...should be the title of this Gizmodo article. When it comes to biometrics, everybody wants them. But leave it to the British government to screw it up completely:

Kudos to the British government for spending the equivalent of $6.6 billion US on a biometric National Identity Card program without budgeting for a single card reader.

And, it seems I'm not the only one missing the sense of the idea to have biometric passports and no readers, but leave it to the government to justify this lunacy:

"We have always said that we would roll out the scheme incrementally. The card will not be as useful as it could be until we have got the volumes out there. There's no prospect in the immediate future for the government directing anybody that you have to buy those things [readers] because we would be placing a burden on these organizations.

Why in hell are the Brits rolling out these funky biometric passports then? Possibly to waste taxpayer money in an incremental way, buy the first generation, then the readers show up and these are incompatible with the first generation?

Luckily, I'm not the Queens' subject or rather, taxpaying serf.