Posts by kedwards

Passport Interview Observations

To be fair to the IPS, it could be that the interviews have been successful at preventing fraud by scaring off the fraudsters! Going to Elephant and Castle for the interview certainly scared me.

The biggest problem I reckon is that the questions asked in the interview aren't imaginative enough (no surprise for a government department).

For example, two items entered on the passport form are "Place of Birth" and "Father's Date of Birth".

Rather than just ask for those again in the interview and check they match, if I was running it, I'd ask things like: "What sort of town were you born in? Near the coast? In the mountains? Small? Large?" and "When was your father's fiftieth birthday? What did you do to celebrate?".

Minor Correction

... could talk directly to its immediate neighbors in a four-socket machine, but to reach its fourth partner in a machine ...

Shouldn't that be third partner?

But was it Apple's decision?

One possibility is that the choice of a micro-SIM wasn't Apple's decision as such, but a condition imposed by AT&T - who will be offering cheap unlimited data plans for iPad users.

Presumably Apple's reluctance to allow tethering and VoIP applications is driven by the need not to annoy the network operators ...