Thus the fundamental failure of Marx: ignoring the reality of human nature.

That many people -- in the Russian Empire, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Korea, etc, etc, -- can't just accidentally be paranoid and authoritarian.

Good socio-political theories must take people's baser instincts into account. That's the genius of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand: it presumes that people will be selfish and greedy.

Orwell wrote a book about that...

And academic leftists wonder why Communism collapsed...

"But we can do it the Right Way!!!" Yeah, sure, bud, because (modern) Liberal Arts professors have soooo much experience outside the Ivory Tower...

Yes. But this time, all it would take for good to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Yes, but I think you mean until US laws EXPIRE on June 1, 2015. The most egregious parts of the Patriot Act are still set to expire on June 1, 2015. After that it appears that demanding ALL the records from a business or institution (or person?).... including phone records, email logs, text message logs, web site visitor logs, library records etc etc... will again require an actual constitutionally valid warrant naming the cause, the person and the things to be seized.

You aren't looking forward to seeing Rick Deckard and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls?

This is needed at the bar when pouring into a glass or pitcher.

By then it's far too late. This is about spreading out the active ingredient from the hops during the original mixinig, before brewing, so it can keep the ingredient from the fungi from loading up on carbon dioxide during brewing. By the time you pour, the opportunity for the hops to do anything but add flavor is long gone.

I think it was Milton Friedman who explained there are 4 ways to spend money.

1) Spend your own money on yourself.
    You look for a compromise between cost and quality
2) Spend your own money on somebody else.
    You look mostly for cost
3) Spend somebody else’s money on yourself.
    You look mostly for quality
4) Spend somebody else’s money on somebody else.
    You really don't care.

Most people live where their car is registered. And most commonly it is household members that might be driving that car. So address is a pretty solid way to associate the data. No not 100%., but that wasn't the point. It was merely a convenience for police to be able to bring up the record of someone more quickly based on the car registration.

Name or Name and address should be more than sufficient 99% of the time to bring up the records for an in-state driver.

As for out of state drivers... states have to determine reciprocity for a variety of licensing, so that isn't a new problem.

On the first issue. Having a database association between a car registration and known or even likely drivers is a relatively trivial exercise in associating different databases... namely car registrations and licenses. Shared address would be the simplest way to associate cars and possible drivers. But that would clearly not be 100% reliable, so it would be merely a convenience for the police so they don't have to manually enter information for writing up a ticket or checking for outstanding warrants. Actually, it could be of added benefit because it could end up bringing up information on other household members who may very well be in the car at the time.

The only concern about making up a name that would be valid is if the courts saw making up a name or withholding your name as a valid exercise of your first or 5th amendment rights. Otherwise you could simply make it a requirement for drivers to give their real legal name to police and it would be practically no different than presenting a fake ID or refusing to give your ID to the police. And the benefit is that such a system would eliminate the possibility of people getting cited for driving without a license just for forgetting their license at home. It is a real shame that in most states the system has made forgetfulness a misdemeanor. I know that I have left my wallet at home probably half a dozen or maybe a dozen times over many years and driven my car, thankfully never got caught.

As for the ID being a convenient way to get started for looking up someone's data. I don't dispute that. Especially, for all those scenarios where someone has a hard to spell name or like you mention a hard to facially recognize face. Having a card with a name, picture and bar code on it makes some sense. And there are many many somewhat artificial reasons that having a physical ID makes sense. Like access to Federal facilities requiring a REAL ID compliant state issued picture ID. So I wouldn't argue for a wholesale overnight change. But I do have a concern that most states have laws on the books that make a simple and reasonable act of forgetfullness a misdemeanor crime.

I think what I would suggest as way to make the law less unnecessarily onerous would simply be to allow people to avoid an additional citation for driving without a license if the police can verify your identity via other means and can verify that you do have a license to drive. So simply eliminate the misdemeanor for those who have merely forgotten their licenses as long as the police system is working.

"National Security" is the root password to the Constitution - me

It's a little hard to believe it's insulation degradation despite that .au recalls website entry. When insulation degrades, you tend to get short circuits that trip circuit breakers rather rapidly. It seems more likely to be an undersized or underprotected conductor, e.g., a multistrand conductor in which flexing from improper strain relief can break most of the strands, increasing the local series resistance and heat dissipation and possibly leading to a complete conductor failure with series arcing. Only an arc-fault protector would trip on a failure like this, and those breakers are still uncommon in the US even though they're required in much new construction. It would also seem that cord failures would be more likely in North America, Japan and other 100-120V countries because a universal switching supply producing a given amount of power will require twice the line current draw and produce 4x the heat dissipation (I^2 R) in a high resistance section of cord as it would in a country with a 230-240V supply voltage.

The rules of good journalism clearly state that when the story is positive, no party affiliation mentioned means Republican. If the story is negative, no party affiliation means Democrat.

So, you may have guessed that "Justin Amash" is "Justin Amash (R-MI)"

That is a bit different than what was described in the news story and what I was describing.... What the Department of Transportation was supposedly doing was actually using the cell phone pings to the towers in order to identify, triangulate and track vehicles. So there was no "opt-out" like you can do if you are using an android phone and don't want to provide location data to Google. The only opt out was to power off your phone.

Actually, I think it might be a convenient way to track drivers and eventually to tax people either flat rates or congestion taxes based on their road usage which could eliminate the need for electronic tags. Taxation is always a bigger motivator than police security. According to a local news story I heard reported a few weeks ago, there are systems in place used for traffic monitoring that already grabbing wireless data from people's cell phones. Apparently the technique is being used simply to model traffic patterns and for planning purposes. But there has been talk about the need to replace the gas tax with open road tolling and there is also a push by some urban planners and environmentalists (and the people selling these systems) to start imposing congestion type taxes around densely populated urban centers. Having an app for that already installed on people's phones would be a step in that direction.

I think the public debate should be focused instead on simplifying and limiting the burden on people. Don't impose complicated solutions to simple problems. Just check people's odometers if we want to go to a mileage tax, don't need to track their movements everywhere.