Electric Josh

Bad
Laurie Garrett is a reporter who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos just recently, and she sent this fascinating, mildly scary email to a couple of friends, one of whom enraged her (apparently) by forwarding it to someone else, and thence to the whole internet. Here is the scariest snippet, though by no means the most interesting:

The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.

You are wrong
Deep into timewasting, I've found, via Peter, who introduced himself at the Dave Winer thing a couple weeks ago, a large (though inevitably partial) enumeration of common errors in English. Read up.
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Homing devices everywhere
Those RFID tags (the RF means radio frequency) that sit in EZPass transponders and key cards like the one that gets me into the building at work are pretty fabulous pieces of technology. (Great article here.) The tags themselves consist of little computer chips attached to an antenna. When left alone, they are, by any definition, off. The antenna picks up the energy from an radio signal and converts it to current that powers the chip which, in turn, emits a unique (tho quieter) radio signal. It's this response signal that gets detected by the toll booth, cash register, spy van (holy crap!), or whatever.

A whole industry is popping up around them. There's talk of using these things to track each individual item in a warehouse, each item with its unique chip; there are relatively simple schemes for identifying a whole bunch of these things at once. The chips are getting very small, and are apparently identifiable from hundreds of feet away. The Times and Slashdot are on the case somewhat.
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