10.18.06
Link Salad
Did you know that next year, the laws will change to make it necessary to have a passport to go between the USA and various nearby countries (Canada, for one), for travel that formerly did not require a passport? NYT reports that “The State Department proposed creating a wallet-size passport that Americans could use to travel to Bermuda, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. The card, which would include radio frequency coding to link it to a database of biographical data and a photograph, would be used when a new rule goes into effect next year requiring a passport for travel to those countries.”
Righty-o, then. RFID for personal ID, incidentally, has been noted to be a source of significant problems including massive potential for privacy breaches. Security expert Bruce Schneier seems fairly satisfied with the encryption/protections the USDept of State is planning to implement in its RFID for passports (or what they have indicated they will be planning, at any rate), but if you’re not as sanguine as Bruce is maybe you wanna get the fullsize passport now.
Not, of course, that this’ll keep them from RFID’ing your passport when you have to get it renewed down the line, but perhaps it will keep you from being a guinea pig for the first-gen version. Again, if you care. Which you might or might not.
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Shrub’s megalomania took a giant step forward yesterday when in the first wholesale revision to NASA/space policy in ten years, he decided that all your space is belong to us.
(Yes, I know it’s “base,” not “space,” but that doesn’t work here, see?)
Quoth the WaPo, “President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U.S. interests.’ ” (Link) Well done to you, George, and while I don’t think you have to worry about Al Quaeda sending up a manned explorer any time soon, I wish you good luck keeping, say, China from launching spacecraft if they damn well want to.
Whadda maroon. Someone needs to sit him down and make him watch all of TOS Star Trek. Possibly Clockwork Orange-style. ‘Cause clearly a childhood of Tom Swift and His Gigantic Space Ray of Obliterational Righteousness ‘n’ Doom has gotten far too deep into what passes for his brain. (Or has he been reading those drecky books about life apres-Armageddon that I always see heaped on the remainder table at CostCo? I can’t tell any more. Clearly he is suffering some 2-D/3-D conflict of some sort, since he’s not dealing in the World As We Know It, but what the source of his 2-D delusions is I know not.) Surely Gene Roddenberry would not object to his work being used for conscientious reprogramming purposes.
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And as your reward for reading the depressing news links, go play with this: Altar-Ations, a lovely little bit of interactive media educational art that manages to be funny, insightful, and scathing all at the same time. Brava Juliet for pulling this together.