
Chapter 1
•
The Disruptive Protocol 11
“borrowing” of corporate-owned pencils. Inventory and package tracking
systems could enable frighteningly accurate global just-in-time manufac-
turing applications. You don’t need very much CPU to tell whether an
orange is ripe or rotten, to activate a radio beacon printed on the back of a
postage stamp to locate lost mail, or to arm (or disarm) a piece of military
ordnance.
Researchers continue to progress in developing devices that are cheap
(printed on paper instead of printed circuit boards), powerful enough to do
simple processing and store data statically, and small enough to be incor-
porated into almost any ...