Yes, they do, but the breakeven point is obviously much higher. Depending on fare structure, it's entirely reasonable for a 767 and a 747 have a breakeven point of 65% maximum passenger loads. However, for the former, that's 143 passengers (assuming 220 total) and the latter that's 240 passengers (assuming 370 total.)
There isn't really a "gravy point" with economy class seating at discounted pricing. A great example of that is Continental airlines flying 757s across the atlantic. Continental doesn't give a rats ass about what's in economy, because, for instance, on the Cleveland to London flight, a half full first class one way pays for the entire flight both ways. Everything else in the back cabin is either profit or an expense, depending on average price paid (and the 757 is a smaller aircraft overall that's cheaper to fly than a wide bodied aircraft. There are other routes on which Continental could fly a 757, but fly a 767 or 777 instead...why? Because those routes get lots of profitable cargo, which the 757 doesn't have room for. For this reason transatlantic flight routes are best chosen based on their ability to attract first and business class passengers, plus cargo regardless of the quantity in economy.)
Super Jumbos are inherently inflexible on this point...since it takes a lot of first class passengers/cargo on such a big plane to pay off its costs. If there is a mad rush of economy passengers for a particular route, the airline is in a far better position to raise fares on 150 economy passengers than have 100 economy seats given away for free. It's not about quantity, it's about revenue per seat quality.
Boeing and Airbus have different philosophies regarding air travel.
I disagree with this. Airbus is copying a concept, which they've been copying for about two decades now, that Boeing came up with--a family of airlines, of different sizes and ranges. Airbus took it one step further, by dramatically increasing commonality of parts and flying interfaces (as much as possible.) The A380 is the logical conclusion of this...an aircraft at the top of the Airbus family to compete with an aircraft at the top of the Boeing family.
Boeing, unable to redo the entirety of its family at once, and unable to shoulder the costs of a costly war with Airbus at the top end (by redesigning the 747 to make an A380 killer) figures that it has a much better chance with the 7E7. The 7E7 fills a gap that Airbus doesn't have in its range (yet. Though it'll be hard for Airbus to switch gears to make a 7E7 killer that quickly, so I think Boeing is making a good investment there, in that it gives them a year or two lead time.)
So the flying philosophies are not that different between Airbus and Boeing. Check out the philosophies of Canadair and Embraer in comparison to Boeing or Airbus.
Maybe folk need to ask why the US government is willing to subsidise a business model that is so obviously flawed?
Because the large airlines run their own (very expensive) pension systems which are insured by the federal government.
It's far cheaper to give the airlines support in the tens of billions of dollars to keep them afloat than to let them...hehe..crash and burn, and then have to cover pension liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
I don't need to tell you however that the more the dipshits mess it up, the more valuable your good credit rating becomes, the more likely it will be stolen.
So essentially, the high fraud but fast credit system creates lots of fast credit, which gets ruined, creating a vacuum of credit (in an economic demand sense) that requires more fraud to cure, since the fraud is a lot easier to get than credit repair.
In this framework, the current system is not viable, and you should be contented to have a few years of high interest rates followed by interest rate relief, in comparison to the bureaucratic (and under my hypothesis, inevitable) uglyness of stolen credit.
Overall, this process of trying to holistically determine credit worthiness without a centralized system would be slow as hell and obscenely expensive
I used to feel that this is the main defense for the centralized credit system, and now I've put it into the disadvantage pile.
I certainly know that there are responsible individuals who profit from instant credit...however, the vast majority of americans have screwed the pooch raw...to the point that we have a *negative* savings rate.
Though I can't be sure of this, I believe a lot of debt transactions would not occur if you had to wait a few days for that car loan or Abercrombie and Fitch card to be approved.
Having said all that, it's hard for us to imagine not having the instant credit/centralized system. Keep in mind however, it's fairly new (early to mid 1970s is when it began.) Though I didn't live in New York City prior to then, I'm pretty sure they had systems and institutions in place to handle the credit approval needs of its citizens. Perhaps not as quickly as they do now, but my thesis is becoming that that is not necessarily a disadvantage.
Though I'm a bit of a maverick in my call center, if someone asked me to not record, I would get the supervisor's cordless phone (which is not part of the recorded phone bank) and call the customer back on it.
I make it a point to curse the company, the big shots, their kinfolks, pets and homelands, all the children they may ever have and their children, etc...
Which often achieves little. The vast majority of the time we CSRs have no way of actually recording down complaints or even suggestions. (If you care enough, write a snail mail letter to the head of the company.)
Can you get your way by getting angry with the CSR? Sometimes, especially if they are new. Overall, however, I would say that you catch more flies with honey. (What may appear as you attacking the company may put the anonymous CSR unnaturally on the defensive, even though its the CSR who isn't being attacked, and wouldn't give a rat's ass about the company otherwise. )
If you choose the anger route, I would recommend slowly increasing your irritation, and then backing off with a manager. (Also keep in mind that you can't annoy the CSR too much...often the CSR will introduce the problem to the supervisor, and it doesn't help your cause that that introduction is coming from their agitated point of view and not yours. If they are a trusted CSR the supervisor may have made up their mind even before they hear what you have to say.)
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a supervisor get off the phone call with a customer and say something like "I would have been happy to help them had they not been such a bitch about it..."
No, what I don't understand is how these recordings have not seemed to improve quality / customer service. I keep getting the same tech droid giving wrong answers as before.
Call monitoring can only claim to help the CSRs stick to a particular script. Certainly if the CSR makes a factual error their supervisor will correct them, but it's on a very very low percentage of phone calls that monitoring occurrs, so the only thing that call monitoring will always find is whether they CSR adheres to a script or not.
Some companies think that that is important. I would rather have friendliness over someone who is sticking to a script (though the scripts help keep out editorializing, and, even I, as an experienced customer service agent, have editorialized.)
Echoing sentiments in other posts, this usage is indeed uncommon in modern American....much like complex "reverse negations" like This is not considered incorrect.
(all kidding aside, the language on your website/blog is beautiful.)
are not charged according to the number of units used, but by the maximum amount of power they use during the billing period.
I had an uncle whose house (in a Cleveland suburb) was set to a similar billing plan. The house was all electric (the street didn't have natural gas lines at the time it was developed) so he had a device that measured the electricity load at any one time, and could shut the power to certain high energy appliances in order to reduce the load in a pre-determined sequence (for instance, first dryer, then refrigerator...et cetera.)
Actually they aren't any. The original poster was correct. As I said here the Ohio Turnpike Commission, a private non-profit who owns and maintains the Ohio Turnpike, specifically grants the Ohio Highway Patrol the power to enforce the speed limits the OTC has codified. These speed limits are different from those the state has established for its own publicly owned interstates.
The OTC could tell the Highway Patrol to buzz off and raise speed limit to 125MPH, if it so desired.
Well, if it's built with private funds and is run by private companies (requiring a toll or a "season pass" or whatever they want to do to pay for it), then why would law enforcement have ANY legal powers to enforce speeds?
This is true...you could hypothetically prohibit police from enforcing traffic laws on your own private highway. They could only come and enforce laws on your highway if they have a warrant for a major criminal infraction.
The Ohio Turnpike is not a "public highway" under Ohio law (it is not owned or maintained by the state of Ohio) The Ohio Turnpike Commission (a chartered non-profit) specifically grants the Ohio Highway Patrol the power to enforce OTC speed laws on the Turnpike. (OTC speed laws are not Ohio speed laws, for instance, semis on the Turnpike can do 65mph, but Ohio law restricts them to 55mph on other Ohio interstates.)
It would be entirely possible for the OTC to eliminate its arrangement with the Highway Patrol and create its own police force (like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has for law enforcement on its bridges and tunnels) or just scrap law enforcement entirely (expect that the OTC will raise the Turnpike speed limit to 75 in the next few years.)
How about the Alamo? Texans cite and use it as a rallying point so often that it's easy to forget that it was a huge military disaster.
In that light the "Don't mess with Texas" always made me chuckle a bit.
(I incidentally proposed that Ohio coopt the line and make it "Don't mess with Ohio or we'll burn Atlanta down again" because while Texas lost the Alamo, we burned the south.)
(I agree with your assessment more or less, and I mention the Yankees because it always struck me as a little odd that a New York City based team has a name that is more associated with New England than New York City.)
When he's 18, or I decide to buy it for him.. fine.
Which incidentally doesn't jive with the previous citations for tobacco and alcohol. You are unable to decide for your children that they can consume alcohol/tobacco if they are below the age.
I remember hearing that in the UK a parent could give authorization for their over 16 children to be photographed topless (in a porn sorta way.) Apparently this law was changed to bring it in line with worldwide child protection laws, but it was an interesting footnote in the scheme of things (laws concerning sexual consent are just age based and parental affirmation is irrelevant, even though age of consent laws seem to be created for the purpose of keeping parents happy.)
There is a clear distinction between public and private space.
First, I disagree with the principle of your statement, I don't believe that distinction is all that clear. Second, it is entirely possible to revisit the distinction and redefine it.
In the most famous example of this, the Quebec Supreme Court ruled that cameras in public spaces were a type of privacy invasion because the knowledge that you were being recorded diminished a citizen's ability to enjoy the public space.
(I can't find the citation at the moment.)
There is clearly another way of looking at things. It is not necessary for us to accept the "public space" excuse as irrepairable.
This was actually just from memory and conversations. When I did research on Ontario it indicated to me that the photo licensing requirement was put in place in 1995, as part of the motor vehicle code. This seems to fit in generally with Canadians and their knowledge of photo licenses, but I'm always open to learn more. Quebec and New Brunswick still do not require mandatory photo licenses (at least, from the last time I did research.) Interestingly, the Quebec photo license, while being digital in form, is the only jurisdiction in north america in which the digital photo image is not retained.
I've known about SK and its interesting non-photo history (as well as its issuance via SGI.) The SK assembly discussion about the topic is kinna interesting.
If your special immigrant is here and can't seem to renew their passport on time as the law states, then they're here illegally, and they'll face the consequence.
The only problem being that you could evade detection by simply having a driver's license indicating when your visa expires. If you ask me, its just adding another fraud loophole to the system.
For instance, drivers licenes from Jersey are just a laminated piece of paper with a "hologram" (which was just shiny marking).
And because everyone knows that, very little fraud (true financial or severe fraud) is committed with the (old) Jersey license. The built in fraud protection was the fact that everyone knew that it could be copied on a bubble jet printer (and gave it a trust that corresponded to that knowledge.)
Or should we just go back to a types piece of paper, since it doens't fully, all by itself, fix the problem?
If the terrorists had shown up on that day with non-photo Vermont licenses, do you think that 9/11 would have happened the way it did?
(This answer is a little disingenuous, but think about it nevertheless. The solution is found in my signature line and has to do with eroding trust in the document, not by boosting it.)
They happened to have a photo of the person on them
Actually, they did not. They didn't start getting photos until the late 1960s, most state not until the mid to late 1970s, the last states in the early 1980s and most of Canada not until the mid 1990s. (The exceptions are Colorado and California, which apparently had B+W photos since the late 50s. Everyone else went with color from the get go.)
The description information (height weight eye color) that is still found on the license is how police could tell that the license applied to the person presenting it. It is still found on the license today as an anachronism (no one has bothered to remove it.)
The interesting question is why licenses got photos. The research I've done has indicated that law enforcement (at the time) had little interest in the photos. One clear thing is that black and white photos are better for identification (to this day actor's headshots are mostly found in black and white because the facial features pop up better on black and white.)
Yet for some reason, most states legal codes require the pictures to be in color.
My hypothesis is that the photo licenses became popular right about the same time that Polaroid introduced instant color photo technology, and they needed a place to put that expensive but profitable product. (Indeed, its ID making group was always its most profitable.)
If my suspicions are right, it leads to the lesson that just about anything to do with driver's licenses is vendor driven. Statements like "impossible to counterfeit" as said in the article have been said since the early 1980s and its the same BS now as it always has been. Politicians are being sold biometrics really hard right now.
Remember that that driver's license fraud cycles are profitable (photo drivers license...then photo ID fraud...then better photo licenses, then better fraud...rinse later and repeat.) At some level, I think the companies realize it by now....
Between the 19 hijackers, they had 63 'valid' licenses from various states. One would presume that at least 44 of those were 'fake'.
Fake=counterfeit. All of those licenses were state issued so none of them were either counterfeit or fake.
They may have been fraudulent (obtained through deceit, bad documentation, bribery etc) but they were not counterfeited so the word "fake" cannot apply.
This type of license could only make the problem worse (as told in my signature below.) As long as people trust the document more, those wishing to commit fraud will want the better license more desperately, since it would be more powerful. It's an endless circle of better licenses=better fraud=need for better licenses.)
Slashdot Mirror
Paul Graham has written down the things he wishes somebody had told him when he was in high school
How about Brevity?
(4324 words for chrissakes, and that excludes his footnotes!)
Megajumbos should use less fuel per passenger
Yes, they do, but the breakeven point is obviously much higher. Depending on fare structure, it's entirely reasonable for a 767 and a 747 have a breakeven point of 65% maximum passenger loads. However, for the former, that's 143 passengers (assuming 220 total) and the latter that's 240 passengers (assuming 370 total.)
There isn't really a "gravy point" with economy class seating at discounted pricing. A great example of that is Continental airlines flying 757s across the atlantic. Continental doesn't give a rats ass about what's in economy, because, for instance, on the Cleveland to London flight, a half full first class one way pays for the entire flight both ways. Everything else in the back cabin is either profit or an expense, depending on average price paid (and the 757 is a smaller aircraft overall that's cheaper to fly than a wide bodied aircraft. There are other routes on which Continental could fly a 757, but fly a 767 or 777 instead...why? Because those routes get lots of profitable cargo, which the 757 doesn't have room for. For this reason transatlantic flight routes are best chosen based on their ability to attract first and business class passengers, plus cargo regardless of the quantity in economy.)
Super Jumbos are inherently inflexible on this point...since it takes a lot of first class passengers/cargo on such a big plane to pay off its costs. If there is a mad rush of economy passengers for a particular route, the airline is in a far better position to raise fares on 150 economy passengers than have 100 economy seats given away for free. It's not about quantity, it's about revenue per seat quality.
Boeing and Airbus have different philosophies regarding air travel.
I disagree with this. Airbus is copying a concept, which they've been copying for about two decades now, that Boeing came up with--a family of airlines, of different sizes and ranges. Airbus took it one step further, by dramatically increasing commonality of parts and flying interfaces (as much as possible.) The A380 is the logical conclusion of this...an aircraft at the top of the Airbus family to compete with an aircraft at the top of the Boeing family.
Boeing, unable to redo the entirety of its family at once, and unable to shoulder the costs of a costly war with Airbus at the top end (by redesigning the 747 to make an A380 killer) figures that it has a much better chance with the 7E7. The 7E7 fills a gap that Airbus doesn't have in its range (yet. Though it'll be hard for Airbus to switch gears to make a 7E7 killer that quickly, so I think Boeing is making a good investment there, in that it gives them a year or two lead time.)
So the flying philosophies are not that different between Airbus and Boeing. Check out the philosophies of Canadair and Embraer in comparison to Boeing or Airbus.
Maybe folk need to ask why the US government is willing to subsidise a business model that is so obviously flawed?
Because the large airlines run their own (very expensive) pension systems which are insured by the federal government.
It's far cheaper to give the airlines support in the tens of billions of dollars to keep them afloat than to let them...hehe..crash and burn, and then have to cover pension liabilities in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Will everything in Tiger be 64bit, and, more importantly, will it ship with a 64bit MachKernel?
(I keep on getting conflicting information on this....)
I don't need to tell you however that the more the dipshits mess it up, the more valuable your good credit rating becomes, the more likely it will be stolen.
So essentially, the high fraud but fast credit system creates lots of fast credit, which gets ruined, creating a vacuum of credit (in an economic demand sense) that requires more fraud to cure, since the fraud is a lot easier to get than credit repair.
In this framework, the current system is not viable, and you should be contented to have a few years of high interest rates followed by interest rate relief, in comparison to the bureaucratic (and under my hypothesis, inevitable) uglyness of stolen credit.
Overall, this process of trying to holistically determine credit worthiness without a centralized system would be slow as hell and obscenely expensive
I used to feel that this is the main defense for the centralized credit system, and now I've put it into the disadvantage pile.
I certainly know that there are responsible individuals who profit from instant credit...however, the vast majority of americans have screwed the pooch raw...to the point that we have a *negative* savings rate.
Though I can't be sure of this, I believe a lot of debt transactions would not occur if you had to wait a few days for that car loan or Abercrombie and Fitch card to be approved.
Having said all that, it's hard for us to imagine not having the instant credit/centralized system. Keep in mind however, it's fairly new (early to mid 1970s is when it began.) Though I didn't live in New York City prior to then, I'm pretty sure they had systems and institutions in place to handle the credit approval needs of its citizens. Perhaps not as quickly as they do now, but my thesis is becoming that that is not necessarily a disadvantage.
Though I'm a bit of a maverick in my call center, if someone asked me to not record, I would get the supervisor's cordless phone (which is not part of the recorded phone bank) and call the customer back on it.
The request has never occurred before.
I make it a point to curse the company, the big shots, their kinfolks, pets and homelands, all the children they may ever have and their children, etc...
Which often achieves little. The vast majority of the time we CSRs have no way of actually recording down complaints or even suggestions. (If you care enough, write a snail mail letter to the head of the company.)
Can you get your way by getting angry with the CSR? Sometimes, especially if they are new. Overall, however, I would say that you catch more flies with honey. (What may appear as you attacking the company may put the anonymous CSR unnaturally on the defensive, even though its the CSR who isn't being attacked, and wouldn't give a rat's ass about the company otherwise. )
If you choose the anger route, I would recommend slowly increasing your irritation, and then backing off with a manager. (Also keep in mind that you can't annoy the CSR too much...often the CSR will introduce the problem to the supervisor, and it doesn't help your cause that that introduction is coming from their agitated point of view and not yours. If they are a trusted CSR the supervisor may have made up their mind even before they hear what you have to say.)
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a supervisor get off the phone call with a customer and say something like "I would have been happy to help them had they not been such a bitch about it..."
No, what I don't understand is how these recordings have not seemed to improve quality / customer service. I keep getting the same tech droid giving wrong answers as before.
Call monitoring can only claim to help the CSRs stick to a particular script. Certainly if the CSR makes a factual error their supervisor will correct them, but it's on a very very low percentage of phone calls that monitoring occurrs, so the only thing that call monitoring will always find is whether they CSR adheres to a script or not.
Some companies think that that is important. I would rather have friendliness over someone who is sticking to a script (though the scripts help keep out editorializing, and, even I, as an experienced customer service agent, have editorialized.)
Echoing sentiments in other posts, this usage is indeed uncommon in modern American....much like complex "reverse negations" like This is not considered incorrect.
(all kidding aside, the language on your website/blog is beautiful.)
are not charged according to the number of units used, but by the maximum amount of power they use during the billing period.
I had an uncle whose house (in a Cleveland suburb) was set to a similar billing plan. The house was all electric (the street didn't have natural gas lines at the time it was developed) so he had a device that measured the electricity load at any one time, and could shut the power to certain high energy appliances in order to reduce the load in a pre-determined sequence (for instance, first dryer, then refrigerator...et cetera.)
There are many reasons.
Actually they aren't any. The original poster was correct. As I said here the Ohio Turnpike Commission, a private non-profit who owns and maintains the Ohio Turnpike, specifically grants the Ohio Highway Patrol the power to enforce the speed limits the OTC has codified. These speed limits are different from those the state has established for its own publicly owned interstates.
The OTC could tell the Highway Patrol to buzz off and raise speed limit to 125MPH, if it so desired.
Well, if it's built with private funds and is run by private companies (requiring a toll or a "season pass" or whatever they want to do to pay for it), then why would law enforcement have ANY legal powers to enforce speeds?
This is true...you could hypothetically prohibit police from enforcing traffic laws on your own private highway. They could only come and enforce laws on your highway if they have a warrant for a major criminal infraction.
The Ohio Turnpike is not a "public highway" under Ohio law (it is not owned or maintained by the state of Ohio) The Ohio Turnpike Commission (a chartered non-profit) specifically grants the Ohio Highway Patrol the power to enforce OTC speed laws on the Turnpike. (OTC speed laws are not Ohio speed laws, for instance, semis on the Turnpike can do 65mph, but Ohio law restricts them to 55mph on other Ohio interstates.)
It would be entirely possible for the OTC to eliminate its arrangement with the Highway Patrol and create its own police force (like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has for law enforcement on its bridges and tunnels) or just scrap law enforcement entirely (expect that the OTC will raise the Turnpike speed limit to 75 in the next few years.)
Failure is a success now days?
How about the Alamo? Texans cite and use it as a rallying point so often that it's easy to forget that it was a huge military disaster.
In that light the "Don't mess with Texas" always made me chuckle a bit.
(I incidentally proposed that Ohio coopt the line and make it "Don't mess with Ohio or we'll burn Atlanta down again" because while Texas lost the Alamo, we burned the south.)
Don't forget about the New York Yankees.
(I agree with your assessment more or less, and I mention the Yankees because it always struck me as a little odd that a New York City based team has a name that is more associated with New England than New York City.)
When he's 18, or I decide to buy it for him.. fine.
Which incidentally doesn't jive with the previous citations for tobacco and alcohol. You are unable to decide for your children that they can consume alcohol/tobacco if they are below the age.
I remember hearing that in the UK a parent could give authorization for their over 16 children to be photographed topless (in a porn sorta way.) Apparently this law was changed to bring it in line with worldwide child protection laws, but it was an interesting footnote in the scheme of things (laws concerning sexual consent are just age based and parental affirmation is irrelevant, even though age of consent laws seem to be created for the purpose of keeping parents happy.)
And, in fact, I would not want my bank to provide anonymous transactions
Numbered bank accounts were essentially anonymous. Sure money-laundering was a problem but they offered privacy advantages to those who demanded them.
I suspect that there are still people in this world with numbered accounts.
There is a clear distinction between public and private space.
First, I disagree with the principle of your statement, I don't believe that distinction is all that clear. Second, it is entirely possible to revisit the distinction and redefine it.
In the most famous example of this, the Quebec Supreme Court ruled that cameras in public spaces were a type of privacy invasion because the knowledge that you were being recorded diminished a citizen's ability to enjoy the public space.
(I can't find the citation at the moment.)
There is clearly another way of looking at things. It is not necessary for us to accept the "public space" excuse as irrepairable.
This was actually just from memory and conversations. When I did research on Ontario it indicated to me that the photo licensing requirement was put in place in 1995, as part of the motor vehicle code. This seems to fit in generally with Canadians and their knowledge of photo licenses, but I'm always open to learn more. Quebec and New Brunswick still do not require mandatory photo licenses (at least, from the last time I did research.) Interestingly, the Quebec photo license, while being digital in form, is the only jurisdiction in north america in which the digital photo image is not retained.
I've known about SK and its interesting non-photo history (as well as its issuance via SGI.) The SK assembly discussion about the topic is kinna interesting.
If your special immigrant is here and can't seem to renew their passport on time as the law states, then they're here illegally, and they'll face the consequence.
The only problem being that you could evade detection by simply having a driver's license indicating when your visa expires. If you ask me, its just adding another fraud loophole to the system.
For instance, drivers licenes from Jersey are just a laminated piece of paper with a "hologram" (which was just shiny marking).
And because everyone knows that, very little fraud (true financial or severe fraud) is committed with the (old) Jersey license. The built in fraud protection was the fact that everyone knew that it could be copied on a bubble jet printer (and gave it a trust that corresponded to that knowledge.)
It actually was quite beautiful.
Or should we just go back to a types piece of paper, since it doens't fully, all by itself, fix the problem?
If the terrorists had shown up on that day with non-photo Vermont licenses, do you think that 9/11 would have happened the way it did?
(This answer is a little disingenuous, but think about it nevertheless. The solution is found in my signature line and has to do with eroding trust in the document, not by boosting it.)
They happened to have a photo of the person on them
Actually, they did not. They didn't start getting photos until the late 1960s, most state not until the mid to late 1970s, the last states in the early 1980s and most of Canada not until the mid 1990s. (The exceptions are Colorado and California, which apparently had B+W photos since the late 50s. Everyone else went with color from the get go.)
The description information (height weight eye color) that is still found on the license is how police could tell that the license applied to the person presenting it. It is still found on the license today as an anachronism (no one has bothered to remove it.)
The interesting question is why licenses got photos. The research I've done has indicated that law enforcement (at the time) had little interest in the photos. One clear thing is that black and white photos are better for identification (to this day actor's headshots are mostly found in black and white because the facial features pop up better on black and white.)
Yet for some reason, most states legal codes require the pictures to be in color.
My hypothesis is that the photo licenses became popular right about the same time that Polaroid introduced instant color photo technology, and they needed a place to put that expensive but profitable product. (Indeed, its ID making group was always its most profitable.)
If my suspicions are right, it leads to the lesson that just about anything to do with driver's licenses is vendor driven. Statements like "impossible to counterfeit" as said in the article have been said since the early 1980s and its the same BS now as it always has been. Politicians are being sold biometrics really hard right now.
Remember that that driver's license fraud cycles are profitable (photo drivers license...then photo ID fraud...then better photo licenses, then better fraud...rinse later and repeat.) At some level, I think the companies realize it by now....
Between the 19 hijackers, they had 63 'valid' licenses from various states. One would presume that at least 44 of those were 'fake'.
Fake=counterfeit. All of those licenses were state issued so none of them were either counterfeit or fake.
They may have been fraudulent (obtained through deceit, bad documentation, bribery etc) but they were not counterfeited so the word "fake" cannot apply.
This type of license could only make the problem worse (as told in my signature below.) As long as people trust the document more, those wishing to commit fraud will want the better license more desperately, since it would be more powerful. It's an endless circle of better licenses=better fraud=need for better licenses.)