RFID Tattoo for Tracking Cattle and Humans

ack154 writes "The Register reports that a St Louis based company, Somark Innovations, has successfully tested RFID tattoos to be used for tracking cattle and other animals. Details are limited for the actual tattoo, but it's said to contain no metals and can be read up to about four feet away. Engadget has some more details on the matter. And yes, the article does mention RFID tattoos are possible for people, specifically the military. From the article: 'The system developed by Somark uses an array of needles to quickly inject a pattern of dots into each animal, with the pattern changing for each injection. This pattern can then be read from over a meter away using a proprietary reader operating at high frequency.'"

Comments

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[garcia]

The poster could have left off the 'and humans' part.

Then it would be a real news site and not Slashdot. They have to keep raising the bar to set themselves apart from the rest!

Animals!

[nighty5]

"Somark Innovations, has successfully tested RFID tattoos to be used for tracking cattle and other animals."

So when does every member of Congress receive their tattoo?

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[ElectricRook]

Actually, I think the people tracked as "stock", would become "Livestock".

By any chance

[organgtool]

Are these tattoos shaped like barcodes? All I know is that if an EMP devastates the United States, I'm going to move to Seattle, join the fight against Manticore and get a chance to meet Jessica Alba (with sexy results)!

Re:Tattoos as ID?

[Marko DeBeeste]

When they came for the Jerseies, I didn't protest, because I wasn't a Jersey

When they came for the Angus, I didn't protest, because I wasn't an Angus

When they came for the Herefords, I didn't protest, because I wasn't a Hereford

When they came for the sheep, there was no on left to protest for me

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If you place RFID readers at certain strategic locations, you can go a long way to detecting the presence of, say, pedophiles that have been paroled and are hanging out near a school (assuming you have hidden RFID readers near schools, of course.)

There must be some term coined by now, akin to Godwin's law, that as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of someone using combatting pedophillia to justify their argument approaches 1.

However, unlike Godwin's law, the person who brings up pedophillia usually ends up "winning" the argument, or at least persuading the most amount of people.