Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance.
Well then have the banks issue me whatever they want to identify me (prior to ID cards they have perfectly good internal cusotmer identification systems.)
Medical insurance is an odd one. But, if everyone in a social health care country has automatic insurance, then why do they need a card anyway?
Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem.
One of the main lessons about ID card issues is that each country's experience with it is different. Of what I know of Beligium's ID card experiences I would characterize them (as I would a lot of the Western European ID card experience) as being bureaucratic. A lot of the bureaucracy that a Beligian would use an ID card for would be done differently in the US or UK. Honestly, several european nations really don't need them (I would put Beligum into that category.)
It's an odd paradox, but if you don't have rampant ID card fraud, you really dont' need the card in the first place.
Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case.
Other posters answered this question pretty well. Once again, the Western European model of ID cards is fairly uninteresting and benign, as well as entirely unnecessary.
Take a look at Latin America though for some great experiences. You got everything good, hard to forge ID cards, biometrics, national database, blah blah blah.
And you have the most amazing ID fraud ever. I would say it's a sport in Costa Rica, but that would be singling out just Costa Rica. I think a lot of the problems are bribery (which is the case in the US as well, but DMVs go out of their way to make sure that internal bribery is covered up. Here in Ohio, I happen to know that criminal charges are often not carried out so that the scale of internal bribery is not fully realized.)
Check out Israel for a really odd ID card experience. It's a completely worthless card--not even used for bureaucratic purposes for the most part. It's not even used in security contexts.
It is however used as a way of hassling Palestinians. Stories abound of Israeli guards taking away Palestinian ID cards so that they can be fucked over (something which the UN intervened on several years ago)...or throwing them onto the as a show of force. Honestly, you could write several books about ID cards in Jewish history.
You already do need a license. It's called "citizenship" and you get it when you are born.
Uhhh...talked about being confuzled.
A license is a special authority granted to an individual by the state to do something --like carry a concealed weapon, or fly an airplane. (I left out car for a reason.)
Citizenship is a status, and more importantly a relationship, not everyone is born with one incidentally (which really fucks things up) but most people have one.
The concept of citizenship came from the idea that when a baby was born, it was the king's (who ruled the land in that area) responsibility to protect the child. When that child would get older and became an adult, they had responsibilities back to the king for that protection when they were young.
Hence, if you are born in an airplane in international airspace, the citizneship of the child could be that of the flag carrier. (Since it was them whom you were entrusted to.)
It's a very modern thing to use citizenship as a way of allowing people not to move around between different nation states.
To adopt a new citizenship, or dump another is a creation/severing of a relationship, not of a license.
You can surrender this license if, for example, you become a citizen of a different country that doesn't recognize dual citizenship. In this case your country of birth is well within its rights to refuse you entry and prevent you from walk down the street in your native country.
A bunch of countries do not recognize dual citizenship, cuz it confuses them to have people walking around with multiple relationship/statuses. However, while the US does not recognize it, they don't have much choice, since a lot of people have dual citizenship anyway (the fact that I have two passports is something that the US will get over. Not that I'm telling them of course, that would be asinine. They cannot prevent me from creating a realtionship with Canada, Costa Rica, or the Comoros.)
Certainly schools aren't there to make students feel good about themselves -- they are there to help students learn.
I find this sentence really funny, because it's easy to take ad absurdum.
"Students who don't finish the test in 15 minutes will be savagely beaten."
By motivating people who otherwise might not be interested (through fear of a bad grade or desire for a good one), grades help many students learn by providing a goal to focus on. This aspect of grading is particularly obvious in elementary schools...
Actually the point of grading in elementary schools has never been all that clear. I believe it to be a ranking mechanism purely.
Perhaps the negative motivation thing works at the high school level, but the educator Maria Montessorri figured out very quickly that grading at the elementary school level had an overall depressing effect on kids performances.
There are many schools who do not use letter grades at the elementary level (particularly Montessorri.) My recollection is that letter grades for 1-6 is actually a fairly new phenomenon (last fifty years or so.)
So if Vonage were not covered by PSC, they would be covered by the state AG's office, and I would expect little different in their arbitration/leveraging abilities.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I had an extra thought.
You can make a good justification for the AG's office to be more effective. Public Utilities Commissions are often very strongly lobbied by telcos and complaints of incestuousness are not unheard of.
I'm afraid I disagree. While I am somewhat leery of Government regulation the PSC does a good job. Ask anyone who has been stonewalled by their phone company. All it takes is one phone call to the PSC and a complaint and your phone company will fall all over you trying to fix the problem.
Your examples all have to with using the public utilities/services commission as an arbitrator when the utility company is not doing its job.
If the company is not a public utility, then the Attorney General's office would serve the same role. (The AG's office has power over all companies in the state not specifically by another state department.) I have found it very useful to use the Ohio AG's office to whack a few companies on the head when I'm having issues with them.
So if Vonage were not covered by PSC, they would be covered by the state AG's office, and I would expect little different in their arbitration/leveraging abilities.
The problem is that voip is going to be used by everyone - not just techies...The same will be true in situations where the power goes out and these people can't use their phones. The regulators are just trying to stay "ahead of the curve"...
I find this line of thinking extremely distasteful.
First, Vonage goes out of its way to make it very clear to new customers that it may not be as realiable as POTS, does not work for 911, et cetera. The warning is huge, and to imply that only techies would get it is disingenuous--its not in fine print, it's in huge lettering.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the ideat that the public utilities commission could regulate VOIP for the purpose of being an arbitrator when things go bad (though that's what the Attorney General's office is for.) However I see no reason to protect customer's from something, and dramatically increase their cost, when it's spelled out pretty clearly and anyone can understand it.
That may be a problem with the electrical system in your car.
Actually a change of tires would help likely help.
In the early 1990's tire makers started reducing the quantity of carbon black in order to decrease rolling resistance and thereby increase fuel economy.
The issue is that carbon black does a very good job grounding the vehicle electrically.
I remember reading an article about the mid 1990's Honda Accord, which had new Michelin tires with a low carbon black level. Illinois Toll employees were wearing gloves and/or refusing to take toll from individuals in these new Hondas because they were shocking the beejesus out of them.
I haven't seen an article on this in a long time, but I'm presuming tire makers have figured out a new way of grounding tires. In the meantime, this still implies to me that some tires are better at grounding your car than others.
I'd be interested to know if the Americans have taken on board problems that the UK trial encountered early on.
On a semi-related note, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which is some quasi-non profit group (email for more on that) for DMV administrators for all of North America, has rejected biometrics for driver's licenses and state ID cards...at least, for now.
Why? They want reliable 1 to 300 million matching. I think they feel that anything below that would be too subject to criticism, and the privacy peeps would jump on that too quickly. Further, what's the point in investing the money into what they claim won't be a national biometric database if it can't actually do a match on every single person in the US?
Right now the matching systems in place in those states that use biometrics top out at 1 to 40,000. The best technology out there is 1 to 10 million. So the good news is, we really won't be seeing any more biometric proposals for state licenses anytime soon, the bad news is, 1 to 300 million may be possible.
There is no way that somebody can just go out and buy an ISO 14443 reader and war drive your pocket. They need the proper keys to talk to the card and if they don't have them they are out of luck.
To which I reply... millions of dollars have been invested in all sorts of great smart card technology, and DirecTV is still facing an uphill battle.
Sure, if you are trying to protect a limited number of expensive smart cards, which are read by a limited number of readers, then perhaps you got something. Even DirecTV can update its smart cards fairly frequently (though it doesn't do it nearly as much as it could, I suspect that's because it figures that it has a semi-losing battle on its hands and it might as well contain profits.)
On the other hand, this passport will be good for 10 years no matter what, and so the RFID scanners will have to be good for that long as well. Which means that, even if it takes five years to crack the RFID encryption, that still leaves five years for a fraudster to use it--at least.
IMHO, the metric system is doomed in the US because it's not American.
Exactly, but we Americans aren't stubborn enough to admit that there is an advantage to such a system. What we need is a uniquely American way of solving this problem.
For that reason, we shall create a new base-10 system called New Imperial which shall be terribly convenient and comfortable for everyone to use. There shall be 10 new inches in a new foot, 1000 new feet in a new mile, 10 new quarts in a new gallon, et cetera.
And then we shall force the rest of the world to use our delightfully thought out system, and then decades later make them kiss our feet for saving them from whatever entirely illogical system they were using previously.
On a semi-odd and definitely irrelevant note, I got my hands on a presentation done at a conference of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Part of this conference was talking about a standardized driver's license/photo ID card. (Which they took great pains to say wasn't a national ID card since it wasn't being issued by the federal government.)
Anyway, it's based on a bunch of ISO standards, and the ISO standard is to call the document a "driving licence."
I've got pages and page upon pages of bitching about the fact that these people couldn't deal with the spelling of "licence" (though oddly "driving" doesn't bother them one bit.)
So while we might have won sulphur, we may lose license.
I worked in California a few years ago, and my taxes were actually higher than Alberta.
Not an entirely fair comparison--California taxes are some of the highest (if not the highest) in the nation. Alberta's taxes are easily the lowest in Canada.
The stats are very clear in the insurance industry
Here's one stat that has gone unnoted.
I agree with the idea that multiple teens in a car is bad.
However, I have to wonder, everytime you get out onto the road you have a statistically higher chance of being killed. It would seem to me that while you would be the on the road just as much alone or with one person as you would be with four people, isn't there some type of mitigating issue that you're dealing with multiple cars?
So, instead of four teens, one driver, one car, we now have four teens, two drivers, two cars. Seems to me that we're playing new odds of more cars that could possibly get into an accident.
Until this moment, I actually agreed with the passenger limits (until I hear an argument to the contrary.)
Your post would imply that there is a cultural basis for not having a shower curtain in Korea.
That's possible, different cultures react differently to that sorta thing.
Latin Americans *hate* standing water, they think it's very unclean.
An American will put water in the sink and soak their dishes in water, whereas a Latin American will run the water continuously and wash each dish under the running water. (Though a cousin of mine would turn off the water, soap up the dish and then restart the water, I guess that was a water efficient way of doing things.) At any rate, coming from a Latin American family, I've spent more time hearing people bitch about water on the floor after getting out of the shower.
Sometimes, though I think this statement is actually becoming a little worn and doesn't apply nearly as much as it used to. California is so out there on some things that there is no chance that everything they do will influence the nation.
However, I will agree that this is a pretty major situation. There was a very concerted effort by activists (with some computer scientists such as Dave Dill from Stanford) who worked their assess off to alert the California Secretary of State of the problems with e-voting machines. That by all means will influence events in other states.
Keep in mind that every state has its own story for upgrading. In Georgia and Maryland it was politicians in the legislature that jumped on board and decided to do everything as quickly as possible. Here in Ohio our Secretary of State, who by constitutional definition, doesn't have much to do other than business filings and elections, is pushing for DREs because he wants to reform elections so that he can claim he did something--for his gubenatorial run in 2006. Stopping the California situation was easy because it was vendors vs. people, here it is politicians vs. people.
The excuse is that asking for ID "intimidates" minorities, and thereby violates their civil rights, but the real reason is that it makes it easier for non-citizens and dead people to vote.
Uhhh...no. Ohio has the same law as well--Ohio law specifically says that an individual is not required to have an ID card. This law has been taken to imply that no level of government can require you to procure an ID card in order to interact with them.
While I've never seen a court case on the topic, there is a general idea that requiring photo ID to vote would be a hardship on the voter which is illegal by the bunches of laws and court cases that protect voting rights.
Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city?
The headlight itself is not $3. The Xenon gas requires a tremendous charge to light up (I think I've read in the order of several hundred thousands of volts.) It's the eletrical ballast for the lamps that are so expensive.
Candlepower is likely the same, but since the light comes from another part of the spectrum, it's a lot easier to ess, and it illuminates better. Go drive one at night and the difference is worth it.
On a side note, they may be $3k to replace, but they are optional on most cars at about $500.
As already noted in another post, automakers love building cars all the same. The fact that 95% of Honda Accords have power windows is a tremendous relief for the assemblyline. (And if you're one of those who insists on getting an Accord without power windows, you have already subsidized at least part of the cost of having the power windows in your car anyway--so you might as well take them. The exception to this subsidization are things like navigation--which is still pretty unusual.)
Next, as the price of cars has gone up, the price of the option as a percentage has gone down--the cost of power windows is so insignificant in comparison to everything else.
Here's another factor--leasing. In leasing options that raise the cars resale value will make little or no change to the monhtly lease cost, since the cost residualizes in the end. All your normal stuff (A/C, power equipment, CD player) work that way. It could be possible for a lease to be more expensive on a base car than a car with power gadgets because the power gadgets have such a powerful effect on resale.
Honestly, if you buy the car, the resale value jups so much with the power equipment (and leather) that it makes financial sense to get it.
Yes the price of cars is numerically higher, but once you factor in inflation, and, more importantly, purchasing power, the price of cars has gone down.
I've seen statistics sayign that it used to take the average american worker 35 weeks to pay for a new car, whereas today that's in the 20-22 week range.
Indeed, at the state university I'm at, there are more new cars than you can shake a stick at--even your unskilled jobs provide enough money for a car paymen (at least a lease.)
100 years ago, they were still using children in dangerous factory jobs.
The end of child labor has been demonstrably linked to other effects, not unionization. (These days economic theory is holding that the end of child labor came with machinery that did what children could do better and cheaper. It was no longer worth employing them, add that to incomes big enough to keep children in school.)
To give a more recent example, management of American Airlines was complaining that they might have go to bankrupty if the Unions did not make concessions, which they did. Not long after it was revealed that management was giving itself retention bonuses.
This is a "bad example" sorta thing--the executive bonuses were probably a thousandth of a percentage of the cost of the union concessions. I agree with the unions here that it was a bad faith and hypocritical thing, though financially it was likely a drop in the bucket.
Airlines have been destroyed by unions--the problem is that unions negotiate at different times, and each union can destroy the airline. It means that the airline is forced to give the union exactly what they want every two years or so.
It would be easier if all the union negotiations happened at the same time. It would require fewer concessions and a better balance sheet for the airline.
I happen to be pro-union incidentally, I'm just disagreeing with some of your assertions. (A huge issue I have with unions is that they haven't figured out how to get out of the blue collar fields and get into white collar fields. I happen to believe that open shop laws would allow them to penetrate white collar workplaces, and that's where the growth opportunities are.)
Is it just me or should this type of information be private until you are actually convicted of something?
I need not echo the other comments, but I believe that the 5th/6th Amendment has been interpreted to mean that you have the right to be arrested in a public manner (preventing state tyranny by having public arrest, trials, et cetera.)
However, I can't find anything that says that you have the right to request that your arrest be a private matter (say, within the law enforcement system.) On the other hand, court proceedings *have to be public* so the arrest record would become public anyway once you get into court, so what's the point?
I believe a stronger truth-in-advertising law is in order in the US....There should be penalties for lying to people in order to sell a product. I also think political campaigns should be held most strictly to this policy.
It's damn hard to police political campaigns. And honestly, all the laws concerning political speech/campaign finance laws benefit the incumbents. It's an awful system.
Truth in advertising laws already exist. They work fine as they are.
Kudos to Elena and the editors for a great human interest story.
On the last page she has left her mailing address. (Ex-soviet bloc mail is, amusingly enough, addressed in reverse of ours--country first, then city, next line address, post box, last line name.)
She may very well have no need for money at all, but perhaps the well off slashdotters would consider sending her a token of appreciation.
Though at this moment in time, I can't exactly figure out the best way of doing that:-)
(Apparently Ukraine doesn't take international money orders.)
This is a dead thread,but I wanted to comment on your post in case you check that sorta thing.:-)
It's because of the FDA's rigorous testing process that America didn't have several thousand Thalidomide babies along with the rest of the world.
Err...we did have Thalidomide babies in the US. There were more in Europe admittedly, but the FDA gained a lot of its powers after that scare, not before.
On the other side of the coin, we've had a steady stream of scares, scandals and deaths from the largely unregulated herbal/dietary suppliment industry in recent years.
Most of which are frenzies with little merit to them. I would hardly call it a "steady stream" and the danger of herbal/dietary supplements hardly pales in comparison to approved FDA drugs.
I would counter your arguments saying that FDA regulations have killed more people than they have saved...how about all of the deaths in the 1980's because the FDA would not release AZT? The complicity to keep a drug off the market that could have saved thousands of lives deserves nothing less than criminal prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance.
Well then have the banks issue me whatever they want to identify me (prior to ID cards they have perfectly good internal cusotmer identification systems.)
Medical insurance is an odd one. But, if everyone in a social health care country has automatic insurance, then why do they need a card anyway?
Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem.
One of the main lessons about ID card issues is that each country's experience with it is different. Of what I know of Beligium's ID card experiences I would characterize them (as I would a lot of the Western European ID card experience) as being bureaucratic. A lot of the bureaucracy that a Beligian would use an ID card for would be done differently in the US or UK. Honestly, several european nations really don't need them (I would put Beligum into that category.)
It's an odd paradox, but if you don't have rampant ID card fraud, you really dont' need the card in the first place.
Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case.
Other posters answered this question pretty well. Once again, the Western European model of ID cards is fairly uninteresting and benign, as well as entirely unnecessary.
Take a look at Latin America though for some great experiences. You got everything good, hard to forge ID cards, biometrics, national database, blah blah blah.
And you have the most amazing ID fraud ever. I would say it's a sport in Costa Rica, but that would be singling out just Costa Rica. I think a lot of the problems are bribery (which is the case in the US as well, but DMVs go out of their way to make sure that internal bribery is covered up. Here in Ohio, I happen to know that criminal charges are often not carried out so that the scale of internal bribery is not fully realized.)
Check out Israel for a really odd ID card experience. It's a completely worthless card--not even used for bureaucratic purposes for the most part. It's not even used in security contexts.
It is however used as a way of hassling Palestinians. Stories abound of Israeli guards taking away Palestinian ID cards so that they can be fucked over (something which the UN intervened on several years ago)...or throwing them onto the as a show of force. Honestly, you could write several books about ID cards in Jewish history.
You already do need a license. It's called "citizenship" and you get it when you are born.
Uhhh...talked about being confuzled.
A license is a special authority granted to an individual by the state to do something --like carry a concealed weapon, or fly an airplane. (I left out car for a reason.)
Citizenship is a status, and more importantly a relationship, not everyone is born with one incidentally (which really fucks things up) but most people have one.
The concept of citizenship came from the idea that when a baby was born, it was the king's (who ruled the land in that area) responsibility to protect the child. When that child would get older and became an adult, they had responsibilities back to the king for that protection when they were young.
Hence, if you are born in an airplane in international airspace, the citizneship of the child could be that of the flag carrier. (Since it was them whom you were entrusted to.)
It's a very modern thing to use citizenship as a way of allowing people not to move around between different nation states.
To adopt a new citizenship, or dump another is a creation/severing of a relationship, not of a license.
You can surrender this license if, for example, you become a citizen of a different country that doesn't recognize dual citizenship. In this case your country of birth is well within its rights to refuse you entry and prevent you from walk down the street in your native country.
A bunch of countries do not recognize dual citizenship, cuz it confuses them to have people walking around with multiple relationship/statuses. However, while the US does not recognize it, they don't have much choice, since a lot of people have dual citizenship anyway (the fact that I have two passports is something that the US will get over. Not that I'm telling them of course, that would be asinine. They cannot prevent me from creating a realtionship with Canada, Costa Rica, or the Comoros.)
Certainly schools aren't there to make students feel good about themselves -- they are there to help students learn.
I find this sentence really funny, because it's easy to take ad absurdum.
"Students who don't finish the test in 15 minutes will be savagely beaten."
By motivating people who otherwise might not be interested (through fear of a bad grade or desire for a good one), grades help many students learn by providing a goal to focus on. This aspect of grading is particularly obvious in elementary schools...
Actually the point of grading in elementary schools has never been all that clear. I believe it to be a ranking mechanism purely.
Perhaps the negative motivation thing works at the high school level, but the educator Maria Montessorri figured out very quickly that grading at the elementary school level had an overall depressing effect on kids performances.
There are many schools who do not use letter grades at the elementary level (particularly Montessorri.) My recollection is that letter grades for 1-6 is actually a fairly new phenomenon (last fifty years or so.)
So if Vonage were not covered by PSC, they would be covered by the state AG's office, and I would expect little different in their arbitration/leveraging abilities.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I had an extra thought.
You can make a good justification for the AG's office to be more effective. Public Utilities Commissions are often very strongly lobbied by telcos and complaints of incestuousness are not unheard of.
I'm afraid I disagree. While I am somewhat leery of Government regulation the PSC does a good job. Ask anyone who has been stonewalled by their phone company. All it takes is one phone call to the PSC and a complaint and your phone company will fall all over you trying to fix the problem.
Your examples all have to with using the public utilities/services commission as an arbitrator when the utility company is not doing its job.
If the company is not a public utility, then the Attorney General's office would serve the same role. (The AG's office has power over all companies in the state not specifically by another state department.) I have found it very useful to use the Ohio AG's office to whack a few companies on the head when I'm having issues with them.
So if Vonage were not covered by PSC, they would be covered by the state AG's office, and I would expect little different in their arbitration/leveraging abilities.
The problem is that voip is going to be used by everyone - not just techies...The same will be true in situations where the power goes out and these people can't use their phones. The regulators are just trying to stay "ahead of the curve"...
I find this line of thinking extremely distasteful.
First, Vonage goes out of its way to make it very clear to new customers that it may not be as realiable as POTS, does not work for 911, et cetera. The warning is huge, and to imply that only techies would get it is disingenuous--its not in fine print, it's in huge lettering.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the ideat that the public utilities commission could regulate VOIP for the purpose of being an arbitrator when things go bad (though that's what the Attorney General's office is for.) However I see no reason to protect customer's from something, and dramatically increase their cost, when it's spelled out pretty clearly and anyone can understand it.
That may be a problem with the electrical system in your car.
Actually a change of tires would help likely help.
In the early 1990's tire makers started reducing the quantity of carbon black in order to decrease rolling resistance and thereby increase fuel economy.
The issue is that carbon black does a very good job grounding the vehicle electrically.
I remember reading an article about the mid 1990's Honda Accord, which had new Michelin tires with a low carbon black level. Illinois Toll employees were wearing gloves and/or refusing to take toll from individuals in these new Hondas because they were shocking the beejesus out of them.
I haven't seen an article on this in a long time, but I'm presuming tire makers have figured out a new way of grounding tires. In the meantime, this still implies to me that some tires are better at grounding your car than others.
I got a bill with 25 different charges that looked like LOCKBOX 54345333453345 - $45.55.
Dude, You just got reamed for paying the secretary's Citibank Mastercard bill.
I'd be interested to know if the Americans have taken on board problems that the UK trial encountered early on.
On a semi-related note, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which is some quasi-non profit group (email for more on that) for DMV administrators for all of North America, has rejected biometrics for driver's licenses and state ID cards...at least, for now.
Why? They want reliable 1 to 300 million matching. I think they feel that anything below that would be too subject to criticism, and the privacy peeps would jump on that too quickly. Further, what's the point in investing the money into what they claim won't be a national biometric database if it can't actually do a match on every single person in the US?
Right now the matching systems in place in those states that use biometrics top out at 1 to 40,000. The best technology out there is 1 to 10 million. So the good news is, we really won't be seeing any more biometric proposals for state licenses anytime soon, the bad news is, 1 to 300 million may be possible.
There is no way that somebody can just go out and buy an ISO 14443 reader and war drive your pocket. They need the proper keys to talk to the card and if they don't have them they are out of luck.
To which I reply... millions of dollars have been invested in all sorts of great smart card technology, and DirecTV is still facing an uphill battle.
Sure, if you are trying to protect a limited number of expensive smart cards, which are read by a limited number of readers, then perhaps you got something. Even DirecTV can update its smart cards fairly frequently (though it doesn't do it nearly as much as it could, I suspect that's because it figures that it has a semi-losing battle on its hands and it might as well contain profits.)
On the other hand, this passport will be good for 10 years no matter what, and so the RFID scanners will have to be good for that long as well. Which means that, even if it takes five years to crack the RFID encryption, that still leaves five years for a fraudster to use it--at least.
IMHO, the metric system is doomed in the US because it's not American.
Exactly, but we Americans aren't stubborn enough to admit that there is an advantage to such a system. What we need is a uniquely American way of solving this problem.
For that reason, we shall create a new base-10 system called New Imperial which shall be terribly convenient and comfortable for everyone to use. There shall be 10 new inches in a new foot, 1000 new feet in a new mile, 10 new quarts in a new gallon, et cetera.
And then we shall force the rest of the world to use our delightfully thought out system, and then decades later make them kiss our feet for saving them from whatever entirely illogical system they were using previously.
On a semi-odd and definitely irrelevant note, I got my hands on a presentation done at a conference of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Part of this conference was talking about a standardized driver's license/photo ID card. (Which they took great pains to say wasn't a national ID card since it wasn't being issued by the federal government.)
Anyway, it's based on a bunch of ISO standards, and the ISO standard is to call the document a "driving licence."
I've got pages and page upon pages of bitching about the fact that these people couldn't deal with the spelling of "licence" (though oddly "driving" doesn't bother them one bit.)
So while we might have won sulphur, we may lose license.
I worked in California a few years ago, and my taxes were actually higher than Alberta.
Not an entirely fair comparison--California taxes are some of the highest (if not the highest) in the nation. Alberta's taxes are easily the lowest in Canada.
The stats are very clear in the insurance industry
Here's one stat that has gone unnoted.
I agree with the idea that multiple teens in a car is bad.
However, I have to wonder, everytime you get out onto the road you have a statistically higher chance of being killed. It would seem to me that while you would be the on the road just as much alone or with one person as you would be with four people, isn't there some type of mitigating issue that you're dealing with multiple cars?
So, instead of four teens, one driver, one car, we now have four teens, two drivers, two cars. Seems to me that we're playing new odds of more cars that could possibly get into an accident.
Until this moment, I actually agreed with the passenger limits (until I hear an argument to the contrary.)
Your post would imply that there is a cultural basis for not having a shower curtain in Korea.
That's possible, different cultures react differently to that sorta thing.
Latin Americans *hate* standing water, they think it's very unclean.
An American will put water in the sink and soak their dishes in water, whereas a Latin American will run the water continuously and wash each dish under the running water. (Though a cousin of mine would turn off the water, soap up the dish and then restart the water, I guess that was a water efficient way of doing things.) At any rate, coming from a Latin American family, I've spent more time hearing people bitch about water on the floor after getting out of the shower.
How CA goes so goes the nation.
Sometimes, though I think this statement is actually becoming a little worn and doesn't apply nearly as much as it used to. California is so out there on some things that there is no chance that everything they do will influence the nation.
However, I will agree that this is a pretty major situation. There was a very concerted effort by activists (with some computer scientists such as Dave Dill from Stanford) who worked their assess off to alert the California Secretary of State of the problems with e-voting machines. That by all means will influence events in other states.
Keep in mind that every state has its own story for upgrading. In Georgia and Maryland it was politicians in the legislature that jumped on board and decided to do everything as quickly as possible. Here in Ohio our Secretary of State, who by constitutional definition, doesn't have much to do other than business filings and elections, is pushing for DREs because he wants to reform elections so that he can claim he did something--for his gubenatorial run in 2006. Stopping the California situation was easy because it was vendors vs. people, here it is politicians vs. people.
The excuse is that asking for ID "intimidates" minorities, and thereby violates their civil rights, but the real reason is that it makes it easier for non-citizens and dead people to vote.
Uhhh...no. Ohio has the same law as well--Ohio law specifically says that an individual is not required to have an ID card. This law has been taken to imply that no level of government can require you to procure an ID card in order to interact with them.
While I've never seen a court case on the topic, there is a general idea that requiring photo ID to vote would be a hardship on the voter which is illegal by the bunches of laws and court cases that protect voting rights.
Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city?
The headlight itself is not $3. The Xenon gas requires a tremendous charge to light up (I think I've read in the order of several hundred thousands of volts.) It's the eletrical ballast for the lamps that are so expensive.
Candlepower is likely the same, but since the light comes from another part of the spectrum, it's a lot easier to ess, and it illuminates better. Go drive one at night and the difference is worth it.
On a side note, they may be $3k to replace, but they are optional on most cars at about $500.
but we simply could not find a "base" model
As already noted in another post, automakers love building cars all the same. The fact that 95% of Honda Accords have power windows is a tremendous relief for the assemblyline. (And if you're one of those who insists on getting an Accord without power windows, you have already subsidized at least part of the cost of having the power windows in your car anyway--so you might as well take them. The exception to this subsidization are things like navigation--which is still pretty unusual.)
Next, as the price of cars has gone up, the price of the option as a percentage has gone down--the cost of power windows is so insignificant in comparison to everything else.
Here's another factor--leasing. In leasing options that raise the cars resale value will make little or no change to the monhtly lease cost, since the cost residualizes in the end. All your normal stuff (A/C, power equipment, CD player) work that way. It could be possible for a lease to be more expensive on a base car than a car with power gadgets because the power gadgets have such a powerful effect on resale.
Honestly, if you buy the car, the resale value jups so much with the power equipment (and leather) that it makes financial sense to get it.
Whoa there!
Yes the price of cars is numerically higher, but once you factor in inflation, and, more importantly, purchasing power, the price of cars has gone down.
I've seen statistics sayign that it used to take the average american worker 35 weeks to pay for a new car, whereas today that's in the 20-22 week range.
Indeed, at the state university I'm at, there are more new cars than you can shake a stick at--even your unskilled jobs provide enough money for a car paymen (at least a lease.)
100 years ago, they were still using children in dangerous factory jobs.
The end of child labor has been demonstrably linked to other effects, not unionization. (These days economic theory is holding that the end of child labor came with machinery that did what children could do better and cheaper. It was no longer worth employing them, add that to incomes big enough to keep children in school.)
To give a more recent example, management of American Airlines was complaining that they might have go to bankrupty if the Unions did not make concessions, which they did. Not long after it was revealed that management was giving itself retention bonuses.
This is a "bad example" sorta thing--the executive bonuses were probably a thousandth of a percentage of the cost of the union concessions. I agree with the unions here that it was a bad faith and hypocritical thing, though financially it was likely a drop in the bucket.
Airlines have been destroyed by unions--the problem is that unions negotiate at different times, and each union can destroy the airline. It means that the airline is forced to give the union exactly what they want every two years or so.
It would be easier if all the union negotiations happened at the same time. It would require fewer concessions and a better balance sheet for the airline.
I happen to be pro-union incidentally, I'm just disagreeing with some of your assertions. (A huge issue I have with unions is that they haven't figured out how to get out of the blue collar fields and get into white collar fields. I happen to believe that open shop laws would allow them to penetrate white collar workplaces, and that's where the growth opportunities are.)
Is it just me or should this type of information be private until you are actually convicted of something?
I need not echo the other comments, but I believe that the 5th/6th Amendment has been interpreted to mean that you have the right to be arrested in a public manner (preventing state tyranny by having public arrest, trials, et cetera.)
However, I can't find anything that says that you have the right to request that your arrest be a private matter (say, within the law enforcement system.) On the other hand, court proceedings *have to be public* so the arrest record would become public anyway once you get into court, so what's the point?
I believe a stronger truth-in-advertising law is in order in the US....There should be penalties for lying to people in order to sell a product. I also think political campaigns should be held most strictly to this policy.
It's damn hard to police political campaigns. And honestly, all the laws concerning political speech/campaign finance laws benefit the incumbents. It's an awful system.
Truth in advertising laws already exist. They work fine as they are.
Kudos to Elena and the editors for a great human interest story.
:-)
On the last page she has left her mailing address. (Ex-soviet bloc mail is, amusingly enough, addressed in reverse of ours--country first, then city, next line address, post box, last line name.)
She may very well have no need for money at all, but perhaps the well off slashdotters would consider sending her a token of appreciation.
Though at this moment in time, I can't exactly figure out the best way of doing that
(Apparently Ukraine doesn't take international money orders.)
This is a dead thread,but I wanted to comment on your post in case you check that sorta thing. :-)
It's because of the FDA's rigorous testing process that America didn't have several thousand Thalidomide babies along with the rest of the world.
Err...we did have Thalidomide babies in the US. There were more in Europe admittedly, but the FDA gained a lot of its powers after that scare, not before.
On the other side of the coin, we've had a steady stream of scares, scandals and deaths from the largely unregulated herbal/dietary suppliment industry in recent years.
Most of which are frenzies with little merit to them. I would hardly call it a "steady stream" and the danger of herbal/dietary supplements hardly pales in comparison to approved FDA drugs.
I would counter your arguments saying that FDA regulations have killed more people than they have saved...how about all of the deaths in the 1980's because the FDA would not release AZT? The complicity to keep a drug off the market that could have saved thousands of lives deserves nothing less than criminal prosecution.