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Note: This was an April Fools joke .....



Hey Everyone!!

It has been a tough year but my family and I (with the help of my attorneys) finally managed to acquire entry visas for my fiancée and her family. So, it is with great excitement that I can finally announce that our wedding will take place on May 24th 2008 in Alpine, NJ!!

For questions regarding the bachelor and bachelorette party please contact Luke Hakkinen and Daniel Morse respectively. If you have any security questions or require extra protection please contact Mr. Sherman

If you think you are invited be on the look out for the official invitations coming by snail mail to a postbox next to you! Until then, if you are unsure what to get us please check out our wish list setup at Athena's By Alison as well as at Linens-N-Things

We look forward to seeing you at our wedding.

Sava Kostadinov

P.S. Please do not stress out about the attire, however due to Bulgarian traditions please learn the steps to this dance!
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Edit: Surprisingly enough a lot of people believed this ....

RFID

Abstract: We have all heard of the hype behind RFID. It is after all one of the “newest” technologies that will simplify our lives. Not surprisingly we have also heard that it will inflict on our constitutional penumbral right to privacy. (Neither the constitution, nor the Bill of Rights ever use the word privacy hence penumbral, i.e. derived from multiple Amendments) So do the benefits of RFID outweigh the negatives? You decide!

The Technology: You've probably never seen an RFID tag (or if you have, you didn’t care), but chances are there's one within 10 ft. of you. An RFID tag--it stands for radio-frequency identification--is a tiny device consisting of a very small chip attached to a very small antenna. The chip is no great shakes, but it doesn't have to be; it just stores one very large number. When the RFID tag hears a particular radio signal, it responds by broadcasting back the number in its chip. That's its entire purpose in life, to respond to a reader with a number. Some prototype RFID tags are about the size of a grain of ground pepper (told you they were small).

Some RFID Background: There really is not anything new about RFID technology--its history can be traced back to World War II, when the Allies used a similar principle to tell friendly aircraft from their dreaded enemies. But RFID did get a massive boost in the late 1990s, when two MIT (yes I did say MIT sorry RPI) professors hit on RFID tags as a way to help robots "visualize" the “real”/physical objects around them. That's the coolness of RFID: “it's a way to make the ordinary physical world of people and objects visible to the virtual world that computers inhabit. It maps real space onto virtual space, so the two worlds can talk to each other.” In some cases they can even help tell us what we want! Some other historic uses of electronic tags were to be attached to the ears of cattle 30 years ago. They allowed ranchers to track the movement of their herds and the animals' mating habits. By the 1990s, millions of chips were being attached to or implanted in livestock, fish, pets, and racehorses. These chips are attached to car windshields today to allow drivers to pay tolls automatically, and they are also found in "contactless" credit cards that users simply pass in front of store readers. In 2006, IBM received patent approval for a device that uses RFID-tagged items to identify and track people. One purpose of the new device is to collect information about where people move through stores or other areas. When someone enters a store, a "sniffer" scans "all identifiable RFID tags carried on the person" and compares that information with sales records to determine the individual's identity. Then a device called a person tracking unit (PTU) assigns a tracking number to the shopper "to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas." The patent makes clear that the invention could work in other places as well.

RFID Uses & Problems: More and more Americans are being “secretly” tracked by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips. Right now, the chips primarily keep track of the products people buy. RFID chips are tiny, sometimes no bigger than a grain of sand. They can be hidden in the folds of clothes or between layers of cardboard or molded in plastic. When a customer picks up a product, the chip sends a signal to a "reader" in the store. The reader knows the product has left the shelf and is about to be purchased. By combining that information with a credit card number, the store can create a list of what the customer buys. Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot all use RFID. RFID technology does more than help stores sell products. Chips help scientists track wild animals, such as migrating birds or whales. Chips are also useful in medicine. Implanted in a human, an RFID chip can send a patient's medical history to a hospital's reader. The chips can also be used to find lost pets.

In South Korea, an entire city is being built to make use of RFID technology. Chip readers will monitor all products and services in New Songdo City. Homes will have medical stations that monitor people's blood pressure. Readers will keep track of kids so parents know when they're at school (talk about obsessive parenting). Builders are considering using RFID to track trash and recycling.

According to Dan Muller, president of AIM Inc., a national association of data collection business, "[w]e're probably still just scratching the surface in terms of places RFID can be used." The idea of New Songdo City horrifies some people. To them, an expansion of RFID technology means an end to privacy and to people's right to do as they please without being spied on or tracked. They worry that chips on clothing, toys, or electronics will expose consumers to later invasions of privacy--some envision powerful radio gear reading the tags from a distance to see what's inside a house. One solution might be to disable them at the checkout counter, although that would keep the technology from benefiting people at home. Refrigerators armed with readers could send an alert when the milk is getting old, and a washing machine could scan the clothes in its tub and set the best wash cycle. "Red clothes no longer would bleed on white clothes," Presto! No more pink underwear.

Google’s Benefits – adSense on Steroids (or RFID): Last month, Mini USA began erecting billboards in four U.S. cities for a volunteer pilot program. When a Mini Cooper passes, the RFID in the driver's key fob is picked up, and the board displays a personalized message like, "Motor On Jim!" The Texas-based company Media Cart Holdings is set to begin testing its shopping carts--which sense RFIDs on shelves--in a handful of supermarkets. Roll by the milk section, and you may see a silent ad on the cart's digital screen for cookies. The cart will also locate items on your shopping list. "We know basically--to the foot--where these carts are in the store," says Media Cart CEO Steve Carpenter. This is all but miracle for companies who cannot wait to copy Google’s adSense technology in the real world. Yes we will send you the wrong ads sometimes, but oh my G*d are we going to be able to custom tailor every single newsletter you get. In all reality it will be little less different from the “loyalty” cards that we currently have for many of the stores, which from what we see is not that well utilized.

Total Recall: It is exciting that you can be mapped but also a bit scary for anyone who doesn't want to be. It's not hard to imagine Orwellian (In reference to George Orwell’s privacy-less novel 1984, aka Big Brother) scenarios, in which prison inmates or even immigrants would be tagged with RFID implants to make it easier for the government to monitor them. Bizarre as it sounds, these ideas have been floated seriously enough that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--possibly flashing back to the tracking implant he had in his nose in Total Recall--formally banned the forced implantation of RFID tags in humans in the state of California.

End Result: At this moment in the development of RFID chips, the technology follows a pattern shared by most revolutionary consumer technologies. Evangelists unload fluffy tales of bliss, and naysayers make Orwellian proclamations about the loss of privacy or some long-revered tradition. But, what usually happens is that the technology is introduced anyway, and the results prove to be far less stark than the naysayers predicted as well as more interesting than the predictions of the cheerleaders. We have heard of various tales from the late 1990s that online shopping was going to create a digital paper trail for our transactions that hackers would be able to access, while simultaneously destroying beloved mom-and-pop stores across the country. Fast-forward five years and consumers have happily embraced online shopping, and mom-and-pop stores have flourished thanks to auction sites like eBay or the used-book service of Amazon. Something comparable is likely to happen with RFID: Embedding billions of tiny chips in an entire universe of commercial objects might well end up empowering consumers more than snoops and marketers. It may change the very nature of consumerism.

Works Referenced:

Johnson, Steven. "Smart-label revolution: tiny talking identification tags could change the very nature of consumerism.(EMERGING TECHNOLOGY)." Discover 25.3 (March 2004): 24(2). Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. 24 Mar. 2008
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LaGesse, David. "They know where you are." U.S. News & World Report 135.7 (Sept 8, 2003): 32-36,. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. 24 Mar. 2008
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"Ads Made For You.(Brief article)." Newsweek (March 5, 2007): 12. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. 24 Mar. 2008
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:"Chipping people.(Inside Track)(radio frequency identification tags)(Brief article)." The New American 23.17 (August 20, 2007): 8(1). Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale 24 Mar. 2008
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Grossman, Lev. "Tag, You're It.(Life; Nerd World)(radio-frequency identification tag)." Time International (Europe Edition) 170.18 (Nov 5, 2007): 40. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. 24 Mar. 2008
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:"Invasion of the spy chips: useful tools or destroyers of privacy?(DEBATE)(Radio Frequency Identification)." Current Events, a Weekly Reader publication 107.18 (Feb 25, 2008): 7(2). Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. 24 Mar. 2008
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Edit: Some "opinionated" parenthesized comments have been removed.

Sava = Sick

Unfortunately I do not feel well today. My head feels like it is going to explode. I hope that tylenol helps, nonetheless I will not be able to make it to class today.

Going National: Wafaa Bilal

Well not going to lie it seems as the school is handling the case the worst way possible. Instead of presenting an united front when confronted with the issues regarding Mr. Bilal's work we have the Arts department + Bilal against everybody else. Recently the story was picked up by the Washington Post. Is this the image we want to present to the prosperous RPI students? The faculty senate was not enough of a "divide" between the faculty and the administration now we need to make everything national yay!! Remember how I said that we need to be very careful how we handle the situation. (Maybe it would have been better if the people who didn't attend the lecture had attended it, and those who did, reviewed it badly (i.e. said it promotes terrorism) --neither happened)
Sava

The Bear and the Pirates

So I was watching Pirates of the Sillicon Valley and I really liked the idea of the "wrong enemy." There was Steve Jobs thinking that his enemy was IBM when it turned out it was M$. Well now lets apply that to the current situation. The US thinks that their enemy is al Qaeda (nothing new there), this country has been going after them since 2001. Meanwhile our cold-war friends over at Russia are kicking back and reeking the profits of the US stupidity. For those of you who are still not following ..... the US is fighting the wrong enemy!! So far all the Russian presidents before Putin have been a threat to themselves and Russia/USSR now the situation is a little different they are actually turning Russia into the world power it used to be. So while the US is fighting the war in Iraq which has massively lead to people refusing to join the army/navy/marines/air force the Russians are rebuilding their military and resuming military test flights and trainings. I think its time for this government to reasses the situation and maybe find a proper target.

And thats my 2 cents of the day.

The Rise and ____ of MySpace

Myspace one of many "social" websites has dominated the scene since 2003. Why it has become so popular is a question we need to answer, the question we need to concentrate on is: how much longer it will be around, and who will use it. First I would like to start with a look at Facebook which started off as a website accessible to only college students. I personally quickly switched from myspace to facebook as soon as I started college. Why? Because I wanted to run away from all the spam, bands, and the 18- population. I found that a lot of my newly acquired friends had done the same. I did not question their choice. And then IT happened, facebook opened its doors to everyone! And then I started to think how it all started. If my memory serves me right it all started with an IM, one of my buddies asked if I had a myspace and I said what the hell is that (circa Spring 2004). And that is when my eyes "opened," actually not really. Unlike most of my friends I perceived my house as my personal space, the only controlled moments were times when I had to clean my room. I saw myspace as a medium where I can meet (stalk) people. I was technically free to do anything I want, but I think what I liked about myspace was the fact that I did not have to promote it, it promoted itself and best of all it was free. My co workers, and friends used myspace for similar reasons, one of them was invited to a tv show, and the other met his girlfriend on myspace. So what did myspace do for them it promoted them, it bridged the gap between different "communities", between people who would have not met in real life due to distance or social reasons. But I have digressed, let's get back on topic. All those experiences lead me to believe that no matter what myspace can be useful and that it invites millions of users. Furthermore, the idea that it can help you achieve your 15 minutes of fame is something that will keep bringing people to it.
Do I think that myspace will be forgotten? Eventually everything is, however I do not think it will be soon unless parents/the government start regulating it. I.E. they say that people under 18 cannot use it. Until then myspace will continue to attract more teenagers who will willfully waste 3-5 hours a day making it look "nice" (whatever they think nice means"). So the title of this article is The Rise and Domination of myspace (not the fall as you thought).

(This post requires further writing/research at a time when my head is not all over the place)