The British government is going ahead with testing of an RFID enabled license plate. Not only is it enable, but it is using active RFID tags, which means that the information is transmitted up to 300 feet away. How long before a cop can say:

well the RFID signal from this car was received at mile marker 100 35 minutes ago, meaning that your average speed was 70 mph, so here is your ticket for speeding. (or some other scenario like that)

I am all in favor of trying to make the country a safer place, but this just seems like there are too many bad uses for technology than good uses. There is talk about how the US government has already begun using this in limited places to help track foreign cargo shipments.

So if you want to read more, you can read this blog here, or read the Wired News article here.

-Matt

On July 4th, NASA had a projectile that was planned to intersect with a comet in order to help them better understand what makes up a comet. The project website can be found here. At 1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4th 2005, the projectile hit the comet (Temple 1). Looking at the images, it looks like it was a pretty impressive impact, and because of the way things happen in space there was still a large plume of material coming off the comet some 50 minutes later. Really, all of this is amazing considering an 800 pound projectile made such a large bang on a comet the size of Rhode Island.

NASA has been having all sorts of problems and issues raised recently, but I think that they are still doing a really great job. For how difficult of a mission they are undertaking, they are usually succeeding with a relatively small amount of casualties. I look forward to finding out more about what NASA has learned from this experiment.

-Matt