I was driving down the road, passing by Micro Center, and some voice in my brain said "why don'tcha see what they have?" So, I did this, and they had a crapload of new Type M keyboards. I bought two of them for $5 each, and have been happy as a clam ever since. Both were made in Scotland by IBM (or at least with IBM tags on it) in 1999.
Since then, I dunno if I would be willing to pay $49 for em.
When I had a land line phone, if that number rang four times, it would automagically forward into my cell phone. If you listened to this while it happened, you heard some type of little click.
The county jail uses some sorta automated call out system, announcing that "inmate x" (recorded voice by inmate)is trying to get in touch with you, do you want to accept the collect call for $1.95 (or some other vigorously offensive amount for what is really just a local phone call.)
For some reason, that little click made on forwarding was enough for the computer to think I accepted the damn collect call...so I would pick up my cell phone and someone would say:
"yo? snake?"
"no...sorry...you got the wrong number."
"sheeeeeeeeeeet" (inmate hangsup)
This happened to me a bunch of times...and there was no fucking way i could get out of paying the 1.95 or whatever it was (without a huge amount of work.) Furthermore, when I did answer my landline, and refused the call, the inmate would continue trying back over and over again (since there was no way to tell him that he got the wrong number.) Finally, it truly pisses me off that some company out there is making a killing off those incarcerated (and their friends/families) simply to make what is in most instances a local phone call. Look: americans have had unlimited local calling for years, and many businesses have it now too. Why can't the county jail? (The minimal cost of the line and the phone is likely paid already by the county.)
As the "pot of wealth" has grown, so have the expenses that must be paid.
Not exactly. There definitely are more expenses now, but as a percentage of income, those expenses are dropping. In 1900 food was no less than 50% of your income, whereas that's pretty unusual today (unless you're like me, not having a job and still eating out daily.) Car prices are rising like the dickens, but whereas the average American needed to work, i think the common figure was 35 weeks sometime in the 1950's to afford the average car, its now in the 20 week range, even though the average car price is in the mid 20k. And of course, a lot of that rise in the price of cars has to do with all sorts of neato eqiupment thats pretty expensive but universal, like air bags.
I really can't see how reducing regulation will improve the masses' lot. If not for "regulation" our economy would currently be dominated by two or three mega monopolies, ensuring that the top 1% have 99% of the wealth.
The article in question is more of a discussion of regulations affecting individuals, and the resulting effect on the distribution of wealth. Regulations affecting corporations are not discussed (they are very different. Sweden is dominated by a few large corporations, but CEO pay in Sweden is very different than that found in the US.) As for the newscientist article, I would have linked it, but I can't seem to find it on their website, so that debate shall have to be postponed.
Actually, in the western world, 20% of people have 80% of the wealth, more or less.
Furthermore, an article here talks about this idea physically modeled. The 20/80 idea may very well be a physical constant that we can't do very much about, except by reducing regulation and making sure that money can flow freely, that maximises the relationship, distributing wealth as much as possible.
There is also a bit of disingenousness in discussing this idea and comparing to other times in history. the communists came about at a time when the pot of wealth was so much smaller, and people were just getting by paying for food and shelter. Today, the wealth pot is huge, sure 20% owns 80%, yet the other 20% of wealth owned by the rest is amazingly large, and more than sufficient for the non wealthy 80% to live very comfortably.
There's some odd logic here, and it's driving me insane. I don't believe that the reason for not embracing pictures as much over here is "we want to teach reading for content."
The reason is, culturally, we don't like pictograms as much...and it has nothing to do with some higher motive to teach people how to read technical manuals. If that motive was there, we probably would be teaching it some other way, since technical material has this amazing property to alienate everyone except for the most avid individuals. I'm gonna attempt to keep this rant short, but there is a deep cluelessness among some extremely educated individuals on how to teach certain subjects--textbooks about Economics are some of the worst...but so are some about Mathematics, Chemistry--well, the list goes on and on. Plenty of opportunities there to practice your technical reading skills, but I bet few people are truly learning how to read that way.
Each page of the book shown is so easy and nice to read...I think that just about anyone will understand what's going on. You're right that each page is not teaching all that much--its entirely possible that a good editor could take that book, translate it into techinical language, and make it only 15 pages long.
On the other hand, people who actually go through that book will not only be more likely to enjoy learning about Fourier transformations, they are also far more likely to understand thoroughly. Then, having a good understanding of some pretty complex mathematical concepts, those individuals will have an easier time reading some lame technical documentation, because they have a clearer understanding of concepts. In fact, graphical documentation fosters better technical reading abilities than simply reading technical documentation.
Continuing my rant, one of the things you learn about second language acquisition is that there is a huge learning drop after about 20-30 minutes. Quality language tapes only last for half an hour per lesson. Now some may say that you should teach longer, since a person going to another country will be immersed the entire time in the language--however, the brain learns best in short time spans, and someone who has had short language classes will have mastered the language better than someone who has painfully labored through 2 hour classes.
I'm in that database because when I was an 18 year old high school senior I committed the high crime of having had consensual sex with my girlfriend, who was a year and a half younger than I was.
Kind of a random curiosity, but what state was this in? Most US states recognize 16 as the age of "sexual majority." (All Canadian provinces are at 14.) In my state of Ohio, its 16, but if the younger person is between 12 and 16, and the older one is within 4 years of their age, then the crime is a misdemeanor, and not a felonly. i presumed that other states had the same progressive system.
In a historical context, it's funny that MS should have called their little product passports. the modern passport, as a photo based nationality document, was invented, in europe, during world war I--and was promised to be a "temporary" war time measure (europeans at the time were highly suspicious of the idea of such a document, and were afraid that it would severely effect liberty. my understanding is that one of the main points of the league of nations was to make sure that passports were eliminated at the end of the war.)
So therefore, it is amusing to note that the microsoft service in question, named after a strongly opposed document whose purpose was to control the movement of people, is now being investigated by the same people who came up with the damn document in the first place. clusterfuck anyone?
It blows my mind that any company would take a credit report as anything but mild information that is suspect.
My understanding is that scoring algorithims taken that into consideration. Take person x, who has a great payment history on her car, mortgage, credit cards, gas bill, et cetera, but for some reason has a $500 credit card in default on her account. The computer will just throw that out as an anomaly and score normally. If it were a $10,000 card, the computers should think that something is clearly wrong, and flag the history for deeper research.
I say this because I believe that the good identity theft artists are not getting caught (though, few are getting caught anyway.) The way someone gets caught for identity theft is by destroying an entire credit record, then law enforcement gets on the paper trail. However, I believe the future is in "copying and pasting" credit report data...identity theft person gets out a credit card, defaults on it, makes sure it's associated with only one credit report, then does the same to another credit report. Or is copying and pasting good data into another credit history file "for some reason this credit card is showing up under SSN xyz, but my SSN is really xyz, can you make the change for me?"
On a side note, i used to live at a dormitory that also held about 14 floors of university offices. for some reason, my credit report said I worked for the university travel agency located in that building. amusingly, i never got my credit reports to say where i actually worked.
anyway, the worst part of the credit report system is this: the bear of it is the data, data coming in, data going out, processing hundreds of millions of records, giving data to hundreds of thousdands of different companies, and receiving the same data from the same companies. with all that in mind, it simply is impossible to be in control of the data...i don't think that anybody here would disagree with the concept that you could, with the proper information, do anything you want with someone else's credit history--make it better, ruin in, copy and paste from it, et cetera.
Experian is not in control of the data...they simply keep the computer powered up. the problem is, they *think* they are in control of the data, and the way they treat you whe you have a claim indicates this. nothin causes identity theft more than the fact that these bozos have legitimacy. (their downfall is more arrogance than anything if you ask me.)
Which is, by all means, an issue. However, if you ask me, it's far more an issue that
*SSN's are issued consecutively
And why not? There only purpose was to maintain records for the Social Security administration, so what did it matter?
Many of us who are/., and born before 1986, but not 18 in 1986, likely had their SSN issued in 1986, as a result of the Tax Reform Act of that year. As of 1987, a child needed to have an SSN in order to be claimed as a dependent on their tax form (still a source of deep anger for the anti-enumeration peeps out there.) So...if there were multiple children, all the children got their SSN at the same time--result-their SSN's are often sequential.
Furthermore, and this gets more into the oddities of how the SSA issues SSN's at any particular time...but I'm sure there are some pretty good patterns based on region and time with regards to the first 3 digits of the SSN. So if you know location, you've got quite a lot of information (first 3 digits at least, if you have a good enough match on time and location very precisely.)
Talk about a clusterfuck.
Any SSN is good
I suspect the mathematical ideas for check digits existed when SSN's were being created. However, since they were just account numbers, it hardly mattered. Add a digit to your SSN, you have another SSN, subtract a digit, you have another SSN. That's an invitation for fly-fishing through records. "Well if that one doesn't work...what about this one...?"
I got the big privilege to see it this morning in DLP here in Cleveland. The digital system is not exactly earth shattering, but it is impressive (and I don't think I would even try going to see it on regular film.) There are no specks in the screen, and colors are indeed super bright (though the light sabers don't seem any more brillaint than they would be otherwise. I was disappointed by that.) Roger Ebert said that it looked disappointing on regular film, and I could how that would be , though I can't explain why.
One thing that bugged me is that, and I dunno if this was the result of dlp, or it just happened that way, i could see that some of the scenes were not of tremendous quality. Standing in Palantine's office, you could see the entrance way (a door or two and a little room leading to his office) is computer generated, and lacks depth. Also, when Amidala is in the factory and stuck in a molten core barrel, you could sense how it was done in a studio--it lost the factory's touch.
On an incidental note, I was a bit more touched by the romantic scenes, I'm just that type of person--I think the average/.'er requires electric shock therapy to feel love. (But I liked Jar Jar and the Ewoks, if that gives you any impression on the type of person I am.) And yeah, the dialogue leaves something to be desired.
The main thing to note about all this, with regards to the research, is that there is a pretty good certainty, at least at this moment, that fingerprints are "unique" as long as a sufficient amount of points are actually collected and examined. So if you have a professional fingerprint collector collecting 10 fingers, and comparing it to a previous collection card, you have a very high probability of match.
The issue is, the certainty of picking up just one or two latent prints on a door knob, and then comparing to the fingerprint card, has not been fully determined--and for good reason, the latent print is simply not the quality of the professional print.
This is one of the reasons why, in the states that fingerprint for driver's licenses, the prints are never used for criminal investigations--the quality of one thumbprint smudge on the little glass platen is simply not good enough to compare a latent print to.
This is kinda a fun time to talk about dl fingerprinting--since dl privacy is a big thing for me and all. California law, for instance, says that they must take a thumbprint of an individual getting a license. If you are a hairdresser, working with bleach, or a bricklayer, working with lime, it is highly possible that they will not have fingerprints. There is some type of print that would normally appear, but it has not. So is the fingerprint the potential print...or the one the blank one that is showing up. Apparently, they just write off the print as being uncollectable...which is very telling. It begs the question...what is your identity anyway?
jacksonville.com engaging demonstration
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I was deeply convinced and profoundly amazed by the magic box demonstration they have on their site.
Now click here or cliquez ici for those who speak spanish in the audience, and, yes you must have flash...everybody must have flash!
So, note, if you press the "compatibility test" you will see how the blue flows through the magic box far better than it flows through your 56k...box. Yes I know compatibility means how compatible something is, not how it compares to something else, but ignore the words...just watch the test. Again...see how the blue flooooows through the magic box box...but still crawls along on the T3!
In fact, if you press the "test" button next to the magic box box, you will note that the blue comes through sharply, clearly, quickly every time! That's how reliable *your* customers will find the magic box every single time!
[sorry...i couldn't help it...my parents were in Amway...i've seen it all before]
It makes for an interesting story. In 1998, the state legislature was trying to pass this law, and I went up there and spoke against them (all the orwellian stuff...blah blah blah.) I, and a few others, in speaking against the bill, had a pretty good effect, and so the bill was amended to
a.) put a really, really big sign indicating that the intersection has the thingies
b.) let your first red light ticket be a freebie
It was the second that was the stroke of genius. See, most people are not going to run the red light more than twice...and the damn cameras are so expensive, that a good part of the ticket revenue was going to pay for them. So without a collectible fine on the first ticket, there was a guarantee that little revenue was going to come in.
Suddenly, we were able to get everyone to say that not enough money is coming in and then we were able to say "then clearly, this is not about safety now is it?" Then the camera makers said that if the bill was passed, Ohio would not see a single camera because there's no money to be made to pay for them. The bill passed the house almost barely, and the senate wasn't even gonna pick up the albatross.
In the end, a few brave jurisdictions, like dayton and toledo, put them in anyway, because ohio cities are empowered to do whatever they want if the state hasnt prohibited them from doing so. It still is not a great situation for the cities, because they should have state law to guide them. Oh well.
This is true...but that does not make it any less of an annoyance. His point is that it is enitrely unnecessary to hyperlink the homepage of the site, even if all it requires is you to mouseover two links to figure out which one is the site and which one is the article.
I mean...it's one thing not to do something, and as a result there is an annoyance. However, someone is putting just that little bit of effort to add a completely wasteful hyperlink...which is an annoyance. Ooo...cnn.com I never heard of them before...I should check em out before reading whatever the article is that I'm gonna read.
Actually...I shall defer to you on this issue...because I have to admit, I have heard of weird situations in the California Republic that have caught my attention.
I do also admit that states aren't doing as good of a job as they should be with correlating death certificates to voter registration.
And I also agree that, in the case of California, voter fraud perpetuates the current government, so there is little interest in changing it.
Thankfully, the evidence does not seem to support that idea--unless the evidence is being read by the few people out there who wanna see photo voter ID cards. (They are out there...though your post appears to be tongue in cheek.)
If anything, fraudulent voter registrations (but not necessarily people fraudulently voting) went up when "motor voter" passed...because some state DMV's...never known for competence...started willy nilly registering any bloody person to vote when they have a driver's license. (I've got an acquitaince in Georgia who was registered to vote when he got his license, even though he has EU citizenship. Morever, it proved to be a bitch to get off the voting rolls.)
Oath based/addressed based voter registration works very well in this country...and there is no need to change it. The idea of needing a photo ID to vote is deeply offensive to liberty.
Incidentally, I have been a pollworker (which is an outstanding way to serve your community, and make a little bit of money on the side) and I will be a pollworker in the election coming up this next Tuesday.
What we do on my state is when a person comes up to vote, they sign the poll book next to the signature from when they registered. If the signatures match, we let them vote. Sometimes they wanna show ID...and we refuse it. I've had this conversation before:
"don't you wanna see my ID?"
"No...we are not permitted to do so by law, and furthermore, I have no idea if it's fake or not. How do I know if the license is fake?"
"well you don't know if the license is fake...all you can do is believe me when I say it isn't, and I present it to you."
"then in that instance, instead of arguing about some cheap plastic card, I'll just believe you when you claim to be who you are the first time around, and you can enter the polling booth."
In case the police want to know if you are you, they send the image to the capital and in 24 hs, they said yes, and they let you out of the police deparment.
Countries with national ID cards look at the whole idea of innocence very differently that those without.
See, in the US, Canada, UK, NZ, et cetera, if you're being arrested, and the only reason you get arrested is for a crime, or because the belief is you would be perpetrating a serious crime if you weren't arrested...then you are identified in a complex manner.
However, if you're just stopped, then you are let go...and what should happen is the officer will believe you when you claim to be. Remember...to not believe who you claim to be is essentially them convicting you of the crime of misrepresentation...before you even had the chance to misrepresent yourself. But here, innocence before guilt prevails. We believe who you claim to be.
But the Argentines, or the Greeks, or the Belgians, or the Indonesians, are not happy with that. Not only must you prove who you are, but sometimes, you'll be dragged in, with or without a crime under suspicion, and the government has the ability to hold you under arrest, for a certain amount of time, so that they can prove, to their satisfaction, that you are whom you claim to be.
Countries with ID cards are simply, ID happy. They ask for it wherever you go, for no good reason. Does it prove who you are...well, in context, it proves that you have a name and an address. What exactly does that prove? I think the officer coulda figured out that you had a name and an address before he saw you. I'm starting to see more ID happiness here in the US...and I'm getting pretty bothered by it.
They need a way to identify everyone in the country uniquely, so a retinal scan seems like a fine idea.
If you already are of this opinion...then I could see why you would say that there is no privacy. There are a lot of people who believe that there is no need to identify everyone uniquely--the only time that is required is when someone is arrested, and when they are, there are systems in place to identify them at that time. Otherwise, as has been established in the common law countries, like the US, NZ and Canada, you are not required to *document* yourself simply by existing.
Canada does take that a bit more seriously...for instance, photo driver's licenses are much newer there and were fought much harder (and, at least two provinces I can think of, Quebec and New Brunswick, leave the photo as being optional. The yearly report of the Societe de l'assurance from Quebec says that about 11-13% of Quebecois decline to have the photo on their license. Clearly not a majority, but those are people who clearly value the idea that they do not want nor need a photographic identifier.)In fact, no Canadian provincial legislature has ever mandated that a photo be on a license (even in Ontario, it's the minister or transportation that has ordered the photo license, and the minister of health that has ordered the photo health insurance plan card.)
The SSN and SIN are related...but there are indeed duplicate SIN's as well as duplicate SSNs. And people do get new SSN's occasionally. This proposal is not meant as a replacement for the SSN, or even to augment the SSN...it is actually meant to add security to the driver's license, which may or may not be linked to the SSN in a verifiable way. (While SSN's are commonly collected for driver's licensing, they are not necessarily confirmed--at least, not in all states.)
Do you give your SSN out for every little thing? That depends...the SSN has, regrettably, become the lookup key to a person's credit history. If the credit history can be looked up by name and address, than the SSN lookup is not necessary.
Funny, I've always been convinced that retinal/iris scan will be the least likely biometric they would move to. Why? Because the damn retina changes with time. In particular, those with cataracts and macular degeneration also have changing retinal/iris patterns. Furthermore, there are prescription medications, designed to help those suffering from macular degeneration, which cause very quick and complex changes in the retinal structure.
replacement for a signature (which is also a biometric
I have a quick disagreement with that part of his article (which is otherwise very good.) Yes it is a biometric, but it is a changeable biometric. You may decide one day that you don't like your signature, and that you start signing documents with a completely different signature.
Is this possible with retinal/iris scan or a fingerprint? Yes. Apparently retinal patterns change when someone takes a particular type of prescription for macular degeneration. And of course, if you were a bricklayer, the lime used in the stuff that connects the bricks will burn away your prints...however, it is significantly harder than just changing your signature.
Fine, the number may be legitimate, and the card may be legitimate, but is the actual transaction legitimate? In other words, there is no validation that the card being used for the transaction really does belong to the person making the transaction.
For the most part, this isn't important with in-store transactions. Why?
1. Online fraud is more pervasive than in store fraud--20 to 1. 2. The type of fraud in which a person uses someone else's card is *extremely rare.* Most people who lose their wallets or have their wallets stolen are vigilant and get the cards cancelled quickly enough. 3. The in store fraud which does take place involve fake cards printed up by the fraudster with a new card number and expiration date, or sometimes they magnetize one of their own cards with the new card number/expiration date. Clearly those could be fought with a more complex (possibly biometric based) system...but the cost is astronomical in comparison to what it would stop. In fact, in the mid 90's there was this idea to put photos on credit cards, and that seems to have fallen by the way side. The cost to the bank of processing cards that way simply is not justifiable, especially since it doesn't achieve a damn thing. In store fraud simply is not the problem online fraud is.
but it will cut down on innocent people being ripped off
not directly. innocent people don't get ripped off because credit card issuers swallow the charges (even that $50 thing that we hear so much about is usually waived.) however, on-line fraud is swallowed by the merchant, but that's a different story.
For the vast majority of people, science is just another religion: taken on faith or rejected as heresy.
This is probably a good time to remind ourselves that "science" started out as philosophy. Once a certain branch of philosophy became sufficiently advanced, then they got their own special name, like "physics", "mathematics" even "economics" . The only thing that makes them halfway scientific is that they have a very particular and well tested methodology used for assessment (which other things like, astrology or psychic power can't be tested by.) Otherwise, they were just random ramblings by a bunch of greeks who didn't have jobs. And the only difference between their ramblings and some world relgions is that the religions actually had some vigorous faith and the occasional super-nifty phenonmenon.
God help me I was. I couldn't have been more than ten years old, watching this big guy explode in his Lazy boy. Frankly, I stopped watching the show because of it, because it scarred me too much. (Note the word scarred, not scared) I'm going to try to catch the episodes on rerun, I believe I can stand em more now.
The main advantage of the new system, Kapioski said, is the security. People no longer have to worry that their cards will be lost or stolen and then used to run up hefty charges.
What bugs me about this is that people shouldn't have to worry now--credit card fraud (which is not identity fraud) is covered by the credit card issuers. Even that $50 thing which is talked about is usually waived.
The only way this helps with fraud is that it reduces the amount of times the credit card is pulled out--obviously when your card is pulled out someone could quickly read the number and expiration date. (Hopefully all the merchants you go to no longer print the entirety of the credit card number and expiration date on the card. I just spoke in front of the Ohio General Assembly about passing a law to prevent that here.)
The vast majority of credit card fraud is online credit card fraud--which is an issue, by all means. However most companies have address verification now, and if the fraudster gets your address, then you got another problem altogether.
Fraud with a card in a store is too expensive and personal, and is generally avoided. It does happen (a fake credit card printed with your credit card number and expiration date, a fraudster's credit card remagnetized with a new credit card number, and in unusual situations, a stolen card with a new signature strip.) The least likely is someone just using a stolen credit card as is.
I think what's funny is that, as I said, credit card fraud is not identity fraud. However, by tying the credit card to your fingerprint, suddenly subverting the system becomes identity fraud. That's progress for ya.
Slashdot Mirror
I was driving down the road, passing by Micro Center, and some voice in my brain said "why don'tcha see what they have?" So, I did this, and they had a crapload of new Type M keyboards. I bought two of them for $5 each, and have been happy as a clam ever since. Both were made in Scotland by IBM (or at least with IBM tags on it) in 1999.
Since then, I dunno if I would be willing to pay $49 for em.
When I had a land line phone, if that number rang four times, it would automagically forward into my cell phone. If you listened to this while it happened, you heard some type of little click.
The county jail uses some sorta automated call out system, announcing that "inmate x" (recorded voice by inmate)is trying to get in touch with you, do you want to accept the collect call for $1.95 (or some other vigorously offensive amount for what is really just a local phone call.)
For some reason, that little click made on forwarding was enough for the computer to think I accepted the damn collect call...so I would pick up my cell phone and someone would say:
"yo? snake?"
"no...sorry...you got the wrong number."
"sheeeeeeeeeeet" (inmate hangsup)
This happened to me a bunch of times...and there was no fucking way i could get out of paying the 1.95 or whatever it was (without a huge amount of work.) Furthermore, when I did answer my landline, and refused the call, the inmate would continue trying back over and over again (since there was no way to tell him that he got the wrong number.) Finally, it truly pisses me off that some company out there is making a killing off those incarcerated (and their friends/families) simply to make what is in most instances a local phone call. Look: americans have had unlimited local calling for years, and many businesses have it now too. Why can't the county jail? (The minimal cost of the line and the phone is likely paid already by the county.)
...makes it that much better. The DLP projector is silent, so there was absolutely no noise at all to be heard. A remarkable moment.
Good thing it didn't happen about, 20 minutes later, which is when everyone started their mad rushes to the restroom.
As the "pot of wealth" has grown, so have the expenses that must be paid.
Not exactly. There definitely are more expenses now, but as a percentage of income, those expenses are dropping. In 1900 food was no less than 50% of your income, whereas that's pretty unusual today (unless you're like me, not having a job and still eating out daily.) Car prices are rising like the dickens, but whereas the average American needed to work, i think the common figure was 35 weeks sometime in the 1950's to afford the average car, its now in the 20 week range, even though the average car price is in the mid 20k. And of course, a lot of that rise in the price of cars has to do with all sorts of neato eqiupment thats pretty expensive but universal, like air bags.
I really can't see how reducing regulation will improve the masses' lot. If not for "regulation" our economy would currently be dominated by two or three mega monopolies, ensuring that the top 1% have 99% of the wealth.
The article in question is more of a discussion of regulations affecting individuals, and the resulting effect on the distribution of wealth. Regulations affecting corporations are not discussed (they are very different. Sweden is dominated by a few large corporations, but CEO pay in Sweden is very different than that found in the US.) As for the newscientist article, I would have linked it, but I can't seem to find it on their website, so that debate shall have to be postponed.
Actually, in the western world, 20% of people have 80% of the wealth, more or less.
Furthermore, an article here talks about this idea physically modeled. The 20/80 idea may very well be a physical constant that we can't do very much about, except by reducing regulation and making sure that money can flow freely, that maximises the relationship, distributing wealth as much as possible.
There is also a bit of disingenousness in discussing this idea and comparing to other times in history. the communists came about at a time when the pot of wealth was so much smaller, and people were just getting by paying for food and shelter. Today, the wealth pot is huge, sure 20% owns 80%, yet the other 20% of wealth owned by the rest is amazingly large, and more than sufficient for the non wealthy 80% to live very comfortably.
There's some odd logic here, and it's driving me insane. I don't believe that the reason for not embracing pictures as much over here is "we want to teach reading for content."
The reason is, culturally, we don't like pictograms as much...and it has nothing to do with some higher motive to teach people how to read technical manuals. If that motive was there, we probably would be teaching it some other way, since technical material has this amazing property to alienate everyone except for the most avid individuals. I'm gonna attempt to keep this rant short, but there is a deep cluelessness among some extremely educated individuals on how to teach certain subjects--textbooks about Economics are some of the worst...but so are some about Mathematics, Chemistry--well, the list goes on and on. Plenty of opportunities there to practice your technical reading skills, but I bet few people are truly learning how to read that way.
Each page of the book shown is so easy and nice to read...I think that just about anyone will understand what's going on. You're right that each page is not teaching all that much--its entirely possible that a good editor could take that book, translate it into techinical language, and make it only 15 pages long.
On the other hand, people who actually go through that book will not only be more likely to enjoy learning about Fourier transformations, they are also far more likely to understand thoroughly. Then, having a good understanding of some pretty complex mathematical concepts, those individuals will have an easier time reading some lame technical documentation, because they have a clearer understanding of concepts. In fact, graphical documentation fosters better technical reading abilities than simply reading technical documentation.
Continuing my rant, one of the things you learn about second language acquisition is that there is a huge learning drop after about 20-30 minutes. Quality language tapes only last for half an hour per lesson. Now some may say that you should teach longer, since a person going to another country will be immersed the entire time in the language--however, the brain learns best in short time spans, and someone who has had short language classes will have mastered the language better than someone who has painfully labored through 2 hour classes.
I'm in that database because when I was an 18 year old high school senior I committed the high crime of having had consensual sex with my girlfriend, who was a year and a half younger than I was.
Kind of a random curiosity, but what state was this in? Most US states recognize 16 as the age of "sexual majority." (All Canadian provinces are at 14.) In my state of Ohio, its 16, but if the younger person is between 12 and 16, and the older one is within 4 years of their age, then the crime is a misdemeanor, and not a felonly. i presumed that other states had the same progressive system.
In a historical context, it's funny that MS should have called their little product passports. the modern passport, as a photo based nationality document, was invented, in europe, during world war I--and was promised to be a "temporary" war time measure (europeans at the time were highly suspicious of the idea of such a document, and were afraid that it would severely effect liberty. my understanding is that one of the main points of the league of nations was to make sure that passports were eliminated at the end of the war.)
So therefore, it is amusing to note that the microsoft service in question, named after a strongly opposed document whose purpose was to control the movement of people, is now being investigated by the same people who came up with the damn document in the first place. clusterfuck anyone?
It blows my mind that any company would take a credit report as anything but mild information that is suspect.
My understanding is that scoring algorithims taken that into consideration. Take person x, who has a great payment history on her car, mortgage, credit cards, gas bill, et cetera, but for some reason has a $500 credit card in default on her account. The computer will just throw that out as an anomaly and score normally. If it were a $10,000 card, the computers should think that something is clearly wrong, and flag the history for deeper research.
I say this because I believe that the good identity theft artists are not getting caught (though, few are getting caught anyway.) The way someone gets caught for identity theft is by destroying an entire credit record, then law enforcement gets on the paper trail. However, I believe the future is in "copying and pasting" credit report data...identity theft person gets out a credit card, defaults on it, makes sure it's associated with only one credit report, then does the same to another credit report. Or is copying and pasting good data into another credit history file "for some reason this credit card is showing up under SSN xyz, but my SSN is really xyz, can you make the change for me?"
On a side note, i used to live at a dormitory that also held about 14 floors of university offices. for some reason, my credit report said I worked for the university travel agency located in that building. amusingly, i never got my credit reports to say where i actually worked.
anyway, the worst part of the credit report system is this: the bear of it is the data, data coming in, data going out, processing hundreds of millions of records, giving data to hundreds of thousdands of different companies, and receiving the same data from the same companies. with all that in mind, it simply is impossible to be in control of the data...i don't think that anybody here would disagree with the concept that you could, with the proper information, do anything you want with someone else's credit history--make it better, ruin in, copy and paste from it, et cetera.
Experian is not in control of the data...they simply keep the computer powered up. the problem is, they *think* they are in control of the data, and the way they treat you whe you have a claim indicates this. nothin causes identity theft more than the fact that these bozos have legitimacy. (their downfall is more arrogance than anything if you ask me.)
Any suggestions for search terms I might use to find such companies?
afraid not...but just wait six hours...they'll be emailing you. consider yourself convenienced.
The thing is, SSNs aren't unique IDs.
/., and born before 1986, but not 18 in 1986, likely had their SSN issued in 1986, as a result of the Tax Reform Act of that year. As of 1987, a child needed to have an SSN in order to be claimed as a dependent on their tax form (still a source of deep anger for the anti-enumeration peeps out there.) So...if there were multiple children, all the children got their SSN at the same time--result-their SSN's are often sequential.
Which is, by all means, an issue. However, if you ask me, it's far more an issue that
*SSN's are issued consecutively
And why not? There only purpose was to maintain records for the Social Security administration, so what did it matter?
Many of us who are
Furthermore, and this gets more into the oddities of how the SSA issues SSN's at any particular time...but I'm sure there are some pretty good patterns based on region and time with regards to the first 3 digits of the SSN. So if you know location, you've got quite a lot of information (first 3 digits at least, if you have a good enough match on time and location very precisely.)
Talk about a clusterfuck.
Any SSN is good
I suspect the mathematical ideas for check digits existed when SSN's were being created. However, since they were just account numbers, it hardly mattered. Add a digit to your SSN, you have another SSN, subtract a digit, you have another SSN. That's an invitation for fly-fishing through records. "Well if that one doesn't work...what about this one...?"
**sorta spoilers included**
/.'er requires electric shock therapy to feel love. (But I liked Jar Jar and the Ewoks, if that gives you any impression on the type of person I am.) And yeah, the dialogue leaves something to be desired.
I got the big privilege to see it this morning in DLP here in Cleveland. The digital system is not exactly earth shattering, but it is impressive (and I don't think I would even try going to see it on regular film.) There are no specks in the screen, and colors are indeed super bright (though the light sabers don't seem any more brillaint than they would be otherwise. I was disappointed by that.) Roger Ebert said that it looked disappointing on regular film, and I could how that would be , though I can't explain why.
One thing that bugged me is that, and I dunno if this was the result of dlp, or it just happened that way, i could see that some of the scenes were not of tremendous quality. Standing in Palantine's office, you could see the entrance way (a door or two and a little room leading to his office) is computer generated, and lacks depth. Also, when Amidala is in the factory and stuck in a molten core barrel, you could sense how it was done in a studio--it lost the factory's touch.
On an incidental note, I was a bit more touched by the romantic scenes, I'm just that type of person--I think the average
The main thing to note about all this, with regards to the research, is that there is a pretty good certainty, at least at this moment, that fingerprints are "unique" as long as a sufficient amount of points are actually collected and examined. So if you have a professional fingerprint collector collecting 10 fingers, and comparing it to a previous collection card, you have a very high probability of match.
The issue is, the certainty of picking up just one or two latent prints on a door knob, and then comparing to the fingerprint card, has not been fully determined--and for good reason, the latent print is simply not the quality of the professional print.
This is one of the reasons why, in the states that fingerprint for driver's licenses, the prints are never used for criminal investigations--the quality of one thumbprint smudge on the little glass platen is simply not good enough to compare a latent print to.
This is kinda a fun time to talk about dl fingerprinting--since dl privacy is a big thing for me and all. California law, for instance, says that they must take a thumbprint of an individual getting a license. If you are a hairdresser, working with bleach, or a bricklayer, working with lime, it is highly possible that they will not have fingerprints. There is some type of print that would normally appear, but it has not. So is the fingerprint the potential print...or the one the blank one that is showing up. Apparently, they just write off the print as being uncollectable...which is very telling. It begs the question...what is your identity anyway?
I was deeply convinced and profoundly amazed by the magic box demonstration they have on their site.
Now click here or cliquez ici for those who speak spanish in the audience, and, yes you must have flash...everybody must have flash!
So, note, if you press the "compatibility test" you will see how the blue flows through the magic box far better than it flows through your 56k...box. Yes I know compatibility means how compatible something is, not how it compares to something else, but ignore the words...just watch the test. Again...see how the blue flooooows through the magic box box...but still crawls along on the T3!
In fact, if you press the "test" button next to the magic box box, you will note that the blue comes through sharply, clearly, quickly every time! That's how reliable *your* customers will find the magic box every single time!
[sorry...i couldn't help it...my parents were in Amway...i've seen it all before]
It makes for an interesting story. In 1998, the state legislature was trying to pass this law, and I went up there and spoke against them (all the orwellian stuff...blah blah blah.) I, and a few others, in speaking against the bill, had a pretty good effect, and so the bill was amended to
a.) put a really, really big sign indicating that the intersection has the thingies
b.) let your first red light ticket be a freebie
It was the second that was the stroke of genius. See, most people are not going to run the red light more than twice...and the damn cameras are so expensive, that a good part of the ticket revenue was going to pay for them. So without a collectible fine on the first ticket, there was a guarantee that little revenue was going to come in.
Suddenly, we were able to get everyone to say that not enough money is coming in and then we were able to say "then clearly, this is not about safety now is it?" Then the camera makers said that if the bill was passed, Ohio would not see a single camera because there's no money to be made to pay for them. The bill passed the house almost barely, and the senate wasn't even gonna pick up the albatross.
In the end, a few brave jurisdictions, like dayton and toledo, put them in anyway, because ohio cities are empowered to do whatever they want if the state hasnt prohibited them from doing so. It still is not a great situation for the cities, because they should have state law to guide them. Oh well.
This is true...but that does not make it any less of an annoyance. His point is that it is enitrely unnecessary to hyperlink the homepage of the site, even if all it requires is you to mouseover two links to figure out which one is the site and which one is the article.
I mean...it's one thing not to do something, and as a result there is an annoyance. However, someone is putting just that little bit of effort to add a completely wasteful hyperlink...which is an annoyance. Ooo...cnn.com I never heard of them before...I should check em out before reading whatever the article is that I'm gonna read.
Actually...I shall defer to you on this issue...because I have to admit, I have heard of weird situations in the California Republic that have caught my attention.
I do also admit that states aren't doing as good of a job as they should be with correlating death certificates to voter registration.
And I also agree that, in the case of California, voter fraud perpetuates the current government, so there is little interest in changing it.
Thankfully, the evidence does not seem to support that idea--unless the evidence is being read by the few people out there who wanna see photo voter ID cards. (They are out there...though your post appears to be tongue in cheek.)
If anything, fraudulent voter registrations (but not necessarily people fraudulently voting) went up when "motor voter" passed...because some state DMV's...never known for competence...started willy nilly registering any bloody person to vote when they have a driver's license. (I've got an acquitaince in Georgia who was registered to vote when he got his license, even though he has EU citizenship. Morever, it proved to be a bitch to get off the voting rolls.)
Oath based/addressed based voter registration works very well in this country...and there is no need to change it. The idea of needing a photo ID to vote is deeply offensive to liberty.
Incidentally, I have been a pollworker (which is an outstanding way to serve your community, and make a little bit of money on the side) and I will be a pollworker in the election coming up this next Tuesday.
What we do on my state is when a person comes up to vote, they sign the poll book next to the signature from when they registered. If the signatures match, we let them vote. Sometimes they wanna show ID...and we refuse it. I've had this conversation before:
"don't you wanna see my ID?"
"No...we are not permitted to do so by law, and furthermore, I have no idea if it's fake or not. How do I know if the license is fake?"
"well you don't know if the license is fake...all you can do is believe me when I say it isn't, and I present it to you."
"then in that instance, instead of arguing about some cheap plastic card, I'll just believe you when you claim to be who you are the first time around, and you can enter the polling booth."
In case the police want to know if you are you, they send the image to the capital and in 24 hs, they said yes, and they let you out of the police deparment.
Countries with national ID cards look at the whole idea of innocence very differently that those without.
See, in the US, Canada, UK, NZ, et cetera, if you're being arrested, and the only reason you get arrested is for a crime, or because the belief is you would be perpetrating a serious crime if you weren't arrested...then you are identified in a complex manner.
However, if you're just stopped, then you are let go...and what should happen is the officer will believe you when you claim to be. Remember...to not believe who you claim to be is essentially them convicting you of the crime of misrepresentation...before you even had the chance to misrepresent yourself. But here, innocence before guilt prevails. We believe who you claim to be.
But the Argentines, or the Greeks, or the Belgians, or the Indonesians, are not happy with that. Not only must you prove who you are, but sometimes, you'll be dragged in, with or without a crime under suspicion, and the government has the ability to hold you under arrest, for a certain amount of time, so that they can prove, to their satisfaction, that you are whom you claim to be.
Countries with ID cards are simply, ID happy. They ask for it wherever you go, for no good reason. Does it prove who you are...well, in context, it proves that you have a name and an address. What exactly does that prove? I think the officer coulda figured out that you had a name and an address before he saw you. I'm starting to see more ID happiness here in the US...and I'm getting pretty bothered by it.
They need a way to identify everyone in the country uniquely, so a retinal scan seems like a fine idea.
If you already are of this opinion...then I could see why you would say that there is no privacy. There are a lot of people who believe that there is no need to identify everyone uniquely--the only time that is required is when someone is arrested, and when they are, there are systems in place to identify them at that time. Otherwise, as has been established in the common law countries, like the US, NZ and Canada, you are not required to *document* yourself simply by existing.
Canada does take that a bit more seriously...for instance, photo driver's licenses are much newer there and were fought much harder (and, at least two provinces I can think of, Quebec and New Brunswick, leave the photo as being optional. The yearly report of the Societe de l'assurance from Quebec says that about 11-13% of Quebecois decline to have the photo on their license. Clearly not a majority, but those are people who clearly value the idea that they do not want nor need a photographic identifier.)In fact, no Canadian provincial legislature has ever mandated that a photo be on a license (even in Ontario, it's the minister or transportation that has ordered the photo license, and the minister of health that has ordered the photo health insurance plan card.)
The SSN and SIN are related...but there are indeed duplicate SIN's as well as duplicate SSNs. And people do get new SSN's occasionally. This proposal is not meant as a replacement for the SSN, or even to augment the SSN...it is actually meant to add security to the driver's license, which may or may not be linked to the SSN in a verifiable way. (While SSN's are commonly collected for driver's licensing, they are not necessarily confirmed--at least, not in all states.)
Do you give your SSN out for every little thing? That depends...the SSN has, regrettably, become the lookup key to a person's credit history. If the credit history can be looked up by name and address, than the SSN lookup is not necessary.
Funny, I've always been convinced that retinal/iris scan will be the least likely biometric they would move to. Why? Because the damn retina changes with time. In particular, those with cataracts and macular degeneration also have changing retinal/iris patterns. Furthermore, there are prescription medications, designed to help those suffering from macular degeneration, which cause very quick and complex changes in the retinal structure.
replacement for a signature (which is also a biometric
I have a quick disagreement with that part of his article (which is otherwise very good.) Yes it is a biometric, but it is a changeable biometric. You may decide one day that you don't like your signature, and that you start signing documents with a completely different signature.
Is this possible with retinal/iris scan or a fingerprint? Yes. Apparently retinal patterns change when someone takes a particular type of prescription for macular degeneration. And of course, if you were a bricklayer, the lime used in the stuff that connects the bricks will burn away your prints...however, it is significantly harder than just changing your signature.
Fine, the number may be legitimate, and the card may be legitimate, but is the actual transaction legitimate? In other words, there is no validation that the card being used for the transaction really does belong to the person making the transaction.
For the most part, this isn't important with in-store transactions. Why?
1. Online fraud is more pervasive than in store fraud--20 to 1.
2. The type of fraud in which a person uses someone else's card is *extremely rare.* Most people who lose their wallets or have their wallets stolen are vigilant and get the cards cancelled quickly enough.
3. The in store fraud which does take place involve fake cards printed up by the fraudster with a new card number and expiration date, or sometimes they magnetize one of their own cards with the new card number/expiration date. Clearly those could be fought with a more complex (possibly biometric based) system...but the cost is astronomical in comparison to what it would stop. In fact, in the mid 90's there was this idea to put photos on credit cards, and that seems to have fallen by the way side. The cost to the bank of processing cards that way simply is not justifiable, especially since it doesn't achieve a damn thing. In store fraud simply is not the problem online fraud is.
but it will cut down on innocent people being ripped off
not directly. innocent people don't get ripped off because credit card issuers swallow the charges (even that $50 thing that we hear so much about is usually waived.)
however, on-line fraud is swallowed by the merchant, but that's a different story.
For the vast majority of people, science is just another religion: taken on faith or rejected as heresy.
This is probably a good time to remind ourselves that "science" started out as philosophy. Once a certain branch of philosophy became sufficiently advanced, then they got their own special name, like "physics", "mathematics" even "economics" . The only thing that makes them halfway scientific is that they have a very particular and well tested methodology used for assessment (which other things like, astrology or psychic power can't be tested by.) Otherwise, they were just random ramblings by a bunch of greeks who didn't have jobs. And the only difference between their ramblings and some world relgions is that the religions actually had some vigorous faith and the occasional super-nifty phenonmenon.
Was anyone else as shocked as me...
God help me I was. I couldn't have been more than ten years old, watching this big guy explode in his Lazy boy. Frankly, I stopped watching the show because of it, because it scarred me too much. (Note the word scarred, not scared) I'm going to try to catch the episodes on rerun, I believe I can stand em more now.
The main advantage of the new system, Kapioski said, is the security. People no longer have to worry that their cards will be lost or stolen and then used to run up hefty charges.
What bugs me about this is that people shouldn't have to worry now--credit card fraud (which is not identity fraud) is covered by the credit card issuers. Even that $50 thing which is talked about is usually waived.
The only way this helps with fraud is that it reduces the amount of times the credit card is pulled out--obviously when your card is pulled out someone could quickly read the number and expiration date. (Hopefully all the merchants you go to no longer print the entirety of the credit card number and expiration date on the card. I just spoke in front of the Ohio General Assembly about passing a law to prevent that here.)
The vast majority of credit card fraud is online credit card fraud--which is an issue, by all means. However most companies have address verification now, and if the fraudster gets your address, then you got another problem altogether.
Fraud with a card in a store is too expensive and personal, and is generally avoided. It does happen (a fake credit card printed with your credit card number and expiration date, a fraudster's credit card remagnetized with a new credit card number, and in unusual situations, a stolen card with a new signature strip.) The least likely is someone just using a stolen credit card as is.
I think what's funny is that, as I said, credit card fraud is not identity fraud. However, by tying the credit card to your fingerprint, suddenly subverting the system becomes identity fraud. That's progress for ya.