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White House Frowns on National ID Card
sonic writes "'One security measure that [Homeland Defense Chief] Clarke didn't put much store in, however, was a proposal by some industry leaders, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, to create a national ID card.
Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said. "
Robert Heinlein said it best:
"When ID's are mandatory, it is time to leave the planet."
Does the word "vulture" come to mind ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
.NET My Services previously known as hailstorm, would be a system for centrally storing all the user info from Hotmail/Windows XP users that decided they want Microsoft to be the central arbiter of their information.
At best,
Oracle and Sun on the other hand decided to use the an incident that involved the most deaths by violent means on American soil in over a century as a chance to hawk their fucking software. People on Slashdot like the bash Microsoft because their software is buggy and they put a couple of greedy startups out of business yet when people sink so low as to use the deaths of their fellow citizens as a cheap and guady way to make more money WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?.
Here's my take on it...Prototype of US National ID Card Unveiled
PS: What's interesting is that besides being one big ad for Oracle and Sun products not one person has shown how a national ID card would have prevented the acts of September 11th. Heck, it isn't like teh airlines weren't already asking for ID before people boarded the plane or are Ellison and McNeally suggesting racial profiling where all foreigners fly on seperate flights from God Fearing Americans?
First we have...
"no big brother in sight"
And then we see...
"national ID cards"
"you must register where you live at the local public authority"
Perhaps you need to try opening your eyes... or at least learn what is meant by "Big Brother:" a government keeping an eye on its citizens for little reason beyond "their own protection."
As for some of the other more interesting one-liners...
"our economic wealth is greater"
By what measure? I'm assuming it's not by GDP (in which caes you're blinder than I thought), but even if you go by GDP-per-capita, we've got every major western European country beat by about $10,000.
Belgium - $25,300
Denmark - $25,500
Finland - $22,900
France - $24,400
Germany - $23,400
Italy - $22,100
Netherlands - $24,400
Norway - $27,700
Portugal - $15,800
Spain - $18,000
Sweden - $22,200
Switzerland - $28,600
UK - $22,800
USA - $36,200
The only European country I could find that beats the US is Luxembourg with its $36,400 per capita. Even CANADA and its $24,800 manages to beat all the G8 members in that list.
"There might be reasons for this but they belong to the 18th century not to the 21th."
The reason is "decentralization of power due to distrust of authority." And several European countries through the course of the 20th century have had very good examples of why authority shouldn't be trusted.
And since I'm going to get modded down to Offtopic/Flamebait anyway...
The EU and its member states are already giving examples of the abuse of power and trampling of personal rights this early into the 21st century. New York City and Washington, D.C. were attacked, and yet its the European politicans that are talking about shutting down mosques and denying entrance to their countries to any and all Arabs...
The EU used to make me laugh. Now they're frightening me. In my opinion, "The Europeans are doing just fine with it" is an argument against the US doing something, not for it.
Your inability to do so much as type "Heinlein" into Google (~100,000 hits) is not.
If you remain unable to answer even the simplest questions on your own, how can you hope to even understand the daily news without prior spoon feeding of the history, technology, and other information it depends on? I hope you haven't reached voting age yet.