So Osama apparently vanished. Doh... I don't know if he left Afghanistan or not, but it would be pretty easy to hide there. Lots of mountains, valleys, and caves. I note that he could throw on a veil and be pretty much undetectable even in downtown Kabul.

Many of us were reminded last week that the stock market is in fact not all that different than a lottery. We gamble that the squiggly line will either go up or down. Historically the odds are in our favor that if we do our homework and pick winning tickets it will usually go up over time. Some people of course gamble that it will go down, and sometimes they win. But in the end it is impossible for a mortal human to foresee bad business decisions, the effects of competition, and of course human emotion and fiscal calamity on their choices. All this is a brief intro into why I dumped good money into the state lotto today. I've watched companies that I gambled on trend right into the ground and into chapter 11 - thousands of dollars in some cases - millions of dollars in fluctuations in others, though the amounts are meaningless until the chips are cashed in. So why not throw a handful of 1-dollar notes on a purely speculative lotto? It's a compressed time scale so you don't have the luxury of waiting years for the odds to work in your favor. In fact the deck is stacked solidly against you. In either case, don't bet the farm unless you're prepared to be homeless. But I'm also reminded of some unconventional thoughts which I believe came out of India or China. It doesn't matter that the odds of winning the big prize are a gazillion to one. In the final analysis of the effects on you personally, your odds are fifty-fifty. Either you'll win or you'll lose.

Larry (Ellison) - get a grip. You're losing it again, as I note you're prone to do on ocassion. The American public is not yet ready to accept a national ID card. We could of course use a slightly better method than SSN and/or state driver's license to verify citizenship or birthright. Biometrics we can probably live with. Take my thumbprint. Take a strand of hair for a DNA match if you need it. But I ain't carrying no stinking papers. Of course all of this was self-serving because it also offered to give the government Oracle software for free (and make a fortune in upgrades). This at a time when most database consumers are shopping elsewhere.

But here's a twist... I might be willing to accept a national ID card if it replaced the state driver's license I already carry, and I wouldn't object harshly if it contained my certified birthplace and citizenship status along with a checkbox for each state I'm certified to drive in and also served as passport. Yes, I also know it's a slippery slope that could easily erode freedom. But people like simplicity, and ending this huge stream of forgeable documents we need to get through life and prove who we are could possibly gain support. But to get there from here, we need to figure out a secure and reliable way of knowing who you are in the first place. That problem may defy solution. Likewise there is no precedent in human history for being able to amass this much data and keep it updated and correct in a timely manner without end-user intervention; which you can't have because it allows a loophole into the reliability of the data. Therein lies the conceptual flaw.

For those of you who take this to its logical conclusion, tattooed barcodes or embedded microchips - all have loopholes you could drive a truck through. One can change a tattooed barcode with a felt-tip pen. Any number of third-world surgeons would be willing to remove/replace an embedded microchip with a reverse-engineered substitute for a nominal fee.