national id, or state id: from a privacy point of view, what's the difference?
The difference is this: a state ID card is an administrative document. It helps verify identity in particular situations, but it is still an optional document. (It's really only tangentially related to driving--it's the driver's record that more important, not so much the license itself.)
And while the uses of the state ID card are more varied today, I maintain that it's easier to live without one than it would have been 10 or 15 years ago (when financial transactions were heavily dependent on an ID card.)
A national ID card is a document of citizenship. If other countries experiences are a guide, it does more than verify identity, it is your identity. Failure to carry makes you a non-person in the eyes of the state. An expired document means your citizenship is suspended. (To be fair, this can happen with state ID cards. Recent laws requiring ID to vote often require the ID to be valid, which I think is a bad precedence. After all, does your citizenship magically come to an end simply because your license is 30 days too old?)
A national ID can be thought of as a document of requesting the privilege to exist from the state, and in that way, changes dramatically the relationship between individuals and the state for the worst. So yes, I think "there will be more nefarious government activity with one big model" as you put it because the stakes are so very different.
however, from a security point of view, one national id obviously superior than all the different state models.
Whoa there! Obviously? Not at all. A national model is, using the security lingo, a much more brittle system than the 50 state model.
Let's compare a non-standardized 50 state model to a fully centralized national ID card model, issued by a federal agency:
a.) The fraud vectors increase with the quantity of employees involved. A national ID card system would introduce probably 30 to 50,000 employees all of whom would have varying levels of access to creating what is an extremely sensitive document. Compare that to even the worst case state--California--which probably has only 2000 employees with similar access. (This is a problem both of employees doing wrong, and employees who just don't know any better.) Either way, I suggest this fraud vector issue is not minor, and the relationship is not linear, but either logarithmic or exponential (much in the same way that the complexities of bureaucracies grow exponentially and not necessarily linearly.)
And for god sakes, the closest thing we have to a national ID document, the passport, has postal employees as the identification verification vector.
b.) Document counterfeiters have just one easy target. In an ideal system, the 50 state documents are sufficiently different from each other so that a counterfeiter who masters the creation of one document doesn't necessarily learn much to help him create another document. (To be fair, this isn't necessarily the case, because there are few companies involved in the US who make the documents. However, European docuements are different.) Having said that, counterfeiters do indeed communicate with each other and explore synergies and other sharing strategies. Whereas today, a California counterfeiter specializes in the California DL and a New York counterfeiter specializes in the New York DL, both will simply put their brains together on the national ID. If you can imagine all the counterfeiting talent (arguably worldwide) focusing themselves on the national ID, you'll understand why it really won't matter how amazing the document would be.
c.) A fraudulent/counterfeited document's value is correlated, obviously, with how useful it is and how trusted it is. A national ID card would be very useful and unjustifiably trusted--which would create a much higher incentive for fraud than the driver's licenses we have today. (Since it would include information about citizenship/status than a driver's license doesn't, you can essentially think of it as the worst combination of driver's license fraud with passport fraud.)
On that note, there is some weird correlation between how people trust the document and the level of government issuing it. (A document is more trusted issued by the federal government than issued by a state government. A state government document is more trusted than a document issued by a county government. Etc.)
None of that makes any sense really. A passport is far more likely to be bad than, say, a Kentucky driver's license, but time and time again, people will assume the opposite.
d.) Identity theft artists have one target. The reason why the SSN is the number we have to protect and not the driver's license number is being institutions were so happy to accept the national standardized number for their own purposes, but they just didn't know what to do with the DL number. (I have written before that I think the DL number will become a fraud vector in time anyway, but at least it took alot longer.)
It's possible that a national ID card would have much stricter laws regarding its use, and prohibit a lot of 3rd party uses as a way of dealing with privacy and security issues. (I think this will happen in time with driver's licenses anyway--states will simply become forced to define who may and may not use the driver's license for verifying identity. They were the idiots who thought that licenses needed photos, so they should de
For what it's worth, the original slashdot discussion had a lot of people incorrectly assuming that Maine was giving up highway funding in order to reject the REAL ID Act.
The REAL ID Act doesn't affect funding at all, and promises no money to states in order to meet REAL ID Act requirements.
Maine's decision only means that Maine licenses after the deadline will not be REAL ID Act compliant and will not be accepted for identification by the Department of Homeland Security (which, for all practical purposes, means a slight change on how one travels by air.)
Having said that, the REAL ID Act also allows for mixed issuance systems--where a state would issue both Real ID Act compliant license documents, and non-compliant documents, with the requirement that the non-compliant documents indicate their non-compliance.
Let people fill in an optical scan ballot by hand OR give them a touch screen that will mark the ballot for them.
This technology does indeed exist and is required in counties where optical scan ballot is used in order to comply with the disability requirements of HAVA.
Hypothetically, of course, such a system could be used where everyone marks their ballot on such a device. I have not heard of a county that does it that way though.
In a way, the perpetrators of these ripoffs are actually doing humanity a favor. They are making stupidity more painful.
Stupidity, by its very nature, is already painful. There are however better and cheaper ways of teaching these lessons (cheaper for both the person learning, and for society as a whole.)
I also think there is a massive amount of institutional stupidity, the consequences for which are not being borne by the institutions responsible. I think whoever came up with the idea of tying credit bureau records to the Social Security Number needs to be beaten very hard. I think the Social Security Administration is partially responsible because they are willing accomplices in this for failure to protect the SSN better.
Your comments also reminded me of a disaster which almost occurred. There was (and might still be) a big push on the part of state AG offices for social networking sites to perform age verification. One ideas was to require an SSN to sign up for a Myspace. (Apparently the main thing that killed this idea was the sudden and unexpected relevation that Myspace is a worldwide site used by many who do not have an SSN.)
However this idea would have turned the phishing world upside down. Since people would suddenly be expected to give up their SSNs as part of being on xanga, livejournal or myspace, then phishing would become ridiculously easy (particularly for the group this is supposed to protect--who may not be all that sophisticated in figuring out whom they shouldn't be giving their SSN to.)
In effect, I'm resentful that I'm supposed to be watching out for the consequences of other institutions errors.
This is the second time that Cecil Stanton's name has been associated with strange legislation.
He is the sponsor of a bill which would amend the state constitution to allow for photo ID requirements on election day.
While I understand that reasonable people will disagree with this, Georgia has lost twice in court now on this issue, and the amendment will not likely change that. What I don't understand is why they are so desperate that they need to amend the state constitution.
It seems like every state legislature has at least one guy who puts up the most moronic legislation possible. Perhaps the legislation is introduced by someone who has no change of losing an election.
It will be interesting to see if any of the other republican candidates have the balls to debate him.
There is a tendency to write him off, but, unless I'm imagining things and I hang around too many libertarian leaning people, he's got a good amount of support in the blogosphere. With the right help, he could leverage that and might be able to pull off a really good showing in New Hampshire. He's got the type of respect and reputation that people will vote and support him even if they don't agree with his all his views.
What he needs though is a lot of help. Blog/internet savvy people to help him spread his message.
S. marcescens, the type that makes your shower curtain moldy
I was bothered by the slashdot summary because I didn't know that bacteria "did the mold thing." The article says that these bacteria contribute to pink stains, which I have seen and know but don't think of as being "moldy" per se. (The article doesn't use the term mold.)
Just so that I'm clear on this...isn't mold specifically referring to fungi?
I've heard indeed that the US and maybe Canada are the exception to the world in this regard. I seem to recall someone saying Brazil as well. (I go through my moments of dislike against them, sliding back towards ambivalence. At the moment, however, I've got $100 in rebates sitting on my desk ready to be taken to the bank, so I'm not complaining too much.)
Which makes me wonder...how does the accountants and stock peddlers like the idea of rebates.
Though I should do more research on this, it seems like the entire process is outsourced to just a handful of companies. So the electronics manufacturer or end-retailler may make a fixed deal with the rebate company, and it's the rebate company that shoulders the risk of how many rebates come through. (Multiple rebates (though usually not more than two) on one item often occurs, and sometimes they even go to different rebate handlers in different places. This implies to me that rebates are often a combination of offers from the manufacturer and the end-retailler.)
I also remember reading somewhere that rebates allow for greater pricing flexibility on the part of manufacturers. If Sony sells Best Buy a DVD Player for $100, (and Best Buy plans to sell it for $120) but sees the market change very quickly, and decides that DVD player needs to be sold to the end-consumer for $100, they can just go ahead and maintain their original deal with Best Buy and throw in a manufacturer's rebate of $20 to bring the price down to the new market price.
So I imagine that accountants and stock peddlers adore them for their flexibility in the market.
The Federal law doesn't technically force states to implement the ID stuff, it just says that if they don't, they won't get their federal highway money.
This was repeated over and over again in this thread, and while it's too late now, I should point out that it's a common misunderstanding.
The REAL ID Act doesn't affect highway funding at all nor does it have anything to do with doctrine of nullification.
What it will do, essentially, is direct the Department of Homeland Security to refuse to recognize a license that is not issued under REAL ID Act criteria. While there are peculiar situations here and there, its main implication is that non-REAL ID Act compliant documents may not be used as identification for air travel.
The REAL ID Act does give states hypothetical wiggle-room--issuing both REAL ID Act compliant and non-compliant license documents, but the state is required to indicate which documents are not REAL ID Act compliant if they choose a mixed issuing system.
If the state refused to do any REAL ID Act compliance, then DHS is required to reject all those states licenses for identification purposes--again, that basically leads you back to air travel issues.
I'm not sure why I decided not to mention it. I have before on slashdot. I hope to make it a bigger issue at some point in the future.
Since you're an Ohioan and the thread is dead...I'll give it to ya.:-)
Ohio BMV archiving driver's license photos. They were never given express permission to keep the photos archived. (Interestingly, they were given permission to keep license photos for CDLs.) The BMV claims they were given indirect permission because the legislature passed a law saying the photos are not subject to public records requests.
It makes for a great situation, particularly because I have an article from 1974...when the photo licenses were introduced, saying that the BMV "promises never to maintain a central negative file."
At any rate, it's on my list of things to do, I'm slowly getting around to it.
I'm not sure if I agree. I think the issue here is that you can't predict who is using the license number and how, and frankly, I don't think people have become particularly creative with misusing the license number (which, in most states, if not all states, is a fixed number.)
I think this will become an issue with time. It's becoming a back up to the SSN, and since it seems to be on the same path that the SSN was on in the late 70s/early 80s, then I'm going to safely bet that in the next 10 years or so that you're going to have to end up protecting your license number in the same way you protect your SSN.
Several years ago I wrote a state agency in Ohio telling them that they did not have the authority to collect certain data that they were collecting. (We're calling it data type X.) Ohio law specifically says that any state agency must be granted the ability by the state legislature in order to collect data.)
What Ohio law does have, for this particular example, was a law like "Data type X shall not be a public record." The agency I was dealing with responded that the legislature must have indirectly given the agency the ability to collect data type X because they went out of their way to recognize it in another part of the code.
Both this and Gonzale's testimony are creative ways of redefining law.
Seriously, some doctors are cramming other peopless shit into their patient's colons.
I read recently that scientists are now coming around to the idea that we all go through a "poop transplant" before we are born--taking in bacteria from our mother's digestive tracts and vaginal areas for our own digestive system. Poop transplants seem to the logical extension...
"Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one."
From "Hard to digest", The Economist, June 2, 2006
I've been involved in several Ohio elections. The law and its consequences has become too complex for pollworkers. I am pushing for all mail in voting because that way the legal complexities are centralized and could be better handled.
Perhaps we should pay people to administer polls then.
We do. Every lever of election helper in Ohio, from the pollworker ($100 for election day) to the Director of the county board of elections to the Secretary of State ($125k per year) is paid.
I think there's too much of an obsession with Ohio.
I don't agree or disagree. Now for one thing, there's no doubt in my mind, as an Ohioan, that on the day of the 04 election, the state swung more in favor of Bush than Kerry.
In that regard, it's easy to say that there is too much obsession. On the other hand, a lot of the focus remains because there is always the ability for Ohio to create even closer election results (whereas Florida has become less unstable in that regard.)
Ohio's election system, arguably more than other states, is built of various layers of administration which are not fully discrete. Add to the fact that the last Secretary of State really had very little interest in the job and by all means ran his office that way, a legislature that really doesn't and probably will never understand elections, and you get significant vacuums of authority that lead to, in some instances, each precinct making its own decision about things. So when the recount came through, it started to flesh out all these issues.
It makes for a great car accident really. The new Secretary of State is settling alot of the cases against the old one, possibly to the tune of millions of dollars.
Print the forms, get a calculator, and do the math....whats the problem?
I made $7000 last year gross income and Turbotax printed nearly 16 pages of various forms. Of course, the reason for that is because I work 1099 jobs, so I become a mini-little business and quite a lot of things become deducting-eligible. TurboTax did in about 1 1/2 hr what I couldn't do with days of research into the awesome complexities of Schedule C.
Just out of curiousity, is there any precedence for parents being charged with parental negligence in this type of situation?
In Michigan a father let an adult male who was dating his under the age of consent daughter live in their house for some time. The father presented no particular objections to the relationship, and, as I recall, bought the daughter condoms for the express purpose of sex with the adult male.
Relationships between everyone concerned soured to the point that the father reported his daughter's boyfriend to police for violation AOC statutes, and it ended up that the father became charged with acting as an accessory to that violation. (
As you can see, prosecutors avoid these issues. It sets up horrible precedence that gets very complex. The fact that the father bought condoms was a key fact in charging him with the crime. If that's the case, then handing out condoms to 15 year olds might very well bring on the same obligations/liabilities.
It's the closest thing I can think of. Article here.
All that "power" that they've given to the users, coupled with the nasty CSS it takes to use it, will be their undoing.
I'm not sure how it will be of their undoing. Myspace continues to attract people who continue to design extremely complex and visually bad pages; but in reality, that's ok. Eventually, they will likely outgrow that and their page will change too.
While people laud sites like facebook for being a lot less manipulatable, people seem to use the two sites differently and in that regard Myspace's openness is a tremendous asset.
Indeed, Myspace is expanding overseas and it's keeping the same openess paradigm in its international sites.
AIM is basically unheard of here since nobody actually uses AOL in this country.
No one really uses AOL in the US much anymore either. However, it had enough of a running start in the 90s that it became the defacto instant messaging preference. (Which is fine by me, cuz I hate MSN.)
MSN? Must be a different crowd. I don't know anyone with MSN. Almost everyone I know uses AIM
MSN is the worldwide leader, but AIM is significantly more popular in the US. Undoubtedly AIM's popularity came out of the widespread use of AOL, and it remains the standard in the US even though AOL isn't used by many people anymore.
I have both, but don't keep myself logged into MSN. I only keep it around for my non-US friends. I can't stand the interface. It's go the suck of a Microsoft product.
To be fair, I can't stand the new AIM interface either...I purposefully keep with an older version of AIM.
Slashdot Mirror
national id, or state id: from a privacy point of view, what's the difference?
The difference is this: a state ID card is an administrative document. It helps verify identity in particular situations, but it is still an optional document. (It's really only tangentially related to driving--it's the driver's record that more important, not so much the license itself.)
And while the uses of the state ID card are more varied today, I maintain that it's easier to live without one than it would have been 10 or 15 years ago (when financial transactions were heavily dependent on an ID card.)
A national ID card is a document of citizenship. If other countries experiences are a guide, it does more than verify identity, it is your identity. Failure to carry makes you a non-person in the eyes of the state. An expired document means your citizenship is suspended. (To be fair, this can happen with state ID cards. Recent laws requiring ID to vote often require the ID to be valid, which I think is a bad precedence. After all, does your citizenship magically come to an end simply because your license is 30 days too old?)
A national ID can be thought of as a document of requesting the privilege to exist from the state, and in that way, changes dramatically the relationship between individuals and the state for the worst. So yes, I think "there will be more nefarious government activity with one big model" as you put it because the stakes are so very different.
however, from a security point of view, one national id obviously superior than all the different state models.
Whoa there! Obviously? Not at all. A national model is, using the security lingo, a much more brittle system than the 50 state model.
Let's compare a non-standardized 50 state model to a fully centralized national ID card model, issued by a federal agency:
a.) The fraud vectors increase with the quantity of employees involved. A national ID card system would introduce probably 30 to 50,000 employees all of whom would have varying levels of access to creating what is an extremely sensitive document. Compare that to even the worst case state--California--which probably has only 2000 employees with similar access. (This is a problem both of employees doing wrong, and employees who just don't know any better.) Either way, I suggest this fraud vector issue is not minor, and the relationship is not linear, but either logarithmic or exponential (much in the same way that the complexities of bureaucracies grow exponentially and not necessarily linearly.)
And for god sakes, the closest thing we have to a national ID document, the passport, has postal employees as the identification verification vector.
b.) Document counterfeiters have just one easy target. In an ideal system, the 50 state documents are sufficiently different from each other so that a counterfeiter who masters the creation of one document doesn't necessarily learn much to help him create another document. (To be fair, this isn't necessarily the case, because there are few companies involved in the US who make the documents. However, European docuements are different.) Having said that, counterfeiters do indeed communicate with each other and explore synergies and other sharing strategies. Whereas today, a California counterfeiter specializes in the California DL and a New York counterfeiter specializes in the New York DL, both will simply put their brains together on the national ID. If you can imagine all the counterfeiting talent (arguably worldwide) focusing themselves on the national ID, you'll understand why it really won't matter how amazing the document would be.
c.) A fraudulent/counterfeited document's value is correlated, obviously, with how useful it is and how trusted it is. A national ID card would be very useful and unjustifiably trusted--which would create a much higher incentive for fraud than the driver's licenses we have today. (Since it would include information about citizenship/status than a driver's license doesn't, you can essentially think of it as the worst combination of driver's license fraud with passport fraud.)
On that note, there is some weird correlation between how people trust the document and the level of government issuing it. (A document is more trusted issued by the federal government than issued by a state government. A state government document is more trusted than a document issued by a county government. Etc.)
None of that makes any sense really. A passport is far more likely to be bad than, say, a Kentucky driver's license, but time and time again, people will assume the opposite.
d.) Identity theft artists have one target. The reason why the SSN is the number we have to protect and not the driver's license number is being institutions were so happy to accept the national standardized number for their own purposes, but they just didn't know what to do with the DL number. (I have written before that I think the DL number will become a fraud vector in time anyway, but at least it took alot longer.)
It's possible that a national ID card would have much stricter laws regarding its use, and prohibit a lot of 3rd party uses as a way of dealing with privacy and security issues. (I think this will happen in time with driver's licenses anyway--states will simply become forced to define who may and may not use the driver's license for verifying identity. They were the idiots who thought that licenses needed photos, so they should de
For what it's worth, the original slashdot discussion had a lot of people incorrectly assuming that Maine was giving up highway funding in order to reject the REAL ID Act.
The REAL ID Act doesn't affect funding at all, and promises no money to states in order to meet REAL ID Act requirements.
Maine's decision only means that Maine licenses after the deadline will not be REAL ID Act compliant and will not be accepted for identification by the Department of Homeland Security (which, for all practical purposes, means a slight change on how one travels by air.)
Having said that, the REAL ID Act also allows for mixed issuance systems--where a state would issue both Real ID Act compliant license documents, and non-compliant documents, with the requirement that the non-compliant documents indicate their non-compliance.
Let people fill in an optical scan ballot by hand OR give them a touch screen that will mark the ballot for them.
This technology does indeed exist and is required in counties where optical scan ballot is used in order to comply with the disability requirements of HAVA.
Hypothetically, of course, such a system could be used where everyone marks their ballot on such a device. I have not heard of a county that does it that way though.
In a way, the perpetrators of these ripoffs are actually doing humanity a favor. They are making stupidity more painful.
Stupidity, by its very nature, is already painful. There are however better and cheaper ways of teaching these lessons (cheaper for both the person learning, and for society as a whole.)
I also think there is a massive amount of institutional stupidity, the consequences for which are not being borne by the institutions responsible. I think whoever came up with the idea of tying credit bureau records to the Social Security Number needs to be beaten very hard. I think the Social Security Administration is partially responsible because they are willing accomplices in this for failure to protect the SSN better.
Your comments also reminded me of a disaster which almost occurred. There was (and might still be) a big push on the part of state AG offices for social networking sites to perform age verification. One ideas was to require an SSN to sign up for a Myspace. (Apparently the main thing that killed this idea was the sudden and unexpected relevation that Myspace is a worldwide site used by many who do not have an SSN.)
However this idea would have turned the phishing world upside down. Since people would suddenly be expected to give up their SSNs as part of being on xanga, livejournal or myspace, then phishing would become ridiculously easy (particularly for the group this is supposed to protect--who may not be all that sophisticated in figuring out whom they shouldn't be giving their SSN to.)
In effect, I'm resentful that I'm supposed to be watching out for the consequences of other institutions errors.
This is the second time that Cecil Stanton's name has been associated with strange legislation.
He is the sponsor of a bill which would amend the state constitution to allow for photo ID requirements on election day.
While I understand that reasonable people will disagree with this, Georgia has lost twice in court now on this issue, and the amendment will not likely change that. What I don't understand is why they are so desperate that they need to amend the state constitution.
It seems like every state legislature has at least one guy who puts up the most moronic legislation possible. Perhaps the legislation is introduced by someone who has no change of losing an election.
It will be interesting to see if any of the other republican candidates have the balls to debate him.
There is a tendency to write him off, but, unless I'm imagining things and I hang around too many libertarian leaning people, he's got a good amount of support in the blogosphere. With the right help, he could leverage that and might be able to pull off a really good showing in New Hampshire. He's got the type of respect and reputation that people will vote and support him even if they don't agree with his all his views.
What he needs though is a lot of help. Blog/internet savvy people to help him spread his message.
S. marcescens, the type that makes your shower curtain moldy
I was bothered by the slashdot summary because I didn't know that bacteria "did the mold thing." The article says that these bacteria contribute to pink stains, which I have seen and know but don't think of as being "moldy" per se. (The article doesn't use the term mold.)
Just so that I'm clear on this...isn't mold specifically referring to fungi?
Rebates are illegal here.
I've heard indeed that the US and maybe Canada are the exception to the world in this regard. I seem to recall someone saying Brazil as well. (I go through my moments of dislike against them, sliding back towards ambivalence. At the moment, however, I've got $100 in rebates sitting on my desk ready to be taken to the bank, so I'm not complaining too much.)
Which makes me wonder...how does the accountants and stock peddlers like the idea of rebates.
Though I should do more research on this, it seems like the entire process is outsourced to just a handful of companies. So the electronics manufacturer or end-retailler may make a fixed deal with the rebate company, and it's the rebate company that shoulders the risk of how many rebates come through. (Multiple rebates (though usually not more than two) on one item often occurs, and sometimes they even go to different rebate handlers in different places. This implies to me that rebates are often a combination of offers from the manufacturer and the end-retailler.)
I also remember reading somewhere that rebates allow for greater pricing flexibility on the part of manufacturers. If Sony sells Best Buy a DVD Player for $100, (and Best Buy plans to sell it for $120) but sees the market change very quickly, and decides that DVD player needs to be sold to the end-consumer for $100, they can just go ahead and maintain their original deal with Best Buy and throw in a manufacturer's rebate of $20 to bring the price down to the new market price.
So I imagine that accountants and stock peddlers adore them for their flexibility in the market.
Sony Ericsson W810i
;-)
Cheapest I can find is US$ 247 (minimum price during the 6 months)
I decided to do the research with the phone for your example...
If someone had no phone service, they might buy the W810i through this deal here, which will give you a rebate of $50.
Phone price=$50
Rebate with contract=$100
Actual phone price= -$50
Cingular 450 plan (450 day minutes, 5000 night and weekend minutes, rollover for unused day minutes)=$39/month.
6 months service=$184 (not that it matters since it's a 2 year contract anyway
Now that allows me to make 450 minutes of outgoing calls for $40/month, but that would cost you $63 per month.
The Federal law doesn't technically force states to implement the ID stuff, it just says that if they don't, they won't get their federal highway money.
This was repeated over and over again in this thread, and while it's too late now, I should point out that it's a common misunderstanding.
The REAL ID Act doesn't affect highway funding at all nor does it have anything to do with doctrine of nullification.
What it will do, essentially, is direct the Department of Homeland Security to refuse to recognize a license that is not issued under REAL ID Act criteria. While there are peculiar situations here and there, its main implication is that non-REAL ID Act compliant documents may not be used as identification for air travel.
The REAL ID Act does give states hypothetical wiggle-room--issuing both REAL ID Act compliant and non-compliant license documents, but the state is required to indicate which documents are not REAL ID Act compliant if they choose a mixed issuing system.
If the state refused to do any REAL ID Act compliance, then DHS is required to reject all those states licenses for identification purposes--again, that basically leads you back to air travel issues.
I'm not sure why I decided not to mention it. I have before on slashdot. I hope to make it a bigger issue at some point in the future.
:-)
Since you're an Ohioan and the thread is dead...I'll give it to ya.
Ohio BMV archiving driver's license photos. They were never given express permission to keep the photos archived. (Interestingly, they were given permission to keep license photos for CDLs.) The BMV claims they were given indirect permission because the legislature passed a law saying the photos are not subject to public records requests.
It makes for a great situation, particularly because I have an article from 1974...when the photo licenses were introduced, saying that the BMV "promises never to maintain a central negative file."
At any rate, it's on my list of things to do, I'm slowly getting around to it.
Your license number isn't really sensetive.
I'm not sure if I agree. I think the issue here is that you can't predict who is using the license number and how, and frankly, I don't think people have become particularly creative with misusing the license number (which, in most states, if not all states, is a fixed number.)
I think this will become an issue with time. It's becoming a back up to the SSN, and since it seems to be on the same path that the SSN was on in the late 70s/early 80s, then I'm going to safely bet that in the next 10 years or so that you're going to have to end up protecting your license number in the same way you protect your SSN.
Several years ago I wrote a state agency in Ohio telling them that they did not have the authority to collect certain data that they were collecting. (We're calling it data type X.) Ohio law specifically says that any state agency must be granted the ability by the state legislature in order to collect data.)
What Ohio law does have, for this particular example, was a law like "Data type X shall not be a public record." The agency I was dealing with responded that the legislature must have indirectly given the agency the ability to collect data type X because they went out of their way to recognize it in another part of the code.
Both this and Gonzale's testimony are creative ways of redefining law.
Actually NTSB tend to use phrases like "controlled flight into terrain".
Don't forget my personal favorite..."uncontained engine failure"
(otherwise known as an engine exploding)
Seriously, some doctors are cramming other peopless shit into their patient's colons.
I read recently that scientists are now coming around to the idea that we all go through a "poop transplant" before we are born--taking in bacteria from our mother's digestive tracts and vaginal areas for our own digestive system. Poop transplants seem to the logical extension...
"Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one."
From "Hard to digest", The Economist, June 2, 2006
Oh ok...sorry about that.
I've been involved in several Ohio elections. The law and its consequences has become too complex for pollworkers. I am pushing for all mail in voting because that way the legal complexities are centralized and could be better handled.
Perhaps we should pay people to administer polls then.
We do. Every lever of election helper in Ohio, from the pollworker ($100 for election day) to the Director of the county board of elections to the Secretary of State ($125k per year) is paid.
I think there's too much of an obsession with Ohio.
I don't agree or disagree. Now for one thing, there's no doubt in my mind, as an Ohioan, that on the day of the 04 election, the state swung more in favor of Bush than Kerry.
In that regard, it's easy to say that there is too much obsession. On the other hand, a lot of the focus remains because there is always the ability for Ohio to create even closer election results (whereas Florida has become less unstable in that regard.)
Ohio's election system, arguably more than other states, is built of various layers of administration which are not fully discrete. Add to the fact that the last Secretary of State really had very little interest in the job and by all means ran his office that way, a legislature that really doesn't and probably will never understand elections, and you get significant vacuums of authority that lead to, in some instances, each precinct making its own decision about things. So when the recount came through, it started to flesh out all these issues.
It makes for a great car accident really. The new Secretary of State is settling alot of the cases against the old one, possibly to the tune of millions of dollars.
Print the forms, get a calculator, and do the math....whats the problem?
I made $7000 last year gross income and Turbotax printed nearly 16 pages of various forms. Of course, the reason for that is because I work 1099 jobs, so I become a mini-little business and quite a lot of things become deducting-eligible. TurboTax did in about 1 1/2 hr what I couldn't do with days of research into the awesome complexities of Schedule C.
A criminal out to steal your soul
I have found the difference between that and a teenage female to be nauseatingly imperceptible.
Just out of curiousity, is there any precedence for parents being charged with parental negligence in this type of situation?
In Michigan a father let an adult male who was dating his under the age of consent daughter live in their house for some time. The father presented no particular objections to the relationship, and, as I recall, bought the daughter condoms for the express purpose of sex with the adult male.
Relationships between everyone concerned soured to the point that the father reported his daughter's boyfriend to police for violation AOC statutes, and it ended up that the father became charged with acting as an accessory to that violation. (
As you can see, prosecutors avoid these issues. It sets up horrible precedence that gets very complex. The fact that the father bought condoms was a key fact in charging him with the crime. If that's the case, then handing out condoms to 15 year olds might very well bring on the same obligations/liabilities.
It's the closest thing I can think of. Article here.
All that "power" that they've given to the users, coupled with the nasty CSS it takes to use it, will be their undoing.
I'm not sure how it will be of their undoing. Myspace continues to attract people who continue to design extremely complex and visually bad pages; but in reality, that's ok. Eventually, they will likely outgrow that and their page will change too.
While people laud sites like facebook for being a lot less manipulatable, people seem to use the two sites differently and in that regard Myspace's openness is a tremendous asset.
Indeed, Myspace is expanding overseas and it's keeping the same openess paradigm in its international sites.
AIM is basically unheard of here since nobody actually uses AOL in this country.
No one really uses AOL in the US much anymore either. However, it had enough of a running start in the 90s that it became the defacto instant messaging preference. (Which is fine by me, cuz I hate MSN.)
MSN? Must be a different crowd. I don't know anyone with MSN. Almost everyone I know uses AIM
MSN is the worldwide leader, but AIM is significantly more popular in the US. Undoubtedly AIM's popularity came out of the widespread use of AOL, and it remains the standard in the US even though AOL isn't used by many people anymore.
I have both, but don't keep myself logged into MSN. I only keep it around for my non-US friends. I can't stand the interface. It's go the suck of a Microsoft product.
To be fair, I can't stand the new AIM interface either...I purposefully keep with an older version of AIM.