerprint resembles someone else's. But I can 100% avoid the risk of a false positive by not being in the database *at*all*, by not travelling to the U.S. In my country, the only reason I would be fingerprinted is if I was a criminal, and I'm not. Why should I travel to a country that will treat me as a criminal when I arrive at customs?

Of course, the unrealistic expectation that terrorists are already going to have their fingerprints on file makes the whole thing rather suspect as a tool for its claimed purpose. All they are going to be able to find are the terrorists they already have on file, and any sane person will realize that leaves wide scope for people visiting the U.S. for the very first time to get in without any problem, whether they have malicious intent or not.

Would having their fingerprints have stopped any of the 9/11 highjackers? I don't think so. If I recall correctly, they all flew with non-forged ID. Mohammed Atta, for example, checked in with his own name. The authorities knew who they were. So what's the damn point? You're going to stop the repeat terrorists or something? There isn't much point in knowing Mohamed Atta's fingerprints now, is there?

"A US Homeland Security director assured EU officials that the program would operate under strict privacy rules. But he noted that the FBI and CIA will have access to the biometric data, which over time may expand beyond fingerprints."

As past events have shown, the innocent have plenty to fear from this, even if they have nothing to hide.

False positives could really ruin your day.

On the other hand, if it were to happen, once a false positive ordeal is over, I suppose it could be rather lucrative, given the precident that has been set.

And this guy was a U.S. citizen. Imagine the result if you were a citizen of another country and subject to the same sort of mistake.

"A US Homeland Security director assured EU officials that the program would operate under strict privacy rules. But he noted that the FBI and CIA will have access to the biometric data, which over time may expand beyond fingerprints."

As past events have shown, the innocent have plenty to fear from this, even if they have nothing to hide.

False positives could really ruin your day.

On the other hand, if it were to happen, once a false positive ordeal is over, I suppose it could be rather lucrative, given the precident that has been set.

And this guy was a U.S. citizen. Imagine the result if you were a citizen of another country and subject to the same sort of mistake.

The real question that should be asked is why was the employee allowed to take the laptop with him on vacation. After all, the laptop is government property and belonged to Sandia National Labs. If the employee was going on vacation, he should have taken his personal laptop, not his work computer.

If SNL (and any other government agency for that matter) had stricter rules regarding personal use outside of work, them things like this might not happen as often.

a quick search yields:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/06/29/AR2006062900352.html/ http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/10/govt _id_theft.html/