that's one of the reasons I've liked "finger vein" authentication, it uses infrared to look through your skin, and touchless scanners are available. well, for lots of $$$ anyway. I keep expecting to see them in hospitals, where germ propagation and HIPAA are big isssues.

also, I forgot to mention, finger-vein can't be subverted with gummi bears. Somebody will come up with something, someday, but I wouldn't imagine it will be easy, inconspicuous, and cheap. (at least for quite a while)

Hitachi has something called "finger-vein authentication", which seems pretty good.
Supposedly, it has really good accuracy, it's scanning something internal, so you don't leave copies of it everywhere you touch, or in long-zoom high megapixel pictures. Scanners can (have) been made that are touchless, making them useful in hospitals where germ-spread is an issue.

Unfortunately, it's pretty expensive.

Yeah, I just stuck it in my .sig.
with room for future changes, even.

Actually, I saw a full-color hologram in high school (mumble-decades) ago. It was worse about angles, there was pretty much exactly one precise angle you had to look from, or the colors were all bad, but still, it worked. As for the "narrow range of angles from which they can be viewed", I thought one of the great parts about holograms was that it WASN'T "just ONE spot". Narrow, maybe, but honestly some of the new parallax barrier screens are MUCH worse.

The game is over when you die.
While you are alive, whether you are investing in the stock market, keeping your money in a bank, precious metals, or other assets, you are being played by the game.
When you are done playing or being played, you are free to ignore it and Praise God. (actually, you could do that all along, but then it becomes more obvious)

Airset is a "social" tool that has a model like this; but it never took off like Facebook did.

It has much better find-grained controls for each group of friends, and lots of tools, including one of the best contacts data models I've seen. Unfortunately a good data model doesn't make you popular.

Yes, it has a database, but it sync's to the metadata in the file.
The part I like best is the "tags, with hierarchy". Maybe that's just a sign I have too many tags. You can't really get that feature without paying money, (photoshop elements, lightroom, IMatch) and this tool seems the best of them to me. (not as slow as elements, better features than the other two, not too expensive)

A few people above have mentioned the "thou shalt not touch the originals" principle, which I personally don't quite believe in, but it is possible with IdImager: You can set up the downloader to mirror to another location for backup or whatever.

IdImager has a bunch of other advanced features I haven't fully taken advantage of yet, like Stacks, Versioning, and scripting. It has a face detector, but it isn't as good as picasa's. Still, it's something, and picasa's tag system is horrible.

Overall, the best image organizer available right now. Technically I guess it is a general-purpose DAM, since it can import other file types, but it definitely focuses on images.