At 06:54 PM 3/4/2006, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
i was really impressed last month when i saw the lockers in cologne
railway station - you put your bag in and it gets taken somewhere
underground. you get a magnetic card. you collect your bag not from
the same locker, but from any of only about a dozen of these,
scattered across the station. the system reads your magnetic stripe
and collects the bag from wherever it is stored underground,
delivering it at the point where you try to collect it.
turns out this is a new system and cologne was the first
installation - http://www.gilgen.com/English/23/23_8_E.html
Nice. Should be a trivial matter to run all these bags thru a scanner
on their way to storage, too. Divert the funny-looking ones into a
blast vault, and no more station bombs. I won't bother to mention
that the technology was available as far back as the early 1960s --
Western Airlines used it at their LAX terminal to deliver bags to
planes, even if the flight hadn't yet been scheduled for a gate.
Next question: I know full well that a decade ago I would have been
more impressed with the gracious use of technology than in the
security implications. Does this change mean that I'm growing
paranoid, that I'm paying better attention, or just that I'm getting old?
Bruce Metcalf,
Lake Buena Vista, FL
