Who gave you the right to force TV (and most
especially the noise from it) upon me in a
public place? Stop the public
dispersal of these and require headphones,
preferably ones that make some attempt to
send the noise inward only.
Noise pollution is as bad as air pollution.
People putting TVs up in every possible place
are as bad as smokers. Some people like quiet; some people like to breathe.
There are many places I go where I don't have
a reasonable choice to avoid this.
(I won't count restaurants in this, because there are so usually many
choices available.)
For example, my current dentist and the three
I have had previously over the years all have
TVs in their waiting rooms. I always make my
appointments as early in the morning as
possible and usually arrive to an empty
waiting room, usually with the TV off.
Inevitably, the next person to arrive just HAS to
turn it on and crank up the volume without
even checking to see if anyone cared. There
is no place to get away from that noise in
there.
For another example, one shopping mall that
I avoid whenever possible has large TVs
every 50 feet or so hanging from the ceiling
in the hallways. The noise from those is so
loud, I can't hear my wife shouting right
next to me. Well, I can hear her, I just can't
understand what she is saying because of all
the interference that she cannot overcome.
I have never seen anyone showing any indication
of paying attention to either the TVs or the
noise from them.
Finally, airports are the most annoying
offenders I can think of. If you want to hear
the boarding call for your flight, there is
NO place you can go to get away from the
overhead TVs blaring away at you. And, where
the noise from the overhead TVs is weakest,
that's wheere they place the group of loud
pay-per-use individual TV seats. Trying to
use a pay phone or cell phone in all that racket
is about as bad as trying to use one on the side of a busy highway.
A gas station I used to use almost exclusively
recently lost my business when they installed
ad-spewing TVs on each pump. I never go there
anymore.
I was recently called for jury duty. We were
required to stay in one specific large room.
Mounted near the ceiling at each corner of the room was a TV, just out of reach; all were
on loud and all were on different channels.
When I asked if ONE could be turned off, the
response was that someone might want to watch it.
Not that anyone WAS watching it, that someone MIGHT want to watch it.
In the previous town I lived in, a water main broke near the phone company's central office, and the water flowed directly through a ground-level window (that was protected against forseeable water events, such as severe storms) and flooded their vault.
Phones and 911 systems were affected for immediately surrounding cities for almost 24 hours. The parking lot of a nearby grocery store looked like a phone company service truck convention that night as they worked to replace equipment and wires.
If I remember the numbers right, over 100,000 phones were affected, and service was retored to over 80,000 within 24 hours. (My phone was restored early, but my DSL took another two days to come back.
So, now the terrorists know that they *might* be able to disrupt communications if they can pump a sufficient quantity of water into the basement of a vulnerable (which are still vulnerable and which have been updated to protect against this?) central office.
Really now, how useful is this information? It's not like this wasn't broadcast over every news channel in the entire area for two whole days, with particular emphasis on what areas were and were not affected so that people would know where they could go to find a working phone and reach those 911 services that were accessible.
Well, it looks like they've restructured since I last looked (2 years ago when I first moved here).
Basic is "$10.25-$13.50" (they don't know!?) and has about 20 channels, mainly the broadcast, local access, and home shopping ones.
The only other analog tier is Standard for $44.10
which has about 75 channels.
The old "basic" used to be around $25 and offered about 30 channels, and was the lowest tier available. If there was a lower tier available then, the salesperson chose to lose the sale rather than offer it.
I might consider going for basic cable now to get clearer pictures. For what I would watch, $10 is reasonable.
The most *basic* cable package I can get is $25/month, and other than the regular broadcast channels, it's mainly a lot of home shopping channels. At least PBS is a decent strength here, so my kids have something to watch when I just can't stand the pokemon DVD anymore.
By "allowed" I really meant "it should be easily possible". By "not allowed" I really meant "it should be very difficult if not impossible".
I was a little lazy in my use of language.
If you had read the rest of my post, I *think* it should have been obvious what I meant.
The current state of things is that it is very difficult for the average person, but easy for people with money or specific technical skills.
The site this story is about brings easy-to-use spoofing to everyone.
Either anyone should be allowed to spoof their ID, in which case caller ID becomes worthless, or nobody should be allowed to do it. Some types of companies are prohibited by law from spoofing their ID, and for good reason. The phone companies should implement a technological means of prevention for this, and not allow anyone at all to do it.
Caller's should be allowed to block or reveal their ID, but not spoof it. Receivers should be able to accept or reject calls with a blocked ID.
I've had more than enough calls from "0" which were not from the operator. I've had plenty of calls from other numbers that are obviously false (not 7 or 10 digits). I've had plenty of calls from numbers that were "out of service" when I called them.
If the phone companies are unable to prevent spoofing, the government should implement laws either to make spoofing illegal or to mandate an upgrade to the phone system to make it impossible.
I started buying CDs because I lost too many cassette tapes to malfunctioning tape players. CDs seemed a lot less likely to have their innards ripped out and strung all over the place.
I bought CDs because I didn't have to rewind/fast forward forever to get to the song I wanted to listen to at the time.
I bought CDs because I knew cassettes were already a thing of the past. I am always surprised when I see them still in the stores now.
The difference is that when you scratch the Cognac glass, you can still use it. When you scratch a CD, you start having trouble. A scratch on a DVD is even worse.
The difference is that when you break the Cognac glass, you might be able to repair it, especially if it a clean break or just a chip. How would you repair a broken CD or DVD?
Amtrak is more efficient and cheap than "any other mode of transportation"???
To travel from Raleigh NC to Dallas TX is about $500.00 one way on Amtrak. The same trip is under $200.00 round trip by plane. On Amtrak, I would have to change trains at least 6 different times, often in the middle of the night, and the trip would take a little over 2 days. By plane, I *might* have to change planes one time, the actual flying time is a little under 4 hours, and the layover when changing planes is usually less than 3 hours.
Short distances are certainly cheaper by train and bus, but nothing can compare to airplanes when going long distances.
...there is an important distinction between playing the music from your car radio and the music at a dentist's office.
Yes, there is a difference. I'm free to go choose a different dentist if I don't like his music selection.
The guy blasting music out in the street is intentionally doing so and should be fined (whether by the police or RIAA I don't care).
I can't get away until the traffic light lets me.
Even worse is that no amount of soundproofing will keep my home's windows from rattling when the jerks are driving by. At 2 in the morning, I can hear the car coming well over a minute before it actually passes by my house and then another minute after.
My mail server run from my house has had less total downtime than that of any one single ISP I have used in the past 5 years. (Not counting a ten day outage after an ice storm, where I had more pressing concerns than mail, such as power and heat.)
My best advice if you don't like your ISP's servers is find one that works better.
I did exactly that. My mailserver works better
for my purposes than that of any ISP I have
ever used. I found what works best for me and
implemented it. Who are you to say that my
solution of running my own mailserver is wrong?
All those other reasons you lumped together as "specious excuses" are valid reasons. An ISP
typically has hundreds, thousands, or even tens
of thousands of users. They have massive mail
servers that are designed to provide service
to those vast quntities of users. My mail server
is used by only a very few people (4). It is a
lot more suitable for my needs than my ISP's
server is.
They've got a really nice site that lets you choose from a dozen different colors (I really liked the dark purple) for the car, but what I would really like to see is an option to cover it with solar cells so it can recharge on its own.
That should extend the driving range slightly, but most importantly it would recharge it while I am sitting in the office for 8 hours.
What really has me curious is why they included power ports for laptops in the thing. With the battery life it has (or hasn't), who would dare add on anything that would use more electricity?
For that matter, why have power windows? The only reason I like power windows is so I can raise/lower passenger and rear windows.
In this car, there isn't a window that is even the slightest bit difficult to reach by the driver.
I realize it takes a while to write a book,
but doesn't it usually need to be finished before
someone can read and review it?
If it is already finished, why is it taking so
long to publish it?
Surely it can't take a whole year to
setup the press to print the book.
If they open access to this to EVERYONE,
then I would have no complaint about it.
Make it easy to access, and let anyone
who wants to.
What I object to is all the surveillance
where only a few unknown people or groups
have acess to it, and you don't even know
it is happening.
Letting anyone access the data will be
even more effective than the small group
of people watching it. If hundreds of
random people are watching, imagine how
much more likely it is that an evil-doer
will be caught and reported.
How many incredibly annoying features do they have to cram into these phones?
Yesterday, a phone at a table near me announced very loudly to the entire restaurant "You have an incoming call!" over and over and over again. It took the guy forever to figure out how to answer it.
What do I want in a phone?
Limit the annoyance capabilities (volume, music, etc.)
Let me have two or more phones share a single phone number. It has got to be possible, but nobody will do it. That's the only missing feature that makes me think back fondly about my old land-line phone. If someone wanted to reach whoever picked up first, or leave a message for whoever checked first, they only had one number to call; now they have two (me and my wife) and have to leave a message for both if neither of us answer. And soon half our calls will consist of "sorry, he's not with me; try his mother (or father) instead".
Let it be an option to create a blacklist of numbers (including "unknown") which will NOT generate a ring at all.
Let me hit END to drop an incoming call unanswered so I can place an outgoing call immediately instead of having to wait for the incoming call to eventually shunt over to voicemail.
Get three-way calling working better. I have had 5 different models of phones in the past 4 years, and NONE of them has handled three-way calling well at all.
Let me choose between color and black-and-white for the display. I never had any trouble reading the B&W display on my older phones at a quick glance. With this color display on my new phone, I have to shield it from the light, even at max contrast, and stare at it for a few seconds just to read the clock which is in larger numbers than everything else.
Make data cables available. I should not have to go to the store and stand in line for half an hour praying that when I get to the end of the line and ask to have my phonebook copied out, that their computer isn't down, that their cable isn't broken, that their software isn't misbehaving, that the person I get actually knows how to perform such a simple task, etc.
Make the equipment consistent. Every time I upgrade (mainly due to loss/damage) my phone, I have to get a new charger (usually included), new car charger, new headset, new data cable (if available!), new belt clip/holster, etc. And I use the term "upgrade" loosely, because out of all the phones I have had, I still like the first one best. If that model were still available, I would keep getting it, but unfortunately being 4 years old it is obsolete.
Out of college in 98, I started at $36K (pre-tax) and managed to pay the $1100/month mortgage and $350/month car payment and still eat.
It wasn't easy, and it wasn't always pretty, but we survived.
Within a year, I was promoted and got a raise to $48K, which made a huge difference. We ate better, starting paying down the credit cards, and occasionally even got some entertainment squeezed into the budget.
The public's (or individual's) privacy is already dead and long gone. What we need to do is mandate that all that information be open and free to everyone. Get rid of government and corporate privacy. If the governments and companies can obtain our data, we should be able to obtain theirs.
If everyone can look up *anything* at all about *anyone*, there would probably be a lot less abuse than there is now. It's hard to blackmail someone when the information is already publically available, and when the victim could probably find something that the blackmailer wouldn't want called to the public's attention.
As for identify theft, that's already a serious problem. We already need to find better ways to verify identity and authenticate authorization. Making all that personal data available to everyone probably won't cause an upswing in abuse; most of the people who would abuse having access to the data are already doing so.
emailing answering machine recordings -
keep the recording on a secure web server
that requires authentication, and send an
email to notify that voicemail is there,
and maybe some basic info such as caller ID
and date/time.
OCR a fax then email the text -
www.efax.com - incoming faxes are converted to tiff pitcures and emailed to you
www.fax1.com - email files (PDF, WORD, text, etc) to be transmitted to a real fax machine at a specified number
scanning in snail mail and emailing images - this just sounds like a real pain. I know I'd quickly go insane if that's what I did all day long
Yeah, but whoever is doing that would have to have a lot of free time, and probably a lot of email addresses. The phone call would not occur until the user responds to the email. I would expect some kind of safeguards, like only 3 phone call failures before the associated email adress is blocked for a day or week. And probably require the user to enter credit card info before the verification process starts, to verify that a valid card is being used. And maybe even at the very beginng, use the hard to read pictures of numbers to verify that a real person, and not a program/script, is filling out the form. And possibly more as they try to identify fraudulent entries to cut down on unnecessary phone charges and postage.
OK, so I didn't explicitly state that the user should be able to specify a preferred language. Sorry. I know the language capabilities exist for both the computer voices and the automatic letters.
For the hearing impaired, they usually have some way to cope with phone usage, from amplifiers, to TDD.
I was offering a general outline of a way to verify the submitted information. I was not trying to provide the complete end product!
The US example of how absurd identity verification is is the only example I have any direct experience with. If you can offer similar examples from other countries to show they are just as absurd, feel free to do so.
Here is an easy and reasonably cheap way to verify the accuracy of , with no human intervention on the Registrar's side:
Request email address, snail mail address, and phone number via a web form.
The registrar places the domain on reserve, pending successful verification.
Within a few minutes, an email is sent with a unique code to enter or a URL to click on. The user does so.
Within 10 minutes, a computer calls the phone number and reads a short list of randomly generated numbers.
The user enters those numbers on the form.
The computer generates a postcard (or sealed letter) with a different set of random numbers/characters and mails it to the user. The user can elect to pay for faster delivery options.
The user receives the letter and enters that data.
The registrar activates the domain.
This may not validate the identity of the user, but it should go a long way toward validating the email address, snail mail address, and phone number that the user provided.
The registrar could even require this validation to be performed once a year, initiated by sending an email to the given address and a letter to the snail mail address. This would be good incentive for people to keep their information updated.
Other than the initial setup, this process shouldn't come close to costing $5 for each validation attempt.
As for identity verification; I have no idea how to do that. In the US, the social security office only wants to see your (or *someone's*) birth certificate before they will issue a replacement card. The department of motor vehicles only wants to see your (or *someone's*) birth certificate or social security card before they will issue a replacement driver's license. Neither the social security card nor the birth cetificate has *ANY* information on it that can be used to even roughly validate my identity. The fact that a driver's license and passport both rely on those documents for verification is absurd.
After having my wallet stolen and having to get my license replaced, I'm no longer surprised that identity theft is so easy and common. All you have to know is a name, their parent's names, their birthplace, and their birthdate, and with that you can get a birth certificate for $5-$10. You'll find out their social security number after waiting 2 weeks for the social security office to mail you "your" new card. Maybe now that many DMV offices do your license photo electronically, a clerk *might* pull up "your" previous photo and question you if you look too obviously different (oh wow! I used to look even fatter than I thought! This diet is amazing!), but maybe not. After that, and maybe a little research on the web, you've got pretty much all you need to check credit reports (to get credit card numbers, etc) and obtain a passport.
I had to do all this for myself once, and the ultimate proof that I was me is that I was able to obtain a copy of a birth certificate with my name on it.
However, I don't know what more they could require and still have validation be possible. Maybe eventually, the social security office or the DMV will start requiring a full set of fingerprints for initial cards or licenses, and a new set for comparison before a replacement is issued.
1) How are you supposed to place an order without registering and giving them your info?
For a one time order, why make you register? Like many other places I have ordered from on the internet, it should be an option to let me just fill out my info and place the order.
If I want to actually register for an account so that next time I can login and have all my info miraculously remembered, that's fine. But don't force me to do that.
Maybe I don't want to have to remember yet another account name and password for yet another site. If I go back in the future and create yet another account for another order, will it cause problems that I use the same name, email address, billing address, shipping address, and/or credit card number as an existing account which I can't remember? Some sites have had problems with that, and some of those have lost my business because they didn't have easy ways to retrieve the forgotten userid or password.
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Noise pollution is as bad as air pollution. People putting TVs up in every possible place are as bad as smokers. Some people like quiet; some people like to breathe.
There are many places I go where I don't have a reasonable choice to avoid this. (I won't count restaurants in this, because there are so usually many choices available.)
For example, my current dentist and the three I have had previously over the years all have TVs in their waiting rooms. I always make my appointments as early in the morning as possible and usually arrive to an empty waiting room, usually with the TV off. Inevitably, the next person to arrive just HAS to turn it on and crank up the volume without even checking to see if anyone cared. There is no place to get away from that noise in there.
For another example, one shopping mall that I avoid whenever possible has large TVs every 50 feet or so hanging from the ceiling in the hallways. The noise from those is so loud, I can't hear my wife shouting right next to me. Well, I can hear her, I just can't understand what she is saying because of all the interference that she cannot overcome. I have never seen anyone showing any indication of paying attention to either the TVs or the noise from them.
Finally, airports are the most annoying offenders I can think of. If you want to hear the boarding call for your flight, there is NO place you can go to get away from the overhead TVs blaring away at you. And, where the noise from the overhead TVs is weakest, that's wheere they place the group of loud pay-per-use individual TV seats. Trying to use a pay phone or cell phone in all that racket is about as bad as trying to use one on the side of a busy highway.
A gas station I used to use almost exclusively recently lost my business when they installed ad-spewing TVs on each pump. I never go there anymore.
I was recently called for jury duty. We were required to stay in one specific large room. Mounted near the ceiling at each corner of the room was a TV, just out of reach; all were on loud and all were on different channels. When I asked if ONE could be turned off, the response was that someone might want to watch it. Not that anyone WAS watching it, that someone MIGHT want to watch it.
So, now the terrorists know that they *might* be able to disrupt communications if they can pump a sufficient quantity of water into the basement of a vulnerable (which are still vulnerable and which have been updated to protect against this?) central office.
Really now, how useful is this information? It's not like this wasn't broadcast over every news channel in the entire area for two whole days, with particular emphasis on what areas were and were not affected so that people would know where they could go to find a working phone and reach those 911 services that were accessible.
Basic is "$10.25-$13.50" (they don't know!?) and has about 20 channels, mainly the broadcast, local access, and home shopping ones. The only other analog tier is Standard for $44.10 which has about 75 channels.
The old "basic" used to be around $25 and offered about 30 channels, and was the lowest tier available. If there was a lower tier available then, the salesperson chose to lose the sale rather than offer it.
I might consider going for basic cable now to get clearer pictures. For what I would watch, $10 is reasonable.
The most *basic* cable package I can get is $25/month, and other than the regular broadcast channels, it's mainly a lot of home shopping channels. At least PBS is a decent strength here, so my kids have something to watch when I just can't stand the pokemon DVD anymore.
The current state of things is that it is very difficult for the average person, but easy for people with money or specific technical skills. The site this story is about brings easy-to-use spoofing to everyone.
Caller's should be allowed to block or reveal their ID, but not spoof it. Receivers should be able to accept or reject calls with a blocked ID.
I've had more than enough calls from "0" which were not from the operator. I've had plenty of calls from other numbers that are obviously false (not 7 or 10 digits). I've had plenty of calls from numbers that were "out of service" when I called them.
If the phone companies are unable to prevent spoofing, the government should implement laws either to make spoofing illegal or to mandate an upgrade to the phone system to make it impossible.
I bought CDs because I didn't have to rewind/fast forward forever to get to the song I wanted to listen to at the time.
I bought CDs because I knew cassettes were already a thing of the past. I am always surprised when I see them still in the stores now.
The difference is that when you break the Cognac glass, you might be able to repair it, especially if it a clean break or just a chip. How would you repair a broken CD or DVD?
To travel from Raleigh NC to Dallas TX is about $500.00 one way on Amtrak. The same trip is under $200.00 round trip by plane. On Amtrak, I would have to change trains at least 6 different times, often in the middle of the night, and the trip would take a little over 2 days. By plane, I *might* have to change planes one time, the actual flying time is a little under 4 hours, and the layover when changing planes is usually less than 3 hours.
Short distances are certainly cheaper by train and bus, but nothing can compare to airplanes when going long distances.
Yes, there is a difference. I'm free to go choose a different dentist if I don't like his music selection. The guy blasting music out in the street is intentionally doing so and should be fined (whether by the police or RIAA I don't care). I can't get away until the traffic light lets me. Even worse is that no amount of soundproofing will keep my home's windows from rattling when the jerks are driving by. At 2 in the morning, I can hear the car coming well over a minute before it actually passes by my house and then another minute after.
My mail server run from my house has had less total downtime than that of any one single ISP I have used in the past 5 years. (Not counting a ten day outage after an ice storm, where I had more pressing concerns than mail, such as power and heat.)
I did exactly that. My mailserver works better for my purposes than that of any ISP I have ever used. I found what works best for me and implemented it. Who are you to say that my solution of running my own mailserver is wrong?
All those other reasons you lumped together as "specious excuses" are valid reasons. An ISP typically has hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of users. They have massive mail servers that are designed to provide service to those vast quntities of users. My mail server is used by only a very few people (4). It is a lot more suitable for my needs than my ISP's server is.
What really has me curious is why they included power ports for laptops in the thing. With the battery life it has (or hasn't), who would dare add on anything that would use more electricity?
For that matter, why have power windows? The only reason I like power windows is so I can raise/lower passenger and rear windows. In this car, there isn't a window that is even the slightest bit difficult to reach by the driver.
I realize it takes a while to write a book, but doesn't it usually need to be finished before someone can read and review it? If it is already finished, why is it taking so long to publish it? Surely it can't take a whole year to setup the press to print the book.
What I object to is all the surveillance where only a few unknown people or groups have acess to it, and you don't even know it is happening.
Letting anyone access the data will be even more effective than the small group of people watching it. If hundreds of random people are watching, imagine how much more likely it is that an evil-doer will be caught and reported.
Yesterday, a phone at a table near me announced very loudly to the entire restaurant "You have an incoming call!" over and over and over again. It took the guy forever to figure out how to answer it.
What do I want in a phone?
Limit the annoyance capabilities (volume, music, etc.)
Let me have two or more phones share a single phone number. It has got to be possible, but nobody will do it. That's the only missing feature that makes me think back fondly about my old land-line phone. If someone wanted to reach whoever picked up first, or leave a message for whoever checked first, they only had one number to call; now they have two (me and my wife) and have to leave a message for both if neither of us answer. And soon half our calls will consist of "sorry, he's not with me; try his mother (or father) instead".
Let it be an option to create a blacklist of numbers (including "unknown") which will NOT generate a ring at all.
Let me hit END to drop an incoming call unanswered so I can place an outgoing call immediately instead of having to wait for the incoming call to eventually shunt over to voicemail.
Get three-way calling working better. I have had 5 different models of phones in the past 4 years, and NONE of them has handled three-way calling well at all.
Let me choose between color and black-and-white for the display. I never had any trouble reading the B&W display on my older phones at a quick glance. With this color display on my new phone, I have to shield it from the light, even at max contrast, and stare at it for a few seconds just to read the clock which is in larger numbers than everything else.
Make data cables available. I should not have to go to the store and stand in line for half an hour praying that when I get to the end of the line and ask to have my phonebook copied out, that their computer isn't down, that their cable isn't broken, that their software isn't misbehaving, that the person I get actually knows how to perform such a simple task, etc.
Make the equipment consistent. Every time I upgrade (mainly due to loss/damage) my phone, I have to get a new charger (usually included), new car charger, new headset, new data cable (if available!), new belt clip/holster, etc. And I use the term "upgrade" loosely, because out of all the phones I have had, I still like the first one best. If that model were still available, I would keep getting it, but unfortunately being 4 years old it is obsolete.
Out of college in 98, I started at $36K (pre-tax) and managed to pay the $1100/month mortgage and $350/month car payment and still eat. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't always pretty, but we survived. Within a year, I was promoted and got a raise to $48K, which made a huge difference. We ate better, starting paying down the credit cards, and occasionally even got some entertainment squeezed into the budget.
That surcharge may be worth it. How much do they save by not needing to empty the coinbox as often.
If everyone can look up *anything* at all about *anyone*, there would probably be a lot less abuse than there is now. It's hard to blackmail someone when the information is already publically available, and when the victim could probably find something that the blackmailer wouldn't want called to the public's attention.
As for identify theft, that's already a serious problem. We already need to find better ways to verify identity and authenticate authorization. Making all that personal data available to everyone probably won't cause an upswing in abuse; most of the people who would abuse having access to the data are already doing so.
OCR a fax then email the text -
www.efax.com - incoming faxes are converted to tiff pitcures and emailed to you
www.fax1.com - email files (PDF, WORD, text, etc) to be transmitted to a real fax machine at a specified number
scanning in snail mail and emailing images - this just sounds like a real pain. I know I'd quickly go insane if that's what I did all day long
The customer has to hang up first. You can't hang up until the customer does. It's monitored.
Yeah, but whoever is doing that would have to have a lot of free time, and probably a lot of email addresses. The phone call would not occur until the user responds to the email. I would expect some kind of safeguards, like only 3 phone call failures before the associated email adress is blocked for a day or week. And probably require the user to enter credit card info before the verification process starts, to verify that a valid card is being used. And maybe even at the very beginng, use the hard to read pictures of numbers to verify that a real person, and not a program/script, is filling out the form. And possibly more as they try to identify fraudulent entries to cut down on unnecessary phone charges and postage.
For the hearing impaired, they usually have some way to cope with phone usage, from amplifiers, to TDD.
I was offering a general outline of a way to verify the submitted information. I was not trying to provide the complete end product!
The US example of how absurd identity verification is is the only example I have any direct experience with. If you can offer similar examples from other countries to show they are just as absurd, feel free to do so.
This may not validate the identity of the user, but it should go a long way toward validating the email address, snail mail address, and phone number that the user provided.
The registrar could even require this validation to be performed once a year, initiated by sending an email to the given address and a letter to the snail mail address. This would be good incentive for people to keep their information updated.
Other than the initial setup, this process shouldn't come close to costing $5 for each validation attempt.
As for identity verification; I have no idea how to do that. In the US, the social security office only wants to see your (or *someone's*) birth certificate before they will issue a replacement card. The department of motor vehicles only wants to see your (or *someone's*) birth certificate or social security card before they will issue a replacement driver's license. Neither the social security card nor the birth cetificate has *ANY* information on it that can be used to even roughly validate my identity. The fact that a driver's license and passport both rely on those documents for verification is absurd.
After having my wallet stolen and having to get my license replaced, I'm no longer surprised that identity theft is so easy and common. All you have to know is a name, their parent's names, their birthplace, and their birthdate, and with that you can get a birth certificate for $5-$10. You'll find out their social security number after waiting 2 weeks for the social security office to mail you "your" new card. Maybe now that many DMV offices do your license photo electronically, a clerk *might* pull up "your" previous photo and question you if you look too obviously different (oh wow! I used to look even fatter than I thought! This diet is amazing!), but maybe not. After that, and maybe a little research on the web, you've got pretty much all you need to check credit reports (to get credit card numbers, etc) and obtain a passport.
I had to do all this for myself once, and the ultimate proof that I was me is that I was able to obtain a copy of a birth certificate with my name on it.
However, I don't know what more they could require and still have validation be possible. Maybe eventually, the social security office or the DMV will start requiring a full set of fingerprints for initial cards or licenses, and a new set for comparison before a replacement is issued.
Maybe then identity verification could work.
For a one time order, why make you register? Like many other places I have ordered from on the internet, it should be an option to let me just fill out my info and place the order.
If I want to actually register for an account so that next time I can login and have all my info miraculously remembered, that's fine. But don't force me to do that.
Maybe I don't want to have to remember yet another account name and password for yet another site. If I go back in the future and create yet another account for another order, will it cause problems that I use the same name, email address, billing address, shipping address, and/or credit card number as an existing account which I can't remember? Some sites have had problems with that, and some of those have lost my business because they didn't have easy ways to retrieve the forgotten userid or password.