that crossed my mind, but still is not relevant to the post...since the post i was responding to wanted an executive office, not a state legislature office (which was pretty minor at the time since Illinois was a small state at the time.)
these days you can't just jump from state legislature to the presidency.
I contend that we cannot consider ANY third party candidate to be truly serious about running for President until they have run for AND WON a race wherein the votes cast were made from a statewide race (i.e. senator, governor, state attorney general, etc.).
Then throw out your pennies and five dollar bills. The Republican party was organized just four months prior to the 1860 election, and its lead candidate, a certain Mr. Lincoln, never held office until he won the presidency that same year.
Anything that makes a license harder to counterfeit is a good thing.
Err..not entirely.
There is nothing wrong with making a document difficult to counterfeit...the problem is if people believe that, because the document is difficult to counterfeit, it is somehow more trustworthy.
There have been a lot of times when states upgrade their licenses, and shortly afterwards they experience a spike of fraud with the new licenses. People, assuming the documents are more harder to counterfeit, and therefore obtain, trust them too much...and criminals catch on (this also happened with the new $20 bill too.)
When issuing licences to non-citizens, all states should be required to have the word "ALIEN" likewise superimposed.
Ohhh..that's a very bad idea. See, at least under the current system, where citizenship/residency is not indicated on the license, there is no particular benefit for anyone getting the license if they are trying to use it for citizenship purposes.
Once the license indicates citizenship/residency, it could only cause a huge spike in fraud...because then people will want the document in order to work or vote or whatever the case may be.
Think about it this way, driver's license fraud did not exist until the photograph was added. Now imagine what will happen to driver's license fraud when a passport/green card is added.
You're lucky so far. Immediately after 9/11 the Virginia legislature attempted to bring in fingerprinting for driver's licensing. I believe it passed the Senate, but failed in the House of Delegates.
I helped the Virginia Taxpayer Association to kill the bill.
What reason, other than scanning from a distance, could there be to include RFID in a peice of identification?
Some RFID/Photo ID manufacturer stands to make a huge profit off it.
What..you thought that Virginia legislators were so tech savvy that they came up with the idea all by themselves?
The history of photo ID cards is that it has been almost entirely vendor driven...we functioned perfectly fine in the US with non-photo licenses, but once instant color photography came on the scene, vendors needed to sell their photo ID cards to someone. Once those caused fraud, vendors came up with a variety of expensive solutions that don't actually solve the fundamental flaws in photo ID card issuance. Coupled with a four year replacement cycle, photo ID vendors really ride the money train.
How long before companies stop letting $5 an hour employees handle "meaningless" data (with literally no background checks or security controls) that is worth millions when properly exploited?
Or, alternatively, when will companies stop pretending that they can be trusted simply because of employee credit card verification checks, background checks and a piss test?
I like to look at it this way, here in Ohio (as in most states) you need to go through the most awewsome background check ever in order to take the state bar. Full multi level 10 finger fingerprint check (local, state, national) credit check, employer verification check for all jobs worked since you were 16, the list goes on and on and it may even go into your mental health history (one of the few jobs you hear of that occuring.)
In spite of all of this, the industry as a whole can be summarized as a convention of pricks.
I presume that the parent believes that this is an industry that likely will require regulation in the future, correct?
Not necessarily. It is entirely possible but not inevitable. There are some industries that are public utility-like and require regulation, and others that the invisible hand takes care of everything, and efficiently.
I'm not necessarily anti-regulation, I'm just very cautious about it. I'm fretful to apply it her for fear of damaging a nascent industry.
One of the reasons the US is a better place to live (for most people) than Mexico is not because we have better laws, or better people, but because the laws are made by (representatives of) the people, and equally important, the laws are actually enforced.
As a Latin American, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Business regulations are comprehensive and just plain retarded. Often time they are created by well meaning individuals (who are left leaning) but what they succeed in doing is perpetuating monopolies, which have an amazingly ability to perpetuate themselves both politically and economically.
We do have better laws in the US. I was going to say at first that we have a better regulatory environment, in that we don't have so much bribery.
I've decided to take that back. At least in Latin America, the small businessman has a chance of getting through all the silly bureaucracy by bribing someone. In the US, bribery does not occur at the bureaucratic level, it really only occurs at the political level, which is far too expensive for the small businessman. In one instance the law doesn't get enforced, in another instance, the law just doesn't get made.
If you plan to launch a commercial space tourism effort from this country, of course it needs regulation. Would you prefer if any moron could claim to have a rocket and start tossing people up into space?
I'm not going to deny that there are certain industries that require regulation. But I would say that this is an industry that requires no regulation at this point in time. For instance, it's not exactly true that any moron can throw people into space...especially since the people will be paying somehwere in the $200-$300k range for that privilege and will likely be very interested in making sure that it's an extremely safe process.
If it were a $50 airline ticket from Cleveland to Chicago, the average flier would not have the ablity nor resources to assess the airline's ability to safely transport them. But on a nascent industry whose primary customer has an extra $300k around, I would say that the customers have the resources to perform such research in advance...and I'm further sure that they would insist on multiple levels of insurance policies, and those insurance companies will go out of their way to check on other related issues (like the possibility of debris raining down and how that could affect them.)
Your local travel agencty is subject to regulation to prevent the worst of the scammers from coming into/staying into existence.
Though there are sometimes, in some jurisdictions, specialized laws covering travel agents, existing criminal fraud and deception laws are sufficient.
Having said all that, I think you would have to be insane to believe that the precautions and internal policies put in place on a private spaceship system would somehow be less than equal to NASA. NASA doesn't have to worry about profit. NASA has no insurance company breathing down its neck if something goes wrong. NASA astronauts worked their careers for the risk and privilege to be an astronaut, they didn't just pay for it. All NASA has to worry about is congressional oversight, which is often political, not necessarily practical. All in all I would trust a private company far more than the government to pull this off safely and cheaply, and I certainly couldn't see what benefit they would add in regulating it.
We no longer live in the Wild Wild West...the insurance companies took care of that.
Once upon a time my mother was the manager of vehcile registration renewal for the NYS DMV
If you wouldn't mind, I got a question for you, especially if your mom worked there in the last five years or so...please do email me if that's the case.
Commercial software vendors would rather release a program on time and hide any last-minute security flaws that pop up
While I'm not a software engineer, and I don't play one on television, it seems to me that commercial software vendors likely don't test for security flaws at all, or program with that sorta thing in mind. Functionality is their number one concern, and testing for security issues is a bitch. The outside world takes care of that for them.
Open Source projects have the luxury to take everything into account. When you are not being paid to make something, your emphasis is on art and craft, and a good piece of art is thorough.
Well you beat me to revealing the PR hype. In addition, if the fingerprint suddenly stops working for some reason (let's say our employee was bricklaying the last weekend, or doing an intensive Vitamin C exfoliation) is there a way of getting the computer to boot? And if there is, what's the point? It's just expensive snake oil.
Guards outside the building know the only places people can exit, always be stationed around there, and can ambush the robbers
And in spite of all this good common sense, you almost never see guards stationed outside a building, and if you do, they are specifically there to control people going into the building (or are ceremonial.)
I suspect the issue may be one of containment--guards outside the building can be distracted by other things too easily.
Up until a few years ago, Colorado was one of those states that would laminate driver's licenses on the spot, much like a high school ID.
This is one of those damned if you do damned if you don't things.
Office issuance clearly has the advantage that the person gets the license immediately, as opposed to some piece of paper, which may or may not work as ID if the person needs it immediately. It doesn't give them a very good feeling.
Office issuance has the problem that the offices themselves are often not that hard to break into, and then people steal the printer, blank cards, hologram rolls, et cetera. Honestly, you can count on that happening within 2 weeks of a state introducing a new licensing system.
Central issuance has the advantage that the machines are harder to steal. Further, the sillyness of license fraud (see my signature for more details) means that we are going to faster upgrade cycles. States can just upgrade the central machines instead of putting new machines into each office (in Ohio that would be over 220 office.)
Problem? You need to have amazingly good auditing and security measures. Consider the fact that California issues all their licenses centrally and that, if you do the math, that means that they issue at least 25,000 a day. Someone with particularly good access could probably figure out a way of getting an extra 1000 out, and no one will notice the difference.
So fraud is easier with office issuance, but if you can do it with central issuance, you can really go to town.
What happened to good old fashionned mainframes + thin clients with monchrome screens...
Most likely its there. The photo ID card vendors sell everything in packages though, and those systems run on either *nix or NT, so then you have to have some sorta program to interface with them.
Could they have created a licensing system that interfaced with a mainframe directly? Absolutely (and its not actually a requirement that the digital image be viewable by the people in the DMV, if they retain the image.)
But the photo ID card vendors make significantly more money by selling everything in a very overbloated package.
1.) tell states that their fraud problems are caused by easy to counterfeit licenses 2.) sell overbloated digital licensing package to states 3.) watch fraud increase because new license is too valuable not to counterfeit 4.) four years later vendors tell state that their fraud problems are caused by too easy to counterfeit licenses 5.) repeat step 1
Most Flash drives don't have the pen form factor so Pen Drive is inappropiate
Strictly speaking, no. But they are almost universally thin and long, a shape that may be associated with many different objects, though certainly with pens, and there are indeed pens with dimensions similar to many drives.
I believe that pen drive is one of the better terms because it implies the portability and size that is asociated with them (which is also implied by keychain drive, but not by USB/flash drive.)
I usually call it a "USB pen drive" which somehow rolls off my tongue well.
There is no entrapment, because the feds aren't encouraging a crime that would not otherwise have taken place. The cops are making a situation available, but they aren't coercing anyone into the deal.
I will have to think about this a bit longer, though for the most part I feel this is wrong.
Private companies use "secret shoppers" to see how an average customer is treated at a particular place a business. It certainly is the privilege of the company to do that.
What you are supporting is essentially "secret shopping" by the government against the citizens. I'm not sure if secret shopping is a role the government should provide.
On the other side of things, I've always said that the government should provide "secret shopping" versus itself. People testing out the DMV, people purposefully doing whatever in order to get pulled over so that they can see how cop X or Y performs.
But imagine how law enforcement would react if they heard such a plan. So I imagine we would see a healthy dose of hypocrisy from the secret shoppers.
In an email conversation with Richard Winger (who runs Ballot Access News and invests all his energy and resources into the effort of being the central repository of a very complex subject) he noted the inherent hypocrisy of the parties.
The Republican party was very hastily assembled and won a big election (1860) in very short order (just a few months of organization on the national level.) Under todays hugely complex ballot laws, that would have been simply impossible. (Ballot access laws came about with the secret ballot. Prior to the secret ballot, the state didn't print ballots at all, and candidates did not register themselves with the state for an election. They just started campaigning, and people wrote the candidate's names down, or they brought candidate lists with them to the polling place and dropped them into the box. Essentially, *everyone* was a write-in candidate. The secret ballot made pre-printing necessary and therefore candidate pre-registration, and now we have a very technical system for keeping undesireables off the ballot.)
Winger does imply that there may be a federal ballot access system setup in the future, but I don't know how far off that is, nor how fair it would be for third parties.
He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
I may add incidentally that he sticks his money where his mouth is. I was told by a mutual acquiantance that he hires someone to drive him around the country so he doesn't get on a domestic flight.
He already proved to himself that this was false, as he says in his own description of events that SFO would have allowed him to fly with no ID if he submitted to a search.
That's actually what he's protesting essentially. What law says that he must submit to the search in order to fly without ID. People do fly without ID all the time, and, honestly, sometimes they are marked as a selectee, and other times they aren't. Gilmore is trying to figure out the regulations and logistics for this behavior.
Frankly, I thought he was chasing up the wrong tree as well (and I actually told that to his lawyer several months ago.) But now that the government is trying to be so secretive about it implies to me that there's far more than the eye can see.
The whole premise behind the school system is that there are things kids Need To Know, and they're going to learn them whether they care about them at the time or not...
One of my major issues with standardized testing is that it implies that information is becoming more scarce. It's not, information has never been cheaper, and often, it's just plain free.
People have asked me why there's so much ADD, I tell them that kids are very smart; if they ever need to know information, they know how to get it, a 5 year old today can master google. Therefore they look at their mental resources, see that whatever is being taught to them is not useful, and choose to ignore it. It comes off as ADD simply because the teacher is frustrated that the student doesn't give a shit, but honestly, that is the most efficient use of their time.
We should model our security around that used by Israel
Actually nearly 90% or more of the El Al security model is focused on behavior, interactions, history and other things which are not actually related to identity. The biggest use of the passport for them is to see what other countries the passenger has been to.
I have been told by people who've been to Israel that the ID card is really only used as a way of hassling Palestinians, but isn't really used for identity.
Slashdot Mirror
that crossed my mind, but still is not relevant to the post...since the post i was responding to wanted an executive office, not a state legislature office (which was pretty minor at the time since Illinois was a small state at the time.)
these days you can't just jump from state legislature to the presidency.
I contend that we cannot consider ANY third party candidate to be truly serious about running for President until they have run for AND WON a race wherein the votes cast were made from a statewide race (i.e. senator, governor, state attorney general, etc.).
Then throw out your pennies and five dollar bills. The Republican party was organized just four months prior to the 1860 election, and its lead candidate, a certain Mr. Lincoln, never held office until he won the presidency that same year.
Anything that makes a license harder to counterfeit is a good thing.
.sig.
Err..not entirely.
There is nothing wrong with making a document difficult to counterfeit...the problem is if people believe that, because the document is difficult to counterfeit, it is somehow more trustworthy.
There have been a lot of times when states upgrade their licenses, and shortly afterwards they experience a spike of fraud with the new licenses. People, assuming the documents are more harder to counterfeit, and therefore obtain, trust them too much...and criminals catch on (this also happened with the new $20 bill too.)
More info in my
When issuing licences to non-citizens, all states should be required to have the word "ALIEN" likewise superimposed.
Ohhh..that's a very bad idea. See, at least under the current system, where citizenship/residency is not indicated on the license, there is no particular benefit for anyone getting the license if they are trying to use it for citizenship purposes.
Once the license indicates citizenship/residency, it could only cause a huge spike in fraud...because then people will want the document in order to work or vote or whatever the case may be.
Think about it this way, driver's license fraud did not exist until the photograph was added. Now imagine what will happen to driver's license fraud when a passport/green card is added.
You're lucky so far. Immediately after 9/11 the Virginia legislature attempted to bring in fingerprinting for driver's licensing. I believe it passed the Senate, but failed in the House of Delegates.
I helped the Virginia Taxpayer Association to kill the bill.
What reason, other than scanning from a distance, could there be to include RFID in a peice of identification?
Some RFID/Photo ID manufacturer stands to make a huge profit off it.
What..you thought that Virginia legislators were so tech savvy that they came up with the idea all by themselves?
The history of photo ID cards is that it has been almost entirely vendor driven...we functioned perfectly fine in the US with non-photo licenses, but once instant color photography came on the scene, vendors needed to sell their photo ID cards to someone. Once those caused fraud, vendors came up with a variety of expensive solutions that don't actually solve the fundamental flaws in photo ID card issuance. Coupled with a four year replacement cycle, photo ID vendors really ride the money train.
How long before companies stop letting $5 an hour employees handle "meaningless" data (with literally no background checks or security controls) that is worth millions when properly exploited?
Or, alternatively, when will companies stop pretending that they can be trusted simply because of employee credit card verification checks, background checks and a piss test?
I like to look at it this way, here in Ohio (as in most states) you need to go through the most awewsome background check ever in order to take the state bar. Full multi level 10 finger fingerprint check (local, state, national) credit check, employer verification check for all jobs worked since you were 16, the list goes on and on and it may even go into your mental health history (one of the few jobs you hear of that occuring.)
In spite of all of this, the industry as a whole can be summarized as a convention of pricks.
There are limits to background checks.
I presume that the parent believes that this is an industry that likely will require regulation in the future, correct?
Not necessarily. It is entirely possible but not inevitable. There are some industries that are public utility-like and require regulation, and others that the invisible hand takes care of everything, and efficiently.
I'm not necessarily anti-regulation, I'm just very cautious about it. I'm fretful to apply it her for fear of damaging a nascent industry.
One of the reasons the US is a better place to live (for most people) than Mexico is not because we have better laws, or better people, but because the laws are made by (representatives of) the people, and equally important, the laws are actually enforced.
As a Latin American, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Business regulations are comprehensive and just plain retarded. Often time they are created by well meaning individuals (who are left leaning) but what they succeed in doing is perpetuating monopolies, which have an amazingly ability to perpetuate themselves both politically and economically.
We do have better laws in the US. I was going to say at first that we have a better regulatory environment, in that we don't have so much bribery.
I've decided to take that back. At least in Latin America, the small businessman has a chance of getting through all the silly bureaucracy by bribing someone. In the US, bribery does not occur at the bureaucratic level, it really only occurs at the political level, which is far too expensive for the small businessman. In one instance the law doesn't get enforced, in another instance, the law just doesn't get made.
If you plan to launch a commercial space tourism effort from this country, of course it needs regulation. Would you prefer if any moron could claim to have a rocket and start tossing people up into space?
I'm not going to deny that there are certain industries that require regulation. But I would say that this is an industry that requires no regulation at this point in time. For instance, it's not exactly true that any moron can throw people into space...especially since the people will be paying somehwere in the $200-$300k range for that privilege and will likely be very interested in making sure that it's an extremely safe process.
If it were a $50 airline ticket from Cleveland to Chicago, the average flier would not have the ablity nor resources to assess the airline's ability to safely transport them. But on a nascent industry whose primary customer has an extra $300k around, I would say that the customers have the resources to perform such research in advance...and I'm further sure that they would insist on multiple levels of insurance policies, and those insurance companies will go out of their way to check on other related issues (like the possibility of debris raining down and how that could affect them.)
Your local travel agencty is subject to regulation to prevent the worst of the scammers from coming into/staying into existence.
Though there are sometimes, in some jurisdictions, specialized laws covering travel agents, existing criminal fraud and deception laws are sufficient.
Having said all that, I think you would have to be insane to believe that the precautions and internal policies put in place on a private spaceship system would somehow be less than equal to NASA. NASA doesn't have to worry about profit. NASA has no insurance company breathing down its neck if something goes wrong. NASA astronauts worked their careers for the risk and privilege to be an astronaut, they didn't just pay for it. All NASA has to worry about is congressional oversight, which is often political, not necessarily practical. All in all I would trust a private company far more than the government to pull this off safely and cheaply, and I certainly couldn't see what benefit they would add in regulating it.
We no longer live in the Wild Wild West...the insurance companies took care of that.
Once upon a time my mother was the manager of vehcile registration renewal for the NYS DMV
If you wouldn't mind, I got a question for you, especially if your mom worked there in the last five years or so...please do email me if that's the case.
Commercial software vendors would rather release a program on time and hide any last-minute security flaws that pop up
While I'm not a software engineer, and I don't play one on television, it seems to me that commercial software vendors likely don't test for security flaws at all, or program with that sorta thing in mind. Functionality is their number one concern, and testing for security issues is a bitch. The outside world takes care of that for them.
Open Source projects have the luxury to take everything into account. When you are not being paid to make something, your emphasis is on art and craft, and a good piece of art is thorough.
Well you beat me to revealing the PR hype. In addition, if the fingerprint suddenly stops working for some reason (let's say our employee was bricklaying the last weekend, or doing an intensive Vitamin C exfoliation) is there a way of getting the computer to boot? And if there is, what's the point? It's just expensive snake oil.
Guards outside the building know the only places people can exit, always be stationed around there, and can ambush the robbers
And in spite of all this good common sense, you almost never see guards stationed outside a building, and if you do, they are specifically there to control people going into the building (or are ceremonial.)
I suspect the issue may be one of containment--guards outside the building can be distracted by other things too easily.
Up until a few years ago, Colorado was one of those states that would laminate driver's licenses on the spot, much like a high school ID.
This is one of those damned if you do damned if you don't things.
Office issuance clearly has the advantage that the person gets the license immediately, as opposed to some piece of paper, which may or may not work as ID if the person needs it immediately. It doesn't give them a very good feeling.
Office issuance has the problem that the offices themselves are often not that hard to break into, and then people steal the printer, blank cards, hologram rolls, et cetera. Honestly, you can count on that happening within 2 weeks of a state introducing a new licensing system.
Central issuance has the advantage that the machines are harder to steal. Further, the sillyness of license fraud (see my signature for more details) means that we are going to faster upgrade cycles. States can just upgrade the central machines instead of putting new machines into each office (in Ohio that would be over 220 office.)
Problem? You need to have amazingly good auditing and security measures. Consider the fact that California issues all their licenses centrally and that, if you do the math, that means that they issue at least 25,000 a day. Someone with particularly good access could probably figure out a way of getting an extra 1000 out, and no one will notice the difference.
So fraud is easier with office issuance, but if you can do it with central issuance, you can really go to town.
What happened to good old fashionned mainframes + thin clients with monchrome screens...
Most likely its there. The photo ID card vendors sell everything in packages though, and those systems run on either *nix or NT, so then you have to have some sorta program to interface with them.
Could they have created a licensing system that interfaced with a mainframe directly? Absolutely (and its not actually a requirement that the digital image be viewable by the people in the DMV, if they retain the image.)
But the photo ID card vendors make significantly more money by selling everything in a very overbloated package.
1.) tell states that their fraud problems are caused by easy to counterfeit licenses
2.) sell overbloated digital licensing package to states
3.) watch fraud increase because new license is too valuable not to counterfeit
4.) four years later vendors tell state that their fraud problems are caused by too easy to counterfeit licenses
5.) repeat step 1
Most Flash drives don't have the pen form factor so Pen Drive is inappropiate
Strictly speaking, no. But they are almost universally thin and long, a shape that may be associated with many different objects, though certainly with pens, and there are indeed pens with dimensions similar to many drives.
I believe that pen drive is one of the better terms because it implies the portability and size that is asociated with them (which is also implied by keychain drive, but not by USB/flash drive.)
I usually call it a "USB pen drive" which somehow rolls off my tongue well.
There is no entrapment, because the feds aren't encouraging a crime that would not otherwise have taken place. The cops are making a situation available, but they aren't coercing anyone into the deal.
I will have to think about this a bit longer, though for the most part I feel this is wrong.
Private companies use "secret shoppers" to see how an average customer is treated at a particular place a business. It certainly is the privilege of the company to do that.
What you are supporting is essentially "secret shopping" by the government against the citizens. I'm not sure if secret shopping is a role the government should provide.
On the other side of things, I've always said that the government should provide "secret shopping" versus itself. People testing out the DMV, people purposefully doing whatever in order to get pulled over so that they can see how cop X or Y performs.
But imagine how law enforcement would react if they heard such a plan. So I imagine we would see a healthy dose of hypocrisy from the secret shoppers.
In an email conversation with Richard Winger (who runs Ballot Access News and invests all his energy and resources into the effort of being the central repository of a very complex subject) he noted the inherent hypocrisy of the parties.
The Republican party was very hastily assembled and won a big election (1860) in very short order (just a few months of organization on the national level.) Under todays hugely complex ballot laws, that would have been simply impossible. (Ballot access laws came about with the secret ballot. Prior to the secret ballot, the state didn't print ballots at all, and candidates did not register themselves with the state for an election. They just started campaigning, and people wrote the candidate's names down, or they brought candidate lists with them to the polling place and dropped them into the box. Essentially, *everyone* was a write-in candidate. The secret ballot made pre-printing necessary and therefore candidate pre-registration, and now we have a very technical system for keeping undesireables off the ballot.)
Winger does imply that there may be a federal ballot access system setup in the future, but I don't know how far off that is, nor how fair it would be for third parties.
I don't believe the tinfoil hats are called for just yet, but please try to remember that there's more than one election taking place this fall.
And I would agree with you,but thanks to the way that California redistricts, almost all of those races have already been decided in advance.
He is free to travel by foot, bike, motorcycle, car, boat, or other device himself while not violating applicable pedestrian or traffic laws, or by bus or train, entirely anonymously.
I may add incidentally that he sticks his money where his mouth is. I was told by a mutual acquiantance that he hires someone to drive him around the country so he doesn't get on a domestic flight.
He already proved to himself that this was false, as he says in his own description of events that SFO would have allowed him to fly with no ID if he submitted to a search.
That's actually what he's protesting essentially. What law says that he must submit to the search in order to fly without ID. People do fly without ID all the time, and, honestly, sometimes they are marked as a selectee, and other times they aren't. Gilmore is trying to figure out the regulations and logistics for this behavior.
Frankly, I thought he was chasing up the wrong tree as well (and I actually told that to his lawyer several months ago.) But now that the government is trying to be so secretive about it implies to me that there's far more than the eye can see.
The whole premise behind the school system is that there are things kids Need To Know, and they're going to learn them whether they care about them at the time or not...
One of my major issues with standardized testing is that it implies that information is becoming more scarce. It's not, information has never been cheaper, and often, it's just plain free.
People have asked me why there's so much ADD, I tell them that kids are very smart; if they ever need to know information, they know how to get it, a 5 year old today can master google. Therefore they look at their mental resources, see that whatever is being taught to them is not useful, and choose to ignore it. It comes off as ADD simply because the teacher is frustrated that the student doesn't give a shit, but honestly, that is the most efficient use of their time.
We should model our security around that used by Israel
Actually nearly 90% or more of the El Al security model is focused on behavior, interactions, history and other things which are not actually related to identity. The biggest use of the passport for them is to see what other countries the passenger has been to.
I have been told by people who've been to Israel that the ID card is really only used as a way of hassling Palestinians, but isn't really used for identity.
the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car
You mean that, in the future, I will use floppies on a hobby/recreational basis?? Kick ass!