The chipped passports have a copy of what is printed on the face plus the extra biometric bits, all of which is also stored in a database, including reconciled entries for your previous visits through passport control. If the printed information or chip output differ from the central copy, they know it has been tampered with. This is not a terribly large departure from what already has been happening for decades when they scan your passport or punch in the number to pull up the record manually. The only difference in any of this is that they're adding a couple extra fields that don't really lend themselves to visual inspection. The cross-border data sharing and centralized collection within each country isn't remotely a new idea.
Besides, the more "secure" the document gets in the sense of positively linking it to the person carrying it, the less frightful the consequences of losing it. Not long ago, if you were roughly the same height/weight/age/gender, you could pretty well just pick a passport out of a stack provided by the hotel maid service. I mean, 6'1" brown/brown 180lbs 30yo male isn't a very precise set of biometrics, which doesn't sound too terrible until someone matching your description smuggles drugs into the country on your passport before you realize it went missing. If they can solve the question of "is this REALLY you" with an iris scan and a fingerprint, roughly 99.9% of the stolen document industry will disappear leaving only the most ridiculous James Bond worthy scenarios to worry about.
The bottom line is that the document is an assertion of the holder's identity. You have a personal interest in ensuring that you are the only one who can use it to successfully make that assertion.
It would take three or four Hiroshimas worth of power to spin a single Library of Congress length of nanowire, but amazingly it would only weigh one Escalade despite being able to support five Empire State Buildings. Unfortunately, it would also cost one Medicaid budget per Los Angeles to Sydney length of cable the width of a human hair.
When I show people Ubuntu, the response is generally very receptive. When I tell people "you should look at Linux" they come back from their first Google search bleary-eyed asking what's the difference between the three to five versions each of Ubuntu, SuSE, Redhat/Fedora, BSD (yes, I know, I know) and a half dozen other variations.
I pause and try to make it recognizable by saying "hey, Ubuntu looks and feels a lot like OS/X, which is itself essentially BSD with eye candy."
They invariably blink, sigh and ask "so, should I just get a Mac?"
At that point, 99% of the time, it is very hard to argue with them.
Rwanda is overwhelmingly Christian. A MILLION people were quartered, shot, buried and/or burnt alive--often inside their churches...in one case at least, incited by their own priest.
Granted, we have this minor little problem going on, but it's Muslims killing each other...
They did not force anyone to do anything and, moreover, the program in question was only looking at native Icelanders. Adding a non-native to that database would not only be pointless, it would defeat the purpose entirely.
Customs inspections began during the administration of GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1789 to be exact. It was the FIFTH act of Congress. You might think they all had a pretty accurate inkling of the intentions of the framers at that juncture.
You're right that doesn't smell right, because I didn't say or imply any of it.
The bottom line is/you/ being allowed into the country and/your stuff/ being allowed into the country are two very different questions. In short, YES, borders ARE exceptions and have codified as such since the Tariff Act of 1789 that established the Customs Service--and with it the authorization to search, seize and/or levy duty upon any goods crossing the border.
Now, there is the problem of non-citizens when neither this country nor their own is particularly keen on letting them in. So, they have no visa, residency or citizenship for this country and their own refuses to take them back for reasons that don't particularly thrill us either. Short of a fly-over and pushing them out with a parachute, what do you think happens? Hmm? Three hots and a cot, babe.
They don't have to send you back anywhere. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate detention centers (read: prisons) around the country for people with problematic status.
Who the hell thinks it's free? The states know full well the money came from their taxpayers. Most of that money goes to programs enacted and administered at the state level. Absent the federal tax intermediary or program administration, the states will just tax their citizens directly.
The majority of Americans live in states where removing the federal administration and financing of those programs will do absolutely nothing to remove the programs or the funding, it will just shift the path of the receipts and will in many cases result in a net INCREASE in cost for those states that currently receive more from Washington than they remit.
Okay, so RP is running on the purist federalist philosophy. Dandy.
Given that most of the administration in Washington is largely in the business of collecting and redistributing funding to the states with standards compliance requirements attached, does he honestly think that removing the federal component will make a stick of difference to the average American on the ground? The programs will still exist and the revenue will need to come from somewhere. I get the home-rule states' rights bit, but I rarely hear the fanbois cooing over anything but the prospect of cutting their tax bill, which isn't likely even if we burnt Washington to the ground.
It's not like it's food, water or shelter. It's amazing how much none of this stuff really matters when you couldn't care less about the product in any form or method of delivery.
"Just War Doctrine" does allow you to kill those who try to kill you. However, it roughly states that if someone storms in and beats your wife, while you may have warrant to blow his head off while he's in your house, you don't have warrant to nuke Manhattan because you're certain he escaped into the subway.
We already imprison more than the Soviets ever did and more than the current Chinese regime does. In terms of regimented control under threat of loss of liberty, property and life at the barrel of a gun owing to a complacent population all too ready to watch their neighbors hauled off in shackles because, well, they must have had it coming, not playing by the rules and all. Well, it's a good thing we're only doing it to "criminals." They all had their three chances, then off for life. Who cares if the third offense was stealing a loaf of bread? They were criminals. Off with the lot of 'em.
Disturbing Hillary Clinton was interviewed about rolling back some of the more egregious sentencing guidelines and was asked why she wouldn't make it retroactive. Well, of course, then we'd have all these criminals back in our neighborhoods...
Right, so I can get MySQL Enterprise for $5k per server per year while MSSQL is $25k, plus about $8k per year for 24x7 support. So, on a five-year plan, a MySQL installation costs $416/month while a MSSQL installation costs $1083/month, or a difference of about $22/day. If an administrator can make the case that MSSQL will on average save fifteen minutes per day of his time, there's no financial incentive whatsoever. If the damned thing was free across the board, including free 24x7 support, they'd just have to justify one day per month of savings to make it even at which point any infinitesimal functional advantage or shortcoming will tip the scale.
The bottom line is that for such a critical application, the cost of staff so far dwarfs the licensing fees that the free software + paid support model can't compete unless the product is truly superior and better suited to begin with.
Hell, that should be modded +5 each Informative, Insightful and Redundant for obviousness.
Every job I've had for the last decade I've made the simple, usually accepted, case that coming to work an hour earlier costs me two to three hours of my own time, which comes out to roughly 500-800 hours of my life per year just to entertain some pointless mark on the clock and I'm not willing to write off an entire MONTH of my life every year for something wholly without purpose, much less am I willing to come in while it's still dark just because of some anachronistic farmer's pride in rising before the damned birds.
Why is this so hilariously difficult for so many people to deal with without their collective heads exploding at the thought?
The deficit is an insidious beast. It exists for the primary purpose of wealth transfer and is essentially one of the most elaborate and successful Ponzi schemes ever conceived--and, contrary to popular belief, most of the beneficiaries of this welfare program are wealthy Americans, not Chinese bureaucrats.
For example, you can not be arrested for walking down the street and being unable to produce your birth certificate.
But it has already been a very long time since it has been possible to be detained for not being able to produce your state ID that is based on that birth certificate. The limitations on that are so slim as to be non-existent. Probable cause? "Oh, we're looking for someone matching your description." This has happened to me numerous times. In one case, the officer was fortunate enough to be holding a mug shot I could see just enough of to actually justify the encounter, so I gladly complied. My cooperation comes with significantly less ease when the justification is less so.
I don't follow this sheepishly, but I do realize that the sky has already long since fallen and, ironically, a national ID would solve as many problems for the individual as people think it would cause.
Apart from the obvious fact that private schools exist at every level, the experience with Charter Schools has proven this to be a questionable proposition. They've simply not succeeded, much less offered any dramatic advantage.
The problem is quite simple. On average, it costs $10-15k per student year for primary and secondary education, public OR private. A family of four making $45k per year (read: the average American household), simply cannot afford to spend $30k on school. So, on the front-end, you have a choice: public, tax-supported financing or millions of hooligans in the street because their parents can't pay the school bill. Most people find the former acceptable without getting into the greater economic issues. On the other end, where the public schools are abysmal, so are the private schools. "Good" schools, public and private, happen where the community, be it wealthy parishioners or wealthy property-tax payers or both, can afford them. Crappy schools happen where the parishes and tax base CAN'T afford them. Vouchers will not change this for the better. If suddenly you made it so everyone could afford to go to St. Alban's, just as quickly, the price would adjust so that only the very few could, voucher or not.
Plenty of people who use their passport as primary id for employment, entering bars, cashing checks, identifying to police officers etc. etc. Presenting that document is already equivalent to presenting all of the above. Your drivers license is already searchable nationwide and is also tied to your SSN and birth certificate. "RealID" does not present any particularly spectacular changes to the nature of the documents themselves, other than standardizing the format of the physical representation. The data behind those cards, however, is already at the point you are fearing.
I'm not naive of the implications of all of these things, I'm just saying the sky fell a very long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the U.S. system of past and present...both.
The chipped passports have a copy of what is printed on the face plus the extra biometric bits, all of which is also stored in a database, including reconciled entries for your previous visits through passport control. If the printed information or chip output differ from the central copy, they know it has been tampered with. This is not a terribly large departure from what already has been happening for decades when they scan your passport or punch in the number to pull up the record manually. The only difference in any of this is that they're adding a couple extra fields that don't really lend themselves to visual inspection. The cross-border data sharing and centralized collection within each country isn't remotely a new idea.
Besides, the more "secure" the document gets in the sense of positively linking it to the person carrying it, the less frightful the consequences of losing it. Not long ago, if you were roughly the same height/weight/age/gender, you could pretty well just pick a passport out of a stack provided by the hotel maid service. I mean, 6'1" brown/brown 180lbs 30yo male isn't a very precise set of biometrics, which doesn't sound too terrible until someone matching your description smuggles drugs into the country on your passport before you realize it went missing. If they can solve the question of "is this REALLY you" with an iris scan and a fingerprint, roughly 99.9% of the stolen document industry will disappear leaving only the most ridiculous James Bond worthy scenarios to worry about.
The bottom line is that the document is an assertion of the holder's identity. You have a personal interest in ensuring that you are the only one who can use it to successfully make that assertion.
It would take three or four Hiroshimas worth of power to spin a single Library of Congress length of nanowire, but amazingly it would only weigh one Escalade despite being able to support five Empire State Buildings. Unfortunately, it would also cost one Medicaid budget per Los Angeles to Sydney length of cable the width of a human hair.
When I show people Ubuntu, the response is generally very receptive. When I tell people "you should look at Linux" they come back from their first Google search bleary-eyed asking what's the difference between the three to five versions each of Ubuntu, SuSE, Redhat/Fedora, BSD (yes, I know, I know) and a half dozen other variations.
I pause and try to make it recognizable by saying "hey, Ubuntu looks and feels a lot like OS/X, which is itself essentially BSD with eye candy."
They invariably blink, sigh and ask "so, should I just get a Mac?"
At that point, 99% of the time, it is very hard to argue with them.
I tried that a year ago. All that made it into the pool was a few gallons of Brennivín.
this all adds to bandwidth and processing on the client (think AJAX),
Why? You can perform XSL transformations on the server and return plain HTML.
The worst case of mass murder in Europe in the last sixty years was Christians killing Muslims.
Rwanda is overwhelmingly Christian. A MILLION people were quartered, shot, buried and/or burnt alive--often inside their churches...in one case at least, incited by their own priest.
Granted, we have this minor little problem going on, but it's Muslims killing each other...
They did not force anyone to do anything and, moreover, the program in question was only looking at native Icelanders. Adding a non-native to that database would not only be pointless, it would defeat the purpose entirely.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1217842,00.html
Customs inspections began during the administration of GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1789 to be exact. It was the FIFTH act of Congress. You might think they all had a pretty accurate inkling of the intentions of the framers at that juncture.
Google is your friend.
/you/ being allowed into the country and /your stuff/ being allowed into the country are two very different questions. In short, YES, borders ARE exceptions and have codified as such since the Tariff Act of 1789 that established the Customs Service--and with it the authorization to search, seize and/or levy duty upon any goods crossing the border.
http://www.ice.gov/pi/dro/facilities.htm
Something doesn't smell right about all of that.
You're right that doesn't smell right, because I didn't say or imply any of it.
The bottom line is
Now, there is the problem of non-citizens when neither this country nor their own is particularly keen on letting them in. So, they have no visa, residency or citizenship for this country and their own refuses to take them back for reasons that don't particularly thrill us either. Short of a fly-over and pushing them out with a parachute, what do you think happens? Hmm? Three hots and a cot, babe.
They don't have to send you back anywhere. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate detention centers (read: prisons) around the country for people with problematic status.
So, no, there's no need to send you to Gitmo.
Who the hell thinks it's free? The states know full well the money came from their taxpayers. Most of that money goes to programs enacted and administered at the state level. Absent the federal tax intermediary or program administration, the states will just tax their citizens directly.
The majority of Americans live in states where removing the federal administration and financing of those programs will do absolutely nothing to remove the programs or the funding, it will just shift the path of the receipts and will in many cases result in a net INCREASE in cost for those states that currently receive more from Washington than they remit.
Okay, so RP is running on the purist federalist philosophy. Dandy.
Given that most of the administration in Washington is largely in the business of collecting and redistributing funding to the states with standards compliance requirements attached, does he honestly think that removing the federal component will make a stick of difference to the average American on the ground? The programs will still exist and the revenue will need to come from somewhere. I get the home-rule states' rights bit, but I rarely hear the fanbois cooing over anything but the prospect of cutting their tax bill, which isn't likely even if we burnt Washington to the ground.
How about we stop buying consuming their shit?
FTFY.
It's not like it's food, water or shelter. It's amazing how much none of this stuff really matters when you couldn't care less about the product in any form or method of delivery.
By the way -- the second best tool for knowledge capture is a cocktail napkin.
The first best tool for knowledge release is the cocktail itself.
"Just War Doctrine" does allow you to kill those who try to kill you. However, it roughly states that if someone storms in and beats your wife, while you may have warrant to blow his head off while he's in your house, you don't have warrant to nuke Manhattan because you're certain he escaped into the subway.
I've always wondered how HAL or Joshua would interpret:
Rule 1: Kill enemy combatants.
Rule 2: Do not kill or abuse prisoners.
"Take no prisoners, kill everything that moves" would be the most efficient means of satisfying both, especially after friendly-fire ensues.
We already imprison more than the Soviets ever did and more than the current Chinese regime does. In terms of regimented control under threat of loss of liberty, property and life at the barrel of a gun owing to a complacent population all too ready to watch their neighbors hauled off in shackles because, well, they must have had it coming, not playing by the rules and all. Well, it's a good thing we're only doing it to "criminals." They all had their three chances, then off for life. Who cares if the third offense was stealing a loaf of bread? They were criminals. Off with the lot of 'em.
Disturbing Hillary Clinton was interviewed about rolling back some of the more egregious sentencing guidelines and was asked why she wouldn't make it retroactive. Well, of course, then we'd have all these criminals back in our neighborhoods...
Right, so I can get MySQL Enterprise for $5k per server per year while MSSQL is $25k, plus about $8k per year for 24x7 support. So, on a five-year plan, a MySQL installation costs $416/month while a MSSQL installation costs $1083/month, or a difference of about $22/day. If an administrator can make the case that MSSQL will on average save fifteen minutes per day of his time, there's no financial incentive whatsoever. If the damned thing was free across the board, including free 24x7 support, they'd just have to justify one day per month of savings to make it even at which point any infinitesimal functional advantage or shortcoming will tip the scale.
The bottom line is that for such a critical application, the cost of staff so far dwarfs the licensing fees that the free software + paid support model can't compete unless the product is truly superior and better suited to begin with.
Hell, that should be modded +5 each Informative, Insightful and Redundant for obviousness.
Every job I've had for the last decade I've made the simple, usually accepted, case that coming to work an hour earlier costs me two to three hours of my own time, which comes out to roughly 500-800 hours of my life per year just to entertain some pointless mark on the clock and I'm not willing to write off an entire MONTH of my life every year for something wholly without purpose, much less am I willing to come in while it's still dark just because of some anachronistic farmer's pride in rising before the damned birds.
Why is this so hilariously difficult for so many people to deal with without their collective heads exploding at the thought?
The deficit is an insidious beast. It exists for the primary purpose of wealth transfer and is essentially one of the most elaborate and successful Ponzi schemes ever conceived--and, contrary to popular belief, most of the beneficiaries of this welfare program are wealthy Americans, not Chinese bureaucrats.
"A paper-cut is a tragedy. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and DIE."
--Mel Brooks
For example, you can not be arrested for walking down the street and being unable to produce your birth certificate.
But it has already been a very long time since it has been possible to be detained for not being able to produce your state ID that is based on that birth certificate. The limitations on that are so slim as to be non-existent. Probable cause? "Oh, we're looking for someone matching your description." This has happened to me numerous times. In one case, the officer was fortunate enough to be holding a mug shot I could see just enough of to actually justify the encounter, so I gladly complied. My cooperation comes with significantly less ease when the justification is less so.
I don't follow this sheepishly, but I do realize that the sky has already long since fallen and, ironically, a national ID would solve as many problems for the individual as people think it would cause.
Apart from the obvious fact that private schools exist at every level, the experience with Charter Schools has proven this to be a questionable proposition. They've simply not succeeded, much less offered any dramatic advantage.
The problem is quite simple. On average, it costs $10-15k per student year for primary and secondary education, public OR private. A family of four making $45k per year (read: the average American household), simply cannot afford to spend $30k on school. So, on the front-end, you have a choice: public, tax-supported financing or millions of hooligans in the street because their parents can't pay the school bill. Most people find the former acceptable without getting into the greater economic issues. On the other end, where the public schools are abysmal, so are the private schools. "Good" schools, public and private, happen where the community, be it wealthy parishioners or wealthy property-tax payers or both, can afford them. Crappy schools happen where the parishes and tax base CAN'T afford them. Vouchers will not change this for the better. If suddenly you made it so everyone could afford to go to St. Alban's, just as quickly, the price would adjust so that only the very few could, voucher or not.
That IS the market at work.
What people fear will be possible with this, I was doing for a living twenty years ago.
Plenty of people who use their passport as primary id for employment, entering bars, cashing checks, identifying to police officers etc. etc. Presenting that document is already equivalent to presenting all of the above. Your drivers license is already searchable nationwide and is also tied to your SSN and birth certificate. "RealID" does not present any particularly spectacular changes to the nature of the documents themselves, other than standardizing the format of the physical representation. The data behind those cards, however, is already at the point you are fearing.
I'm not naive of the implications of all of these things, I'm just saying the sky fell a very long time ago.