One caveat about the movie: bring Dramamine. Lots of it. I had two friends with me who missed the whole second half of the movie because they couldn't look at the screen. Or just wait a while and download a CAM from BitTorrent; sooner or later someone's going to be swaying with the on-screen motion so smoothly that there will be a rock steady capture in DIVX format.:)
The article says that it's an automated module designed to be attached to the outside of the ISS, but that doesn't necessarily mean it could be made to operate fully autonomously of the ISS. It could still require some degree of manual intervention from the crew onboard the ISS to enable it to perform any meaningful experiments. True, you could possibly do that remotely via a comms link, but there could be any number of things it's currently dependent on the ISS for; power, cooling and communications being three fairly obvious ones.
Maybe because one of the "necessary bits" is a human being to run it? I'm just guessing here, based on the fact it's specifically called a laboratory as opposed to a module, but if it absolutely requires human intervention to operate and can't be automated then it's the ISS or nothing. It might even be possible to get the module into orbit with an alternate launch vehicle, but even if you can get it parked alongside the ISS, overcoming the logistics of physically mounting it without the aid of the Shuttle's robot arm could easily be another show stopper.
I'm not going to be holding my breath on this one, quite frankly.
Re:Submitter is Charles Nesson, Professor of Law
on
RIAA Afraid of Harvard
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, "NewYorkCountryLawyer" is the Slashdot ID of Ray Beckerman, attorney at Vandenberg & Feliu and long standing pain in ass of the RIAA. Charles Nesson and John Palfrey wrote the original Harvard response to the RIAA which was orignally covered at Information Week, then picked up by P2PNet and Ray Beckerman's own blog, amongst others.
The reason thought most likely is that the core has broken up, so this may turn out to be the comet's last trip around the sun as anything other than a cloud of rocky fragments.
Do members have to contribute financially to ISO in order to sit on these committees, or is it free as long as you are a duly appointed representative of a body recognized by ISO? If it's chargeable, which I suspect that it is, then the worst case scenario would probably be that nothing gets done until the next renewal fee. In all likelihood it will be even quicker than that once the "name and shame" game inevitably starts if a couple more rounds of attempting to convince the non-voting P-members to downgrade themselves back to Observer Status fails. There's even a chance that may be successful enough to allow votes to start passing if a point is reached where 50% of the P-voters can be bothered to express an opinion. Once that happens the very next votes should be on the topics of "what do we do about the sock puppets Microsoft bought?" and "how do we stop this happening again?"
Maybe it's a comedy about a bunch of Orcish misfits called "Auf Wiedersehen, Nazgul"?
Other than that, without resorting to making stuff up, there's really not a lot going on outside Mordor is there? LoTR makes it pretty clear that pretty much everyone got caught off guard by Sauron's return to Barad-dur, and even Gandalf's suspicions only got roused by Bilbo's disappearing act at his birthday party at the start of LoTR. The only other thing I can think of right now might be to take a look at Balin's return to Moria and the subsequent heroic last stand of the dwarves after waking the Balrog, maybe tying the effort into some ulterior motive connected with Sauron and Barad-dur.
Hey, the RIAA clearly has different concepts of enumerating CD drives and the value of copies of individual songs than everyone else, why should we expect them to have a grasp of time that is grounded in reality either? The discrepancy is about 1m20 in both cases, so it's likely to be something along the lines of the RIAA's lawyer was including the time taken to fetch each CD from the other side of the room and take it back again afterwards or something asinine like that.
Tell that to the UK/US media. About the only place I've seen so far that has consistently used "Burma" that could be classed as mainstream media is the BBC who have a stated policy on the matter. CNN has been equally consistent with "Myanmar", and everywhere else seems to be leaving it up to the editor or journalist responsible for the article.
Actually, Dan Rather is probably not making this up - he's more likely (mis)reporting some allegations made by a now sacked Boeing engineer, Vince Weldon. The Register has a write up based on what was said by the engineer and the rebuttals made by Boeing and the FAA.
That will list all the listening services on a Linux box, complete with the program/PID that is associated with it. It's faster than just running something like NMAP, plus it will identify whether a program is binding to a specific external IP, a loopback IP and so on, not all of which an external port scanner is going to be able to report on.
That does seem to the way of most Blogs. If only this thought would occur to a few more wannabe bloggers, then there might be a higher signal to noise ratio out there.
It is indeed Richard Dawkins, from "The God Delusion" to be precise, where he proposes that altruism originally derived from the concepts of kinship and reciprocation in tribes. Essentially this is just survival of the fittest applied to groups rather than individuals; enhancing one's own survival and procreation chances by working as a team. It's not just humans either; plenty of animals exhibit similar behavior, both within their own species (meerkats taking turns to act as lookout instead of foraging for food) and with others via various symbiotic relationships (sharks and remoras).
This finding also strengthens his theory that if something appears to defy a Darwinian explanation, such as altruism, then it is almost certainly a "misfire" of something else that does. That altruism stimulates the parts of the brain responsible for finding food and sex points quite strongly to what is misfiring here and why altruism makes people feel good about being charitable. If I recall correctly, Dawkins even suggested sexual desire as a likely misfire that drove people towards altruism - anyone got the book on hand?
NTP.org" maintains a pool of public NTP servers that are accessible via the hostname "pool.ntp.org", so perhaps something similar would work for a global DTD repository. An industry organization with a vested interest, the W3C seems like the most logical, could maintain the DNS zone and organizations could volunteer some server space and bandwidth to host a mirror of the collected pool of DTDs. Volunteering organizations might come and go, but when that happens it's just a matter of updating the DNS zone to reflect the change and everyone using DTDs just needs to know a single generic hostname will always provide a copy of the required DTD.
and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test.
*cough* Xen/VMWare/Parallels/... *cough*. At this point, I think that anyone doing any serious development work, whether that be coding for the or standalone applications, who isn't using some form of virtualization is probably a member of a rapidly shrinking breed. Or a masochist.
Exactly. This is the strongest message you can send and it's actually your easiest option thanks to Internet search engines. Any decent web logfile analysis package is capable of showing stats on the number of visitors that only visited the home page and didn't follow any links. If the site in question is using one and that figure gets high enough then they might just correlate it with browser usage and the clue train will pull into the station. If not, well, it's their lost sales, advertising revenue, warm-fuzzies though high pages hits or whatever other factor they judge the success of the site by.
You think that SCO is going to stop at the deposition if they can take things further? That's simply not the way SCO operates at all. There is some stuff under seal, so it could well be that SCO does have something they want to depose PJ about that could go somewhere, but there doesn't appear be much substance in what we can read other than circumstantial evidence and co-incidence. So, yes, this does appear to be little more than a fishing trip, but you can bet that anything, no matter how flimsy, that they can use to keep PJ bogged down on matters other than Groklaw they are going to use, and if they can get her into the courtroom on either the SCO-IBM or Novell-SCO cases then they are going to be all over that.
Clearly Groklaw is the biggest of the many sites that go over the minutae of the various SCO lawsuits, so they are probably quite correct in their assertion that it's materially impacting their business - and proves that you do indeed reap what you sow. So, SCO drags PJ into the lawsuit, probably knowing full well that it's almost certainly not going to get them anywhere legally, but that it will buy them yet more delays, something they really seem to like. IANAL, but from what I understand of US law free speech does not extend to those involved in a legal case being able to comment on that case, and that surely has to be the real goal here. By getting PJ involved in the case and getting really, *really* lucky, they might be able to effectively gag Groklaw, or at least limit what they can and cannot post.
Personally, I think getting someone with a detailed knowledge of the case, a legal background, additional protections through being a journalist and despises you and your company onto the witness stand is not a smart move, but then I think SCO & BSF have already proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are not smart. Desperate maybe, but not smart.
Nargothrond ruined, dragonfire and orcs all around, our hero living in the wild as a bandit hunting monsters, reclaims birthright, slays dragon, gets the girl, lives happily ever after... that (unfortunately) is Hollywood.
Well that's kind of dumb, but you can still recover from that quite easily. I have an x86_64 system running Fedora Core 6 on which I have removed *every* single i?86 package just to see if it was possible (it is - see below), and along the way managed to cripple RPM by trashing "popt" by mistake. Oops. The recovery process to undo *your* mistake is basically to boot from the CD/DVD in recovery mode and then reinstall the package using the --relocate option (forcing it if need be) to restore the necessary files to the live system, then reboot.
As to getting a "pure" 64bit FC6 system, well you can't really do that since some of the "x86_64" packages include 32bit versions libraries for compatibility reasons and ease of packaging, but you can still prune the entire i?86 RPM dependency tree from top to bottom (glibc). The only gotcha is that many of the i?86 packages have shared files with their x86_64 counterparts and quite often remove these shared files as part of the uninstall (kudos to the packagers that worked around this). The trick is to uninstall the.?86 package, do a "--force --justdb" (omitting "--justdb" is how I stuffed "popt") uninstall of the x86_64 package, then re-install the x86_64 package over the top. Do the "-devel" packages, first, then the applications, then the libraries. A little bit of shell scripting and exploration of RPM options can give you a list of all the RPMs which have no dependent packages, and are thus safe to uninstall without breaking anything.
I'm actually rather disappointed in the response from the public to this poll. Just 28 thousand signatures after all the efforts of No2ID and the political posturing, back-tracking and outright changes in tack that it prompted over the last few years? I'd say it was the normal apathy from the UK electorate, except that this is not the petition that has been generating all the fuss - that one has about 1.5 *million* signatures and is over the introduction of per-mile road charging for the most heavily congested roads.
I doubt that much is going to stand in the way of the UK introduction of biometric ID cards now, short of the usual government incompetence with large scale IT projects or the Conservatives getting elected and actually keeping their promise to scrap the plan. Congestion charging on the otherhand now seems a little more touch and go and it's unlikely that a simple email is going to placate the dissenters that signed that petetion. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how that gets responded to, especially since we're looking at a general election in the next year or so and there are going to be a lot of Labour voters' names on that list...
The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed. The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into
because any email that from the 'Democratic People's Republic of $Country' is likely to be as bogus as the countries name. If a country needs to add 'Democratic' or 'Republic' to its name, you know something's wrong
Central African Republic
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Dominican Republic
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
And that's just the common names and not the official ones like "Republic of Ireland". Given that this is precisely the kind of verbose terminology that you would find in a genuine official email from a government body in such a country, I don't think that's going be suitable for anything other than a minor nudge towards spamminess.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says that it's an automated module designed to be attached to the outside of the ISS, but that doesn't necessarily mean it could be made to operate fully autonomously of the ISS. It could still require some degree of manual intervention from the crew onboard the ISS to enable it to perform any meaningful experiments. True, you could possibly do that remotely via a comms link, but there could be any number of things it's currently dependent on the ISS for; power, cooling and communications being three fairly obvious ones.
Maybe because one of the "necessary bits" is a human being to run it? I'm just guessing here, based on the fact it's specifically called a laboratory as opposed to a module, but if it absolutely requires human intervention to operate and can't be automated then it's the ISS or nothing. It might even be possible to get the module into orbit with an alternate launch vehicle, but even if you can get it parked alongside the ISS, overcoming the logistics of physically mounting it without the aid of the Shuttle's robot arm could easily be another show stopper.
I'm not going to be holding my breath on this one, quite frankly.
Actually, "NewYorkCountryLawyer" is the Slashdot ID of Ray Beckerman, attorney at Vandenberg & Feliu and long standing pain in ass of the RIAA. Charles Nesson and John Palfrey wrote the original Harvard response to the RIAA which was orignally covered at Information Week, then picked up by P2PNet and Ray Beckerman's own blog, amongst others.
The reason thought most likely is that the core has broken up, so this may turn out to be the comet's last trip around the sun as anything other than a cloud of rocky fragments.
I'm not quite sure whether that is that a typo for "paid gold" or "played golf", but either way it works. :)
Do members have to contribute financially to ISO in order to sit on these committees, or is it free as long as you are a duly appointed representative of a body recognized by ISO? If it's chargeable, which I suspect that it is, then the worst case scenario would probably be that nothing gets done until the next renewal fee. In all likelihood it will be even quicker than that once the "name and shame" game inevitably starts if a couple more rounds of attempting to convince the non-voting P-members to downgrade themselves back to Observer Status fails. There's even a chance that may be successful enough to allow votes to start passing if a point is reached where 50% of the P-voters can be bothered to express an opinion. Once that happens the very next votes should be on the topics of "what do we do about the sock puppets Microsoft bought?" and "how do we stop this happening again?"
Maybe it's a comedy about a bunch of Orcish misfits called "Auf Wiedersehen, Nazgul"?
Other than that, without resorting to making stuff up, there's really not a lot going on outside Mordor is there? LoTR makes it pretty clear that pretty much everyone got caught off guard by Sauron's return to Barad-dur, and even Gandalf's suspicions only got roused by Bilbo's disappearing act at his birthday party at the start of LoTR. The only other thing I can think of right now might be to take a look at Balin's return to Moria and the subsequent heroic last stand of the dwarves after waking the Balrog, maybe tying the effort into some ulterior motive connected with Sauron and Barad-dur.
Hey, the RIAA clearly has different concepts of enumerating CD drives and the value of copies of individual songs than everyone else, why should we expect them to have a grasp of time that is grounded in reality either? The discrepancy is about 1m20 in both cases, so it's likely to be something along the lines of the RIAA's lawyer was including the time taken to fetch each CD from the other side of the room and take it back again afterwards or something asinine like that.
Tell that to the UK/US media. About the only place I've seen so far that has consistently used "Burma" that could be classed as mainstream media is the BBC who have a stated policy on the matter. CNN has been equally consistent with "Myanmar", and everywhere else seems to be leaving it up to the editor or journalist responsible for the article.
Actually, Dan Rather is probably not making this up - he's more likely (mis)reporting some allegations made by a now sacked Boeing engineer, Vince Weldon. The Register has a write up based on what was said by the engineer and the rebuttals made by Boeing and the FAA.
That does seem to the way of most Blogs. If only this thought would occur to a few more wannabe bloggers, then there might be a higher signal to noise ratio out there.
Which makes me wonder, why not just sell the damn printer at a profit and then stop going so anal about the ink?
Ask Gillette.
It is indeed Richard Dawkins, from "The God Delusion" to be precise, where he proposes that altruism originally derived from the concepts of kinship and reciprocation in tribes. Essentially this is just survival of the fittest applied to groups rather than individuals; enhancing one's own survival and procreation chances by working as a team. It's not just humans either; plenty of animals exhibit similar behavior, both within their own species (meerkats taking turns to act as lookout instead of foraging for food) and with others via various symbiotic relationships (sharks and remoras).
This finding also strengthens his theory that if something appears to defy a Darwinian explanation, such as altruism, then it is almost certainly a "misfire" of something else that does. That altruism stimulates the parts of the brain responsible for finding food and sex points quite strongly to what is misfiring here and why altruism makes people feel good about being charitable. If I recall correctly, Dawkins even suggested sexual desire as a likely misfire that drove people towards altruism - anyone got the book on hand?
NTP.org" maintains a pool of public NTP servers that are accessible via the hostname "pool.ntp.org", so perhaps something similar would work for a global DTD repository. An industry organization with a vested interest, the W3C seems like the most logical, could maintain the DNS zone and organizations could volunteer some server space and bandwidth to host a mirror of the collected pool of DTDs. Volunteering organizations might come and go, but when that happens it's just a matter of updating the DNS zone to reflect the change and everyone using DTDs just needs to know a single generic hostname will always provide a copy of the required DTD.
Just a thought...
and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test.
*cough* Xen/VMWare/Parallels/... *cough*. At this point, I think that anyone doing any serious development work, whether that be coding for the or standalone applications, who isn't using some form of virtualization is probably a member of a rapidly shrinking breed. Or a masochist.Exactly. This is the strongest message you can send and it's actually your easiest option thanks to Internet search engines. Any decent web logfile analysis package is capable of showing stats on the number of visitors that only visited the home page and didn't follow any links. If the site in question is using one and that figure gets high enough then they might just correlate it with browser usage and the clue train will pull into the station. If not, well, it's their lost sales, advertising revenue, warm-fuzzies though high pages hits or whatever other factor they judge the success of the site by.
You think that SCO is going to stop at the deposition if they can take things further? That's simply not the way SCO operates at all. There is some stuff under seal, so it could well be that SCO does have something they want to depose PJ about that could go somewhere, but there doesn't appear be much substance in what we can read other than circumstantial evidence and co-incidence. So, yes, this does appear to be little more than a fishing trip, but you can bet that anything, no matter how flimsy, that they can use to keep PJ bogged down on matters other than Groklaw they are going to use, and if they can get her into the courtroom on either the SCO-IBM or Novell-SCO cases then they are going to be all over that.
Clearly Groklaw is the biggest of the many sites that go over the minutae of the various SCO lawsuits, so they are probably quite correct in their assertion that it's materially impacting their business - and proves that you do indeed reap what you sow. So, SCO drags PJ into the lawsuit, probably knowing full well that it's almost certainly not going to get them anywhere legally, but that it will buy them yet more delays, something they really seem to like. IANAL, but from what I understand of US law free speech does not extend to those involved in a legal case being able to comment on that case, and that surely has to be the real goal here. By getting PJ involved in the case and getting really, *really* lucky, they might be able to effectively gag Groklaw, or at least limit what they can and cannot post.
Personally, I think getting someone with a detailed knowledge of the case, a legal background, additional protections through being a journalist and despises you and your company onto the witness stand is not a smart move, but then I think SCO & BSF have already proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are not smart. Desperate maybe, but not smart.
Nargothrond ruined, dragonfire and orcs all around, our hero living in the wild as a bandit hunting monsters, reclaims birthright, slays dragon, gets the girl, lives happily ever after... that (unfortunately) is Hollywood.
Well that's kind of dumb, but you can still recover from that quite easily. I have an x86_64 system running Fedora Core 6 on which I have removed *every* single i?86 package just to see if it was possible (it is - see below), and along the way managed to cripple RPM by trashing "popt" by mistake. Oops. The recovery process to undo *your* mistake is basically to boot from the CD/DVD in recovery mode and then reinstall the package using the --relocate option (forcing it if need be) to restore the necessary files to the live system, then reboot.
As to getting a "pure" 64bit FC6 system, well you can't really do that since some of the "x86_64" packages include 32bit versions libraries for compatibility reasons and ease of packaging, but you can still prune the entire i?86 RPM dependency tree from top to bottom (glibc). The only gotcha is that many of the i?86 packages have shared files with their x86_64 counterparts and quite often remove these shared files as part of the uninstall (kudos to the packagers that worked around this). The trick is to uninstall the .?86 package, do a "--force --justdb" (omitting "--justdb" is how I stuffed "popt") uninstall of the x86_64 package, then re-install the x86_64 package over the top. Do the "-devel" packages, first, then the applications, then the libraries. A little bit of shell scripting and exploration of RPM options can give you a list of all the RPMs which have no dependent packages, and are thus safe to uninstall without breaking anything.
I'm actually rather disappointed in the response from the public to this poll. Just 28 thousand signatures after all the efforts of No2ID and the political posturing, back-tracking and outright changes in tack that it prompted over the last few years? I'd say it was the normal apathy from the UK electorate, except that this is not the petition that has been generating all the fuss - that one has about 1.5 *million* signatures and is over the introduction of per-mile road charging for the most heavily congested roads.
I doubt that much is going to stand in the way of the UK introduction of biometric ID cards now, short of the usual government incompetence with large scale IT projects or the Conservatives getting elected and actually keeping their promise to scrap the plan. Congestion charging on the otherhand now seems a little more touch and go and it's unlikely that a simple email is going to placate the dissenters that signed that petetion. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how that gets responded to, especially since we're looking at a general election in the next year or so and there are going to be a lot of Labour voters' names on that list...
The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed. The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into
because any email that from the 'Democratic People's Republic of $Country' is likely to be as bogus as the countries name. If a country needs to add 'Democratic' or 'Republic' to its name, you know something's wrong
- Central African Republic
- Czech Republic
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Dominican Republic
- Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
And that's just the common names and not the official ones like "Republic of Ireland". Given that this is precisely the kind of verbose terminology that you would find in a genuine official email from a government body in such a country, I don't think that's going be suitable for anything other than a minor nudge towards spamminess.