Actually, it is pretty safe to conclude causation here as there are/very/ strictly monitored limitations of PAC funding. The limitations are so low that the difference between what "one nutjob billionaire" can give compared to the average mortal is less than you're likely to spend on a decent meal in Penn Quarter.
That was precisely the point I was making. The "invalid" passports that cleared as "valid" did so because they allowed for this loophole that renders the chip no more useful than the machine-readable coding that has been used for decades. Even with that glaring flaw, it still makes them harder to pull off than a simple paper document.
The real problem is that identity assertion is a notoriously sketchy business to begin with. If you can obtain the handful of disparate pieces of paper that already form this flimsy basis of identity in the eyes of government, you can get a legitimate passport (or credit card, driver's license, beautician's permit, whatever) for your illegitimate identity. It doesn't matter if the final document is woven out of your DNA and your identity is validated by growing a clone in a vat on the spot. Hell, in certain circumstances, you can have a passport issued with the primary basis of establishing your identity being sworn testimony of thirdy parties....and we think the problem is in a sliver of copper and silicon?
Uhm, a successful chip forgery also requires a successful paper forgery to be wrapped around it, ergo, these are/still/ harder to falsify. The only thing they proved was that when they turned off all the encryption and key validation, essentially rendering the electronic component no more physically secure than the paper, the machines defaulted to "valid" as all they could validate was that the data was complete.
Centralizing that information takes away control from us as individuals.
I specifically stated that your medical records themselves would not be centralized and that your consent to release would be required and would further fall under the clinical discretion of each of your medical providers.
The only thing I was suggesting is that for emergency purposes, it would be possible to quickly locate records sources that you have explicitly authorized. Whether or not any particular situation meets your consent requirements to actually release the records is a totally different story, which was the whole point you so cleverly failed to understand.
A lot of people go get mental health care and pay out of their own pocket so that it isn't 'in the system'.
Your method of payment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your medical records and how they may -- or even MUST, with or without your consent (See: http://www.cdc.gov/ncphi/disss/nndss/PHS/infdis.htm ) -- be legally be released.
Sure, you can choose to go to witch doctors who keep no records to "stay off the grid." So what? Since the whole point of my post was "consent," what's your point? "I'm a super-secret rebel and I don't leave a paper trail?" Well, good for you, but what does that have to do with a single word of what I said?
http://www.hl7.org/
Major medical records systems are pretty universally HL7 compliant. That means medical providers can uniformly interchange your charts without the help of Google.
It has been around for a decade.
We already have HL7. Providers have the ability to exchange and consolidate your medical records directly and to provide electronic copies for the patient to physically retain to personally bring by sneakernet between their providers without the need for a proxy.
The vast majority of people don't have that many medical providers, nor do they change them very often. It is neither necessary nor desirable to have a company like Google aggregate the records. Its only strength is in being the *only* repository, which is its greatest weakness as a single point of failure. If there are multiple companies like Google providing the service, how is that terribly different than polling the providers directly?
Central clearinghouses might be useful, a la the credit reporting agencies. When someone has records on you, they publish that fact without publishing the actual records. So, in an emergency situation, a provider could ask the question "where does this person have records" and then proceed to retrieve them with proper clinical discretion on both ends.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised.
And that's precisely what QoS bandwidth shaping is for. I *AM* a Comcast customer and since they recently stopped throttling BitTorrent traffic, the other jagoffs on my local segment are now flooding my building's line to the point that my connection is totally useless between midnight and 6AM.
Face it, bandwidth shaping is necessary on shared media as it is completely uneconomical to allot fixed bandwidth. I'd have to have a dedicated OC-192 connection into my building to _guarantee_ 10Mb/s without some sort of shaping. Well, sparky, that's going to cost about $250,000 per year and I'm kinda doubting we're all going to pony up the necessary $210/month each to support it. You know what's really funny about that number? That's about the threshold for individual business SLA accounts. When I wanted ever bit of my bandwidth for whatever purpose I wanted, I paid for it and, oh the shock, I received it.
This wet-nappy brigade of cheap low-end cry-babies may get exactly what they've been screaming for only to find out that the result is 5% of their local network segment floods 95% of the shared pipe and as a result, like me, they'll all too often get a faster connection through their fucking cellphones.
Congratulations, guys. You won. I give it six months until the same whiners start bitching that the providers need to perform bandwidth shaping to ensure you get what you're paying for...you know, sort of what they've been saying the whole time.
I mean, shit, people, if your network at work as a function of doing business has to have QoS throttling in place to ensure one dipshit butterbars mid-grade executive doesn't bring the whole damned network down, how the fuck do you think you local ISP works?
They do business with Europe, they do business with Latin American countries. The fact that they have those european-hotels has not facilitated in any means that a normal cuban can spend the night there
You could say that about every western hotel from Cairo to Cape Town. Perhaps we should detain and fine Americans for traveling to Africa. I mean, what normal African could possibly stay HERE? Hell, what "normal" AMERICAN could stay there when the cheapest rack rate makes the Ritz Carlton look like Motel-6?
Yes, there is injustice in the world great and small. The Cuban embargo and travel restriction is an injustice. Does it outweigh whatever perceived oppression you feel the average Cuban suffers? Who knows. The fact is, there are people FAR more oppressed than the Cubans who have not been blessed with the criminalization of Americans traveling to and trading with their countries.
In addition, we got a late delivery assortment of about 100,000 psychopaths, drug dealers and sundry other career criminals that have come to characterize the typical Miami experience for the better part of thirty years.
Nice that you brought that up. So is not the killing part that disturbs you, is the "reason" part. So, if the "excuse" is just right, then is ok.
Back at 'ya. What's so disturbing about all the various atrocities that have been committed by dozens of countries that are apparently a-okay, even while at the height of executing said atrocities, yet when performed on a far lesser scale (and often factually questionable to any degree) make Cuba supremely evil and worthy of banning American citizens effectively from so much as setting foot there? You could travel to and spend money in the Soviet Union during the cold war, we had full diplomatic relations the entire time, and they were "the Evil Empire" supposedly hell-bent on the complete annihilation of our entire way of life under hair-trigger threat of nuclear hellfire sufficient to wipe out every city with a population exceeding fifty, yet some old coot with a cigar and a fleet of '56 Chevys is worthy of total blockade? Hell, the worst he's done is let the Russians plant three nukes on his island. For godssakes, FRANCE has more firepower pointed at us than every commie in the Western Hemisphere combined.
Like, say, killing the people that try to escape it?
Mass political murder was good enough for Pinochet, the PRI and Noriega -- and they were all good enough for us...and only one of those three was even vaguely socialist.
They nationalized property without compensating international businesses.
So did Mexico. So did Venezuela.
Then they became Soviet puppets.
Pretty much all of Europe east of Austria, a third of Latin America, half of Africa and most of Asia. We left the first reasonably well alone, but we fought direct wars all over the second and proxy wars everywhere else, but the worst we can muster with Cuba is, what, the Bay of Pigs? Hell, we killed Ghaddafi's daughter with a cruise missile and now we're toasting his health. What gives?
Various acts like supporting leftist guerrillas or shooting down Cessnas with MiGs continued to earn them international contempt.
We never removed diplomatic relations from Russia, we established it long ago and never rescinded it with China, even though we were fighting a half dozen proxy wars in Africa and Asia funded by both of them (think: Iran-Contra and the other war in Afghanistan, and a little tiff we call 'Vietnam' for starts), and we recently restored it with freakin' Libya--which is, from the American point of view at least, a terrorist sponsoring socialist dictatorship in the habit of not bringing down Cessnas, but, with Pan Am 103, like the Soviets with KAL007, bringing down 747s. But, then again, in their eyes, so are we, what with blasting Iranian Air 655 out of the sky, incinerating about 300 civilians in the process, for which we paid $60 million and refused to apologize. We milked Libya for $2 Billion and made them grovel in order get back on the party invite list.
It is not as bad as the neo-cons paint it nor is it as good as the far left paints it.
The "far left" is more in the habit of pointing out the cozy relationships neo-cons and democrats alike have been more than happy to have with regimes FAR more out of line than Cuba. I mean, honestly, the PRI, Pinochet and Noriega were best buddies but Castro was Satan incarnate? Are we kidding here? The point of it is we could AFFORD to isolate Cuba (or, say, Chile) for having dirty little socialist tendencies in order to make a shining example of our not allowing other forms of government in our hemisphere. When countries like Mexico or Venezuela pull the same thing, we wag our fingers in their general direction, shrug, and let the container ships and oil tankers roll into port on schedule. The "far left" looks at that and puzzles why it's A-Okay to blow your kids' college fund in Moscow, Beijing, Triploi, Tehran, Panama or Saigon--hell, you can lunch in Pyongyang with no trouble from the Feds and we're technically still at war with them--yet it's a crime worthy of imprisonment to smoke a stogie in Havana?
Personally, I'd like my vote to matter more by being one of 624,000, instead of one of 300,000,000.
If you're a resident of North Dakota, you'd probably come out better. For the rest of us whose cities out populate your state, probably not so much.
Yes, I DO understand it. Unfortunately, most people in this country don't live in states as small as yours and the end result will not be much different than the status quo.
"The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport."
The problem with hydrogen is the "easy to store and transport" part. Basically, CO2 is a big molecule that is easy and safe to store for long periods of time. H2 shares none of these properties. It's a small molecule that is extremely difficult to store for extended periods and inevitably brings up images of Shuttle launches and Hindenburg crashes. Besides, it is more efficient to crack H2 out of hydrocarbons than to pull it out of, say, water through electrolysis. Though, if you're a country like Iceland with lots of renewable, practically free and non-polluting geothermal energy and water lying around everywhere, suddenly electrolysis starts to make a whole lot of sense despite being otherwise horribly inefficient, but that still doesn't solve the whole storage and transport problem.
Sure it is, which they will do by tiering service, just like every other industry on the planet.
If they can't handle either of the above then how the hell are they going to handle HD video streams?
They already handle HD video streams. Press the "On Demand" button on your Comcast remote, then click "HD Movies."
Even with fiber, there is a limit to how much you can shove down a single pipe. When you're getting your TV, Telephone and Internet on one wire, something's gotta give. You've cut a compromising deal with them in order to share the wire at a dramatically reduced price. My office has a dozen or so T1s--roughly 15Mb/s available. It costs about $150k per year. Your Comcast connection offers up to 4Mb/s for, what, fifty bucks per month? So, you're expecting the equivalent of our 15 T1's that cost $18k/month for $187. Suffice it to say, you just are not going to receive the same 24/7 guaranteed uptime and unrestricted service that comes with paying the other $17,813 per month for service. Since you're on/., it comes off as a little juvenile to not understand that.
Is that we have 50 state governments each with bureaucracies the size of national governments, each already the final executors of the federal government's policies. You could burn every Executive branch department to the ground save the DoD, send all the bureaucrats home and demolish the IRS with the result that people's lives would endure at least as much if not more government complexity and intrusion into their lives.
The whole platform is little more than a sweet-smelling red herring designed to attract people's unfocused angst and lack of understanding of federalism while simultaneously claiming to be the embodiment thereof.
You know, I've suddenly had a complete change of heart. You're right. We should just give up the entire charade and do away with any form of identification that involves any kind of centralized record keeping. Just prior to final descent, we'll just hand out cocktail napkins and bic pens to the whole cabin and they'll write whatever name they want on it. When you get stopped for doing 135mph in a school zone, we'll expect when the officer asks you to identify yourself that'll you'll just be a sport and tell the truth about where to send the ticket.
There just isn't any reason for anything more than that, because if there were, your paranoia would apply equally to card catalogs, datacenters and, well, for that matter, cocktail napkins -- sshhhhh, they're secretly harvesting our DNA and drinking habits... and OMFG, peanuts! Those can KILL people! We must stop the oppression of the cocktail napkin before it's too late!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is pretty safe to conclude causation here as there are /very/ strictly monitored limitations of PAC funding. The limitations are so low that the difference between what "one nutjob billionaire" can give compared to the average mortal is less than you're likely to spend on a decent meal in Penn Quarter.
And not all countries are providing such keys.
That was precisely the point I was making. The "invalid" passports that cleared as "valid" did so because they allowed for this loophole that renders the chip no more useful than the machine-readable coding that has been used for decades. Even with that glaring flaw, it still makes them harder to pull off than a simple paper document.
The real problem is that identity assertion is a notoriously sketchy business to begin with. If you can obtain the handful of disparate pieces of paper that already form this flimsy basis of identity in the eyes of government, you can get a legitimate passport (or credit card, driver's license, beautician's permit, whatever) for your illegitimate identity. It doesn't matter if the final document is woven out of your DNA and your identity is validated by growing a clone in a vat on the spot. Hell, in certain circumstances, you can have a passport issued with the primary basis of establishing your identity being sworn testimony of thirdy parties. ...and we think the problem is in a sliver of copper and silicon?
Uhm, a successful chip forgery also requires a successful paper forgery to be wrapped around it, ergo, these are /still/ harder to falsify. The only thing they proved was that when they turned off all the encryption and key validation, essentially rendering the electronic component no more physically secure than the paper, the machines defaulted to "valid" as all they could validate was that the data was complete.
If you've ever set foot near the Capitol, you'd realize the chamber is constantly on an internal multichannel CCTV feed with captioning.
Just because no one is in the room does not mean it isn't being watched or heard in the members' offices.
If I don't want anyone else to know that I'm going to a psychiatrist or psychologist
I'm pretty sure you either a) already are or b) should do so immediately.
See: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa
Centralizing that information takes away control from us as individuals.
I specifically stated that your medical records themselves would not be centralized and that your consent to release would be required and would further fall under the clinical discretion of each of your medical providers.
The only thing I was suggesting is that for emergency purposes, it would be possible to quickly locate records sources that you have explicitly authorized. Whether or not any particular situation meets your consent requirements to actually release the records is a totally different story, which was the whole point you so cleverly failed to understand.
A lot of people go get mental health care and pay out of their own pocket so that it isn't 'in the system'.
Your method of payment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your medical records and how they may -- or even MUST, with or without your consent (See: http://www.cdc.gov/ncphi/disss/nndss/PHS/infdis.htm ) -- be legally be released.
Sure, you can choose to go to witch doctors who keep no records to "stay off the grid." So what? Since the whole point of my post was "consent," what's your point? "I'm a super-secret rebel and I don't leave a paper trail?" Well, good for you, but what does that have to do with a single word of what I said?
http://www.hl7.org/ Major medical records systems are pretty universally HL7 compliant. That means medical providers can uniformly interchange your charts without the help of Google. It has been around for a decade.
We already have HL7. Providers have the ability to exchange and consolidate your medical records directly and to provide electronic copies for the patient to physically retain to personally bring by sneakernet between their providers without the need for a proxy. The vast majority of people don't have that many medical providers, nor do they change them very often. It is neither necessary nor desirable to have a company like Google aggregate the records. Its only strength is in being the *only* repository, which is its greatest weakness as a single point of failure. If there are multiple companies like Google providing the service, how is that terribly different than polling the providers directly? Central clearinghouses might be useful, a la the credit reporting agencies. When someone has records on you, they publish that fact without publishing the actual records. So, in an emergency situation, a provider could ask the question "where does this person have records" and then proceed to retrieve them with proper clinical discretion on both ends.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised.
And that's precisely what QoS bandwidth shaping is for. I *AM* a Comcast customer and since they recently stopped throttling BitTorrent traffic, the other jagoffs on my local segment are now flooding my building's line to the point that my connection is totally useless between midnight and 6AM.
Face it, bandwidth shaping is necessary on shared media as it is completely uneconomical to allot fixed bandwidth. I'd have to have a dedicated OC-192 connection into my building to _guarantee_ 10Mb/s without some sort of shaping. Well, sparky, that's going to cost about $250,000 per year and I'm kinda doubting we're all going to pony up the necessary $210/month each to support it. You know what's really funny about that number? That's about the threshold for individual business SLA accounts. When I wanted ever bit of my bandwidth for whatever purpose I wanted, I paid for it and, oh the shock, I received it.
This wet-nappy brigade of cheap low-end cry-babies may get exactly what they've been screaming for only to find out that the result is 5% of their local network segment floods 95% of the shared pipe and as a result, like me, they'll all too often get a faster connection through their fucking cellphones.
Congratulations, guys. You won. I give it six months until the same whiners start bitching that the providers need to perform bandwidth shaping to ensure you get what you're paying for...you know, sort of what they've been saying the whole time.
I mean, shit, people, if your network at work as a function of doing business has to have QoS throttling in place to ensure one dipshit butterbars mid-grade executive doesn't bring the whole damned network down, how the fuck do you think you local ISP works?
Hell, even third dynasty Egyptians were paving roads.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E0D71439F93BA35756C0A962958260
...in a far less paranoid state of mind than Ms. Rosenbaum's:
"Wise men, though all laws were abolished, would lead the same lives."
--Aristophanes
They do business with Europe, they do business with Latin American countries. The fact that they have those european-hotels has not facilitated in any means that a normal cuban can spend the night there You could say that about every western hotel from Cairo to Cape Town. Perhaps we should detain and fine Americans for traveling to Africa. I mean, what normal African could possibly stay HERE? Hell, what "normal" AMERICAN could stay there when the cheapest rack rate makes the Ritz Carlton look like Motel-6? Yes, there is injustice in the world great and small. The Cuban embargo and travel restriction is an injustice. Does it outweigh whatever perceived oppression you feel the average Cuban suffers? Who knows. The fact is, there are people FAR more oppressed than the Cubans who have not been blessed with the criminalization of Americans traveling to and trading with their countries.
In addition, we got a late delivery assortment of about 100,000 psychopaths, drug dealers and sundry other career criminals that have come to characterize the typical Miami experience for the better part of thirty years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_Boatlift
But, if not for that event, Don Johnson would never have had a career.
Nice that you brought that up. So is not the killing part that disturbs you, is the "reason" part. So, if the "excuse" is just right, then is ok.
Back at 'ya. What's so disturbing about all the various atrocities that have been committed by dozens of countries that are apparently a-okay, even while at the height of executing said atrocities, yet when performed on a far lesser scale (and often factually questionable to any degree) make Cuba supremely evil and worthy of banning American citizens effectively from so much as setting foot there? You could travel to and spend money in the Soviet Union during the cold war, we had full diplomatic relations the entire time, and they were "the Evil Empire" supposedly hell-bent on the complete annihilation of our entire way of life under hair-trigger threat of nuclear hellfire sufficient to wipe out every city with a population exceeding fifty, yet some old coot with a cigar and a fleet of '56 Chevys is worthy of total blockade? Hell, the worst he's done is let the Russians plant three nukes on his island. For godssakes, FRANCE has more firepower pointed at us than every commie in the Western Hemisphere combined.
Come on...
Venezuela's nationalization habits have been going on since the Nixon administration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Andr%C3%A9s_P%C3%A9rez
Like, say, killing the people that try to escape it?
Mass political murder was good enough for Pinochet, the PRI and Noriega -- and they were all good enough for us...and only one of those three was even vaguely socialist.
So, why not embargo Mexico? Their entire oil industry was started on nationalized American assets.
They nationalized property without compensating international businesses.
So did Mexico. So did Venezuela.
Then they became Soviet puppets.
Pretty much all of Europe east of Austria, a third of Latin America, half of Africa and most of Asia. We left the first reasonably well alone, but we fought direct wars all over the second and proxy wars everywhere else, but the worst we can muster with Cuba is, what, the Bay of Pigs? Hell, we killed Ghaddafi's daughter with a cruise missile and now we're toasting his health. What gives?
Various acts like supporting leftist guerrillas or shooting down Cessnas with MiGs continued to earn them international contempt.
We never removed diplomatic relations from Russia, we established it long ago and never rescinded it with China, even though we were fighting a half dozen proxy wars in Africa and Asia funded by both of them (think: Iran-Contra and the other war in Afghanistan, and a little tiff we call 'Vietnam' for starts), and we recently restored it with freakin' Libya--which is, from the American point of view at least, a terrorist sponsoring socialist dictatorship in the habit of not bringing down Cessnas, but, with Pan Am 103, like the Soviets with KAL007, bringing down 747s. But, then again, in their eyes, so are we, what with blasting Iranian Air 655 out of the sky, incinerating about 300 civilians in the process, for which we paid $60 million and refused to apologize. We milked Libya for $2 Billion and made them grovel in order get back on the party invite list.
It is not as bad as the neo-cons paint it nor is it as good as the far left paints it.
The "far left" is more in the habit of pointing out the cozy relationships neo-cons and democrats alike have been more than happy to have with regimes FAR more out of line than Cuba. I mean, honestly, the PRI, Pinochet and Noriega were best buddies but Castro was Satan incarnate? Are we kidding here? The point of it is we could AFFORD to isolate Cuba (or, say, Chile) for having dirty little socialist tendencies in order to make a shining example of our not allowing other forms of government in our hemisphere. When countries like Mexico or Venezuela pull the same thing, we wag our fingers in their general direction, shrug, and let the container ships and oil tankers roll into port on schedule. The "far left" looks at that and puzzles why it's A-Okay to blow your kids' college fund in Moscow, Beijing, Triploi, Tehran, Panama or Saigon--hell, you can lunch in Pyongyang with no trouble from the Feds and we're technically still at war with them--yet it's a crime worthy of imprisonment to smoke a stogie in Havana?
Personally, I'd like my vote to matter more by being one of 624,000, instead of one of 300,000,000.
If you're a resident of North Dakota, you'd probably come out better. For the rest of us whose cities out populate your state, probably not so much.
Yes, I DO understand it. Unfortunately, most people in this country don't live in states as small as yours and the end result will not be much different than the status quo.
No, what they are proposing is:
"The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport."
The problem with hydrogen is the "easy to store and transport" part. Basically, CO2 is a big molecule that is easy and safe to store for long periods of time. H2 shares none of these properties. It's a small molecule that is extremely difficult to store for extended periods and inevitably brings up images of Shuttle launches and Hindenburg crashes. Besides, it is more efficient to crack H2 out of hydrocarbons than to pull it out of, say, water through electrolysis. Though, if you're a country like Iceland with lots of renewable, practically free and non-polluting geothermal energy and water lying around everywhere, suddenly electrolysis starts to make a whole lot of sense despite being otherwise horribly inefficient, but that still doesn't solve the whole storage and transport problem.
Yes, an entire house programmed to second guess your every move...to "help" you. How could that not be terrific?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB03aRifPLU
Upgrading their network isn't an option?
/., it comes off as a little juvenile to not understand that.
Sure it is, which they will do by tiering service, just like every other industry on the planet.
If they can't handle either of the above then how the hell are they going to handle HD video streams?
They already handle HD video streams. Press the "On Demand" button on your Comcast remote, then click "HD Movies."
Even with fiber, there is a limit to how much you can shove down a single pipe. When you're getting your TV, Telephone and Internet on one wire, something's gotta give. You've cut a compromising deal with them in order to share the wire at a dramatically reduced price. My office has a dozen or so T1s--roughly 15Mb/s available. It costs about $150k per year. Your Comcast connection offers up to 4Mb/s for, what, fifty bucks per month? So, you're expecting the equivalent of our 15 T1's that cost $18k/month for $187. Suffice it to say, you just are not going to receive the same 24/7 guaranteed uptime and unrestricted service that comes with paying the other $17,813 per month for service. Since you're on
Is that we have 50 state governments each with bureaucracies the size of national governments, each already the final executors of the federal government's policies. You could burn every Executive branch department to the ground save the DoD, send all the bureaucrats home and demolish the IRS with the result that people's lives would endure at least as much if not more government complexity and intrusion into their lives.
The whole platform is little more than a sweet-smelling red herring designed to attract people's unfocused angst and lack of understanding of federalism while simultaneously claiming to be the embodiment thereof.
It is, frankly, embarrassing.
You know, I've suddenly had a complete change of heart. You're right. We should just give up the entire charade and do away with any form of identification that involves any kind of centralized record keeping. Just prior to final descent, we'll just hand out cocktail napkins and bic pens to the whole cabin and they'll write whatever name they want on it. When you get stopped for doing 135mph in a school zone, we'll expect when the officer asks you to identify yourself that'll you'll just be a sport and tell the truth about where to send the ticket.
There just isn't any reason for anything more than that, because if there were, your paranoia would apply equally to card catalogs, datacenters and, well, for that matter, cocktail napkins -- sshhhhh, they're secretly harvesting our DNA and drinking habits... and OMFG, peanuts! Those can KILL people! We must stop the oppression of the cocktail napkin before it's too late!
Travel may have been "more civilized," but the experience of having a passport stolen while abroad was quite certainly far less so.