Personal patches

[Narvi]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Allan Bowhill wrote:

> On  0, Narvi <narvi at haldjas.folklore.ee> wrote:
> :
> :On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Allan Bowhill wrote:
> :
> :> On  0, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote:
> :> :At 5:56 PM +0100 2004/01/06, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> :> :
> :> :>>                       [...] just remember that a meeting of peoples
> :> :>>     who disagree, who are different, who ... is pretty much undeniably
> :> :>>     one of the things that does make America great.
> :> :>
> :> :> America is great?
> :> :
> :> :	No.  It has been turned into a police state.
> :> :
> :> :	Prepare to be fingerprinted.
> :>
> :> Few U.S. citizens haven't been.
> :
> :you find it reasonable? Besides, it in no way counters the police state
> :part, and rather enodorses it.
>
> How so? There is nothing illegitmate, arbitrary, illegal, secret or
> repressive about requiring fingerprints and photos of visitors who come
> across our international borders. It is necessary record-keeping.
>

nothing repressive? whats the colour of sky on the planet you are on?

> {Personally I hope genetic fingerprinting ultimately replaces this
> system. This method of identification has proven indispensable in
> catching criminals who would otherwise have gone unnoticed. It works.
> Take Gary Ridegeway for example, who may have killed over 60 women in
> Washington State. He would never have confessed (and may never have been
> arrested) if the police could not confront him with a solid death
> penalty case, supported by genetic evidence. Because the police were
> able to confront him with this, he plea-bargained out of death in exchange
> for leading the police to his victim's gravesites.)
>

hah. and you bring some stupid and arbitrary plea bargain as a good reason
for geneticly fingerprinting everybody?

> :> Why should extranationals have more privilige?
> :
> :Mainly because they are extranationals?
>
> Again, why should we trust?
>

because you want to have international visitors and trade. Oh, and because
inbound tourism in US number 2 export at ~ $80 billion. Which is already
20% down from 2000.

> No organization (or nation) with plenty to lose will base it's practices
> on institutionalized trust. It's always institutionalized mistrust that
> makes it possible to conduct business. Like with banks.
>

US has plenty to lose by having less people visit it.

> :Also, they are way less likely to
> :commit any crime than those already living inside the US.
>
> It's anybody's guess without statistics. But it's peripheral to the
> reasons for this type of security.

Lets take say year 2000. There were 15500+ murders in the US, for a rate
of 5.5 per 100000. If the ratio of murders commited by tourists was the
same as natives, they should have accounted for over 2400+ murders in year
2002. You can now easily convince by a couple of queries that that was not
teh case.

The absurd thing is that 9/11 merely meant that peopel in US killed by
US citizens had the same per person rate as peopel killed in US by people
who came into US.

>
> The point is to identify and catch people posing as travelers who
> are known to be terrorists, or associated with terrorism. If the
> system helps law enforcement catch other people on the lam, then
> more power to it.

except that there not only is no likelyhood that such is achieved but
there isn't even any credible description how such would work.

>
> --
> Allan Bowhill
> abowhill at blarg.net
>
> Etymology, n.:
>         Some early etymological scholars came up with derivations that
> were hard for the public to believe.  The term "etymology" was formed
> from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"), and "logy"
> ("study of").  It meant "the study of things that are hard to swallow."
>                 -- Mike Kellen
>