At 4:19 PM +0100 2/23/07, Eugen Leitl wrote:

Hitachi shows off powder-sized smart tag

This reminds me of the gunpowder/explosive taggants debate. Essentially, once tags get small enough, they blow around so much that they're forensically useless, especially in places where a lot of different taggants show up together, like, say, a forensic lab. :-) Remember how the claim was made a decade or so ago, that at small enough concentrations that just about every bill of any cash denomination had cocaine on it if it had traded hands more than a few times? Same idea. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'