Knowing that the police may quickly verify the identity of someone who claims to be someone else really gives me the illusion of feeling safer. I don't know why.

Giving an easy way for the police to confirm that I am myself only gives the government more power if I DON'T want them to know who I am.

I'm not trolling or antagonizing with you, really. I just don't get it (maybe I was brainwashed, being born during Brazilian's military dictatorship).

Case 1: I have the right not to show ID, police asks me who I am, I tell them the truth, they go away.
Case 2: I have no right to deny showing the ID, police asks me to show it, I do, they go away.

They got the true in both cases. They'd only get a lie in Case 1 if I had a reason to hide who I am.

How Case 2 gives them more power over me than Case 1? By the same logic, one will get to the point where police won't be allowed to even get close to you and ask for the time without having reasonable reason, a warrant, and five lawyers in standby.

In Brazil the law says you have to show ID if asked for, but that not result in Police asking for IDs of every person they meet (as I said, I was never asked for it unless while driving). It just makes things easier when they do have to verify your identity.

Even if the law did not say I had to show it, why deny it just because I have the right to? The law doesn't say I have to pack broken glasses safely when disposing them in the recycling bin, nor where and how I should leave the tray in a fast food, but doing that makes other people's jobs easier. Showing the ID to an officer (even if you don't have to) makes his job easier. Isn't that a good thing?

There are bad cops? Sure. But what extra "abuse" rights does that rule gives them? If they are going to harass a guy just because of his looks, they are going to harass him - the only difference would be that he would legally have the right not to show the ID - not before "his" stash of pot was "found".

In the US, if you deny showing your ID, the cop will not know if you are doing that because you "know your rights and draw the line", or if you have a serious reason to hide it. In Brazil if you deny it, you must have a serious reason, so there's no doubt.

To be honest, there are indeed downsides: You always have to remember carrying your ID, and if you are caught without it by a commonsenseless cop you'll be in trouble, but it is the same if you are caught driving without a driver's or vehicle document - or, in the US if you are thrown in a situation where you really have to show ID. Basically, everybody carries it - and in regions so underdeveloped that people do not have them, well, generally there aren't even cops there, and if there are, they will know people don't have IDs.

I used "positive feedback" in the "control loop" sense, not in the "pat in the back" or "antropomorphic" sense.

You introduce a tiny, random perturbation in a control system. Positive feedback loops back to the input reinforcing that tiny perturbation in the same direction. Negative feedback subtracts from that perturbation in the input.

And please, positive/negative are not something intelligently designed, it's just positive=pass the characteristic along; negative=does not pass the characteristic along. Huge male sea elephants are a result of the "positive feedback" of females picking the bullies over generations. In the same "control loop" terminology, one could say the output "overshoot", and now the size may become a disadvantage (they may unintentionally squash the females) - that's "negative feedback" kicking in.

Hmm, I did not anthropomorphize evolution. It was a metaphor. Do you think incest is just a taboo? Isn't there a biological advantage in not interbreeding? When there's a possibly inheritable characteristic (not "designed"!) that has some slight advantage over another in terms of health/survival of the genes, won't that result in this characteristic being reinforced because of natural selection? Can then you "get" the metaphor of, say, "The urge for a cockroach to run to dark places is evolution's reaction to predators" without one having to explain the actual whole process? (well, my mistake for using metaphors in writing a scientific paper...)

But you must be right; incest is just a taboo - Nature almighty does not want us to mix up genes; that's why She created Eve from an Adam's body part; we all have the same genetic code, and that's the way it should be.

As you said "many animals have incestuous relations **when there's no better alternative**". How do they "decide" that not interbreeding is the "better alternative"? Do animals have taboos too? Or is that a behavior that could be explained by the advantage of not interbreeding being reinforced by natural selection?

(and yes, I know there are even animals that reproduce asexually, thus passing along the same code. I'm talking about the rest of us)

But evolution didn't have time to adapt to foster-parenting yet :-)

Then for this there's AnyoneEB's interesting reference below.

Indeed, but can't one of the reasons for this need to set out on their own be our instincts' way of avoiding inbreeding (instincts inherited from the times when they could set out on their own)? What is the reason we (and some mammals) have the urge to set out on our own, whereas other mammals (like meerkats, which then live in clans where only the alpha pair breeds) haven't?

No flame disclaimer: I'm not trying to present a "scientific explanation" here, just brainstorming and trying get free knowledge from you. My field observations are from Animal Planet, and I'm a semi-autistic engineer, so what do I know about human and animal social behavior? My first post was an attempt to do a funny musing I had about the subject.

That's really interesting! I wish I had mod points...

Would there be an opposite equivalent on the parents' side? An explanation for why parents are not sexually attracted to their offspring?

Only imprinting that on the offspring side surely works well to avoid sibling inbreeding, but maybe not as effective to avoid parent-offspring inbreeding (at least not consensual!)

Is there some similar imprinting in the parents, or is it just learned moral values?

(I was about to ask "Can't they be there to avoid crimes in the first place?" but then I though "Minority Report"...)

In Brazil (as far as I know) you ought to carry an ID, and ought to show it to the police officer, if asked for.

I have no problem showing my ID if asked (I'm 41, and was never asked to show it, except while driving through police "blocks", maybe 10 times or so). I'm Ok with exchanging this bit of "freedom" or "privacy" for better security.

It's not like "surrender this freedom today, and it's 1984 tomorrow". Even if you have the right not to, showing the ID makes it easier to you (unless you have something to hide) and to the police, who will then spend more taxpayer dollars going after criminals instead of going into a legal argument with you. What is the downside?

(and yes, criminality numbers are not good in Brazil, but that's not caused by the ID policy...)

Wow, I didn't know posts here were considered "scientific" explanations! I naively thought it was just a healthy exchange of ideas.

They would venture far enough not to interbreed, not necessarily away from the whole group. A lot of mammals get urges to leave the family when they get close to sexual maturity.

I though about this "scientific" explanation (I'm posting here, so it ought to be) when I saw a documentary where two cheetahs, brother and sister, who got along so far started to get aggressive towards each other and parted ways then they became "teenagers". The "scientific" explanation (this time from the most authoritative source of true - the telly) was that this diminished the chance of interbreeding.

Couldn't it be plausible that humans too had a mechanism to separate close-to-sexual-maturity from siblings and parents? Couldn't that be activated by something as simple as a pool of hormones also having effect on a developing brain? Maybe that is a bug now, but used to be a feature?

I don't suppose we (well, most of us) suddenly became morally aware that interbreeding was not correct, thus decided not to do it. Unless, of course we were intelligently designed this way.

...to incest, which is bad for the gene pool.

When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?

That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).

When I read this part, I thought you would mention Symbian. At least it looks like it does what you suggest. I am not a Symbian specialist, but when you write something that needs access to more than simple GUI stuff, you need to sign the app (tied to a specific phone IMEI, at least with the free online signing process), and in the process request what you want to allow the app to access (GPS data, user data, comms etc). Then when installing the app, Symbian will warn you that the app requires access to special features. Of course nothing is unbreakable, but it's a step in the direction you described.

don't you realize that, being Open Source there will be much more peer-reviews, and lots of people contributing for addressing bugs and instabilities, thus drastically reducing crashes and downtimes?

The even releases will be stable enough that they will have very high uptimes and rarely crash - when compared with closed-source cars, so they won't even need crash testing (that will be done on odd releases).

Besides lowering insurance costs due to less crashing, it will also do so by being less prone to theft, since - you know - it will have less vulnerabilities which could allow break-ins.

...the dog ate my homework was good enough!

Interesting. I only saw HP-UX, SunOS, AIX and Linux. No Windows used in T-Mobile, or they could not be cracked? Or T-Mobile just don't put anything important on Windows servers?