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Have you seen Minority Report yet? Considering they used retnal scanners in the movie?

No, I am not a microbiologist, I am just a lowly student that has to bow down to microbiologist profs.

Minority Report shows a sort of example of this: stop the disease by fully understanding it and stopping before it happens. This may involve a lot of science (which may include the horrid bad science ), but it does look promising and more research into it is very exciting.

There are many spectulated culprits ( randomness, heredities and free radicals ), but I believe I am going to be one of those graduate students doing 1000s of hours of expirments and research on this. Or maybe I will write a bash script for it instead (bash 3.0 released!)

This whole idea of copying the Windows desktop is one of the reasons I get turned off Linux. If I want to use a Windows like interface why wouldn't I just use the real thing? People in the Open-Source community do a lot of talking about being innovative but I just ain't seeing it with projects like this. The post yesterday about ROX (even though it does copy an older RISC type OS) is at least a fresh idea in the Linux world and I give cudos to the author for trying something different. Sun also deserves cudos for their work on a 3D desktop as mentioned last week or so. It's innovative directions like these that Linux needs to go to differentiate itself from the Windows and Mac OSes that are already out there. How about working on a graphical and gesture interface like in Minority Report? Now that would be cool and would interest me in Linux. For now I'll just stick with my Mac.

What if biometric authentication were used instead? Thumbprints, retina scans and the like
will probably eventually replace the pile of plastic cards that we're all forced to carry around. The practical problem with the Vancouver nightclubs' plan will be getting customers to go through with the photo ID card process. There will always be bars that choose not to be Orwellian, and there are other things to do in Vancouver besides clubbing. If biometrics is ubiquitous, though, schemes like this might become the norm, like in the movie Minority Report.

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Great! I'll ship my CD collection to someone in Europe and ask them to upload it to the P2P network.

What a preposterous law! Seems a lot like the Office of Precrime to me.

Right now we have reached the beginning of the transition away from button inputs to gesture inputs. There are of course many projects working on gesture inputs. The first that are really viable are the 2D ones from fingerworks.com. The next will be refined versions of the P5 Glove or the sensible phantom. I think eventually gesture based input will be the type used in Minority Report, (see the 1st and 10th images in the gallery).

Finally, I think we will move on to direct input. It's been shown that people can control very simple objects, (move a ball to the top or bottom of the screen), with electrodes connected to their head. Unfortunately so far it has not been responsive enough to see application. Input may also be of the form in Ghost in the Shell where people have wireless connections through implants in their body and also physical jacks in the back of their neck. (Another thing shown in the movie are fingers that come apart on wires to type. Rather than that I'd expect a low-power data transmission in the fingers so set the fingers in appropriately shaped cavities and have the data transmitted across the skin.)

Keyboards are nice. They have worked for a long time, but it is time to replace them. Slowly we can transition from keyboards, through the 2D gesture inputs of fingerworks to 3D inputs along the lines of minority report at which time, hopefully, direct input methods will be viable.

This certainly reminds me of those retina-scanning, robotic spiders in Tom Cruise's "Minority Report."

Also check out this guy's company at iRobot which offers real life robotic product like the "Roomba" - a robotic vacuum cleaner.

I guess we may be only half a century away from commericialized robot similar to Honda's Asimo Humaniod.

• Nothing happens to your privacy when tracked from floor to door, as long as it ends there.

That's precisely the point. Do we trust corporate and/or government entities to stop tracking the items after they leave the store?

• Now.. if the RFID tags follow you home.. thats another issue. But the show I saw on it. (Tech Tv? Might have been?) Did not seem to think that was possible.. they are a direct scan sort of thing, rather than a "scan from black helicopter" sort of thing.

Another reply already mentioned the case of the tires with the embedded chips that can be read from sensors embedded in the road. Those folks learned that they could create an antennae that could be read at a height of close to 24"... through heavy rubber. So you see, it's not the helicopter scan that should be worrying you. It's the door frame.

Reports in the NYT last year revealed how many cameras were installed in the Big Apple alone. Installing sensors in doorways of all publicly accessible buildings (including public transit) would allow you to scan quite a bit of the population. Before you know it, you have advertising a la Minority Report. That's where the privacy concerns begin.

Who else is getting a deja-vu from this?

Somebody let me know if there's a major difference in the technology required to match fingerprints vs. the technology required to match retinas. Everything I've read -- and a dual professor in computer science/biomedical engineering I asked -- says that there really isn't much of one.

The problems you raised with retinal scans as a means of proof-positive ID are completely valid. And precisely the reason that we don't, and aren't planning, on using fingerprinting (a technology thats been around for a little while) as a reliable form of IDing. Could the sort of retinal IDing in Minority Report become a reality? I doubt it. It's a sort of science fiction fantasy. Rewind to 1950, and note how fingerprints and fingerprint databases were used in the way scifi uses retinal scans nowadays.

Summa argumentum, don't worry. Or start walking around with gloves and sunglasses whenever you leave your house.

-Sam

Well the only other trailer I was apple to find was on the movie's website here.
I don't think Tom Cruise would be that bad. I AM worried about Spielberg fucking it up though.
From what I've been able to find out, the originally had the script based around a cop who found out his brother was scheduled to be arrested. I think the strongest point of the book is the fact that the DIRECTOR of the agency is the one who finds out.