I actually wonder how serious this is - of course a faked passport will not be detected by software that cannot verify the trust chain. The systems at airports can do this from what I've read.
Identity Shopping.
The process of finding a cryptographically secured ID of someone else that is "close enough" to pass visual inspection. No key swapping required.
The passport contains data - name, address, photograph (and in future fingerprints and retinal scans).
The day when real biometrics are included on passports is a long way off, and honestly I hope it never comes - but even if it does, the birthday problem will be enough to enable identity shopping.
Furthermore, rfid based passport data can be snooped from a relative distance, attempts to build a faraday cage into the cover are a colossal fail. Put a snooper in a doorframe somewhere high-traffic - like a touristy shopping area - and you can record the data of every passport that walks through, yielding thousands of potential identities to shop from every day.
Contrary to your crazy, paranoid rants on the so-called system, most business travelers aren't particularly rich and the powerful - they just care about getting from point A to point B, and they are just trying to do their jobs with the least amount of inconvenience.
You have a basic misunderstanding of set theory. The potential set of "Clear" customers includes BOTH regular joe-blow business travelers AND just about everyone in the governing class except the executive. Just because most users of "Clear" don't make the laws doesn't mean the lawmakers won't use it to escape the personal consequences of their legislative decisions.
Bugs2squash's response to your original post summed it up perfectly:
The fact that a scheme like Clear's is so useful is a red flag that the rest of the system is incompetent.
I guess it's just a coincidence (or crazy random happenstance - DrHorrible) that both marriage and procreation require a man and woman. What are the chances of that?
Bzzzzzt! Marriage was about assets and alliances long before it was about anything else, children were just a side-effect. Hell, even today half the world still works on the arranged marriage model. Procreation sure as FUCK doesn't require marriage.
But what's really funny about your response is how you ignored the fact that anti-discrimination laws have been on the books for decades now. The laws were passed by the elected representatives, just as you stated they ought to be. The deal was done many years ago.
This whole 'Clear' thing is bullshit. Its a bad solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
If you buy the story that all the airport security that results in thousands standing around waiting to get to their gates is both necessary and effective then you must question any program that claims to pre-screen anyone because that just opens a window of opportunity between the pre-screen and the actual boarding of the flight in which the pre-screened person can be compromised in any number of ways.
It all comes back to the problem that there is no such thing as "the evil bit" - and any system which tries to make up for that by using some other combination of 'bits' as a proxy for the non-existent 'evil bit' is just a house of cards built on a non-existent foundation.
Even if you take Bruce Schneier's view that Clear is a good thing - not for the pre-screen, but because of the open-market approach to airport security which lets people pay more in exchange for a guaranteed short processing time - its still bullshit. That's because the rich and the powerful - the idiots who make the laws that created the TSA and their time/money wasting policies will be able to avoid having to suffer the consequences of their own actions. They can just pay a few hundred dollars more and never suffer the crap that they dumped on all the plebes.
Congress already exempts itself from too many of the laws its passes (no social security, they have their own program, no anti-discrimination in hiring laws on the hill, etc) they should not be able to get another free pass on suffering the effects of creating the TSA.
Are you a lawyer? I suppose a lawyer might argue that it's ok to censor a blog because it's on the internet, and your right to free speech (written in the 18th century) doesn't 'explicitly' say internet. But the 'spirit of the law' is that the government may not abridge your free speech whether it be on a soap box, newspaper, radio, tv, internet blog, or any future method. It is not possible to be infinitely 'explicit'.
Dude, you are insane. seriously. First you argue that we shouldn't change laws that don't exist. Then you claim we shouldn't change the spirit of the law. Except your analogy is seriously flawed because ALL of the court rulings for gay marriage have been based on actual laws that say no discrimination based on gender. Its only now that people have started to realize the full scope of those laws.
Let's be reasonable, civilizations worldwide haven't had a problem with the definition for thousands of years, but you do? Just how 'explicit' would you require it to be? Full color pictures of a penis entering a vagina with an internal camera to explicitly show conception?
Woah!! Did you just try to pull out the marriage is for procreation argument? Puhlease. History is against you on that one.
In many places, judges are 'redefining' marriage from Husband & Wife, to Partner A & Partner B. If you just felt a knee-jerk reaction on this one, take a second to think about it. If you really cared about homosexual marriage, then you should go about it in the correct manner.
The thing is, most such laws originally on the books don't explicitly specify man and woman to begin with - note the bazillion local movements to pass new laws that do explicitly specify one man and one woman. Those new laws would not be necessary if the original laws had been explicit to begin with.
When companies post announcements via third party media, those announcements are presumably archived. I wonder what the impacts would be of blog-disclosures being retracted or edited after the fact, Ministry of Truth-style?
The SEC already serves as a repository of a variety of official communications from all listed companies. Seems to me they are the logical candidate for a centralized clearinghouse of all disclosures. Sure, let the companies post it wherever else they want too, but require them to first send a copy to the SEC who will archive it and put it up for public access ASAP. Make the copy on file with the SEC the official record and leave it at that.
It sure beats the problems that come with 'self auditing' like in this new proposal and it also means we don't have to pay someone (or more likely someones) to run a spider that hits all the websites and blogs of all the listed companies every 30 seconds in order to get newly released info.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen, if and when we can ever get people to Mars. If this is indeed the case, then YES, this is exciting news, a whole lot more important than why Mars is red, and is on the level of the sort of thing that the President might want to know about.
However, this particular president is not interested in that. As an oxidizer is an essential component of a bomb, NASA briefed him so that he could declare Mars a "red level" terrorist threat due to the significant amounts of WMDs that could be manufactured there. Plans to liberate Mars are already in the works.
This UN document describes how after the occupation of the west bank in 1967, the standard of living increased for the Palestinians living there.
The document describes things like increased GNP, decreased infant mortality, increased investment, and other increases in standard of living from 1967 until 1984.
Well that document is immediately suspect due to the source - which wasn't the UN. Maybe it is all true, or maybe it just PR telling only the half of the story which legitimizes the occupation. It certainly does not start out well, citing misleading statistics by saying, "GNP increased 3-fold (Israel's GNP Increased only 1.4-fold in the same period)" -- which ignores the difference in absolute values, numbers which a quick text search of the rest of the document does not yield. A GNP increase of 3x during the period of occupation by a neighbor with a GNP at least 40x times greater which is also 10x richer on a per-person basis is probably inevitable. How much better would they have done without the occupation but still with the closest neighbor having so much wealth?
The whole touring live show is superfluous and exhausting, and it's not related to the process of music composition.
Yep - composition and performance are two different things. Of course as an electronica guy you are a teeny-tiny minority where performance can be automated. You could take a cue from the other guys and make performing more than just about music playback - put some hot chicks on stage to dance, you could even use that projector to project images and video on to the bodies of the hot chicks.
I've never heard of them. A quick Google search turns up nothing either.
I think all that shows is your lack of skill with google. I found them with the first search I did - just the two words 'calypso' and 'brazil.' It looks like 27 of the first 30 hits are for "Banda Calypso." Similarly, searching for "banda" and "Calypso" looks like at least the first 50 out of 50 hits are for the same group. Presumably 'banda' is portuguese for 'band' and so anyone from brazil would probably search using those terms too, just as you searched for "calypso band."
that goes against google's core principle of hoarding as much data as possible
Google sells a server you can drop in to index your internal corporate network, dropping in a similar apps server doesn't seem any different from a 'data hoarding' perspective.
It is not a one-dimensional comparison. Just because the level is not the same, does not mean there are not similarities in kind.
No, it's a ludicrous comparison. You might as well say that the person who flipped you off on the highway was like the Nazis. The Nazis killed millions of people simply because they believed that they were of an inferior race. Israel killed.. how many? Thousands? Tens of thousands, since 1948? And that was while fighting against people who were trying to destroy it.
Please explain to me how your response addresses anything beyond 'the level is not the same?' I point out that numbers are not the only basis for comparison and all you do is come back with... numbers. Do you think that was a rational response?
You have to be a hardcore holocaust denier to claim that the Nazis' genocidal campaign comes close to the tiny regional conflict between Israel and Palestine
Uh, no. You have a real misunderstanding of cause and effect. Just because you think you found that a bunch of deniers in russia also made the comparison does not mean deniers are the only people to come up with the comparison. You've basically just done the same thing as say, "you have to be a hardcore anti-semite to criticize israeli policies."
You have to be incredibly ignorant (or incredibly biased) to claim that human rights in Israel are as bad as they were in Nazi Germany.
It is not a one-dimensional comparison. Just because the level is not the same, does not mean there are not similarities in kind.
comparing people to the people who killed 'em is kind of tasteless.
But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
After all, Nietzsche, that nazi-enabler, said: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. For if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Which is a generic admonition of essentially the same thing and few if any people fault him for it.
When I first learned of what was going on in palestine I really could not reconcile it with what I had been taught in history class (still can't actually) it seemed to me that the two countries most likely to have empathy for palestinians were the ones with the least - the USA (because of all the propaganda about freedom, self-determination, etc) and Israel because of their recent experience at the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful force. Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
To further mix metaphors its like palestine is the weimar republic after WWI - they lost the war and israel is determined to exact unrealistic penalties from them, thus making them an ideal breeding ground for continuation of the conflict. When they ought to be taking a cue from the way the Allied powers handled the situation with the Axis countries after WWII.
Conan Doyle didn't have to explain what a license plate was or what use a detective could make it
No duh - you are SUPPORTING the OP's premise. Its obvious that license plates are a mechanism to violate the 4th amendment to fricking EVERYBODY, that's why he didn't have to explain what use a detective would make of it.
In 1738 Benjamin Franklin began a campaign to reform and - in a sense - to professionalize the night watch in Philadelphia. The Life of Benjamin Franklin
In the colonial era any notion you might have had that you could use the public roads anonymously would have been dispelled very quickly.
Societies forged on the frontiers of civilization simply don't think that way.
So horses had plates too, eh? Are you familiar with the phrase, "Papers, please!"
The US Constitution doesn't restrict an individuals rights to ANYTHING.
That would be false. The constitution specifically defines where and under what circumstances the state can impinge on the rights of citizens and residents - that's its sole purpose. Everything else not defined by the constitution is a right reserved to the people, ergo driving is a right.
You might want to go learn a little more about how the government and laws work before you make baseless statements regarding the US Constitution.
The idea that an enormous multi-national corporation would be so careless as to unknowingly name their flagship product "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is just absurd on it's face. Do you have any idea how much time, effort, care, and money goes into the branding of a product like that?
Well, back in early 1900s when coca-cola was first distributed in asia they weren't quite so much the enormous multi-national corporation then as they are now.
When you put the last two characters together it just means cola. It is a transliteration
Might want to look up homophones for "lê" (happy) like "la" which means wax and is actually closer to the western pronunciation of cola than "lê"
Good thing Verizon hasn't expanded its monopoly across the pond to the UK yet, else the entire town of Scunthrope would be blocked from the net. For the children's sake, of course!
Travelling is not ONLY done by car, but can be done by foot, helicopter, bicycle, bus, hack, horseback, train, dirigible, truck, airplane, donkey, riverboat, section-car, lorry, goat carriage, jitney, pogo-stick or stage coach.
And yet none of those methods of travel were restricted in the constitution either. So your point is moot.
That, my friend, is a circular argument -- It's a privilege because you have a bunch of rules to follow else you won't be permitted to exercise your privilege.
Freedom of travel is a right and the constitution does not contain any language restricting it. Just because a lot of bureaucrats have tried to usurp that right and a lot of sheeple have accepted it, does not mean it still isn't a right.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles [1902] by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Ok, what's your point? That's a story of fiction. You aren't trying to argue that a fictional story was somehow the impetus for license plates, are you?
The first guy said they were pushed as a tool to circumvent 4th Amendment issues, making law enforcement easier at the expense of constitutional freedoms. You cite a fictional story and then a bunch of modern news stories where license plates have played a part in solving the crime - but so what? That's the guy's point - they make law enforcements job easier by sacrificing our freedom, this theme is very common in any modern society.
The policeman is first and last the successor to the watchman in the night. He needs to know who is out there. He needs to move quickly sometimes.
Well, points for being poetic, but no points for disputing how license tags are not an abrogation of the 4th amendment.
As to making money with patronage -- who needs an escrow account?
For large projects, its probably required. For example, it costs roughly $5M per episode for a top-line television show. Projects on that scale need risk mitigation and having all or at least a significant proportion of the profits "locked in" ahead of time is the best form of risk mitigation there is. One of the problems with the current hollywood system is the massive fear of financial risk leading to crappy lowest-common-denominator sequels, without that fear the creators would have a lot more freedom to take more artistic risks.
I'm not saying escrowed release is the one and only way to do business in a world of a billion free copies, but it addresses certain important problems for some common scenarios.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually wonder how serious this is - of course a faked passport will not be detected by software that cannot verify the trust chain. The systems at airports can do this from what I've read.
Identity Shopping.
The process of finding a cryptographically secured ID of someone else that is "close enough" to pass visual inspection. No key swapping required.
The passport contains data - name, address, photograph (and in future fingerprints and retinal scans).
The day when real biometrics are included on passports is a long way off, and honestly I hope it never comes - but even if it does, the birthday problem will be enough to enable identity shopping.
Furthermore, rfid based passport data can be snooped from a relative distance, attempts to build a faraday cage into the cover are a colossal fail. Put a snooper in a doorframe somewhere high-traffic - like a touristy shopping area - and you can record the data of every passport that walks through, yielding thousands of potential identities to shop from every day.
Contrary to your crazy, paranoid rants on the so-called system, most business travelers aren't particularly rich and the powerful - they just care about getting from point A to point B, and they are just trying to do their jobs with the least amount of inconvenience.
You have a basic misunderstanding of set theory. The potential set of "Clear" customers includes BOTH regular joe-blow business travelers AND just about everyone in the governing class except the executive. Just because most users of "Clear" don't make the laws doesn't mean the lawmakers won't use it to escape the personal consequences of their legislative decisions.
Bugs2squash's response to your original post summed it up perfectly:
The fact that a scheme like Clear's is so useful is a red flag that the rest of the system is incompetent.
I guess it's just a coincidence (or crazy random happenstance - DrHorrible) that both marriage and procreation require a man and woman. What are the chances of that?
Bzzzzzt! Marriage was about assets and alliances long before it was about anything else, children were just a side-effect. Hell, even today half the world still works on the arranged marriage model. Procreation sure as FUCK doesn't require marriage.
But what's really funny about your response is how you ignored the fact that anti-discrimination laws have been on the books for decades now. The laws were passed by the elected representatives, just as you stated they ought to be. The deal was done many years ago.
This whole 'Clear' thing is bullshit. Its a bad solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
If you buy the story that all the airport security that results in thousands standing around waiting to get to their gates is both necessary and effective then you must question any program that claims to pre-screen anyone because that just opens a window of opportunity between the pre-screen and the actual boarding of the flight in which the pre-screened person can be compromised in any number of ways.
It all comes back to the problem that there is no such thing as "the evil bit" - and any system which tries to make up for that by using some other combination of 'bits' as a proxy for the non-existent 'evil bit' is just a house of cards built on a non-existent foundation.
Even if you take Bruce Schneier's view that Clear is a good thing - not for the pre-screen, but because of the open-market approach to airport security which lets people pay more in exchange for a guaranteed short processing time - its still bullshit. That's because the rich and the powerful - the idiots who make the laws that created the TSA and their time/money wasting policies will be able to avoid having to suffer the consequences of their own actions. They can just pay a few hundred dollars more and never suffer the crap that they dumped on all the plebes.
Congress already exempts itself from too many of the laws its passes (no social security, they have their own program, no anti-discrimination in hiring laws on the hill, etc) they should not be able to get another free pass on suffering the effects of creating the TSA.
Are you a lawyer?
I suppose a lawyer might argue that it's ok to censor a blog because it's on the internet, and your right to free speech (written in the 18th century) doesn't 'explicitly' say internet. But the 'spirit of the law' is that the government may not abridge your free speech whether it be on a soap box, newspaper, radio, tv, internet blog, or any future method. It is not possible to be infinitely 'explicit'.
Dude, you are insane. seriously. First you argue that we shouldn't change laws that don't exist. Then you claim we shouldn't change the spirit of the law. Except your analogy is seriously flawed because ALL of the court rulings for gay marriage have been based on actual laws that say no discrimination based on gender. Its only now that people have started to realize the full scope of those laws.
Let's be reasonable, civilizations worldwide haven't had a problem with the definition for thousands of years, but you do? Just how 'explicit' would you require it to be? Full color pictures of a penis entering a vagina with an internal camera to explicitly show conception?
Woah!! Did you just try to pull out the marriage is for procreation argument? Puhlease. History is against you on that one.
In many places, judges are 'redefining' marriage from Husband & Wife, to Partner A & Partner B. If you just felt a knee-jerk reaction on this one, take a second to think about it. If you really cared about homosexual marriage, then you should go about it in the correct manner.
The thing is, most such laws originally on the books don't explicitly specify man and woman to begin with - note the bazillion local movements to pass new laws that do explicitly specify one man and one woman. Those new laws would not be necessary if the original laws had been explicit to begin with.
When companies post announcements via third party media, those announcements are presumably archived. I wonder what the impacts would be of blog-disclosures being retracted or edited after the fact, Ministry of Truth-style?
The SEC already serves as a repository of a variety of official communications from all listed companies. Seems to me they are the logical candidate for a centralized clearinghouse of all disclosures. Sure, let the companies post it wherever else they want too, but require them to first send a copy to the SEC who will archive it and put it up for public access ASAP. Make the copy on file with the SEC the official record and leave it at that.
It sure beats the problems that come with 'self auditing' like in this new proposal and it also means we don't have to pay someone (or more likely someones) to run a spider that hits all the websites and blogs of all the listed companies every 30 seconds in order to get newly released info.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen, if and when we can ever get people to Mars. If this is indeed the case, then YES, this is exciting news, a whole lot more important than why Mars is red, and is on the level of the sort of thing that the President might want to know about.
However, this particular president is not interested in that. As an oxidizer is an essential component of a bomb, NASA briefed him so that he could declare Mars a "red level" terrorist threat due to the significant amounts of WMDs that could be manufactured there. Plans to liberate Mars are already in the works.
This UN document describes how after the occupation of the west bank in 1967, the standard of living increased for the Palestinians living there.
The document describes things like increased GNP, decreased infant mortality, increased investment, and other increases in standard of living from 1967 until 1984.
Well that document is immediately suspect due to the source - which wasn't the UN. Maybe it is all true, or maybe it just PR telling only the half of the story which legitimizes the occupation. It certainly does not start out well, citing misleading statistics by saying, "GNP increased 3-fold (Israel's GNP Increased only 1.4-fold in the same period)" -- which ignores the difference in absolute values, numbers which a quick text search of the rest of the document does not yield. A GNP increase of 3x during the period of occupation by a neighbor with a GNP at least 40x times greater which is also 10x richer on a per-person basis is probably inevitable. How much better would they have done without the occupation but still with the closest neighbor having so much wealth?
The whole touring live show is superfluous and exhausting, and it's not related to the process of music composition.
Yep - composition and performance are two different things.
Of course as an electronica guy you are a teeny-tiny minority where performance can be automated.
You could take a cue from the other guys and make performing more than just about music playback - put some hot chicks on stage to dance, you could even use that projector to project images and video on to the bodies of the hot chicks.
I've never heard of them. A quick Google search turns up nothing either.
I think all that shows is your lack of skill with google. I found them with the first search I did - just the two words 'calypso' and 'brazil.' It looks like 27 of the first 30 hits are for "Banda Calypso." Similarly, searching for "banda" and "Calypso" looks like at least the first 50 out of 50 hits are for the same group. Presumably 'banda' is portuguese for 'band' and so anyone from brazil would probably search using those terms too, just as you searched for "calypso band."
that goes against google's core principle of hoarding as much data as possible
Google sells a server you can drop in to index your internal corporate network, dropping in a similar apps server doesn't seem any different from a 'data hoarding' perspective.
It is not a one-dimensional comparison. Just because the level is not the same, does not mean there are not similarities in kind.
No, it's a ludicrous comparison. You might as well say that the person who flipped you off on the highway was like the Nazis. The Nazis killed millions of people simply because they believed that they were of an inferior race. Israel killed.. how many? Thousands? Tens of thousands, since 1948? And that was while fighting against people who were trying to destroy it.
Please explain to me how your response addresses anything beyond 'the level is not the same?' I point out that numbers are not the only basis for comparison and all you do is come back with ... numbers. Do you think that was a rational response?
You have to be a hardcore holocaust denier to claim that the Nazis' genocidal campaign comes close to the tiny regional conflict between Israel and Palestine
Uh, no. You have a real misunderstanding of cause and effect. Just because you think you found that a bunch of deniers in russia also made the comparison does not mean deniers are the only people to come up with the comparison. You've basically just done the same thing as say, "you have to be a hardcore anti-semite to criticize israeli policies."
You have to be incredibly ignorant (or incredibly biased) to claim that human rights in Israel are as bad as they were in Nazi Germany.
It is not a one-dimensional comparison. Just because the level is not the same, does not mean there are not similarities in kind.
comparing people to the people who killed 'em is kind of tasteless.
But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
After all, Nietzsche, that nazi-enabler, said: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. For if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Which is a generic admonition of essentially the same thing and few if any people fault him for it.
When I first learned of what was going on in palestine I really could not reconcile it with what I had been taught in history class (still can't actually) it seemed to me that the two countries most likely to have empathy for palestinians were the ones with the least - the USA (because of all the propaganda about freedom, self-determination, etc) and Israel because of their recent experience at the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful force. Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
To further mix metaphors its like palestine is the weimar republic after WWI - they lost the war and israel is determined to exact unrealistic penalties from them, thus making them an ideal breeding ground for continuation of the conflict. When they ought to be taking a cue from the way the Allied powers handled the situation with the Axis countries after WWII.
Conan Doyle didn't have to explain what a license plate was or what use a detective could make it
No duh - you are SUPPORTING the OP's premise. Its obvious that license plates are a mechanism to violate the 4th amendment to fricking EVERYBODY, that's why he didn't have to explain what use a detective would make of it.
In 1738 Benjamin Franklin began a campaign to reform and - in a sense - to professionalize the night watch in Philadelphia. The Life of Benjamin Franklin
In the colonial era any notion you might have had that you could use the public roads anonymously would have been dispelled very quickly.
Societies forged on the frontiers of civilization simply don't think that way.
So horses had plates too, eh? Are you familiar with the phrase, "Papers, please!"
The US Constitution doesn't restrict an individuals rights to ANYTHING.
That would be false. The constitution specifically defines where and under what circumstances the state can impinge on the rights of citizens and residents - that's its sole purpose. Everything else not defined by the constitution is a right reserved to the people, ergo driving is a right.
You might want to go learn a little more about how the government and laws work before you make baseless statements regarding the US Constitution.
Yeah, right.
Monopoly -- I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I'm pretty sure that I know what it means far better than you do.
Hint, there is more than one definition.
Beijing have supposedly removed dog off the menus for the duration of the Games.
In Korea they 'permanently' solved the problem by forbidding restaurants that serve dog from using English to advertise the menu option at all.
The idea that an enormous multi-national corporation would be so careless as to unknowingly name their flagship product "Bite the Wax Tadpole" is just absurd on it's face. Do you have any idea how much time, effort, care, and money goes into the branding of a product like that?
Well, back in early 1900s when coca-cola was first distributed in asia they weren't quite so much the enormous multi-national corporation then as they are now.
When you put the last two characters together it just means cola. It is a transliteration
Might want to look up homophones for "lê" (happy) like "la" which means wax and is actually closer to the western pronunciation of cola than "lê"
Good thing Verizon hasn't expanded its monopoly across the pond to the UK yet, else the entire town of Scunthrope would be blocked from the net. For the children's sake, of course!
Travelling is not ONLY done by car, but can be done by foot, helicopter, bicycle, bus, hack, horseback, train, dirigible, truck, airplane, donkey, riverboat, section-car, lorry, goat carriage, jitney, pogo-stick or stage coach.
And yet none of those methods of travel were restricted in the constitution either. So your point is moot.
That, my friend, is a circular argument -- It's a privilege because you have a bunch of rules to follow else you won't be permitted to exercise your privilege.
Freedom of travel is a right and the constitution does not contain any language restricting it. Just because a lot of bureaucrats have tried to usurp that right and a lot of sheeple have accepted it, does not mean it still isn't a right.
The history of the license plate:
In The Hound of the Baskervilles [1902] by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Ok, what's your point? That's a story of fiction. You aren't trying to argue that a fictional story was somehow the impetus for license plates, are you?
The first guy said they were pushed as a tool to circumvent 4th Amendment issues, making law enforcement easier at the expense of constitutional freedoms. You cite a fictional story and then a bunch of modern news stories where license plates have played a part in solving the crime - but so what? That's the guy's point - they make law enforcements job easier by sacrificing our freedom, this theme is very common in any modern society.
The policeman is first and last the successor to the watchman in the night. He needs to know who is out there. He needs to move quickly sometimes.
Well, points for being poetic, but no points for disputing how license tags are not an abrogation of the 4th amendment.
As to making money with patronage -- who needs an escrow account?
For large projects, its probably required. For example, it costs roughly $5M per episode for a top-line television show. Projects on that scale need risk mitigation and having all or at least a significant proportion of the profits "locked in" ahead of time is the best form of risk mitigation there is. One of the problems with the current hollywood system is the massive fear of financial risk leading to crappy lowest-common-denominator sequels, without that fear the creators would have a lot more freedom to take more artistic risks.
I'm not saying escrowed release is the one and only way to do business in a world of a billion free copies, but it addresses certain important problems for some common scenarios.