Oh, I disagree, establishing an easier-to-prove charge does make it harder for criminals to operate. Also, you're neglecting the fact that there will be plenty of criminals too dumb to take countermeasures. Criminals are mostly very very stupid. The smart ones tend to go for legalized theft, and go into politics or become CEOs. The drug lords tend to be somewhere in-between, smarter than the dummies who usually get caught but not smart enough to go legit. Still, taking stupid criminals off the street is serves a valuable purpose. As to the "I borrowed Juan's phone." dodge, well, you've identified either one of his associates, or one of his phones. Either way, it's valuable Intel, and a smart criminal would have to go and get a new phone. Presumably they're going for a one-to-one mapping of phones, so if Juan lends Jaime his phone, then Juan is without one. If people have multiple phones, then that in itself is something suspicious to flag for followup. Personally, if I were going to implement this system, I would not allow multiple phones per person.

People always claim that if such-and-such would happen, 'x would move'. Or 'capital would flee; Well, sure, if you only change one thing, in your quest to reform the world. The reason the pro-corporate faction is always "Rah, rah free trade" is exactly so they have that option. to hold no allegiance to any country, and to flee if the People get uppity. If, at the same time you enact your other reforms, you reenact the capital controls that used to exist and you embargo trade with any corporation that pulls up stakes and leaves, then they're stuck. The megacorps need access to the largest (by dollar value) economy in the world. They'll fold like Glass Joe if we stand up to them. But people are surprisingly cowardly when it comes to the moneyed classes.

No, the stated goal is to make a requirement that criminals will have to violate in order to conduct their business effectively.Then, when you catch them on something else, you have an additional charge to stick them with, which is especially handy if the main charges can't be made to stick. Once the criminal is caught, they can look up the falsified cell phone quite easily to see who it's registered to and charge them if it's false. They nailed Al Capone on tax evasion and mail fraud. Also, it segregates the country into law-abiding and suspicious quite neatly. Take the example of the hundreds of people who registered as the Mexican President. Finding them is quite easy. Shut down all the phones registered as such, take the President's EMEI and reactivate just his. All the others are lawbreakers, at least of the registration law: get a warrant for the billing records, or in the case of prepaid use cell-tower triangulation to track them down, and bam you're filling the arrest quotas and prisons!

Now now, let's not be prejudiced. People can consume meaningful information on an iPad too. Most will just choose not to.

I still have my Altair 680 in a closet somewhere. I paid 10 dollars for it at a ham radio fleamarket. A real bargain to own a piece of computing history.

When you print your own money, with your name on it, perhaps I'll agree. In the meantime, the money in my pocket says United States of America on it, and the Constitution of said country says that the Government *is* entitled to take it when a simple majority of both houses of congress levies a tax and the President signs the bill allowing the tax. They printed it, on our behalf, it's their money. They just let us use it to trade amongst ourselves.

Would lichens count as live plants for the purpose of the ordinance? They take very little water and never need mowing.

Dude, a football field is just a decikilometer. Or a hectometer if you prefer.

Your Texas is showing, Shiner Bock is not well-known outside the region. Good stuff.

You're wrong. Happy?

No, we're bankrupt due to tax cuts, wars and bailouts. But yeah, let's keep reducing our government's income while its expenses increase. That's always been a recipe for prosperity. =p

Er, sorry pigiron, that was meant to be a top-level reply to the article. I clicked the wrong button, thus proving my point.

'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because"... they are largely ignorant of science, technology, politics, economic, history, strategy and other cultures. Of course it's frightening to them, they don't have the information necessary to understand anything that's going on. Sheesh.

This piece of art reminds me of The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson. In that story, the bottle had to be resold for less than you paid for it. Similar concept though http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rlstevenson/bl-rlst-bot.htm

Mining asteroids virtually while riding in a craft that can't even reach the Belt. bwahahaha.