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Comment It doesn't work (Score 1) 337

I spend a rather large amount of time earlier this year looking at just this for an assignment, so I'm reasonably up to speed on the idea of biometric chips. The only upside to an embedded RFID chip is that it's much harder to lose your card or leave it at home. The downsides are massive:

* RFID chips are a health risk - they've been known to cause cancers in rats since 1996, and there is evidence of increased cancer risks in large animals too, such as dogs and cats. That's a risk in itself. They also block you from having an MRI scan in the future.
* They are hard to lose, but very easy to clone. Once your chip has been cloned you need surgery to change the password!
* If the idea takes off, where you do put different RFID chips around your body so they don't clash, or does there need to be a global standard? Do employees need to have the chips removed when they leave the country
* You can't remove your staff pass. Ideally, you only wear your staff pass in the office, so people outside the office can't easily copy/clone it. Try taking the RFID chip off on a daily basis...
* Companies are already banned from forcing implants on their staff in some states - California and Georgia come to mind.

And this is all before employees turn around and tell employers to go screw themselves over being permanently tagged and scarred by their employer, who can now keep tabs on them after leaving emplyoment...

Science

Antarctic's First Plane, Found In Ice 110

Arvisp writes "In 1912 Australian explorer Douglas Mawson planned to fly over the southern pole. His lost plane has now been found. The plane – the first off the Vickers production line in Britain – was built in 1911, only eight years after the Wright brothers executed the first powered flight. For the past three years, a team of Australian explorers has been engaged in a fruitless search for the aircraft, last seen in 1975. Then on Friday, a carpenter with the team, Mark Farrell, struck gold: wandering along the icy shore near the team's camp, he noticed large fragments of metal sitting among the rocks, just a few inches beneath the water."
Games

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
Google

Submission + - Google throws mud at OOXML (blogspot.com)

yogi writes: In a Blog post on Friday, Google welcomed the ISO decision not to fasttrack OOXML. From the article "Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit. Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure." while indicating their support for ODF.

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