William Safire does a very good job ofsumming up my concerns of a National ID card. It’s just too easy for it to become so much of a hassle dealing with folks that I’d like to do business with but really don’t see a need for them to collect all the personal information that they want to collect to enter into a business relationship with. As Mr. Safire so astutely points out:

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Hospitals would say: How about a chip providing a complete medical history in case of emergencies? Merchants would add a chip for credit rating, bank accounts and product preferences, while divorced spouses would lobby for a rundown of net assets and yearly expenditures. Politicians would like to know voting records and political affiliation. Cops, of course, would insist on a record of arrests, speeding tickets, E-Z pass auto movements and links to suspicious Web sites and associates.

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I have enough problems dealing with Radio Shack on a cash basis and their demanding my name address and phone number. I’ve even had the local water utility demanding my social security number in order for me to buy water from them, this after already having a 15 year long relationship with them. (They didn’t get it, by the way, and they are supplying me with water)

It is hard enough to maintain personal information private with people having to ask you for the information, think how impossible it will be to control access when all the information resides in your “smart” National ID card. There will be legitimate reasons for others to require being shown your card without having legitimate reasons to have access to all the information that it contains. Sure, it will be possible to limit what access they do have but it won’t be you or me that has control over what is limited and what isn’t.

Perhaps I just worry too much. What do you think?

Now you can get your pr0n fast at 30,000 feet. Sure, there are other uses for broadband connections on airline flights but we all know that it will mainly be used as an escape mechanism.

It’s Christmas day and my mother died just a few hours ago. I’m still in sort of a state of denial at this point because I can’t believe that the woman that gave me life and that I had just talked to this morning is now dead. I’ve never seen my father in so much pain.

She got up this morning and she and dad had breakfast and exchanged a few Merry Christmases with family and friends. She then went into the living room for a short nap while dad went out to the den for his short midmorning nap. Mom never woke back up.

Their preacher came by to comfort Dad, my brother and me while we were waiting for the funeral home to come pick up her body. “She’s gone to be with Jesus”, he told us. I didn’t bother to tell him that Mom had been with Jesus every day of her life since I could remember. She was that kind of a woman. Always available to serve anyone who needed her help. Never passing judgement on anyone. That was Momma.

She taught me about Kingdom Living through the way she lived, not by telling me what I needed to be doing. What? You say you’ve never heard of Kingdom Living?

Kingdom living is the Christian equivilent of the Buddhist Nirvana. It’s living in a morally and ethically rightous state without standing in judgement of others or even being aware that this lifestyle or behavior is anything other than normal. There is a special happiness that comes with this state of being. Some folks may look at someone who is “Kingdom Living” and see a stoic. It’s just possible that they may be correct.

Momma, I’m going to miss you.

Merry Christmas

I know some of my readers are Jewish, some of my readers are Pagan and quite a few of my readers are atheist or agnostic. I’m a Christian. Please take this greeting in the spirit of its intent. I wish all of you a Merry Christmas.

Surgically implanting microchips under the skin for ID purposes is really nothing new. We’ve been doing this with livestock and pets for sometime now. I can see where it would have its benefits in implanting them in humans, as long as it is done voluntarily and with full understanding that these things can “leak” personal information. The only part that really scares me is that most people don’t think before they make decisions on things like this.

I’ve just added a PDA version of Justin’s Journal that appears to work well with Avantgo.

A dying 15 year old boy in Australia had a last request, to lose his virginity before he died. Well, would you try to arrange to have the last request honored? Remember, the lad is a minor and there’s a risk of the woman being charged with sexual abuse wether the act is consensual or not. I would really be interested to see some comments on this one.

Shelley gives an explanation of what set her off on WaSP. She makes a compelling argument for her case but also asks this question:

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Couldn’t we have waited a year or two for that? Couldn’t we have used HTML tables for layout just one more year? What would be the harm in waiting? The Mozilla folks (and the Netscape people on the Mozilla project) are working on standards support, but it takes time. And open source projects, unfortunately, usually take more time than commercial ventures. That’s a business fact of life. Couldn’t we have been patient?

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Shelley, we waited two years. Your complaint is that standards compliance, or compliance for the latest standards, shouldn’t come at the cost of innovation but what about innovation on the part of web developers? Without user agents that comply to current standards the web designer is going to be too busy building workarounds to have time to work on innovative designs.

See, Shelley, we are all in this thing together. If one of us fails in delivering the technology the rest of us needs then the rest of us will also fail in our part of the equation. IE and Opera were out the door and delivering browsers that were compliant with CSS 2 and XHTML 1 browsers. Netscape was late but now they have delivered a browser that is compliant with these standards. Even the latest release of Konqurer and Galleon, especially Galleon, appear to meet these standards. But was two years too long of a wait? Yes.

I just picked up a copy of blogBuddy and I’m giving it a try. I let ya’ll know what I think of it in a few days.

I’m going to agree with Dave’s opinion on why XP isn’t jumping off the shelves. The reason that I haven’t upgraded to XP is not because of the cost to purchase or the hassle to upgrade or even the uncertainty of full compatability with my current software and work habits. The reason I haven’t upgraded is because of uncertainty as to how this new license registration is going to work out. I don’t like having to call or or otherwise contact people for support. I have this fear that if I load XP at the worst possible moment I’m going to add some piece of hardware to my computer and it won’t boot because of the licensing thingy built into XP.

At some point in the future IP owners are going to have to recognize that its the money they stand to make that is what is important, not whether or not every copy of their product is properly licensed. When you give up sales to protect yourself from IP theft you are only going backwards. Pirates will not buy so why be so overly concerned with them that you lose sales?

Elves are Finnish? The Finnish Epic Behind Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:

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The Finnish language that so delighted the young student became the inspiration for the lyrical tongue of Middle-earth’s elves. Tolkien taught himself the ancient and newly codified Finnish to develop his elfin language, and so that he could read the Kalevala in its original Finnish. This extraordinary achievement opened the door to many further influences from Finnish mythology. Parallels abound between the Kalevala and Tolkien’s own saga, in terms of both the characters themselves and the idea of the hero’s journey.

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I loved the books but I’m going to have to see that movie before year end.

Ha, where else but MIT? One Ring To Rule The Dome. On a snowy morning during Fall finals, at the beginning of the week that the first Lord Of The Rings movie was to be released, a “gold” ring with red Elvish script appeared around the Great Dome. The elvish script translates to:

“One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness bind them.”

If you are running Windows XP on a computer that you connect to the internet you really need to read this.

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Microsoft Corp. is urging customers to quickly install a patch to repair serious flaws in the newest version of Windows, which was marketed as the most secure ever.

The problems allow hackers to steal or destroy a user’s data files across the Internet or implant rogue computer software.

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Microsoft has a fix available but it makes me wonder what will be found next.

I’m trying hard to find exactly what it was about WaSP that suddenly set Shelly, at Burningbird, off. Okay, the group did/does have its own bit of arrogance to them but what did they do lately and why this rant now? Also, I believe she is giving way too much credit to WaSP for Netscape’s problems with the release of their 6.0 browser. Yes it was released too soon but I don’t think that WaSP is the primary reason for that. The primary reason was that Netscape 4.x crashed hard on CSS and JavaScript that was being used on more and more and more sites. A fix had to be released.

Well, after three months, the Ground Zero fires are finally out. The smoke and smell are finally gone so hopefully this will help New Yorkers in the job of getting on with their lives. Sitting here in Chattanooga every thing has pretty much gotten back to normal and there have been several days that I haven’t thought about the 9-11 attack. The constant haze hanging over New York from the fire along with the plume of acrid smoke arising from Ground Zero has been a constant reminder of what happened to them. It has prevented them from the reprieve that I’ve managed to enjoy sitting several hundred miles away. Maybe they too can forget occassionally now.