Ask a domestic violence victim about the efficacy of restraining orders and other paperwork at preventing illegal behaviour by a powerful adversary.
Got $100,000 laying around to appeal your case to the Supreme Court? If not, best of luck to ya.
Posted on 05/21/2006 9:35:29 AM PDT by Nachum
The roots of radio-frequency identification technology stretch at least as far back as World War II, when transponders helped distinguish between Axis and Allied aircraft. Over the years the concept has been greatly miniaturized, landing RFID technology in such settings as animal tags, toll-collection devices, passports, keyless entry systems for cars and wireless credit cards.
But perhaps none of these projects will have as much impact for consumers as the adoption of RFID in the supply chains of huge retail stores.
Mega-retailers led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) have gotten their biggest suppliers to add RFID chips to pallets and cases shipped to stores. Now, rather than having people with bar-code scanners walk around to take inventory, RFID readers in warehouses can automatically tally items on the fly.
RFID is expected to yield substantial savings largely by reducing the frequency of the following scenario: A customer goes to a store for an item, only to find its shelf empty, even though replacement stock lurks somewhere in the back. It's one of the costliest problems in retail.
Simon Langford, Wal-Mart's director of logistics, distribution and replenishment systems, explains that a bar-code scanner can register that certain items have entered a store's back room. But not until one of the items gets scanned at checkout does the store typically get an update. In between, the item might be on a store shelf or still sitting among back-room clutter.
In the more than 500 stores where Wal-Mart has integrated RFID, radio tags give additional insight - they inform employees when supplies enter the storeroom, when they leave it for the sales floor and when their emptied cartons are taken to the trash.
A University of Arkansas study last year determined that these stores saw a 16 percent reduction in the times that products were missing from shelves. But Langford said that figure understated RFID's true power, because the study included popular items that sales staffers already were sure to replenish. When the research examined only items that Wal-Mart sold less than 15 times a day, the out-of-stock reduction was 30 percent.
Wal-Mart hopes to see even greater improvement soon by giving employees handheld RFID scanners that will direct them precisely to cartons of products they need to bring from the storeroom.
Eventually, individual products in Wal-Mart and other stores are expected to get their own RFID tags to give stores even clearer views of their inventory.
"That's really where the supply chain gets most messy," said Kevin Ashton, who helped drive RFID development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now heads marketing for ThingMagic LLC, a maker of RFID readers.
Some high-value items like TVs and pharmaceuticals already have their own tags. But most item-level tagging is a decade away.
First, tag prices must drop below their current 5-to-7 cent range. Work also still needs to be done to master wireless interference issues that can arise in RFID-dense environments. And developers have to assure the public and retailers that data on the tags are secure and not invasive.
"We're seeing the RFID industry get a little bit more mature every day," Ashton said. "We don't view the RFID market as some overnight sensation."
If that is the case, then someone could drive through your neighborhood and determine the items in the homes there. People could do this for a variety of reasons--not necessarily benign.
Best solution so far is the aftershock mechanical; I had a really big deer take four steps and then collapse like he'd had a heart attack with one of those last fall, didn't look like a bow kill at all, no tracking required.
I am sure you will be able to buy a detector - if your house is "lit up" by a scanner, it will go off.
Gives a whole new twist to the old-fashioned frat-boy panty-raid. A panty-raid, MIT-style.
Given that the RFID-pushers are doing their best to insure that nobody knows about the technology and how they're hiding it, the question becomes why anyone would spend the money on a detector?
Of course not. But RFID technology knows no borders. Major internet firms are cooperating with totalitarian China to censor the internet, what makes you think they won't heed the call of a few bucks to cooperate with such regimes to implement a nationwide surveillance system that the Cheka only dreamed of?
They already have surveillance cameras at nearly every street corner in London, by the way.
Like the chip laminated between layers of cardboard, hidden inside a sealed shampoo cap, or built in to the sole of your shoe?
So I take it by your sarcastic tone that you've never done anything even the slightest bit illegal, and have never been part of any group or organization that has irritated or annoyed the powers that be at any time in history?
Suppose, instead of tracking creamed corn, they are tracking a particular box of matches and a particular package of parrafin firestarter sticks that were sold at a particular grocery store shortly before and in the vicinity of an arson in which those two types of items were used, and they kick in your door, haul you to court, and railroad you into prison on that basis alone regardless of the fact that you bought those two items for a camping trip and had nothing to do with the arson?
Are they speaking of an easier means to scan entire shelves for the presence of product? That could be done optically if codes were affixed to areas that are always going to be exposed.
When I pointed out how it's a total-surveillance state's wet dream, you just brushed it aside as "unlikely."
The current legal regime in the USA would be unlikely to permit this. The Supreme Court some years ago nixed the usage of thermal scanners to locate purported nefarious home operations, saying that if you can't perceive it with the ordinary human senses then you can't use it to examine a home sans warrant. RFID poll/response would fall into similar category.
You're a little behind the technology curve, there, friend:
The reader emits radio waves in ranges of anywhere from one inch to 100 feet or more, depending upon its power output and the radio frequency used. When an RFID tag passes through the electromagnetic zone, it detects the reader's activation signal. The reader decodes the data encoded in the tag's integrated circuit (silicon chip) and the data is passed to the host computer for processing.High-frequency (850 MHz to 950 MHz and 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz) systems, offering long read ranges (greater than 90 feet) and high reading speeds, are used for such applications as railroad car tracking and automated toll collection.
Actually, they have introduced detectors. They have made handheld games out of them.
Skannerz UPC Scanner Game - Commander
My sons got them as a gift and they are continuously uppacking my cabinets to scan our food, cleaners, books, everything.
uppacking = unpacking
Ask a domestic violence victim about the efficacy of restraining orders and other paperwork at preventing illegal behaviour by a powerful adversary.
Got $100,000 laying around to appeal your case to the Supreme Court? If not, best of luck to ya.
Lower appellate courts generally kowtow closely to clear Supreme Court rulings. There are times you need tin foil but this isn't one.
I'll state the unthinkable: I have faith in my government, the laws and the American people. I actually do.
Just wait, someone will pass a law...you don't have to change a thing.
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