Wednesday, July 08, 2009

"...There's Men Who'd Do It Gladly..."

The headline tells the story: "Cover charge at this club? An RFID implant!" Yeah, not just tagged for life: paying to be tagged for life for a trivial reason.
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Bonus round won by Bob G, who correctly identified the post title as being from War Of The Worlds, perhaps most memorably in the Mercury Theatre radio play.
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Bonus round: Name the source of the title of this post and win...public recognition that you knew then answer!

3 comments:

Quigley said...

MythBusters proposed doing a show on RFID with all the pitfalls and the "other side" lawyered up in a big way and got the show (about RFID) scuttled. There are obviously big down-sides the RFID industry does not want you to know about. Of course, that makes me want them to do a show about it even more.

Anonymous said...

Like nearly any other technology, RFID has its upside (pretty cool for managing diverse inventory in a large warehouse) and its downside (amply discussed here and elsewhere).

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is pretty much guarantees misuse. I was at an academic conference last fall, and I attended a presentation by a gentleman who'd written a paper on RFID in supply chain management (and indeed, this is where RFID shines). Part of the paper covered barriers to adoption, one of which was public unease over RFID.

He mentioned that no company had asked their employees to submit to being chipped. Thinking of the company in the Midwest that made smoking outside business hours and off premises grounds for termination, I just said, "Wait." He gave me a snarky look over his reading glasses and said, "Hush."

BobG said...

The title of the post comes from War of the Worlds. It was during a conversation with a soldier whether some humans could be trained to hunt other humans.