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RFID + Dart gun = DartMail!
breon.halling writes "Snail mail? Too slow. Email? Too much spam. So what's left? DartMail! Tony Tang and Eric Pattison from the University of Calgary introduce a new (well, new as of January 2003) method of transferring files and possibly shooting your eye out. Using RFID and a toy dart gun, 'DartMail lets people physically shoot electronic information at others.' Be sure to check out the movie, too!"
I'd be more interested in seeing something that would let you shoot a specific bit of information wirelessly at specific people near you. Seems like it'd be a funny way (now and then) to get to know people, by sending weird little one-liners to them from across a room. Among other possible "silent-communication" possibilities.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Anyway, this would be a lot more "useful" (and I use that term loosely)if they weren't just sending pointers to files that are on a shared server. This implies they've already got a network link between them, making a physical transport even more pointless than it would be anyway.
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I know your link is in jest, as is your post.
But I did read about a hiking service that uses Pigeons to send back photos of the hiking/whitewater trip ahead of the hikers so that the photos would be ready when the hikers got back. Wireless tech wherever they were was not up to the task. Just an interesting aside.
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Hey, just spitballing, but what if ammunition manufacturers were required to add RFID tags to individual rounds?
(Okay, I know how cost prohibitive this would be, as well as technically difficult - how would the tag even survive? But ignore that for a sec.)
Ballistic analysis during a homicide investigation is usually used to try to determine what weapon fired a round in a given incident, assuming you cant say for certain. But what if the ballistics data isn't good enough? If the round had a surviving RFID tag, it could eventually be tracked back not only to its manufacturer, but to the store that sold it, and in theory to whom.
Just a thought.
I'd be more interested in seeing something that would let you shoot a specific bit of information wirelessly at specific people near you.
We should be able to do this in our cars by now. It's gotta be more efficient than speaking in ones (finger raised) and zeros (fist raised)!
No really, I would only use it only to helpfully point out to other drivers that they left their blinkers on or ask them to kindly allow me to change lanes.
Fasten your seat belt, you've got mail!
About two years ago I saw a guy speak at a school board meeting, and complain about how difficult it was to be a substitute teacher--it's hard to hold kids accountable when you don't know their names or anything about them. He said he envisioned a system where kids would all where electronic ID badges (he didn't refer to RFID but he described the concept) and all school staff would get some kind of tagger that could read the kids info, and append the disciplinary file. Everybody thought this was absurdly authoritarian, but 2 years later there are plans to start tracking students using RFIDS...and the crazy thing the guy said: "When some class clown shoots a spit ball, I should be able to fire a demerit right back" is also closer to reality.
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About that same time, my engineering department had an IDBD--Inter-Department Ballistic Duck. It was one of those cheesy rubber figures (in our case, Donald Duck) with a suction cup base and a spring inside. Compress it, and it launches when the suction cup vacuum leaks off. We sent messages on bits of paper held in place with rubber bands. Worked great until we accidentally hit a senior manager making a walk-through. The engineering director forthwith confiscated the IDBD and we never saw it again.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Actually, you could insert a small written message into a hole in a carrot, then freeze the carrot and insert it into an un-frozen potato. Then you drop the potato into a potato gun and fire it at a car. As long as the carrot is frozen enough, it may very well pass through the metal sides of a car, creating an APDSFCMR, or "Armour-piercing discarding-sabot frozen carrot message round."
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.