> Most Word users, I expect, want to write letters to their mothers, not recompile the application.
And while we're at it. Stallman's solution is " All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing
things."
Sure. Why don't we "ask" them to stop top-posting, sending HTML mail, and clicking on "snow_white.txt.vbs".
(I've been saying "Sorry, I don't do Windows" to.DOC files for years. It hasn't stopped the lusers yet. The worst time was when someone sent me a list of names in.DOC, and then resent it as a column of cells in an Excel spreadsheet. No, they weren't being sarcastic, they were just. that. dumb. To this luser, Word and Excel were the only applications on their computer.)
> Instead of a large RAM buffer, they could've used a special HDD
Why? A single 32M RAM chip costs about a buck. The engineering behind a special "slow-rotating-to-save-battery-life" hard drive would cost billions.
Wanna save more battery life? Use a 64M RAM chip and cache most of a CD's worth (at 128 kbps) of music whenever an "album" heuristic comes up, such as "user is playing Track 01 of a directory of songs all ID3-tagged or filenamed as being from the same artist".
> Am I the only one whose ID3 tag info is sorely lacking across his entire collection?
It may be a bit late now, but I was lucky enough to pick up the habit of filling out the ID3 tags after downloading, but before listening.
Get in the habit of spending a minute or two filling 'em out when you download or rip an album, and you can save yourself the "oh my God, I have how many to fill out?" frustration a few years down the road.
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
> > The big beef in the Arab and Islamic world is that you've been meddling in their affairs for decades. They would
like you to stay on your own side of the world and mind your own business. Is that negociable? >
> As long as we continue to focus on the symptoms and ignore the cause, this war will never be over.
(I agree with you -- the poster of the aforementioned unpopular view shouldn't have been moderated as Flamebait in the context of this discussion.)
In response to both him and you - suppose we were to stop "meddling" in Arab affairs in response to 9/11, please choose the most plausible scenario:
Osama, Arafat, and Hussein say "Thanks! We're glad you heard us! We now disband our paramilitary operations and disarm!"
Osama, Arafat, and Hussein say "Good start. Now, about Israel. Help us destroy their nuclear capability or we'll lob more planes into your skyscrapers. We've, uh... got plans for Israel."
The notion that we should have regarded 9/11 as a "wake-up call to stop meddling in other nations' affairs" reminds me of Neville Chamberlain, who proclaimed "peace in our time" through Britain's refusal to "meddle" in the affairs of Germany and Czechoslovakia. (After all, the Germans only wanted the Sudetenland, it's not like they would have tried to exterminate the rest of Europe, huh?)
Appeasement. We've been there, done that, time and time again - and it's consistently resulted in more bloodshed than it was intended to prevent.
> There's no way to 'block' flash ads in Mozilla yet
Under 'doze, can't you just nuke the DLL? Or make it "prompt/unknown" for the relevant MIME-type? (I did both years ago under Nutscrape and never missed anything.)
> I didn't see any. Can someone toss up a link to an actual ad? (I can't believe what I just asked for)
Me too.
(I know, I can't believe it either. I'd click it too, just to see what the fuss was about. Maybe this is all a cynical ploy by some Yahoo exec to get us to click on his brand-new ad, once someone finds it;-)
> I scanned through the news articles and while an x10 ad (and boy, why does it have to be x10) popped up underneath the
news article, I didn't see any articles merely being links to advertisements. What am I missing here?
Same here. I don't get it.
I see a bunch of news stories to the left (some on Yahoo, most on other sites), a list of news stories in the middle (again, some on Yahoo, most on other sites), and a bunch of URLs to advertisements (all of which start with rd.yahoo.com, Yahoo's advertisement redirector server) on the right, with the header "Advertisement" above the column of ads.
And no pop-unders, 'cuz I never use Javashit, and even if I did, I'd have blocked the server in Junkbuster:)
Can anyone (including the original article submitter) show us the HTML that prompted the article in question?
Re:This won't ever happen
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
> Do you think that any country that possesses nuclear
weapons will allow themselves to be taken over without using them, no matter how horrible their use is?
Yes. And ironically, it was the pro-Apartheid government of South Africa, in one of the few humane things they ever did.
Re:Another issue of the Katzine
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
> For instance, it wouldn't have mattered how many nuclear weapons we have, if the USSR had been willing
to fight to the death to make its point -- since nukes only counter other nukes by fear, unless you have such
overwhelming intelligence and numbers that you eliminate the opponent's capabilities in a massive,
undetected first strike. And that presumes that you've figured out that it's time to strike first.
Side note:...which is what scares the hell out of me with regards Pakistan and India.
Each nation has so few nukes that a pre-emptive first-strike on its opponents' nukes is a viable option. They need to cool it for a few years until each side has a second-strike capability and deterrence can work.
Re:Not all gas weapons are inhalation agents. . .
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
> [if] gas masks become common, it's pretty much certain that someone will
develop [an anti-riot agent that is absorbed on skin contact, not inhaled] A gaseous laxative comes to mind as an especially effective
idea. . .
Well, if a cutaneous-absorption "instant laxative" agent were developed and deployed over a large crowd, it'd also double as a gaseous noxious agent, wouldn't it?;-)
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> When we declared a war on terrorism, I suspect that Al Qaeda was thrilled. If they could have gone to war
with us in a conventional way, instead of terrorism, they would have. Finally they were taken seriously
enough to go toe-to-toe with America. I imagine some of them were hopeful that they would finally get to
fight with Americans, and kill American soldiers.
> >
But they didn't really have the chance. The Americans were like (nearly) unseen aliens, sending precise
destruction down from the skies. They mostly didn't see an American to shoot at.
> >
So, what message does that send? [...]
"Choose your battles wisely."
(Or, in the vernacular, "Don't mess with Texas";-)
> I'm concerned that the war against terrorism will convince many people
that terrorism is the only way left to them to wage war against us.
But they already concluded that, a long time ago, which is why they've conspired to bomb the USS Cole, the US army barracks, and fly airliners into the WTC, Pentagon, and other targets. They've believed it for years, and lack of a commensurate response has taught them that terrorism can be "gotten away with" indefinitely.
Our "message" for the past 20-30 years has been one of "Annoy us, and we'll fart in your general direction", and has been interpreted as "try again, and make it bigger, and maybe then we'll notice!")
The message we're sending now is different:
"If you have a beef with us, and don't use diplomacy to address that beef, you will be exterminated, and your beef will go unaddressed. Your followers will also be exterminated, and be unable to carry on the cause. The only way to live long enough to have your grievance aired is to negotiate with us."
I believe the IRA saw the writing on the wall and clued in. Arafat appears to be somewhat clue-resistant at this point. Some of Arafat's followers obviously haven't figured it out, and are going to have to learn the hard way.
There's historical precedent (granted, we lost Vietnam) but "bombing them back to the stone age" often results in bringing them to the negotiating table.
The goal is to make the cost of terrorism so high that it, too, ceases to be an option for those who oppose us.
Re:BattleBots/Robot Wars
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
>Forget Robot Wars/Battle Bots, They could televise it and then we could see some really good robots doing
battle... Stuff robots made for $50 and we have robots made for $500,000
> My understanding is it REQUIES VERY HIGH temperatures to Dissacociate water on the order of 3500 degreesf plus
(PS Dont ever try to quelch a thermite reaction with water:)
Well, you can try, so long as you do it from a safe distance, and so long as you expect the attempt to fail spectacularly. (I mean, isn't "spectacular" why you ignited the thermite in the first place?;-)
> > [You win Civ and MOO by maximizing research] > >An interesting observation, but I think that it is possible that the reason that this works in Civ or MOO (though I have
played neither) is that, in that defined system, maximizing research delivers maximimum game-end benefit. I don't
think the same is necessarily true in meatspace (ie diminishing returns from long term investment as we reach limits of
what is possible). Also, there is no game end the real world.
Fair enough - but we've seen it happen in the real world, too.
ca. 5000-7000 BC: "Dawn of Civilization" - agricultural societies gradually came to dominate over their nomadic brethren, because the ability to grow more food than your people can eat allows the development of a leisure class who can invent stuff. Technologies: Agriculture, Religion, Writing.
16th-Century North America: Cavalry with muskets (4-2-1) beat foot-mounted soldiers with hand weapons (2-1-1). Kill ratios of 100:1. (Technology: Domestication of the horse, which didn't exist in North America at the time)
Iraq, 1990: Air power (better aircraft, higher-rated pilots) and sea power (nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) cut off lines of supply long enough to wear down enemy troops, which could then be mopped up. (Technology: Air power, fission plant)
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan: Air power beat ground power hands-down. Just yesterday, I read a plausible account in the mainstream media of 10 Green Berets using force multipliers like remote sensing equipment, superior communications, and smart weapons to direct air power and achieve a 100:1 kill ratio. (Technology: Air power multiplied by semiconductors as used in communications, computer chips, CCDs and laser diodes)
The reason why Civ designers made technology a key to "winning the game" is because it's been demonstrated to work in the Real World.
> To paraphrase Denis Leary, everybody
wants to get themselves a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, hot pink [... ] and toss the styrofoam container right out the side and there ain't a God damned thing anybody can do about it.
Except the Japanese! Why? Because they got the laser!.
That's right, two words, solar fuckin' weapons!;-)
Fascinating story based on the idea.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Someone introduced me to a strip called The Spiders
Fiction:
Spiders, Part 1: A group of Afghan women have had it up to here with the Taliban...
Spiders, Part 2: US civilians take part in the hunt for OBL and document history by means of massively-distributed, networked, robots, called "spiders", which are airdropped en masse around the countryside.
(I'm still looking forward to Part 3...)
Non-fiction:
Omnicam - a 360-degree camera. One application of which is to mount in a system like...
LOTS: Lehigh Omnidirectional Tracking System, a system whereby autonomous cameras can be dropped around hell's half-acre and human operators alerted when something "interesting" happens.
Sounds a lot like "Spiders", come to think of it. I wonder if this is where the artist got the idea for the strip?
OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sorry, but if you've got technology that allows you to kill your enemy, without getting (as many of) your own soldiers killed, it's moral to use it. That's right - moral, as in, it's a Good Thing.
It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.
It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.
It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.
If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.
Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.
Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.
> The only way I can imagine an analogue broadcast could be in any way protected is by
dropping the quality so no one would bother capturing it, but I guess lot's of people wouldn't bother watching it or paying for
a service
"Survivor", "Blind Date", "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"... mission accomplished.
> [Larry Ellison will] just start bitching the first time some old lady gets flagged as a terrorist and gets stripped searched.
Then you'll hear "If they were using Oracle 8i this wouldn't have happened..."
Note to self: Join the police force, if for no other reason than to see the onboard dash camera footage the day Larry tries getting out of a speeding ticket this way;-)
> [story of insurance company that didn't realize the existence of a out-of-state bad driving record]
With all due respect, why do you imply by your post ("We're screwed!") that you had any right to deprive your insurance company of that information?
(That is, if, as a condition of getting insurance, you had to disclose such information, why is it a Bad Thing for such information to be available to them. I don't begrudge you your good luck in this situation - as you appeared quite prepared to pay the higher premiums had they discovered your infraction - I merely question whether it's a Good Thing for the rest of us on the road that you got lucky in the first place;-)
> Someone can steal my ID card and go buy booze, withdraw my cash, purchase lottery tickets
on my credit, get into x-rated clubs as my age, purchase firearms with my clean slate, shoot someone,
and then leave the country..... all as "me".
The problem you outline is that reliable ID is more than "something you have". Same as the "password problem" -- ID should be "two out of three: Something you have, something you are, something you know."
OK, implant a uniquely-serialized chip into yourself.
(Or, if you don't like that idea, use a fingerprint scanner or retinal scanner. Encode the results of the scan on the card.)
Then, socially-engineer folks to think of "ID" to "something you have AND something you are".
When Joe Crook steals your card, he gets busted for presenting someone else's card at the strip club, because the data on his implant/retinascan don't match what's on the card.
Better yet, if Joe Crook has ever had valid ID, it's a trivial matter for the mismatch to be tracked back to him.
Best of all, if you lose your wallet, you just go to the DMV, stick your eyeball in the scanner, or wave your arm underneath the reader, and they issue you a new one.
Wild-ass suggestion: Retrofit existing systems to use the fingerprints some parents have voluntarily taken of their children in order that the kids' remains can be identified in the event of abduction. Within 30-40 years, damn near everyone is in the system, and identity theft becomes impossible.
(Side benefit -- as most kidnappings are done by non-custodial parents, a thumbprint-scanning of all students upon enrollment in a new school would render most kidnappings impractical, too.)
> It's really hard to get anything done these days without some sort of government-sanctioned (be it state, federal, whatever) picture identification. Can't cash a check, board a plane, get a loan, or [...]
Cash a check: To combat fraud.
Get a loan: Again, to combat fraud.
Board a plane: Neither you nor the government owns that plane, the shareholders of your airline do. As having customers die in giant fireballs tends to be expensive (planes aren't cheap), they, too, are merely protecting their investment.
The problem with fraud and terrorism is, of course, that identity documents can be faked. Faked identity documents can be used to commit fraud and terrorism. (The only difference is that the terrorist doesn't care if his real identity is discovered after the crime.)
Unlike the old adage "If you're innocent, what are you hiding?", I fail to see how strenghtening the integrity of identity documents can be a Bad Thing.
Admittedly, changing the laws to require that I produce ID before I post to Slashdot, or purchase potato chips, could be a Bad Thing.
But that's not really what we're talking about here -- the notion of tying together state Driver's Licenses into a central database is really just finding ways in which things that require ID (and which require them for very good reasons) can be made more secure.
Given the alternative -- give Larry Ellison a billion dollars to develop a new bureaucracy around Oracle -- I'd say strengthening and integrating existing systems is the better way to go.
> You also have to have proof of date of birth, which is the tough one. Basically you need a passport,
military ID or birth certificate. I have no passport or military ID, so I have to somehow track down my
birth certificate (an original, not a copy) before I can get my NY state license.
Consider the benefit of this -- if it's hard for you to get new ID issued in your name, it's also that much harder for identity thieves.
Stopping identity theft provides economic benefits far beyond any those from any knee-jerk reactions to 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
And while we're at it. Stallman's solution is " All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
Sure. Why don't we "ask" them to stop top-posting, sending HTML mail, and clicking on "snow_white.txt.vbs".
(I've been saying "Sorry, I don't do Windows" to .DOC files for years. It hasn't stopped the lusers yet. The worst time was when someone sent me a list of names in .DOC, and then resent it as a column of cells in an Excel spreadsheet. No, they weren't being sarcastic, they were just. that. dumb. To this luser, Word and Excel were the only applications on their computer.)
Why? A single 32M RAM chip costs about a buck. The engineering behind a special "slow-rotating-to-save-battery-life" hard drive would cost billions.
Wanna save more battery life? Use a 64M RAM chip and cache most of a CD's worth (at 128 kbps) of music whenever an "album" heuristic comes up, such as "user is playing Track 01 of a directory of songs all ID3-tagged or filenamed as being from the same artist".
It may be a bit late now, but I was lucky enough to pick up the habit of filling out the ID3 tags after downloading, but before listening.
Get in the habit of spending a minute or two filling 'em out when you download or rip an album, and you can save yourself the "oh my God, I have how many to fill out?" frustration a few years down the road.
>
> As long as we continue to focus on the symptoms and ignore the cause, this war will never be over.
(I agree with you -- the poster of the aforementioned unpopular view shouldn't have been moderated as Flamebait in the context of this discussion.)
In response to both him and you - suppose we were to stop "meddling" in Arab affairs in response to 9/11, please choose the most plausible scenario:
The notion that we should have regarded 9/11 as a "wake-up call to stop meddling in other nations' affairs" reminds me of Neville Chamberlain, who proclaimed "peace in our time" through Britain's refusal to "meddle" in the affairs of Germany and Czechoslovakia. (After all, the Germans only wanted the Sudetenland, it's not like they would have tried to exterminate the rest of Europe, huh?)
Appeasement. We've been there, done that, time and time again - and it's consistently resulted in more bloodshed than it was intended to prevent.
Under 'doze, can't you just nuke the DLL? Or make it "prompt/unknown" for the relevant MIME-type? (I did both years ago under Nutscrape and never missed anything.)
Me too.
(I know, I can't believe it either. I'd click it too, just to see what the fuss was about. Maybe this is all a cynical ploy by some Yahoo exec to get us to click on his brand-new ad, once someone finds it ;-)
Same here. I don't get it.
I see a bunch of news stories to the left (some on Yahoo, most on other sites), a list of news stories in the middle (again, some on Yahoo, most on other sites), and a bunch of URLs to advertisements (all of which start with rd.yahoo.com, Yahoo's advertisement redirector server) on the right, with the header "Advertisement" above the column of ads.
And no pop-unders, 'cuz I never use Javashit, and even if I did, I'd have blocked the server in Junkbuster :)
Can anyone (including the original article submitter) show us the HTML that prompted the article in question?
Yes. And ironically, it was the pro-Apartheid government of South Africa, in one of the few humane things they ever did.
Side note: ...which is what scares the hell out of me with regards Pakistan and India.
Each nation has so few nukes that a pre-emptive first-strike on its opponents' nukes is a viable option. They need to cool it for a few years until each side has a second-strike capability and deterrence can work.
Well, if a cutaneous-absorption "instant laxative" agent were developed and deployed over a large crowd, it'd also double as a gaseous noxious agent, wouldn't it? ;-)
>
> But they didn't really have the chance. The Americans were like (nearly) unseen aliens, sending precise destruction down from the skies. They mostly didn't see an American to shoot at.
>
> So, what message does that send? [...]
"Choose your battles wisely."
(Or, in the vernacular, "Don't mess with Texas" ;-)
> I'm concerned that the war against terrorism will convince many people that terrorism is the only way left to them to wage war against us.
But they already concluded that, a long time ago, which is why they've conspired to bomb the USS Cole, the US army barracks, and fly airliners into the WTC, Pentagon, and other targets. They've believed it for years, and lack of a commensurate response has taught them that terrorism can be "gotten away with" indefinitely.
Our "message" for the past 20-30 years has been one of "Annoy us, and we'll fart in your general direction", and has been interpreted as "try again, and make it bigger, and maybe then we'll notice!")
The message we're sending now is different:
"If you have a beef with us, and don't use diplomacy to address that beef, you will be exterminated, and your beef will go unaddressed. Your followers will also be exterminated, and be unable to carry on the cause. The only way to live long enough to have your grievance aired is to negotiate with us."
I believe the IRA saw the writing on the wall and clued in. Arafat appears to be somewhat clue-resistant at this point. Some of Arafat's followers obviously haven't figured it out, and are going to have to learn the hard way.
There's historical precedent (granted, we lost Vietnam) but "bombing them back to the stone age" often results in bringing them to the negotiating table.
The goal is to make the cost of terrorism so high that it, too, ceases to be an option for those who oppose us.
> Maniacal laughter, yes.
My all-time favorite orbital laser cartoon: "The Flower Who Cried Wolf"
I've decided it's time to get a grip on my total fixation on robots!
Well, you can try, so long as you do it from a safe distance, and so long as you expect the attempt to fail spectacularly. (I mean, isn't "spectacular" why you ignited the thermite in the first place? ;-)
>
>An interesting observation, but I think that it is possible that the reason that this works in Civ or MOO (though I have played neither) is that, in that defined system, maximizing research delivers maximimum game-end benefit. I don't think the same is necessarily true in meatspace (ie diminishing returns from long term investment as we reach limits of what is possible). Also, there is no game end the real world.
Fair enough - but we've seen it happen in the real world, too.
ca. 5000-7000 BC: "Dawn of Civilization" - agricultural societies gradually came to dominate over their nomadic brethren, because the ability to grow more food than your people can eat allows the development of a leisure class who can invent stuff. Technologies: Agriculture, Religion, Writing.
16th-Century North America: Cavalry with muskets (4-2-1) beat foot-mounted soldiers with hand weapons (2-1-1). Kill ratios of 100:1. (Technology: Domestication of the horse, which didn't exist in North America at the time)
Poland, 1939: Mechanized infantry beat mounted cavalry. (Technology: Internal combustion engine)
Iraq, 1990: Air power (better aircraft, higher-rated pilots) and sea power (nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) cut off lines of supply long enough to wear down enemy troops, which could then be mopped up. (Technology: Air power, fission plant)
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan: Air power beat ground power hands-down. Just yesterday, I read a plausible account in the mainstream media of 10 Green Berets using force multipliers like remote sensing equipment, superior communications, and smart weapons to direct air power and achieve a 100:1 kill ratio. (Technology: Air power multiplied by semiconductors as used in communications, computer chips, CCDs and laser diodes)
The reason why Civ designers made technology a key to "winning the game" is because it's been demonstrated to work in the Real World.
Except the Japanese! Why? Because they got the laser!. That's right, two words, solar fuckin' weapons! ;-)
Fiction:
Spiders, Part 1: A group of Afghan women have had it up to here with the Taliban...
Spiders, Part 2: US civilians take part in the hunt for OBL and document history by means of massively-distributed, networked, robots, called "spiders", which are airdropped en masse around the countryside.
(I'm still looking forward to Part 3...)
Non-fiction:
Omnicam - a 360-degree camera. One application of which is to mount in a system like...
LOTS: Lehigh Omnidirectional Tracking System, a system whereby autonomous cameras can be dropped around hell's half-acre and human operators alerted when something "interesting" happens.
Sounds a lot like "Spiders", come to think of it. I wonder if this is where the artist got the idea for the strip?
It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.
It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.
It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.
If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.
Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.
Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.
"Survivor", "Blind Date", "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"... mission accomplished.
Note to self: Join the police force, if for no other reason than to see the onboard dash camera footage the day Larry tries getting out of a speeding ticket this way ;-)
With all due respect, why do you imply by your post ("We're screwed!") that you had any right to deprive your insurance company of that information?
(That is, if, as a condition of getting insurance, you had to disclose such information, why is it a Bad Thing for such information to be available to them. I don't begrudge you your good luck in this situation - as you appeared quite prepared to pay the higher premiums had they discovered your infraction - I merely question whether it's a Good Thing for the rest of us on the road that you got lucky in the first place ;-)
The problem you outline is that reliable ID is more than "something you have". Same as the "password problem" -- ID should be "two out of three: Something you have, something you are, something you know."
OK, implant a uniquely-serialized chip into yourself. (Or, if you don't like that idea, use a fingerprint scanner or retinal scanner. Encode the results of the scan on the card.)
Then, socially-engineer folks to think of "ID" to "something you have AND something you are".
When Joe Crook steals your card, he gets busted for presenting someone else's card at the strip club, because the data on his implant/retinascan don't match what's on the card.
Better yet, if Joe Crook has ever had valid ID, it's a trivial matter for the mismatch to be tracked back to him.
Best of all, if you lose your wallet, you just go to the DMV, stick your eyeball in the scanner, or wave your arm underneath the reader, and they issue you a new one.
Wild-ass suggestion: Retrofit existing systems to use the fingerprints some parents have voluntarily taken of their children in order that the kids' remains can be identified in the event of abduction. Within 30-40 years, damn near everyone is in the system, and identity theft becomes impossible.
(Side benefit -- as most kidnappings are done by non-custodial parents, a thumbprint-scanning of all students upon enrollment in a new school would render most kidnappings impractical, too.)
Marketing tool, hell. If you're a smoker, and they're a drugstore, that information is worth big money to your insurance company ;-)
Cash a check: To combat fraud.
Get a loan: Again, to combat fraud.
Board a plane: Neither you nor the government owns that plane, the shareholders of your airline do. As having customers die in giant fireballs tends to be expensive (planes aren't cheap), they, too, are merely protecting their investment.
The problem with fraud and terrorism is, of course, that identity documents can be faked. Faked identity documents can be used to commit fraud and terrorism. (The only difference is that the terrorist doesn't care if his real identity is discovered after the crime.)
Unlike the old adage "If you're innocent, what are you hiding?", I fail to see how strenghtening the integrity of identity documents can be a Bad Thing.
Admittedly, changing the laws to require that I produce ID before I post to Slashdot, or purchase potato chips, could be a Bad Thing.
But that's not really what we're talking about here -- the notion of tying together state Driver's Licenses into a central database is really just finding ways in which things that require ID (and which require them for very good reasons) can be made more secure.
Given the alternative -- give Larry Ellison a billion dollars to develop a new bureaucracy around Oracle -- I'd say strengthening and integrating existing systems is the better way to go.
Consider the benefit of this -- if it's hard for you to get new ID issued in your name, it's also that much harder for identity thieves.
Stopping identity theft provides economic benefits far beyond any those from any knee-jerk reactions to 9/11.