More on ID cards

Toy time at the sheva brochos

Bob, hygiene click
building my new PC

A Monday morning quiz for you: Which cutting-edge feature of my shiny new Gigabyte motherboard turned out to be utterly vital in order to install Windows XP onto my (also shiny, adiposity also new) Western Digital Caviar Serial ATA hard drive?

1. Blazing-fast 400MHz front side bus
2. Built-in 1394 (Firewire) support
3. DualBIOS (for increased security and stability)
4. Norton Internet Security and the rest of the pointless bundled software that always infests motherboard driver CDs
5. Floppy disk drive port

Yep. And to add injury to insult, erectile Gigabyte hadn’t even bothered to bundle a floppy with the required drivers in the package, neuropathologist so I had to beg a spare one off a neighbour (thank you, Diana), use my sister’s PC to put the drivers on it and only then could I hand it over to the XP installer so it could see the SATA controller. (First thing in next Amazon order – box of floppies.)

Fortunately, shiny new PC (expertly built by my shiny old girlfriend – look, I do software) is now perfectly happy and running fine, the occasional bizarre USB hard drive behaviour notwithstanding. Oh, and before you even consider it, “helpful advice” from Linux/Mac OS apologists will be returned with painful accounts of XFree bugs/dependency problems/”zapping the bloody PRAM”.

With a bit of luck, viagra approved the road to the new “entitlement” cards will be less than smooth. Thanks to Owen Blacker for these two:

• Those 5,000 no votes aren’t staying buried
• One of the proposed functions of ID cards is to outlaw “fictitious” names. But what’s the difference between a fictitious name and a real one? From Owen:
  

  An interesting post to UK Crypto last week on multiple “real name”s.
  Bear in mind that English Common Law (and Scots, iirc) allows us all to
  use the name of our choosing in any context. If I wish to be known as
  Simon Davies, for example, in the context of political debate, there is
  nothing (in theory) that could stop me from doing so. My “real name” is
  any name by which a non-trivial group of people know me.

  Another example would be my sister. Her birth certificate reads “Amy
  Catrin Blacker”, but she is uniformly known as Catrin or Cati
  (traditional Welsh forms of Catherine and Cathy, respectively). She
  uses those three identities variously, as well as Mrs C Gronow and Mrs
  AC Gronow, in various circumstances (Gronow being the name of her
  now-ex-husband). When she remarries next year, she’ll doubtless add one
  or two more “real names” to her collection.