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Japanese Cigarette Vending Machine Verifies Age By Scanning Face

By Robert Paul Reyes

"A new system developed by a Japanese firm could help enforce a new law set for July that will require vending machines in Japan to ensure the buyer is at least the legal age of 20. The technology will use facial features to determine age.

A computer will analyze an image of the customer's face and compare it against 100,000 other faces, looking at skin sags, bone structure, crow's feet and wrinkles." Quotation from ShortNews.Com

This new facial recognition technology may do more than all the public service announcements in the world to discourage young women from smoking. If one of these newfangled cigarette vending machine verifies a 20-something woman as being of legal age, she might become so disgusted and frustrated that she will never buy cigarettes from a vending machine again. Many young ladies like to believe that they could still pass for teenagers.

Joan Rivers is 100-something, but she's had so much plastic surgery that her skin has the look and texture of a Barbie doll. I wonder if the Japanese vending machine could be fooled into thinking she's a 5-year old doll.

Instead of analyzing a customer's face, the machine should take an image of the lung. If the organ is shrunken and dark, then the computer technology should assume the customer is a long-time smoker, and therefore at least 20.

I hope this idea doesn't catch on; I would hate the idea of a snacks vending machine weighing a customer to determine if he is obese. The machine would not dispense any delicious goodies to anyone 20 pounds overweight. I'm not obese, but I am a few pounds overweight, and I wouldn't want to risk being rejected by a stupid machine.

People of the world unite! Just say no to Big Brother vending machines. We have enough people telling us what we can or can't do, the last thing we need is a darn machine acting like our Mom.