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Brill's Contentious ID Card
pwackerly writes "The New York Times (illegal kidney sale required) is running a story on a private venture funded by the man behind CourtTV to sell ID cards that let you bypass security, both national (airports) and private (your business's lobby). Outside of the standard national ID concerns, now we'd have to worry about a terrorist stealing our super-secret ID from our wallet. Don't these people learn anything from reading 'Mostly Harmless?'"
Don't Terrorize the Homeland without It!
Don't these people learn anything from reading 'Mostly Harmless?'
Of course they did, they learned how to bilk gullible people out of money...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
- 'cos these are the ID cards I'd vote for!
...that these aren't the sort of people who read Douglas Adams.
This way we don't have to worry about poor terrorist... just rich one's with the capital to buy bombs.
Boy does that take a load off my mind. Thanks card inventor guy!
Damn! I sold one already!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
They can bypass the national security systems with a card but they can't get past the New York Times registration page.
Trolling is a art,
coolest thing I could buy since that elevator pass in high school...oh, wait...
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
How naive. If it quacks like a national ID card, it's probably a duck trying to bypass security. Quick, increase to threat level fowl!
is going to be blowing up the White House you can get red carpet treatment for $50 (plus a few).
Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
KFG
And how long before this is required by airlines and such?
"Sir, you cannot fly Delta Airlines if you do not have your privatized National ID card. What's that? You don't have one? Well, you must be a terrorist, because only terrorists wouldn't have one. Please remain calm, as authority figures have already been alerted and are en route as we speak."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Screw the ID cards, let's just skip right to microchip implants in the back of your neck. Think of all the time you could save!! You don't have to remember your ATM pin, just walk up to machine and you have access to your money. No waiting to pay at the store. It'd be great.. because no one who fits the security profile would ever turn out to be a terrorist. And of course, like all new technologies, it's sure to be infallible.
I hope we don't have to wait until 2060 for the next big counterculture movement.
Ah, but they will be prevented from entering
by a large "No Terrorists Past This Point" sign.
Well, then let's just put up the signs and forget this ID card, eh?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
It's just like a national ID card, except we have to pay for them!
Are you a communist or something? You have to encourage private enterprise.
There will be good honest folks, true-blue Americans all, raised from the dead to provide verifiable identity, because no agency knows for sure who's dead yet.
....
... many ... many others. Politicians and CEOs will help build the future of America.
Then again in a few years they will get a big database going that identifies all the verified dead. The contract for the database will go to the Database American Future Technical (DAFT) Company who's parent company is "Patriotic Alliance" Halliburton Brown & Root
Anyway, DAFT subcontracts to small businesses in Pakistan and China will perform data entry as it is received from the US Deaths Agency that received the data from the FBI who verified the death from local municipal records.
Finally, corporate America will be able to issue ID cards to whoever walks through the door. This is not a job that politicians would want to have civil servants perform, because America Businesses do everything better then government employees. Examples: Global-Cross/Double-Cross, Enrun/AnRun with the money, Diebald/Scalped,
Hell, maybe Mexico (in 50 to 100 years) will eventually be able to invade and save US.
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
`I'll do the jokes,' snarled Ford.
`No,' said [Vann Harl, editor-in-chief]. `You will do the restaurant column.'
He tossed a piece of plastic onto the desk in front of him. Ford did not move to pick it up.
`You what?' said Ford.
[...]
.
[Harl] `Every possible position of every possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Billions and billions of shining, gleaming futures! You know what that means?'
[Ford Prefect] `You're dribbling down your chin.'
[...]
[Harl]`Excuse me,' he said, `but this gets me so excited.' Ford handed him his towel. `This is the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.'
`And you want me to be its restaurant critic,' said Ford.
`We would value your input.'
`Kill!' shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.
The towel leapt up out of Harl's hands.
This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might. The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just lunging for the credit card, but you don't get to occupy the sort of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal dreams.
Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly everything had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he now held in his hand -- it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford had ever seen in his life -- then he clambered over the desk to see to Harl.
He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl's breast pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens. Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of someone's wife and family -- presumably Harl's, but it was hard to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn't have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends.
Ha!
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant -- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the w
Why would a suicidal hijacker ever pay CASH when he could use a credit card and FLY FOR FREE.
The sooner America becomes a police state the better.
Then the US will be safe, just like Israel.