An iPod for the masses
It has been widely reported that the London School of Economics think that the cost of the government National ID card scheme could be in the region of £30 billion. This is of course a far higher figure than any of us would dare to think about and in order to avoid being caught out with yet another badly planned, poorly executed and woefully underperforming IT scheme for an ever growing price, the government came up with an ingenious method of avoiding a debate about its cost. They have simply refused to tell either the electorate or indeed Parliament as to what they think it is all going to cost us.
However, buried within the DTI there is a man by the name of Patrick Cooper, who is one of their top IT people and he has come up with an interesting idea.
"Give everyone in the country an iPod" he suggested at a Technology Predictions conference hosted by Adobe.
He went on to point out that as security and authentication are important issues the best way of getting around it was by having secure encrypted keys stored on either a mobile phone or an iPod. This could then be docked with your PC. This could then be used for payment systems and identity proof (along with personal codes which the owner only would know).
But if the mobile phone or iPod was also loaded up with the data that is meant to be stored on the National Identity Card scheme, then there are further advantages one of which is the interesting one of reducing crime. If everyone gets given an iPod by the government then everyone will have one and there will be no reason to steal them. Mr. Cooper goes on "you could do a lot with that and we know that it would be cheaper than the ID cards because the LSE have told us so!"
With the £30 billion figure for the whole scheme the LSE worked out the cost at £500 per person. But an iPod Nano is now less than a £100. That would save £2.4 billion, which is a hell of a lot of money. I am sure that the money saved would pay for a lot of schools, hospitals and other essential services. Heh, it would even pay for some decent equipment for our troops.
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