Everything You Wanted To Know About MacBook Air

Jason Snell's review of the MacBook Air is long, comprehensive, and hits all the right notes. Not only does he review the unit, but also the experience of using it, right down to the "hard-to-define weight barrier" that subnotebooks straddle.

There are benchmarks, 690 words just about the battery, and even ruminations on whether it could be reasonably used as a primary computer. (Conclusion: it would be a lifestyle choice.)

It's almost tragic that he has to rate it 3.5 out of 5 right at the start of the review, with one sentence of Pros and another of Cons. Its as if all those words were completely superfluous. Does Metacritic do gadgets yet?

Review: MacBook Air [Macworld]

32GB Sandisk SDHC Chip Revealed

Now that your shiny new ultracompact digicam can capture HD video that 1GB card is going to fill up after about only 15 minutes of recording. Lucky for you, SanDisk just announced their new 32GB SDHC chip at PMA08. The 32GB SDHC chip supports read/write speads of 15 megabytes per second.

You'll be able to pick up a 32GB SanDisk chip in April for only a little more than what you just spent on your HD capable digicam. The 32GB SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card will retail at a suggested $349 including the reader.

Bionic Contact Lenses - Real Holographic Displays for the Eye

Bionic eyes! For the first time, researchers have developed a safe contact lens that can give humans vision like Superman. The lens has an imprinted circuit and lights which would display graphics similar to the Terminator and or the eyes of Bionic Woman.

These characters have “bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs,” UWNews explained. “Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes—visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.”

Imagine the uses for heads up displays for every thing from flying to playing a game.
"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW's electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center's ophthalmology department. (uwnews.washington.edu)

Paying by fingerprint at the supermarket

Customers of a German supermarket as well as many U.S. retailers will soon be able to pay for their shopping by placing their finger on a scanner at the check-out.An Edeka store in the southwest German town of Ruelzheim has piloted the technology since November, cutting out on time otherwise wasted scrabbling for coins or cards.

Paying with your fingerprint
many companies plan to equip it's stores with the new technology.

Retailers say : "All customers need do is register once with their identity card and bank details, then they can shop right away".

The technology is based on comparing the shopper's fingerprint with those stored in its database along with account details. Some retailers say that they were confident the system could not be abused. The chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about one in 220 million.

Yet, the security of the systems largely remains a question mark. Security and privacy experts worry that pay-by-fingerprint schemes could lead to hard-to-combat identity fraud and greater threats to civil rights.

"What are their security practices and how much more extraordinary are they compared to a ChoicePoint, a LexisNexis, or a CardSystems?" said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. ChoicePoint, Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis, and CardSystems Solutions have all had high-profile incidents where consumers' financial and personal data has been leaked.

"Stealing a credit card number is one thing," she said. "But if your biometric is stolen and can be reconstituted, then that is a big problem."

Both Pay By Touch and BioPay pledged that their customers' security and privacy are of paramount importance.

Both companies require customers to physically enroll and link their fingerprint and customer ID number to one or more financial accounts. Social Security numbers are not used and accounts are only identified by the last few digits of the account number. The merchant never sees any of the information and nothing is left behind, said Donita Prakash, vice president of marketing for Herndon, Virginia-based BioPay.

"It is the least amount of information left behind about you for any of the possible ways of completing a transaction," Prakash said. "Nothing physical passes to the merchant that could be skimmed, and it's not leaving your body."

Moreover, neither system uses the actual fingerprint to identify the user, but creates a template of the fingerprint--generally a set of numbers measuring specific features of the print. The data format reduces transmission time, but also makes it impossible to reconstitute the original fingerprint, said Larry Hollowood, chief security officer for Pay By Touch.

So what are your views of this adaptation of technology? People are still weary. In a world of an ever growing case of identity theft. Will this change things? or just cause other crimes to evolve.. Are you willing to let just anybody have access to your finger print?