Politics.NET

Unlike my 6-year old nephew, who once exclaimed "I know everything!", I don't know everything. Here's a few things that dumbfound me: How do transgendered people know they really are supposed to be the other sex? Say you are biologicially male, how do you know you'll feel more comfortable in a female body? Why do people hire life coaches that are in the same tax bracket as themselves? Who buys a $50 " Jr. Size Paper Planner "? How can you embrace the concept of civil union and reject same sex marriage ? How could the Navy have paid several millions for a network that makes traffic slow to a crawl? Network is so bad sometimes it can't even load its own error messages before timing out! Why does the govt keep rewarding private contractors of failed projects with more projects for more money? SAIC I am looking at you for what you did with the FBI 's VCF .

First came username/password combination. That quickly got old and unwieldily. Then came Microsoft Passport to makes authentication easier. Of course like all proprietory schemes, it failed woefully. Then came openID. While it hasn't gain much traction with regular folks, tech-savvy users have been embracing it. But oh no, here's comes Google and Facebook with their closed authentication schemes. Closed in the sense that, unlike OpenID , only Facebook can be a provider of facebook connect. Likewise Google is the only supplier of Google Friend Connect . I am sure Microsoft and Yahoo won't be far behind in coming up with their authentication schemes (not counting Microsoft Live since I have yet to see it on a non-Microsoft site). The question isn't so much who'll win but whether coming up with all these different authentication schemes isn't creating more problems than it's solving. The original problem was this: each website requires authentication. This ...