New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual’s name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.
The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.
The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure,” Shannon said. “It’s yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally.”
But civil libertarians and some technologists say the chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person’s biographical information and photo from several feet away.
Madison Rep’s Copenhagen
Go…. see the Madison Rep’s production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. We very much enjoyed Thursday’s performance which was the Rep’s first show at the new Overture Center. Nancy noted that the lighting and set were very well done. The rep has a page on the people behind the set construction.
Loma Prieta +15 Years, Continued
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Anchor Banker Brian Zimdars (give them a call) read my post and passed along his recollections from that day (Brian lived and worked in the Bay Area at the time:
I read your story about the earthquakes that hit SF fifteen years ago. It brought back memories. Linda and I were also living in CA at the time, I was working in Palo Alto and Linda was in San Mateo. We lived down in the Almaden Valley in San Jose. I remember my drive home lasting close to three hours, there were massive buckles in the road on 280 which really slowed down traffic. As I made my way down to San Jose it was eerie, all of the power was out in San Jose. What an amazing sight, seeing (or not seeing) more than one million people without power. We did not have any damage to our home. Seeing the devastation to 880 up in Oakland, the damage to the Bay Bridge (I traveled these roads frequently during business trips) and downed housing with fires in San Francisco was amazing. I felt lucky to be in the office that day and not out on the road conducting business. Thanks for the story.
WSJ on City Spending Growth
The Wisconsin State Journal Editorial Page on Alder Zach Brandon’s view of the Mayor’s proposed 3.6% spending increase:
It’s the spirit that counts: Madison Ald. Zach Brandon wants his City Council colleagues to break with their time-honored tradition of soaking the taxpayers for a few dollars more.
Brandon is developing a list of spending items that could be cut from the Madison city budget, saving taxpayers more than $2 million. But what he proposes isn’t as important as the underlying goal: Reversing the council’s longstandin g profligacy.
Brandon, who pushed a package of cuts last year along with a spending cap that went nowhere, this time believes he can strong-arm council members with a political pledge to put a lid on city spending. He has dropped his red “tax cap” baseball- hat publicity gimmick for a modest pledge he’s circulating to council members. Brandon, of the Southwest Side’s 7th District, wants each council member to promise not to increase city spending beyond the $192.5 million that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has already proposed. If they want to add a few dollars for a pet project, they need to subtract the money from another item in the budget.
“I’d have to get a real job”.
Walking quickly on a brisk Saturday morning Farmer’s Market (cold wind) last week, we stopped to make a purchase. I asked the vendor how he was holding up in the cold? “If I didn’t do this, I’d have to get a real job”. “I’m great!”
Silicon Valley School District Cuts Salaries by 5%
Facing a budget crisis, California’s Silicon Valley school district has resorted to cutting salaries of teachers and other employees by 5 percent.
This is one of the problems that can arise when districts become too dependent on rising property taxes (Silicon Valley has a number of empty office buildings, due to the dot com crash).
More Code in Your Car
More than one-third of the cost of GM’s automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the amount of software loaded into a typical automobile is skyrocketing, Scott said. Cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, but this number will jump to 100 million by 2010, he predicted.
The emergence of the automobile as a platform for software developers will mean that a much broader range of software will be used in tomorrow’s cars. Remote diagnostics software, media players, even database software all will run on automobiles at some point, he said. “I can’t think of software ? that isn’t going to run on the vehicle.”
I think we’re already north of 100 million lines of code. BMW and others have baked Windows CE into their cars. This ill advised move has introduced a legion of bugs and challenges to our once reliable cars. I believe the automakers are better off creating very simple, purpose built software, rather than extending Windows….
TV’s go Dark
In the middle of a scene, the TV turned off.
For 10 seconds, Li kept looking, waiting, not blinking through his glasses. At last, he left his stool, trashed his plate and emerged into the cool autumn night.
Leaving, he passed 48-year-old Mitch Altman, who was twiddling a matte-black plastic fob on his key chain. Altman’s blue and purple hair reflected the pizza shop’s neon, and he was smiling excitedly.
“We just saved him several minutes of his life,” he said.
Li agreed. He said he didn’t care that the TV was gone, even though he had been watching the show.
Altman’s key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.
I think this is great. I’ve never understood the need to put TV’s absolutely everywhere….. Ken Lonnquist comes to the rescue with an appropriate
mp3 – Time Vacuum!
Nobelist Edward Prescott’s views on Tax Cuts
An intresting yin to the professor’s yang on the Bush Tax Cuts:
Russ Wiles:
Prescott, speaking from Minnesota, where he advises the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, described Kerry’s plan to roll back tax cuts for top wage-earners as counterproductive.
“The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid,” he said.
Bush’s campaign on Monday released a letter signed by Prescott and five other Nobel laureates critical of Kerry’s proposal to roll back tax reductions for families earning $200,000 or more.
In The Republic interview, he said such a policy would discourage people from working.
“It’s easy to get over $200,000 in income with two wage earners in a household,” Prescott said. “We want those highly educated, talented people to work.”
Prescott also gave Bush the nod on another controversial campaign issue, dismissing Kerry’s claims that outsourcing of jobs is damaging the economy. . . . Prescott also backed the idea, espoused by Bush, to reform Social Security by allowing some workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into private savings accounts.
Personally, I’d rather see a more straightforward approach to taxes, than the ongoing deals with special interest groups that Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported recently. via instapundit
2 Shipbuilders Get Big Breaks in New Tax Bill
As always, the rest of us get to pay. Evidently our senators, Russ Feingold (Yes) and Herb Kohl (“Present”) support these very narrow non populist measures. Edmund Andrews:
Under the bill, Navy shipbuilders would be allowed to once again defer paying most federal income taxes on a project until the contract was completed. Because it takes about five years to build an aircraft carrier and three years to build a destroyer, the shipyards would be able to delay their tax bills for years, allowing more opportunity to offset taxes against future losses.
….
“This provision takes dramatic steps to remedy the inequity of how naval shipbuilders pay their taxes,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement last week, just after House and Senate negotiators agreed to include the provision in a broader bill that would shower $140 billion in tax cuts across almost every segment of industry.
But critics said the provision would not create jobs, the stated intention of the tax bill, because employment at naval shipyards is determined almost entirely by federal spending on ships and submarines rather than by tax incentives.
“We’re not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices. “We’re going to buy more boats if the government decides we need more boats.”