Everything has good uses and bad, it's just that the bad far outweigh the good for RFIDs. Or rather, they're so powerful that people WILL abuse them. Just like nuclear bombs, P2P networks and, err, snake venom.
...and electricity, and antibiotics, and recombinant DNA, and desktop publishing?
I'm curious--how is the parent poster so certain that RFID's negative uses will outweigh the positive ones?
Yes, but IMs by their very nature tend to be a whole lot personal than emails.
I think that's very subjective, and very much depends on the user.
Is there nobody left who can write a steamy love letter? I know this is Slashdot, but there must be someone here who knows more about romance than "a/s/l?" People somehow managed to get laid even before the Internet was invented.
People might also tend to discuss more technical things via email, when detail is more important than instant feedback. If someone is talking about a medical condition, for instance.
Unless we build dozens or hundreds of these clocks, we'll never know if the universe is changing or if there is a manufacturing defect in the clock.
Well...yes?
But they had to build the first one somewhere, and develop the technology before they do mass production, right? When Edison built the first light bulb, did people say, "Gee, that's cool Tom, but it's of no use to us. You've only got one."
If you're looking for subtle physical effects, you'd probably have to have a couple of these clocks in a given place--as you say, it's otherwise very difficult to detect small errors made by the clock itself. Then you can put these pairs at widely separated points on the Earth's surface. Put another few in space. Put some on the Moon. Send a few to the edge of the Solar System. Pretty cool.
Actually, the problem may be even worse. You might want to have two different groups build hyper-accurate clocks. There's the group mentioned in this article that uses optical transitions of strontium ions, and there's a U.S. group that built a clock using the transitions of mercury ions. Pairing different clocks of similar precision might allow you to catch systemic errors and design (rather than just manufacturing) flaws.
And when you're home at Thanksgiving, I'm sure Mom will be glad to invoice you for your share of the turkey, plus labour costs in the kitchen. She can add it to your tab from last year's Christmas cookies. The cookies will include a modest and reasonable interest payment, since you're family.
If I were a carpenter, would my parents expect me to build them a shed? Probably not. Hang a picture? Definitely. It's about proportionality, and doing things for family. They shouldn't take advantage of you, but you shouldn't mind doing small stuff sometimes.
I wondered what the hell that stuff was...
on
Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 4, Funny
From the article:
At $11.09 for 1.75 liter...Vladimir is a steal. It is, however, painful to drink, has a repugnant aftertaste, posesses a bouquet reminiscent of rubbing alcohol.
I was in St. Louis at a conference several months ago; after the closing dinner, a group of us descended on the local blues scene hoping to find some good live music.
We found it--there was a nice patio and a great band. As the evening wore on, we progressed from beer to shooters. A round of vodka seemed a good idea at one point. It smelled like isopropanol (I'm a chemist, I know my alcohols) and tasted as bad as one would expect. To this day, I have wondered what the hell it was we drank, so that I could avoid ever encountering it again. I fear unfamiliar vodkas in unfamiliar bars.
Now, I know it was Vladimir. I can rest easy. Thank you Slashdot!
Are these the same senators that passed PATRIOT and the DMCA?
Quite. The vote on the USA PATRIOT Act was 98-1 (the lone dissenter was Feinstein, D-CA), and the DMCA passed unanimously (99 senators voted for it).
Since the Senate has shown such excellent judgement on these other issues, we can no doubt trust that their rejection of the Kyoto Protocol was equally well-reasoned and based entirely on rational scientific investigation.
Does anyone seriously believe that Senators read (or even look at) most of the bills and treaties on which they vote?
But they're still talking about the stations being a mile apart. Which means an average of a one-mile hike and a max of a two mile hike if your starting location and destination are exactly between stations.
I don't think that a system like this is designed for use in isolation. If you look at just about any major public transit system, there will be some mix of (some of) subways, elevated rail, light rail, streetcars, and buses.
Densely packed urban areas will probably already have a subway system in place that is well-suited to handling the extremely high densities of passenger traffic. SkyWeb could then act as a feeder from less dense regions surrounding the subway. In smaller cities, the SkyWeb could be built right into the core, and incorporated into future development. Even if passengers drive to the SkyWeb stops and then ride the rails in to the city, it still cuts down on traffic and air pollution.
SkyWeb could also nicely complement a bus system, providing an appropriate solution for traffic densities midway between bus and subway/passenger rail systems. In some areas, it might even make sense to shadow a bus route with an overhead SkyWeb line. One of the key problems with closely spaced bus stops is that it takes forever to cover a long distance by bus. If passengers travel most of the way by SkyWeb (space the stations a couple miles apart, say) and then just the last little bit by bus, you get much faster commuting.
You still need roads everywhere, anyhow, to deliver heavy goods (like building material and furniture). And a car can go anywhere there's a decent road (and an SUV where the roads are truly rotten and many places where they're just dirt paths or nonexistent), rather than being limited to the pricey rails.
The problem is that there aren't enough roads. (Or, alternately, there are too many cars.) In just about any large city, there are areas and times of day where a car can't even move. In an established city, there often isn't any place to put additional roads or additional lanes of traffic unless you do something incredibly expensive like Boston's Big Dig. If road traffic was limited to delivery, emergency, and public transit vehicles, the reduction in traffic--and the associated improvements in noise, air quality, and road wear--would be phenomenal.
I don't think SkyWeb's proponents necessarily seek to eliminate all automobiles (though the use of SUVs and Hummers for single-occupant commuter travel is definitely an absurdity we could dispense with). However they quite rightly observe that improving the speed, convenience, and affordability of public transit can serve to reduce road traffic and all its associated problems.
And you know what? A mile isn't so far to walk. Everybody should walk a mile on their way to and from work--it would do them a great deal of good. Reduce obesity and heart disease as well as traffic congestion.
If you don't think that's the case, then you should never step into a building made of concrete and steel again.
We have a great deal of experience in working with materials that last for decades, we have some experience (and testing ability) to design for centuries of use.
There's a great deal of guesswork involved in the hydrogeology and materials science of predicting the effects of ten thousand years of heat, radiation, and groundwater--and any engineer who tells you otherwise is a damn liar.
First, technological innovation doesn't always appear in the areas we expect it. Take the flying car, for example, which we've been expecting for a long time, as well as robot servants.
On the other hand, despite lacking flying cars the field of transportation taken as a whole has advanced dramatically in the last century, yes? Humans have--historically--been terrible at predicting the precise direction that technology would take. (We've all read science fiction stories from a few decades ago that feature space flight, rejuvenating drugs, force fields...and slide rules.)
Also, if we are leaving a problem for generations to come, isn't it better to leave the problem in the desert under ground that may (according to some people, at some time thousands of years in the future) need attention, rather than in casks above ground that will NEED attention for SURE?
The chief problem with Yucca Mountain is that it will engender an 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude. You can easily forget a slowly leaking drum of radioactive waste under the Nevada desert, but it's much harder to ignore a cask sitting out on the surface in plain sight. It's also arguably quite a bit easier to monitor a cask on the surface for signs of premature wear, and it's much easier to access and repair.
The cost of digging and preparing and loading Yucca Mountain is nothing compared to the cost of site remediation if there is an early failure of their storage system. (Ever try to scoop out a radioactive mountain for disposal? And where do you put it, a bigger mountain?) Even looking at it on a PDV basis, if there is a failure or engineering problem discovered in the first century or two (rather than a thousand years down the road) it's likely much more cost-effective to stick with surface storage.
The costs of a surface cask-based system are also easily predictable. Monitoring and site security costs X. Replacing the casks and transferring the spent fuel every century costs Y. Underground storage--at the moment--leaves us with very uncertain costs related to potential remediation and repair. Also, the costs of surface storage will only ever decrease, if we develop improved disposal technology in the future. The same can't be said for Yucca Mountain.
What makes the Chinese ones special is that they will not be for spying on the Europeans, Americans, Australians or Africans. Nor are they intended to keep an eye on the Middle east. They will be a instrument with 100% coverage of Chinese national territory for the Chinese govt. to use for monitoring the Chinese . That makes them uniqe.
Well, they say that they're not intending to use the satellites to monitor the Middle East, or the Americas, or Europe. In practice, if they put a hundred satellites in polar and oblique orbits suitable for maintaining relatively constant coverage of Chinese territory, they will coincidentally have pretty solid satellite coverage of the rest of the earth, too. Purely coincidence, of course.
Interesting that we're obsessed with the Chinese government being a totalitarian dictatorship...we're not bothered that they're spying on everyone else--including us--just that they're watching their own country. Meanwhile, I'm sure that the United States' satellites are only ever used to monitor other countries' activities, and never anything domestic...hm.
As the parent notes, unless the Chinese are prepared to launch extremely costly, and extremely large optical elements, this network of satellites just won't have the resolution to carry out the sort of Orwellian tasks that Slashdot groupthink seems to expect. At 500 km altitude, a 1 m mirror can resolve about 30 cm on the ground. That's about one pixel per person--they're not going to read your mail over your shoulder, or even be able to see your license plate. Even the James Webb Space Telescope in that orbit would only resolve objects to about 10 cm (four inches). If the Chinese government wants to know what its citizens are up to, they can use spies, open their mail, sniff their net traffic, and set up cameras on the ground. They don't need satellites to play Big Brother.
A minor nitpick--Russia is part of Asia, not Europe.
Depending on how much they're spending per satelite it's possible they're using geosync orbits, and simply have spent extra to have top end resoltutions.
That's a lot of extra spending.
Spatial resolution on the ground is directly proportional to the diameter of the aperture (primary lens or mirror) and inversely proportional to altitude.
By going from a low to middling earth orbit at 500 to 1000 kilometers, to geosynchronous orbit at 36000 km, you need to increase the size of your aperture by a factor of between about thirty and seventy. To replicate the resolution performance of a 1' (30 cm) mirror in low earth orbit takes a mirror 30' to 70' (about twenty meters) across in geosynchronous orbit. That's twice the diameter of the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, three times the diameter of the as-yet-unlaunched James Webb Space Telescope, and eight times the diameter of Hubble. (My back-of-the-envelope number is a resolution of a little better than one meter with those mirrors).
Also, putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit is significantly more difficult than putting stuff in low earth orbit. (For commercial launches, lofting a payload to geosynchronous transfer orbit sets you back about three times as much on a per pound basis.)
The physics and economics strongly argue for many satellites in lower orbits. There's the added benefit of being able to spy on other countries, too. The Chinese government doesn't need satellites to spy on its own people--it can do that with human intelligence (spies), ground-based cameras, and aircraft/drone surveillance.
Re:Mouse aiming? Forget that, I need WASD too~!
on
Internet Hunting
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· Score: 1
I thought that Segways running over innocent Roombas was bad enough--now you want to give them guns?!
You could also include the cost of auto insurance in the gas price, so that everyone's automatically insured to some required minimum...
Except that there is then no financial incentive to be a good driver, unless traffic fines are made insanely high. Everyone would pay for poor drivers through the higher gas taxes.
So essentially, we'll be getting a bunch of *stupid* forensic examiners these next couple decades. Guess what you'll have to thank for that?
Nah, I don't think it will be problem. Unlike the dotcom boom, where any idiot who could use Frontpage could get a job and stock options, there isn't a rapidly growing demand for forensic experts. Steady growth, perhaps, but not a monster demand fuelled by dimwit venture capitalists.
So, there's a finite number of jobs, but more applicants. That's okay. You might improve the top end of the talent pool a bit, and you can afford to throw away all the chaff.
A lot of kids are very interested in basketball. Does that mean that the NBA is suddenly full of bad players? Nope--it means that the teams get to pick and choose.
Reading this post has made me wonder if a map exists of places humans have not recently been.
Mostly those big blue areas. Until recently, I know we had explored less of the ocean floor than of the Moon; that may still be true. Either way, the deep oceans are really the least examined and least-visted areas of Earth.
On land, this photograph will probably give you a good idea where to start looking. The places without lights are probably pretty seldom visited--mountains, deserts, and tundra.
Thin, still cold dry air makes for excellent seeing in the visible and IR and the cold is a positive advantage for IR work, since it reduces thermal IR in the environment.
The other neat benefit is that it's dark for almost half the year, instead of just a handful of hours each night. You could track a star around and around for days or weeks.
On the other hand, I imagine that they have really crappy weather sometimes. Mauna Kea has something like 325 clear nights each year, and the temperature at worst never drops below about ten below (Celsius). I fear that the weather at an Antarctic station is likely to be somewhat more hostile....
I mean you have a license plate now, whats the dif between that and rfid. right, right, nudge nudge.
Uh--yeah...what is the difference between a government-issued RFID tag for automobiles and a license plate?
I suppose the RFID tag is easier to read at night, and it won't get covered with mud. What did I miss?
It's already possible to use automated cameras to record and identify passing license plates by visual means. It's done on a large scale on Ontario's highway 407 right now, in order to charge tolls without making people stop. RFID license tags would make the system quite a bit more robust, and be no more invasive. You give up your right to anonymity once you want to use a public road; deal with it.
But Griffith theory teaches us that the length of the 'critical' crack (one that releases enough energy to drive its own spontaneous propagation) goes down as 1/(stress). So even if exotic materials can be machined in gigaton lots, we may find that they are unusable at the huge stresses we need. The first woodpecker that comes along may bring the whole thing down if the critical crack is a few microns long.
I don't think this has to be a dealbreaker. If carbon nanotubes are used, their natural structural unit--one tube--is a nanometer or so in diameter. It takes thousands of strands to get a structure that's anywhere near a micron in size. Bundle those together every so often to prevent propagation of a failure up and down (think ripstop nylon) and voila. They key problem these days is in reliably synthesizing significant lengths of nanotube consistently and reliably. (Not to minimize all the other engineering difficulties, of course....)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious--how is the parent poster so certain that RFID's negative uses will outweigh the positive ones?
I think that's very subjective, and very much depends on the user.
Is there nobody left who can write a steamy love letter? I know this is Slashdot, but there must be someone here who knows more about romance than "a/s/l?" People somehow managed to get laid even before the Internet was invented.
People might also tend to discuss more technical things via email, when detail is more important than instant feedback. If someone is talking about a medical condition, for instance.
Well...yes?
But they had to build the first one somewhere, and develop the technology before they do mass production, right? When Edison built the first light bulb, did people say, "Gee, that's cool Tom, but it's of no use to us. You've only got one."
If you're looking for subtle physical effects, you'd probably have to have a couple of these clocks in a given place--as you say, it's otherwise very difficult to detect small errors made by the clock itself. Then you can put these pairs at widely separated points on the Earth's surface. Put another few in space. Put some on the Moon. Send a few to the edge of the Solar System. Pretty cool.
Actually, the problem may be even worse. You might want to have two different groups build hyper-accurate clocks. There's the group mentioned in this article that uses optical transitions of strontium ions, and there's a U.S. group that built a clock using the transitions of mercury ions. Pairing different clocks of similar precision might allow you to catch systemic errors and design (rather than just manufacturing) flaws.
Of course not.
And when you're home at Thanksgiving, I'm sure Mom will be glad to invoice you for your share of the turkey, plus labour costs in the kitchen. She can add it to your tab from last year's Christmas cookies. The cookies will include a modest and reasonable interest payment, since you're family.
If I were a carpenter, would my parents expect me to build them a shed? Probably not. Hang a picture? Definitely. It's about proportionality, and doing things for family. They shouldn't take advantage of you, but you shouldn't mind doing small stuff sometimes.
We found it--there was a nice patio and a great band. As the evening wore on, we progressed from beer to shooters. A round of vodka seemed a good idea at one point. It smelled like isopropanol (I'm a chemist, I know my alcohols) and tasted as bad as one would expect. To this day, I have wondered what the hell it was we drank, so that I could avoid ever encountering it again. I fear unfamiliar vodkas in unfamiliar bars.
Now, I know it was Vladimir. I can rest easy. Thank you Slashdot!
Oops--damn. You're right. I misread the page. You'd think I'd remember that here, too.
Quite. The vote on the USA PATRIOT Act was 98-1 (the lone dissenter was Feinstein, D-CA), and the DMCA passed unanimously (99 senators voted for it).
Since the Senate has shown such excellent judgement on these other issues, we can no doubt trust that their rejection of the Kyoto Protocol was equally well-reasoned and based entirely on rational scientific investigation.
Does anyone seriously believe that Senators read (or even look at) most of the bills and treaties on which they vote?
I don't think that a system like this is designed for use in isolation. If you look at just about any major public transit system, there will be some mix of (some of) subways, elevated rail, light rail, streetcars, and buses.
Densely packed urban areas will probably already have a subway system in place that is well-suited to handling the extremely high densities of passenger traffic. SkyWeb could then act as a feeder from less dense regions surrounding the subway. In smaller cities, the SkyWeb could be built right into the core, and incorporated into future development. Even if passengers drive to the SkyWeb stops and then ride the rails in to the city, it still cuts down on traffic and air pollution.
SkyWeb could also nicely complement a bus system, providing an appropriate solution for traffic densities midway between bus and subway/passenger rail systems. In some areas, it might even make sense to shadow a bus route with an overhead SkyWeb line. One of the key problems with closely spaced bus stops is that it takes forever to cover a long distance by bus. If passengers travel most of the way by SkyWeb (space the stations a couple miles apart, say) and then just the last little bit by bus, you get much faster commuting.
You still need roads everywhere, anyhow, to deliver heavy goods (like building material and furniture). And a car can go anywhere there's a decent road (and an SUV where the roads are truly rotten and many places where they're just dirt paths or nonexistent), rather than being limited to the pricey rails.
The problem is that there aren't enough roads. (Or, alternately, there are too many cars.) In just about any large city, there are areas and times of day where a car can't even move. In an established city, there often isn't any place to put additional roads or additional lanes of traffic unless you do something incredibly expensive like Boston's Big Dig. If road traffic was limited to delivery, emergency, and public transit vehicles, the reduction in traffic--and the associated improvements in noise, air quality, and road wear--would be phenomenal.
I don't think SkyWeb's proponents necessarily seek to eliminate all automobiles (though the use of SUVs and Hummers for single-occupant commuter travel is definitely an absurdity we could dispense with). However they quite rightly observe that improving the speed, convenience, and affordability of public transit can serve to reduce road traffic and all its associated problems.
And you know what? A mile isn't so far to walk. Everybody should walk a mile on their way to and from work--it would do them a great deal of good. Reduce obesity and heart disease as well as traffic congestion.
Eh? Amnesty International killed nearly ten thousand people in Nepal?
How did that happen?
Bah. With the lower cost of CRTs, you can afford to drop a couple and still come out ahead of the cost of an LCD or plasma solution. :)
Canada doesn't want to start taking U.S. nuclear waste?
On the other hand, it might be an excellent solution for Canadian high-level waste...
We have a great deal of experience in working with materials that last for decades, we have some experience (and testing ability) to design for centuries of use.
There's a great deal of guesswork involved in the hydrogeology and materials science of predicting the effects of ten thousand years of heat, radiation, and groundwater--and any engineer who tells you otherwise is a damn liar.
On the other hand, despite lacking flying cars the field of transportation taken as a whole has advanced dramatically in the last century, yes? Humans have--historically--been terrible at predicting the precise direction that technology would take. (We've all read science fiction stories from a few decades ago that feature space flight, rejuvenating drugs, force fields...and slide rules.)
Also, if we are leaving a problem for generations to come, isn't it better to leave the problem in the desert under ground that may (according to some people, at some time thousands of years in the future) need attention, rather than in casks above ground that will NEED attention for SURE?
The chief problem with Yucca Mountain is that it will engender an 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude. You can easily forget a slowly leaking drum of radioactive waste under the Nevada desert, but it's much harder to ignore a cask sitting out on the surface in plain sight. It's also arguably quite a bit easier to monitor a cask on the surface for signs of premature wear, and it's much easier to access and repair.
The cost of digging and preparing and loading Yucca Mountain is nothing compared to the cost of site remediation if there is an early failure of their storage system. (Ever try to scoop out a radioactive mountain for disposal? And where do you put it, a bigger mountain?) Even looking at it on a PDV basis, if there is a failure or engineering problem discovered in the first century or two (rather than a thousand years down the road) it's likely much more cost-effective to stick with surface storage.
The costs of a surface cask-based system are also easily predictable. Monitoring and site security costs X. Replacing the casks and transferring the spent fuel every century costs Y. Underground storage--at the moment--leaves us with very uncertain costs related to potential remediation and repair. Also, the costs of surface storage will only ever decrease, if we develop improved disposal technology in the future. The same can't be said for Yucca Mountain.
Well, they say that they're not intending to use the satellites to monitor the Middle East, or the Americas, or Europe. In practice, if they put a hundred satellites in polar and oblique orbits suitable for maintaining relatively constant coverage of Chinese territory, they will coincidentally have pretty solid satellite coverage of the rest of the earth, too. Purely coincidence, of course.
Interesting that we're obsessed with the Chinese government being a totalitarian dictatorship...we're not bothered that they're spying on everyone else--including us--just that they're watching their own country. Meanwhile, I'm sure that the United States' satellites are only ever used to monitor other countries' activities, and never anything domestic...hm.
As the parent notes, unless the Chinese are prepared to launch extremely costly, and extremely large optical elements, this network of satellites just won't have the resolution to carry out the sort of Orwellian tasks that Slashdot groupthink seems to expect. At 500 km altitude, a 1 m mirror can resolve about 30 cm on the ground. That's about one pixel per person--they're not going to read your mail over your shoulder, or even be able to see your license plate. Even the James Webb Space Telescope in that orbit would only resolve objects to about 10 cm (four inches). If the Chinese government wants to know what its citizens are up to, they can use spies, open their mail, sniff their net traffic, and set up cameras on the ground. They don't need satellites to play Big Brother.
A minor nitpick--Russia is part of Asia, not Europe.
That's a lot of extra spending.
Spatial resolution on the ground is directly proportional to the diameter of the aperture (primary lens or mirror) and inversely proportional to altitude.
By going from a low to middling earth orbit at 500 to 1000 kilometers, to geosynchronous orbit at 36000 km, you need to increase the size of your aperture by a factor of between about thirty and seventy. To replicate the resolution performance of a 1' (30 cm) mirror in low earth orbit takes a mirror 30' to 70' (about twenty meters) across in geosynchronous orbit. That's twice the diameter of the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, three times the diameter of the as-yet-unlaunched James Webb Space Telescope, and eight times the diameter of Hubble. (My back-of-the-envelope number is a resolution of a little better than one meter with those mirrors).
Also, putting stuff into geosynchronous orbit is significantly more difficult than putting stuff in low earth orbit. (For commercial launches, lofting a payload to geosynchronous transfer orbit sets you back about three times as much on a per pound basis.)
The physics and economics strongly argue for many satellites in lower orbits. There's the added benefit of being able to spy on other countries, too. The Chinese government doesn't need satellites to spy on its own people--it can do that with human intelligence (spies), ground-based cameras, and aircraft/drone surveillance.
I thought that Segways running over innocent Roombas was bad enough--now you want to give them guns?!
Except that there is then no financial incentive to be a good driver, unless traffic fines are made insanely high. Everyone would pay for poor drivers through the higher gas taxes.
Nah, I don't think it will be problem. Unlike the dotcom boom, where any idiot who could use Frontpage could get a job and stock options, there isn't a rapidly growing demand for forensic experts. Steady growth, perhaps, but not a monster demand fuelled by dimwit venture capitalists.
So, there's a finite number of jobs, but more applicants. That's okay. You might improve the top end of the talent pool a bit, and you can afford to throw away all the chaff.
A lot of kids are very interested in basketball. Does that mean that the NBA is suddenly full of bad players? Nope--it means that the teams get to pick and choose.
Mostly those big blue areas. Until recently, I know we had explored less of the ocean floor than of the Moon; that may still be true. Either way, the deep oceans are really the least examined and least-visted areas of Earth.
On land, this photograph will probably give you a good idea where to start looking. The places without lights are probably pretty seldom visited--mountains, deserts, and tundra.
The other neat benefit is that it's dark for almost half the year, instead of just a handful of hours each night. You could track a star around and around for days or weeks.
On the other hand, I imagine that they have really crappy weather sometimes. Mauna Kea has something like 325 clear nights each year, and the temperature at worst never drops below about ten below (Celsius). I fear that the weather at an Antarctic station is likely to be somewhat more hostile....
Primarily, I expect they fear the idiot backlash from Greenpeace.
There may also be political and security issues associated with leaving a box of radioisotopes unattended for long periods of time.
Uh--yeah...what is the difference between a government-issued RFID tag for automobiles and a license plate?
I suppose the RFID tag is easier to read at night, and it won't get covered with mud. What did I miss?
It's already possible to use automated cameras to record and identify passing license plates by visual means. It's done on a large scale on Ontario's highway 407 right now, in order to charge tolls without making people stop. RFID license tags would make the system quite a bit more robust, and be no more invasive. You give up your right to anonymity once you want to use a public road; deal with it.
I don't think this has to be a dealbreaker. If carbon nanotubes are used, their natural structural unit--one tube--is a nanometer or so in diameter. It takes thousands of strands to get a structure that's anywhere near a micron in size. Bundle those together every so often to prevent propagation of a failure up and down (think ripstop nylon) and voila. They key problem these days is in reliably synthesizing significant lengths of nanotube consistently and reliably. (Not to minimize all the other engineering difficulties, of course....)
Yes, but you catch more flies with honey... :)