Actually, the term "Moor" refers specifically to North African, i.e. black, Muslims, as opposed to Arab Muslims. So it's both a racist and, uh, religionist slur at the same time. Certainly by the time the character of Dracula was created, the term Moor was used more in the racial sense than the religious one. See, for example, Shakespeare's Othello, where the title character is the "Moor of Venice", even thought his religion is never really mentioned so far as I recall.

Who are these "militant atheists"? Do they actually exist, or are they just somebody's straw man?

I'm an atheist with a lot of atheist friends, and this is the first time I've heard any claims that atheists are riled about Spore's religion mechanic. Everybody I know is really excited about the game.

"Conveniently forgetting to mention exactly how you forged the rest of the passport convincingly..."

And you're conveniently forgetting that this is really easy to do, which is why they wanted to include RFID in passports in the first place. You're also conveniently forgetting that, as time goes on and RFID passports get more common, the customs folks who check these things will end up relying almost entirely on the RFID and not checking the paper bits at all. Because, really, why waste the time of opening the thing up when you can wave it at a sensor and get the same info?

It's not doom and gloom, but the ease with which people are cloning RFID passports should be troubling to anybody concerned with privacy and identify theft.

Admittedly, though, $80 is a perfectly reasonable price even if it were a completely ordinary watch.

Thanks for the links, Tim. Tesla was a really cool guy. Along with Claude Shannon, I identify him as one of the unappreciated inventors of the modern world.

But there are a lot of Tesla kooks out there (sadly including Tesla himself, after the Wardenclyffe project tanked and he went into a deep depression for not being able to fund his research any longer), as well, and it's good to have some solid references. Frankly, Tesla is one of those cases where the reality is so endlessly fascinating that one wonders why anyone ever thought it necessary to tack on the weird "death ray" or Philadelphia Experiment stories... the real man was amazing enough, it just seems so superfluous. A gilded lily, as they say.

B, did you read? This device replaces "more traditional routes -- which require irradiating the items to be scanned with radioactive element". Your garden variety dental X-rays, of course, don't require radioactive elements to be sprinkled on the target, but they also don't need to work through metal.

The key distinction is that we're talking about radioactive decay and not EM radiation. Obviously, any X-ray machine will emit EM radiation. This one sees through metal without needing the other kind.

Concern over RFID passports has nothing to do with the supposed "Big Brother" and everything to do with ID theft. And if you think ID theft is a myth, check your spam filter.

I, for one, welcome our new RFID-cloning overlords.

(What? Someone had to do it.)

I'm assuming that the eventual goal is to combine a bunch of these, compound-eye style, to composite a big, high-res picture out of a bunch of little, low-res ones. In other words, rather than increasing the pixel density of camera sensors, increase the amount of picture information you can get from each pixel. Which would be a neat approach, I think, though time will tell whether it's worthwhile. (I think pixel density, amazingly, has a fair way to go yet, and the really high-end digicams are already beating film for sheer resolution, though not always necessarily for colour or exposure lattitude.)

Oy vey. "The government wants to treat us like children.", I meant. Serious brainfart.