Have a good day, honey … and don’t forget your transponder!
Ahh, those loving words our children will someday bark at their spouses as they head out the door for work.
My mother would remind my father to grab his lunch and I remind my husband to grab his cellular phone, but life is about change and in the future we just might need our transponders before we head out into the world.
“Smart guns” were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last week by Colt Manufacturing Co. Inc. The high-tech device is being developed for law enforcement officers and allows a gun to only be fired by its owner.
The gun uses radio frequency technology to block unauthorized people from firing it. A receiver inside the weapon picks up signals from a transponder implanted in the owners wristband or ring allowing the gun to fire only when in the proper hands.
The Associated Press reported that one in six police officers killed with a firearm is shot by his or her own gun. Smart guns are intended to reduce these statistics.
The technology is still under development and reportedly will raise the price of a gun by about 50 percent. Colt is developing the product for law enforcement use and the possibility of public sale has not yet been investigated … but let’s imagine …
Why not have a transponder connected to your cellular phone or to your car or to your CD player or to any operating device of value? It could be a good theft deterrent. If the item doesn’t work except for when in use by the owner why steal it?
The new crime then would be transponder theft.
The transponder in the smart gun is the size of a pea, but by the time the technology is widely available maybe it will be much smaller than that. Maybe a receiver could be implanted in a human hair or a fingernail.
Instead of walking up to your car and pushing a button to disarm the security system, the car would recognize its owner approaching and disarm itself. The same type of signal could disarm a home security system as you approached the driveway. No more codes and phone numbers to remember.
Cellular fraudsters would be foiled. Forget about electronic serial numbers and authentication and what have you. Without the transponder signal from the owner to his particular device there wouldn’t be any other signals.
I guess it could be annoying though without some personal control mechanism. If you got too close to the CD player it would just turn on and what if last time you used the CD the volume was up really loud and this time the baby was sleeping … but he wouldn’t be sleeping anymore and …
HONEY, you forget to remove your darn transponder again!
