"the ballot screen would not appear if IE were not pre-installed" What a bunch of shit. Someone who's supposed to be an authority on the issue is claiming that it absolutely MUST be IE displaying it. You don't need to have a full featured browser (or a browser of any kind) to display this kind of ballot screen. Just a connection or a collection of installable browsers. The ballot can be a normal windows app.

Could you put the "Book Review" part of the title in the RSS feed? I personally don't find any of the book entries useful and I'd rather avoid them instead of clicking thinking I'm gonna read something that excites me... Not that books don't excite me. The ones listed here, however, do nothing for me. Not even after 10 beers.

I personally don't care how much it means in real money. What I care about is that, suddenly, 80% to 85% of the in game spam is going to stop. It will be as if millions of voices will suddenly cry out in terror and be silenced. I, for one, welcome the new found silence. These gold farmers have been a royal pain the MMO player's side for far too long. They've been seriously screwing up in-game economies and putting grouping players on edge, camping the spawn points for high gold mobs while legit players have to make do without. China has my full support in this.

It's still a little early for me so unless sleep is playing tricks on my memory... As I recall, Real ID was supposed to make it harder for terrorists to cause problems here in the US. To quote you quoting the article: "But critics said the changes gut the law, weakening tools to fight fraud and learn whether bad drivers, drug runners or counterfeiters have licenses in more than one state." What the hell? Using a law designed to fight terrorism in order to prosecute a civilian who does something that is, at best, questionable is an abuse of power. It works both ways. This is blatantly, unignorably, an abuse of the intention and a JUMP towards taking power from the states and giving it to the Federal Government - It's one thing to have states work with each other (as was intended) but to usurp that process like this and then brag about how it could be used to monitor US citizens (innocent until proven guilty?) is an abuse! Papers, Citizen! If you do not provide papers, you cannot pass. This is, of course, assuming I am remembering the intent behind Real ID correctly.

You know what I have to say to this? Monkeys. Pure, unmitigated, unadulterated monkeys. And not just the flying kind either. We're talking the regular monkeys that fling themselves from tree to tree. They dance. They sing. They commit acts of war and bob up and down. And they throw feces when they're mad. So don't make the monkeys mad.

Oh, good question! :) I don't get pulled over alot. I almost never carry my ID simply because I'm really absent minded and lose things...like keys, wallets... I keep two wallets...both have duplicates of my ID just in case I lose one or misplace it (I am indeed aware that duplicate ID's present a problem but if I'm in a situation where it's that important, I probably have done something very very bad.)