No no, you eat the Olivine after you drink your Martian-tini.

For punch card machines you can go all the way back to the Jaquard Loom in 1801 which used punch cards to set weave patterns. Again, probably 95% of you readers knew this, but no one else had mentioned it yet so...

FTFA:

1.5 million to teach them how to type "joshua"? Seems exhorbitant.

There are some pretty inexpensive ways to do this (grid cards) so like the article you linked, I don't buy cost as an excuse. Of course I did take a photo of my buddy's grid card once as a joke, but at least it isn't personal data I could harvest from his facebook page which most of those bank questions are. If people are willing to carry a "bonus" card for every flipping retail establishment in existence, they should be willing to carry a card to keep their money secure. And I can't believe that the added cost of the security wouldn't pay for itself in the long run.

Of course if you have the ability to surreptitiously place a 200 Euro (quote from the article) RFID reader at the passport agency to snoop traffic, you probably can also place a surreptitious CAMERA ( probably less than 200 euro) to photograph the bar code containing the KEY on the printed page. Much more efficient. BTW as I've said before this same statement applies to the "passport detonator" FUD. I bet some Iraqis would be more than happy to hide in the bushes with a remote control detonator for far less than 200 Euros. And they will be better at detecting Americans too.

As a backup solution we always have a dial-up connection ready ... Coupled with scripts which automate the switch from Cable Dial-Up Internet Access, the perfect solution to still have at least communication going at all times.