Chan's Personal Blog

Lund and Company Invention, L.L.C., a toy design studio based near Chicago, makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolyzing water. Now the company is being funded by the US army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead.

The US Army are interested in arming soldiers with weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes. They asked the company to make a rifle that can fire projectiles at various speeds. [...]

The problem with non-lethal kinetic rounds such as rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds is that they tend to be deadly at very close range and useless beyond seventy meters. This was discussed last year at the European Symposium On Non-Lethal Weapons: "The problem is not so much to deliver an effect to a certain distance, but to maintain that effect from the muzzle out to that distance. It is possible to design a constant energy impact projectile by means of a launcher with a controllable muzzle velocity."

So a weapon with a laser rangefinder could calculate the required muzzle velocity and fire non-lethal rounds with just the right energy to incapacitate the target without undue harm. (Note that, there is always an element of risk, and that even a "non-lethal" launcher like the FN303 which has a very low muzzle energy can be deadly. Critics have pointed out that non-lethal rounds can be misused, as was shown in Israel this week.)

The design Lund is currently working on is a lightweight .50 caliber weapon, and he says that the technology is scalable "from handgun to howitzer." There have been attempts to develop similar weapons before, notably by Rusi Taleyarkhan who has since become bogged down in controversy over his Bubble Fusion claims. However, Lund's technology seems to have advanced further and the Army appear keen to pursue it.

A California judge on Tuesday continued the $5 million bail for a San Francisco city worker accused of hijacking the city's computer system, and ordered the network administrator to enter a plea on Thursday.

Terry Childs, 43, is accused of locking out the city from its FiberWAN network containing city e-mails, payroll, police records, information on jail inmates -- it was virtually an all access pass to City Hall. He was arrested Sunday after refusing to hand over passwords to the Wide Area Network system he is accused of taking control of illegally.

"He had the trump card and he could have brought everything down if he wanted to," said Ron Vinson, deputy director of the city's Department of Technology Information Services, who said the city's network has continued functioning without a hitch.

Erica Derryck, a spokeswoman for San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, said the defendant, who faces four felony charges of computer tampering, was a "threat to public safety."

Childs' bail was set five times higher than most murder defendants' because the authorities feared that, if released, he might permanently lock the system and erase records. "There is a real fear of that," Vinson said.

The FiberWAN network system is the major backbone of city government's computing infrastructure, connecting hundreds of different departments and buildings to a central data center, and to each other. The FiberWAN system carries more than 60 percent of the network traffic of all city government, Vinson said.

Childs has worked as a computer technician with the city for five years. He earned $126,000 in base pay last year, in addition to another $22,500 for being on-call to assist with network malfunctions.

Vinson said the city's data system has been functioning without error since it was discovered Sunday that the city had lost control of the bulk of its network.

"We couldn't access it, but it was functioning," Vinson said. "We now have the necessary devices in place that will detect any intrusions."

Vinson said the city was working to restore total access. "Every city department uses our fiber line," he said. "We are in the process of making sure we have complete access."

He said it was "unclear" whether the defendant actually accessed or stole any data, although he had the keys.

"He created it so that he had access to the network and blocked other people from having access," Vinson said. "He created his own passwords."

After more than five months of sparring, the battle for control of Yahoo Inc. has turned into a bare-knuckles brawl with a whiff of desperation hanging over all the key combatants.

The showdown intensified late Saturday after Yahoo revealed that it had spurned Microsoft's latest attempt to buy its online search engine in a joint proposal made with activist investor Carl Icahn, who is leading a shareholder rebellion aimed at removing Yahoo's current board.

Icahn, who has no experience running an Internet company, would have been left in charge of Yahoo's remaining pieces had an agreement to sell the search engine to Microsoft been reached.

"It's not surprising that Yahoo would reject an offer like that," Gartner Inc. analyst Andrew Frank said Sunday. "It would be just too complicated to do."

Microsoft declined comment Sunday. Icahn didn't respond to requests for comment.

Yahoo's explanation for rebuffing Microsoft left little doubt that both Yahoo and Icahn are now willing to explore options that they had previously scorned as they appeal to Yahoo shareholders before a pivotal Aug. 1 vote.

The shareholders are being asked to either support the current Yahoo regime that has overseen the Internet icon's recent struggles or roll the dice on an alternate board led by Icahn in hopes of finally working out a deal with Microsoft.

Hoping to fend off the revolt, Yahoo's board is now willing to sell the entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share — a price it rejected as too low 10 weeks ago. But Microsoft has said it has no interest in buying Yahoo in its entirety as long as the company's current board is in place.

Yahoo evidently has concluded it miscalculated by demanding $37 per share in early May, prompting Microsoft to withdraw its bid to the dismay of Yahoo shareholders as they helplessly watched the company's stock price sink back toward $20.

As for Icahn, he is now pushing Yahoo to sell its search operations to Microsoft — an idea that he implored the company's board not to pursue just last month.

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?.