> Desmond Morris has a series on TLC called The Human Animal in which he describes in termendous detail how and why humans have sex.
There's even a nipple in the show!
So? I've got two of the damn things right here on my own chest. Pretty useless if you ask me.
And nipples get shown during the weightlifting, swimming, or bodybuilding sporting events televised every weekend, to say nothing of all the "beach" sitcoms and dramas on the major networks every night. Nipples on TV? Big freakin' deal.
Oh, you meant a nipple of a female human. Well, OK, those are pretty neat!:)
> I just had this weird flashed and imagined "FBI Proposes putting Videocameras in every room in America to catch criminals" The inevitable first post might read something like this: > > [...] Well... unless you are a criminal or gay or really ugly in the nude or read socially unacceptable books or masturbate or pick your nose and scratch your butt. But, we don't like people like that anyway.
When the video cameras in private homes do come, I'd say it's precisely the ugly gay butt-scratching nudists who have the least to fear when reading naughty books.
I mean, I'm nowhere near as uptight as the typical FBI guy, and even I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen all day having to see the false positives the AI comes up with for human intervention.
While straight, I'm sufficiently ugly that I doubt I'd be worth watching. (But just to be on the safe sice, I'll take up butt-scratching. I think one scratch every chapter should be enough. Maybe once every couple of pages if it's really subversive stuff like Ayn Rand.)
As for you beautiful people out there, well, you'll get watched more closely. Sucks to be you. (But if you're so damn hot, what the hell are you doing reading Slashdot? Go 'way. This our turf!:)
> You guys should try the British naming scheme, we call our ships things like "Illustrious" and "Invincible". Sounds better, no?
I'm still waiting to see ships worthy of GCC-class names: Ah, to serve on the "USS I've Got Your Gravitas Right Here!", or the "USS Sleeping Giant That You Really Shouldn't Have Awoken That Day In September".
Side note: HMS Vengeance is up for auction. $7.5M, and you could rename it anything you wanted.
(I call dibs on "TSS Tackhead Only Had $7.5 Megabucks But This Is Still Way Cooler Than One Of Your Yachts, Mr. Ellison!".)
> Of course sendmail's old open relays, wide open proxy servers on linux boxes, owned linux DNS
servers which play redirection games and so on don't contribute to spam. No siree, because they're on linux, and everyone knows linux has no problems what so ever.
Fair enough.
But the real problem from the spam point of view is the negligence of consumer broadband ISPs.
Dialup pools block outbound port 25. Why can't attbi.com, comcast.com, and rr.com get their acts together too?
At present, 12.0.0.0/8, 66.0.0.0/8 (fuggit, I'm lazy!) and 24.0.0.0/8 produce nothing but spam, and I block 'em wholesale.
You wanna run an MTA? Fine - smarthost. The 90% of Windoze luzers with SoBig.* and 9% of 0wn3d Linux boxen don't belong on the 'net, and IMO the ISPs where these boxen reside are criminally negligent in not blocking outbound port 25 traffic to anything other than the ISP's outbound mail server.
> Except the beautiful thing about the Apple ]['s were the learning one could get out of them. My Apple ][+ at least shipped with full schematics to the computer including all wiring and chip ID's. It was a fantastic opportunity for a then 11 year old back in 1981 or so,
...and best of all, a complete, FULLY COMMENTED DISASSEMBLY of the monitor ROM!
Today, the same kid gets a EULA that forbids him to even make a hex dump:(
> If I have a pizzeria in New York City and I install a phone, and you call me from Los Angeles trying to order a pepperoni pizza, I'm going to hang up on you.
Naw, just tell him to go to Lou Malnati's of Chicago. They'll bake him an awesome deep-dish pie, quick-freeze it, toss it in with some dry ice, and send it to him by FedEx overnight, anywhere in the U.S. of A. (So our Hungarian friend is still out of luck, but at least the guy in LA is OK:)
> "Why aren't you calling pizzerias in Los Angeles?" I'd ask,
Or Chicago:)
Ah, high-speed transcontinental pizza delivery. I love this country!
> Right now, I get coupons for tampons and hairspray, neither of which I use. Now, if
they'd sent me coupons for steak, that I could use. I buy steak anyway.
Suppose I'm your local grocer. Steak costs me $6/pound. Tampons cost me $3/pack.
You buy steak. You've shown the store you're willing to pay $10 per pound for steak, regularly. You tell the store that you're willing to pay $10/lb for steak every week you go grocery shopping, when you buy one of my 16-oz New York Strips.
And I make $4.00 from your steak purchase every week. (Thanks!)
Now tampons, on the other hand - I usually sell 'em for $5/pack, but since you don't buy 'em from me... well, I don't make anything from you in the tampon department. But if I can get you to buy tampons at $4/pack, that's better than not selling them at all. Another buck in my pocket.
But what's in it for me to give you a coupon for $8.99/lb beef? You're already paying $9.99!
> I'd rather get steak coupons than tampon
coupons. I see this type of data mining as a GOOD THING. The store saves money on mailings, and I get cheap steak, plus not having free samples of feminine products dumped on my doorstep.
Except you don't get to choose what coupons you get. I do!
And that's why you get coupons for $0.99 off your next tampon purchase, but not for steak.
> [Zubrin's Mars Direct] would only be a 7%
increase in NASA's budget for the next 10 years, and that would give us 5 manned missions.
And if Congress doesn't wanna increase NASA's budget, how about we scrap the Shuttle and ISS and use the savings to fund a permanent presence on Mars, rather than just low earth orbit?
The Shuttle will have to be retired and replaced with a better manned launch system in 10 years anyways.
What would you rather have by 2010? A shuttle replacement, or a permanent Mars base AND a shuttle replacement?
> [Please tell me] they have picked between metric and/or imperial to give measurements in so they don't park the thing at high velocity into Mars. > > Remeber...... Faster, Better, Cheaper
> >..my question is how much g's does it take for the skin to fall off a human's body?' >Probably worthy enough research, but hellish death for the volunteer research subjects
Well, there are gonna be an awful lot of telemarketers out of work in the real near future, aren't there?
(Oh, wait, he said human body. Aaw, fuggit. Telemarketers should be close enough. Besides, I already poured the concrete and rented the rocket sled.)
> I specifically emailed him the instructions. I am the software lead on the project - not just some flunky.
Awright, the user in question is now officially pronounced too dumb to breathe. Get an email from a real human being in reponse to a question, and the email says "Do X", you farking. well. DO. X.:)
But thanks for the laughs. Gads, users. The only reason things aren't foolproof is because fools are so damn ingenious.
> You take the Red pill and you stay in wonderland, and SCO will show you just how deep the Rabbit hole goes. Oh, and you can't tell anyone what you saw.
That's no Rabbit Hole! That's a Space Station! [darlmcbridse.cx]
> In the instructions for the replacement file, I stated most clearly: >
Step 1: update the unit to the latest firmware. > Step 2: after you have done the update, apply the attached replacement file.
First off: yeah, unlike home computer users, the customer was a dork and should have known better.
Hypothesis: "Update to the latest firmware" is (a) nonspecific, and (b) sounds an awful lot like waving a dead chicken - sorta like "reboot your machine before installing Solitaire". Many times rebooting before installing a game is unnecessary. So the user probably figured "screw it, the firmware update step was probably just cut and pasted from a generic template, it's the update file that's the important thing". (Dumb, but that's probably what they thought.)
This is the (sad) result of years of handholding. I just read a set of instructions for flashing BIOS that started with "Log In to your Support Center", "Provide your name and userid", "Go to the Download Center", (yadda yadda, about 5 steps that were all about getting to download the freakin' BIOS update), before I finally got to "Download BIOS-FOO.EXE, extract/unzip, flash with FLASH-BAR.exe".
So - back to your problem.
Suggestion: If the firmware revision matters, tell the user that it matters by being specific:
1) Update firmware to rev XYZ or higher.
2) after you have done the update, apply the attached replacement file.
If it just said "current" or "latest" firmware, and the guy just bought the device, he might think he's current, even though the box has been sitting on a supplier's shelf for six months.
Being a bit more specific won't totally protect you from clueless n00bz, but a guy who doesn't understand firmware will at least *check* to see if he's running XYZ or higher, even if his box is brand-new.
> your average non-computer user tends to think of the monitor as the computer and more often than not they end up calling the computer itself the 'modem'.
Neat!
That's the influence of those goddamned ISA and PCI Win"Modems" for ya.
15 years ago, the glass thing on your desktop was the "computer", and the big metal and plastic thing beneath it was the "hard drive". (Because that's where your WordPerfect files got saved if you didn't use the floppy. Even had a little light that flashed when you did it.)
Today, the most complicated bit of setup for a home user is to "plug your phone line into the modem" (which, for a nontechnical user, is a port on the motherboard, or an ISA or PCI slot with a phone jack - but never an external modem hooked up through a serial port!).
Why, the big plastic and metal box must be the modem! Heck, if you turn the modem's speaker on, the big plastic box even makes dial tones and beep beep noises. It has to be the modem!:)
> Oh good, more super-kewl names like "Opteron 200" and "Opteron 800" and "RADEON 9000" and
"RADEON 9100" and "RADEON 9200" and "RADEON 9300" and "RADEON 9400" and "RADEON
9500"
Actually, those are good names. Because of the numbers (unique to each card) and the brand name ("Radeon"), at least you can google for a 3-4 year old card with reasonable confidence.
There was a time when ATI simply picked a random subset of the words "pro", "turbo", "ultra", "graphics", "video" and "3d", and prepended "ATI" before printing the box.
Follow me back into a horrible flashback. It's 1997, and I'm trying to compare ATI's lineup: "ATI 3D Xpression", "ATI 3D Pro" "ATI 3D Pro Turbo" "ATI Graphics Pro Turbo", "ATI Graphics Ultra", "ATI Graphics Ultra Plus", "ATI Graphics Ultra Pro".
> [...] not all gamers are the anti-social folk they are hyped to be by parents and the media. [... ] the image of a nerdy guy who spends all day in a dimly lit room blowing up computer-generated bad guys is off base, according to a new study.
But there's still hope! And you - yes, YOU - can make a difference!
Clearly, we've been slacking off. This article is a clarion call for all us nerdy guys who do spend all day in dimly lit rooms blowing up computer-generated bad guys, to stop reading this and get the hell back to those pimp gaming rigs we spent hours casemodding, and get back to what's important in life: fragging n00b azz!
> Now I don't do much to attract the ire of governments or corporations; I pay my bills, buy my music, and live my life in security. I don't worry about the gov collecting my info, because the government isn't coordinated enough to figure out what to do with it even if they had it. As a small potato, I worry more about the honesty of my fellow citizens. Store employees get caught scamming credit cards, and now, do we get to look forward to the future criminal "warscanning" around the neighborhood with his radio sensor, instantly detecting what valuables you have inside your house...
Grok. Thanks for saying it better than I could.
Warscanning could be countered pretty easily - RFIDs are passive receivers. A warscanner (I vote for "warfider" - waRFIDer, and it rhymes with "lowrider" to pay homage to "wardriving":-)...
Anyways, a warfider will need a pretty beefy transmitter, and it'll have to be pretty directional. This opens up lots of geeky possibilities for the security-minded. Hook up an old spectrum analyzer and away you go. (Or just build your own antenna, print it on a circuit board, and scatter 'em liberally against the inside walls of your home. Add LEDs for funky twinkly-star effect, oh, hell, you get the idea:)
The point is that a waRFIDer (hmm, warfidder might be easier to type:) has to give away his position by means of his scanning device. He has to have an active device, yet you can alert yourself to his presence with a passive receiver. Odds are good that his transmitter ain't FCC-approved, and apart from George Carlin and Howard Stern, nobody's fucked with the FCC and lived to tell about it:)
Net advantage: You.
> Somehow, we the community need to express our concern that the proper precautions are taken.
Won't do a lick of good. How loud did we scream about WEP? IIS holes? The existence of W9x? The fact that our credit cards have zero security, (and haven't since they were introduced decades ago). How much good has any of that done? None at all.
So take it for granted - RFID will come. There will be no checks and balances. There will be abuses. A few thousand people will lose their property, a few dozen their livelihoods, and maybe (through warfidder-prompted muggings, etc) a life or two. Statistical noise. And much like the issues surrounding credit cards and identity theft, the benefits in terms of productivity gains and cost controls will outweigh - on balance - the losses.
We can at least take solace in the fact that as a defense (or at least as an early warning system) against being warfided, individual geeks will be able to build gadgetry to detect RFID scanners, and the bigger the threat (guy scanning your house for valuables from across the street), bigger the target (bigger his transmitter has to be, easier it is for you and your neighbors to detect and triangulate his ass).
Best of all, because owning an RFID receiver/scan-detector doesn't threaten the viability of the RFID makers' business model (that is, you can't use an RFID detector to steal stuff, nor change the RFID data your chips beam back when scanned), nobody on the white-hat side of the fence has to get sued or charged with anything.
Heck, building warfidder-detecting gear might even be fun!
> I can hear Orrin Hatch now: "I really think that these textile pirates have to understand that RFID tags subsidize their clothing purchases. Disabling these tags should be punishable by death."
Well, the original article did say that...
78% of surveyed consumers feel RFID is negative for privacy and 61% fear its health consequences.
Now, I was just about to post something to the effect that while it may well be a privacy negative, anyone who thinks it's a health hazard has probably caught Alzheimers from the aluminum in their tinfoil hat. (Which would be pretty hard, considering the Aluminum-Alzheimer's link has been largely debunked, but never underestimate the power of the placebo effect on a dedicated conspiracy theorist!)
But reading your post... I just realized... who are the real clothing pirates? Who's the greatest threat to WalMart and Chinese Hegemony? Who's the biggest threat the CIAA (Cotton Industry Association of America, oh what an appropriate acronym!)
My God! The friggin' Amish! Of course! The Amish are engaged in the rampant PIRATING of TEXTILES, and they're doing it RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES, RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA!
So yeah, if the research company did the polling in Pennsylvania, you can bet your ass that 61% would fear the health consequences of RFID tags. Hatch! Utah! Mormons! It's a MORMON CONSPIRACY to ERADICATE the AMISH! Gotta get the word out on Slashdot! Hey, check out that horse and buggy across the street, but that's weird, it's got two clean-shaven young drivers in white shirts, damn nice buggy, but the drivers sure don't look Ami{$4[[4][NO CARRIER
> I would personally never use software written by someone else(closed source, that is, open source software is great in the way that it will let me see all it can do) for anything remomtely secure/sensitive. I just do not trust people enough.
Aside: That paragraph should be required reading for anyone who thinks NSA's just being silly here. Don't just read it, understand it. Drink it in its fullness. Sear it into your memory with red-hot nichrome wire.
Now, grok this: If you wouldn't trust your secrets to code you couldn't audit yourself, why should you expect NSA to?
> Its just everyquest with star wars races. Seriously! You have an admiral ackbar race running
around in bone armor with an axe. [... ] Its everquest with a star wars theme.
Slashdot Mirror
So? I've got two of the damn things right here on my own chest. Pretty useless if you ask me.
And nipples get shown during the weightlifting, swimming, or bodybuilding sporting events televised every weekend, to say nothing of all the "beach" sitcoms and dramas on the major networks every night. Nipples on TV? Big freakin' deal.
Oh, you meant a nipple of a female human. Well, OK, those are pretty neat! :)
>
> [...] Well... unless you are a criminal or gay or really ugly in the nude or read socially unacceptable books or masturbate or pick your nose and scratch your butt. But, we don't like people like that anyway.
When the video cameras in private homes do come, I'd say it's precisely the ugly gay butt-scratching nudists who have the least to fear when reading naughty books.
I mean, I'm nowhere near as uptight as the typical FBI guy, and even I wouldn't want to spend 8 hours a day sitting in front of a computer screen all day having to see the false positives the AI comes up with for human intervention.
While straight, I'm sufficiently ugly that I doubt I'd be worth watching. (But just to be on the safe sice, I'll take up butt-scratching. I think one scratch every chapter should be enough. Maybe once every couple of pages if it's really subversive stuff like Ayn Rand.)
As for you beautiful people out there, well, you'll get watched more closely. Sucks to be you. (But if you're so damn hot, what the hell are you doing reading Slashdot? Go 'way. This our turf! :)
I'm still waiting to see ships worthy of GCC-class names: Ah, to serve on the "USS I've Got Your Gravitas Right Here!", or the "USS Sleeping Giant That You Really Shouldn't Have Awoken That Day In September".
Side note: HMS Vengeance is up for auction. $7.5M, and you could rename it anything you wanted.
(I call dibs on "TSS Tackhead Only Had $7.5 Megabucks But This Is Still Way Cooler Than One Of Your Yachts, Mr. Ellison!".)
Fair enough.
But the real problem from the spam point of view is the negligence of consumer broadband ISPs.
Dialup pools block outbound port 25. Why can't attbi.com, comcast.com, and rr.com get their acts together too?
At present, 12.0.0.0/8, 66.0.0.0/8 (fuggit, I'm lazy!) and 24.0.0.0/8 produce nothing but spam, and I block 'em wholesale.
You wanna run an MTA? Fine - smarthost. The 90% of Windoze luzers with SoBig.* and 9% of 0wn3d Linux boxen don't belong on the 'net, and IMO the ISPs where these boxen reside are criminally negligent in not blocking outbound port 25 traffic to anything other than the ISP's outbound mail server.
Today, the same kid gets a EULA that forbids him to even make a hex dump :(
GNOME's Not GNO/ME. GNO/ME's Not GNOME. GNO/ME's Not Orca. GNOME's Not Orca either. GNOME's Not GNO/ME's not Orc*** STACK OVERFLOW ***
He used the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. (This is news? :)
Naw, just tell him to go to Lou Malnati's of Chicago. They'll bake him an awesome deep-dish pie, quick-freeze it, toss it in with some dry ice, and send it to him by FedEx overnight, anywhere in the U.S. of A. (So our Hungarian friend is still out of luck, but at least the guy in LA is OK :)
> "Why aren't you calling pizzerias in Los Angeles?" I'd ask,
Or Chicago :)
Ah, high-speed transcontinental pizza delivery. I love this country!
In Soviet Russia... when outlaws have crypto, only crypto is outlawed!
Suppose I'm your local grocer. Steak costs me $6/pound. Tampons cost me $3/pack.
You buy steak. You've shown the store you're willing to pay $10 per pound for steak, regularly. You tell the store that you're willing to pay $10/lb for steak every week you go grocery shopping, when you buy one of my 16-oz New York Strips. And I make $4.00 from your steak purchase every week. (Thanks!)
Now tampons, on the other hand - I usually sell 'em for $5/pack, but since you don't buy 'em from me... well, I don't make anything from you in the tampon department. But if I can get you to buy tampons at $4/pack, that's better than not selling them at all. Another buck in my pocket.
But what's in it for me to give you a coupon for $8.99/lb beef? You're already paying $9.99!
> I'd rather get steak coupons than tampon coupons. I see this type of data mining as a GOOD THING. The store saves money on mailings, and I get cheap steak, plus not having free samples of feminine products dumped on my doorstep.
Except you don't get to choose what coupons you get. I do!
And that's why you get coupons for $0.99 off your next tampon purchase, but not for steak.
And if Congress doesn't wanna increase NASA's budget, how about we scrap the Shuttle and ISS and use the savings to fund a permanent presence on Mars, rather than just low earth orbit?
The Shuttle will have to be retired and replaced with a better manned launch system in 10 years anyways.
What would you rather have by 2010? A shuttle replacement, or a permanent Mars base AND a shuttle replacement?
>
> Remeber...... Faster, Better, Cheaper
"...Choose any two."
>Probably worthy enough research, but hellish death for the volunteer research subjects
Well, there are gonna be an awful lot of telemarketers out of work in the real near future, aren't there?
(Oh, wait, he said human body. Aaw, fuggit. Telemarketers should be close enough. Besides, I already poured the concrete and rented the rocket sled.)
Awright, the user in question is now officially pronounced too dumb to breathe. Get an email from a real human being in reponse to a question, and the email says "Do X", you farking. well. DO. X. :)
But thanks for the laughs. Gads, users. The only reason things aren't foolproof is because fools are so damn ingenious.
That's no Rabbit Hole! That's a Space Station! [darlmcbridse.cx]
Five years of experience, or One Fucked Up Powerpoint Slide?
Just like poor presentation of temperature data killed Challenger, poor presentation of the foam data killed Columbia.
Stupid goddamn PHBs and their fucking PowerPoint slides.
> Step 1: update the unit to the latest firmware.
> Step 2: after you have done the update, apply the attached replacement file.
First off: yeah, unlike home computer users, the customer was a dork and should have known better.
Hypothesis: "Update to the latest firmware" is (a) nonspecific, and (b) sounds an awful lot like waving a dead chicken - sorta like "reboot your machine before installing Solitaire". Many times rebooting before installing a game is unnecessary. So the user probably figured "screw it, the firmware update step was probably just cut and pasted from a generic template, it's the update file that's the important thing". (Dumb, but that's probably what they thought.)
This is the (sad) result of years of handholding. I just read a set of instructions for flashing BIOS that started with "Log In to your Support Center", "Provide your name and userid", "Go to the Download Center", (yadda yadda, about 5 steps that were all about getting to download the freakin' BIOS update), before I finally got to "Download BIOS-FOO.EXE, extract/unzip, flash with FLASH-BAR.exe".
So - back to your problem.
Suggestion: If the firmware revision matters, tell the user that it matters by being specific:
1) Update firmware to rev XYZ or higher.
2) after you have done the update, apply the attached replacement file.
If it just said "current" or "latest" firmware, and the guy just bought the device, he might think he's current, even though the box has been sitting on a supplier's shelf for six months.
Being a bit more specific won't totally protect you from clueless n00bz, but a guy who doesn't understand firmware will at least *check* to see if he's running XYZ or higher, even if his box is brand-new.
Neat!
That's the influence of those goddamned ISA and PCI Win"Modems" for ya.
15 years ago, the glass thing on your desktop was the "computer", and the big metal and plastic thing beneath it was the "hard drive". (Because that's where your WordPerfect files got saved if you didn't use the floppy. Even had a little light that flashed when you did it.)
Today, the most complicated bit of setup for a home user is to "plug your phone line into the modem" (which, for a nontechnical user, is a port on the motherboard, or an ISA or PCI slot with a phone jack - but never an external modem hooked up through a serial port!).
Why, the big plastic and metal box must be the modem! Heck, if you turn the modem's speaker on, the big plastic box even makes dial tones and beep beep noises. It has to be the modem! :)
Actually, those are good names. Because of the numbers (unique to each card) and the brand name ("Radeon"), at least you can google for a 3-4 year old card with reasonable confidence.
There was a time when ATI simply picked a random subset of the words "pro", "turbo", "ultra", "graphics", "video" and "3d", and prepended "ATI" before printing the box.
Follow me back into a horrible flashback. It's 1997, and I'm trying to compare ATI's lineup: "ATI 3D Xpression", "ATI 3D Pro" "ATI 3D Pro Turbo" "ATI Graphics Pro Turbo", "ATI Graphics Ultra", "ATI Graphics Ultra Plus", "ATI Graphics Ultra Pro".
No freakin' way!
> Now there's an interface. That stupid New York law should be rescinded on interface elegance alone.
What, you got something against the nipple? It's the only "instinctive" UI ever invented!
But there's still hope! And you - yes, YOU - can make a difference!
Clearly, we've been slacking off. This article is a clarion call for all us nerdy guys who do spend all day in dimly lit rooms blowing up computer-generated bad guys, to stop reading this and get the hell back to those pimp gaming rigs we spent hours casemodding, and get back to what's important in life: fragging n00b azz!
We've got an image to uphold, dammit!
Grok. Thanks for saying it better than I could.
Warscanning could be countered pretty easily - RFIDs are passive receivers. A warscanner (I vote for "warfider" - waRFIDer, and it rhymes with "lowrider" to pay homage to "wardriving" :-)...
Anyways, a warfider will need a pretty beefy transmitter, and it'll have to be pretty directional. This opens up lots of geeky possibilities for the security-minded. Hook up an old spectrum analyzer and away you go. (Or just build your own antenna, print it on a circuit board, and scatter 'em liberally against the inside walls of your home. Add LEDs for funky twinkly-star effect, oh, hell, you get the idea :)
The point is that a waRFIDer (hmm, warfidder might be easier to type :) has to give away his position by means of his scanning device. He has to have an active device, yet you can alert yourself to his presence with a passive receiver. Odds are good that his transmitter ain't FCC-approved, and apart from George Carlin and Howard Stern, nobody's fucked with the FCC and lived to tell about it :)
Net advantage: You.
> Somehow, we the community need to express our concern that the proper precautions are taken.
Won't do a lick of good. How loud did we scream about WEP? IIS holes? The existence of W9x? The fact that our credit cards have zero security, (and haven't since they were introduced decades ago). How much good has any of that done? None at all.
So take it for granted - RFID will come. There will be no checks and balances. There will be abuses. A few thousand people will lose their property, a few dozen their livelihoods, and maybe (through warfidder-prompted muggings, etc) a life or two. Statistical noise. And much like the issues surrounding credit cards and identity theft, the benefits in terms of productivity gains and cost controls will outweigh - on balance - the losses.
We can at least take solace in the fact that as a defense (or at least as an early warning system) against being warfided, individual geeks will be able to build gadgetry to detect RFID scanners, and the bigger the threat (guy scanning your house for valuables from across the street), bigger the target (bigger his transmitter has to be, easier it is for you and your neighbors to detect and triangulate his ass).
Best of all, because owning an RFID receiver/scan-detector doesn't threaten the viability of the RFID makers' business model (that is, you can't use an RFID detector to steal stuff, nor change the RFID data your chips beam back when scanned), nobody on the white-hat side of the fence has to get sued or charged with anything.
Heck, building warfidder-detecting gear might even be fun!
Well, the original article did say that...
Now, I was just about to post something to the effect that while it may well be a privacy negative, anyone who thinks it's a health hazard has probably caught Alzheimers from the aluminum in their tinfoil hat. (Which would be pretty hard, considering the Aluminum-Alzheimer's link has been largely debunked, but never underestimate the power of the placebo effect on a dedicated conspiracy theorist!)
But reading your post... I just realized... who are the real clothing pirates? Who's the greatest threat to WalMart and Chinese Hegemony? Who's the biggest threat the CIAA (Cotton Industry Association of America, oh what an appropriate acronym!)
My God! The friggin' Amish! Of course! The Amish are engaged in the rampant PIRATING of TEXTILES, and they're doing it RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES, RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA!
So yeah, if the research company did the polling in Pennsylvania, you can bet your ass that 61% would fear the health consequences of RFID tags. Hatch! Utah! Mormons! It's a MORMON CONSPIRACY to ERADICATE the AMISH! Gotta get the word out on Slashdot! Hey, check out that horse and buggy across the street, but that's weird, it's got two clean-shaven young drivers in white shirts, damn nice buggy, but the drivers sure don't look Ami{$4[[4][NO CARRIER
Aside: That paragraph should be required reading for anyone who thinks NSA's just being silly here. Don't just read it, understand it. Drink it in its fullness. Sear it into your memory with red-hot nichrome wire.
Now, grok this: If you wouldn't trust your secrets to code you couldn't audit yourself, why should you expect NSA to?
So you're saying IT'S A TRAP? :)