German engineers are arrogant bastards. They know what's best and don't give a crap about what anyone else thinks
I think it's a European engineering problem in general (take a look at their washing machines for god sakes.)
My Saab 9-5 has a climate control system that one auto critic said "requires an electrical engineering degree to understand." While that is obviously exaggeration it really is a complex system which has 12 pages of the manual devoted to it, and 3 matrices of different options and such. In spite of my repeated attempts, I haven't fully figured it out yet.
Interestingly, the new 9-5 went back to analog dials. Some people complained that it was "decontenting" which is a common complaint that's been lodged against Saab in recent years. And while it's true the digital system in my car is very cool looking, everyone I know who's had both prefers the analog knobs for their simplicity.
The first "sci-fi" reference for two suns that I can think of comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (keep in mind, I really don't know my sci-fi at all, so I expect there are others.)
Does anyone have an earlier reference? I suspect that Tatooine is a fairly recent reference, though popularly known it may be.
If you're a permanent resident or a H1-B holder you're not am American citizen
Though this reply sorta contradicts another reply I made to the parent, US Permanent Residents are treated by Canada as if they were American citizens, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to have an enhanced license indicating they were a green card holder.
My contention on that is they don't need it because they already have a green card--which is sufficient for crossing into Canada and back.
What would permanent residents and H1-B types have on their "enhanced" papers in lieu of proof of American citizenship?
Permanent US residents don't need an enhanced license because they already have a Green Card. The Green Card is accepted by Canada for entry and it's accepted by the US for return. (Permanent US residents are, in effect, treated by Canada as if they were US citizens.)
Non-permanent residents are not treated the same way, and are evaluated by their citizenship and other credential issues--so they'll need their passport anyway.
Montana seems to have 2 Democrat senators... maybe they should start a groundswell by voting in some libertarians who wouldn't put up for that stuff.
The Democratic party has been doing well in the Mountain West because it has a libertarian slant. It's is generally reckoned that Jon Tester won the US Senate race in 06 because of libertarian leaning voters who voted for him.
You can safely expect this trend to continue, at least in the Mountain West.
The term "district attorney" is common, but not as common nationally as one would think. It's popular in the public consciousness because that's the term for prosecutor in California and New York--and therefore the term that is carried over in the media.
I think the wings on every plane do that. If they wouldn't, they would break.
There seems to be a movement towards even more wing flex than we've come to expect. Conceptual drawings of new Boeing aircraft, such as the 787, show enormous wing flex. New materials and engineering are likely allowing for it.
While it might freak out the uninitiated, wing flex is pretty nifty--it absorbs turbulence before it actually reaches the cabin.
More passengers just means a little less freight - and the passengers certainly make more money.
This is not exactly indicated by the fact that FedEx and UPS are enormously profitable operations, while domestic airlines have struggled for some time.
Whenever FedEx and UPS are asked about carrying passengers they say it'd be crazy. Passengers are an enormous pain.
Of course, there are many different passengers, paying quite a lot of different airfares (a first class passenger is enormously profitable.) But, all things considered, between 170lb passenger paying a discount economy fare, and 170lb of freight, the freight is probably more profitable, particularly on an international flight.
29 percent of American households consist of "really old people".
I was at a nursing home the other day, getting a tour, and the manager pointed me to a computer with an internet connection. She said that it was "very popular with some of our residents...particularly those over the age of 90."
Over the age of 90? I asked her what she attributed that to:
"It's a trick you see. People who get to be 90 have a natural predisposition to wanting to live longer, and as part of living longer, they want to stay as involved in and be a part of society as much as possible, and the internet is a major part of society today."
how many people out there will wreck their finances this way?
I can't tell you how many people I know who have run up their cell phone bills into the $300-$500 range because they simply are not able to control their texting/minute usage. The horror of finding a cell phone bill 3x what you normally budget is what wrecks people's finances.
I don't like the fact that scientists say the world is round so I'm going to petition my local government to enact legislation to make the world flat. Does that sound right?
No. But you can petition your local government to declare that the world is flat.
Does it make a difference? It could depending on a few things, but such an arbitrary declaration would probably be symbolic today.
But it illustrates that quite a lot of what politicians do is arbitrary, though much of it has enormous implications. The process of creating and amending law is by its nature political and often times unrelated to the law that's being created.
Criminal law has lots of examples of arbitrary declarations that have a huge effect. Take the age of consent--whether a state's age of consent is 16 or 18 means a lot--not just because a relationship in one state is legal but the same in another is tremendously illegal--but because the law is just words on paper, created in a process that might have been a weird tit for tat that's remarkably irrelevant to the law ("I'll vote for your bill to lower the AOC if you vote for mine to make the turtle the state animal.")
traction control (I think to be required starting in '08 - can someone substantiate that?)
Wikipedia claims that stability control will be required by 2012. Most automakers will have it installed by 2009/2010 however.
The stability control requirement will bring traction control standard, because traction control is part of the stability control system. However, it's stability control, and not traction control, which is being required.
There's no such thing in any european country of my knowledge, and frankly I don't understand why the idea of a national ID with a picture on it to certify who you really are is so scary to you and the english. How is it possible for someone to impersonate someone else in the USA by simply using their SSN?
The problem is not the lack of an identity card (and I happen to disagree with the parent posters that somehow the point of failure is that the SSN is used both as an identifier and password.)
The problem is simply that we give large amounts of credit in the US very quickly. You can fill out a form and get a $10,000 credit line instantaneously. It's my understanding that that is unique to the US. When you have that much money available that conveniently, it's worth it to a fraudster to do whatever it takes to get it.
Honestly, your national ID card doesn't have these problems because you don't have so much on the line. If you had a mechanism in your country for getting $10,000 simply by filling out a form and showing ID, you'll find out very quickly that your ID card is pretty worthless when that amount of money is on the line.
If they have a work visa then they can get an international drivers license (no need for a state ID) and they can get a TIN (no need for a SSN) and with those two pieces of data along with their passport they can buy US car insurance if they drive.
There are even easier ways to do this. While Ohio now requires legal presence documentation to issue a driver's license, the state never bothered to require an Ohio driver's license for Ohio insurance.
Smartest thing they never did do. Even some of the big insurance companies will give out Ohio insurance on a Mexican state license. It's cheap easy and affordable, so our illegals tend to be insured.
The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance
There's no doubt in my mind that the monarchical system developed through some sorta odd psychological need. While it's true that a lot of uglyness has occurred in maintaining monarchies over the centuries, it's not like democracy doesn't take us in a semi-similar direction.
As it has been said before, 8 years of President Hillary Clinton would make for 28 straight years of domination of US politics by two families. This is really not that unusual in countries where people elect the head of government. (Undoubtedly, the framers of the Constitution didn't want us to elect the head of government and it's an accident of history that we do. In fact, the parliamentary style system, the most common system found in monarchies/ex-monarchies, doesn't have popular elections for the head of government, so they don't get that pseudo-monarchy effect.)
but it often involves leaving behind the concept of the secret ballot (as does mail-in voting as in Oregon of course
I don't agree that any state's mail-in system is particularly vulnerable in terms of secret ballot issues. What's important is the system and processes that are used in how the ballot envelope is handled.
When the envelopes are received, individuals check the outer envelope to see if it meets the identification/verification criteria. Once that is done, the ballot is in a second envelope and that is separated.
You can watch the people who are doing this process very closely, since it will only be a handful of individuals.
Given the competition that exists within the industry, is this needed?"
I don't know if I consider this industry all that competitive--it's an oligopoly mixed with a cultural monopoly (what I mean by that is it's the same type of people running all of the companies. The people who run what we now call, again, AT&T, are basically old phone company fuddy-duddies who think it's a privilege (I'm using that word in the worst way possible) that we all have phone service. The same applies to Verizon and to a lesser extent T-Mobile and Sprint/Nextel.)
I'm not sure what I think of the idea. Half of me thinks it would be great, and the other half thinks that the companies would decline to upgrade to 3G, thinking that they'd be better off financially keeping the network slow enough so that Skype couldn't work on it.
I really haven't met anyone who locks their phone, regularly, with a PIN anyway. It's a lot of hassle for what is often data that is more important to have a backup copy of than to secure from other people.
So it seems to me that this is even more overkill.
I did have a phone once, a Sanyo (SCP-6400 I think) that allowed you, if you setup the feature, to send a specially encoded text message with a password, to the phone, which would erase the phones data. I thought that was a nifty feature if the phone were lost.
It smells because there are easy solutions to the problems.
I agree, I had VOIP put into my parent's home, and we got the alarm system to operate with it fine. The cable company's main concern was that the alarm system was a newer model and can dial via tone dialing (apparently there are a lot of old ones in the wild that only do pulse, which is incompatible with VOIP.)
The VOIP router has its own 8 hour battery backup, so electrical problems aren't so much a concern. And the installer had it set so that the alarm system cuts in and take priority on the line. (Like you said)
And my step-father often uses a fax machine on the same system without difficulty (indicating that the bandwidth is there for that.)
The alarm company was more than happy to run a series of tests to the alarm from their central station to test it after the installation and we had no issues with those tests.
Keep in mind, this was a cable company VOIP set-up and not a Vonage setup. Perhaps Vonage would present more issues.
I have no problem with a centralized two-factor authentication card.
Does that imply, incidentally, that you're ok with others having a problem with such a card. I personally do have a problem with such a device and don't want one.
My main issue is that governments think their great ideas should be adopted by everyone (pushed by companies that will make a lot of money on, say, everyone having a two factor authentication card.)
Why, because the solution to photo ID fraud is more photo ID cards?
I can't imagine how enrollment would work for such a system, but, essentially, you'd be using the same flawed documents (passport, driver's license) we have now to apply for the card. A card which would likely be trusted more than the flawed documents that were used to apply for the card in the first place.
If you were to dig down, I think you'd find that the level of resistance to the initiative is directly proportional to the cost of complying.
I'd say you have to dig down deeper than that. For the most part, states are all about in the same place in regards to compliance costs. Every state today has a digital license, and, hell, 2/3rds of those states are using the same equipment made by one company.
The main person mentioned as being pro-REAL ID was basically the CIO/CTO for the state of New Jersey. While she may have some input regarding how the DMV is run, she is not the head of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. She's got her own priorities and goals and they include creative ways of making government work better in New Jersey that having nothing to do with the DMV or its operations.
If anything, she probably likes the REAL ID Act because it allows her to push things like microprocessor based cards, useful for her goals, that the state legislature wouldn't have enacted by itself.
I need all three to get a Passport, but then I can't use my Passport to get a Driver's license.
I'm curious to know which state that is, but in either case that's perfectly fine by me. Passport fraud is a much bigger problem than driver's licensing fraud, and there is no reason to trust the passport application/issuance process over the driver's license application/issuance process. I'd rather keep them separated by not having one document usable for application for the other, as a way to isolate fraud issues.
Iris scanning and underhandedness go together. Motor vehicle administrators think it's the ideal biometric because the iris scan can be conducted surreptitiously as you are having your eye test for driver's license application/renewal.
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German engineers are arrogant bastards. They know what's best and don't give a crap about what anyone else thinks
I think it's a European engineering problem in general (take a look at their washing machines for god sakes.)
My Saab 9-5 has a climate control system that one auto critic said "requires an electrical engineering degree to understand." While that is obviously exaggeration it really is a complex system which has 12 pages of the manual devoted to it, and 3 matrices of different options and such. In spite of my repeated attempts, I haven't fully figured it out yet.
Interestingly, the new 9-5 went back to analog dials. Some people complained that it was "decontenting" which is a common complaint that's been lodged against Saab in recent years. And while it's true the digital system in my car is very cool looking, everyone I know who's had both prefers the analog knobs for their simplicity.
The first "sci-fi" reference for two suns that I can think of comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (keep in mind, I really don't know my sci-fi at all, so I expect there are others.)
Does anyone have an earlier reference? I suspect that Tatooine is a fairly recent reference, though popularly known it may be.
Funny though, I've never heard of any luggage accidentally ending up in San Jose, California (SJC).
On that note, having been born in Costa Rica, I deal with the Puerto Rico problem all the time--sometimes even with friends who should know better.
If you're a permanent resident or a H1-B holder you're not am American citizen
Though this reply sorta contradicts another reply I made to the parent, US Permanent Residents are treated by Canada as if they were American citizens, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to have an enhanced license indicating they were a green card holder.
My contention on that is they don't need it because they already have a green card--which is sufficient for crossing into Canada and back.
What would permanent residents and H1-B types have on their "enhanced" papers in lieu of proof of American citizenship?
Permanent US residents don't need an enhanced license because they already have a Green Card. The Green Card is accepted by Canada for entry and it's accepted by the US for return. (Permanent US residents are, in effect, treated by Canada as if they were US citizens.)
Non-permanent residents are not treated the same way, and are evaluated by their citizenship and other credential issues--so they'll need their passport anyway.
Montana seems to have 2 Democrat senators... maybe they should start a groundswell by voting in some libertarians who wouldn't put up for that stuff.
The Democratic party has been doing well in the Mountain West because it has a libertarian slant. It's is generally reckoned that Jon Tester won the US Senate race in 06 because of libertarian leaning voters who voted for him.
You can safely expect this trend to continue, at least in the Mountain West.
Usually, the person who prosecutes criminal cases--representing the state rather than the county--is called the "district attorney".
A quick google search indicates that the Montana "County Attorney" does both--they are the local prosecutor as well as the individual who represents the County. ("The Missoula County Attorney is an elected official who serves as both the public prosecutor for the State of Montana and as the legal advisor for all county officials within Missoula County.")
The term "district attorney" is common, but not as common nationally as one would think. It's popular in the public consciousness because that's the term for prosecutor in California and New York--and therefore the term that is carried over in the media.
I think the wings on every plane do that. If they wouldn't, they would break.
There seems to be a movement towards even more wing flex than we've come to expect. Conceptual drawings of new Boeing aircraft, such as the 787, show enormous wing flex. New materials and engineering are likely allowing for it.
While it might freak out the uninitiated, wing flex is pretty nifty--it absorbs turbulence before it actually reaches the cabin.
More passengers just means a little less freight - and the passengers certainly make more money.
This is not exactly indicated by the fact that FedEx and UPS are enormously profitable operations, while domestic airlines have struggled for some time.
Whenever FedEx and UPS are asked about carrying passengers they say it'd be crazy. Passengers are an enormous pain.
Of course, there are many different passengers, paying quite a lot of different airfares (a first class passenger is enormously profitable.) But, all things considered, between 170lb passenger paying a discount economy fare, and 170lb of freight, the freight is probably more profitable, particularly on an international flight.
29 percent of American households consist of "really old people".
I was at a nursing home the other day, getting a tour, and the manager pointed me to a computer with an internet connection. She said that it was "very popular with some of our residents...particularly those over the age of 90."
Over the age of 90? I asked her what she attributed that to:
"It's a trick you see. People who get to be 90 have a natural predisposition to wanting to live longer, and as part of living longer, they want to stay as involved in and be a part of society as much as possible, and the internet is a major part of society today."
how many people out there will wreck their finances this way?
I can't tell you how many people I know who have run up their cell phone bills into the $300-$500 range because they simply are not able to control their texting/minute usage. The horror of finding a cell phone bill 3x what you normally budget is what wrecks people's finances.
I don't like the fact that scientists say the world is round so I'm going to petition my local government to enact legislation to make the world flat. Does that sound right?
No. But you can petition your local government to declare that the world is flat.
Does it make a difference? It could depending on a few things, but such an arbitrary declaration would probably be symbolic today.
But it illustrates that quite a lot of what politicians do is arbitrary, though much of it has enormous implications. The process of creating and amending law is by its nature political and often times unrelated to the law that's being created.
Criminal law has lots of examples of arbitrary declarations that have a huge effect. Take the age of consent--whether a state's age of consent is 16 or 18 means a lot--not just because a relationship in one state is legal but the same in another is tremendously illegal--but because the law is just words on paper, created in a process that might have been a weird tit for tat that's remarkably irrelevant to the law ("I'll vote for your bill to lower the AOC if you vote for mine to make the turtle the state animal.")
Law making is agonizingly strange and arbitrary.
traction control (I think to be required starting in '08 - can someone substantiate that?)
Wikipedia claims that stability control will be required by 2012. Most automakers will have it installed by 2009/2010 however.
The stability control requirement will bring traction control standard, because traction control is part of the stability control system. However, it's stability control, and not traction control, which is being required.
There's no such thing in any european country of my knowledge, and frankly I don't understand why the idea of a national ID with a picture on it to certify who you really are is so scary to you and the english. How is it possible for someone to impersonate someone else in the USA by simply using their SSN?
The problem is not the lack of an identity card (and I happen to disagree with the parent posters that somehow the point of failure is that the SSN is used both as an identifier and password.)
The problem is simply that we give large amounts of credit in the US very quickly. You can fill out a form and get a $10,000 credit line instantaneously. It's my understanding that that is unique to the US. When you have that much money available that conveniently, it's worth it to a fraudster to do whatever it takes to get it.
Honestly, your national ID card doesn't have these problems because you don't have so much on the line. If you had a mechanism in your country for getting $10,000 simply by filling out a form and showing ID, you'll find out very quickly that your ID card is pretty worthless when that amount of money is on the line.
If they have a work visa then they can get an international drivers license (no need for a state ID) and they can get a TIN (no need for a SSN) and with those two pieces of data along with their passport they can buy US car insurance if they drive.
There are even easier ways to do this. While Ohio now requires legal presence documentation to issue a driver's license, the state never bothered to require an Ohio driver's license for Ohio insurance.
Smartest thing they never did do. Even some of the big insurance companies will give out Ohio insurance on a Mexican state license. It's cheap easy and affordable, so our illegals tend to be insured.
The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance
There's no doubt in my mind that the monarchical system developed through some sorta odd psychological need. While it's true that a lot of uglyness has occurred in maintaining monarchies over the centuries, it's not like democracy doesn't take us in a semi-similar direction.
As it has been said before, 8 years of President Hillary Clinton would make for 28 straight years of domination of US politics by two families. This is really not that unusual in countries where people elect the head of government. (Undoubtedly, the framers of the Constitution didn't want us to elect the head of government and it's an accident of history that we do. In fact, the parliamentary style system, the most common system found in monarchies/ex-monarchies, doesn't have popular elections for the head of government, so they don't get that pseudo-monarchy effect.)
but it often involves leaving behind the concept of the secret ballot (as does mail-in voting as in Oregon of course
I don't agree that any state's mail-in system is particularly vulnerable in terms of secret ballot issues. What's important is the system and processes that are used in how the ballot envelope is handled.
When the envelopes are received, individuals check the outer envelope to see if it meets the identification/verification criteria. Once that is done, the ballot is in a second envelope and that is separated.
You can watch the people who are doing this process very closely, since it will only be a handful of individuals.
Given the competition that exists within the industry, is this needed?"
I don't know if I consider this industry all that competitive--it's an oligopoly mixed with a cultural monopoly (what I mean by that is it's the same type of people running all of the companies. The people who run what we now call, again, AT&T, are basically old phone company fuddy-duddies who think it's a privilege (I'm using that word in the worst way possible) that we all have phone service. The same applies to Verizon and to a lesser extent T-Mobile and Sprint/Nextel.)
I'm not sure what I think of the idea. Half of me thinks it would be great, and the other half thinks that the companies would decline to upgrade to 3G, thinking that they'd be better off financially keeping the network slow enough so that Skype couldn't work on it.
I really haven't met anyone who locks their phone, regularly, with a PIN anyway. It's a lot of hassle for what is often data that is more important to have a backup copy of than to secure from other people.
So it seems to me that this is even more overkill.
I did have a phone once, a Sanyo (SCP-6400 I think) that allowed you, if you setup the feature, to send a specially encoded text message with a password, to the phone, which would erase the phones data. I thought that was a nifty feature if the phone were lost.
To be fair however, I never setup the feature.
It smells because there are easy solutions to the problems.
I agree, I had VOIP put into my parent's home, and we got the alarm system to operate with it fine. The cable company's main concern was that the alarm system was a newer model and can dial via tone dialing (apparently there are a lot of old ones in the wild that only do pulse, which is incompatible with VOIP.)
The VOIP router has its own 8 hour battery backup, so electrical problems aren't so much a concern. And the installer had it set so that the alarm system cuts in and take priority on the line. (Like you said)
And my step-father often uses a fax machine on the same system without difficulty (indicating that the bandwidth is there for that.)
The alarm company was more than happy to run a series of tests to the alarm from their central station to test it after the installation and we had no issues with those tests.
Keep in mind, this was a cable company VOIP set-up and not a Vonage setup. Perhaps Vonage would present more issues.
I have no problem with a centralized two-factor authentication card.
Does that imply, incidentally, that you're ok with others having a problem with such a card. I personally do have a problem with such a device and don't want one.
My main issue is that governments think their great ideas should be adopted by everyone (pushed by companies that will make a lot of money on, say, everyone having a two factor authentication card.)
Have one if you want, leave me out of it however.
... to at least include a picture.
Why, because the solution to photo ID fraud is more photo ID cards?
I can't imagine how enrollment would work for such a system, but, essentially, you'd be using the same flawed documents (passport, driver's license) we have now to apply for the card. A card which would likely be trusted more than the flawed documents that were used to apply for the card in the first place.
If you were to dig down, I think you'd find that the level of resistance to the initiative is directly proportional to the cost of complying.
I'd say you have to dig down deeper than that. For the most part, states are all about in the same place in regards to compliance costs. Every state today has a digital license, and, hell, 2/3rds of those states are using the same equipment made by one company.
The main person mentioned as being pro-REAL ID was basically the CIO/CTO for the state of New Jersey. While she may have some input regarding how the DMV is run, she is not the head of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. She's got her own priorities and goals and they include creative ways of making government work better in New Jersey that having nothing to do with the DMV or its operations.
If anything, she probably likes the REAL ID Act because it allows her to push things like microprocessor based cards, useful for her goals, that the state legislature wouldn't have enacted by itself.
I need all three to get a Passport, but then I can't use my Passport to get a Driver's license.
I'm curious to know which state that is, but in either case that's perfectly fine by me. Passport fraud is a much bigger problem than driver's licensing fraud, and there is no reason to trust the passport application/issuance process over the driver's license application/issuance process. I'd rather keep them separated by not having one document usable for application for the other, as a way to isolate fraud issues.
That would be underhanded to say the least.
Iris scanning and underhandedness go together. Motor vehicle administrators think it's the ideal biometric because the iris scan can be conducted surreptitiously as you are having your eye test for driver's license application/renewal.