The View From North Central Idaho

The U.S. Army is working on getting some new ordinance:

The Army is fast tracking a GPS guided 120mm mortar round to Afghanistan in response to an urgent request for precision mortar fire from commanders on the ground there, and should be fielded by the end of the year. Called the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI), it improves upon the current round’s 136-meter Circular Error Probable (CEP) reducing it to about 10-meters.

Reading the comments to this article you will find out that 10 meters is the maximum. They are hoping to get about 5 meters.

Just a few minutes before reading this I had pointed out to Barb how accurate the location information given by my Windows Phone 7 Series is. Not only did it put the little diamond for the location of the phone on the correct house--it put it in the correct corner of our house.

Don't buy a mobile phone unless you can remove the battery.

Update: I forgot to include the link to the article. That has been fixed.

I think this is really funny. But it probably isn't nearly as funny to those that haven't done the equivalent--as I have.

It's a geek thing.

Your cellphone can spy on you in many ways. It can be a remote listening device, report your location, and send copies of all your text messages to a third party. Get a copy of the software to install on the target phone here.

If you are concerned about such things remove the battery or leave the phone someplace where you are not.

Wow!

I got about ten percent on this little test.

This is consistent with technical papers that I have read on the effectiveness of picture ID. The human brain is an amazing thing.

I just got back from work after 17 hours.

Crystal is finishing up a new test and things were dying in inconsistent and strange ways in the middle of the test. It looked like it might be my problem.

I certainly held a good share of the responsibility. There were a couple of big memory leaks which I was responsible for. I fixed those and the test now sometimes runs to completion. Hiep will be surprised in the morning to find several new bugs on his plate. He had more, but smaller, memory leaks than I did.

It's a good thing we are investing so much in automated tests. These bugs only showed up with a cross country trip. Crystal started us out in Redmond and we died somewhere in the Great Plains a few minutes later. We now sometimes make it to New York City.

I did get some laughter relief during the middle of the day. We were trying to recreate the problem and she asked me, "Do you ever use Depends?"

Ahh.... No.

From the context I knew she was talking about a software tool that probably checked for dependencies but I didn't know of the tool she was referring to and decided to tease her about the inadvertent insult she just made. I frowned at her and told her, "I'm not that old!"

We both started laughing and my officemate then wanted to know what she had missed. Being an India native Depend had to be explained to her. More laughter then ensued.

I'm sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple's industrial design, while the iPhone's UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Jesus Diaz
February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple
[And to make sure those coffin nails for Apple stay tight I've been at work for nearly 15 hours straight now.

I'm running tests after fixing bugs that would only show up as somewhat excessive battery drain if multiple failures in the entire system (including network connectivity and/or servers temporarily being missing some data) occurred.--Joe]

From my Windows Series Seven phone Windows Phone 7 Series.

Update: Yeah, yeah. I was in a meeting and didn't want to spend the time looking for the proper name. I got the words correct. Just not in the right order.

As a software developer deeply involved in providing location information to applications running on cell phones I have some advice if this concerns you:

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

...

Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

...

The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)

...

Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years.

Of course this is a two edged sword. If they can use your cell phone as evidence you were at a given location then you can use it to show you were not at some location. Leave your phone at work/home or in a friends car if you need to take supplies to your Jewish friends in the attic.

My advice is that no matter how careful you are with the applications you install or "disabling" the GPS or location services that isn't good enough. The cell phone company will still know where your phone is within a few hundred yards anytime it is turned on. And with some phones it's possible for you to think it is turned off when it actually is still functional at a level sufficient for your cell phone service provider to get location information.

As a friend of mine in the cell phone manufacturing business once told me, "I don't know exactly what's in the phone software. But I do know the phone only has one battery."

This and this is very good to see.

Not only from the standpoint of being proud to have contributed to the project but this sort of press might positively affect my bonus and salary.

Update: Second link fixed. See also this collection.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan
[Although we can see road behind us with reasonable clarity our ability to discern the cliffs, turns, and rockslides ahead is severely limited. It's a shame Dr. Ronald L. Mallett's time machine isn't up and running.--Joe]

That's fire and brimstone.  This is pure gun geekery, and even for gun geeks its nerdy because it's about percussion guns of the 1800s.  You've been warned.

Saturday, Nephew and I tried some heavy loads for the repro 1858 Remington revolver.  I'd been using a 28 grain powder charge and a round ball with decent results, but wanted to try something with more pep.  Civil War era military loads ranged from very light, to as much powder and lead as could be stuffed in the cylinder.  To start, we tried round ball (~140 grains) over a charge of 39 grains of 3F Goex with a greased felt wad in between.  That load filled the chambers completely and delivered an average of 925 fps at 10 feet with an extreme spread of 46.  Not too bad.  The 29 grain charge was yielding a velocity of about 850 fps.

It's like pulling teeth to find acceptable "conical" bullets ("bullet shaped" as opposed to a round ball) for these ".44" percussion revolvers unless you cast your own, which I don't.  I did find some Buffalo Bullets 180 grain jobs that fit the chambers nicely, and ordered 100 of them to try.  Since the bullet takes up more room in the chamber, the most powder I could get in and still seat the bullet below the cylinder face was 30 grains.  But, wow.  Average velocity was 1047 fps.  That's a tad better than a .40 S&W, and matches the V of a .45 Auto load in the Speer manual for their 185 gr GDHP.  Extreme spread was 67, with a standard deviation of 21.

That was with two different people doing the loading.  I'm going to guess that with the same person loading all the rounds, the charge weight and ramming pressure would be a little more consistent, and so too the velocity.  Groups with this load opened up slightly from last week's all-ball venture, but not enough to be sure.  This time was in direct sunlight, which makes aiming a little more difficult.

The extra pressure it takes to move the heavier bullet, which also has more friction surface against the bore, I will assume ramps up the powder's burn rate.  More velocity with less powder and a heavier bullet.  Neat.  We've found a performance, or efficiency, zone.  More pressure equals more heat, equals a faster, more complete burn inside the bore, equals yet more pressure.

This is how guns (and sometimes chemical factories, engines, etc.) blow up-- things look great as you increase the pressure and temp a little.  The reaction speeds up, a little bit more, things are doing fine, a little bit more and, Boom!.  A threshold is reached and a runaway reaction takes place.  You shear some bolt lugs, or burst a cylinder, etc. and maybe you go home with slightly fewer or slightly misshapen body parts.  That can be embarrassing.

I wasn't worried about this load in a modern repro made with modern steel.  When these revolvers were designed and built originally, metallurgy wasn't anything like it is today, and even back then they were known to stuff the chambers full on a regular basis.  Further, it makes no sense to build a cylinder that will take more powder than it can handle with the commonly used "44-100" bullets of up to 250 grains.  That would take more material and make the gun bigger and heavier, for no other reason than to encourage over-pressure loads.  I'm also running on some faith that they wouldn't have done that (though the much longer 1847 .44 Colt "Walker" cylinder was known to occasionally let go).  Remember that back then there was only black powder, not the wide spectrum of nitro powders we have now.  All they had to control the powder's burn rate were different granulations of the same mixture (though brand and lot inconsistency would likely have thrown in some degree of uncertainty).  With smokeless propellants you can get into a LOT MORE TROUBLE making your own loads.

Here's Nephew torching off one of the heavy loads.  The bullet has been on its way for about a millisecond, as the gun is still in firing position and the hot gas (I mean hot-- this is in direct sunlight) has traveled a foot or so out from the muzzle;

Below is the same shot in full recoil a fraction of a second later.  Forget about quick follow-up shots.  You can't see the target until the smoke clears. By then you're re-cocked and ready to go.  A side wind would be a big help in this case;

Today's rapid fire guns wouldn't be worth as much if they had to run on black powder.  For one thing you wouldn't be able to see squat.  It is "interesting" to take a shot, and find that your target has simply disappeared after the smoke has cleared.  There's that moment of uncertainty.

I like the slow, frame-by-frame animations as below.  You can see the mechanics of the recoil (though a high speed camera would be nice).  You can watch the force wave travel from his wrist, into the arm, the shoulder, and whole torso.  Nephew's grip is fairly relaxed, which isn't a problem with a medium weight 44 revolver.  Some people hate animated gifs on a web page.  I'm one of them, but this is for science;

You shouldn't haul off and max out your charcoal burner just because I did.  I'm not saying it's the thing to do.  What I can say is; I still, for the moment, have all my body parts (and gun parts) and all are operating satisfactorily, thank you.  I have a load that's within the range of those used in the 1860s for the Remington New Model Army revolver and 1860 Colt Army, and it matches some of the .45 ACP loads for a ~180 grain bullet.

Now here's a puzzler.  I've had barrel leading in modern revolvers and autos firing bare lead, hard-cast or swaged bullets.  Using pure, soft lead bullets in the '58 Remington and '51 Colts, no leading has been observed, even with these loads that achieve modern handgun KE levels.  I don't know why.  Is it the grease?  But we're told in no uncertain terms never to lubricate a modern gun bore, while black powder guns are greased all to hell.  Is it the propellant temp?  But the KE is the same.

This is what I'm working on.

Deep down in the O/S you will find a location application programming interface. Below that you will find code that converts the existence of Wi-Fi and cell tower radio signals into a latitude and longitude. That (and a few other things) has been my job for the last several months.

This is just one small piece of a very large and impressive picture.

As Sean just said a minute ago in an IM, "Wow. You showed me some neat stuff Friday, but I was still impressed by today's reveal. With this piece of the puzzle, I get a tingling feeling up and down my leg. Like we really might be entering a new golden age for Microsoft."

This sort of thing appears with some regularity on the forums, product reviews, etc., so I can only assume there is a significant number of people who don't quite understand how a shot group on a target is measured.  What I recently read on an ammo review is that, since the bullet is x diameter, your group size cannot be less than x.

That's not how it works. (Boomershooters bear with me, I'm pretty sure you all know this)  For the size of your group on the target, you're measuring the center-to-center distance between hits.  If your holes were clean enough to allow such precise measurements, it is in theory possible to have half-inch diameter bullets and a group size of a hundredth of an inch or less.  You could just as well, theoretically, have an eighteen inch Navy ship's gun that shoots a group of 1" (all rounds through the same hole, to within one inch of center).  Actually getting a gun and several projectiles to do that is of course another matter, but it wouldn't violate the simple theory of taking a distance measurement on your target.

This isn't rocket science.  Well, maybe some aspects of shooting are in fact rocket science, but measuring the distance between centers of a few holes isn't complicated, and has nothing to do with the diameter of the holes.  Any carpenter, machinist or cabinet maker, etc. knows this, and it is often learned by farm mechanics in early childhood.

Kevin has the story.

I just want to add that my degrees are in Electrical Engineering but when I worked for the Aerospace Division at Boeing a lot of my time there was in the "Terminal Guidance Lab". Now at Microsoft I work on "location for cell phones". In my spare time I play with my chemistry set and make targets.

It's almost as if Kevin was talking about my career.

I've been seeing ads for the new NRA on-line national firearms museum, and I've also been working on building a period rifle.  I therefore thought it would be great to go and see if I could find some original examples of said period rifle at this new-fangled on-line museum, rather than having to, say, drive to Wyoming and visit the Cody Museum or pay 5 to 10 thousand dollars for an original rifle.  I tried it from home using my Mac G4 to no avail.  OK, I can forgive that.  The old G4 still has an old version of OS-X and Safari, and I sometimes have problems using other web sites.  Here at work I use XP Pro, IE 8, and a 700+ KBps ADSL connection.  I patiently try nationalfirearmsmuseum.org a few times from work and I'm redirected to nramuseum.org which displays a black screen, this tiny little sentence in the middle, and a heap big helping of nothing else;

The full NRA experience requires a broadband connection.  Click here to go directly to the standard NRA.org website.

From the standard NRA.org website you can eventually find a link to the museum, which then gives you said black screen.  Repeat as needed to become convinced beyond reasonable doubt that you're not going to see any museum, no matter what, in spite of the fact that said non-viewable museum is currently being advertized all over the NRA publications.  Denied.  I then tried "compatibility view" in IE 8, which made quite a difference-- it put that sentence at the bottom of the black screen instead of the middle.  Double denied.

If my setup can't work, who's does?  I thought DSL was about as broad as broadband gets, while the only clue to the denial is a note telling me my connection speed is too low, with no indication of what they consider to be "broadband".  Have I missed some new and wonderful breakthrough in IT that everyone else knows about and uses already?  Do I need a cable ISP?  Do I need to get Win 7 or what?  In any case I think that if your web site doesn't work with the vast majority of existing computer setups, you're doing something wrong.  That is, if you want the majority of people to see it, and you're not just interested in being cutting-edge for the sake of it, being satisfied with catering to an exclusive audience.

Then again, maybe I'm doing something wrong that makes it impossible to see this web site, though all the others I visit seem to work OK.

Dear NRA; I'd write you directly about this, but a black screen with nothing on it includes, as an accompanying feature, the non existence of a "if you can't view this page, please notify our web designer by clicking here" or anything like that.

Update Jan. 10; Without my having contected them directly, NRA Tech Support wrote me this morning and fixed my problem.  Wow.  That's service.  More in comments.

I guess I'll call them "PRRs" or "RRPs" (Rifle Receiver Pistols).  A few of us made comments over at at Say Uncle about the use of such pistols.  There was the assertion that Blackwater personnel have been using AK pistols out of vehicles.  I don't get it.  Here's my last comment;

A cut down, folding stock carbine I can see (AKS-74U et al) but I have yet to understand the allure of the "pistol" version (no shoulder stock at all).

"They became very common with Blackwater in Iraq."

You're not referring to a folder rather than a pistol?

Stateside, I see the rifle receiver pistol as a political creation (if it has a shoulder stock it falls under the NFA [as a short barreled rifle, or SBR]) rather than something that arose for a particular application.  Otherwise we'd be seeing handguns more along the lines of an Automag with 30 round mags, and/or the Tech 9 or some iteration thereof would be popular, which it isn't.

There must be something I don't understand.  Is it all about suppressive fire?  But in that case what's wrong with having a folding stock on there just in case you want to, you know, aim, or something?

Can anyone fill me in on the particulars?  Why an AK pistol, AR pistol, etc., other than the fact that the stocked version comes with the NFA hassles and tax for civilians?  I mean; why are such pistols desired for defense and/or in combat?  Or are they?

There was a book written nearly 40 years ago that sits on my bookshelf only partially read. I read about a third of it about 25 years ago and got bored with it. If I had the time I would pull it off the shelf and give it another try and see if what he said could not be done is true with today's computers. He claimed they will never be able to do some tasks. I not entirely convinced such strong bets could be placed--if for no other reason than never is a very strong statement. But I do know that some revolutionary changes will have to be made before he can be proven wrong.

Chris has contributed some fascinating information to the discussion on exobrains. But not everyone may find it as fascinating or understandable as some of us geeks do. I hope to give a couple examples here that will be a little easier to relate to.

From a book I listened to recently I picked up an absolutely true insight that nearly caused a temporary meltdown of the control system of my muscular skeleton system. I nearly went deaf, blind, and limp as my brain dumped all I/O to the outside world and spent several seconds pondering the implications of that insight. What follows is a glimpse into the differences of computer "brains" and animal brains and highlights one area of tasks that are very, very difficult to do with todays computers and how much room for improvement there is. We may think computer hardware and software are really hot stuff. But when compared to meatware, for some tasks, its not even in the race.

We know how fast signals travel in the human nervous system. It isn't electrical as much as it is chemical. People frequently say it's electrical but, as Sean Flynn would say, that is only true for some values of electrical. Instead of signals taking about one nanosecond to travel one foot as is the case for true electrical signals it is (IIRC) something on the order of one millisecond per foot. About one million times slower. The "logic elements" of the brain have known response times as well. Thus by timing how long it takes for you to respond to some input we can determine how many "logic elements" were involved in making decisions based on the given input.

For example--suppose we were to show you set of random images that contain either a picture of some sort of cat (including leopards, lions, tigers, and domestic short hairs) or a picture of some sort of dog (including foxes, wolves, greyhounds, and Shih Tzus). You are to hit button "C" or "D" depending on whether it is a cat or a dog in the picture. If the pictures were clear and the animal was in full view normal, healthy humans could perform this task in well under one second. Even a three year old could do it. I've been programming computers professionally (admittedly in non-AI fields so this isn't as strong a statement as I would like it to be) for about 25 years but I think it would be possible to choose the set of pictures such that the best computer program, given the same time limits, would have an error rate would be little better than chance yet the human would have an error rate of near zero.

In a similar vein I once had someone at the CIA tell me they had spent millions and millions of dollars developing software that would analyze photographs and find objects of military interest. These would be things like tanks, missles, and AK-47s. When the CIA is interested in these type of objects the picture they get to work with were not taken with the full cooperation of the owners of said military hardware. Hence the objects of interest may be in less than full view of the person taking the picture and a considerably harder problem than the dog and cat problem outlined above. Said CIA employee told me that after spending all those millions of dollars what they found worked best was if they put the pictures on the wall above the urinal and left a pencil nearby. At the end of the day all the objects of military interest would be circled. No computer could match that in processing time, accuracy, or cost.

Once we subtract out the nerve transmission time from your eyes to your brain and from your brain to your fingers we find that the maximum "depth" of the "logic elements" is about 200. There were many, many elements working in parallel but no path exceeded 200 elements in length. There is no existing computer, no matter how massively parallel it's "logic elements" are, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms to take advantage of parallel processing power, that can reach a decision for the given problem with that sort of depth. The depth of the logic paths are going to be 100s of thousands of times deeper for the computer and yet it would end up with far, far, inferior decisions.

That still gives me goose bumps.

Say Uncle wrote about our exobrains this morning then I went to work today and worked on the operating system for one. I fired off a build of the software and I happily noted that the CPU usage on the eight 3 GHz processors went to 98%. It pretty much stayed there for most of the two to three hours it took to do a build. The CPUs get some rest when it's writing a bunch of stuff to disk but still it's an impressive amount of CPU cycles being burned.

Then I wondered just how impressive is it? What does it really mean?

That computer can add 20 numbers together in the time it takes for light to travel one foot.

Eight 3 GHz processors are doing something on the order of 20 billion operations per second. And those "operations" aren't exactly trivial. Each operation is something like an addition, subtraction, multiplication, reading or writing a number. And those aren't just numbers like 0 through 10. The CPU can handle any number in the range from -2147483648 to +2147483647 just as easily as it can from -10 to +10. And while it is doing that it can keep up a running commentary telling me what it is doing at a rate that is far to fast for me to keep up.

Imagine you have every man, woman and child on this planet (about six billion) working on the same task they couldn't even do the raw arithmetic let along the communication and coordination at a rate that is even 1/100^th of what the little box under my desk can do. I have the brain power (for some tasks) exceeding the capacity of several earth-like planets complete sentient population at my disposal.

The exobrain of today is only about one 1/3 of a planets worth--but that isn't a bad start on a budding cyborg.

Did I also tell you we are working on project SkyNet?

Update: Some of the comments about this post here are absolutely awesome. To completely appreciate some of them require having read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Also closely related.

I left my copy of Lethal Logic in Idaho this weekend or I would quote chapter and page but in essence one thing Henigan says, "Yes, the NRA is right, 'Guns don’t kill people; people kill people' but guns enable people to kill people." And of course that is justification, in his mind, to restrict access to firearms.

What is overlooked, minimized, or deliberated not mentioned is that guns also enable the protection of innocent life and any roadblocks you put up to reduce access to "people that shouldn't have guns" also reduces access to people that need guns to protect themselves and others. The reduction in access might be not be a complete blockage but any increase in the price of acquisition and ownership reduces the number of people willing to pay that price. Just being put on a government list has a chilling effect on any type of activity. Particularly when that activity has a history of increasing your odds of being put on a death list. Would you be willing to register with the government as a homosexual or Jew?

Another technology that enables both good and evil has been blogged about recently is something I have been working overtime on for The Borg recently. In fact my tester and I were exchanging IM as late as 11:33 tonight and I still have one eye on a build in progress.

Here are some of the blog posts I have recently read about cell phones being used for determining the location of the user:

• Law Enforcement GPS Cell Phone Tracking
• Sprint hands over GPS data
• Surveillance Nation
• It. Does. Not. Work. That. Way. (Roberta is absolutely correct here but she has a minor oversight I'll address below)

I'm extremely busy at work right now on Windows Mobile 7.0. This is an operating system which will be used in millions and millions of cell phones. My team is the location team. We are responsible for determining the location of the phone and getting that information to applications that want it. I know as much about this topic as just about anybody in the company.

There are multiple ways of determining the location of a modern cell phone. In a decent environment (underground, or next to tall buildings are not good environments) the built-in GPS can obtain the device location with an accuracy of 10 meters or better. The other obvious way to determine location is using the cell tower you are connected to. As a rough estimate this can get you about 1000 meter accuracy. There is a third way that isn't quite so obvious and Roberta didn't mention it. High end phones these days have built-in Wi-Fi and by grabbing the BSSIDs* of the visible Wi-Fi access points you have pretty good odds of determining the location to approximately 100 meters.

This is an enabling technology. It can enable good things.

It can help you find your lost phone. 10 meter accuracy can enable turn by turn directions to get you to or from an unfamiliar location. 100 meter accuracy can get you all the pizza shops within walking distances. 1000 meter accuracy can get you a weather forecast or the cheapest gasoline nearby.

It can enable bad things.

That little application your ex boyfriend put on your phone when you were on good terms (or by hiding his own phone in the bumper of your car) might be Roberta's transponder and he is using it to stalk you. It could be that the cell phone operator (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc.) has put the transponder application in all the phones or is able to remotely install one and is selling the service to the secret police tracking down dissidents, homosexuals, and Jews. The technology could be used to give credence to your stalkers alibi that he was 50 miles away when your house was set on fire with you in it.

I can't directly speak to the acceptability of what Sprint did with the location information of their customers. I'm as skeptical of the morality of what happened as anyone but without more data it's hard to say for absolute certainty they were slim-balls. I do know the amount of effort we at Microsoft put into protecting the privacy of our customers.

When I started on this project I had expected to be in fights over making the technology sufficiently "safe" without neutering it so much to make it useless. I figured I would get a reputation as a paranoid nut. I was wrong. There was never a scenario that I proposed as something to be guarded against which people didn't take seriously and address. I don't think I was even the most vocal advocate for privacy safeguards. I was exceptionally pleased when one program manager put his foot down over an issue and said it was because he didn't want to get into the "police nightmare situation". "What is that?", I asked. His answer? "The police are constantly bugging us for location information. If we don't store it we can't give it to them and they won't ask for it more than once or twice."

Some of the solutions we are implementing to protect user privacy are:

• Store the minimum amount of data required to enable valuable customer services.
• Strip out personally identifiable information (PII) at every opportunity.
• Delete the PII data we do store within a few hours (or maybe a few days in the case of "Find My Phone").
• Applications that access location information are required to ask you for permission (if your Windows Mobile Seven phone ever asks you this the dialog you see is one I implemented).
• Except "Find My Phone", which requires a username and password, users can disable all location services with a single switch (again, I implemented the user interface for this).

The biggest problem we see is that all it takes is for the user to download the application called "StalkersHelper" and say "Allow" to the location permission question and all the work (I'm sure we have spent many 10s of thousands of dollars just on meetings to discuss the privacy issues) we have done has been bypassed.

The second biggest problem is that the mobile operators might bypass (intentionally or by neglect) our safeguards. Getting bad publicy like Verizon just did (and perhaps the threat of lawsuits) will motivate them to protect the privacy of their customers so I don't worry about this nearly as much as the customer themselves inviting the wolf in the door.

With those risks is it worth it? How many lives have to be lost to stalkers tracking down their victims before the technology is banned? If it saves just one life isn't it worth it to ban it? In another year or two will Microsoft be regarded as a "merchant of death" like Glock, Smith & Wesson, and Ruger?

My guess is the technology will be accepted and while there will be instances where the technology was used for evil and/or immoral purposes most people will recognize the benefits it enables outweigh the evil it enables. It's really no different than cars, knives, and guns. There are rules to follow which reduce the chances of accidents and deliberate misuse must be dealt with by punishing the offender not by attempting the removal of the technology from society.

Now if only Henigan and company could follow the same line of reasoning.

*The Basic Service Set Identifier identifies each Basic Service Set (BSS). The BSSID is the Medium Access Control (MAC) address of the Access Point (AP) in the Infrastructure BSS networks, and it is generated randomly in Independent BSS or ad hoc networks. This means there are duplicates out there and there is ambiguity to be resolved in some instances.

One of my fantasies is to be able to make Boomershoot targets completely out of very simple and easy to obtain materials. For a while I was essentially there. I could get ammonium nitrate by going over to the local fertilizer plant with the truck and telling them to "fill 'er up" and they would dump in as many tons as the truck would hold and I could pay for. The potassium chlorate was a little harder but with just my drivers license I could get that mail order without hassles. The rest could be obtained at the grocery store or Wal-Mart. Then ammonium nitrate started getting difficult to get. I had to use the leverage of my ATF type 20 license to manufacture high explosives to get my last batch of AN. And in the quantities of potassium chlorate we consume the suppliers require the ATF license as well.

But there might be something else as possible replacements.

They are making rocket fuel out of aluminum and ice:

Researchers are using aluminum and frozen water to make a propellant that could allow rockets to refuel on the moon or even Mars.

Last week researchers from Purdue and Penn State University launched a rocket that uses an unconventional propellant: aluminum-ice. The fuel mix, dubbed ALICE, is made of nano-aluminum powder and frozen water, and gets its thrust from the chemical reaction between the ingredients. The propellant is environmentally friendly, and it could perhaps allow spacecraft to refuel at locations like the moon, where water has been discovered.

That is majorerly cool from the standpoint of rocketry and space travel. But it also has implications for Boomershoot. Any high energy compound or mixture has the potential to be an explosive. Rocket fuel in particular is interesting because, like explosives, it contains both a fuel and an oxidizer.

Nano-aluminum powder might be tough to make but the precursor components of that particular mixture sure are going to be easy.

That is to say, they're inside the heated space in my home and it's heating season.  I can therefore use them all I want, or leave them on when I'm not using them, and it costs me nothing in energy use.  I wrote about this a while back, and Say Uncle has a post that touches on the subject.

There are some qualifiers though.  A dishwasher dumps warm water outside the heated space, as does a clothes washer.  A dryer dumps hot air outside the heated space too, but you can leave your television or oven on all day and it costs you no extra energy useage.  If the appliances or the incandescent lights aren't heating your home, the furnace takes over and uses that same amount of energy anyway.  I submit that using the appliances more may actually save energy.  Here's how I got there; at least in my case, the furnace ducts are under the house, outside the heated space.  Some of the losses from that extra-hot air running through the ducts under the house might be avoided by keeping the heat generation all inside the house.  There was also a chapter in my college physics book that explained how inductive loads may be getting you some free energy, because of the way the metering works.  I forget how that happens, but if it's true then over-use of motors and transformers (florescent lights or anything that uses a power supply transformer) as opposed to relying more on the resistive loads in your electric furnace may be saving on your energy bill.  Though that particular difference would be very small for a single home, IIRC the physics book says that this difference, this un-billed energy, is significant on a large scale.

If you want to save energy this heating season, using CF bulbs, turning off your lights, and using super efficient appliances (with the above caveats) isn't the way to do it.  Not during the heating season.  Tightening up the house, adding insulation, using a heat recovery system on your dryer vent, etc., using less hot water (assuming that water's being dumped outside the heated space) or turning down the thermostat, will save energy.  Otherwise, don't let ignorance and simplistic thinking influence your lifestyle.

Someone mentioned last time that some of the light from your evil incandescents (or any other lights) is being lost through your windows.  True, but the visible light is a small fraction of the total output unless you’re using LEDs.  In any case it's the energy you don't see that's being lost in far greater quantity through your windows, and that loss takes place whether or not your lights are on.  Use double or triple panes, and close your blinds at night.  We use opaque (to visible and IR) venetian blinds.  My friend, who I helped build a house on the Yukon/Kuskokwim delta, had a large, triple pane picture window with an insulated door that swung down from the ceiling and had magnetic seals like a refrigerator door.  The house also has 18" to 24" of insulation in the walls and floor (double framed) and more in the ceiling.  We had to insulate the house from the tundra underneath too, to keep the tundra from thawing in summer.  That was an interesting project, but now I have digressed.

We've wanted to design an optic mount for the M1 Garand rifle for years, and people have been asking us for one, but it always seemed like there was something else we had to do.  Well, here's our M1 rifle optic mount prototype.  I think it's going to be designated the M12 optic mount.  You saw it here first.

I don't know how many people have told me that their "old eyes" can't make use of the iron sights like they use to, or that it would sure be nice to have a simple way to mount a scout scope or dot sight on a Garand, etc., but it's been a lot.

If you're not familiar with the M1 rifle, it has to be loaded from the top, and when the clip of ammo you shove into the magazine runs empty, the clip is ejected forcefully out the top when the last shot is fired.  That means you can't put an optic over the top of the receiver, 'cause it gets in the way of loading and ejection.  Some M1 rifles were used with scopes mounted off to the left side, but few people like that arrangement.  It works, but you need a special mount and I understand you have to drill the receiver on your classic rifle, plus your manual clip eject button ("clip latch") is there on the left side.

This new mount replaces the handguard just in front of the receiver, clamping solid to the barrel with steel clamps and screws similar to the UltiMAK M8 for the M-14 rifle.  This is the prototype, and is left "in the white".  The production units will be anodized and finished in black.  It sits low enough to co witness (use the iron sights without removing the optic, right through the optic, in case the dot fails) with most tubular dot sights which also means you need no comb riser to get a decent cheekweld.  On this example (a vintage Springfield war horse - Thanks Mr. Devoe) I can center the dot in the Aimpoint Micro, with the rear iron sight all the way down hard, and the rear aperture is completely out of the way, yet I can still aim with the irons if I want.  It's as if the rifle, mount and Micro sight were all made for each other.  That's the way we like it.

[shameless self promotion = "off"]

I'm not putting it on our web site just yet, because we have more tweaking to do, and a lot of other things before it goes into production.  This post is just what the title says.

The M1 rifle is fascinating for several reasons.  One reason is that the gas port in the barrel (where high pressure gas is bled off to operate the action) is right near the muzzle, under the front sight, so the operating rod goes full length form the charging handle to the front sight.  We were talking here the other day about how much machining went into one of these rifle, and how many were made in a short time.  Amazing.  Its design led to a whole family of long guns, including the M-14, M1A, Mini-14, Mini-30, and the M1 Carbine shares some things in common with it.  Back in the day the M1 was state of the art, but today it would be considered on the high end of heavy for a battle rifle, it holds a small number of rounds in the magazine, doesn't lend itself to "tactical reloads" very well, but it sure is a lot of fun, and its .30-06 cartridge packs a punch.  And look how pretty it is.  Just..just look at it.

So maybe I'm an idiot.  I was out firing a Colt AR-15 HBAR with a Trijicon ACOG scope.  I'd gone the extra step and drilled through the A2 carry handle on this otherwise pristine Colt so as to add the second mounting screw for the scope.  The BDC (Bullet Drop Compensating) reticle has different crosshairs for elevation at different ranges (wind is of course still up to your doping skills).  You zero at, say, 100 using the main crosshair, and your elevation is supposed to be correct at all the other indicated distances.  One comment on that; it would be much better to refine your zero at greater distances, using that other crosshair, say, at 500 using the number 5 crosshair or etc.

Out in the real world though, your targets aren't placed at nice, even, measured distances, so it gets just a little bit more complicated.  I'd brought a laser with me to do range measurements.  The laser registered a particular target at 385 yards.  Said right there, so it couldn't be wrong, "385 yd".  That's close enough to 400 that I opt for the number 4 crosshair.  Shot went high.  "Not possible-- I called that shot dead on."  Same thing again.  Walking the shots onto the target, I find I have to hold halfway between the number 3 and 4 crosshairs*.  "Crap.  This shouldn't be happening.  I have nigh on three grand worth of equipment in top condition, the right ammo, and a standard length barrel.  What the hell?"

Some of you will already have figured out the problem (I seem to recall something about an interplanetary probe oblitorating itself on Mars due to a similar error).  The ACOG scope is calibrated in meters and the laser was set to display in yards.  A yard is 0.9144 meters.  In realistic rifle shooting distances, we can simplify that to either adding or subtracting 10% to do the conversion in our heads, and be close enough.  At 385 yards I was rounding up to 400, which made sense, but I was still thinking all in yards.  I didn't convert.  385 - 10% (simplify further and subtract 38) =  about 347 meters, or close enough to the 350 meter crosshair for this target.  *Ah Hah!

Better yet would have been to take all of half a minute (only because I don't mess with the settings much and I'd have had to take that long to figure it out) to set the laser to read in meters.

On a nice, relaxing day with a full belly and a Thermos-full of hot coffee (as backup this time) the sun shining and the birds chirping among the beautiful North Idaho scenery, this was more of an amusing lesson than anything serious.  If there is ever a situation in which it really matters, you'll want to be aware of these things in advance, and have taken the necessary steps already.

Part of my problem is that I fool around with so many different weapon systems, in addition to being an idiot.  How does that saying go?  "Beware the man with only one gun."  Something like that.  He knows his weapon backwards and forwards, right and left, upside down and every which way, in the dark, summer and winter, and with one hand tied behind his back just to make if fair he'll still kick your ass.  Hmm.  Maybe there's a new IPSC stage in there somewhere.

Update: With the low recoil of the 5.56 round and a low power optic, you can usually spot your own hits even at longer distances.  Take that for what it's worth.

I read a great many of the responses to Douglas Weil's spiel on CCW and his attack on John Lott. Perhaps some might find it interesting, that first of all, Douglas Weil's degree ScD (doctorate of science) is only an honorary degree, and not earned. In my case, i earned my degree, in a field I pioneered: Analytical Investigative Science. I know Doug Weil, I know what he is and I know how he does things. If he can't get the numbers he wants, he takes somebody elses numbers and plays with them, to make them say what he wants. If numbers aren't available, he invents them. Doug Weil is 100% committed to Hand Gun Control, Inc. and the disarming of America. To characterize him as anything less than totally Socialist minded, would be to honor him. The numbers he used in this article were twisted and misused.

JBD, ScD. (Initials used @ employers request)
March 30, 1998
From http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/98/0326/iccon.asp
[The link is now dead but you can view the archive here.

As near as I can tell the anti-gun people have been lying and twisting the truth for as long as there has been a debate about gun ownership. When the WWW began taking off and the mainstream media began losing power the good guys finally started winning a few battles. It was stuff like this that made the difference. Before that the lies and spin would be heard because the MSM wanted the population to hear that. Had high speed cheap communication not made its debut for another 10 or 15 years we would most likely have completely lost the battle.--Joe]

I have had about 20 hits on my Sitemeter this morning from a certain I.P. address that look like this:

Domain Name		(Unknown)
IP Address		204.68.130.# (National Rifle Association of America)
ISP		National Rifle Association of America
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Virginia City  :  Fairfax Lat/Long  :  38.8357, -77.3375 (Map) Distance  :  2,059 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1504 x 873 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Oct 23 2009 8:28:54 am
Last Page View		Oct 23 2009 8:28:54 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/2009/10/23/PopularityContest.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/2009/10/23/PopularityContest.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Oct 23 2009 11:28:54 am
Visit Number		623,291

No referral URL, no hit on the main page, just a direct hit to my Popularity contest post. It looks like there is an email going around that organization with a link to my post.

Still nothing visible from the Brady Campaign I.P. address. But just one solitary hit might have gotten lost in the noise. Either that or the fifth of Jack Daniels and 30 count bottle of Ambien started kicking in.

Update: Scratch that. They just stopped by looking at something else:

Domain Name		sct.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address		65.242.56.# (HANDGUN CONTROL)
ISP		Verizon Business
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.9042, -77.032 (Map) Distance  :  2,071 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Oct 23 2009 9:28:09 am
Last Page View		Oct 23 2009 9:28:09 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://blogsearch.go...Henigan%22&scoring=d
Search Engine		blogsearch.google.com
Search Words		"dennis henigan"
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...alftruthHenigan.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...alftruthHenigan.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Oct 23 2009 12:28:09 pm
Visit Number		623,363

For someone who reloads metalic cartridges, I've done it very little.  Still, I've had problems, with several calibers, in seating bullets.  The seating plug that comes with the die set (you only get one plug) doesn't fit every bullet shape ever made, which means it doesn't fit the bullet you're actually using, even if the dies and the bullet were made by the same company.  As a partner to this phenomenon, the loading manual (also written by the bullet company whose sister company made the loading dies) says very little about seating plugs, or the fact that a plug made for one bullet shape might be a real problem when seating a bullet of some other shape.

With some bullet/seating plug combinations, I find it impossible to maintain a cartridge OAL to within 15 or even 20 thousandths, yet the construction of the press should be capable of easily maintaining a seating depth to within a thou or two.

Another part of this cascade of problems is that depending on the bullet type, the bullet itself may be part of the problem.  Softpoints can be distorted in packaging and shipping, can mash during seating if the plug touches soft lead, or a jacketed hollowpoint match bullet's meplat can be inconsistent to several thousandths.  The latter inconsistency isn't all that much of a problem if the seater plug fits OK.  The bullet's ogive is still being seated to the same position and the base is still seating to a consistent depth inside the case because the seater plug doesn't touch the meplat (assuming it fits OK) and you can always trim the meplats.

Today I got the primers I ordered last April or May, so I decided to load some of the 110 gr "Varminter" HPs I'd gotten to try out in .30 Carbine.  Brand new cases, all prepped and flared the same, and I can barely hold C.O.A.L. to within 15 thousandths.  The seater plug was made for the round nose 30 Carb FMJ, and the HP's round nose, made by the same company, has a distinctly different shape from the FMJ, which makes the seater plug impinge on the soft lead corners at the very tip of the bullets.  These HPs, by design, are very soft at the tip.  Some of the bullets get swaged inward at the tip, narrowing the hollow tip opening, raising a burr at the tip and lengthening the bullet.  Others don't distort much at all.  The phenomenon is binary-- either I get a distorted nose and the OAL is 10 to 13 thou over, or the nose stays intact and the OAL is within a couple thou of nominal.  Nothing in between.

Long story short; Die makers should be discussing seater plug issues a lot more, and they should offer a plug for just about every bullet shape, especially plugs that don't impinge on the soft lead of hollowpoints and softpoints unless the plug is going to match the bullet shape perfectly.  Another plug/bullet mismatch I've had results in the mouth of the plug cutting a circle around the bullet like a sharpened punch-- the extremely small contact surface area isn't conducive to repeat accuracy.  As it is, I can always make my own seater plugs, but what a pain just so I can try out some different bullets as a lark.  On a positive note; standard reloading dies are priced unbelieveably low.  You may connect the dots.

We had a rep from Speer in at UltiMAK several weeks ago, setting up some M1 Carbines with our forward optic mounts and high-end combat optics for a LE demonstration of their new .308 110 gr Gold Dot loads (offered to LE only last time I checked).  I've thought for a long time that the M1 Carbine would make a good patrol carbine or "truck gun" if one were to use good HP loads in it.  Haven't heard back from the rep about how the demo went, and I'd sure like to try some of those new Gold Dots.  I guess when they release them to the public they'll be backordered eight months within a week.  I'll take a thousand, please.

Via following a Sitemeter referral (someone at the FBI was looking for answers and ended up on my blog) I discovered The California Criminalistics Institute did a study on obtaining forensic evidence from cartridge casings before and after firing. The conclusions were:

Likelihood of obtaining useable fingerprints on c. cases:

Not likely.

If you eliminate bloody prints from consideration, then only 3/32 [9%] cartridge cases displayed useable prints.

No useable prints were obtained on the cartridge cases that had been fired.

...

If you eliminate bloody prints from consideration, then no DNA profiles were obtained.

I'm not sure that it's of any use to me but I found it fascinating.

Maybe I'm the last to know, but I just found out that the nominal outer diameter of a gauge-numbered machine screw is defined as the gauge number multiplied by .013", plus .060".  The actual diameter is usually two or three thousandths or so under nominal.  I know 'cause we tried it.  And as you are all know doubt aware; once you reach a quarter inch, you're going by fractional inch dimensions instead of gauge.  Wood screws go by their own, as yet mysterious to me, system, probably developed by some guy and his partner making screws by hand 250 years ago.

Who cares?  Well, we have run into problems with what we refer to as "stacking tolerances" in our production-- a threading tap varies slightly (both initially and over time with wear) the anodizing depth varies slightly, and screw dimensions vary slightly even if you stick with one supplier.  If these variations all go in the wrong direction at once, you end up with customers calling you saying the screws are so tight in the mount that some of them are breaking, even though you've been doing everything exactly the same for years and it's always worked nicely.  We started using +.001" and +.002" oversized form taps a few years ago, to make up for the thickness the anodizing adds to the threads, and then some, and the problem went away.  Now at least we can measure screws and know exactly how they vary from "nominal" as opposed to making simply comparative measurements.

This new (to me) tidbit of information is just icing on the cake for you engineers out there, in the unlikely event that you were as ignorant of such things as I was a few minutes ago.  What I still don't understand is why we call a number eight screw a number eight screw instead of a .164" screw.  Too many digits?  But then you'd not have to remember gauge x .013" + .060".

Some of these oddities come down from the past in "organic" ways.  Firearm bullet and bore diameters are a good example.  Who the hell came up with .223, .308 or .452, as opposed to, say .200, .250, .300 .350, etc?  Some of these unlikely numbers, at least in part, come from the days of black powder, wrought iron barrels, soft lead bullets, and the manufacturing tolerances of yore.  The realistic tolerances back then were nowhere near what's possible now, and it resulted in some pretty weird numbers that became standards out of expediency and in response to backward compatibility issues.  I use a .454 ball (that number's still with us) in an 1850s .44 percussion revolver for example, because the oversized ball gets better purchase on the sides of the chamber and on the rifling.  We would now refer to a .454 bullet as caliber 45, though you were shooting it from what was called a .44 caliber pistol back in the 1860s, and the modern 45 cal bullets are .451" and .452".  Modern 44 caliber bullets are .429".  Huh?  I definitely need to learn more about this stuff.  In another .44 percussion revolver I have I use a .457" ball-- you want a ball that's bigger than the cylinder, and a cylinder that's bigger than the barrel groove diameter, so everything gets a sure, tight fit with the soft lead ball.

We still use grains as a unit of measurement, which came from some king somewhere telling us that the official definition of a pound was "seven thousand plump grains of wheat" (what poor saps had to count them, then recount them, and who verified their work?).  Shotgunners use the dram, which converts to the tidy number of 27.34375 grains, or the "dram equivalent", which is a charge of modern smokeless powder that generates about the same energy as that number of drams of black powder.

If we were to start all over and reinvent guns from the beginning today, we'd no doubt end up with simpler units and numbers, but the world doesn't work that way.  Each incremental development is built upon the previous one, and you don't immediately re-tool everyone in the business, make all the old versions unusable, and change all the established experience and data, just for that little increment of improvement.

Still, I keep saying someone needs to reinvent the computer OS (or the very concept of the computer OS-- maybe the very use of the term "OS" is thinking too much inside the box) from the beginning.  There is of course no basis-- no established school of thought or system of evaluation that would warrant such a claim.

When I bought my first computer (an IBM XT) I splurged and bought a 1200 baud modem instead of the 300 baud almost everyone else was buying. It was amazingly fast. It would download the posts from the BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) faster than I could read. How could anyone have a need for anything faster than that?

It's a good thing we didn't have the anti-free speech bigot equivalents of the anti-gun Senators Feinstein and Schumer who stopped the sale of new magazines with more than a 10 round capacity. Otherwise we would be still stuck at 1200 baud instead of 15,500,000,000,000 baud:

To achieve these results, researchers from the Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100 Gigabits of data per second. The team multiplied the number of lasers by their transmission rate of 100 Gigabits per second and then multiplied the 15.5-Terabit-per-second result by the 7,000-kilometer distance achieved. The combination of speed multiplied by distance expressed as bit per second.kilometers is a standard measure for high-speed optical transmission.

Of course I and others discovered the 1200 baud modems were way too slow when we started downloading porn--even if they were just 320 x 200 x 256 color .GIF files. Just think of the improvement in quality and speed at which we will be able get our porn once we have terabit data connections. That should come close to the needs for one of Quark's holosuites. We just need to get the holographic emitters working.

I'd taken my nephew Ben out shooting several times, including the Boomershoot last Spring, and he'd liked it well enough he decided to tell his cousin Matt about it.  Matt decided he wanted to learn about rifles and marksmanship, so they called me and we set up a date.

This Winchester AK-47 is in recoil as a cloud of dirt erupts from behind the 100 yard target.  Ben is behind the controls (or is that terror rifle controlling him?  OMG!!);

Below is Matt firing a Colt AK-47 HBAR from the bench.  After starting out on a Marlin .22 rimfire AK-47 and graduating to the 1894 Winchester AK-47 chambered for the old .30-30 Copkiller cartridge, both off-hand with open sights, this Colt AK-47 shown below with its 4x Trijicon ACOG telescope was as easy for him as, well, something super easy;

And Matt again below, with a Springfield AK-47 HBAR chambered in .308 Massmurder, and a Billybob 3-9 x 40 scope on an ARMS #18 mount.  The deep space telescope on the T&E mount at left is for spotting bullet holes;

The ARMS 18 mount sits nice and low over the receiver, but that nice lowness creates a problem.  Several shots from each magazine result in a failure to eject due to cases hitting the mount.  During Boomershoot I was told that standard M80 ball works fine and dandy with this config.  We were using some super accurate, deadly at 37.25 miles, sniper rounds in this AK-47, but I had tried the far-less-dangerous-to-the-climate-and-all-things-holy, M80 earlier, and the claims made by some military shooters at Boomershoot seem to be correct.  For some reason, I'll guess op-rod velocity, the .mil stuff seems to run without being stopped by the ARMS mount.  My preferred load for this AK-47 though is the Black Hills 168 grain Match/Terrorist/AngryRacistMob round.

By the way; if you're contemplating installing ANY receiver scope mount on an M1A (sorry-- AK-47) you must plan on hand-fitting it, or having it fit by someone who's aware of this issue.  Your chances of a drop-in fit are quite low, from my experience, and from talking with many other users.  That includes a Springfield mount on a Springfield rifle too.  It took me hours of file-and-try, file-and-try, to get this ARMS mount to sit on there correctly.  The catch is; it SEEMS to go on OK with the first try, but if you tighten the receiver bolt, you're potentially distorting your receiver, mount, and bolt threads, as the mount is being forced into a position it can't fit.  You then notice, either before you've spent hours at the range in frustration, or after, that the mount's rail isn't near well enough aligned with the barrel to get a zero.  That's if you're lucky.  If you're unlucky like I was when I installed my first Springfield mount, the rail will be close enough in alignment that you can actually get a zero, and then things go all to hell afterwards as your mount and receiver slowly peen together, and the zero never stays in one place for long.  If the mount is fit properly, the design and function is quite successful, other than the aforementioned ejection issue.  This Springfield AK-47 has never had a single stoppage otherwise, either.  'Course, if you have the standard barrel version, you solve all this time and heartache by using the UltiMAK M8 forward mount.  One problem THERE is; a lot of owners don't really know which barrel weight they have, and SA was making it worse for a couple years by naming one of their medium weight barrel models the "Loaded Standard".  Yeesh.  But they fixed that since.

On Friday my officemate told me Kris had just stopped by and left something for me. I found a damaged Pocket PC with a note on it asking that I do an Idaho Stress Test on it. I contacted Kris via IM for more details. The screen had been damaged and was completely non-functional. There was company sensitive data on the device which needed to be destroyed and Kris wanted me to do this for him.

On Saturday daughter Kimberly and I went to the Boomershoot site and, among other things, destroyed the data for Kris. I also had a hard disk that was in similar need of "data reduction" and we deleted the data on both items at the same time.

Tomorrow I'll deliver the pieces Kim and I found to Kris but for the rest of you here are a few pictures assembled into a video:

Surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens, Nokia, and Secure Computing built Iran's surveillance infrastructure. U.S. companies helped build China's electronic police state. Twitter's anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents -- anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Every year brings more Internet censorship and control -- not just in countries like China and Iran, but in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other free countries.

The control movement is egged on by both law enforcement, trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals, and by media companies, trying to stop file sharers.

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

Bruce Schneier
August 3, 2009
Building in Surveillance
[Schneier doesn't mention this but the concept of "bad civic hygiene" has wider application than just surveillance technology. It also applies to the TSA, gun control, and even government provided health care (do you want health care decisions for gays made by people like Fred Phelps--or vice versa?). It's another way of expressing concern about failures of my Jews In The Attic Test.

Some people have a lot of concern about Microsoft contributing to this sort of thing. I have been, and am, involved in projects that have the potential to cause concern. I have been very pleased to see that not only the corporate policy is appropriate to protect innocents but also the attitude of the people I work with is on par with my standards in this regard.--Joe]

Why is it that every printer ever made has User Frustrator Tabs (UFTs) built into the paper tray?  Their only function is to prevent the user from sliding a new stack of paper into the paper tray.  They're there to catch the corners of the paper as you're trying to get it into the machine, thus causing one or more sheets to bunch or shift inside the tray.  Often it's the bottom sheet that gets hung up, and of course it's impossible to slide the bottom sheet forward under the stack, even without UTFs, unless you remove the whole stack and try again.  UFTs work especially well when you have an important customer on the phone and you're in a hurry to print something.  Of course the printer never knows that you've just installed a new, crumpled stack of paper in it, so while you're on the phone you have to find the right button to push, telling the printer it is now time to jam and wad a new sheet in its mechanism.

I can just see Butters, in his aluminum foil Professor Chaos uniform, evil grin on his face, as he builds the CAD file for the new HP paper tray; "He he he heeee.  Now the world will know the pain and frustration...."

Hey guys; ever though of having, you know, flat, smooth surfaces inside the paper tray?

#876,394.2;

Why is it that the printer and camera manufacturers actually hire (and presumably pay) extra people to write software, and then actually include it in their product packaging, just to take over my computer, turning it into an All-HP Fun House, or the Wonderful, Lollipop World of Cannon, instead of the computer I actually liked and paid for?  It's like putting dog turds in your product packaging.  You hire people to search for dog turds, you hire people to wrap those dog turds, and then you pay to ship those dog turds with each camera or each printer, so that I'll stick one in my optical drive and ruin everything, permeating my whole computer.  Gee, thanks.  All I wanted to do was print stuff, OK?  How hard is that to understand?  All I want to do is take pictures and put them on my computer.  Why does that require special dog turd software?  You know what I do?  I pull the card from the camera and use a damned card reader, 'cause that way I know I'm not sticking yet another dog turd in my optical drive.

(go ahead-- ask me how I feel about it)

I occasionally post about the adverse results of socialized medicine but probably haven't said much about what I think about it. A friend asked the following via email:

I have been meaning to ask you for a more detailed explaination of your stance on universal government run health care as it is being proposed right now. I understand you oppose it, but as someone who is poor and hasn't had healthcare for 11 years and has used the emergency room for most of my healthcare needs, why it is bad.

I know there is no free lunch.
I know that someone is paying for it.
I want to know why YOU are opposed to it and why.

My response (except for a few personal things that were deleted to protect privacy):

Health care... Big, big topic.

I understand the no insurance situation. [details deleted]

I have tried to express this in a "Just One Question" format but haven't quite been able to do it. Here's my best attempt:

If it were possible to keep someone alive and robust essentially forever (baring catastrophic injury) but it cost $1M/year per person should the "government" supply it for everyone?

Of course the answer is "we can't afford that".

The thing is we are rapidly approaching the point where immortality may be achievable for some people. I suspect age-wise I am just above the cutoff line where it will be technically feasible. My kids (and probably you) have a good chance at that.

All government health care plans equalize (for the most part--people in power typically are more equal than others even if the law says otherwise) the care. There simply isn't budget for everyone to get "the best". Care will be rationed or it will be substandard. Look into what happened in the UK. The waiting lists cause people to die. Too old, too fat, or smoke? You don't get the knee replacement or other care because that money would be "better spent" on someone younger or healthier.

Government bureaucrats will make the rules and/or review cases deciding who gets care and who dies. It WILL be abused. It might be on racial or religious lines or it might be on the basis of who you know. Whatever the case it won't be on the basis of what you and/or friends and family think you are worth or can afford. When someone pulls the plug on me I want it to be because I and/or my family decided it was time or couldn't afford the cost rather than some government official that decided they didn't like my skin color or I had been just a little too uppity with some of my blog postings.

If Bill Gates and other extremely wealthy people are allowed to pay for whatever the free market can come up with immortality will probably be achieved soon. It will be extremely expensive and only a few will be able to afford it. But the price will come down and someday it will be affordable by the middle class. If equality of care is enforced we may never have that available to us.

See also what Alan Korwin has to say about it:

http://pagenine.typepad.com/page_nine/2009/07/dangerous-health-care-insanity-spreads.html

I tried this before, but the camera/recorder I used then was equipped with AGC circuitry, and the extremely wide dynamic range of gunfire made for an unsatisfactory result.  This time I used a dedicated, stereo sound recorder with no compression.

Because the sound of live fire, even from the 400 yard distance in this example, has such a wide dynamic range, you need to crank up your speaker volume very high.  You'll need a high quality sound system, or some good headphones with good frequency response, from low bass to the upper highs.  You should be able to clearly hear the sound of the rushing creek in the distance between shots, and the high-frequency bullet crack should almost hurt your ears.  Warning;  Make absolutely sure your computer or other device isn't going to make any other sounds (chimes, alarms, etc.) or it will blow your head off.  Be sure to turn the volume down when you're done.  When I play these files on the Altec speaker system with sub woofer, it sounds like it did when I was standing there making the recording.

We fired an AR-15 (.223) from 400 yards at plastic water jugs.  You can hear the sound of impact, but it's not as loud as the bullet's sonic "crack" or the low frequency muzzle blast that follows.  I was holding the recorder at a position behind a hill from the shooter, about 20 yards off to the side of the bullet path, and about 20 yards up-range from the targets.  This is the same recording in both WMA and MP3 formats;

01 223FireWMA.wma (1.4 MB)

223FireMp3.mp3 (584.91 KB)

Note that you've probably never heard this sound in movies or television, with the possible exception of Quigley Down Under, but in that case Quigley's bullets were sub sonic well before impact at long range and we can forgive the "whoosh-boom" as being probably accurate enough.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Computer Networks, second edition, page 254
[While at the gym this morning I watched Sotomayor's confirmation hearing for a few minutes. When she started talking about court precedents in regard to the 2nd Amendment I was reminded of Tanenbaum's quote.--Joe]

I'll bet some Microsoft geeks had fun with this.

You should hear about some of the parties we have had. Read Renegades of the Empire for some hints.

[Via an email from Rob.]

An interesting development:

The TASER® XREP™ is a self-contained, wireless electronic control device (ECD), that deploys from a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. It delivers a similar Neuro Muscular Incapacitation (NMI) bio-effect as our handheld TASER® X26™ ECD, but can be delivered to a maximum effective range of 100 feet (30.48 meters), combining blunt impact force. The battery supply is fully integrated into the chassis and provides the power to drive the XREP projectile engine.

Links to pictures here. Video here.

I wonder if I can get a couple of boxes of those from Wal-Mart. I could see having few rounds available if I ever got an invitation to go bird hunting with Dick Cheney and he got a little out of control again.

Via email from Kris.

I'm just wondering aloud here.  When will we decide that women are regular citizens, instead of treating female shooters as though they are a separate class of citizen?  I understand that there is a perception that women need their own, separate training classes and all that, so they feel comfortable.  Is that condescending to women or am I missing something?  At what point, or under what circumstances, will we be treating female shooters the same as we treat male shooters (within the sport I mean)?

Maybe it's a dumb question.  Maybe men can't help but see a woman as something special and maybe that attitude is bound to find its way into our chosen sport.  Maybe some women are so accustomed to being treated differently that they expect it without a lot of thought.

Maybe the question is simply premature.  Any female shooters want to comment on that?  Do you believe you need separate training or separate categories in a competition, and if so, why?  Should there be guns made for girls, and others for the boys and if so, why"  Marketing strategies are beyond the scope of the question.  Hell, maybe it's all about marketing, in which case, never mind.

I could understand if shooting involved some heavy lifting, but even then we've all seen some women who can out-lift some men.  So you want different weight classes, like in wrestling?

Here's another.  How long is it going to be before the various races of humans are treated the same in general, in the media, and in the courts?  I understand personal preferences, but that's quite different.  I'm talking socially, politically and legally.  When will I be able to tell a black guy he's being a fool without being accused of racism, or tell a Mexican woman she's wrong without her getting in my face on some racial or sex-related tangent?  When will we be able to disagree without changing the subject as a form of crutch?  I really am getting sick and damned tired of this, so I am herein putting my foot down.  Knock off the race and sex defenses.  Some people are using it as a tool and I'm not buying it.  Not at all, and I'm getting right back in your face if you try it with me so don't even start.

When, or under what exact specified circumstances, will the gun-restriction advocates declare their work done, pack up their tents, and get jobs?  Any time you hear one of them guffaw over the assertion that they won't quit until all guns are banned, your immediate response must be, "OK, then tell me precisely when or under what circumstances you will stop, declare victory, and find something else to do, 'cause what I see is that any time you get a win, you're right on to calling for another restriction.  This has been happening for over 70 years, so, you know, we have a pretty undeniable track record here.  Go ahead.  Lay out the circumstances.  I have all day."

Staying on the title subject;
A problem with saying, "this far and no farther" is you've already established that a) you're willing to give ground, and/or that b) you've accepted or granted your opponent's basic premise(s).  Some things are properly subject to compromise (such as where to go for lunch, assuming you want the company) and others are not (such as basic rights).  When it comes to basic rights, the response it not, "this far and no farther".  Properly, the response is zero tolerance, same as it would be for a robber or a rapist.  If someone violates your basic rights, they are criminal and it is not incumbent upon you to prove your magnanimity by compromising with them.  You fight to win, then you fight for compensation and restitution, then you fight for justice, assuming your opponent is still breathing.  Few if any in Congress, for example, seem to have a clue how that might happen with regard to their violations of our basic rights.

I listened to all (I only had time for half of #7 which I had previously heard) the Vicious Circle podcasts on my way to/from Idaho this weekend. The most common topic is guns with some porn and technology discussions thrown in. My kind of stuff!

With very little structure, mediocre production quality, and a fair amount of rambling it's never going to win any awards. But I enjoyed it. It certainly was much better than merely listening to road noise.

In some episodes (especially #8, We be hating) it sort of reminded me of gossipy Jr. High girls whispering to each other about someone else behind their back. And then there was another than made perhaps a few too many "short jokes" for me to be entirely comfortable with it (and I'm not short). But there wasn't really anything I hadn't said in private conversations before. But I wouldn't make those sort of conversations public.

I'll be adding more to my Zune as they come out for further entertainment while on the road.

Full disclosure:

#7, Boomershoot 2009, was very favorable about Boomershoot. Late in #5 a favorable mention of somethings I have said appears to be at least partial inspiration for episode #6. I think there was another favorable mention or two of me in some of the episodes as well.

I don't believe these significantly affected my opinion of the podcasts but I thought you should know they might have.

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft but not in Search.

I know MS has been spending a lot of money attempting to catch up to Google as a search tool. A year or so ago I attended a few internal meetings and saw data that showed objective tests placing search results above Yahoo! and nearly as good as Google. I expect the results are at least on par with Google by now, but still MS wasn't getting the traffic anywhere close to that of Google.

It appears MS has decided that search quality wasn't a deciding factor. Yes, the branding of "Live Search" sucked. "Bing", to this non-marketing expert, appears to be much better. And I hope that will help. But what they are doing is much, much more than just rebranding it. Check out this video. It's a decision engine, not just a search engine.

Coming soon: Bing.

I thought we appropriately articulated our opinion of czars in America on April 19, 1775. And the last Czar and his family were permanently removed from power with extreme prejudice on July 17, 1918. So why is it that our government is creating new czars? I would think we have had enough of them in this world. But apparently our government doesn't see it that way because tomorrow President Obama is expected to announce still another czar:

President Obama is expected to announce Friday the creation of the position of cyber czar, a person who will coordinate the nation's efforts to protect government and private computer systems from hackers, criminal gangs, terrorists and spies, people familiar with the plan said Thursday.

The czar will report to both the national security adviser and the head of the National Economic Council, the sources said.

Obama will not name anyone Friday to the post because the selection process is ongoing, they said.

In addition, the White House will release a 40-page report that sets broad goals for combating cyber intrusions, but does not spell out in detail how to do so, said the sources, who would not agree to be identified because the report has not been released.

Several years ago I was asked to comment on some preliminary Homeland Security plans for the Feds to "protect the Internet". As one might imagine they were just the opposite of what I thought should be done. I gave them my feedback as politely as I could while still making my points and my boss said he passed it on up the chain with his blessing.

I don't know if they have come up with something having better alignment with reality by now. We will have to see what the "40-page report" says. But just the fact that the Feds want to extend their reach into still another area where they don't have any Constitutionally granted powers when they are so deeply in debt they can't pay for all the stuff they already messing up does not bode well.

Update: The document is now available. A quick scan doesn't reveal any of the stuff I disapproved of a few years back. But it is a very high level document without many details that can be addressed. And, of course, frequently "the devil is in the details". What I did find a little odd was the frequent use of the phrase "State, local, and tribal governments" (emphasis added). There were 12 instances of the use of "tribal". Is it usual to include tribal governments in such documents? And it makes me wonder...could I set up my own tribe and tribal government? I need to look into that sometime. I own land that is on an indian reservation (Boomershoot is held on indian reservation land as well).

I've long been disgusted by Hollywood's portrayal of sounds.  Sounds in space, sound traveling at the speed of light, and the ridiculous sounds of gunfire made up in a studio.  Even the news services will often do a time-shift, to synchronize the sound of a distant event with the video even though anyone who's been alive long enough to understand what they're seeing on TV knows that sound and light travel at different rates.  I just, do, not, get why TV and movie people have to screw up reality so much.  Far from adding anything, it subtracts from the final product.

For example, I think the long delay in the sound of a distant explosion at Boomershoot makes the experience more awesome.  It adds to the perception of enormity.  The movie, "Band of Brothers" is an attempt to show it like it really was, and for the most part they seem to have done a good job.  Not when it comes to sound editing though.  Super-sonic bullets whiz by, "whoosh-whoosh, zip, zip" and so on, and of course the sound always travels at the speed of light.  It's taking a serious subject and turning it into slapstick.

In the interest of universal understanding, I made this recording of .308 rifle fire from about 380 yards while setting up some rifles for Boomershoot.  The camera is about 20 yards from the targets (yeah, I was holding the camera, but I was behind a hill from the gun and in radio communication with the shooter-- completely safe).  Each shot delivers multiple sonic effects or events.  First is the "CRACK-hiss" (mini sonic boom) from the bullet.  Take the sonic boom from a jet flying over, speed it up a few octaves, and you'll have about the same thing.  That bit is interesting in that it does not come from the gun, but from the bullet.  You have no sense of the direction from which the bullet came.  Imagine standing in the water on the shore of a lake and feeling the wake from a passing boat on your legs.  From that sensation alone, you have no idea of where the boat came from, and little or no information about its direction of travel.  The bullet's wake, as sound, gives you no more information-- just a "snap" that seems to come from nowhere.  Next is the sound of impact, which is only audible in the first shot in this recording.  Then comes the "boom" from the muzzle blast, followed by the reverberation in the surrounding hills and trees.

Note that the reverb almost seems louder than the crack-boom.  That's due to the AGC (Automatic Gain Control) circuitry, A.K.A. "compression" built into the camera.  The initial crack drives circuitry into gain reduction, and the gain comes back up for the reverb.  To get the relative levels of the events portrayed accurately, I'll have to take a full-range stereo recorder into the field on another day and use its un-compressed level mode.  If you have some nice speakers (and pretty powerful, as the dynamic range is quite wide) you’ll hear it as if you were actually standing there.  Regular CD audio has a dynamic range of about 100dB, IIRC-- close enough.  This recording isn’t all that bad, though.  Crank up the volume, use good speakers, and boost the bass to get the full effect (the mini electret mic on the camera isn’t great for bass response);

Full disclosure and disclaimer time. I work for Microsoft. The following opinion is my personal opinion and does not represent, to the best of my knowledge, the opinion of anyone in MS management.

The EU is about to fine Intel:

Microsoft and Intel are taking it on the chin in Europe these days. On Wednesday, the EU is expected to bring down a heavy fine on Intel for its myriad anticompetitive activities at the expense of AMD. The Wall Street Journal reports it will be one of the biggest fines in the EU’s history.

The anticompetetition commissioner can fine Intel as much as 10 percent of its annual revenue. That would be a $3.8 billion fine based on 2008 revenue, more than triple the $1.16 billion charged to Microsoft for noncompliance in the EU’s long-running antitrust action against Redmond.

One has to wonder what percentage of the EU income is based on fines and what percentage is based on taxes. But most of all I wonder how long the EU would last without Intel and Microsoft products. I'm sure Intel and Microsoft could do without the EU a lot better than the EU could do without Microsoft and Intel.

I just wish Microsoft and Intel had the gumption and the means to demonstrate that to those commies.

My wife reads a lot of "who dunnit" mystery novels.  The one she's reading now addresses long-range marksmanship and the use of hollowpoint "match" bullets.  As a person normally 100% uninterested guns and shooting, she had a very good question for me; "Why do they use hollowpoints for accuracy"?  This lead to a very interesting discussion-- one uninterested in guns was trying to understand something that few gun enthusiasts understand completely and rarely discuss in such detail.

I had to admit I was at something of a loss.  My best understanding is that the hollowpoint bullet jacket can be manufactured to higher standards of concentricity (the mass being better centered around the mechanical center so as to avoid wobble in flight) and consistency of mass and shape.  That is all true, but exactly why it is true I was at a loss to explain with certainty.  My best guesses are that it has to do with the process of forming the jacket's shape, and with the insertion of the bullet's lead core, but I don't know the actual processes used in bullet manufacturing.

I also told her it was my opinion that since the hollowpoint jacket (having a closed copper base due to the way it's constructed) allows none of the bullet's lead base to melt away during the intense heat of firing, it is going to retain its mass, and therefore its consistency of mass from shot to shot, better than the open base of a standard full metal jacket bullet.  I've also read that the open-base FMJ can allow the jacket to partially separate from the core at the base under the pressure of firing.  If so, that would certainly alter its flight slightly and at random.

She explained that it was her understanding that hollowpoints were used to cause more trauma inside the target, and I told her that she was correct.  She was having a hard time understanding that there is no direct correlation between the objectives behind hollowpoint "match" bullet designs, and the hollowpoint bullets designed to expand and cause more damage.  This was getting too technical for a layperson, but her interest was piqued by the story she was reading.  I had to explain that hollowpoints designed specifically for expansion on impact have a wide range of designs, operating velocities and applications, and that match hollowpoints have nothing to do with any of that.  The match bullets are only designed for accuracy, with no regard to their effects on a target.

That being the case, one can nonetheless do a little experimentation.  Manufacturers of match rifle bullets usually make a point of telling the customer that they are NOT intended, and should not be used for, hunting.  There is one company, Burger Bullets, that touts their match VLD (Very Low Drag) hollowpoints as hunting bullets.  I've been loading Berger 7 mm bullets in 280 Remington for my son's use at Boomershoot, and since he keeps his rifle zeroed for that load, he has also used the VLDs for hunting.  This particular bullet has a light (read weak) jacket, and while it is an awesome animal stopper, it explodes at high velocity inside the animal due to its light construction and causes major damage to any meat it comes near.  It also tears a large hole in the hide for those of us who keep the skins.  They make a tiny entry wound and a softball-sized exit wound.  That would be OK if the shot placement and angle were ideal because only the heart/lung cavity would be so effected (then too, we like to eat the heart if it's intact).  Other match hollowpoints have heavier jackets that don't behave much different, on impact, from a standard FMJ bullet.

Practicing for Boomershoot last week, we found one of our 30 caliber match bullet jackets behind a 2' diameter rotten, wet log that it had penetrated.  Just the jacket, turned nearly inside-out, with no lead core.  The hollowpoint tip was almost perfectly intact, and so behaved radically different from a hollowpoint hunting or defense bullet.  The bullet had traveled 400 yards, entered and then yawed violently sideways inside the log.  The intense pressure of deceleration caused the heavier lead core to burst out the side of the jacket, separating completely.  The open-sided jacket followed through to drop on the ground just behind the log.  These match bullets were loaded in .308 Winchester cartridges made by Black Hills Ammunition.  We were using 168 and 175 grain, "red box" new loads.  I think the bullets they use in these loads are from Sierra, but don't quote me on that.  You can call them and ask if you're curious.

This is an open letter to all the talk show hosts, pundits, party hacks, cheaters, scumbags, sick twisted freaks (you know who you are) and pro-freedom bloggers.  We could spend the rest of our lives cataloging the outrageous behavior of nasty, America-hating, ignorant, self-loathing, cultist, freedom-hating, anti-human, leftist politicians including Progressive Republicans.  We know they're bad, OK?  If there are three or four people who still don't get it, that's all right.

I'd rather try to figure out how we're going to get some principled Americans nominated so we're not always forced to choose between bad and worse-- between more socialism slower, and more socialism faster.  This last national election was a real puker.  The Republican Party is, at the moment, just as lost, dumbfounded, selfish and clueless as ever.  They're a herd of does, staring blankly into the headlights of an on-coming truck, and the worst part of it is; they don't even suspect that they're clueless.  They in the Republican leadership think they have some really clever answers, which amount to more of what got us into this mess.  I recently heard it described as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That fits very well.  The Republicans have some really super great, super ultra smart ideas for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  No really, listen...  (all the while we have this simple, proven model for success, and it's being ignored.)

We need to change that.  You need to change it.  I need to change it.  There isn't anyone else.  I suppose, since it's up to us, it will have to be on the local level for most of us, being as we're not billionaires.  That's OK.  We can still do what we can do.  A lot of people are jazzed up right now.  They just need somewhere to start.  Well, pick a place, a local issue or a local politician that needs a hand (or a very public spanking) and get to it!

That there are clueless people is not the issue.  There will always be the clueless.  They'll sit on the sidelines, worrying about who likes them and who doesn't, trying to figure out where the "center" is so they can position themselves in it and claim superiority for having done so, while someone else does the lifting.  Are you a sitter or a lifter?

I have a bad feeling that things could come to blows before this government is brought under control, and I really don't want that to happen.  Do you?  This country is far too important in the grand scheme of things.

And with that; I don't have much more to say on here, other than to repeat myself or talk about the weather and what I did last weekend, unless it's to tell you what I'm doing on the local level to influence politics.  Now I think I have some calls to make.

(Note that I placed this in nearly every one of Joe's categories. It's relevant to everything we do and every opportunity we want for our kids in the future)

[Alternate title: Freeing my inner geek]

Over at Kevin's place in the comments to this post Ben was wondering if he should choose a bullet with a better Ballistic Coefficient (BC) for Boomershoot. The primary reason for making that sort of decision would be because, in most cases, it would be more tolerant of cross winds. But BC isn't the only factor to consider. Accuracy and muzzle velocity are obvious considerations as well.

What isn't so obvious and is difficult to calculate is at what point and under what conditions do you make the choice for one cartridge or another if the low wind tolerant bullet is more accurate than the high wind tolerant bullet? For example, imagine you have two guns to choose from. One is a .223 shooting bullets that, given no wind conditions, you can shoot with 0.5 MOA accuracy. The other is a .300 Win Mag that you can shoot with 0.75 MOA accuracy.

Obviously for any reasonable load in either gun the .300 Win Mag is going to have less wind drift than the .223. But it's not as accurate. So when do the wind errors add up to enough difference to make the .300 Win Mag the more likely gun to get a bullet on target? It depends on the range of the target, the altitude, the temperature, and how accurately you can estimate the wind. If your wind estimation skills are perfect it doesn't matter. But if you are perfect wouldn't be reading this blog post because you already know all the answers.

You can measure everything will good enough accuracy except the wind. But you know that you are probably within say +/- 2 MPH of the true wind speed. So now what? Which gun should you use?

It turns out I worked out the answer several years ago. The expression is not simple, but the calculation is much easier than testing at the range:

In the general case an expression for discovering wind estimation error V_w (in MPH) beyond which, at a given range (R), a less accurate but lower wind drift cartridge is the better choice.  This equation is:

V_w = 1/7563 x SQRT(( E_r2² - E_r1²)/(1/(MV₁ x (F0₁/R - 1.5))² - 1/(MV₂ x (F0₂/R - 1.5))²))

Where for each of the rifles under ideal Boomershoot conditions (3000 feet, 70F):

BC_c = 1.15 x BC
F0 = 166 x BC_c x SQRT(MV)
E_r = Error of the rifle in MOA.
MV = Muzzle velocity in fps.

So get out your calculators and start crunching those numbers!

Or you could just download the spreadsheet I made. But that would be cheating and you wouldn't feel good about yourself for at least a week.

Breaking shit sounds easy, but it's not. It's actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn't break.

hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It's an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, "Where do you think the greatest weakness are?" And "How would you go about breaking this?" Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.

On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven't found any bugs. If they haven't found any bugs then they aren't doing their job, right?

Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It's about a year old and I'm pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven't gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.

I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She's a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn't show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I'll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.--Joe]

I took my daughter to her middle school (6th, 7th & 8th grade) science fair last night.  She did an experiment to determine whether dog saliva has more or fewer germs than human saliva.  You guessed it-- humans' mouths carry more germs.

There were the usual baking soda volcanoes, rotting food experiments, egg-in-the-bottle demonstrations and such.  I also counted four terminal ballistics demonstrations.  Kids took several calibers out to the field and tested them on bricks, cinder blocks, fir timbers, drywall, phonebooks, and one even used a pistol-rated Kevlar vest.  All had the results anyone familiar with guns would expect-- common centerfire rifle rounds pretty much overwhelm any of these targets, while some pistol rounds can be stopped by some of them.

One kid had assumed that a .30-30 would penetrate a hard target better than a .25-06, simply because of the bigger, heavier bullet.  He of course found out otherwise.

While there were no firearms brought into the school, there were several spend bullets, targets showing depth of penetration, and several cartridges were displayed including .50 BMG tracer and a training (inert) round for a 3-inch naval (ship's) gun.

Nice work, kids!

Sorry-- no pictures (has anyone seen a rather nice, new pocket Olympus camera lying on the ground between Moscow, ID and Garfield, WA?).

Last month at Tam's place people were commenting things we had which were old. It was sort of "back when I was a young'n..." story telling time.

I visited my parents last Saturday and picked up my contribution to the discussion:

I brought it in to work today and asked my office mate if she knew what it was.

Her eyes got big and she said, "Oh my! Is this a punched card? I have never seen one of these before!"

I told her that it was more than that. "This", I told her, "Is proof I was writing software before you were born."

I took Engr 131 fall semester 1973 at the University of Idaho. Punched cards is a tough way to program a computer. There is no back space or delete and retype. There is no "white out". If you make a mistake on a card you get to type a new one (there were rare exceptions but that is beyond the scope of this discussion).

We would leave our card deck on a table in the hall and come back three DAYS later to read the print-out result of the submission to the IBM 360. Usually it was something like ten pages of paper that boiled down to something like "Syntax error on card five, column 17." Or "Program error. Core dump follows."

The next year using a line editor on a teletype that looked like an IBM Selectric typewriter with a box of paper in back was such a thrill. You could get the compile and run results in a minute or two instead of days. And "editing" was just AWESOME compared to punching cards.

In the early 80's I started programming on a CRT. It was still a line editor but listing lines 120-140 only took a couple of silent seconds instead of 30 seconds of clattering with the teletype. I started hearing rumors of something called a "visual editor" about the time son James was born in '84. I couldn't imagine what the fuss was about. "Visual editor?" What is that about? How much better than Edline could an editor be? I didn't bother to check it out for several months.

Even then I would tell people about programming the microprocessor system I had build on a plug-board. I had typed in hand assembled hex codes into a PROM programmer. Then I plugging the PROM into a socket and powered up the system trying to debug it from the deciphering the way the LEDs blinked. Now that was a tough way to program.

Ry and I visited the Boomershoot site on Saturday. I checked the power supply and verified the batteries were fully charged and the inverters were working. The Wi-Fi was working just fine too but the last time I was there it wasn't working so I plan to replace some of the components the next time I go out there.

Ry and I both took pictures of the snow. I had not tried a Photosythn before and I thought this would be kinda neat to try. So I took hundreds of pictures. The first attempt failed and the second attempt is here. I learned quite a bit from the effort and will try some more later on but the result is still pretty interesting.

Ry has his take on the snow.

I think it's still a little early to tell. We are seven weeks from the event. I needed snow shoes to make it out the Taj Mahal but the deepest snow I could find at the shooting line near the berm was only about 17 inches deep.

We have more snow now at seven week out that last year at six weeks and five weeks out. We also had snow on the ground for the actual event too. After I visit next time we will have a better comparison to previous years.

The ATF explosives examiner for Idaho said I could just email the scans of the copies I kept. But after two days of getting neither confirmation or bounced email messages about the "Employee Possessor Questionnaires" (background check paperwork for handling explosives) I was about to call him when he emailed me. He said he hadn't received any emails from me after the first one. I had actually sent him two emails in that time frame. The first had bounced and I presumed it was because the attachment was too large. So I put the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file on the boomershoot.org website (the .ZIP file has now been deleted and my logs indicate only I had attempted to download it) and sent him a link to that. That email did not bounce.

But I noticed something, the email address he used was different than the one I had originally used to contact him. I originally used <something>@atf.gov and the one he responded with was <somethingelse>@usdoj.gov. So I sent the same two emails again. One with the attachment and one with the link. Then a couple hours ago I called him. He hadn't received anything.

We verified the email addresses. The first one (which, on Tuesday, made it through to him) was wrong. The other, which I had done a "reply to" from his email was the correct one. He would not download a file from a website ("We don't do that"). Okay, so I'll try sending a plain text test message from a different email account to his preferred email address. That worked. Okay, now the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file. He's not sure what a .ZIP file is. He knows about .PDF files. .JPG files? Yeah, kinda.

The 9 Mbyte .ZIP bounced. The message:

The original message was received at Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:15:40 -0800

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- "somethingelse@usdoj.gov"

----- Transcript of session follows ----- .. while talking to mailsc20.usdoj.gov

>>> DATA <<< 550 5.7.0 Maximum Attachment Size (12M) Violation

Yeah, my 9 Mbyte .ZIP file exceeded their maximum attachment size restriction of 12 M.

Maybe this is a test to see if I'm calm enough to be trusted with explosives.

I broke the 9 Mbyte file into five .ZIP files the largest being 1.95 Mbytes and sent them as attachments to five plain text emails from my alternate email address to his second email address.

About 15 minutes later he called back. He had received them but it was going to "take a while" to get them from "picture viewer" to the printer. He would start work on that the first thing in the morning.

Apparently I passed the test.

I'm going out to the Boomershoot site this weekend. I think I need to blow something up.

I've finally dumped my old hosting provider (Servergrid who was really flaky) for all but the most trivial of sites to port. This blog was the biggest obstacle and is finally functional. There are still bugs from the admin side but as near as I can tell, so far, the user experience is working correctly. Let me know if you have problems.

Do you like the new theme?

As planned Caleb and I did some more tests with Ry's test target. Video and commentary by Caleb.

We went to the Boomershoot site expecting to find little or no snow. We should have called ahead. There was about two feet of snow and we were unable to make it to the Taj Mahal with all our gear. We made do at the first berm. We used a paper target to zero the gun for this range (25 yards) then took a single shot with each caliber at the stack of steel plates at the base of the stump. The bullets at the steel plate went over the chronograph.

This was our setup.

In the following video you see the result of SS-109 and 30.06 blacktip ammo shot at the stack of steel plates each 0.25 inches thick. There is a gap of about 0.75 inches between each plate. Estimated velocity of the .223 bullet at the target is 2600 fps. Estimated velocity of the 30.06 bullet at the target is 2360 fps.

The .223 went through one and almost penetrated the second plate. The 30.06 went through three plates and partially into the fourth.

The .300 Win Mag pushing hand-loaded 162 grain military surplus black tip bullets was able to hit the target with a velocity of about 3315 fps. It went through all six plates:

Update: See also this paper on AP ammo. It's just the first page (you have to pay for the rest of it) but it's interesting reading.

Ry sent me an email telling me about $99 1 TByte hard drives:

Don't know if you're in the market to upgrade (I'm not), but NewEgg is selling 1tb sata drives for $99 with free shipping.

this is the item:

 

use discount code: EMCABCKFC

Interesting. My first hard drive was a 10 MByte which I purchased in 1984. And the 1 TByte drives have been out for two years now.

Assuming the rate of data density increases at a constant rate we can compute when we will have drives of even more more mind boggling capacity.

10 TByte drives should be available in 4.6 years.
100 TByte drives should be available in 9.2 years.
1 PByte drives should be available in 13.8 years.
1 EByte drives should be available in 27.8 years.
1 ZByte drives should be available in 41.4 years.
1 YByte drives should be available in 55.2 years.

Of course using all the data is going to take a lot of computing horsepower. Like maybe a supercomputer.

I have just the thing for you...

Sign up NOW (the deadline is January 31st) to have a chance at receiving:

• A Cray CX1 desk-side supercomputer
• One of 10 Premium MSDN Visual Studio Professional subscriptions
• One of 10 Xbox 360 consoles

Yeah, it's old news. But I'm liking it on my computer at work so I'm about to install it at home. Get it here.

At a meeting this morning we were discussing a possible name for a new product. It was suggested that since we already have SkyDrive and SkyMarket (with rumors of SkyLine and SkyBox), maybe we should name the project SkyNet. The consensus was there were probably names less threatening to the warm and fuzzies.

This is actually old news but I just ran across it reading an old Bruce Schneier post. Here is the story from last September in New Scientist:

Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.

Project Hostile Intent as it was called aimed to help security staff choose who to pull over for a gently probing interview - or more.

Commentators slated the idea that sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions. One likened it to the "pre-crime" units that predict criminal behaviour in the movie Minority Report.

FOXNews has more.

Basically they are doing remote lie detector type measurement without the subject being aware they are being scanned and implying intent from these measurements. Given that lie detectors aren't particularly reliable I don't think this will be very effective either. But still, one has to ask, "At what point does it become an unwarranted search and will the courts care?"

In a functioning market, vendors producing superior products would take share from vendors producing inferior products. Today that's simply not possible because the cost of the most effective channel for distribution, shipping as the default browser with new computers, for everyone except the OS vendor is prohibitively high.

Asa Dotzler
Mozilla's director of community development
January 17, 2009
competition is good (see also EU: Microsoft 'shields' IE from competition -- Web too important to let one company dominate browser market, says Opera CEO)
[Taking this quote out of context is a bit unfair and he does address some of the issues I have concerns about. But the bottom line is there is much more to the story. "Superior products", in his mind, is defined differently than the market has defined it. And unless there is government inference (or other application of force in the market place) then the "superior product" has, in fact, dominated the marketplace. The (relatively) free market has defined "superior product" in such a way that ease of distribution has played a major factor. In order words Microsoft is competing in the distribution channel and the market has spoken and said, "The Microsoft distribution channel is better."

That Microsoft exploited their superior distribution channel and the customers responded favorably to this offering is not justification for some government thugs (the EU) to declare MS a law breaker and demand fines or that they offer free access of that distribution channel to their competition. Those competitors need to build their own distribution channel and compete in that market. Until they successfully do that they have a big hole in their offering because the distribution channel is part of the feature set.

Microsoft management will, almost for certain, be more "responsible to the stockholders" than I would. If it were up to me I would be strongly inclined to tell the EU they can write their own damn software. MS would refuse to allow any of their software be used in any EU country until the EU thugs making these decisions are all in prison or selling pencils and apples on the street corners to see what the free market is really all about.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but I am not in a position of management and my opinion in no way reflects that of my employer.--Joe]

When it comes to turning off lights around the house, my wife is a nag (not as a member of the National Association of Gals, but one who incessantly nitpicks on her own).  "You're wasting electricity" she will say, approximately thirty eight thousand times per day (give or take).  Similarly, the political nags (not NAGs) are ordering us to use CF lights instead of the tungsten filament jobs, saying we're destroying the very planet with our light bulbs.

If we cast aside all arguments about rights and liberty (and if we have a chance to toy with other people as a means of boosting our self esteem, why wouldn't we?) there is the issue of home heating during the cooler months.  I gathered my family together, and explained this to them in terms anyone can understand;

If you have a 100 Watt light going full time inside a heated living space, that's 100 fewer Watts, on average, that the home heating system has to put out. You have shifted 100 Watts of your energy use from the heater to the light bulb.  Your total usage is exactly the same.  Same goes if you leave the refrigerator open a little longer, or the television on all night.  If you're heating that space anyway, it makes no significant difference.

Say I have a 10 KW electric furnace.  I could hook up 100 light bulbs, each rated at 100 Watts, through a relay to my thermostat (assuming I had the proper wiring) thereby taking all the heating load off the furnace and placing it on the light bulbs.  Will my heating bill change?  Maybe, and maybe not.  It would depend on the distribution of the lights within the house, the quality of the insulation on my furnace duct work in the cold space under the house, and a few other minor variables.  Maybe I'd save a few pennies, and maybe I'd loose a few pennies.  If you have a gas furnace the situation is still the same-- you're just trading back and forth between gas and electricity, but your total energy usage is going to be about the same.

The situation is completely different in the summer of course.  The waste heat from your TV, fridge, etc., is of no use to you.  If you're running an air conditioner, anything else in your house that produces heat is causing the AC to work harder.

In both cases, insulation, windows, door seals, and the structure's orientation and exposure to the sun will overwhelm the other issues.

So we can stop nitpicking each other.

I have to wonder if we started dropping these devices from airplanes by the millions into certain mid-Eastern countries if we couldn't eradicate radical Islam within a generation:

One end of the canister-type devices sized to fit easily in one's lap is made of soft 'Haptic' synthetic material akin to that used for nipples of baby bottles.

The faux-flesh wall is slotted to allow the insertion of a body part of a man's choosing.

RealTouch devices connect to computers with USB cables and synchronise with adult movies streamed online so the inner workings replicate what a fellow might be feeling were he to be the man in the film.

'You watch the action on a screen and a signal is sent to the box to simulate what is happening,' Mr Drysdale said.

Rich men in some Islamic countries have many wives unbalancing the normal male/female ratio of approximately 50/50. Sex outside of marriage is forbidden. And women who defy (or are even suspected of defying) this are severally punished. Hence significant numbers of young men have no good sexual outlet. Their religion promises those that die in Jihad go to heaven with 72 virgins for eternity. This is a powerful motivator for many men of warrior age to seek battle. If we could significantly reduce or eliminate this motivation there would be less violent conflict with these radicals.

Scott found a user interface bug. That is fixed now. There was a bug in the "Delete All Data" link that I found and fixed as well.

I have also created a new topic tag for this blog "Ballistics". I still have to add this tag to old posts but I should get that done sometime today.

I added another feature to Modern Ballistics for the Field. It now gives you the approximate maximum range for your bullet under the given environmental conditions.

The long-standing Sci-Fi prophecy of intelligent machines rising up to enslave and destroy the human race has disappeared from modern culture.

As far as I can tell, this coincided with the release of MS-DOS.

Dom De Vitto
January 28, 2008 12:42 PM
Comment to Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots
[I was reminded of this after reading Phelps comment to this post of mine.--Joe]

Languages are strongly typed in an effort to find programming errors at compile time, not, as some would believe, to cause compile errors at programming time.

From CodingConventions.doc for the Windows Mobile code base
January 2008
[I ran across this today at work and had to share. I know probably only a handful of my readers will get it but I thought it was so funny. Yeah, I'm a geek.--Joe]

My Modern Ballistics for the Field software is essentially completed (as long as there are a fair number of people using it software is never done). And I'm debating with myself as to whether I should start work on a Leftspeak to English conversion website or if I should work on some explosives modeling software.

The Leftspeak project would be easy and fun and only take a few days in my spare time. The explosives modeling software will probably take months but be far more useful.

Any votes?

I've fixed all the fixable bugs in my cell phone/PDA web based exterior ballistics program I announced last November and put it at it's permanent home at http://field.modernballistics.com/.

Enjoy and let me know if you run across any bugs not mentioned on the Known Bugs page. Suggestions for improvements are also welcome. Send them to "JoeH AT modernballistics.com".

I have worked with the mathematics of exterior ballistics for so long that I sometimes forget the general nature of the path of a rifle bullet to it's target is not mind boggling obvious. I was reminded of this by an email I received today:

Need a answer: I was told that when shot a 30 cal. bullet goes up and makes an arc to the target, when held level. What happens, say at 100 yards.?

This email caused me to have a flashback to when I was in grade-school (yes Kris, firearms had been invented by the time I left grade-school).

When I was about the fourth grade a friend of mind, Verl (yeah, kids had strange names back in those days), insisted that the bullet would rise after it left the barrel of a rifle. I didn't believe it and asked how long it took before it when into orbit (or some such thing that pointed out the absurdity of his claim). He didn't know but asked his dad and came back to school and explained it went up for a while then came back down. My knowledge of and ability to articulate the physics of gravity and moving objects was limited and although I was profoundly unsatisfied with this explanation I couldn't refute his assertion that it was true.

Later I made sense of it and eventually I wrote a computer programs that accurately predicts the path of a bullet as it leaves the muzzle. I am now much more capable of articulating the physics and will now attempt do so.

If you were to go to the range and instead of shooting the bullet you were to drop it from your fingers you would correctly expect the bullet to immediately accelerate toward the center of earth and pick up speed at the rate of about 32 feet per second for each second it is in the air until it hit something. It doesn't rise for a while then start falling. If you take a carpenter's level to the range and line up the bore with the level such that the bore was horizontal and fire the gun the bullet will drop, relative to the horizontal, from the instant it leaves the barrel. It does not rise and then fall. It also does not fall at the same rate as a bullet you dropped from your fingers but that is another, much more complicated issue that is beyond the scope of this post.

Because the bullet immediately starts falling as it leaves the barrel in order for the sights to predict the impact point they are not aligned exactly parallel with the bore. They are aligned such that when you view the target they line up where the bullet will actually hit after bullet has dropped by whatever amount on it's travel to the target. If the bore is horizontal the sights are pointed slight down. If the sights are horizontal then the bore will be pointed slightly up. In other words there is an angle between the line of sight and the bore of the gun. I call this angle the "Sight Angle".

As far as I know I am the first to use the phrase "Sight Angle". I use this to simplify the setting of the scope for long distance shooting. Most long range shooting instructors refer to your gun having a "Zero" that depends on the altitude, temperature, bullet velocity, and ballistic coefficient of the bullet. This is wrong. The gun is constant with respect to the environment. The drop of the bullet changes, not the scope setting.

Knowing the distance to the target and the drop the bullet makes when it goes this distance we can compute the proper angle the barrel should be with the horizontal to hit a target that is the same distance above the ground as the muzzle of the barrel. This angle is the proper angle required to have the gun exactly compensate for the drop of the bullet on it's way to the target. This angle is not the sight angle because there is another complication--the height of the sight above (almost always but not necessarily) the bore. For a typical scoped rifle the line of sight through the scope is about 1.5 inches above the center of the bore. I call this the sight height. Using some trigonometry the sight height and proper angles can all be number crunched into a single number that you can dial into your scope such that for any give range and bullet drop you can dial your scope to the proper angle and you have precisely compensated for the drop of the bullet such that where you line the sights up that is where the bullet is going to go (minus bullet inaccuracy, wind drift, and shooter error). This "proper angle" is my Sight Angle. If you know what the environment is and you know the angle of the scope (and its height) relative to the bore you will know where the bullet will hit for any given range.

So, the email asked for what happens at 100 yards. Here are the graphs (generated with Modern Ballistics, which I wrote).

First the drop for a bullet fired with the bore of the gun horizontal. This is for a .308 Winchester shooting Federal match 168 grain bullets at "standard conditions" (59 F, sea level). Yes, I know this graph is confusing. It is not the path of the bullet. This is the distance the bullet has dropped as it traverses from the muzzle to the target. The drop increases the further it travels:

By the time the bullet has traveled 100 yards it has dropped nearly 3 inches. If you point the bore up at a slight angle (4.23 Minutes of Angle to be exact) compared to a scope mounted 1.5 inches above the center of the bore, aim the scope at a target 100 yards the bullet will start out 1.5 inches below the line of sight of the scope. Because the barrel is pointed up slightly as the bullet travels forward it will rise as it travels to the target. The distance from the line of sight through the scope to the bullet at any given range is called the height of the bullet at that range. Hence at the muzzle the height is -1.5 inches. And since the proper angle for a 100 yard zero was dialed into the scope the height at 100 yards will be 0.00 inches as seen in this graph:

So, from the viewpoint of the scope the bullet does rise and then fall. Of particular interest is that there are actually two zeros for this scope setting. There is a "Near Zero" at 49.8 yards and there is the normal or "Far Zero" at 100 yards. At what is called the Midrange, 75.1 yards in this case, the bullet is at its maximum height of 0.2 inches above the line of sight.

So that is the path of the bullet for a 100 yard shot.

It is just my opinion but I don't think shooting at 100 yards is very interesting with a rifle. The errors involved for temperature changes, air pressure, wind drift, and bullet velocity variations just don't stack up enough to amount to much at that kind of range. For a .30 caliber rifle I don't find things particularly interesting until we start shooting targets at 500 yards and beyond. I'm not going to get into all the interesting details because 99.9% of the people will find what I think is fascinating as mind bogglingly boring. But here is a hint of 500 yard shooting. A graph of the height of a bullet, again relative to the line of sight of the scope, for the same rifle and cartridge as above but for a 500 yard target:

We now have a source of anti-matter.

In a lot of ways it would take a lot of the fun out of long range shooting but I'd still buy a few rounds if I could get them "cheap". I'm sure even as mil-surplus they would be expensive enough I wouldn't be shooting a lot of these:

Darpa, the Defense Department's far-out research arm, announced a pair of contracts yesterday, to start designing a super, .50-caliber sniper rifle that fires guided bullets. Lockheed Martin recieved $12.3 million for the "EXACTO" (EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance) project, while Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, LLC got another $9.5 million.

If the system works, it'll "provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military," Darpa says. "The use of an actively controlled bullet will make it possible to counter environmental effects such as crosswinds and air density, and prosecute both stationary and moving targets while enhancing shooter covertness. This capability would have the further benefit of providing increased accuracy and range while reducing training requirements."

And from the same article:

The agency has earmarked $7.5 million for a laser-guided bullet program. Darpa gave Lockheed $2 million for advanced sniper scopes that could boost kill rates by tenfold, or more. If the system works out as planned, it would actually allow snipers to remain virtually invisible, lost in the "heat haze" in between them and their targets. Our own David Hamling called the project the "next war's secret weapon."

I started buying guns during the Clinton years, simply because they were trying to ban them, but never thought much about hunting until my son was old enough to carry a youth-stocked shotgun in the field.  I took him through hunter safety and we'd gotten a few upland game birds together, but he was always interested in big game hunting.  Three years ago we bought him his own rifle, and the next day he'd gotten his first deer.  I'd gotten a deer tag here and there, and gone out a day or two some seasons, but it was never a big priority for me.  We went out with Joe once near his folks' place, which was really nice, but only managed to see one deer in full sprint, which makes for a lousy (and dangerous) shot.  No dice.  I did what I could to help Son get his deer or two each year, and the vicarious satisfaction was enough, I guess.

Not this year.  When I took Son to get his '08 deer tag, I decided to get one for myself-- for late muzzleloader season, and I meant it this time.  Fewer hunters in the field and the cooler weather of the late season appealed to me.  We'd selected the perfect site for a tree stand, just a short walk from our house on a steep hill covered by thick brush where humans rarely tread, and where the deer trails all seem to converge.  This is a choke point in their travel around the city of Palouse, along the Palouse river.  Son got a deer there last year, and had seen several deer almost every time he'd been up there.  Last year I sat in that tree and watched a doe with two fawns, sitting, chewing the cud, the young ones chasing a covey of quail, and just generally hanging out, for about an hour.  My tag was for buck only at that time, so I just sat there watching them, not 15 yards from me.  It's good to really blend into the environment now and then.  You see some amazing things.

This year I went out before dawn on the first day of the season, November 20th, with the caplock muzzleloader.  Some people use in-line muzzleloaders with substitute propellant pellets, modern sabots, shotgun primers, and scopes.  I don't quite understand the benefit.  A sidelock with the right load, standard percussion caps, using black powder which ignites more easily, can perform just as well at reasonable distances, and it's not as if these rifles are 300 yards hunting worthy.  I charged the rifle with powder and round ball with a lubricated patch before heading out of the house (a muzzleloader that is not primed is not considered "loaded").  A few yards from the house and I was out of the city limits.  Time to cap the nipple.  If I see a deer after about 15 minutes I can legally fire.

Nothing.  No other hunters and no deer.  I crawl through the brush and up the steep slope to the tree.  Tough going.  I'm winded.  I have a tendency to be afraid of heights.  Huffing and puffing, I start up the tree.  Too shaky.  Not safe.  Back to the ground.  I have to think; my hands aren't going to suddenly let go just because I'm a little winded.  Back up the tree (it's a hairy climb) to sit on the small stand.  I experience just a bit of vertigo for a minute, and then everything's fine.  The rifle was decapped and tied to some parachute cord at the ground, so I hoisted it up to the stand and capped it again.  I sat there for two hours as the sun came up and then, suddenly; nothing happened.  No prey was doing me the favor of walking in front of my extremely limited field of fire that day.  Tons of sign on the ground, but no luck.  Time to climb down and get ready for work.

Two days later, I went back up to the tree late in the day and sat there for an hour and a half.  Nothing.  Tons of fresh sign, but nothing.  I was thinking of climbing down and taking a hike along the river for about two miles.  Anywhere along that corridor there could be deer.  I wanted to act.  But no-- if I'm moving, the deer are infinitely more likely to detect my presence and high-tail it before I can get a shot.  If you're still, and your prey is moving, you have the advantage, especially if your prey is somewhat predictable.  These deer are predictable.  For sure, they'll be moving at dusk, which is right now.  The only questing is where.  But I should act-- he who hesitates is lost.  But haste makes waste.  But the early bird gets the worm.  Look before you leap.  There's no time like the present, tomorrow's another day, etc.. I was trying to think of more contradictory words of wisdom when I heard a rustling in the brush behind me.  Had to be a human or a large animal, no question.  A large doe appears from the brush, followed by more deer.  Who cares-- this one looks really good.  The muzzleloader tag is for a deer with either a 3-point minimum rack or antlerless.  I'm shooting for the table, not for trophies.

She's directly below me now, oblivious to my presence, walking fast.  I could have shot downward, through the spine and anchored her right there, but I'd rehearsed this in my mind many times and the picture was always of a side-on shot.  No matter, she's moving quickly, leading more deer up the hill to feed on the farmers' wheat.  It's a herd.  She's still oblivious.  Have to hurry.  I pull the trigger, thumb the hammer all the way back, release the trigger, and ease the hammer forward into full cock.  Silent cock-- rehearsed this hundreds of times.  It wouldn't have mattered because the deer were trundling through the brush making plenty of noise, but it's the way this was rehearsed.  Keep the trigger finger straight along the stock.  Can't touch this trigger.  Its pull is as light as some set triggers-- a pound or less.  I'd spent hours on it, messed it up, replaced the tumbler and sear, and started over.  Now the trigger pull is as light as you'd ever dare, even slightly dangerous, but this isn't a social rifle.  The charge has been in the barrel for over 48 hours, it came in from the cold last time and into the warm house where it could have pulled in some condensation, but it should be fine.  I've tested this and there should be plenty of headroom in that regard.  I'd been using CCI caps, but it was a little frustrating that once in a while I'd get a misfire.  The caps fit too tight on this nipple, and some of the hammer's energy had to be spent seating the cap.  The same thing can happen with metallic cartridges if the caps aren't properly seated, or if headspace is too great.  I'd read that Remington caps tend to fit looser, so this time I had a Remington cap on there, as I'd tried them and couldn't get a failure.  No worries about a misfire.

The doe turned her side to me in the perfect spot, not 20 yards from my tree, with perfect backstop.  Front sight behind the shoulder, rear sight, finger on trigger, Bam!  On later reflection, I recall having sensed no recoil and he noise, without hearing protection, was not uncomfortable.  You do this at the gun range and it hurts.  Here it's not even noticed.  It's a strange thing.

The doe bounded away from the cloud of smoke, up the slope, and into the field like a perfectly healthy deer, several others behind her.  No time to reload-- that's not an option.  I could not possibly have missed.  I know.  I was there.  I saw the whole thing.  But off she ran.  Crap...no, wait, she's slowing down.  At the top of the hill out in the wheat field, she stumbled and went down.  OK.  I have to remember to breathe at this point.  Sometimes that's important.  I tied the rifle to the cord, lowered it to the ground, called Son on the radio & told him to bring the pickup, and then started climbing down.  He called back about something or other.  Crap.  I felt I had to answer right then, holding onto one of the "steps" (angled metal screws we put in the tree for hand-holds) with one hand while operating the radio with the other.  Probably not a good idea.

The 50 caliber ball (mass; ~180 grains) pushed by 110 grains of Goex FF black powder (this is the charcoal, sulfur and KNO3 mixture of yore) had traveled squarely through the rib cage and out the other side, behind the shoulders and in front of the diaphragm.  That's the "boiler room"--the heart/lung cavity.  I'd been told this wouldn't happen-- that the round ball would stop just short of full penetration, but maybe those hunters use a lighter powder charge.  Still, more velocity should mean more deformation of the soft lead ball...  Impact velocity was about 1850 fps, and the exit hole was about the same size as the entry.  That's a "one-shot stop" but, both lungs partially liquefied, this doe ran up a steep slope, bounding over bushes as pretty as you please, and into a field before going down.  That was about 75 yards total, with some rough going.  Something to keep in mind.  If you want to "anchor" the animal, it has to be a critical skeletal shot, like right through two shoulders (they can run pretty well on three legs) or a central nervous system (CNS) shot.  Little else will stop an animal (two legged or four legged) in its tracks, Hollywood notwithstanding (see update below).  I tried to avoid the shoulders because there's some good meat there.  One of Son's deer had had a scapula shattered, and that was a mess.  No thankee.

The whole sequence, from first hearing noise in the bushes to the deer falling, lasted around 15 seconds.

What, I can't go on and on about it?  I'm 50 years old, this was my first deer, and now we have a lot more good meat for the freezer.  Yahoo!  For those who fear "gamy" venison; maybe we've just been lucky, but we've not noticed a trace of this phenomenon with the animals we've harvested so far.  We've gotten does because they're vastly more common.  People who tell me they hate venison because its gamy all seem to have eaten bucks.  I really don't know what makes for sweet meat verses gamy.  More research is obviously needed.  No doubt a federal grant is in order.

Next I'd like to try a flintlock.  Why?  Just 'cause.  For one thing, a modern rifle is for long shots, and the hunting we do near the house is limited to no more than about 70 yards (so far we've killed no deer beyond about 40 yards).  For another; I just want to.  I'd've used a muzzleloading pistol if the WA game department allowed it.  I won't go on about how using a primitive gun is some sort of superior life choice or anything.  It isn't.  I admit it's a distraction.  The people who used them back in the day were in fact using state-of-the-art technology.  We should learn the state-of-the-art for our own time, and endeavor to advance it.  If they'd wanted to be old-fashioned in the 18th or early 19th century, they'd have used matchlocks or bows and arrows.

Here's the obligatory, grizzly post kill photo along with the rifle;

Yes, some people find liver to be disgusting.  I like it.  I'd show you a big juicy steak, but for best flavor and tenderness, the muscle meat has to age for several days before cutting and cooking.  The liver is great if eaten right away.  These deer liver steaks were fried in olive oil with shallots, just a pinch of crushed of rosemary, and salt & pepper, served with a nice baked potato and a glass of red Zinfandel.  Simply lovely.

Update Dec. 1 / 08

Butchering the deer this weekend, we found the heart had been grazed by the ball, opening a hole in one chamber (yeah, we leave the heart in while it hangs.  Call us weird).  The ball entered straight through one rib and out through another, severing both.  The doe had run about 75 yards with two blown lungs, a blown heart and two severed ribs.  I also found an almost pristine 17 caliber air rifle pellet lodged against the pelvis.  It would have had to travel through the hide, through a layer of fat, through 2.5 inches of meat and stop at the bone.  I doubt this could have happened to the adult doe. 17 cal air rifles don't typically have near enough penetration, plus there was no apparent wound channel, so I'm thinking someone shot a fawn in the butt.  Some people's kids.

Ephemeral conversation is dying.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

We can't turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay and even our voice conversations are threatened. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. Laws requiring ISPs to store e-mails and other personal communications are exactly what we don't need.

Rules pertaining to government need to be different, because of the power differential. Subjecting the president's communications to eventual public review increases liberty because it reduces the government's power with respect to the people. Subjecting our communications to government review decreases liberty because it reduces our power with respect to the government. The president, as well as other members of government, need some ability to converse ephemerally -- just as they're allowed to have unrecorded meetings and phone calls -- but more of their actions need to be subject to public scrutiny. But laws can only go so far. Law or no law, when something is made public it's too late. And many of us like having complete records of all our e-mail at our fingertips; it's like our offline brains.

In the end, this is cultural.

The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.

When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.

Bruce Schneier
November 24, 2008
The Future of Ephemeral Conversation
[What I fear will happen is that people, and politicians in particular, will fail to realize is that the society needs to compensate for the power differential and open up government while securing the individual and private organizations. They will think government "needs" to be private and that in order for the government to "protect" us they need to monitor our every word and move.

You can see this mindset in that so many people fear "large corporations" more than governments. They want the government to protect them from the corporations. They want more power for the government so it can further regulate businesses and individuals. They apparently are totally oblivious to the fact that an abusive corporation can be taken down in a few months by a massive boycott. Corporations don't have the means to force you to buy their goods. On the other hand a government uses guns to take your money, your property, your freedom, and/or your life. Giving governments a monopoly on force and privacy is extremely poor social hygiene.--Joe]

Saturday I mentioned some sniper detection devices designed by the Brits. It turns out the U.S. Army ordered $10 million dollars worth of them:

QinetiQ North America's Technology Solutions Group, a global developer of innovative technology solutions for national defense, today announced a $9.95 million order from the U. S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF) for SWATS(R) Soldier-Wearable Acoustic Targeting Systems. Part of the Ears(R) Gunshot Localization System product family, SWATS(R) soldier-worn units will be deployed to U.S. Army troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan this year. The deployment is expected to be completed by early next year.

A brochure and other info are here.

I wonder if it would crash if it were placed down range at Boomershoot when the opening horn was sounded.

I have my software project ready for an alpha release (feature complete, but there are known bugs which must be fixed before release).

This was designed for cell phones not a desktop. It will work on desktop and laptop computers but whenever a user interface design was a trade-off between a desktop user and a mobile user the mobile user was given the advantage.

The software is a web based exterior ballistics calculator and can be found here: http://test.joehuffman.org/ http://field.modernballistics.com.This is much different that Modern Ballistics but uses the same algorithms and concepts. This web based version is for use in the field. Example, while at Boomershoot you can input the exact ranges and inclination to a set of targets combined with the weather conditions to get the scope setting needed for one shot, one "kill" hits on the boomers. I plan to have it running on a local server at Boomershoot 2009 so cell phones (and laptops) with WiFi support can get really fast results even with a heavy load of users.

I'm also thinking that maybe for Boomershoot 2010 I will have a weather station on site that will update the conditions for a special version of the software in real time.

Known bugs:

• The help page is for the desktop version not the web based version.
• If the bullet velocity at the target is less than 1400 fps all parameters such as elevation angle, windage, time to target, etc. are in error.
• Some optimization for response time and load handling should still be done.

All data is stored in cookies on your device. This means the website does not need to save the data on the site in order to save your data. The downside is that all your input from the desktop does not show up on your cell phone or if you get a new cell phone the data will have to be reentered.

At this point I’m mostly looking for user interface and device compatibility issues. Does it appear to work on your Blackberry? Does it work on your iPhone? Is the user interface easy enough to understand and use? If you have problems with your cell phone try using it on a desktop computer to make sure you are using the software right before assuming the cell phone is having problems with the website.

Leave comments here.

Thanks for your feedback.

This is a very cool device:

The palm-sized device designed by Qinetiq, the British defence firm that was once the government research laboratories, is pinned to the uniform and uses acoustic technology to calculate the exact position of the rifle fire.

Then a electronic voice passes on the "bearing and range" to the soldier allowing him to jump to safety and return fire.

The machine has already been purchased by the Americans for deployment in the New Year and the British are looking at a vehicle mounted version.

...

The device, which costs around £2,500, works by isolating the crack of the sniper rifle thanks to four microphones, a GPS system and a powerful microprocessor.

It takes less than a tenth of a second and provides the results in audio and visual formats. It can even send a grid reference via radio to supporting artillery and aircraft.

The system, which weighs less than 6oz, is so sensitive it can tell the difference between outgoing friendly fire and incoming enemy fire and can distinguish a sniper even in a gun battle.

It also works when the soldier is travelling at up to 50 mph on a vehicle.

The device has already been road tested in Iraq and Afghanistan to claims of great success.

The new machines being proposed for airplane security give results like this:

Never mind What TSA Really Stands For, that almost for certain it can never be effective security, and it costs billions each year that could be spent on something more effective, the response is:

After the machines were introduced at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport last year, officials there said they had few complaints from passengers, saying most approved because lines moved faster.

Sheep.

...[W]hen I get to the moon I'd like a choice of food other than Happy Family Pork Seafood Rice #5. I was kinda hoping for a Big Mac rather than some soy & curry concoction, though. If we want to get back in the game, I say we tell Americans that anything that happens over a hundred miles up is tax-free, and then stand the hell back.

Tamara K.
October 22, 2008
The space race goes on...
[I'd prefer a little lower altitude, like five miles, but we're just quibbling over details at that point.--Joe]

Yeah, my blog was down for most of yesterday. All my websites that use ASP.NET were down. It was a problem with my web provider. I need to finish migrating to another provider but I haven't. Maybe over Thanksgiving or something...

Earlier today Say Uncle sent me an email asking if I could help out a reporter looking for "someone of authority" to address the body armor versus deer hunting ammo issue. I know a lot more about exterior ballistics (I wrote Modern Ballistics) than terminal ballistics but I'm not totally ignorant of it either. So I agreed to "look up a few references" for the guy.

My email, with very minor edits, to the reporter follows. His email response indicated he was happy with my answers.

Say Uncle asked that I address your “deer ammo going through body armor” story. I’ll address it as best I can but strictly speaking I’m not an expert. I’m a very well informed hobbyist.

Although there is occasional some controversy over the National Institute of Justice testing procedures and standards they are still “the standard”. You can read their standard here.

Their main page on Body Armor is here.

Probably the part that is most relevant to your issue is the body armor classification. This can be found in section 2 starting on page 17. The basics are that body armor is classified according to the level of protection it provides. Those classes are, in order of increasing protection level:

• Type IIA (9 mm; .40 S&W)
• Type II (9 mm; .357 Magnum)
• Type IIIA (.357 SIG; .44 Magnum)
• Type III (Rifles)
• Type IV (Armor Piercing Rifle)

Most law enforcement officers wear type II or IIIA. Higher levels of protection require metal or ceramic inserts which increase the weight, bulk, and the body heat retention. See also Section 6, Selecting the Appropriate Level of Protection in this document. At some point in the tradeoff between comfort and protection the police officer will stop wearing the armor on an everyday patrol. In a high risk entry/arrest situation they are more likely to upgrade to type III armor if it is available.

The problem certain well intentioned politicians get into is that they don’t realize the body armor problem is as much a velocity problem as it is a bullet construction problem. Certainly sharp pointed Teflon coated tungsten carbide (a very hard metal used for metal working tools) bullets will penetrate a higher level of armor than a blunt nosed soft lead bullet. But that only goes so far. Increasing the velocity of the bullet by a few hundred feet per second will overcome the inferior construction in most applications. Rifle bullets are much faster than common pistol bullets. The typical handgun bullet is on the order of 1000 fps. A typical modern center fire rifle bullet leaves the muzzle at a velocity on the order of 2500 fps or greater.

I’ve done some informal testing with the 30-06 rifle on an engine block. The Speer Reloading Manual says of this rifle cartridge, “It is safe to say that the 30-06 Springfield is the best-known and most successful centerfire cartridge ever developed.” In a typical hunting load (see http://www.federalpremium.com/products/details/rifle.aspx?id=260) at 100 yards from the muzzle the bullet is still traveling at over 2600 fps. The tests I did were with a target cartridge and bullet (http://www.federalpremium.com/products/details/rifle.aspx?id=148). At the muzzle this bullet is traveling at about 2700 fps and is still going at over 2500 fps at 100 yards. I was shooting into the side of a six cylinder car engine from the early fifties from about 50 yards away. This was a very heavy engine block compared to today’s cars yet the target bullet would penetrate half way through the block penetrating the water jacket, one side of a cylinder and frequently one side of a piston. A very high velocity (1350 fps at the muzzle) 9mm bullet shot at the same engine block only knocked the rust off of the metal. It did not dent or crack the side of the engine.

It is a very different problem to stop a rifle bullet than to stop a handgun bullet. Although it isn’t quite this simple you can think of it as an energy problem. The energy of the projectile is proportional to the mass of the bullet times the velocity of the bullet squared. That is E = m V². The mass of a common hunting bullet is on the order of 150 to 180 grains. The mass of a pistol bullet is on the order of 125 to 200 grains with the heaver bullets moving much slower than the lighter ones. The rifle bullets typically are moving about 2.5 times as fast as the pistol bullets. Hence they will typically have about 2.5² or about 6 times as much energy as the pistol bullet.

Even the ancient 30-30 Winchester cartridge has a muzzle velocity of nearly 2400 fps with a 150 grain bullet (http://www.federalpremium.com/products/details/rifle.aspx?id=28) which will cut through the typical concealable body armor worn by law enforcement on a daily basis. Higher end rifles for larger game such as, the still very common, .300 Winchester Magnum with a 165 grain bullet (http://www.federalpremium.com/products/details/rifle.aspx?id=592) have muzzle velocities of over 3000 fps. Run the numbers on that and see the sort of problem the body armor is facing.

Hence, the NRA claim that outlawing ammunition on the basis of its ability to penetrate typical body armor would result in the banning nearly all common rifle hunting is true. It is possible the politician did not have that intention but that would be the result.

That is probably more information than you really wanted but I hope it answers your questions. If not or if you have any further questions please let me know.

He says he is sorry about bringing down Microsoft.com today. He didn't even have to use any Boomershoot technology.

As people say, his brain is a very powerful CPU but it's running a buggy operating system.

This is the sort of thing you can expect once Big Brother has taken your firearms away:

"CrimTrac has told us there will be 5000 cameras around the country, overwhelmingly in populated areas, taking some 70 million photos every day.

"There'll be maybe 1000 cameras in downtown Sydney, close to that number in Melbourne, perhaps 100 or so in Brisbane.

"If you use the main roads, you're likely to be snapped several times a day, and all those photos and any related data will be held by CrimTrac for up to five years."

Mr Vaile said it was false to represent the proposal as number plate recognition: "It's a photograph-all-drivers system."

At present, there are an estimated 300 fixed ANPR cameras and 100 mobile units in Australia.

CrimTrac is due to hand a $2.2 million scoping study for an integrated ANPR to the Minister for Home Affairs, Bob Debus, and the Ministerial Council for Police and Emergency Management in November.

According to a privacy consultation paper issued in June, all ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations.

This fails my Jews in the Attic Test with such authority it takes some thought to imagine ways to fail worse.

As my Austrialian friend who sent me the link said, "This is some scary shit..."

However, they call their piston kit a "direct impingement gas piston system."  Anyone else see a problem here?  It may be nitpicking (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but "direct impingement" is exactly that one thing that a piston system is not.  When Stoner came up with his piston-less operation back in the day, he called it "direct impingement" to describe his system of channeling the gas back into the receiver where it "directly impinges" on the bolt carrier without an intervening piston rod or tappet.

At Blackwater last weekend we used ammo supplied by International Cartridge Corporation.

The ammo worked great. I have zero complaints about the performance of the ammo. Accuracy was excellent. We fired the ammo about five or ten feet from steel plates (that is what Tam was doing here) with only a hint of dust coming back when the wind was right. It is made of sintered copper and tin so it is non-toxic. Because there is no jacket the bullets can be made very accurate. The major factor in bullet accuracy is the jacket being of different thicknesses on one side than another. This puts the geometric center of the bullet at a different point from the center of gravity. As the bullet traverses the barrel the bullet rotates about its geometric center. As it exits it rotates about it's center of gravity. If the two centers are not the same it will "jump" a little to one side as it makes the transition. This will cause the bullet to go in a slightly different direction than that which the barrel was pointed. Hence the homogeneous, sintered, bullet can be made more accurate.

The bullets are also made with a lubricant for release from the mold during the manufacturing process. This lubricant is part of the structure of the bullet and is still present when the bullet is fired. Along with the tighter diameter tolerances (about 0.0005") the guns shooting these bullets run much cooler. Todd Jarrett told us of full auto guns having barrels cool enough to hold the gun by after emptying a complete magazine loaded with this type of ammo.

The ammo rep on-site with us said the price was about the same as hollow point ammo. He also said the bullets were not available for reloading. Something about them being too fragile and cracking in reloading presses. This seems a little odd. They didn't crack when we dropped them on the gravel in the shooting bays. They didn't crack when we dropped them on the concrete. The didn't crack when they were fired.

I also found where they are sold for reloading. From their dealer page click on http://www.frangiblebullets.com/. There you can find prices, loading data, and lots of other interesting information.

One thing you will notice about the bullets is they are much lighter than the same caliber lead bullets. This is because the materials used, copper and tin, have a lower density than lead. They can, and are, loaded to higher velocities and can reach IPSC major power factor in .45 ACP, 10mm, and probably .38 Super. Minor PF can apparently be reached with 9mm. .40 S&W appears to be unable to reach major PF.

If my blood levels of lead were on the high end of normal I would probably buy the bullets and reload them in my pistols for practice and competition. As it is my lead levels are on the low end of normal and lead bullets are cheaper (in .40 S&W about $0.18 versus $0.11). And in any case I don't think I would use the bullets for self-defense. I'm inclined to believe that heavy, deep penetrating bullets are better fight stoppers than light bullets that leave a lot of fragments behind upon entry.

Another reason I would be disinclined to use the light bullets is the recoil. For the same bullet momentum (Power Factor in USPSA terminology) you get more recoil. This is because more powder is used with the light bullets and the high velocity powder exiting the barrel adds to the total recoil. The recoil is also spread over a longer period of time with the slower moving bullet. Hence a light fast bullet causes a very "snappy" recoil which tends to be uncomfortable. I noticed this with the .45 gun I was shooting over the weekend. The recoil was much different than what I expected from a .45. I asked what the bullet velocity was on the 155 grain bullets we were shooting. About 1150 fps I was told. Normal .45 ACP velocities are in the range of about 750 to 925 fps and you feel more of a "push" than the "slap" I was feeling.

Still the lead free frangible bullets have their place. I could see indoor ranges requiring lead free bullets or steel plate competitions requiring frangible bullets. I remember taking a pistol class once and the instructor telling us that for every class they usually have, on the average, one injury from the back splatter from the steel targets. They had about 10 students per class and were firing about 1000 rounds each on steel so there were a lot of bullets going down range and eventually the odds would catch up with someone. The injuries were always minor and required nothing more serious than a Band-Aid but still the injuries did occur. Wrap around eye protection and either directly facing the targets or facing away was required. Those concerns would be eliminated with ICC's frangible ammo.

Because my officemate, I, (and a few others) won an award for working some long hours last year and delivering on time we spent the money by taking a few others and going kayaking on Lake Union this afternoon. I updated my Twitter account several times and was wardriving with my cell phone while kayaking. Here are the twitter updates:

• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899833135
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899858649
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899876994
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899900654
• http://twitter.com/JoeHuffman/statuses/899931397

My boss took some pictures and updated his Facebook account with them while still on the water. Ry (who wasn't even there) tagged some of the pictures with names before we made it back to work and dropped people off.

The History Channel recently started running a program entitled, "The Works".  The host, Daniel Wilson, has a PHD in "Robotics".  I didn't know you could get a PHD in robotics, thus becoming what, a "roboticist" or a "robotologist"?  I'd have thought you'd need three degrees for that-- mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, but I'm just a layman.  For all I know, there are degree programs for "Vending Machine Technology" too, you know, for those who don't quite feel up to the work load associated with a major in "Roboticism".

He did an episode on guns, which was pretty good.  It did however show an image of Superman flying "faster than a speeding bullet", and as per the cliché, Superman was shown flying right next to a fully assembled, metallic pistol cartridge.  I'm not sure how one is meant to propel an entire cartridge through the air at the velocity of a speeding pistol bullet (which the host correctly described as about a thousand feet per second) but I'm sure that where there's a will, there's a way, especially if you have a PHD in robotics.

Anyway, the program was interesting.  Though the host talked down to us a little more than required, IMO, I can forgive him-- he's young.  He obviously had a lot of fun with the various guns too, and wasn't afraid to show it.

Check out "The Works" on THC if you have the time.  I think you'll like it.  Oh and;

Congratulations, Dr. Wilson.  Keep up the good works.

It is just me, or does MS spell checker not recognize typos that come purely from proximity on the keyboard ("fat-fingering")?  Example; the word "and" typed as "ans"-- I don't get "and" offered as a correction option.  I find this sort of thing often.

OK, so I'm a whiner.

The other day Lyle posted "We Can't Drill Ourself Out of This Problem".

Today I was poking around in my quote collection and ran across this:

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?  You're crazy.

Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

Apparently the "progressives" still haven't caught up with the capitalists of 150 years ago.

Uncle points out that gun bloggers can change the perception of the world. By providing more links to the viewpoint we want presented we move the ranking of web pages up the chart on Google and other search engines.

Our next target is Carry Permit Holders.

Microsoft is run by a very bright, very energetic, very healthy person who has very few outside interests -- and he has a killer instinct.  I admire the guy -- I think they ought to bronze him and break up his company.

Scott McNealy
[Bill has left the building. His last day at Microsoft was June 27.--Joe]

I changed a setting on my blog a few days ago and apparently there are some bugs associated with that feature.

It turns out that some of my blog posted only showed up for me. I wondered why some of my posts didn't get the attention I though they should. Now I realized that  their invisibility contributed to that.

The rest of the world was being deprived. Once I realized this could mean the end of the world as we know it I changed the setting back to the original. Still the postings did not show up. I finally hand edited the .xml and the missing posts appeared. The RSS feed still didn't work but it was 1:30 AM and I went to bed anyway. This morning I found another field in the .xml that needed to be fixed so I went all geeky on that the RSS feed was populated and probably everyone is wondering, "Where did that come from?"

So now you know. I'm using a "daily build" of software under development and, surprise, surprise, it has bugs. But you probably already knew that from all the time my blog waits several minutes to respond or just plain says, "Service unavailable." Now that Boomershoot 2009 registration is almost complete maybe I can spend some time on upgrading my blog software.

Man catches girlfriend's sex romp on mobile call:

The court was told that the girl named Toni Milton sat on her cell phone by mistake while having sex with her old flame, and thereby unknowingly dialled the number of Neil O’Brien.

She came to know about the blunder only when she heard the muffled sounds of O’Brien.

Not knowing who was on the other side, she said “Hello”, and heard O’Brien shouting in rage.

"I take it we’re finished, then?" British tabloid The Sun quoted O’Brien as shouting.

Angered by what his girlfriend had done, O’Brien drove 15 miles to her home, beat her up in her bedroom and smashed up her possessions.

Just wait until your cell phone GPS can be queried remotely and without your permission.

Last December I made two posts about how busy I was at work:

• Running on empty
• Running on empty makes the news

About 10 days ago while I was in Louisville our Corporate VP held a meeting for all the people under him. I missed out on the big meeting but I've watched part of the video of it since then. One of the topics at the meeting was awards for various people. My officemate, Sapna, mentioned in one the previous posts, our PM, our test/system integration guy and I got one of the awards. Here is a screen capture from that video:

I told Barb about this and she thought it was pretty cool... until I told her what we had done. We designed/wrote/tested some of the website code that puts ads on mobile phones (like what you see here depending on what country you are in) for our mobile websites.

Barb's response was basically "ads are evil". But ads are the reason so much of the Internet is "free" just like most television programs and radio. For example Hotmail requires dozens of servers with massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Ads pay for those resources. There haven't been many ads on a lot of mobile phones for various reasons but that is changing and my little team (above) helped change that.

I find the diversity of our team interesting. Sapna is from India and on Monday participated in a folk-life event at the Seattle Center attended by some large number of people. She and about a dozen others put on several dances from India. I showed up and took a bunch of pictures. At 5' 3" and 110 pounds she doesn't look like a software geek: 

Taqi is from Pakistan (don't India and Pakistan lob expolsives and high speed pieces of metal at each other on a regular basis? Odd--they get alone so well here.) and when he visits "home" I sometimes ask him about what "training camps" he spent time in. He takes it quite well and tells me stories from his time, years ago, in the military--which he makes of point of telling me was the secular military. He is about to finish his master's degree from the U of W in physics.

Zane is of Asian descent and a Canadian citizen who loves to play basketball. Snowboarding is also up there on his list of things to do.

All of them are great people and I'm proud to work with them. However, I'm sometimes intimidated here at Microsoft. If you open your mouth about something you should know what you are talking about because I suspect the average I.Q. in our section of the building is probably about 150. Damn, these guys are smart.

On Saturday night (Sunday morning), at the NRA Convention, I stayed up until 3:00 AM socializing and blogging. I arrived at the Press Room a few minutes before 9:00 the next morning and found I was the first one there for the meeting with Paul Helinkski of Guns America. Wimps. Even the NRA staff hadn't arrived to unlock the door early after being late the day before. If it hadn't been for the wheelbarrow full of cash I received on arrival I would have been a little bit annoyed with the NRA for dropping the ball in this regard two days in a row.

About 9:00 other bloggers and press people showed up to wait. Bitter had no explanation:

More people showed up--and waited:

Then Helinkski showed up and waited with the rest of us:

Finally, about 15 or 20 minutes late, the NRA staff (names withheld to protect the guilty) showed up, let us in, and we all sat down to listen to Helinkski:

He gave us his background and while interesting from a technical aspect most of my readers aren't going to care about that. What probably is interesting is what he had to say about the future of gun sales on the Internet.

Helinkski is of the opinion that gun are a very unique product that cannot be sold like other products. The required FFL for shipment and NICS checks for most sales is the reason. That "speed bump" could be smoothed out by "dealers" that do not stock firearms but simply do the transfers and charge $20 or $30. But, according to Helinkski, this would be the very bad for gun owners. Sure we could get guns a few dollars cheaper if we did our purchases that way but having the gun store down the street on the corner is more important that those few dollars. The public visibility is important and having the customer service locally available is important.

So what is the future of Internet gun sales? Helinkski has an innovative web product that addresses that. Check out GunsAmerica.com. His website allows dealers to post their inventory on the web and the customers to comparison shop. You can search for guns within X miles of your zip code and then if the dealer makes a sale because you found what you liked on the website Helinkski makes a flat fee on the deal. You still have to visit the dealer and purchase the gun face-to-face but what Guns America has done is make the comparison shopping much easier.

Transfers data wirelessly at 2.88 MBytes per second. It also doubles as a gun effective against squirrels, vegans, clowns, hippies, street urchins, hooligans, carpetbaggers & scalawags. Don't try it with the girl scout though. She shoots back.

H/T to Kevin I. of the Lewiston Pistol Club.

People who use Earthlink for their e-mail must have a very different impression of human behavior, because no one ever responds to their e-mail inquiries.  Every time I get an on-line order from an Earthlink user, our auto reply e-mail gets bounced, as we get the following message:

"I apologize for this automatic reply to your email. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand."

Usually followed by a hand-typed e-mail a day later-- some variation of;

"I placed an order from you guys the other day, but I never got a confirmation, so I reordered, and still got no confirmation.  What's wrong with you guys?  Please respond!!!!  Hello!!!????"

The world is a very impolite place for Earthlink users.  No one ever writes back.  I wonder if they ever wonder why.

Update:  We got two of these responses today.  Our only option is to use the old-fashioned telephone, assuming we get a phone number.  I've thought about writing a series of essays on communication skills.

I've never had a big problem with automated traffic law enforcement as long as it was used only for enforcement of moving violations and not for general surveillance.

Now you can add another objection to my list of objections. From Dallas:

Citywide statistics obtained by NBC affiliate KXAS-TV found that red light cameras do reduce accidents. That is a good thing.

But they do it by reducing red light violations, by as much as 29 percent from month to month at particularly busy Dallas intersections. On the face of it, that, too, is a good thing — but not, necessarily, if you rely on traffic fines to make up a healthy chunk of your budget.

Dallas lawmakers originally estimated gross revenue of $15 million from their 62 cameras this fiscal year, which ends June 30. But City Manager Mary Suhm estimated last week that the city would fall short by more than $4 million.

So Friday, the city turned off about a quarter of the least profitable cameras, saying it couldn’t justify the cost of running them.

Yeah, I'm naive, I take things at face value. I actually believed traffic law enforcement was to reduce personal injury and property damage, not just a source of revenue. I don't recall ever believing in Santa Claus and having the myth shattered, but this must be what it feels like.

Last night I wrote a simple encryption program. Basically it's "Encryption for Dummies". You can use it to encrypt text message such as email or even instant messages.

Here is the zip file: CryptLight_1_0_0_1.zip (225.56 KB)

Download it. Unzip it, read the ReadMe.htm file and you should know all you need to know about it. If it sounds like something you could use run Setup.exe and have fun.

As a test message use this with the passphrase of "Password" (without the quotes):

gmPtGYutvQCrqXMT++rFLwcN53qTuDpieDL/Z3svuIz4RnHNTCeJ+8aGC4Z2orZ9Zsen/rg7
8JG/Rm/cQ33D5bqSWqTXU4ctDCabZAKw2po=

Update: I forgot to mention, because of my exceedingly Microsoft centric view of the universe, this only works on Windows. I tested it on XP and 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Update2: If you enter in corrupted cipher text and try to decrypt the program will crash. I have fixed it but haven't released new version yet. I'll wait for a few more days to get feedback and bug reports. Consider what you have as an Alpha release.

Sean said he has a dream. Now he just has to get a really big bonus this fall so he can bring it to Boomershoot 2009.

Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (6 MB WMV).

Boomershoot enthusiast, Bruce, sent this to me. He wants one for the flat trajectory when shooting squirrels.

Sebastian points out new technology may make concealed carry more difficult.

What the people that develop these tools don't tell the politicians that will buy them is they are easy to defeat. Just as a tank can be defeated with a Molotov Cocktail, if you know what you are doing very simple and readily available materials can defeat multi-million dollar surveillance equipment.

In this particular instance what the developers probably aren't telling the potential buyers is that there is something called the Skin Effect. This is, in essence, a law of physics that says the higher the frequency of an electromagnetic wave the shallower the penetration of that wave through a conductor. It depends on the resistivity and magnetic permeability of the conductor but for copper a 1 Terahertz wave will have a skin depth of about 66 nm. The typical aluminum foil you buy at the grocery store has a thickness of 200 um which is over 3000 times thicker. I don't have the skin depth numbers for aluminum but I can tell you that lining your jacket with aluminum foil will make your jacket completely opaque to such machines. Even aluminized mylar balloons or "space blankets" will be opaque. Hence, these machines will not be able to see anything on the other side of the metal lined clothing. I expect even sequined purses and dresses will be opaque.

I've explained build breaks before and why they are big deal.

Last night about 10:40 the guy across the hall submitted a code change for review. About 11:35 someone else replied saying it looked good. At 11:49 the guy across the hall checked it in.

This morning I saw the request for a code review and took a look at it and thought, "Hmmm.... just one line was changed. I'll look at the bug report to make sure this is the right thing to do but it almost for certain should be fine as long as it passes the buddy build." Then I saw that he had already checked it in--without any mention of a buddy build. Hmmm... Okaaaaay.

Then I saw the email about the build being broken this morning. Then I saw the email about a new bug assigned to the guy across the hall. About 30 minutes ago another other guy showed up with a very large baseball bat* in the hall. I started laughing and went out to watch more closely. I stopped laughing and left when the thumping started. It wasn't going to be pretty.

I came back after a few minutes and the guy with the baseball bat was gone and I examined the guy across the hall for bruises. There were none showing so I'm assuming his clothes cover them all.

They take their coding processes seriously around here.

News from STI:

.22 Caliber Conversion Kit

STI international, Inc has joined with Bob Marvel to bring you the finest .22 conversion kits available anywhere. With these conversion kits, you can easily swap out your top end to go from one caliber to another- it’s like getting a second pistol for less than half the price. This will allow shooters to increase their trigger time while decreasing the cost of good training.

The improved Bob Marvel design locks the barrel in place for improved reliability and accuracy. The conversion kit may be purchased for either the 1911 (single stack) platform or the world famous 2011 (double stack) platform. The kit comes complete with adjustable sights, lock back on last round (single stack), an excellent extended 10 round magazine, complete cleaning kit, magazine loading tool, and a custom fitted hard case. The top end works on either 1911 or 2011 frames with only the magazine to replace if the shooter wishes to change frames. Extra magazines for the 1911 and/or 2011 are available.

It's an extra $35.00 for the 2011 frame over the 1911 frame but that is a small price to pay if you don't have the 1911 frame to put it on.

In competition I shoot a STI gun, I carry a STI gun and you should too.

I found the following line here:

Want to find some tools for fighting junk email?

It made me laugh. Actually a pretty good argument could be made for imposing the death penalty on people that send mass junk mail--assuming that sending junk mail should be considered a crime. As much as I hate spam I don't think it should be a crime, but the argument for making the offense punishable by the death penalty is an interesting intellectual exercise for me. I may have hinted at it here before, I'll have to see if I can find it and flesh it out a bit more sometime.

I listen to a lot of Audible.com books on my long commute (300 miles one way) between Moscow Idaho and Redmond Washington. This is one book that I can see raising my adrenaline level to "no sleep for you tonight" levels. From Audible:

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns, our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies, are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry.

From Amazon:

Keen's relentless "polemic" is on target about how a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one's own views rather than expand horizons. But his jeremiad about the death of "our cultural standards and moral values" heads swiftly downhill. Keen became somewhat notorious for a 2006 Weekly Standard essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism; like Karl Marx, he offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details. Readers will nod in recognition at Keen's general arguments—sure, the Web is full of "user-generated nonsense"!—but many will frown at his specific examples, which pretty uniformly miss the point. It's simply not a given, as Keen assumes, that Britannica is superior to Wikipedia, or that record-store clerks offer sounder advice than online friends with similar musical tastes, or that YouTube contains only "one or two blogs or songs or videos with real value." And Keen's fears that genuine talent will go unnourished are overstated: writers penned novels before there were publishers and copyright law; bands recorded songs before they had major-label deals. In its last third, the book runs off the rails completely, blaming Web 2.0 for online poker, child pornography, identity theft and betraying "Judeo-Christian ethics."

First, my opinions are not those of my employer.

Second, I point you to the article titled EU fines Microsoft record $1.4bn.

Third, I bring your attention to a comment about the fine following the article:

Microsoft MUST be brought to account for its' practice of dominating by exclusion. If the company, Microsoft, continues to practice in a manner which refuses to be competitive, then it should be excluded from the EU. Nicholas Carton, USA
Nicholas Carton, Saint Louis, Missouri USA

Fourth, my opinion:

If people only knew how much time and effort MS spends groveling and trying to please these socialist jerks...

I am sometimes (and this is one of those times) of the opinion MS should tell the EU, "Then do without any of our products. Not only will your languages not be supported but all future versions of our software will not run without having at least intermittent Internet access and will not run if said Internet path traverses any part of an EU country."

But that's an emotional response without looking at the cost/benefit numbers. Rational analysis will require looking out for the stockholders best interests on a number of fronts. I know such a response would allow competitors access to a cash cow as well as cutting off MS income from this source. I just can't help wondering at what point the EU will push MS too far and the numbers no longer add up to continue trying to please the greedy socialists.

I wish MS were in a position to demonstrate to the EU they need MS more than MS needs them and had the courage to follow through on a very forceful demonstration of that.

Kirk has the story.

As I said before this brand of stupidity will be laughed out of the legislature. The companies pushing this should try a free market approach to making money on bullets.

H/T to Uncle.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Bill Gates
1981
[I'm listening, live, to Bill Gates tell us his vision for the future of our group. I'm reminded to not take everything he says as the word of god.--Joe]

After doing some thinking on the topic of microstamped bullets I've changed my opinion. I was vehemently opposed and couldn't imagine this would catch on. I was wrong on both accounts. I now think it is a great idea and I think it will do exceptionally well and will be accepted by the majority of shooters.

What I realized was the company pushing this (see Sebastian's post) was trying to use a government mandate instead of the free market. Which, of course, is nearly always a recipe for disaster. They will get much greater market acceptance with a free market approach.

I think that there are a lot of people that would pay another penny per bullet for something like "Mist Maker" engraved on their Speer TNT bullets. I'd pay an extra $0.02 per bullet so I could load up 9mm jacketed hollow points inscribed with "Please Don't Rape" for the women in my life to carry. In my case even at an extra $0.05 per bullet I'd order 1000 Berger .308 caliber 210 Grain Match VLD's engraved with Μολὼν λαβέ.

This article is very interesting for two reasons. The first is:

A group led by a Princeton University computer security researcher has developed a simple method to steal encrypted information stored on computer hard disks.

The technique, which could undermine security software protecting critical data on computers, is as easy as chilling a computer memory chip with a blast of frigid air from a can of dust remover. Encryption software is widely used by companies and government agencies, notably in portable computers that are especially susceptible to theft.

The development, which was described on the group’s Web site Thursday, could also have implications for the protection of encrypted personal data from prosecutors.

The move, which cannot be carried out remotely, exploits a little-known vulnerability of the dynamic random access, or DRAM, chip. Those chips temporarily hold data, including the keys to modern data-scrambling algorithms. When the computer’s electrical power is shut off, the data, including the keys, is supposed to disappear.

In a technical paper that was published Thursday on the Web site of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the group demonstrated that standard memory chips actually retain their data for seconds or even minutes after power is cut off.

When the chips were chilled using an inexpensive can of air, the data was frozen in place, permitting the researchers to easily read the keys — long strings of ones and zeros — out of the chip’s memory.

“Cool the chips in liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) and they hold their state for hours at least, without any power,” Edward W. Felten, a Princeton computer scientist, wrote in a Web posting. “Just put the chips back into a machine and you can read out their contents.”

That's cool enough, but this is just as cool:

The issue of protecting information with disk encryption technology became prominent recently in a criminal case involving a Canadian citizen who late in 2006 was stopped by United States customs agents who said they had found child pornography on his computer.

When the agents tried to examine the machine later, they discovered that the data was protected by encryption. The suspect has refused to divulge his password. A federal agent testified in court that the only way to determine the password otherwise would be with a password guessing program, which could take years.

A federal magistrate ruled recently that forcing the suspect to disclose the password would be unconstitutional.

Not that a child pornographer may be able to get away with his crime but that you can password protect your data and the government can't force you to potentially incriminate yourself.

In my previous posting on microstamping I tried to be as objective as possible. Now I want to give my opinion.

Microstamped bullets

As much as the anti-gun people would like to implement something as expensive and worthless as microstamping of bullets matched to their cases and boxes I believe they will be laughed out of the legislatures. It is just too difficult and impractical to implement and even the police will complain at the paperwork and expense. Add in the ease with which stolen and re-manufactured ammo will defeat the technology and only the most rabid anti-gun people will support it. The police have a lot of influence anytime guns are brought up and without their support this technology will be defeated.

Microstamped firearms

The argument that microstamping of firearms will help solve crimes committed with guns is invalid. The only criminals that will be caught with this technology will be the stupid ones, those that committed crimes of passion, or those that had no plans to get away with the crime (murder-suicide types). In those cases the criminal would have been caught/detected anyway and the microstamping of the firearm will be irrelevant. There will be a few borderline cases where the microstamping does make a difference but the numbers will be insignificant. This is of little concern to the anti-gun people. Even if all crimes committed with guns were solved instantly they would still demand the banning of firearms. It's not about crime reduction, its about banning guns even at the cost of increased crime (see Washington D.C. and Chicago for example). That they tried less drastic measures and they failed will be one of the reason given for the more harsh measures which follow.

Microstamping of firearms, at this point in time, would be a great burden on manufactures. But I believe I have solutions to all the problems mentioned by NSSF as issues for manufactures. All those issues can be solved with a few changes in their processes. If so, then the promise of only adding a dollar or two to the price of the gun might become a reality. It will take some time and it will cost money to make the changes but ultimately it won't be major obstacle to microstamping. I'm not going to provide those answers here because it does no one any good. If I can come up with the answers in less than a day then so can a lot of other people.

As much as I would like for all manufactures to follow STI and Barrett's lead in refusing to do business with California and other anti-gun states the lure of having a less competitive market will mean some manufacture will fill the void. If there is a demand then someone will supply it. Just as with recreational drugs the price will be above free market levels and the quality may be lower but the demand will be filled. Once the boycott, if it ever becomes that, is broken by one or two manufactures then others will probably fold as well. The only question will be whether the manufactures will make guns specifically for sale in those anti-gun states or will they continue to sell non-microstamped guns in other states. I think the answer to that will depend on the "people of the gun". Will we pay a premium for an non-microstamped gun and/or will we mount an effective boycott against the manufactures that sell into the anti-gun states? I don't know the answer to that.

Conclusion

I'm left without a strong argument against microstamping and I'm afraid ultimately our legislatures will be too. It won't make a measurable change in the solving of crimes but it won't hurt the non-criminal gun owner much either. I can't make a case for it violating the Jews in the Attic Test because I claim the technology can be easily defeated. I don't like it because it is worthless and it gives validity to "reasonable government restrictions" on firearms. Ultimately it will lead to government restrictions on defacing the microstamping just as the existing laws against destroying the serial numbers of firearms. The replacement parts will ultimately be tracked and even if you purchase a gun through a private sale without a 4473 being filled out the repair of the firearm, even on your own kitchen table, will result in your gun being, again, tied to you. But this incremental firearm registration will be not be a sufficient hurdle to block it's passage in the legislatures.

I believe the bottom line is that in order to stop state legislation mandating the microstamping of firearms we will mount an effective boycott of those manufactures that sell into those states. Against Federal legislation we will have essentially no defense.

I've been doing a little research into microstamping. High emotions on either side are not productive. I've tried to gather facts and sources for your own research.

This was instigated at the suggestion of Justthisguy in the comments.

First off I would like to point out there are two types of microstamping. Neither of which should be confused with "ballistic fingerprints".

The Technologies

Ballistic Fingerprints are Dead for Now

"Ballistics fingerprints" are a system where law enforcement obtains a bullet and cartridge casing from the manufacture for every new gun. Maryland and New York have passed laws requiring this and at last check not a single crime had been solved with this additional data and Maryland State Police were advising the money should be spent on something more effective.

Microstamping of Bullets

This concept is about putting matching serial numbers on the bullet, shell casing, and bullet box. Of course there would have to be a database that tracked the bullets from manufacture to the end user. It is impractical for many reasons.

I don't expect this to go anywhere in the immediate future.

Microstamping of Firearms

This is about putting unique codes (essentially a serial number) on the firing pin, breach face, ejector and extractor. Typically you will hear the example of the firing pin being marked but actually there will be markings in other places as well. Some people pretend it's a secret where these markings will be. Anyplace that strikes or presses against the shell casing is a potential location for imprinting the codes. This includes inside the chamber but those marking are at high risk of being sheared or smeared away in semi-autos during the extraction while there is still some pressure in the barrel and casing.

These codes will correspond to the serial number of the gun. The manufacture of the gun will be required to cooperate with law enforcement to find the distributor->retailer->initial buyer -- just like current firearm traces when law enforcement has the make, model, and serial number of a firearm.

This technology poses the greatest potential to be generally implemented and California passed such a law on October 13, 2007. This law mandates the technology be used on all new firearms sold in California beginning on January 1, 2010. It requires the microscopic codes be put in two or more places such they are transferred to the cartridge case.

For more information see Wikipedia on microstamping.

The Debate

Overview

The claimed benefit of the proposed technologies is the promise of making it easier to solve crimes committed with firearms.

The arguments against the use of the technology center on the ease of a criminal defeating the technology, the difficulty of manufacturers implementing it, the risk of innocent people being framed, and the increased costs to all gun owners.

Anti-gun advocates

Gun control advocate appear to be in favor of any restrictions on firearms and are in favor of all of the technologies. See also microstamping webpages for The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and their PowerPoint presentation.

Pro-gun advocates

This report on a paper from UC Davis provides some support for the case against microstamping of firearms but probably made a lot of errors and should not be considered strong evidence for the case against microstamping.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. has a document on microstamping that outlines the problems from the manufacturer's viewpoint and the Association of Firearms and Toolmarks Examiners, and that it will not reduce crime. Other documents I found on the NSSF site probably have serious flaws and shouldn't be used as reference material.

Technology advocates

Todd Lizotte is a co-inventor of firearms microstamping. Here is a video of him describing and demonstrating the technology. He also commented on David E. Petzal's Field and Stream blog. I have extracted his comments from this blog and uploaded them here. One of his arguments is the following (a copy and paste with typos intact):

I am not sure a defensive strategy to protecting rights has ever worked. A proactive stretgy always keeps the fight off in the distance. Microstamping does not change the status quo, all data is at the manufacturer. No registration, no licensing and no imaging.

What many people are not aware of is there is a new 3D mapping imaging system being produced. We helped successfully defeat ballistic imaging for new firearms, however the ATF and its vendor are not giving up, the ATF has a $500 Million system in place for linking current ballistic imaging data from crime labs. The company who built that system, located in Quebec, needs to expand its market, it needs to capture the new firearm market.

The old system they built can not accurately imaging new firearms, however it is possible for the new 3D system to work at a much larger expense.

Microstamping neutralizes the need for imaging all togther.

In the end I am for being proactive, instead of being reactive.

If you want to see how bad it could really get, google 3D ballistic imaging and see how costly that system will be, since that system will require all info on the pruchaser and firearm to be entered into a government controlled criminal database.

I am not sure most people understand this fact.

Microstamping is a perfect technology --- completely benign and all data remains at the firearm manufacturer.

In essence of what he is saying is the alternative to microstamping the firearm is a much more expensive version of the "ballistic fingerprint" system implemented with better technology and the associated additional databases.

Conclusions

Because no new database is required, only an additional entry in the manufacturer's database with the serial number, firearm microstamping gets around a number of the arguments against "ballistics fingerprints" and bullet/casing microstamping. For this reason I expect the anti-gun people to push this technology the hardest and have the most success with it.

The best argument against microstamping of firearms is the manufacturing process does not lend itself to serialization of multiple parts. The firing pins are made by some supplier, the extractors, ejectors, and slides by other companies. The manufacture of the gun itself may just assemble the pieces. Each of the serialized parts must be matched with the frame that has the actual official firearm serial number. The code on these serialized parts are not visible without a microscope and all would have to be verified and recorded in database during the assembly process. This will make it expensive and error prone. This argument will not gain much traction with the anti-gun people because increasing the expense of firearms is not regarded as a problem.

The next best argument is probably that criminals can easily defeat the technology. This seems indisputable. Changing of firing pins, extractors, ejectors, and barrels is commonplace in the gun community. A few minutes with an grinding stone on a Dremel tool will obliterate the laser etching without affecting the functioning of the firearm. The counter arguments are somewhat weak; 1) Criminals aren't very smart; and 2) There are redundant markings.

The framing of innocent people is probably the weakest of the arguments against firearm microstamping. The powder residue and other forensic evidence will eliminate most planted shell casing from the real shell cases involved in the crime. Multiple stampings from reloaded shell cases also are probably easily eliminated with the available forensic evidence. It will slow down the process however, but probably no more than it would if they were to do it with existing forensic technology and this appears to be a non-problem. Of course this assumes the prosecutors and law enforcement are forthright and trustworthy in dealing with the evidence. I am inclined to believe this is generally the case but the actual instances of unethical actions of our government officials is much higher than I am comfortable with.

Pretty Pictures

The following pictures are from Forensic Technology and show the level of detail possible with modern microscopes.

Update: The following pictures are from The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence's PowerPoint presentation:

Primer after 2500 rounds through a Thompson SMG.
Glock firing pin after 1400 rounds (image reversed).
Primer from a Glock after 1400 rounds.

Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) image from Glock showing smearing of the primer.

Via Sebastain we have this awesome picture. I love the balls of water suspended in the air. Today we can see things that a 100 years ago people probably didn't even imagine.

An individual would need intimate knowledge of firearms and microstamping, plus the appropriate tools, in order to render the technology ineffective. These tools are certainly not "household items," nor would the common street criminal be expected to have the knowledge necessary to defeat the technology.

[...]

One can also imagine the scene at a shooting range as criminals or gang members wander around and gather spent cartridge cases in bags. Conspicuous? One would certainly think so, and Americans should expect the owners of such ranges to engage in more responsible business practices.

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence & the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence
Microstamping Technology: Precise and Proven
[Another example of the anti-gun bigots being clueless about the real world. Apparently they haven't heard of a Dremel tool or picking up your brass for reloading.--Joe]

From the Washington Post, Studies Say Clearing Land for Biofuels Will Aid Warming:

One study -- written by a group of researchers from Princeton University, Woods Hole Research Center and Iowa State University along with an agriculture consultant -- concluded that over 30 years, use of traditional corn-based ethanol would produce twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as regular gasoline. Another analysis, written by a Nature Conservancy scientist along with University of Minnesota researchers, found that converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas or grasslands in Southeast Asia and Latin America to produce biofuels will increase global warming pollution for decades, if not centuries.

Also in the same article:

There is an urgent need for policy that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forest, grassland or cropland.

Oh, so you expect you can just start growing corn or some other high energy crop on a bare, wind swept rock?

And finally this:

This is a good way of showing where we are, not where we're going to be," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who is chairman of a House global warming panel and who helped write the energy legislation. Noting that the measure set benchmarks requiring any new ethanol plants to produce a fuel that is 20 percent more efficient than gasoline, and even more stringent standards for advanced biofuels,

I have a sneaking suspicious they misspelled that guys name. I'm thinking it should be Malarkey.

Ethanol has less energy content that gasoline. Unless they can produce something other than ethanol from the biomass the end result is they are doing the equivalent of legislating PI is equal to 3.00.

I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

If only I could have convinced Barb when we were in the baby making business we needed some help:

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have created human embryos with three parents in a development they hope could lead to effective treatments for a range of serious hereditary diseases within five years.

Researchers from Newcastle University, in northern England, presented their findings at a medical conference at the weekend, a university spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The IVF, or test-tube, embryos were created using DNA from one man and two women.

Both women have could carried babies that were from all three of us. However great an idea I think this is I am sure Barb will manage to find some fault with it. She is kinda funny that way.

Ry reports on a new Army sniping record from Afghanistan by a Arfcom member. Awesome!

If you are wondering at all the amazing sniping shots coming out of Afghanistan you aren't alone. I knew the high altitude would make a difference but I didn't know exactly how much until I ran some numbers through Modern Ballistics. Below you see the numbers for the .50 BMG shooting a high end bullet/cartridge with a gun zeroed at sea level for 1000 yards at a target at 2300 yards (2100 meters) away for various altitudes. Notice the difference in expected group size as the altitudes goes from 0 to 10000 feet. Notice the windage difference. All those things help but still, the shooter and spotter had to be top notch and have a little luck as well. Assuming a target of 18 inches wide and 24 inches tall the altitude difference changed the odds of a hit from about 10% to 20% (not shown).

Good job SnakeaterM24!

Firearm: Default
Cartridge: .50 BMG HMI with 750 gr. A-MAX
Conditions: Standard Conditions.
Range: 2300
Altitude (ft):           0   1000   2000   3000   4000   5000   6000   7000   8000  10000

Interesting. They are making it into a chain. I wonder if they will be opening a "store" in Nevada. Not that Dr. Joe would have anything more than academic interest or maybe buying some stock.

Contrary to what this web page says, Craig Eisler did have something to say about the feral child they found in the Word source code.

Crag and the Mac Office team are in a different building from our son James who also works on Office but I'll still ping him to see if he knows anything more about the incident.

Most Yahoo employees will feel that, A., we lost, and B., there is no way in hell that I am going to work for Microsoft.

Former Yahoo employee who wishes to remain anonymous
Microsoft and Yahoo!: Happily Ever After?
[After they get their Borg implants and take a couple swigs of Microsoft Brainwash they'll be fine.--Joe]

We have two cell phones on the same account.  My wife lost her phone while traveling.  I told her to go to a "Big Giant Phone Company" booth in any town and get another phone.  Big Giant Phone Company calls me, with her standing there, and wants a copy of my driver's license.  Great - they're protecting me against fraud.  I fax them my license while on the phone with them.  All is OK.  They hand my wife her new phone and she can now make and receive calls on her old number.

But there's a problem.  This new phone is booby-trapped.  They had all her account information, they set up her new phone and personally handed it to her after having verified my account identity.  But she can't get any of the many voice-mail messages that are pouring in, and she’s at a Big Expensive Out-Of-Town Convention and all.

They HANDED HER a new phone IN PERSON that doesn't work.  She the user, is forced to set up the voice mail.  But that can be done ONLY AT CERTAIN TIMES of the day and ONLY if she has my Social Security Number (already faxed them my GD driver's license).

Dear, Big Giant Phone Company,  Why do you harass and attempt to thwart your customers with this idiocy?  What do you think WE the paying customers have to gain from being harassed and thwarted by you?  Why should I ever spend another nickel with you if I can avoid it?

And while I’m venting:  Why does Verizon need a 37 digit account number, when anyone is this country of over 300 million can reach me with my 10 digit phone number?  Can you say, DUUHH!?

We've all head the news about the satellite that's going to make reentry some day soon.  They say it's a spy satellite and that it contains hazardous materials.  I don't know what that tells most people, but to me, even the term "spy satellite" says, "nuclear power on board".  So, is that uranium or plutonium?  I guess it would have been too much trouble to go and either refuel the bird's rockets, or at least remove the fissionable material?

There are some aspects of security the government is and should be responsible for. But when you give the government too much "responsibility" (power) it becomes a source of insecurity. Guns are probably the example most of my readers will readily identify with. The government has a need for weapons but it must never have a monopoly on weapons. To do so would change the fundamental relationship between a free people and their government.

Information is a weapon as well. Giving the government too much information puts innocent people at risk. Read IBM and the Holocaust or for a hint read my Jews in the Attic Test and think about it a little bit.

Here we get still another glimpse of why governments collecting data on people is risky:

Here's an ugly prediction that you can take to the bank: as the amount of data that the feds collect on innocent civilians grows, so will the number of people who are victims of crimes that were made possible by unauthorized access to a government database. I'm not just talking about identity theft, though that is a huge danger with Real ID, but violent crimes as well. As I explained in the OneDOJ post linked above, this prediction is just Metcalfe's Law at work:

This is, of course, a fundamental problem inherent in the very nature of any massive, centralized government data-sharing plan that spans multiple agencies and connects untold numbers of state and federal law enforcement officers: the usefulness of such a system to any one individual (a white hat or a black hat) grows roughly with the square of the number of participants who are using it to share data (Metcalfe's law). So the more white hats that any of these programs manage to connect to each other, the more useful the network as a whole will be to the small handful of black hats who gain access to it at any point.

There is another ugly prediction you can take to the bank when these incidents happen: The politicians will always propose solutions that involve more money and more power being handed over to the government.

Sebastian tells us about a Random Conversation About Fingerprinting. A woman (who happens to be very anti-gun) doesn't want to get her fingerprints taken just so she can be a crossing guard near a school. Sebastian compares it to gun owners exercising constitutionally guaranteed rights having to submit fingerprints first. Which leads to his observation:

What goes around, comes around. You can’t expect to empower the state to take away liberty from people you find undesirable, and then expect the state to respect your liberty when you end up in the cross hairs. When you find yourself in that situation, the people who’s liberties have already been trampled on may not be sympathetic enough to help you.

Of course this reminded me of the famous Niemoller quote and I mentioned it in the comments and figured that will be the end of it. But then commenter ParatrooperJJ says the FBI just checks the fingerprints and discards them after they come back clean. That set off my alarms because just a few days ago this came out:

FBI effort will build biggest biometric database

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here.

Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives.

And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists.

The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

If the technology exists it will be used, data obtained will be kept, used, and abused. The features will creep into areas that were promised would never happen. Remember that NICS records were supposed to be destroyed and then Janet Reno kept them for "audit purposes". Then they used those "audit records" to see if suspected terrorists had purchased firearms. My SS card says "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND TAX PURPOSES--NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION". None of my childrens SS cards have any such markings. It used to be something like a $10K fine if anyone tried to use your SSN for anything other than tax purposes. No so anymore.

We are creating all the mechanisms necessary for an effective police state. Remember what Milton Friedman said.

There are some very interesting questions brought up by David Levy's book, Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (see also Programmed for love). Suppose robots get so human like they are practically indistinguishable from humans in their interactions? What if they are anatomically correct enough to have sex with without you being able to easily detect they are not human?

That's thought provoking enough but the really interesting questions are what this means to the concept of marriage fidelity as the technology is taken to the limit:

• If you have sex with such a robot is it "cheating"?
• Does it depend on whether you knew it was a robot or not?
• If it is considered cheating whether you knew it was a robot or not, then is it "cheating" when a person has sex with an "adult toy" of today?
• If it is considered cheating to have sex with the human like robot, but it's not considered cheating to have sex with an adult toy of today's technology then at what point in the sophistication of the technology does it become cheating?
• If it is not considered cheating if it was a robot then what is the basis for making that distinction? Is it just because one comes with a warranty and has parts that are dishwasher safe?
• What if certain parts of the robot are actually from human donors? How many parts need to be human before it's not considered a robot? Or how many artificial replacement parts must a human have before they are considered a robot?
• If it is not considered cheating if it was a robot, you think it is a robot at the time, what happens if you find out later it was not a robot?
• If it is not considered cheating if it was a robot, you think it is a human at the time, what happens if you find out later it was a robot?

Of course all these questions will have to be answered on a case by case basis by the humans and robots involved but my interest is in the basis of how people will make these decisions. I find it all wonderfully entertaining.

Full auto, recoilless, 12 gauge shotgun.

It has 20 and 32 round magazines available. I especially like the new ammo. Does Wal-Mart have the HE rounds in stock yet?

The other full auto that I would be interested in is this one.

Thanks to Joe D. on the Lewiston Pistol Club discussion list for the pointer.

From Sitemeter, "can a fingerprint be recovered from a fired shell casing"? My guess is yes, at least under some circumstances. DNA from the oils left behind should be possible too.

The more interesting question is, "Who's asking?" Is it someone on the criminal side or on the law enforcement side?

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The little guys try harder:

In what's likely to be seen as a privacy-friendly move, IAC Search & Media's Ask.com search engine Tuesday announced a new feature called AskEraser that deletes a user's search activity data from the company's servers.

When enabled by the user, the feature will completely delete search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers -- including IP addresses, user IDs, session IDs and the text of queries made, according to the company. In most cases, the deletion will take place within a few hours of the time a search is completed, the company said.

What's bizarre is that some people want government involvement in something where the big concern is government involvement to begin with:

Ask.com has also said that it will also retain user search data in cases where it is required by law to do so, according to Chester. Formal legal requests for search data will continue to be honored, even if AskEraser is enabled.

As a result, Chester argued that Ask.com still hasn't fully addressed consumer privacy concerns.

"Some privacy advocates will suggest that this announcement shows the 'market' is working," he said. "No doubt, that's what Google and the other online advertisers opposed to a serious privacy policy will echo, whispering it to regulators, lawmakers and journalists. That's why a national privacy policy is required."

I reported the other day that I was very, very busy at work and was putting in some very long hours on weekends and evenings/nights/early-mornings. They've been telling us it's really important to get these changes done soon, we can't miss this deadline, etc., etc. It's not that I doubted that, but it's interesting when aspects of the project my officemate and I have been spending unreal hours working on (she worked all day on her birthday this last Sunday) make the news.

To my Program Manager and Dev Lead who have been expressing concern; Yes, we will be code complete by Friday. There will probably still be bugs which won't be fixed for week or two but the feature set will be there and working. Perhaps as early as tomorrow.

BulletFootage-5000.wmv (3.27 MB)

I wish I had a camera that would take video like that of my boomers.

That watermelon is pretty cool though.

[Thanks to Joe D.]

If you are into the battle reenactment scene Ozark Pyrotechnics, Inc. now has wireless Cannon Hit Simulation kits for sale.

This might be the way to realize one of my Boomershoot fantasies. That is where I mock the people unable to connect with targets using their rifles by pulling my iron sighted pistol from it's holster and while standing popping off targets at 375 yards away.

Clever trick--hacking a soda machine. But they qualify for an Insufficiently Myelinated Award for posting their faces along with their criminal acts.

[Via Bruce.]

Nice. The TSA is a joke. Kip Hawley is the head of the TSA. He says airport security is good. Investigators do what I have been saying could be done. Hawley tries to put a spin on it in front of congress and gets slapped down:

Investigators used public information to make a liquid bomb consisting of a detonator and a liquid explosive. They made a firebomb using two common products.

To absolute silence in the hearing room, the investigators screened video footage showing tests of their homemade bombs. One clip showed the device exploding inside a car -- metal flying, glass shattering, car doors buckling open and a voice, off camera, saying, "Oh!"

The investigators then designed ways to sneak the components past screeners.

The airports tested were kept classified.

The GAO recommended improvements in personnel, processes and technology; more aggressive pat-downs; and possible restrictions on carry-on luggage.

"Current policies allowing substantial carry-on luggage and related items through TSA checkpoints" increase the risk of a terrorist bringing an improvised explosive device or improvised incendiary device onto a plane, the report said.

Hawley downplayed the tests, arguing first that the components did not get on the plane. "It did get on the plane," countered Gregory Kutz of the GAO.

Hawley then contended that the components the GAO smuggled were not the ones used in the video footage. The GAO's Cooney corrected him.

Hawley also noted that GAO investigators did not smuggle a complete bomb past the checkpoint. Cooney, seated beside him, said: "We could simply have gone into the lavatory and constructed it there."

They don't arrive at the proper conclusion but they are getting the proper data--which is a start.

If you thought your secrets were safe with Hushmail you were wrong:

Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer."

But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.

There are methods to communicate securely (guaranteed at the theoretical level) provided your attacker never gets physical access to your computer or someone doesn't hand over the encryption keys. It's just that it's very, very inconvenient to do so. There are some intermediate difficulty of use methods which are secure as long as your attacker doesn't have millions to spend on cracking your messages. I have been wanting to implement that for a long time but always seem to find something more important to do.

One of my main reasons for not working on the problem is that I can't guarantee "no physical access" to my computer. So it's just doesn't have much point. That is probably always going to be the weak link. I don't have any secrets on my computer or in my communication that need to be kept that secure but its sort of like owning firearms that certain people in government don't want you to have and reading banned books. "You don't want me to have it? Then that means I must have it."

Just a gentle reminder that everything you say on the Internet is read by big brother. Case in point: my post comparing ATF agents to Special Olympics participants got the attention of the DOJ:

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Uncle points us to this article:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

[...]

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

Side note: I heard of such a device from a friend in 2000.

I've gotten into debates with people that insisted we just needed "appropriate regulations with regards to the collection and use of personal information". I expect Kerr, at best, would claim regulation should be in place and would protect us from the harm that might come from government abuse. That people can believe such outrageous fantasies is so mind boggling to me that I have difficulty articulating my case through my anger.

Let me put this as simply and calmly as I can. If the government has access to information that can be abused, no matter what "regulations" are in place, it will be abused. Just two quick examples; 1) Census data, supposedly "sealed" for 72 years was used by the FBI to track down "enemy aliens and foreign nationals who might be dangerous". People of Japanese, Italian, and German descent were put in internment camps based on "sealed" information. 2) Brady records were required to be destroyed if the gun buyer passed the NCIS check. They weren't. They were kept for at least a year "for audit purposes". I told one gun rights leader that I thought the gun rights community should make it an issue to make sure these records were destroyed. He told me that it wasn't that important because even if they existed they couldn't be used in a court of law because they were "legally destroyed" even if they weren't physically destroyed. After 9-11 those records were used to find "terrorist suspects" that might own guns. People who bought guns were found and their homes searched because those records existed. Gun owners screamed bloody-murder and the gun grabbers insisted it was entirely appropriate that the law be ignored.

A few days ago I finished listening to the book IBM and the Holocaust. Read that book and you'll give strong consideration to being on a back-packing trip deep in the woods when the next census is done. Information is power, tremendous power. When the German "Police Battalions" moved in behind the army to "maintain order" they had lists of every Jew in the area. You couldn't say you didn't have any children because they knew from the census a few months or years before that you did have them. They had birth and death records, they knew who lived in which house in which town. And they were able to murder "vermin" by the millions because they had those lists.

For Kerr to say we should "redefine privacy" is an even more inflammatory statement to me than some gun grabbing politician saying they want all the guns turned in. Even if I don't have my guns I have a chance of hiding my "Jews in the Attic". But if I can't buy them food or obtain medical care for them anonymously they are toast (sick pun intended).

I have yet to hear someone give me, despite my insistence they "put something on the table" to discuss, concrete examples of regulations they think would protect people from government abuse of such data. No one has ever done so. It's always been, "those are details that need to be worked out". I suspect Mr. Kerr is no different. In practical terms there are no regulations that will ever exist that would be adequate.

From a purely hypothetical view point I would be willing to compromise on a set of regulations that probably would be adequate but would violate several articles of the Bill of Rights and probably inspire new rights to be articulated in further amendments to our constitution. I'd explain here but you really don't want to know how creative I am in defending this essential piece of liberty.

Hence, since there will be no practical regulations that will protect such data collections we must not allow such data to be gathered in the first place. And the data that is gathered must be of suspect quality. You and I, as liberty and freedom loving people, have a duty to withhold and corrupt as much of this data as we can. And Mr. Kerr should get a one-way ticket on a fence rail, naked, tarred, and feathered, to North Korea, Cuba, or some other police state. [See my follow up post.]

Update: I forgot to mention another important (because I was there and heard it with my own ears) example. While working for the government laboratory PNNL I had fellow "scientist" (he had a degree in computer science and was working in "cyber security" but was unable to write a computer program) Newton Brown tell another co-worker and I, "See this badge?  This means the law doesn't apply to us." That is the mindset of some of those in government. And for all practical purposes Newton is correct.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Archimedes
[From some reason Kevin's project reminded me of this.--Joe]

I'd like to believe it but I won't until the coffin has been nailed shut, it's been cremated, and the ashes dumped in a pig farm lagoon. Here is the story:

"In discussions I participated in with the Department of Homeland Security, they were asked point blank, 'What will happen to states that don't participate?'" said Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who was on the call. "The response was, 'Nothing will happen. There will be no penalty. You can still get on a plane.'"

[...]

States began defying the feds, passing laws saying that they had no intention of complying with the REAL ID requirements. The federal government retorted that this was fine, but citizens from those states could not use drivers' licenses to enter federal buildings or board aircraft (which are screened by federal personnel).

In the face of this sort of opposition, DHS extended the deadline for compliance to 2009, and then again to 2013. Now, it could be extended again, and states could get even more time to issue cards for older drivers (apparently less of a security threat).

Whether the new rules are an expedient compromise or a total backpedalling from the goals of REAL ID depends on who you ask. The ACLU, for instance, holds strong views on the matter.

"DHS is essentially whittling Real ID down to nothing—all in the name of denying Real ID is a failure," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Tim Sparapani. "Real ID is in its death throes, and any signs of life are just last gasps."

It's a pleasant fantasy but the people offering these sort of solutions either don't understand the problem or don't want to face reality. From one of our wonderful government laboratories:

Los Alamos Lab developing liquid scanner for airport security

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a new type of scanner that can distinguish liquids blaring out a warning for bad ones, like explosives, while letting through good ones, like water.

...

They will be able to scan bottles as big as a "magnum-sized champaign bottle," Espy said.

"Apparently the whole duty-free thing is suffering, and people can't carry their liquor on airplanes anymore," Espy said. "It's been disruptive to commerce. So, that's one of the benefits of this."

Software upgrades could add new liquids to the device's detection list if any new threats arise, she said.

"The nice thing about this system is it's not tuned to any specific threats," Espy said. "As new materials of concern arise, it can be adapted to detect those."

Even after the scanner is in place we still won't be able to take liquor on airplanes--unless they are going to allow ethanol on board. In which case I need to demonstrate how to make an "explosive" out of ethanol. It would be tough to get a true detonation but in the enclosed space of an airplane cabin it just won't matter whether the speed of propagation is greater than or less than the speed of sound.

And if they stop letting people take liquid hydrocarbons on board I'll demonstrate the same sort of thing is possible with bread flour, powdered sugar, or coffee creamer. And when they ban those let them build a scanner that is sensitive to powdered human hair.

And those ideas are all taking the direct "brute force" approach. There are lots of other, much more subtle, ways to defeat airport "security". TSA is backward for A Security Theater. It's time we considered the alternatives.

Depending on what your definition of a robot is sex with robots is old hat. But what this guy has in mind is a taking it little bit further:

According to Netherlands University student David Levy, robots may become so human-like in the near future that people could fall in love with them, marry them, and have sex with them.

He recently completed his PhD on the subject of human-robot relationships. He stated that “At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, but once you have a story like “I had sex with a robot and it was great!” appear in a magazine like Cosmo, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon.”

Existing toys include these (not safe for work):

• http://sybian.com/ (considered by many to be the ultimate toy for women)
• http://vrinnovations.com/ (computer driven toy for men)
• http://www.adameve.com/adult-sex-toys-ch-6.aspx (variety of older technology)

There has been a lot of talk (and here) about how the anti-gun bigots got pwned by a section in the microstamping bill that says it won't take effect unless the technology is "available to more than one manufacturer unencumbered by any patent restrictions". Furthermore those people dancing in the streets point out the primary patents won't expire for another 15 years.

I hate to rain on everyone's happy dance but check this out:

Question: Is microstamping a sole-source technology that would create a government-sanctioned monopoly for a single company?

Answer: The patent holder of microstamping technology has announced that a royalty-free license will be provided to every manufacturer in the United States on guns sold in California.

Tell me again who got pwned.

This might help the "bullets on target" problem I have with machine guns but I still am put off by the cost of feeding such a device. At 1000 yards with my "Spud Gun" (some call it "insanely accurate") will deliver a bullet just as accurately and with as much momentum as I could with this sub gun at 25 yards and with far less chance of receiving return fire.

It is a neat engineering advance in guns though. I applaud them for their ingenuity.

I'm ready to go. Barb and I are leaving on a jet plane for Reno and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous this evening. That's assuming the TSA will allow me, my guns, and ammo on the plane. Alaska Airlines will only allow me to take 50 pounds of ammo [heavy sigh]. That would have been enough for what I want to do except that with all the other stuff I'm taking (Boomershoot give aways, knives, spotting scope, tripod, range bag, magazines, holsters, guns, shot timer, eye and ear protection, laser range finder, binoculars, spare batteries, gun cleaning gear, walkie-talkie, altimeter, wind gauge, thermometer, exterior ballistics calculator, targets, and a clean pair of socks) I started running up against a different weight limit without bringing all the ammo I wanted.

I have enough match rifle ammo and if I decide I want some more pistol ammo I'll buy it in Reno sometime tomorrow.

Update: We made it through security without incident. We are now sitting at our gate waiting to board. Pretty amazing considering all the electronics and cables I had in my computer bag. The holster in the computer bag apparently didn't raise an eyebrow either. And the empty water bottle... I thought for sure they would want to open my backpack to make sure it was actually empty. They were cool with me wearing a shirt with the picture of a gun on it and the Boomershoot coat too. All nice to know. Maybe they are happy with just infringing on one constitutionally guaranteed right at a time.

So far the flight is on time. You can track it in near real time here.

Via Thumper.

I'll bet that was a real rush. But when someone prone on a few roller skate wheels passes a motorcycle you know it's got to be a case of insufficient mylenation (another example can be found in the third paragraph here). Notice how he bleeds off speed by swerving side-to-side when coming up behind the motorcycle? I'll bet he doesn't have real brakes. It's still awesome:

Rollersuit in the Swiss Alps

Update: A friend of mine owns a roller skating rink. I asked him if he had ever done anything like this. He replied:

Joe, Back in the "GOOD'OL" days when all my knees worked I skated down 3 of the then MAJOR hills in Lewiston which were Fifth St. Grade, Eighth St. Grade and Twenty-first St. Grade, in Clarkston the biggie was Beachview Park Grade, the trouble with it was it ended in a parking lot with curbs a strip of grass, and the Snake River. It's a bitch to swim with roller skates on...............!  I passed a car on the Eighth ST. Grade deal he was doing 25 or 30 and he said I was still accelerating, but  I sure the first thing he did was let off so it seemed faster then he thought. We did clock the Twenty-first St deal and top was about 42 MPH-.......,use REALLY good Bearings

IIRC the way his knees stopped working was when he and his motorcycle parted company while they were both traveling at about 50 MPH. He tried running to avoid getting a road rash. His knees got messed up in addition to receiving numerous other injuries you might expect from a separation of man and machine of this type.

Put this helmet on and get a connection to your god(s).

It turns out that for an out-of-hospital "witnessed cardiac arrest" you probably shouldn't do the mouth-to-mouth portion of CPR.

Uncle says see-through frogs are creepy. I say you better get used to it. People are now creating completely new species. Future Shock is here and now.

I read Future Shock in about '75 and my opinion hasn't changed with 30+ years of evidence--Toffler just likes to blather about things no one can or has any need to measure.

Do you think we can gain any traction with the environmentalists who whine about the loss of species if we started creating new species faster than we made old ones extinct? No? I didn't think so either. There's just no making some people happy.

Ry has four Halo 3 video ads posted. Microsoft puts an amazing amount of money into marketing (and nearly everything they do).

Xenia made a video of John and her in the park. John is now headed back to the sandbox to guard convoys with his video game.

Good luck and thanks John. Please come back in one piece.

In case you haven't tested it out recently (as in the last day) Microsoft's search engine was just updated and for the first time has search results on par with Google. I know the test methodology for this claim but I'm not sure I'm at liberty to reveal it but I am of the opinion they did a good job measuring this and that the claim is accurate. "On par" is not good enough to win and I expect MS will pull ahead of Google in the near future.

Having an alternative to the anti-gun owner bigots at Google is important and now you don't have to compromise on search results. Now if I can just get the message to the right person to get MS to give us an alternative to AdSense so I can drop the Google ads in the right margin of this blog.

Syria is shamed and silent.  Iran is freaking out in panic.  Defenseless enemies are fun.

Dr. Jack Wheeler
Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran
September 25, 2007
[Via David.--Joe]

For a while I've been saying that this whole national ID debate will be irrelevant soon. In the future you won't have to show ID; they'll already know who you are.

Bruce Schneier
September 26, 2007
The Technology of Homeland Security
[It was this article that inspired the above comment. My comment to Schneier's article was:

I used to specialize in biometrics and was underwhelmed at the actual capabilities compared to the marketing hype. And that was with people that weren’t even actively engaged in trying to defeat the technology. If someone really wants to defeat it the odds of success are very close to 100%.

“Novelty” contact lens easily defeat iris scans. Remote fingerprint scanning can be defeated with Band-Aids (or just the sticky tape part of it). More sophisticated/determined people will use contact lens with someone else’s iris pattern and be wearing someone else’s fingerprints.

The bottom line is that for the average person they might be able to know who you are and where you have been. Great information to use against your political opponents and for stalkers with access to the databases but useless for stopping smart and determined criminals.--Joe]

Speaking of propaganda... I received an email at work yesterday saying something to the effect that the Halo 3 release will be the biggest release event in entertainment history. At least that is what I remember it saying. I don't pay that much attention to games or publicity events.

What struck me was the number of copies they have ordered for employees. At the Redmond company store alone they brought in 25,000 copies. There will be additional shuttles from all over the main campus to the company store to help alleviate the parking issues that would result if people tried to drive themselves.

I asked James when he was going to pick up his copy. He told me that he pre-ordered his a year ago at some retail outlet so he could get some special edition version. Wow...

I stopped off at the company store yesterday at lunch time to pick up some software for Caleb. He told me no big hurry but I just know the store will be a madhouse the rest of this week. I saw a big empty space in the middle of the store where I expect the product will be stacked when it opens later this morning.

I also saw some Halo 3 hats on the shelf:

Instead of addressing the deficiencies or giving it up as a bad idea they are hiring "public relations" consultants to convince the people a national ID card is a good thing. Why don't they be honest about it and go for the tattoo on the forearm or the RFID chip under the skin? Of course they probably would need Joseph Goebbels reincarnated to get that "PR" campaign off the ground.

Details are here:

As controversy rages over forthcoming federal Real ID requirements, state officials should be plotting public relations strategies to counteract the well-publicized rebellion, past and present state motor vehicle administrators advised their colleagues Monday.

Civil liberties and privacy groups, as well as organizations like the National Governors Association, have attacked the 2005 law as insufficiently protective of privacy and too costly to implement. But that's exactly the sort of message motor vehicle departments need to offset with their own materials trumpeting the plan's perceived benefits, suggested Lucinda Babers, interim director of the District of Columbia DMV, and Betty Serian, a retired Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official who now runs a private consulting firm.

"I think it's a classical textbook case of good communications planning, knowing who your audience is, and working that into your implementation plan for Real ID," Serian said during a panel discussion on the first day of the Government ID Technology Summit here. About 100 state and federal officials and representatives from technology vendors were in attendance.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to issue final rules in the fall, but draft rules say that starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved, "machine readable" ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. (States that agree in advance to abide by the rules have until 2013 to comply.)

[...]

But even those states that fall into the anti-Real ID category should be thinking about how to make their residents feel happier about the requirements, the conference speakers said.

Sample messages could include, according to Serian: "It's an improvement to your existing process, it's a way to do the right things for the right reason, it will help prevent identity theft."

They admit they have to make their residents feel happier. I've heard "arbeit macht frei" too. Do you feel happier now?

I suppose its to be expected. You can't get more government contracts if you were to tell them the problem cannot be solved as long as they are headed in that direction. But what you can do is sell them millions and millions of dollars of technology that can be defeated with a few dollars worth of mu-metal and/or a Faraday Shield. I guess it doesn't matter. It's just government money. They have to spend it on something anyway, right?

Here are the details:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a comforting prospect for the million or so daily passengers on U.S. airlines. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on an alternative to the "sandwich bag" solution for carry-on liquids.

Passengers' ability to carry liquids with them during boarding has improved since the original total ban installed after a plot involving liquid explosives on transatlantic flights was busted in London in August 2006.

A total ban has given way to a partial ban because current X-ray machines can detect liquids, but they don't know the difference between Gatorade and a liquid explosive.

But the so-called "3-1-1" plan for placing smaller-than-3-ounce liquid containers into one separately scanned, quart-size plastic bag per passenger remains an annoyance for many airport travelers, a fact that has not been lost on the department.

Within a month after the London scheme was foiled, said Michelle Espy, LANL's co-principal investigator on the project, the laboratory had sketched out a "proof of concept" for a liquid-sensing instrument that has come to be called SENSIT.

In May this year, Brian Tait, a program manager in the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency made a presentation on LANL's demonstration for using magnetic resonance technology to perform non-invasive "liquid and solid explosive detection at ultra-low field without radiation."

Espy said the technology is a variation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a very low-field approach that the lab has been using for studying the brain in a technique known as magneto-encephalography, which is a way of reading signals emanating from the brain.

The sensor or magnetometer used in both the brain study and the bottle analyzer is known as a SQUID, an acronym that stands for Superconducting Quantum Interfering Device.

Comforting? I suppose you could say that. It will give some people a false sense of comfort. But then that's what TSA is all about anyway. A Security Theater that makes some people feel good.

I never was one who was interested in fast or flashy cars. Vehicles, to me, are a means to transport people and things from point A to point B. I once had a long series of conversations with this guy named Walter about cars and women. He figured that a nice car was essential to finding a nice woman. He drove a Mercedes when I first met him. Then it was some sort of flashy looking muscle car. I forget the make and model. I just don't pay attention to that sort of thing. Then after he hit it big he bought a brand new, bright red, Ferrari. Within a day or so after buying it he came over to my place to show it off. "That's nice Walter." I just wasn't interested. And when we went for a ride I couldn't sit up straight. It was extremely uncomfortable for me. I just can't see the point. The only way I could see getting something that "over the top" is if it were REALLY over the top. If it could spread wings and fly at 300 MPH then I could see the appeal. But to be merely 50% faster than an ordinary car just seems pointless to me.

I feel the same way about machine guns. I just don't get the appeal. I've shot them a few times. And sure, they put a lot of lead down range in a short period of time but so what? I can put more pieces of lead on target with a semi-auto in any realistic situation that I can imagine myself being in. There isn't even someone like Walter who could plausibly argue that machine guns will attract the babes--so what is the appeal? I really don't get it.

That said, I just saw the analog in the machine gun world of the car that can spread wings and fly at 300 MPH.

I told Barb this is what I want for Christmas:

Video: VIP Protection Tool

P.S. After a decade of faster and faster, flasher and flasher cars Walter eventually did find a woman that would marry him. Barb and I always figured it would be a gold-digger that took him for a ride since that seemed to be what he was advertising for. But the reports I got back (he is on my "every time I see his face I involuntarily start to draw my gun" list now) is that she appeared to be an alcoholic instead.

Men have a source of potentially life-saving stem cells between their legs:

A team of American researchers has found a way to easily identify stem cells in the testicles of adult mice that can be coaxed to turn into brain cells, muscle cells, heart cells, blood cells and even blood vessels.

One day, they say, male patients may be able to turn to their own testicles as a source of stem cells to repair an ailing heart or kidney or to fix the brain damage caused by Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.

The procedure would involve removing a small piece of testicle - about the same amount used for a biopsy.

The first question that comes to my mind is, "Can you repair the damage you did to my testicle?" They don't answer that question in the article. I presume the answer is yes, but I'd want to make sure before I authorized a major overhaul of my other body parts. I'd hate to have the rest of my body in full working order and then find they had scrapped out my testicles in the process.

From the U.K. we find (via Bruce):

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

[...]

We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it's not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

Not entirely clear? What could be more clear? It appears that the rate of crime resolution is inversely proportional to the number of cameras present.

But they are apparently so accustom to Big Brother being there they are afraid to consider his absence. But don't expect them to remove the cameras and spend the money on something better like more police and/or better enforcement. You should expect them to conclude they don't have enough cameras and to increase proselytization. It's just one of those things about human nature that is hard to accept.

Son James and I watch DVDs of some Science Fiction TV series together nearly every Monday evening. Until we got all caught up with the releases we were watching four episodes of Stargate SG-1 each get together.

About three weeks ago Sean and I checked out a gun store that he had never been to and I had only been to once about 18 months ago. The wall looked like this:

James has been saying he needs to buy a gun. And right there, in plain sight, was a suppressed PS-90 TR (Triple Rail, semi-auto version of the P-90 used by SG-1 as they battle evil aliens from all over the galaxy). I tried to get James to buy it with his bonus money but he was too smart for that. It's space-a-roma (I think that was the word Sean used) appeal is very high but neither James nor I have a use for one.

IBM put 35 programmers on a free OpenOffice offering that will compete with Microsoft Office. I don't know how many programmers Microsoft has working on Office but I know they take up most, if not all, of buildings 16, 17, and 18. Each of those buildings are large three-story buildings.

IBM versus Microsoft. Free versus expensive. 35 versus hundreds (include our son James).

Hmmmm.... place your bets with your broker. I put all my chips on Microsoft.

For once I can actually thank the Gun Guys for doing something useful. They pointed me at this video. Nice. Thanks Gun Guys.

Of course they call it ridiculous. But hey, what do you expect from him?

I still have the sneaking suspicion this guy is working for our side and collecting money from the bad guys. Nice gig if you can get it and aren't encumbered by little things like morals and principles.

I did some maintenance on my blog this morning. The live comment viewer is working now, or at least it was the last couple times I tried it. I can now edit posts and have the changes "stick" which they hadn't been doing for the last couple weeks. Very annoying that last one. In order to edit a post I had to copy the .XML file for that day's entry to my personal computer, using my "geek brain" edit the .XML post which was encoded within the day entry file, then copy the file back up to the blog server.

While I was messing around with it I thought I might as well update the blogroll to better reflect reality. There are other blogs I read fairly frequently but I only put blogs that I read every post nearly every day on my blogroll. I'm sort of a purist I guess. No offense to others that I read frequently but don't have on the list. I just don't have time for everyone that I would like to read and/or that link to me. If you link to me in a post I will read your post and I will monitor the comments to it for a while. And if you put me on your blogroll I will check you out for a few days but it's going to be very rare that I am going to link to you just because you linked to me.

I know I messed up some RSS feeders as things were changing--at least mine was affected. Sorry about that.

There are so many ways to game this technology, that's the difficulty. This is not ready for prime time.

Rick Keene
September 11, 2007
Assemblyman, R-Chico.
Handgun stamping bill sent to governor--Spent shell casings would be imprinted
[Yup. Advocates of this are either exceedingly simple minded and/or just want to increase the difficultly of gun ownership.--Joe]

I fear we are partying like it is 1984.

Ray Ozzie
Microsoft Chief Software Architect
September 6, 2007
Company Meeting 2007--Changing the world
[Ozzie talked about growing up in the 60's and being in fear of "the man" and how the personal computer was believed to help restore power to the individual. He asked us to make sure private things could be kept private even when we are putting more and more information into "the cloud". It was good stuff. I had planned to write up a big post on the meeting last night but got wrapped up in expressing my "sympathy" to Robyn.--Joe]

The whole conference has spent a lot of time talking about ways to control uses of information and to protect peoples' privacy after the information was collected.  But that only works if you assume a good government.  If we get one seriously bad government, they'll have all the information they need to make an efficient police state and make it the last government.  It's more than convenient for them - in fact, it's a temptation for people who want to do that, to try to get into power and do it.  Because we are giving them the means.

John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991
[See also my Jews In The Attic Test.--Joe]

For years Ry and I tested new reactive target recipes for Boomershoot. When our hypothesis for making an explosive which could be easily detonated with long distance rifle fire were proven false Ry would lament that we didn't have enough columns on our spreadsheet. There was some variable, which we didn't know existed, that was critical to our understanding of explosive detonation. Literally it was true that I had (have) a spreadsheet with lots of different variables that we thought might be critical to make our explosives better. Some of those included:

• Flammability limits (acceptable ratios of fuel to oxygen where ignition can occur)
• Heat of vaporization
• Specific heats (including those for phase changes)
• Flash point
• Auto ignition temperature
• Heat of combustion per unit mass
• Heat of combustion per unit of oxygen
• Heat of combustion relative to specific heat of the materials
• Temperature of decomposition of the oxidizer

Our experiments yielded no obvious corelation between any of our hypothesises and the real world--until the last couple of days.

The title for the column on the spreadsheet we apparently were looking for is Ω. In explosive engineering terms (rather than electrical engineering terms which is what first comes to mind with that symbol) this is the weight ratio, expressed as a precentage, of the oxygen remaining or required (expressed as a negative number) for complete combustion of all the fuel in the explosives. For example, TNT, C₇H₅N₃O₆ has end products of CO, H₂O, and N₂. That carbon monoxide (CO) could have been converted into carbon dioxide (CO₂) and more heat if there had been enough oxygen around. It turns out that Ω for TNT is -74%. For RDX (the active ingredient in C-4), C₃H₆N₆O₆, Ω is -21.6%. From my earliest attempts at reactive target explosives I started out with stoichiometric ratios. This would give me the most bang for a given mass of components. That is, no excess fuel and no excess oxygen left over after the reaction was complete. It was ultimately discovered via both experimental results and hints found on the Internet that maximum sensitivity was not achieved with stoichiometric ratios. It was more sensitivity when the explosive was oxygen rich. From some of my "new" books on explosives I found that "Ω" is a measure of that "richness" or "poverty". I modified my spreadsheet to calculate Ω for various recipes.

Here is a partial (I have three times this number of recorded experiments) table of various Boomerite recipes and my best approximation of Ω:

There were other variables that changed as well such as packaging materials, fuel used, ratios of oxidizers, catalysts, size of the particles, and packing density which also affected the sensitivity. But the correlation with Ω is very strong. Each year the sensitivity increased and Ω, a measure of the excess oxygen, was a significant component of that increase in sensitivity. It also can be too high--obviously if there is no fuel at all and only oxiderizer it's going to be a minor explosion at best. But this gives me a reason to revisit old fuels and try something a little bit different this time.

Side note: The most recent recipe on the web is not what we actually use. What I publish is always at least one "generation" behind our "latest and greatest". Ω for the web recipe is 20.1%.

The Brady Bunch has a link to this video about "microstamping" on their website. They ignore obvious and important points of their critics such as:

• Shell casings found at a gun range can be deliberately scattered at a crime scene
• Revolvers don't leave shell casings at the crime scene unless the shooter reloads
• Replacement firing pins and breech faces would have to be registered and tracked as well as the firearm itself
• Gun parts are easily modified or manufactured
  • Firing pins can be manufactured from scrap metal with simple hand tools--they may not last more than a few dozen shots but they should be more than adequate for most crimes
  • Breech faces markings can be ground off and/or filled in with metal filled epoxy
• There are many millions of guns already in circulation
• Stolen guns aren't going to be associated/registered with the criminal who used it in a crime
• A black market will likely develop in unmarked gun components or components that have phony numbers (such as fake SSN cards that have valid numbers but belong to someone else)

One must assume they believe in some sort of supernatural capabilities for this technology that defies the laws of physics and human nature as we know it. But regardless of all the reasons why this scheme could never work the big thing that I noticed while watching this video was the background music--the theme from The X-Files.

Via Bruce.

I'm surprised this works as well as it does. I would have thought you would need a telescope (or cheap rifle scope) to focus the light on the photocell. I'm certain you would get better range if you did so. Also using an infrared laser would make it less likely your eavesdropping will be detected.

Laser Espionage Microphone (how-to)

Being a "double stack guy" I don't have a use for them. But they are pretty and, I'm certain, of very high quality.

ETM_Press_Release_83007.doc (313 KB)

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

Esther Dyson
[The gist of this can be said of virtually all technology (including firearms and explosives) and many other things such as free speech. Technology can used for both good and evil. It's the user not the technology that is important. As with most bigots the anti-gun people are very narrow minded and can't or refuse to see the big picture. Even pointing out analogies such as this fail on most of them. The most typical response I get when trying to make this point is, "But we are talking about guns!" as if they were the equivalent of letting cobras roam around in your home. Guns do not have minds and actions of their own. They are tools of the individuals in possession of them. Among other things firearms are used for recreation, to protect innocent life, and the much more rare, taking of innocent life.--Joe]

What if we could build a society where the information was never collected?  Where you could pay to rent a video without leaving a credit card number or a bank number?  Where you could prove you're certified to drive without ever giving your name?  Where you could send and receive messages without revealing your physical location, like an electronic post office box?

That's the kind of society I want to build.  I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves things like real privacy of personal communications.  Encryption strong enough that even the NSA can't break it.  We already know how.  But we're not applying it.  We also need better protocols for mobile communication that can't be tracked.

John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991

Lots of interesting info here:

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

[...]

Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.

FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf.

The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.

Big brother is listening.

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

John Perry Barlow
[Tell this to every person that tells you laws are the proper solution to privacy issues.--Joe]

I really did comprehend, intellectually at least, that I was engaged in one of the most profoundly thrilling endeavors in human history.

How conservative can you be if you have jumped off the edge of the solar system?

Do conservative people travel at relativist speeds?

By the end of the first year of our voyage we were already traveling at more than a third of the speed of light. And even though there were no sensory cues at all to confirm that we were all well of it and believed it. And I think I can safely say we all found it more than a little thrilling. By the time we reached turn over in nine more years our velocity was going to peak at a hair frying 0.99794 C.

Does a conservative man race photons?

Joel Johnston
A character in the book Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson.
[Johnston is referring to a literal definition of conservative, not the present day political definition. I have another 20 minutes worth of the book to listen to. Both James and I are enjoying it a great deal.--Joe]

Dear Jamie,

Money is the root of all evil. A man does need roots.

Remember to dream with your eyes open so you can act on them to make them real.

G. Eric Engstrom
March 23, 2000
Inscription inside the front cover of Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft
[This inscription was addressed to our son James--who now works at Microsoft. The book is about Eric, Craig Eisler, and Alex St. John. I worked for them when I first started doing contract work for Microsoft in 1995. I've known Eric for about 20 years now starting when we both worked for Zortech (they sold a C/C++ compiler for MSDOS and later OS/2 and Windows). While researching this quote, much to my surprise, I discovered Craig is now back at Microsoft.--Joe]

I consider Stottlemire's actions unethical. But he does have a point:

Stottlemire, 42, of Fremont, California, insists there was no encryption or hacking involved, and therefore he did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "I honestly think there are big problems when you are not allowed to delete files off of your computer," says Stottlemire.

I also think he is on shaky, at best, legal ground. The law says:

`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--

`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The law doesn't say the circumvention has to have anything to do with "encryption or hacking".

Where it gets interesting to me is that if someone were to design their copy protection based on the existence of a browser cookie such that if you had the cookie you couldn't copy the "protected work" and if you didn't you could do the copy. Then if someone make a program or script that selectively deleted just that one cookie they would be violating the law. But a web browser which allowed the user to selectively delete cookies would apparently not subject the authors to legal action. And furthermore someone who told you how delete the cookie with the browser or even the command prompt would not be subject to legal action either.

You can make a crude stun gun from a disposable camera. A better quality flash unit will have a faster recycle time.

There is no limit the number and type of weapons that can be easily made and gotten past the Theater Security Agents (TSA). I've already mentioned making dust explosions with flour (powdered coffee creamer works too). It's long past time to consider some alternatives to existing airplane security.

Via Bruce:

Unlock Plastic Handcuffs! Police Style!

It's back to school time. Time to buy your child a new back pack. Rated at level II it's available here.

I don't know of a single incident where CCTV has actually been used to spot, apprehend or detain offenders in the act.

The presence of CCTV is irrelevant for those who want to sacrifice their lives to carry out a terrorist act.

You need to do this piece of theater so that if the terrorists are looking at you, they can see that you've got some measures in place.

Steve Swain
August 3, 2007
'Ring of Steel' coming to New York
Swain served for years with the London Metropolitan Police and its counter-terror operations and now works for Control Risk, an international security firm.
[Found via Bruce. If you don't see the folly of the security theater argument send me an email and I'll explain.--Joe]

The field of explosives engineering incorporates a broad variety of sciences and engineering technologies that are brought together to bear on each particular design problem. These technologies include chemistry, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, mechanics, electricity, and electronics, and even meteorology, biology, and physiology.

Paul W. Cooper
1996
Preface to Explosives Engineering
[Chemistry? Check. Thermodynamics? That class was lots of fun. I got an A+ in it. Fluid dynamics? Check. Aerodynamics? Check--see Modern Ballistics. Mechanics? Check, Electricity and electronics? I have a BSEE and MSEE. Meteorology? I'll keep the explosive events to a size that shouldn't be affecting the weather. Biology and physiology? Not particularly--That's what the flak jacket, mask, gloves and apron are for--keeping explosives components, by-products, and accelerated objects out of my body.--Joe]

Get your golf ball launcher here. Teaser material from the site:

Each launcher fits ANY NATO standard 22mm flash suppressor or grenade launcher.—M-16/AR-15, Yugo SKS, FAL, CETME/G-3, PTR-91, Galil, MAS 49/56, FR-7, FR-8 and many more.

Lot of other interesting stuff on the site too. You can find videos of "reactive target" shooting also and what a one or two pound charge of explosives will do to a car.

The guy that drove the Jeep into the airport then tried to blow it up wasn't a medical doctor as was originally reported:

THE terror suspect critically ill in a hospital burns unit is an engineer with the skills to make the explosives used in the Glasgow and London attacks.

It has emerged that Kafeel Ahmed, who allegedly drove the Jeep into a Glasgow Airport terminal last Saturday, is a doctor of engineering, not medicine.

Police believe he may have made the two bombs found in vehicles in London, as well as the one in the foiled Glasgow attack.

Ahmed, 28, who was previously thought to be called Khalid, has a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics, a highly specialised subject in which computers are used to simulate the flow of fluids and gases.

The bombs from London and Glasgow consisted of gas cylinders, petrol and a detonating system using mobile phones.

Aeronautical engineering isn't normally about making explosives for bombs--although occasionally that is the inadvertent outcome. But still one would think a good engineer would be able to make something work and would also know enough to do some tests. But it could be he didn't have any practical experience. Schneier called it Terrorist Special Olympics in the UK.

As Ry and I discovered some things that you think would be incredibly easy are not. For example, we spent a couple years, off and on, before we came up with a exploding fireball target that worked. See Project Fireball for both our successes and our failures. And even with all our experiments we occasionally change "some little thing" and we get a failure. As Ry puts it, "We don't have enough columns on the spreadsheet." I recently purchased some ammonium nitrate from a new supplier. The old stuff was fertilizer grade material which took us a couple years of tweaking our recipe, containers, and procedures before we got reliable detonations at Boomershoot. The new stuff is explosive grade. We will do extensive tests and probably make some changes before trusting it for an actual event.

I think it's Hollywood that changes our expectations of both the ease and the effect of explosives. In the recent U.K. cases we can probably thank Hollywood as well as a stupid engineer for the failures of the terrorist bombs.

It looks like Ry and I have some more testing to do. We just make fireballs when we could make fuel-air explosives. We've known about F-A explosives for a long time but it's a much tougher problem than the fireballs. You need some very good timing on the second explosive charge.

Maybe someday--certainly not for this 4th of July.

Terrorists generally select targets where they can cause most damage, inflict mass casualties or attract widespread publicity. VBIEDs can be highly destructive.

National Counter Terrorism Security Office (U.K.)
Police explosives experts prevent carnage at the Tiger Tiger Club
[Just in case you have forgotten, I gave you the minimum evacuation distances for Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) here. It's only a matter of time before we see them in the U.S. You should be prepared.--Joe]

Tamara K. posted:

Heisenberg used to house sit for Schroedinger, and would get annoyed when his buddy would call home from out of town and ask "Where is my cat? And how fast is it going?"

I thought this was quite funny. My son James responded with "*groan*" but my friend Sean wanted to know what the punch line was.

You must not assume Sean didn't "get it". That thought crossed my mind for only a few milliseconds before I dismissed it. So I told him that was it and explained that I thought it was funny just the way it is even if it is a bit obsure. Two minutes later he delivered his punch line for the story:

So Heisenberg put the cat the box with a gadget that released poison gas based on radioactive decay. Schroedinger called again, asking, "Where is my cat? And how fast is it going?"

Heisenberg replied, "Let me check. Oh! It's dead. You killed it." And hung up.

Ouch!  It hurts just watching this, especially having myself fired the Safety Harbor 50 Caliber AR that Ry loaned us last summer.  The 70+ year-old who's firing it didn't get the buttstock on his shoulder, so it slid under his armpit from the recoil, causing the optic sight to clock him in the face.  That's a heavy rifle moving back at him at a good clip.  He was OK, after he stumbled to his feet and I was able to get him to reply to questions.  Notice the image blur as the shock wave (usually referred to as "muzzle blast" but in this case I use "shock wave" as a more descriptive term) hits the camera.  Also notice the gravel being hurled back and to the sides from the high-pressure jets coming out of the muzzle break.

Firing the little .50 BMG "carbine" with a proper hold feels about the same as firing a magnum load from a 12 ga. shotgun.  Quite nice, really.  Its all about style.

When everyone in politics jumps on a bandwagon like ethanol, I start to wonder if there's something wrong with it. And there is. Except for that fact that ethanol comes from corn, nothing you're told about it is true.

John Stossel
May 23, 2007
The Many Myths of Ethanol
[Remember when I wrote about ethanol a while back? My brother Doug did some quickie "back of the envelope" type number crunching and came to the same conclusions Stossel writes about.--Joe]

Replace my real light bulbs with fluorescents, in sickly yellow or morgue blue, and I’ll have to burn something else for color. Whale oil, maybe.

Tom Scocca
May 22, 2007
Fluorescent Fanatics Turn Me Off

Big Brother gets to watch you in return for the false promise of increased security. From our worlds airports:

Faces are blurred, but not chests or crotches. Snoerwang said that was necessary because otherwise "women could just hide things by stuffing them in their bras."

...

Snoerwang said the images generated by the machine were not like photographs.

"They're kind of futuristic. There's nothing sexy about it," she said.

What does "nothing sexy" have to do with making it acceptable? And to who? There are people that find animals and fecal material sexy. Want to bet that there won't be a culture of some sort of deviants built around these photographs? And there will be names attached to the photos as well. Names are checked on your ID just before you go into the machines. People watching the images will snap pictures with their cell-phones or other miniature image capturing devices and associate the picture with the name from their friend checking the ID.

It will do nothing to prevent determined people from getting weapons on board. It only will catch those that are careless. In the mean time airport security costs billions. The airplane security game cannot be won with the current assumptions. It's time we considered the alternatives.

Before bringing my blog back online I did some performance testing while it was hosted on my own machine. This included tests with all the links, sitemeter, etc. visible. Most of the testing was done early (as in midnight until 3:00 AM) on Wednesday morning. Can you tell from my Sitemeter graphic?

No hair transplants for me. I would consider regrowing it though.

I had two old computer hard drives that needed to be disposed of and James had another. I had deleted everything on mine then overwrote the free space with random data and wasn't too concerned about someone getting their hands on it. But James hard drive failed in a strange manner. He could read from it just fine but couldn't write to it. He transfered all the data to his new drive but couldn't delete the data off of the old drive. "Dad", he said, "I think this is something for you to take care of. Boomershoot is next weekend, right?"

The two cardboard boxes on the sides each contain about two pounds of Boomerite (a impact sensitive high explosive manufactured by FlashTek). The cardboard box on the top contains another pound of Boomerite. We call this stress testing.

Here I am about to initiate the stress test with a shot to the top cardboard box.

The stress test is completed in microseconds.

This is where the hard disks used to be. That is my size 14 boot for comparison purposes.

Although there are lots of smaller pieces in the crater this is the majority of the mass we were able to recover from the three hard disks.

Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell's fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence - flat number 27B - where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.

Orwell's view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under 24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.

The flat's rear windows are constantly viewed from two more security cameras outside a conference centre in Canonbury Place.

In a lane, just off the square, close to Orwell's favourite pub, the Compton Arms, a camera at the rear of a car dealership records every person entering or leaving the pub.

Within a 200-yard radius of the flat, there are another 28 CCTV cameras, together with hundreds of private, remote-controlled security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and offices.

The message is reminiscent of a 1949 poster to mark the launch of Orwell's 1984: 'Big Brother is Watching You'.

This Is London
George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house
March 31, 2007
[Via a chain of links I followed starting with Uncle.--Joe]

Here is the moment of cap ignition, all by itself.  Note the little puff of smoke coming from the back of the cylinder-- its from a supersonic explosion.  View the whole sequence here.

We had some fun that day.  We also discovered that 12 gauge slugs REALLY pick up and throw bowling pins off the table, but for speed shooting nothing beats heavy buckshot.

I've upgraded the Boomershoot Internet wireless capabilities to where I want them. I now have an Internet connection at the explosives magazine:

Ahhh.... shelter, guns, explosives, electricity, an Internet connection, a little food and water and all I need is, well... let's just say Barbara.

Here is a crude partial map of the signal strength. I was way overdue to be home and didn't have time to do a very good job on it. I had planned to walk the area but instead drove around in the van. I suspect the neighbors figured I was crazier than they already thought I was. The signal inside the van isn't as going to be as good as if you were in a tent or just set up at your shooting station. There are two access points with the SSIDs of Boomershoot1 and Boomershoot2. Boomershoot1 is illuminating most of the area with Boomershoot2 just hitting the western quarter of what you see in the map. This gives the people in shooting positions 63 through 70 a signal. Although it's not on the map Boomershoot2 is primarily to get signal to the explosives magazine and I was able to tweak it enough to get the west end of the shooting area.

The line of signal strength measurement at the south through the center of the picture is right next to the shooting berm. Further to the east I dipped down into the actual shooting positions in the .50 Caliber Ghetto.

Here is the Taj Mahal with it's wireless antenna fully installed:

First email sent from my explosives magazine (the Taj Mahal) at the Boomershoot site (use the aerial or hybrid view):

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 5:04 PM
To: 'Ry Jones'; 'Doug Huffman'
Subject: From the Taj.

 

Ping times are 1483 mS on average. This makes for a very poor remote desktop experience. But it does work.

 

Lots of fun. An inverter blew out and took out the power supply for the range extender. Lucky I had another with me that worked. Lots of other hiccups too. Nothing ever goes smooth.

 

-joe-

Those ping times were to boomershoot.org which is physically in Dallas (I think). My remote desktop is actually in the Seattle area but I didn't have a way to ping off of that location easily. Yeah, I could have used my remote desktop to connect to the router and enable ping responses but I didn't think of it at the time. The ping times are mostly in the earth to satellite to earth again so it doesn't really matter much if I'm pinging Dallas or Seattle when we are bouncing off of a piece of metal in orbit.

I'll have pictures and a signal strength map to post tomorrow. The bottom line is that it will be hard to find a place at Boomershoot 2007 that doesn't have a free WiFi signal.

Via Ry. Meet MOP, Boeing's new bunker-busting super-bomb:

The 20-foot-long bomb that weighs 30,000 pounds — much heavier than the 21,000-pound MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Burst bomb, unveiled in the prelude to the Iraq war.

...

MOP will go a lot deeper — 200 feet of 5,000 psi concrete. MOP pulls it off by not being all that explosive — less than 20% by weight, compared to almost 90% for the MOAB. That's because bunker-busting bombs need very thick casings to survive the effects of impact.

...

Potential targets for MOP or other deep penetrators would include the Iranian underground centrifuge cascade at Natanz and the heavy-water reactor complex under construction at Arak.

Ry told me about it yesterday. I thought about for a few seconds and announced, "I'll bet I could defeat it with 100 feet or less of concrete." I explained and Ry countered with a solution to my defense. I modified my defense and defeated that as well. About midnight last night I woke up with a solution to my modified defense--use more than one bomb per target. I thought about that solution for a few seconds and came up a defense against that attack plan too.

I incredibly impressed someone has designed a non-nuclear bomb that will penetrate 200 feet of high end concrete. But with a smartly designed bunker that may not enough. But my thought process over the course of just a few hours should be a lesson to Iran, don't count on your bunkers being safe should you continue on your current path. You designs could be made obsolete in a matter of days. Can you redesign and rebuild as fast was we can come up with new attack plans? And you won't know our plans until after the bombs start dropping.

It’s not a build break until you have people baying for your blood in the morning.

Suresh Parameshwar
April 3, 2007
[From a technical perspective a "build break" occurs when computer source code will not compile (the automated process of converting human readable code into machine code). In almost every medium or larger sized project people check-in their code to a common computer which does the compile once per day/week/whatever. The resultant code is then installed on test machines and the testers go to work on it to see if they can find bugs. The developers also "sync up" with the common computer to get everyone else's changes to use in their development for the next day. If the build breaks nearly all the testers and many of the developers are idle until the build is fixed. Hence, it's a big deal if the build is broken.

I had checked in some code in the middle of the afternoon with a stupid mistake that broke things. Mike noticed it something like 40 minutes later and I fixed it within a few minutes--long before the morning build. Suresh was reassuring me it wasn't a big deal, even though I was quite embarrassed.

Today Suresh was slightly embarrassed when I during a code review I pointed out one of his mistakes. But we're not going to talk about that here.--Joe]

Very, very impressive.

Far, far more bravery than I could muster. I would love to fly and probably would try parachuting. This is a couple orders of magnitude beyond that.

Please don't tell my daughter Kim about it. I'd worry too much.

[Thanks to Lyle for the link.]

We have gasoline cars, diesel cars, electric cars, propane cars, and hybrid cars. And we have air guitars. But have you ever heard of an air car? It should get great "gas mileage". And of course the zero pollution (except for electricity powering the air compressor at the filling station) would be very cool. It might even work. Here are some details on the engine.

When grabbing the link to the Berger VLD bullets to make the previous post something jumped out at me. The ballistic coefficient (BC) on my favorite bullet has been changed. It used to be listed as 0.640. They now list it as 0.631.

The first time I fired my rifle at 1000 yards I entered the temperature, air pressure, and wind speed/direction (I already had the scope height, muzzle velocity, BC, and inclination entered), into my little calculator. It reported back the sight angle for my scope, I tweaked my scope, and I happily aimed dead on and put my first three rounds into the bottom right of the X-Ring. I wasn't surprised my wind estimation was a little off but why the bottom of the ring? Since then I've had the nagging suspicion that the algorithm used in the calculator and Modern Ballistics wasn't quite right. Yes, it was close enough for all practical purposes. I couldn't argue with a X-ring hit at 1000 yards on the first shot from the gun beyond 200 yards from a cold clean barrel. But as years went by it always seemed the gun and cartridge was shooting just a tad low from what I expected.

Running the numbers through Modern Ballistics tells me the lower BC gives the bullet another 2.5 inches of drop and an inch of windage to the right under those conditions. Not quite enough to fully explain my results but enough that it accounts for 50% or more of the error. That gets us into the 1/8th MOA range. This is well into the "noise" of shooter ability, bullet jacket uniformity, muzzle velocity variations, and to the point where you have to start worrying about the direction of crosswinds relative to the direction of the spin of your bullet and Coriolis effects--which requires you to know your latitude and the direction you are shooting.

So with the updated BC my little calculator and Modern Ballistics are, as they say, good enough for government work (back when I worked at PNNL I wrote a proposal and made a presentation to Special Forces about the calculator program for their snipers).

Multicam works very well. It is the best overall camo I have ever seen.

Greg Hamilton
February 1, 2007 6:09 PM
http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/insightstraining/
Images of Multi Cam camouflage.
[Hamilton is a former Army Ranger and now trains all branches of the military (and law enforcment and private citizens) in unarmed as well as armed combat.--Joe]

I exaggerate only a little bit when I say this paint resists bombs.

[Hat tip to Jason for sending me the link.]

I recently was given a tour of a "secure area". For access it required your hand geometry biometric information, your RFID card, and your PIN. Or did it?

There were two bolts that connected the sliding door on it's tracks. The removal of two nuts with a 11/16" (I could be wrong on the size, I've been out of the farm shop too long for my eye calibration to be trusted) open end wrench would have allowed the door to be removed. It probably would take as much as a minute to remove the two nuts and the door and a similar amount of time to restore the door and other than the video camera in the area there would be no evidence of access to the "secure area".

I pointed this out to my guide. They didn't seem concerned, "That's why we have other security measures such as the cameras." Security is no stronger than the weakest link. The hand geometry sensor, RFID card, and PIN are easily bypassed. They don't have "other security measures". They have video cameras as their sole means of security.

And of course guns, even in the possession of the guards, were banned in the area.

Very cool. I used it with Net Stumbler files with great results.

My brother Doug still lives on the farm. While visiting recently we talked about the recent trend to make grain into fuel. It's been done for years but recently there has been a lot of new ethanol plants going in and using up a lot of the corn production. We don't raise any corn on the farm but prices for wheat and barley have risen because the corn previously used for livestock feed is being pulled off the market for ethanol. Cattle, sheep, and pigs will eat chopped barley and wheat as well as corn so wheat is now at something like a 30 year high. Ignoring for now the fact that it's not an all time high, that 30+ years ago wheat sold for more than it does today, we realize that there might be an increase in prosperity of some farmers in the near future.

Some people are fantasizing about replacing nearly all our non renewable fuels with "natural" fuels made from grain. The key word in previous sentence is fantasizing. I knew Doug had done the calculations 15 or 20 years ago and realized then farms cannot begin to supply our fuel needs and I asked him to redo the calculations. He sent me this short paper (Microsoft Word .DOC, slightly edited by me). The important information is as follows:

Comparing potential alcohol production to current petroleum production, we see that if we stop eating and make ALL of the world grain production into alcohol, we will produce:

1.77e16/1.447e17 or 12% of the energy we currently get from petroleum.

...

...we are falling behind on world food production versus consumption in the last 10 – 15 years, so there are a few billion people that will have to stop eating if the rest of us want to stop using fossil fuels and switch to biofuels.

Also on the negative side is the fact that the huge increase in agricultural production that we have seen in the last 50 years is mostly due to fertilizers that are based on natural gas. Modern agricultural production also depends on fossil fuels for farm equipment and transportation. Thus, the “renewable” biofuels are also based in part on fossil fuels.

He doesn't take into account that a fair amount of the oil pumped from the ground is not burned as fuel but is used as lubricants, paints, and materials such as plastic. So that 12% number is wrong in that it assumes all oil is converted into energy. So you can probably boost that number up to something like 15 or 20%. But still that is assuming that the entire world's production of grain is used for energy. So assuming that we only ask half the planet to stop eating foods that have grain products in them (no more bread, cookies, noodles, or Twinkies and don't forget most of your meat is grain fed) we can only supply about 8 to 10% of our energy requirements with our current production levels of grain. Also he probably wasn't aware of this recent news on converting cellulose to fuel.

Maybe we can increase production, right? Yes, some. But the last time I checked the U.S. was losing about one million acres of farm land per year. Farm land is easily converted into roads, housing developments, and shopping malls so that's what is happening to most of that one million acres per year. Add to that dwindling supply of farm land the increasing population and the fact that most of the prime farm land is already in production and you rapidly realize biofuels aren't going to be the answer to our energy needs.

Something no person living in the U.S. has experienced is a shortage of food. In Europe during and after WWII there were times when there just wasn't enough food for everyone. In China and Africa it's been even more common. But in the U.S. someone might go hungry because they didn't have enough money for food but there was always food available.

For at least the last 15 years my brother and I have asking each other "when are things going to turn around on the farm?" They are running equipment that is over 30 years old which only keep running because they have a good machine shop and can do their own repairs and even build new parts and equipment. Things have been tough on the farm for a long time and we watched as the cost of production kept rising and the crop prices remained flat or even dropped. Dad figures the government should "set a fair price for everything and keep it there". Nixon tried that and it didn't work. That sort of thing will never work. It simply can't work. There has to be a shortage or at least the threat of a shortage before the price of our crops will increase. Maybe then "things will turn around".

Food is an interesting exercise in supply and demand. Classically one would claim that as prices go down consumption will increase. But in the U.S. today ask yourself, how much more would you eat if the price of food dropped by half? What if the price of food was 10% of present day prices? Or what if food was free? Would you and your family significantly increase your consumption? Probably not. And in the other direction, how much would you pay to avoid cutting your consumption in half? Food demand is extremely inelastic.

15 or 20 years ago there was something like a years supply of wheat in storage. Stop production, and assuming perfect transportation and distribution, and it would be a year before the supply of breads, noodles, and Twinkies disappeared. Recently that surplus has dwindled down into the neighborhood of 30 to 45 days. And during that time the price of wheat did not increase above the "noise". Why? Because there was still a surplus and the demand is inelastic. Now, with the ethanol plants coming on line and wheat and barley replacing corn in the feedlots we might see an actual world-wide shortage of wheat in our near future. And then what happens?

That's an interesting question. Far more interesting that what one might think at first glance. Farmers, contrary to popular impression, are not stupid. All the stupid ones went out of business years ago. What you are left with are smart farmers that were too stubborn to get a job in the city. Smart, stubborn, and making do, scrimping by for 30 years. When it looks like there is actually going to be a shortage do you think those farmers will sell their crop as soon as they get it in from the field? Or will they hold on to it for a while to get a better price? If there wasn't going to be a shortage there will be as all those smart, stubborn farmers figure it's payback time. It's time to make up the missed profit for the last 30 years. They are going to sit on that wheat and wait as long as they can. And with the prices going through the roof it shouldn't be hard for them to get the banks to loan them the money to pay their bills while they "wait for prices to peak".

What happens next? My speculation, and everyone I have talked to about this, is that the people in the cities won't stand for it. Once they start seeing they can't buy an unlimited number of Twinkies and Big Macs anymore and the ones they can buy are twice as expensive as they were a couple months ago they will demand the government "do something". Maybe then Dad will get his wish, the government will set a "fair price" for wheat and the farmers that refuse to sell at that price will have their crop forcibly taken from them. Those smart, stubborn farmers with 30 years of resentment built up will have their crops taken.

Every farmer I knew growing up owned one or more guns. Most of them went hunting. I wonder what they will hunt when the government says they have to sell their crop for less than what the market would pay for it?

Interesting times we live in...

Update: Doug made the following comments:

I am aware of cellulose.  I went on a tour last summer on WSUs conservation farm north of Pullman.  They talked about switch grass in the midwest.  It doesn't grow well here, but we would probably grow things like Reed's Canary grass here.  You can get more energy per acre from switch grass, but they are still working on ways to convert the cellulose to starches and sugars so the yeast can digest it.  It didn't seem like the technological difficulties were insurmountable, but we aren't there yet.  In 10 years, we may be replacing corn ethanol with switch grass ethanol, but I would be willing to bet that without a major crisis of some type, the world demand for energy will continue to outpace production of biofuels.  China for example is ramping up their industry and will have an insatiable thirst for energy if that continues to go well for them.

The second point is what happens when we actually have a shortage of food.  First off, the wealthy people in the world, (Americans and Europeans) won't have a food shortage.  Africa, the poor contries in the middle east and south east asia will all be unable to buy food.  They can't afford it right now, so we give them a lot of food.  If the price of wheat triples, it would then cost a whopping $0.27/lb.  This should barely be measurable when you buy a big mac or other prepared foods.  Breakfast cereals often cost that much per ounce, so I don't think the American consumer will get hurt that bad.  What I do think will happen is the American people will feel empathy for the starving people of the world and the guilt that people of western european culture seem so eager to feel will take over.  The media will start scolding us for taking food out of the mouths of starving children in Africa to put in our SUVs.  The political correctness of biofuels will butt head to head with the political correctness of feeding the starving children of the world.  The media, which controls the thinking of the American people and which takes sides in nearly every issue will have to decide if we want biofuels or if we want to continue fueling the population explosion of undeveloped countries.  My guess is they will instruct the American people through biased reporting to send our food to the starving children of the world.  Politicians will respond accordingly and the ethanol mandate and biodiesel tax credits will be swiped away as an experiment gone wrong.

Where does that leave us with energy?  I am not certain, but I suspect we will be drilling for more oil and speeding up the process of depleting that natural resource.  Greenhouse fears are the fad right now, but will probably fade away when people like Al Gore realize they can't enjoy the things they want in life without consuming fossil fuels.

Update2: I don't expect prices to just triple if a shortage occurs. Prices tripled once before when the Russians had a crop failure and started buying a noticeable portion of the worlds supply. They didn't produce a world wide shortage just reduced the reserves. If there is an actual shortage I wouldn't be surprised to see prices increase by a factor of 10. This might increase the cost of processed food in the U.S. by something like 25 to 50%. Not so much that most people in the U.S. would be unable to buy it and most probably wouldn't change their shopping habits. But something Doug did bring up will put some elastic into the demand. We give a lot of food away to other countries. Those give aways are almost for certain dollar based rather than quantity based. As the price rises less food can be purchased for the same amount of money. Hence the demand (demand in the sense that people with money to actually purchase the food as opposed to just being hungry but without the means to buy it) will decrease some with increasing prices. And of course what will happen when people start actually going hungry in some of those other countries? People will die both from actual lack of food and from fighting over what food is available. Interesting times...

Ms. Dewey has been reported on before but I decided to test out how she handled the topic of guns. I did repeated searches for "gun" and I was rather pleased in how she handled it. Plenty of snark without being anti-rights.

Similar satisfactory results came with searches for:

• keep and bear arms
• 2nd Amendment
• gun control
• Violence Policy Center
• Million Mom March
• Brady Campaign the Prevent Gun Violence
• explosives

Of course I expect lonely geeks will spend lots of time asking her sexual questions. I'm happy to report I spent less than an hour doing that.

Earlier I wrote about the entertainment industry giving magical powers to firearms.  More recently, the Discovery channel, on their new program, Future Weapons, did a bit about an "actual" 1.5 mile, one shot hit from a cold bore using the new .416 Barrett.  The shooter was depicted as firing his first shot ever from that rifle and hitting his target (a circle of about 5 feet diameter) at 1.5 miles.  My skepticism lead me back to Joe's exterior ballistics program.  Since Barrett had just sent us a write-up and the specs on his new cartridge, all I had to do was plug in his numbers.  I allowed, again, for the most amazing velocity standard deviation of 5 feet per second, with a 1/2 MOA accurate rifle/cartridge combination.  I reduced the effects of the atmosphere by raising the elevation to 3000 feet.  I enlarged the target to a 12 x 20 inch ellipse (roughly the one-shot kill area of the human body) and still I came up with a probability of a one shot hit (any hit) of about 8 percent at 1.5 miles.  The hit probability at that range on a 5-foot circle is about 58%.  Time if flight: 4.05 sec.  Extremely good, but you have to push the accuracy of the system to the edge of believability to get it, and with a perfect marksman.  It's certainly not what we're being led to believe by the TV producers.

Barrett's specs for the .416:

      Muzzle velocity: 3250 fps

Ballistic Coefficient: 0.943

           Bullet Mass: 400 grains – solid copper

I want one!  I wonder if they're going to come out with some light varmint bullets for it, or some frangible defense loads.  Heh.

Ice that burns:

Very cool.

Video here.

If we mine the ice off the polar caps, then burn it to power our cars, run our factories, and to heat our homes does that count as an "alternate energy source" to the tree huggers? What does it all mean for "global warming"? Shouldn't it be considered an "all natural" energy source?

It appeals to my inner electrical engineer.

Decades ago my brother and I made some pretty "healthy" sparks for tormenting various farm animals. We probably got zapped ourselves more than any of the animals but it was a lot of fun. This is way beyond "healthy". This is like "holy mother of immortal gods" quality of sparks.

Thanks to Brutal Hugger at Say Uncle.

Lots of lessons to be learned here.

I can imagine situations where the search for a W.C. Fields quote was a valid use of the U.S. Department of Justice resources but the odds are a bit low. People need to realize the power of the internet flows in more than one direction:

Domain Name		usdoj.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		149.101.1.# (US Dept of Justice)
ISP		US Dept of Justice
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Maryland City  :  Potomac Lat/Long  :  39.023, -77.1993 (Map) Distance  :  2,059 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; DI60SP1001; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1152 x 864 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Feb 6 2007 5:24:26 am
Last Page View		Feb 6 2007 5:24:26 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://search.yahoo....e=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
Search Engine		search.yahoo.com
Search Words		w c fields quote
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayW C Fields.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayW C Fields.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Feb 6 2007 8:24:26 am
Visit Number		132,224