The point of picture id's is not to create a foolproof system, that is not possible, it's just to make it reasonably hard to steal somebody's identity. Having to show up somewhere and have your id scrutinized is a lot harder for a thief than sitting in front of a computer somewhere in the world.
Being told to ignore the picture on a picture id but still require it sounds just a tad stupid to me. Bouncers compare pictures to faces every night with reasonable success. Same goes for the police during traffic stops. Of course I can't speak about the motivation and goals of the people who so instructed you.
As for the PayPal issue, I think you missed my point. You would be required to show up to open an account, that was the point of the first part of the post. The real benefit of the PayPal system is that you log in to authorize each individual payment, that way your card can't be charged by just anyone that happens to have come across the card number, thereby taking care of the "public secret" problem. The problem you describe would be taken care of by the showing up part.
As for those logins, a smart card of some variety with some sort of key would probably be a good idea. If your grandmother is able to do business online, I'm sure she could learn to deal with a keycard as well. Sometime in the past people didn't have locks on their houses/caves/huts/whatever, unfortunately it's necessary now, regardless of what grandmothers in the past felt. Just because your grandma might not like something doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. I still love my grandmothers...
Any information you are routinly asked to give up can not be considered secret. The problem with the SSN's is not that they get stolen, the problem is that they are useful to the thief. The idea that knowledge of a "secret" number entitles you to enter into financial obligations is simply insane. Adding other "secret" information to add further "safety", like mother's maiden name or place of birth, does very little to improve the situation and those extra pieces of information are likely to become available to the thief at the same time as the SSN's, from the same database.
The only reason you are able to get into debt just by knowing your SSN is that it suits the lenders. They can be based in one state but do business in all of the states, through mail, internet and telephone. They have then managed to make it your problem that they give money to someone pretending to be you, sticking you with the problem of clearing up the credit reports they use to decide if you are trustworthy and doing what you have to do to get out from under the debt. Basically the lenders punish you for them (the lenders) giving money to someone pretending to be you. (Yes, I know that sentence is twisted, it's a really twisted system). This is an outrageously good deal for them and they have no incentive to fix the system, at least not until the amount of fraudulent loans is more than the money saved by not implementing a secure system.
The solution is painfully obvious. When you apply for a credit card or enter into any contract, you should have to show your face and acceptable forms of id, either at an office of the lender or at a mutually trusted proxy. The proxy could perhaps be the closest USPS office. This proposed system is naturally not totally foolproof, no system can be, but it's a heck of a lot better than the current one. It's a lot more work to falsify id's than it is to harvest SSN's and the chance of capture is much higher. As there's no indication the lending business will self-regulate this, and it's really too big and diverse to ensure self-regulation, this will have to be implemented by laws.
It's really incomprehensible to me that party A stealing my SSN from party B and using it to get money from party C becomes my problem. It should be the problem of party C that gave money to someone without bothering to make sure he was who he said he was.
Making it a bit more work to get more credit cards is really not a bad thing either, most people have too many and practically everyone has too much credit card debt.
While we're at it, we can stop pretending that credit card numbers are secret. That problem has already been solved, the banks just need to implement a system like PayPal, where you sign in and ok each transaction. Again, painfully simple.
The word the parent is looking for is, I believe, oligopoly, defined by dictionary.com as "A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors." You can also look it up on Wikipedia if you care to.
While not as bad as monopoly, it's still a problem, at least if you are a consumer. Voting with your wallet in an oligopoly is not very effective, as the choices are all practically the same.
Monopolies and oligopolies are really capitalism gone wrong. While capitalism is the best system, it needs a firm framework, otherwise you end up with a handful of companies running the show. In that situation they care little about the customers, but focus instead on the CEO's compensation. At the same time they are entrenched, rich and powerful enough to keep out any newcomers, thus maintaining the status quo. This is especially true where the threshold to play is very high, such as in the phone business, excluding voip.
<sarcasm>Finally, I knew there was a reason that annoying Verizon guy in the ads is never shown inside people's houses, of course you shouldn't imagine you could cancel your landline and simply use a cell. Everyone knows cell phones don't work inside private residences.</sarcasm>
When I see a 120 minute movie playing on network TV and taking 3 hours from start to finish, I will not watch it. Stuffing 20 minutes of ads into each hour of broadcast shows major contempt for the viewer, especially when the same boring ads get repeated, within the same adbreak and sometimes even in sequence. Until I get a MythTV box built, I'll simply not watch TV. How long building that box is taking me really says something about how bad the 40 minutes of content per hour really are.
The same holds true for radio. I don't listen to radio (except for NPR) because it seems it has more ads than content.
And to add insult to injury, when I go to the movies I have to watch ads, and not just ads for upcoming movies either. Newsflash: There were already too many ads (trailers) before movies, we needed less, not more.
It all boils down to marketers putting too little value on our time. Instead of having 20 minutes of ads per hour and running each ad 8 times each hour, they should have 10 minutes of ads and run each one 4 times. How would they make up the loss you ask? Simple, charge twice as much. Less supply, more demand, higher price. I would actually see more ads, because TV would become wathable again.
I don't object to the model of watching ads to get free content, I object to the blatant disregard for my time that's evident by the amount of ads, especially duplicate ads. When I'm paying for the time, think DVDs, movie theatres and premium cable channels, I expect to see no ads.
As for the web, I resisted installing adblockers at first. Then I installed them to block out doubleclick and annoying ads. Eventually, chasing after the annoying ads one by one became too time consuming, so I added filters that block most ads (not Google text ads). I don't feel it's my duty to see the ads, but if they aren't annoying I'd like to help support the site. Problem is, 95% of them are annoying and it's too hard to tune the filters to allow the remaining 5%. I don't feel like a bad person for doing this. If there was an easy way to see only non-annoying ads (think no movement, no sound and certainly no Flash) I would use it. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to do this, so I block them all.
Slashdot is nice and all, but it's really just a bulletin board. We all know the editors don't even catch the dupes and there's very little content creation. It's mostly just users submitting stories and users discussing those stories. Don't misunderstand me, that's fine and is all the site has ever claimed to be.
However, this means that the true value of the site is the users, without the users Slashdot wouldn't be worth much, and there's (hopefully) minimal cost for content creation. Hence the money collected from ads and subscription is probably going mostly to upkeep of the site and servers.
Now, it may just be me, but the estimated $28.5 million per year, plus whatever is collected in subscriptions, seems just a tad high for keeping a few servers connected to the internet and running smoothly, even if they do run very smoothly for the most part.
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The point of picture id's is not to create a foolproof system, that is not possible, it's just to make it reasonably hard to steal somebody's identity. Having to show up somewhere and have your id scrutinized is a lot harder for a thief than sitting in front of a computer somewhere in the world.
Being told to ignore the picture on a picture id but still require it sounds just a tad stupid to me. Bouncers compare pictures to faces every night with reasonable success. Same goes for the police during traffic stops. Of course I can't speak about the motivation and goals of the people who so instructed you.
As for the PayPal issue, I think you missed my point. You would be required to show up to open an account, that was the point of the first part of the post. The real benefit of the PayPal system is that you log in to authorize each individual payment, that way your card can't be charged by just anyone that happens to have come across the card number, thereby taking care of the "public secret" problem. The problem you describe would be taken care of by the showing up part.
As for those logins, a smart card of some variety with some sort of key would probably be a good idea. If your grandmother is able to do business online, I'm sure she could learn to deal with a keycard as well. Sometime in the past people didn't have locks on their houses/caves/huts/whatever, unfortunately it's necessary now, regardless of what grandmothers in the past felt. Just because your grandma might not like something doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. I still love my grandmothers...
Any information you are routinly asked to give up can not be considered secret. The problem with the SSN's is not that they get stolen, the problem is that they are useful to the thief. The idea that knowledge of a "secret" number entitles you to enter into financial obligations is simply insane. Adding other "secret" information to add further "safety", like mother's maiden name or place of birth, does very little to improve the situation and those extra pieces of information are likely to become available to the thief at the same time as the SSN's, from the same database.
The only reason you are able to get into debt just by knowing your SSN is that it suits the lenders. They can be based in one state but do business in all of the states, through mail, internet and telephone. They have then managed to make it your problem that they give money to someone pretending to be you, sticking you with the problem of clearing up the credit reports they use to decide if you are trustworthy and doing what you have to do to get out from under the debt. Basically the lenders punish you for them (the lenders) giving money to someone pretending to be you. (Yes, I know that sentence is twisted, it's a really twisted system). This is an outrageously good deal for them and they have no incentive to fix the system, at least not until the amount of fraudulent loans is more than the money saved by not implementing a secure system.
The solution is painfully obvious. When you apply for a credit card or enter into any contract, you should have to show your face and acceptable forms of id, either at an office of the lender or at a mutually trusted proxy. The proxy could perhaps be the closest USPS office. This proposed system is naturally not totally foolproof, no system can be, but it's a heck of a lot better than the current one. It's a lot more work to falsify id's than it is to harvest SSN's and the chance of capture is much higher. As there's no indication the lending business will self-regulate this, and it's really too big and diverse to ensure self-regulation, this will have to be implemented by laws.
It's really incomprehensible to me that party A stealing my SSN from party B and using it to get money from party C becomes my problem. It should be the problem of party C that gave money to someone without bothering to make sure he was who he said he was.
Making it a bit more work to get more credit cards is really not a bad thing either, most people have too many and practically everyone has too much credit card debt.
While we're at it, we can stop pretending that credit card numbers are secret. That problem has already been solved, the banks just need to implement a system like PayPal, where you sign in and ok each transaction. Again, painfully simple.
The word the parent is looking for is, I believe, oligopoly, defined by dictionary.com as "A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors." You can also look it up on Wikipedia if you care to.
While not as bad as monopoly, it's still a problem, at least if you are a consumer. Voting with your wallet in an oligopoly is not very effective, as the choices are all practically the same.
Monopolies and oligopolies are really capitalism gone wrong. While capitalism is the best system, it needs a firm framework, otherwise you end up with a handful of companies running the show. In that situation they care little about the customers, but focus instead on the CEO's compensation. At the same time they are entrenched, rich and powerful enough to keep out any newcomers, thus maintaining the status quo. This is especially true where the threshold to play is very high, such as in the phone business, excluding voip.
<sarcasm>Finally, I knew there was a reason that annoying Verizon guy in the ads is never shown inside people's houses, of course you shouldn't imagine you could cancel your landline and simply use a cell. Everyone knows cell phones don't work inside private residences.</sarcasm>
When I see a 120 minute movie playing on network TV and taking 3 hours from start to finish, I will not watch it. Stuffing 20 minutes of ads into each hour of broadcast shows major contempt for the viewer, especially when the same boring ads get repeated, within the same adbreak and sometimes even in sequence. Until I get a MythTV box built, I'll simply not watch TV. How long building that box is taking me really says something about how bad the 40 minutes of content per hour really are.
The same holds true for radio. I don't listen to radio (except for NPR) because it seems it has more ads than content.
And to add insult to injury, when I go to the movies I have to watch ads, and not just ads for upcoming movies either. Newsflash: There were already too many ads (trailers) before movies, we needed less, not more.
It all boils down to marketers putting too little value on our time. Instead of having 20 minutes of ads per hour and running each ad 8 times each hour, they should have 10 minutes of ads and run each one 4 times. How would they make up the loss you ask? Simple, charge twice as much. Less supply, more demand, higher price. I would actually see more ads, because TV would become wathable again.
I don't object to the model of watching ads to get free content, I object to the blatant disregard for my time that's evident by the amount of ads, especially duplicate ads. When I'm paying for the time, think DVDs, movie theatres and premium cable channels, I expect to see no ads.
As for the web, I resisted installing adblockers at first. Then I installed them to block out doubleclick and annoying ads. Eventually, chasing after the annoying ads one by one became too time consuming, so I added filters that block most ads (not Google text ads). I don't feel it's my duty to see the ads, but if they aren't annoying I'd like to help support the site. Problem is, 95% of them are annoying and it's too hard to tune the filters to allow the remaining 5%. I don't feel like a bad person for doing this. If there was an easy way to see only non-annoying ads (think no movement, no sound and certainly no Flash) I would use it. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to do this, so I block them all.
Slashdot is nice and all, but it's really just a bulletin board. We all know the editors don't even catch the dupes and there's very little content creation. It's mostly just users submitting stories and users discussing those stories. Don't misunderstand me, that's fine and is all the site has ever claimed to be.
However, this means that the true value of the site is the users, without the users Slashdot wouldn't be worth much, and there's (hopefully) minimal cost for content creation. Hence the money collected from ads and subscription is probably going mostly to upkeep of the site and servers.
Now, it may just be me, but the estimated $28.5 million per year, plus whatever is collected in subscriptions, seems just a tad high for keeping a few servers connected to the internet and running smoothly, even if they do run very smoothly for the most part.