The Sims 3 doesn't run (Application Error 0xc0000135)

Having problems getting your install of The Sims 3 to run? I couldn't find any help on their support page. If your local drive was installed as a different letter than C: , you may have luck running the application directly by double clicking the game executable instead of the launcher.

Found mine installed at:

I:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin\TS3.exe

Make a shortcut while you're there

Fisheries provide insight into how to stabilize the economy

A few days ago I was reading through my backlog of dead-tree Scientific Americans and I came across an interesting article tucked in the back. It's essentially a summary of a study conducted by George Sugihara, a mathematician and theoretical ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The study supports the idea that the best way to manage fisheries is not to throw back the small fish, as is currently done, but throw back the big ones. I have believed this same theory for a long time, because we don't want to put an evolutionary pressure on the system to produce smaller individuals, but the article provides evidence that the effects are more immediate and extreme than evolutionary processes alone would produce:

Imagine, Sugihara says, a 500-pound fish in an aquarium. Feed it more, and it gets fatter. Feed it less, and it gets thinner. The population (of one) is stable. But put 1,000 half-pound fish in that aquarium, and food shortages could result in the deaths of hundreds, because the small fry have less stored body fat—and therefore cannot ride out a short famine. Food abundance does not necessarily mean all the fish get bigger, either; it could en­courage reproduction and a population boom—which might in turn overwhelm the food supply and lead to another bust. It is an unstable system. “That’s the reality of fisheries, of economies, of a lot of natural systems,” Sugihara says.

Another researcher actually reproduced this effect in fish tanks. Over five generations, David Conover of Stony Brook University harvested large fish from his tanks, and then discovered that the population had a smaller average size. That should come as no surprise.

This idea is very obviously applicable to economics, which is widely regarded as a chaotic system (though to be fair, there is still some debate on that point), and the article makes mention of that many times, even noting that the chaotic systems of fisheries are so like financial networks that Deutsche Bank hired Sugihara for a time. The article does not expand on this connection as much as I would have liked, but even so, this study can be seen as evidence in favor of the idea that penalizing the big players for their success leads to both a less stable economy and a smaller average size. It's open to debate as to what the correct analogy with the economy is (fish as individuals or corporations, for example), but the specific analogy doesn't matter when we're talking about the broad trends of this class of mathematical system. I don't think anyone thinks those two outcomes are desirable, regardless of their ideology. I'd hesitate to say that it's actually evidence in support of trickle-down economic theories without some more direct information, but it is very plainly evidence against punishing the successful and rewarding the unsuccessful. That shouldn't come as any surprise either.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pi

CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER PIE

1 9" oreo cookie pie crust 8 oz. softened cream cheese 1 cup. granulated sugar 1 cup. Reese's creamy peanut butter  2 tbsp. melted butter 1 cup. whip cream 1 tbsp. vanilla TOPPING: 4 oz. Giradehli dark chocolate 2 tbsp. butter 2 tbsp. olive oil 4 chopped Reese's Crunchy Bars Whip cream cheese until fluffy. Slowly add sugar, peanut butter and butter. In another bowl, whip cream and vanilla until firm. Blend 1/3 of whipped cream into peanut butter mixture. Fold peanut butter mixture into remaining whipped cream until thoroughly incorporated. Fill pie crust, smoothing top. Chill. Combine chocolate, butter and oil in top of double boiler until chocolate melts. Cool slightly. Spread chocolate on cooled peanut butter filling. Start at center and work out. Sprinkle top with chopped candy, chill pie thoroughly. Serves 12. based off the recipe at http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1928,157183-248200,00.html

"I'm a whiz at minesweeper, I could play for days"

HOWTO: Make the perfect office mocha

First off I'm not going to get into the discussion of what a "mocha" is. If you are going to go all high brow on me and start complaining that there is no espresso in this drink then just go away now, this post is not for you.

These are desperate times with limited low quality supplies, and our goal is to make the best tasting chocolate flavored coffee beverage possible from what we can scrounge from the break room.

Ingredients:

• Coffee
  
• Hot Chocolate Mix
• Half and Half

Preparation:

• Begin preparing a new batch of "delicious" Newport coffee. 
• Empty the Smiss Miss hot Chocolate powder (make sure you get the one with sugar, not the "No sugar added" stuff) into the styrofoam cup.
• Add five (5), no more no less, of the Mini Moo's Half and Half to the hot chocolate mix
• Stir mixture with a red coffee stirrer until well combined.
• Add freshly brewed coffee to fill the cup and stir to mix.

Notes:

• DO NOT use the white coffee stirrers, they are too weak and will bend and frustrate you. I reccomend using two white stirrers held together if a red one can not be found.
• DO experiment with different flavors of coffee. The hazelnut blend tastes great with the chocolate flavor.
• DO NOT use any more or less than 5 of those little tubs of Half and Half. 5 tubs is the perfect amount.
• DO NOT put the coffee in the cup first, it is too dificult to mix the cocoa powder evenly, and you lose out on the foam created when you mix it beforehand.
  

Pictures to come when I get around to bringing my camera into work.

Google Chrome overlooks one small security flaw

The release of Google Chrome today, the new open source browser by Google today has the whole internet talking. If you want an exhasutive review you can look elsewhere, everyone has it covered.

One thing I haven't seen discussed anywhere is the lack of the ability to secure my stored passwords. I often let other people just my laptop to check the internet, and while I would trust almost everyone I give access to, I still feel unsecure when all of my passwords can be revealed to someone with just a few simple clicks.

What they did get right is that (at least for Gmail) the browser doesn't attempt to store my password until I successfully log in, so I no longer have 2 or 3 incorrect credentials in every login box.

It's a simple fix that the Google engineerers overlooked and hopefully will be released in the next iteration.

Inheriting before_filters and naming collisions

I've been using Ruby on Rails on and off now for over a year for different kinds of projects. It's great for a quick prototype or creating simple web applications, but there is so much "rails magic" that goes on behind the scenes that I doubt anyone really knows how Rails works.

As a programmer, I like to know how every part of my application works, especially when I need to debug a problem when something isn't working right.

When I started working today I updated my local copy to the head revision in the repo, and after I logged into our application, I was redirected to the edit user page (this was expected), but I was shown the error "Couldn't find User without an ID". As I continued to play around, I noticed that logging in worked fine until I went to a page handled by my Users controller.

The only change since the update in the users controller was in the login method:

class UsersController < ApplicationController
def login
session[:user] = nil
end
end

The addition of the single line in it was the only change, but it makes sense; when someone accesses the log in page, the current user should probably be logged out. Since this was the only change, I removed the line, and magically everything seemed to work again.

But why would this cause the session[:user] to be set to nil whenever I hit the Users Controller. The answer to that lies within my Application Controller which users a before_filter :login to make sure you are logged in before you can access anything in the site.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :login

def login
if !session[:user]
session[:previous_page] = request.request_uri
redirect_to "/users/login"
end

end
end p.s. Yes, I do irrationally hate the unless method :P

As it turns out, the before_filter is inherited by all of the subclasses of my Application Controller, which is all of them. This allows the before_filter to be called no matter which controller is hit.

However, since I also have a login method in my Users Controller, a naming collision occurred and whenever I accessed the Users Controller, the login method (the one in the Users Controller) would be called. This would clear session[:user], which is what caused the errors.

My first step in solving the problem was to rename the login method in my Application controller

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :check_user_logged_in

def check_user_logged_in
if !session[:user]
session[:previous_page] = request.request_uri
redirect_to "/users/login"
end

end
end

This should stop the naming collision, but it also caused a new error for me; I would go into an infinite redirect loop when I would go to the log in page. The application would check to see if a user was logged in, which there was not, and redirect to the login page. Before loading the login page, the filter was called again, and the same result happened ad infinitum.

The solution to this problem was to add a skip_before_filter to my Users controller, which would override the before filter in the Application controller so it would not be called.

class UsersController < ApplicationController
skip_before_filter :check_user_logged_in, :only => ["login", "authenticate"]

def login
session[:user] = nil
end

def authenticate
#code for handling user authentication went here
end

Now, when we access the login page, we still clear any logged in user, but the before_filter doesn't check for a logged in User when we go here, as well as when we go through the authenticate method.

This should fix the problems I was having, but with Rails theres always another mysterious bug lurking behind the great unknown.

13 things I would work on to make Pandora better

Pandora is a great service, it plays music I like, and I'm often finding new music that I like. It has almost completely replaced my desktop music player when I'm at my computer.

In no particular order, here are some of my suggestions on how to improve Pandora. (Disclaimer: I use Pandora, and due to my affiliation would like to see what's best for the company)

1. Link to Wikipedia for Artist information. I found a new band I've never heard of and I like this song. Great! I go into the song menu and I click on 'Artist'. I get a a short blurb about the artist if I'm lucky, worst case I get a nearly blank page. Link to the wikipedia content, because your pages suck.



2. Don't skip songs I like. This new song is awesome! I'm going to create a new station from it (which I prefer to creating stations from artists - you get a more focused station). Wait! You found what I wanted, but you stopped playing what I was listening to and switched to the other station, and I don't get to finish the song I liked.



3. Dump Flash. It takes a lot of memory on my computer. I've noticed times when I have to reload the whole page, usually when changing stations. I'm not the only one that notices how buggy your implementation in Flash is. Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker writes that she sees a 23% increase in CPU usage when Pandora is in a tab in Firefox, or in it's own window.



4. Play music videos. Link to YouTube pages, allow artists to upload their own videos, make your own integrated player. I don't really care how you do it, as long as if I want to watch a video you make it easy to find it.



5. Give me statistics. How do I find out what kind of music I like? I want something better than just what stations I've created. I want to see what song's I thumbed up/down, what genres or musical attributes the song has. I want to see the trends in my music preferences since I started using the service.



6. Let your users contribute. By providing basically only thumbs up/down, you are missing out on lots of data. I know you have your audiophiles who rate the songs, and they do a great job for the most part, but open up that data to your users, and allow your users to add value to your data. Tell me what the 400 characteristics for songs are, not just 30 or so. This could go well with a plugin architecture.



7. I'm tired of this song. Give me the option to set how long you don't play a song for, instead of always 30 days.



8. Make it easier to share radio stations. I don't use the social network built into Pandora at all, and I don't know anyone who does. I know that I can find the link to a station and send that to a friend, but I still want it to be easier, and see more people doing do. Yes, there is a link on the station to "Share This Station With a Friend" but the form only takes email addresses, which is not the easiest way for me to send things to my friends.



9. Pandora Mobile. I would gladly pay the $36 per year fee to access if I had an AT&T or Sprint phone, but I don't, and I probably wont switch carriers until I can get a web and flash enabled phone.



10. Song Queue. Provide a list of the next songs to be played on a station. I know this can change dynamically, but that doesn't prevent you from doing this. I should be able to remove a song that I know I don't like before it plays.



11. Pandora can get too repetitive. The other night I was listening to a station, and heard a familiar song. I looked back and it was played only 21 songs ago, and it wasn't even a song I gave a thumbs up to. That just made me waste one of my "6 per hour, per station, or per QuickMix". [from FAQ] What does skipping a song do? How many skips do I get per hour?



12. Don't keep playing a song I dislike. I know you have weird regulations that require you to do this, but you need to do more than suggest I switch to another station. Give me a list of stations I can switch to, or even better, this is a good time to recommend a new station to me.
    
    



13. Sleep timer. Pandora times out and stops playing music after 3 hours. Why not let me set a timer for earlier as well, 3 hours is too long for me to listen to when I go to sleep, which is something I occasionally do.

Protip 1: What keyboard shortcuts are available? I personally didn't know there was any, and you have to click on the "tuner"(where you change the volume) before you can use them.

Protip 2: Start a classical station.

My stations are here. Send me some links to your favorite stations in the comments.

UPDATE (11:48pm 5/25/08) Another song repeats itself for me, but this time only 3 songs after it was last played, that is unacceptable.

PSA: social|median invites

I'm sure there's more than enough of these around now, but I just received an email saying that I have 5 invites which expire on Friday May 23rd. Just use my username ryansv if you want to try out the site. I haven't used it much, but it's worth checking out.

On May 14, 2008, your socialmedian account has been specially provisioned for you to be able to invite 5 additional people to check out the socialmedian alpha. These special invites are set to expire on Friday May, 23, 2008.

To invite your friends to the socialmedian alpha, you can direct them to:

1. go to www.socialmedian.com

2. click on "create an account"

3. Instruct them to use your socialmedian username as their special invite code.

We are getting close to a public beta of socialmedian -- probably about 4-6 weeks away. Having more of your friends try the service will help us get there faster and help with the launch.

Thanks

-the socialmedian team

Friendfeed unavailable

I'm surprised I haven't seen a huge uproar from all the Scoble followers.

Integrating Social Media and Education, the students are already there

Julian Baldwin has written up a series of interesting thoughts about social media from his perspective. Go and spend some time reading them, they're not very short but it's worth your time if you're interested in social media.

• A new players perspective on why social media is not mainstream
• Killing many birds with one boulder, how and when social media can go mainstream
• Facebook makes you think about the future of social networking

I personally connected with the second article, where Julian talks about how social media could be used in furthering education.

"There are many benefits in asking students to maintain academic blogs. If a student writes an essay they can password protect it. Instead of using paper their essay can be graded online. Essays can link to references, which makes it easy for teachers to verify sources and prevents students from making up sources they never used or excuses for why they don’t have it but claim to have it done."

I just finished taking a class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) called Social Implications of Information Processing(class website). During the duration of the class I posted some of homework assignments from it. The assignments were all approximately one page responses to a prompt question.


This was not required for the class, nor did I really mention the website to the professor or the teaching assistants. I used the idea of posting to this blog to require myself to write articles that I thought the public audience of my blog would enjoy.


I also kept all of the articles very current, sometimes writing in response to things I had read online earlier that day. This, along with being able to link to the sources directly in the articles, I felt really increased the quality of the assignments.


Julian also mentions an interesting idea about letting the general internet using public determine a portion of the grade.

"Students could add work to YouTube, Flickr, Helium etc. to let the masses rate it and determine a small portion of their grade."

This idea however, I am wary of. I believe that students would tailor their assignments to entertain the internet populace, instead of the academic community, and the community in their field of research. This was not a large problem for me, as I'm a student in computer science, and the few people who read this blog would (I feel) be interested in the topics I was given.


One problem many of the students had with the class was that 30% of the grade was determined by "class participation", which was largely determined by awarding up to 3 points per class, 1 for each time you raised your hand and was called on. I (along with some of the other students) immediately realized there was not enough time to include all of the approximately 50 students in a 2 hour class. That's 150 times students would have to talk, more than once every minute.


That being said, it would have been much more reasonable to have class participation be awarded for participation that occurs online. We did use the forums of the Blackboard (wikipedia) system, however, this was used mainly for completing and turning in assignments, and not much collaboration occurred there. For the record, I am not a fan of the MyWPI implementation of Blackboard.


Here's the list of all the assignments I posted online, along with the grade I received on them.

• Google's role in the spread of Information
  ->I couldn't find the original paper which had the grade on it, if had been posted online I would still be able to retrieve the grade :)
• Security through Open Source 5/5
• U.S. Patriot Act causes ethical concerns for software developers 5/5
• Another data breach goes nearly unnoticed. 4.5/5
• Social Implications of Open Source Software 5/5 (I liked this one)
• How criminals will benefit from the REAL ID legislation 5/5
• Evolution of Communication 5/5 (My favorite one)

There was one other paper I wrote which I did not put online, it was written quickly and I didn't feel the quality was up to par. It was about "exploitation of the intellectual property right legislation".


Putting my work online certainly kept me responsible for actually doing the work, and as a side effect, also started me actually writing on the blog. I would love to see social media become more integrated with education. If we can make it easier for students to communicate with each other, I truly believe it would benefit everyone involved.

P.S. Alternate title for this post was "Social media in your classrooms, enhancing your communications"

Google Reader updates again, provides major usability increase

The Google Reader team has just released another update to their product, for those of us who increase the font size on the page. The new feature lets you increase the font of only the current article you are reading.

If this sounds simple and even useless to you, then you are not someone who occaisonally does increase the font. This is a very welcome addition for me. Now when I'm reading with an increased font size, the interface doesn't blow up as well, making what used to be nearly useless usable again.

Here's what used to happen to the interface (notice the buttons and search box at the top collide):


And here's what it looks like now (interface original size, just the post has font increased)


The only minor bug I've found so far is the current folder I'm reading also has it's font increased, which I actually don't mind so much, in fact it may not be a bug at all. However, when I switch to all items from a folder, the original folder font size is still increased.

Good job Google Reader team, especially Mihai Parparita, keep it up.

EDIT (3:19pm 5/8/2008): Forgot to mention, I'm using the Better GReader plugin for Firefox, but I had the same usability issues with the standard version of Google Reader

Google has become constant part of my internet experience

Quick poll, how many tabs do you have open in your web browser, and how many of them are Google services?

I have 9 tabs open, and this includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. Oh, and those 3 tabs never close.

Leave your answers in the comments

Pandora under maintenance

This showed up when I tried to "thumbs up" a song. Anyone know what's going on? There's no mention of it on the official Pandora blog. I wonder if it's just routine, or if they plan to roll out some new features. Here's hoping to the second option.

Google Reader allows me to (surreptitiously) alter the text of any article.

I glad to see Google Reader's new features. I saw another article that I received from Louis Gray's Google Reader Shared Items again. Thanks for keeping on top of the world for me Louis. :-)


The (current) top item in my Shared Items feed shows that you can alter the text of any article, I couldn't find the permalink in my Shared Items Feed.



This could lead to misleading people by changing the content, or even adding more content. It could end up with me not being able to trust content from shared items anymore.



The article appears in my shared items feed with the article changed with the text I included. Note that you can alter full html markup of the article, potentially leading to other sorts of attacks.

Hopefully Google changes this back soon, I'm content with them continuing to post the full article in my Shared Items feed.

UPDATE: Another problem I've had with the new Notes feature is that there is no way to edit the notes (as far as I can find), all you can do is un-share them.

Google Calendar is unavailable - One of the seven signs of the apocalypse?

It's not Gmail or Google Reader, but these things always unnerve me. Anyone else getting this?

UPDATE: It's back now. The world is still here.

Onaswarm sounds like it has potential, but it falls short for me

I read the review Onaswarm Gives FriendFeed a Run For Its Money on Mashable which I found from Louis Gray's Google Reader Shared Items (and proceeded to share myself).

I'm already a big fan of Louis Gray, even having just found his blog when reading a review of Shyftr on April 12th. Louis if you read this, I also have been a big fan of your shared items, sharing 21 items in the last week or so since I subscribed to your shared items, now at the top of my most shared items.



I was happy to see the praise of how easy it was to sign up. I was also interested in exactly how well these location based "swarms" are progressing.

Unfortunately I ran into a problem on the first form.



That's right, there is an arbitrary limit on the size of my password, which I'm annoyed by, but I'll continue on. Also, notice there is no password confirmation box, a single typo and you will lose those users forever, because they can't access their accounts immediately.

I'm presented with a text box which says

"Enter 1 to 4 Account Names/User IDs that you use (on blogger, buzznet, delicious, digg, flickr, jaiku, lastfm, livejournal, msnspaces, myspace, picasa, pownce, soup, stumbleupon, twitter, typepad, tumblr, upcoming, wordpress, vimeo, youtube, vox) and we'll try to find your networks."

I really only "ryansv" for most sites, so I enter that and click go. The process is interesting at first, quickly finding a few sites that I use, (and some that aren't me), as well as reporting that I was not found on certain services.



The one main problem here is that it took almost a whole minute. It doesn't sound that long but when you're sitting there looking at a dimmed page with a spinner for a minute, it's unacceptable.

It also used ryansv.blogpot.com, which I don't use. I guessing it can't pick up group blogs based on the user names of the contributors. I can't edit it once it has been imported, which is frustrating. I have to delete it, and add a new Blogger "identity" duffsdevice, to trick it into finding this blog. I'm sure this could lead to problems with duplicate items just like on FriendFeed.

I signed up for the Worcester, MA swarm which by the title of it looks auto generated, but I'm glad it's there. Unfortunately I'm now the sole member of the group. I didn't see any way to casually browse for popular swarms, so I couldn't find any others to join.

I tried importing contacts from GMail, but no one was found. The only other option is a name search, which isn't too appealing to me.

So, my opinion of the site is, it's no more useful than friendfeed currently, and I repeatedly had trouble finding out where to navigate to, so I gave up and left fairly quickly. I saw the full list on the home page, but that's the only place I saw content that wasn't mine. Also, I'm not fond of the UI, it's unnecessarily sprayed with AJAX, and maybe it's the color scheme, but there's something I cant easily define which distracts me from the content constantly.

Interesting advertising coincidence... or is it?

I'm listening to my Pandora station when the song "Invincible" by Ok Go starts playing and then the ad changes. This is what came up.



Alice in Chains is only voted down because it was a live version. :)

Evolution of Communication

Social interactions between individuals can really be broken down into one simple thing: communication. As time has gone on, communication has evolved along side us. The simplest form of communication began with body language and other visual cues, next came spoken language. In 105 A.D. paper was invented, thus beginning the spread of written documents. In 1450 A.D. The printing press was invented making written material widely available. In 1835 A.D. the telegraph and Morse code brought about the beginning of fast long distance communication. The newspapers, telephone, phonograph, radio, and television were all new forms of communication, all of which had fierce opposition.

A quote from 1920 in regards to the radio:

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

A Western Union internal memo from 1876 says:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

Lee de Forest, the inventor of the cathode ray tube, said that television:

“Theoretically, television may be feasible, but I consider it an impossibility - a development which we should waste little time dreaming about.”

All of these quotes can be found at Things People Said, along with many other interesting (and completely wrong) quotes.

As we know now, all of these technologies have increased the amount of communication in nearly every country in the world. With the introduction of ARPANET in 1969, and the World Wide Web in 1989, the amount of communication has increased again, and as these technologies continue to grow, more and more communication occurs online. Some people have raised concerns that the various forms of communication online has degraded the social interactions between individuals. If this statement was true, we would see a decline in either quality or quantity of conversations, or both.

The quantity of conversations has clearly not decreased, the number of newly enabled conversations created by the communication tools on the Internet far outweighs any loss of communication that may have previously occurred face to face. An article entitled Are We Just Jumping On The Social Media Bandwagon? appearing on SheGeeks written by guest Colin Walker states:

“The internet, and social media on it, merely allows us to extend the range of our conversations. Instead of chatting over the garden fence we are chatting across oceans; instead of meeting in pubs and bars we gather in virtual spaces.”

The harder question to answer here is if the quality of communication has decreased due to use of communication tools such as email, instant messaging, social networking websites, chat rooms, BBS, IRC, SMS, blogs, and many other technologies and systems that facilitate not only personal, but also public conversations. Quality is a subjective term, so it would be impossible for me to provide a complete argument that the quality of conversations has decreased.

It's my personal opinion, and that of many other people, that a change in how or where communication occurs does not imply a decrease in quality. I would go as far to say that the quality of communication can not be decreased. Sure, we can be annoyed when we see the large amount of sophomoric communication online, but these seemingly useless conversations should not distract you from the inherent value of nearly instant communication with nearly anyone around the world. The ability to find almost any information about nearly any topic by simply searching on the Internet more than makes up for the lack of quality in a small group of Internet users.



The prompt for this article was to "Make a point about" how "Email and other forms of electronic communications have degraded the social interactions between individuals."

How criminals will benefit from the REAL ID legislation

Forgot to publish this post for some reason, just noticed today.

“State a point for or against the National ID System, or a facet thereof. Please include references in addition to the book.”

A national ID system is a system used by the government of the country to track the people in the country. It has generally consisted of a unique identifier, with the possibility of appearing on an ID card which would be issued by the government. These types of identification systems have lead to many concerns over privacy, since they often become used for more than they were intended to do. The United States currently uses the Social Security number, which when originally created, “the numbers would only be used by the Social Security Program.”, however as people realized the value of a system which has an unique identifier for all the citizens in the country, it's use began to spread. Currently the Social Security number is used for a large variety of things, from obtaining a job to applying for a credit card. A citizen without a Social Security number would have a enormous number of problems doing things that most people take for granted.

The current legislation for the REAL ID system in the United States would in effect create a new standard for a national ID. It does this by establishing a new set of guidelines for what states would have to include in drivers licenses or other identification cards. If a state does not meet these criteria, “the penalty is barring people without a REAL ID from flying and from entering any federal buildings, such as a courthouse, Social Security Administration office or the office of an elected federal official.” This is a huge infringement on state's rights. When did the federal government get the ability to decide how and who the state's will issue drivers licenses or other identification cards to?

Proponents of the legislation say that the REAL ID act say that it “is necessary to prevent terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants from successfully obtaining and using fraudulent driver's licenses.” however, there are no facts proving the legislation will do this.. Criminals currently still obtain legal documents that are supposed to be difficult to obtain, what makes it that much harder for them to obtain the new forms of identification? The average citizen is who this would really affect. If they lose or need to obtain a new ID for any reason, it would become much more difficult for them to do so. The new IDs would also be a prime target for identity thieves. They contain much more information about the citizen, and as proposed the information would be contained in a 2D bar code, or some other computer readable information on the card.

This also brings up the privacy concerns related to having all of your information in a central location. It is not unlikely that the new IDs would be used widely, since drivers licenses are already used in this way. Whenever you need to present identification, you would just have to let a computer scan this card. This allows easy tracking of nearly every aspect of ones life. The data centers containing the information associated with these cards would be under constant attack by identity thieves, since this would become the most centralized location of personal data anywhere. It's foolish to believe that having this information would not lead to abuse of the information. Whenever data is collected, it is always possible for a leak to occur even in the most secure facility, because someone the data now exists where someone (legitimately or not) can access it.

The benefits to having the REAL ID system in place are few and often misleading. The ease of having only one card to prove your identity is a trade-off with losses in both security and privacy. The increased security measures required would force a huge cost on the states to implement these features, which would undoubtedly never become completely secure. This just makes it harder for a normal citizen to obtain identification, while criminals would have access to these cards, giving them the benefits of this system, instead of stopping them. Some of the reasons given for enacting the bill are to fight terrorism and reduce identity theft, but there is no convincing evidence that the legislation would accomplish that, but it does increase the centralization of personal information, which is likely to attract abuse instead of prevent it.