Japanese people already are tracked, they have been since the Sakoku period. Every Japanese person has a "koseki tohon" registered at the local office (yakuba if you're in the countryside, kuyakusho in tokyo, etc).
It records your address, family, etc etc. Whenever you do anything (get a passport, etc) you wind up interacting with your local office to prove your identity. If you move to a new area? You have two weeks to report your new address.
(It amazes me that foreigners get so uptight about it. It's the same basic system for everybody, it's just that foreigners get their own window and to fill out forms in English.)
My wife has to deal with this every time we do something, and the system is sloooooooow. Our son was just born, the US requirements were truly obnoxious (to the point that one of the window staff at the embassy didn't even understand them properly) but, once you jump through all the hopes (get your grade school to write a personalized letter swearing you're in the US for period x; etc) the passport was produced in two weeks flat.
Japanese Embassy? Very nice, very friendly, very helpful. Took two months -just- to get the kid registered in Japan under her name ("seki wo ireru"). Then they start the passport process.
You can say it's a "cultural difference"; but the fact is that they already track people, and the process is so manual as to be amazing. When we got married there was a team of three people filling out the paperwork (one guy spent a half an hour painstakingly reviewing the way she was supposed to fill out the name change request form).
Deciding to computerize the system is almost elementary.
This is, unfortunately, true.
However Mike's books are consistently balanced (I expect its one of the reasons Wizards picked him up to do their in house DnD books after they let Monte go). The balance problems in his games are one of the reasons why (one presumes) his this-is-going-to-replace-DnD Arcana Unearthed game was almost immeadiately released as a new game book and then largely been abandoned.
Still he's made his $ and he's turning it toward gifted creators who are adding to the d20 open game mechanics and that's to be respected.
Incidentally people who are "anti-d20" miss the point. The vast majority of fantasy worlds can be constructed on the back of a d20 system. Shifting around a bunch of mechanics just to be different is just a waste of time. It's a lot more valuable and interesting to have books that work -with- DnD/d20 instead of a bunch of conflicting systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Japanese people already are tracked, they have been since the Sakoku period. Every Japanese person has a "koseki tohon" registered at the local office (yakuba if you're in the countryside, kuyakusho in tokyo, etc).
It records your address, family, etc etc. Whenever you do anything (get a passport, etc) you wind up interacting with your local office to prove your identity. If you move to a new area? You have two weeks to report your new address.
(It amazes me that foreigners get so uptight about it. It's the same basic system for everybody, it's just that foreigners get their own window and to fill out forms in English.)
My wife has to deal with this every time we do something, and the system is sloooooooow. Our son was just born, the US requirements were truly obnoxious (to the point that one of the window staff at the embassy didn't even understand them properly) but, once you jump through all the hopes (get your grade school to write a personalized letter swearing you're in the US for period x; etc) the passport was produced in two weeks flat.
Japanese Embassy? Very nice, very friendly, very helpful. Took two months -just- to get the kid registered in Japan under her name ("seki wo ireru"). Then they start the passport process.
You can say it's a "cultural difference"; but the fact is that they already track people, and the process is so manual as to be amazing. When we got married there was a team of three people filling out the paperwork (one guy spent a half an hour painstakingly reviewing the way she was supposed to fill out the name change request form).
Deciding to computerize the system is almost elementary.
This is, unfortunately, true. However Mike's books are consistently balanced (I expect its one of the reasons Wizards picked him up to do their in house DnD books after they let Monte go). The balance problems in his games are one of the reasons why (one presumes) his this-is-going-to-replace-DnD Arcana Unearthed game was almost immeadiately released as a new game book and then largely been abandoned. Still he's made his $ and he's turning it toward gifted creators who are adding to the d20 open game mechanics and that's to be respected. Incidentally people who are "anti-d20" miss the point. The vast majority of fantasy worlds can be constructed on the back of a d20 system. Shifting around a bunch of mechanics just to be different is just a waste of time. It's a lot more valuable and interesting to have books that work -with- DnD/d20 instead of a bunch of conflicting systems.