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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Trader who wrote (54670)	10/26/2001 10:57:54 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

re: all sorts of things: The military is asking for input from the public, on creative new ways to find people in remote, difficult places, and the deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Researchers in ecology are currently using rock-sized/shaped sensors, scattered over a test area, sensors that can detect various things in the environment, and uplink the data via radio. In some places (like London's Financial District, in response to IRA bombs), video cameras are so ubiquitous, that public behavior is being affected (minor crimes, kissing in public, going to a restaurant with your "other woman"). Every human constantly sheds pheromones and skin cells, which contain chemical markers unique to that individual. So......imagine a billion pebble-sized sensors scattered (by plane) throughout Afghanistan. Imagine that each one can smell Bin Laden, or recognize his face, and instantly notify us via satellite uplink. We are moving, for better or worse, towards a world where being in a public space means being recognised, and your actions recorded and available for review, by anyone else on the planet. This isn't OT; I'm thinking, "what company is going to make the components in those pebbles"?

To: John Trader who wrote (54670)	10/26/2001 6:41:44 PM
From: mitch-c	Respond to of 70976

OT - One other idea: How about the government funds a sort of high-tech company to design gadgets or whatever to help get him. Maybe some kind of smart spider like things with small cameras that we could drop in to crawl all over those mountains until one of them finds him, and sends a signal back to base for special forces to arrive. I am envisioning a place that would be like a focused think-tank & R&D place for technologies like this. Hope I am not going to far off track with this idea. As an engineer myself, I often drift this way as I think of the whole mess we are dealing with over there in Afghanistan. I read a book a few years back - _David's Sling_, by Marc Steigler (sp?). It develops this concept. Another (fairly fun) one is _A Boy and his Tank_, by Leo Frankowski, an engineer-turned-writer. - Mitch