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National Biometric IDs
Jester998 writes "I just came across this article about how two U.S. congressmen want biometric identification. They're trying to avoid the controversial 'national ID' issue by creating what would be new drivers licenses with biometric information embedded. What does the Slashdot community think about having your retinal pattern embedded on a smart card?"
...To have my stolen "inalienable" rights printed on the card.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
A: Who knows, but three weeks later, it was "Wake Up Little Suzy".
--paraphrased from National Lampoon
Lame stories are posted to Slashdot about National ID cards
while Biker Gangs On Turf Warpath.
I wonder if John Ashcroft will call them as material witnesses or
Donald Rumsfeld will call in the Special Forces.
Thanks in advance.
Woot
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Come help! Trolls we need you!
is that right, eh?
i'm taking you to the loony bin
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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Lameness serial 5809548459340549454554
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Just ride the dog [greyhound.com].
Ride greyhound? I think a three-way with Alan Greenspan and Yassir Arafat would be about a million times more enjoyable!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
well actually its not our fucking falt our government sucks ass
THE CORPORATION & AMERICA
.[The] corporation brought about a new form of dependency. Instead of industry, frugality, and initiatives producing fruits, underlings in the corporate hierarchy had to be aware of style, manners, office politics, and choice of patrons -- very reminiscent of the Old Whig corruption in England at the time of the revolution -- what is today called "corporate culture."
Rewriting history to justify greed
by Sam Smith
THIS ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN 'SHADOWS OF HOPE,'
PUBLISHED BY INDIANA UNIVERITY PRESS, 1994
Encomiums to the wonders of market forces fill speeches and media reports. One National Public Radio reporter even went so far as to describe a form of government called market democracy, apparently a blend of the Bill of Rights and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
In fact, most free workers in this country were self-employed well into the 19th century. They were thus economic as well as political citizens.
Further, until the last decades of the 19th century, Americans believed in a degree of fair distribution of wealth that would shock many today. James L. Huston writes in the American Historical Review:
Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth.
Such a distribution, in theory at least, came from enjoying the "fruits of one's labor" but no more. Businesses that sprung up didn't flourish on competition because there generally wasn't any and, besides, cooperation worked better. You didn't need two banks or two drug stores in the average town. Prices and business ethics were not regulated by the marketplace but by a complicated cultural code and the fact that the banker went to church with his depositors. Although the practice was centuries old, the term capitalism -- and thus the religion -- didn't even exist until the middle of the 19th century.
Americans were intensely commercial, but this spirit was propelled not by Reaganesque fantasies about competition but by the freedom that engaging in business provided from the hierarchical social and economic system of the monarchy. Business, including the exchange as well as the making of goods, was seen as a natural state allowing a community and individuals to get ahead and to prosper without the blessing of nobility.
In the beginning, if you wanted to form a corporation you needed a state charter and had to prove it was in the public interest, convenience and necessity. During the entire colonial period only about a half-dozen business corporations were chartered; between the end of the Revolution and 1795 this rose to about a 150. Jefferson to the end opposed liberal grants of corporate charters and argued that states should be allowed to intervene in corporate matters or take back a charter if necessary.
With the pressure for more commerce and indications that corporate grants were becoming a form of patronage, states began passing free incorporation laws and before long Massachusetts had thirty times as many corporations as there were in all of Europe.
Still it wasn't until after the Civil War that economic conditions turned sharply in favor of the large corporation. These corporations, says Huston:
. . . killed the republican theory of the distribution of wealth and probably ended whatever was left of the political theory of republicanism as well. . .
Concludes Huston:
The rise of Big Business generated the most important transformation of American life that North America has ever experienced.
By the end of the last century the Supreme Court had declared corporations to be persons under the 14th Amendment, entitled to the same protections as human beings. As Morton Mintz pointed out in the National Law Journal, this 1888 case ignored the fact that "the only 'person' Congress had in mind when it adopted the 14th Amendment in 1866 was the newly freed slave." Justice Black observed in the 1930s that in the first fifty years following the adoption of the 14th Amendment, "less than one-half of 1 percent [of Supreme Court cases] invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." During this period the courts moved to limit democratic power in other ways as well. For example, the Supreme Court restricted the common law right of juries to nullify a wrongful law; other courts erected barriers against third parties such as banning fusion slates.
It was during this same time that the myth of competitive virtue sprouted, helping to justify one of the great rapacious periods of American business. It was a time when J.P. Morgan would come to own half the railroad mileage in the country -- the same J. P. Morgan who got his start during the Civil War by buying defective rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal and then selling them to a general in the field for $22 apiece. The founding principles of what we now proudly call the "American free market system" flowered in an era of enormous bribes, massive legislative corruption, and the creation of great anti-competitive cartels. It was a time when the government, in a precursor to industrial policy, gave two railroad companies 21 million acres of free land.
And it was also the time that American workers, who had once used commerce to free themselves from the economic and social straitjacket of the monarchy, found themselves servants of a new rigid hierarchy, that of the modern corporation.
the way i see it the government could stop the widespread use of cannabis across the nation's youth with retinal scans. A large majority of the drug's smokers simply have few places they can safely smoke the drug and so smoke it on the streets: alleys, deserted residential roads, anywhere quite and aware from attention. without a food suuply these people are forced to buy their munchies from various petrol stations and newsagents. when they are asked for the routine money verication (the government simply steps up the usage of the cards) the stoner realises his ultimate fear: staring at a camera of some sort with blazing red eye...
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This posting only serves to get a spam trap test address out there, and see how fast it will be picked up.
This is the address:
spuhm_me_senseless@hotmail.com
(Hotmail does not allow user names containing the word 'spam', hence this mis-spelling...)
Please do not send any email to this address (unless you're a spammer of course...). It is registered to one Spuhm Me Senseless, a craftsman from Burkina Faso (wonder what they'll think of that... and what kind of directed Hotmail spam it will receive...). Mail for this address is picked up through an experimental httpmail gateway daemon (an updated version of hotwayd, see hotwayd.sf.net) and then pulled through a spam filter.
This should be enough text to get through the lameness filter...
Cheers
fascists!
Leaving the paranoia aside, how does any of that add up to standardized voting methods having "plenty of potential for abuse"?
Sig: What REALLY Happened to the Censorware Project