At 9:15 PM 11/1/94 -0500, John Young wrote:
Benevolent advances on the ankle monitors cherished by half-free culprits. Position indicators, DNA IDs, body condition monitors (drugs, anyone), Nicoderm patches, first put on soldiers for their protection and survival, to ease the way to more general acceptance, kind of like the G.I. Bill for tomorrow.
One of the first places I read about this personal transponder stuff was in a book by G.K. O'Neill, of space colony fame. The book _2081_ (published in 1981, obviously), talks among other things (he thought magnetic levitated trains in evacuated tunnels were *way* cool) about transponders, and the uses of them in all kinds of computing, including electronic commerce of a sort: pick up the object you want to buy in a store and walk out with it. The store's systems know what the object is, who you are, and sends a message to your bank to deduct the amount from your account. He thought we were going to have to give up privacy to get this boon (and others which I can't remember), but with PKC and blind signatures, we know better now. Of course we also know now that he was copying Xerox PARC ubiquitous computing studies straight into his Apple II, but I had never heard of PARC, much less ubiquitous computing, and was amazed by the idea at the time. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923