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Why One Man Got a Guerrilla RFID Implant
Shannon writes "One of my writers just did an interview with Amal Graafstra, who just had an RFID implant put in his hand and has been building appliances for it to simplify and automate his life... "I guess I have my own Big Brother paranoia. Given the choice of Orwellian societies, I'd rather live in one based on RFID tags than fingerprints, DNA, or facial structure; an RFID tag system is easy to manage and opt out of, whereas DNA sampling or facial recognition, well, isn't.""
If it's easy to opt out of a system of identification, then no one who is serious will use that system. If your gov't wants to track your movements (or whatever you think you're up against) they're not going to use easily-circumvented RFIDs, they'll use biometrics.
My first thought (as a diabetic) is, what a wonderful opportunity to die of an infection :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Instead of SSN's (here in the States, as most of Americans, I'm ingorant of the rest of the world) I've always thought we should all be assigned a GUID at birth. If you can't remember it, well, you're screwed. Mine just happens to be:
{EDB6154D-43E6-4707-B453-5FAB334B968E}
With it being globally unique (theoretically), it would be nearly impossible to memorize anyone's other than yourself (I struggle to remember my wife's SSN). So when the identity thief goes to the dealership to buy a car with your id, when they can't recite the GUID assigned to you, they are instantly arrested and displayed hanging from their toenails in the town square for all to see.
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Emperor Domitian was a contemporary of St. John the Beloved. Domitian caused a massive statue of himself to be built at Ephesus, overlooking the marketplace. Anyone who wanted to get into the marketplace had to purchase and burn incense in worship to him. Once you had paid for the incense they used a warm blob of wax or a bit of pigment, making a mark on your wrist or forehead to prove you had paid. To worship the Emperor and to swear loyalty to your country were one and the same, considered inseperable. To say "I support our troops but not the Emperor" was sedition. When Christians refused to buy incense, they were asked "Why do you hate your country? Do you wish the Emperor dead?"
Domitian also had a Greek chorus of 24 singers robed in white that followed him around. Ceaselessly they cried "Holy, holy, holy is our lord and our god Domitian who was and who is and who is to come", falling down and worshipping him. For more information about Domitian, find a book by Plutarch in your local library.
Most people completely misinterpret that '666' number. First off, it's not just a number: it is a number *and* a name. The Greeks wrote numbers using letters, each letter standing for a number. Unlike our system where we use only 10 digits and use ordering to denote the significance of the digits, the Greek system had a different 10 digits for each power of 10. Since they ran out of letters fairly quickly, they brought in older letters that had gone into disuse.
What Revelations actually says is that the number and name of the beast is "xi-chi-digamma" (digamma is also known as "stigma"). This is pronounced ks-kh-w (ks as in the x in "fox", kh as in the ch in "loch"). The xi is 600, the chi is 60, and the digamma is 6. This is *not* three sixes, like many people try and reduce it to; it is a six hundred, a sixty, and a six, combined to make the number six hundred sixty six. If you were to write three sixes in ancient Greek, they would be three sixes, not six hundred sixty six.
I once listened to a Philip Glass record for an hour and a half before I realized it was skipping.