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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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
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.