The person took my personal information (from where I'll never know) and opened a credit card in my name - in other words, using my identity. This damaged my credit rating. Granted, it wasn't damaged as bad as it could have been, but that's like saying someone took my car for a joyride one night and brought it back with just a dented fender.

Other people who have had their identity stolen haven't been as lucky as I was. The thieves can make off with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise in a couple of days/weeks and the person won't find out about it until the collection agencies come calling for payment. Then, it can take months or years to get your credit rating back to where it was pre-identity theft. In the meantime, you might not be able to get loans that you need or credit cards that you'd like to open. So you can be deprived of access to things you would have had access to had your identity not been stolen. (Lest anyone try arguing that you still have full access to your credit rating the same as if the identity theft never happened.)

Also, if criminal identity theft occurs - criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB - you could wind up on police watch lists for years which is a whole other kind of hell. Profiled because you are "a known felon." Failing background checks because of the crimes "you" committed, etc. Even if the error is obvious (wrong skin color, alibi about where you were when "you" were arrested, etc), purging it from the police systems takes years of effort. One system left with the error will start flowing it back to the other systems and start the process all over again.

So it's not that you lose all access to your identity, but rather that your identity becomes tarnished and damaged and it can take you a lot of time, money, and effort to fix it.

The Supreme Court majority can't even get their excuses for the Hobby Lobby verdict right. When the verdict came out, they said it was a limited verdict on just those forms of birth control and the form declaring the institution a religious institution was a good workaround. The next day, they said the verdict applies to all forms of birth control. (Apparently, the company just needs to "religiously believe" that something is wrong and they don't need to cover it in their health care plans.) The next day, they made a preliminary ruling in another case that said that the form declaring that an institution has religious issues with something wasn't good. The very form they pointed to 2 days earlier as a good thing. Now, merely requiring an institution to declare "we are religiously offended by X" is offensive.

Of course, Hobby Lobby apparently has no problem covering Viagra regardless of the marital state of their male employees.

I'd boycott Hobby Lobby, but we never shop there anyway as we've known about - and had issues with - the owners making personal religious beliefs into company policy for years. We much prefer Michael's or JoAnn's.

Don't forget that stress is a factor in bad health.

"We've detected your internal stress levels rose so we're charging you $5 more... Wait, they just rose more. $10. There they go again. $15. Boy you really have a problem with stress, $20. $25. $40!"

Sadly, I don't think this will be changed anytime soon. Identity theft doesn't really hurt credit card companies or credit agencies. The credit card companies just close the card and write off the fraudulent purchases. At best. At worst, they'll send collection agencies after you for years until you prove that "you" wasn't really you. (The credit card company in my case had various "suggestions" as to what happened including that my wife opened the account with my information without my knowledge. Finally, since my wife was right there and denied it, they conceded the fraud.) Even if they have to admit the fraud, they can push the charges back on the retailers or just eat the few thousand dollars.

Credit agencies, on the other hand, make their money by selling information about people. (They hate that my credit is frozen because they can't sell my information. ) To them, identity theft is a non-issue. So more people are opening lines of credit on your credit file? Who cares. They'll just adjust your credit score accordingly and demand mountains of proof if you claim that items on your credit report aren't from you. After all, they wouldn't be on your credit report if they weren't yours and they are on your credit report so that means they are obviously yours. There was a bill in Congress at one point to let people freeze/thaw their credit files for free, but the credit agencies lobbied to kill it. Because when the interests of ordinary citizens and giant credit agencies collide, they with the most money (aka the big credit agencies) win.

The businesses who need to change their practices won't do it on their own because identity theft doesn't really hurt them. Meanwhile, the government won't act to force them to change thanks to lobbyist pressure.

With a person's name, SSN, and date of birth (somewhat easy to obtain), you can steal that person's identity and open lines of credit in their name. Add in address (pretty easily obtained) and you can do a lot of damage to their credit - while racking up thousands in purchases to enjoy. I wish I could add the caveat that you'd only enjoy this stuff until the police arrested you but many identity theft cases don't result in arrest because 1) the local police are unprepared to investigate online crimes that span multiple districts/states/countries, 2) the local police don't want to spend resources on an investigation that will just lead to another district having jurisdiction/getting the arrest credit, 3) the federal authorities only care about your case if it is big enough. A single credit card opened in your name will get shrugs from them.

Step 1: Put on a dress shirt (or any shirt with a pocket on the front).
Step 2: Start your camera video recording and put it on your pocket (camera facing out, of course).
Step 3: Wait in line behind the person and position yourself so that you have a good view but also so that it's not obvious what you are doing. Pretend to be looking at something else. (Look at your watch or a book or something.)
Step 4: Review the footage later and get the person's password or PIN.

Wouldn't be hard to do, really.

I've been through identity theft. It's not fun. And I was lucky enough to catch it quick enough that little damage was done. Capital One approved a card for "me" based on an online form where the thieves had my name, address, DOB, and SSN. Mother's maiden name was wrong, but that didn't stop the approval process. The thieves paid for rush delivery of the card and then changed the address on it. This meant that the card was sent to me BEFORE the address change went through. If this hadn't happened, I would have only known about it once the bill collectors came barging down my door.

On a side note: Capital One was not helpful at all. They stonewalled both me ("If we tell you the address on the card and you go and kill the person, we're liable" = what they actually told me) and the police (gave them a phone number linked to an answering machine and never called back). The combination of their approval of the card, missing all of the red flags along the way, and refusing to help beyond canceling the card means Capital One will NEVER be "what's in my wallet."

For those who think they have bad credit and thus wouldn't be victims, it doesn't take much. Remember, the thieves don't care about whether you can pay back the bills they are generating. All it takes is one credit card company to approve a card and they'll tear through the balance leaving you with thousands in debt that you'll need to prove wasn't your doing. In addition, there's another form of identity theft where a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB instead of their own. Then your name goes into the police databases and you'll be harassed as an assumed criminal. Removal of your name can take years during which time you'll flunk any background checks.

There's no protection that I know of from the latter form of identity theft, but you can freeze your credit to protect against the former. This means that nobody - not even you - can open new lines of credit unless you first thaw the credit files. The downside is that you need to pay to freeze and for each thaw. The upside is that you have a handy retort for all of those "You can save $5 if you open up a credit account with us" offers at the cash register. "No, thanks. My credit file is frozen." I've found these people stop their sales push the minute they hear you were a victim of identity theft. (I don't think that's in the script they are supposed to read to customers. ;-) )

The problem was in the story telling. Every writer would put Superman in a perilous situation and then invent a new power to get him out of it. Eventually, they found it hard to write for Superman. After all, when you have a guy who can juggle planets around for fun, what can threaten him enough that readers would think "this could conceivably kill Superman?" (We all know that Threat Of The Week won't kill Superman, but the villain needs to have a reasonable chance of winning or there's no suspense in the story.)

They tried correcting this when they reset the DC Universe and lowered his power levels, but the writers keep doing the same power ramp-up.

Then again, some depictions of Superman work nicely with an uber-powerful Supes. The final episode of Justice League, for example. Superman is beating up on Darkseid and notes that he feels like he lives in a world made of cardboard. He needs to be careful of his every action lest he hurt someone or break something. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in just letting go instead of worrying that hitting the villain would result in needless death and destruction.

Your friends in the aviation industry were mistaken. If you come in flat and level on a decent glide slope and decent weather, the vast majority of the passengers are likely to survive. Some of the ditches in the linked article went terribly, with the plane breaking into multiple pieces on impact, and still had the majority of the passengers surviving. Floatation devices on airplanes are not a joke, despite what some would have you believe.

That story bugs me, not the technology or anything. Just the fact that he spends the first 40% of it lamenting how bad things are and how the wealthy just want to live their life of leisure and leave everyone else to rot in the slums. Then the main character suddenly becomes fabulously wealthy and... leaves everyone else to rot in the slums while he farms... I guess... No one, not even the "good guys" with essentially limitless resources actually tries to change the system that is leaving 99% of humanity living in abject poverty with no hope of escape.

Yes, because it'd be impossible to modify a batter so that 5% is functional (at least, functional enough to turn on the device for a few seconds) and the rest is... whatever.

Why don't thy have wireless charging on these things? It wouldn't be so bad if I took off my watch, threw it on the dresser, and went to bed. Having to stop and fiddle with a charger for multiple devices is a bit of a no go IMO.

SETI is trying to pick up alien signals. These might not be "Hi there humans, we are here" messages. Instead, they might be more mundane messages that alien civilizations "leak" out right after they learn how to use radio signals to communicate. Of course, if they encrypt those radio signals (using a purely alien encryption sequence, of course), we might not be able to tell that encrypted data from random noise.

That's why I made that mistake. The word "Austrian" appears once in the title and once in the summary. My brain skimmed the "where" and focused on the "what" - Tor exit node operator ruled guilty of facilitating a crime as if he had been in on the crime. When I commented, I repeated the wrong country. Which just goes to show you should never skim! That being said, I probably will still skim more posts in the future. I don't have time to read everything there is online!

D'oh! Read the headline too quickly and thought it said Australia.