Alfonso Gutierrez smiles as boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese tagged with tiny chips zip around a conveyor belt and pass under a reader that instantly displays information about the product.
"It's going fast," said Gutierrez, who heads a new university research lab dedicated to helping businesses deploy the technology that could one day replace the bar code.
Gutierrez was referring to the speed of the conveyor belt — 600 feet per minute, the speed Wal-Mart uses in its warehouses — but he could have been talking about the rapid acceptance of radio frequency identification, a technology that can revolutionize business but also erode privacy.
RFID uses a computer chip the size of a grain of rice to store data, which are transmitted wirelessly by a tiny antenna to a receiver. The chips, embedded in tags, now track pallets in warehouses and let drivers pass toll booths without stopping, but its potential is almost limitless.
To accelerate deployment, the University of Wisconsin-Madison formally opened a lab this month to study how to make RFID work better, leaving to others to debate the broader issues such as implementation and privacy.
"RFID technology and applications are revolutionizing supply-chain management and are enabling companies to obtain an enormous amount of data in a short period of time," said Paul Peercy, dean of UW's College of Engineering. "It's only in its infancy state, but it's going to affect nearly all industries."
More than 40 companies, including 3M Co., Kraft Foods Inc. and S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., are contributing $500,000 combined to start the lab, and the university is kicking in another $62,000. Other companies can pay for individual research projects, giving them access to top-notch scientists without having to fund their own lab.
In 2003, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Department of Defense ordered their top suppliers to start using RFID technology by this year. The goal was to track products without human interaction, resulting in fewer misplaced shipments and the ability to restock store shelves as soon as a product runs out.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Christi Gallagher said the retailer is on track to have the technology at 13 distribution centers and up to 600 stores by October, but she said many suppliers have had difficulties finding tags that fit their products or figuring out how to place them in such a way that they can be read without outside interference.
About a dozen of Wal-Mart suppliers are among the chief funders of the Wisconsin lab, which will be dedicated to finding solutions for such challenges, including interference from metal products in warehouses and metal doors on loading docks.
The conveyor belt that Gutierrez oversaw allows companies to test different tags and determine which work best and where they should be placed.
The lab comprises of a few rooms spread out on three floors of an engineering building on campus. It has an echo-free chamber that allows researchers to test the strength of signals from different antennas. Two floors below, a portal-dock station simulates goods passing beneath a reader in a warehouse or at a loading dock.
Researchers are looking at ways to embed the chips in the packaging rather than simply adding them as labels to the outside, allowing companies to lower costs and position tags correctly.
The lab also is testing whether permits that hang on the rearview mirrors of cars can carry tags reliable enough to lift parking lot gates and whether tags on wristbands can track patients in hospitals.
Patrick Sweeney, chief executive of ODIN technologies and author of "RFID for Dummies," said the lab will serve as a trusted source for information at a time the technology is beset by technical problems and fears of privacy abuses.
The technology, around since World War II, got a boost through research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The four-year effort, sponsored by Wal-Mart, Gillette Co. and other major corporations, ended in 2003.
Other universities, including the University of Florida and the University of Arkansas, also have RFID labs as do dozens of other corporations.
What makes UW-Madison's lab unique is its collaboration with industry and its focus on the physics and engineering behind the technology, said Sweeney, who has visited other RFID labs elsewhere.
Critics worry, however, that UW-Madison is contributing to technology that could ultimately track humans.
One such fear involves the use of tags in clothing and shoes. If the chips aren't deactivated at the time of sale, unsuspecting consumers might essentially be carrying around information about their buying habits, allowing stores to target them with intrusive marketing pitches the next time they visit.
"When I see the move of RFID into universities, it concerns me," said Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in RFID technology and shoppers. "It is sending a message that not only do we not have to worry about privacy but you can profit from it by a career perspective."
UW researchers acknowledge the potential for abuse, but insist their work is more about enabling mechanisms to ultimately make humans safer.
RFID could be programmed to detect bacteria and recall tainted food, prevent errors in blood transfusions and ensure that drugs are not counterfeit, they say.
Already, the tags help parents track children at amusement parks and help hospital personnel prevent unauthorized people from kidnapping newborns, said Raj Veeramani, director of a UW consortium of businesses involved in the lab.
And former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, recently named to the board of a company that makes chips to implant into humans, says he may put one into his arm so that doctors can know his medical history. Federal regulators approved that use of the technology earlier this year, though few hospitals are equipped to read the chips.
"It's wrong to blame the technology. It's the people that develop applications for it," Veeramani said. "We are still trying to figure out what role RFID will play in the larger scheme of things."
source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050828/ap_on_sc/rfid_research&printer=1
# posted by dark master : 8/29/2005 09:50:00 AM
0 comments 
Lightning guns, heat rays, weapons that can make you hear the voice of God. This is what happens when the war on terror meets the entrepreneurial spirit
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, August 28, 2005; W18
"This is very clandestine," Pete Bitar whispered, as his red Dodge Caravan idled in the parking lot of a Burger King near Fort Belvoir. "They called last week, and they wanted delivery this week."
It did feel a little clandestine, if a bit unlikely. Yet there, in the Burger King parking lot, a small transaction in America's war on terror was about to take place. In the minivan were Bitar, the president and founder of Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), Edward Fry, the company's research coordinator, and George Gibbs, of Marine Corps Systems Command, who two years ago plucked Bitar's obscure company out of its paper existence and provided it with more than half a million dollars in Pentagon funding.
They were waiting for Superman.
Bitar had battled start-up disappointments and even ridicule -- not to mention January cold and Beltway rush-hour traffic -- to seal his first Pentagon deal. The procurement order had gone through so quickly that the Indiana-based Bitar, who was in town for a conference, agreed to make his final delivery at the Burger King to avoid the hassle of getting onto the Virginia Army base.
Bitar flipped open a case containing his first sale: the "dazzler," one in a line of about a half-dozen "nonlethal" weapons that XADS is marketing to the military. It looked like an executive pen: slick, green and flecked with gold. But the pen was really a green laser designed to disorient and temporarily blind an enemy. Sale price: $1,100 apiece.
It looked, to use one of Bitar's favorite phrases, really cool.
Bitar glanced up. "There's Superman."
Sure enough, a broad-shouldered man materialized in front of the Caravan. He was wearing a leather jacket embroidered with the familiar "S" emblem and a matching tie.
Superman stuck out his hand and introduced himself: Shane Gilmore. Pentagon folks seem especially fond of quirky nicknames and are not above cultivating that mystique. Asked about the Kryptonian symbols, he'd say only, "I'm Superman." But today he wasn't saving the world, just trying to protect it as part of an Army task force buying equipment for troops in Iraq. They had placed an order for 13 of Bitar's dazzlers. Supercharged versions of commercial laser pointers, dazzlers are the lowest-tech of Bitar's weapons, and they're not what initially caught the Pentagon's eye. Rather, it was his concept for a gun that could shoot bolts of artificial lightning to paralyze, but not kill, an enemy, like a "Star Trek" phaser set on stun.
After handing over the goods, Bitar explained his unusual entry into the high-tech weapons market as he headed into Arlington for dinner. The lightning gun began, literally, as a daydream when Bitar was running a Styrofoam recycling business in the early 1990s. Watching the machinery that cut up the used material, he noticed sparks shooting into the air. He began to wonder, at first idly and then more intensely, if there was a way to extend the sparks' range.
But he had no engineering or technical expertise, and his speculation went nowhere.
A decade later, Bitar was no closer to becoming an experimental weapons entrepreneur. But he did have a new business, founded largely to fund an "extreme" hobby of his, powered paragliding. The idea was to turn enthusiasts of the sport -- who strap motors to their backs, take off running, then yank open a parachute -- into flying billboards. He called it XADS -- for "Xtreme Ads," as in advertising.
Undeterred by his lack of engineering qualifications, he began to apply for Department of Defense research and development contracts set aside for small businesses. Bitar started out pitching an idea related to his paragliding business involving a parachute design. But no one at the Pentagon was biting. Then one day, Bitar learned that the Pentagon was seeking ideas for a taser gun. It was like being struck by lightning. He dusted off his decade-old idea and, in 2002, was granted a contract to develop his lightning gun. Suddenly, he needed a new name for his company. "Xtreme Advertising" would sound pretty silly at defense trade shows. Fortuitously, XADS had a handy "D" for Defense.
Now his company consists of two full-time employees, himself and Fry, but he hires physicists and engineers as consultants to design and build the parts for his weapons that aren't commercially available. His job is to be the visionary. "I call myself the glue -- I kind of had the idea and vision of what it could be," Bitar said.
Back in his lab in Anderson, Ind., Bitar has a large apparatus -- 11 feet high -- that shoots sparks about 16 feet. It's too large and cumbersome to be a portable weapon; he thinks it could be used for securing U.S. embassies. He also produces smaller units -- dubbed "StunStrike" -- that he says shoot four-foot bolts of lightning.
His prototype for a rifle weighs about 25 pounds and can shoot electricity about 12 feet, he says.
Gibbs, the Marine Corps official who first funded Bitar, has a fondness for edgy ideas. A chemical engineer and longtime proponent of nonlethal weaponry, Gibbs funds other offbeat projects, such as Medusa, an attempt to develop a weapon that uses low-power microwaves -- believed to cause an audible buzzing in subjects' heads -- to make people think God is speaking to them. Another such weapon would use beams of energy to make people dizzy and lose their balance.
Gibbs acknowledges that electrical engineers in his office said that Bitar's lightning gun would never fly because of a variety of technical hurdles. But, he says, he figured "it was minimal risk to the Marine Corps to try it." He gave XADS the initial $100,000 (that's "minimal risk" in Pentagonese). Bitar was able to prove, by the end of the nine-month contract, that he could generate a one-foot spark with some degree of control, which led to more funding.
Striding into a Lebanese restaurant at Pentagon Row, Bitar greeted the servers in fluent Arabic. "Pete, you never cease to amaze me," Gibbs said to Bitar, as the group was guided to a quiet booth in the back.
Bitar traces his interest in nonlethal weapons to his heritage as a Christian Arab. His father was born in Syria, his mother in Lebanon and he in Michigan. "We're sitting in an Arabic restaurant, speaking Arabic. Honestly, it gives me a little bit of an ad-vantage," he said. "I can think the way a Middle Eastern mind thinks. I understand where they're coming from. So, we can design tactical solutions that deal with that."
Lightning, for example, is a very big fear for Arabs, Bitar contends. Peter Bechtold, the head of Near East studies at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, was dubious that Arabs would be more frightened than anyone else by lightning guns. "It sounds strange," Bechtold said, when presented with Bitar's idea. But ideas are what Bitar overflows with. His latest is to use ultrasonic waves in the dazzler not to just blind enemies, but also to convey messages into their heads, similar to Gibbs's Medusa project. Hearing voices from God is a "big thing" in Arab culture, according to Bitar. "We flash-blind them. And, while their eyes are shut, you could send a recorded message or deep guttural voice that echoes in the inside of their head. They're looking around, 'Hey, did you hear that?'''
Bitar laughed. "That's the psych warfare side of this thing."
Suddenly serious, he leaned back. "You know, I'm a Christian, and I just believe in preserving life," he said. "Yet, preserving it in the context of order, law and force, if needed."
Gibbs interrupted Bitar's soliloquy as dinner arrived. "What if I say grace before we eat?" he asked.
With soft Arabic music playing in the background, Bitar and Fry lowered their heads as Gibbs began: "Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this marvelous meal. We thank you for this opportunity we have to share with each other and do great stuff for our country."
After grace, Bitar resumed with his vision of bloodless warfare. Hostage situations would be as easy as hosing down a whole group of people with the lightning gun, and "then you could separate them out: hostages and non-hostages," he said.
"Um, just the capability to employ force, achieve American objectives and protect ourselves and yet not kill," he said.
"I mean, this whole war on terror, that's exactly what we have to do. We have to be able to minimize our collateral damage because, frankly, we can't afford for the whole world to hate us for very long."
"They always will," Gibbs interrupted again.
Over the past year, Bitar has received almost $1 million to develop his weapons. That includes money from the Marine Corps, a contract from the Navy and a smaller amount of matching funds from the state of Indiana. Of all the products Bitar is developing, he describes a handheld lightning gun as the "Holy Grail." But there is at least one barrier he hasn't even approached.
"We haven't done human testing," Bitar said.
"We haven't done animal testing," Gibbs added.
"Yeah, not officially," Bitar said with a sly smile. He would not elaborate on any unofficial testing.
Anyone happening upon the Quantico Marine Base in April might have thought someone was staging a county fair. Brightly striped canopies crowded the grounds, and concessionary booths advertised snow cones, nachos and ice-cold sodas, as visitors milled about and long lines formed for barbecue and hot dogs.
This was the Force Protection Equipment Demonstration, or FPED, the world's largest trade show for counterterrorism technology. Instead of local crafts and game booths, vendors offered the opportunity to check out the latest in bomb containment devices, among other things. Booth after booth of space-age decontamination suits, newfangled barriers, advanced sensors, X-ray machines, weapons and data destruction devices clamored for people's attention, even as a discordant mix of Bond music and reveille drowned out conversation.
One booth allowed visitors the chance to shoot high-powered pepper balls at dummies. Taser International, the country's largest manufacturer of stun guns, was demonstrating its weapon on any willing takers, provided they'd sign a liability release form. Taser's stun gun (which delivers an electric charge through wires attached to two darts) works by disrupting the body's nervous system, immobilizing its victim. By mid-morning, Taser had more than a dozen volunteers, including Sergio, a dark-haired young man whose friends cheered and laughed as he sat in a chair to be zapped, one leg flying up straight in front of him as the jolt hit his body.
The expo is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of America, but it's also a vision of its future: a nation mired in barriers and locks, fitted out with all-seeing sensors and closed-circuit television, where terrorism, as one company's slogan goes, "is reduced to a minor inconvenience."
Even among military trade shows, FPED is unique. With only five major companies left in the U.S. weapons market, most of today's military expos feature an orderly array of brightly colored PowerPoint briefings displayed next to plastic mockups of weapons. With so few companies, the jockeying of a typical trade show is absent.
FPED, in contrast, harks back to a different era: the 1980s and the Cold War, when an imminent threat of annihilation fueled a market full of companies competing for a slice of the Pentagon's budget. What started off after the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia as a show for a few dozen specialized companies has today grown to more than 500 vendors crowding two massive aircraft hangars and an entire airfield.
The counterterrorism business is booming. And for those who want to break into the market, FPED is the place. The expo was closed to the public, but representatives of law enforcement and military agencies crowded the grounds, shopping for the latest technology. Traffic into the huge base was backed up for more than two miles on the first day of the three-day show.
XADS's 10-by-10 booth was set up at the back of the first hangar; a table in front displayed an assortment of the company's latest products, including its full line of laser dazzlers. XADS had also added a new acoustic weapon called Screech, which true to its name emits an ear-piercing shriek designed to disperse crowds and cause headaches, Bitar said.
The most striking feature of the XADS booth, at first glance, was a framed poster, mounted on a pedestal, that Bitar called concept art. On it, dark, vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men attack a U.S. Embassy, only to writhe in pain as giant bolts of XADS lightning hit them. A graphic artist who draws for GI Joe and Spider-Man comics designed the poster.
But the star attraction was a simple black briefcase that Bitar promised would shoot lightning bolts. He and Fry placed the briefcase (innocuous-looking, if you ignored the pointed needle a few inches long sticking out the side) on top of a carpeted podium, plugged it into a wall socket and flipped a switch. Then they stood back.
Iridescent streaks of purple lightning snaked out of the briefcase, accompanied by the deafening rattle of what sounded like an M-16, and even in the noisy hangar, conversations momentarily ceased.
"It looks like something out of a 1950s movie," one onlooker commented.
Bitar's technology is based on a technique pioneered more than 100 years ago by the eccentric Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. The StunStrike uses an electrical charge to break down the air in front of the weapon to create a path for sparks generated by a "resonant transformer," better known as a Tesla coil. Unlike a typical Tesla coil, however, Bitar's invention uses electronics to tune and direct the spark stream. It goes about four feet.
"We can tune it all the way down so it feels like broom bristles, and all the way up to knock you down," Bitar informed a group of gawkers.
Electricity that shoots out even a few feet is enough to grab people's attention. A small, wiry man wearing a CIA badge and a lanyard emblazoned with "In-Q-Tel," the agency's venture capital arm, stopped at the booth. He paused to look at the lightning, nodded approvingly and picked up a business card before moving on.
Many of the vendors at the expo were strikingly similar to Bitar: men with ambitious ideas who entered the counterterrorism market as a second career. George Cairnes, a former pilot, is now selling full-body restraining cuffs. The elaborate bondage gear was developed for police as an alternative to "hog-tying," and is being used by the military, according to Cairnes. He said he had an order for 200 going to Guantanamo Bay. Joe Villa, a mechanical engineer, founded US Bunkers, a Florida-based company specializing in flying saucer-shaped mini-fortresses that can fit in your back yard. Villa conceived the idea after 1992's Hurricane Andrew as a way to protect people and property from violent storms, but he, too, is expanding into the counterterrorism market: Imagine a safe room to be used after a biochemical attack; the company points out it could also double as a sauna. A promotional poster depicts a family grilling next to a bunker.
With so many vendors, drawing visitors to individual displays -- particularly visitors with money -- is cutthroat competition. Charles Smith, a former Nokia salesman, persuaded a childhood friend from Texas, an attractive blonde, to stand with him at his booth. His strategy appeared to work, as a crowd assembled to look at the blonde, and Smith's product, a desktop machine designed to drill holes through computer drives, destroying sensitive data.
Hesco Bastion, the world's largest manufacturer of sand-filled barricades (ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan to shield against attacks), took a similar route: It hired midriff-baring models to serve soft drinks from a bar made of its sandbags. The show's organizers wouldn't let them serve beer.
Some vendors go negative. Grant Haber, a former police officer and now a distributor of bomb-proof trash cans designed for subways and other public places, hung out by the press trailer, trying to entice a reporter to examine his file of allegations against a rival manufacturer "They've been fraudulent," he said, clutching the folder. "I have proof of falsified test reports."
Back at Bitar's booth, the draw was StunStrike. When the crowd would thin, all Bitar had to do was flip the switch, and people would flock to the booth.
At noon on the second day, XADS captured the attention of a VIP. Marine Corps Col. David Karcher, who heads the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, stopped to watch the demonstration, and promised to return.
The vendors' eyes followed Karcher, a man who controls $55 million in annual funding, as he walked slowly past the exhibits, explaining his role: He pays firms to develop nonlethal technology and to test it against strict Pentagon and international standards. For example, his office helped develop the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses millimeter waves -- a supercharged version of microwaves -- to heat up the skin's nerve endings, creating a burning sensation similar to touching a 100-watt light bulb. Except the beam, while painful, does not actually burn the skin.
The weapon was only recently declassified, and the Pentagon still won't divulge how far the beam goes, but Karcher says it could be used to control crowds at feeding stations in countries like Somalia and Iraq. "Often you see the people pushing their way to the front of the crowd are young men," he said. "They'll push women and children out of the way."
Karcher pointed to a demo of the system set up at Raytheon's booth. No required release forms here; Raytheon took a more direct approach: self-infliction. "We can't do it to you, but if you want to do it to yourself," the vendor said, handing over a control switch.
When a reporter hesitated, Karcher quickly offered up his own hand. "Press the button," he instructed. The invisible beam clicked on.
"I put my hand there, it starts to hurt, I take my hand way," Karcher explained calmly as he slowly slid his arm away from the beam. The point, he continued, is not to hurt someone, but simply to force a particular action, or to condition a response.
"Sort of like Pavlov's dogs," interrupted the enthusiastic Raytheon vendor.
Comparing humans to dogs who salivate on command didn't seem to sit well with Karcher, who winced. The Pentagon's nonlethal work, particularly that which relies on pain, is under intense public scrutiny and subject to international legal conventions. But the main problem with the Active Denial System, and similar directed energy weapons, is size, according to Karcher. Now the weapon goes on a Humvee, but the military is finding that troops in Iraq want smaller, handheld devices -- phasers.
But it's precisely those goals -- small and long-range weapons -- that place phaser technology, at least for now, in the realm of science fiction. The largest lightning guns in the XADS lab are too big to be mobile weapons, and while the rifle has generated sparks of up to 12 feet, Bitar says, the system has blown out repeatedly and isn't stable beyond four feet.
The military would like something that can go 30 to 100 feet. "We can fire a taser and be very effective at 15 feet," Karcher said. But 15 feet is almost "knife fight" range, he added, and in that case, troops may want a more lethal option, like a rifle.
But for every naysaying expert, there always seems to be a Pentagon official who believes the risk is worthwhile. Franz Gayl, one of the officials who contacted Bitar after hearing about XADS from news accounts, agrees there are barriers to a lighting gun, but he argues for helping nascent companies. The concept of a lightning gun, though risky, offers a potential payoff, according to Gayl. He noted a military officer who built a Tesla coil weapon, claiming to have tested it by shooting it "into the grille of an annoying rude driver in a traffic jam."
Back at the show, Bitar looked bitterly across the way at Raytheon, which was handing out customized jars of spicy hot fajita powder to promote its "burning" nonlethal weapon. Other experienced venders dished out logo-inscribed chocolate and pens. XADS had only postcard- size brochures and business cards.
It was the end of the third day, and still no sales. A man who introduced himself as a buyer for the Turkish military asked if he could get a free sample of Bitar's lasers, or barring that, could he borrow one and return it if the Turkish military wasn't interested. Bitar said that wasn't likely.
"We're not going to do that," Bitar chuckled. "We're not Wal-Mart."
But Bitar noticed that foreign militaries were the most interested in his weapons, and officials from Asia, the Middle East and Europe had all visited his booth. "It's kind of weird, especially because when it comes to weapons, you'd rather arm your own country than someone else," he said.
But he shrugged and added, "A customer is a customer."
Toward the end of the expo, Bitar was demonstrating the lightning gun when he suddenly recoiled in pain. "It bit him," Fry said with a note of concern. One of the electric tentacles had reached around and grabbed Bitar. He rubbed his shoulder. Since electricity seeks the quickest route to complete its circuit, it will reach out and touch the first thing that's grounded, such as a person holding the gun.
Bitar appeared unusually downbeat. He'd been standing for three days straight at the booth, and he was worried about how to keep his business going. Even with $1 million total in start-up funds, he'd have to close shop in about six months if he didn't get orders. "I didn't sleep well last night," he acknowledged. "Busy thinking about things, like how to get through to the Joint Nonlethal Directorate, so they take us a little more seriously."
At dinner the night before, Bitar's confidence -- shaken by the competition at the show-- seemed to ebb. He would be turning 40 soon. The initial success of XADS allowed his wife to stay home with their young son. His bravado momentarily gone, he talked about his previous businesses, which, while not failures, had not really been successes either. The Styrofoam recycling company sold at break even, and his parachute logo business barely made a profit.
Back at the show, Bitar sighed. "You get all this stuff going against us."
But a few minutes later, he was uptempo again.
"I just think we're only limited by our funding," Bitar said, pausing to pack up the cartoon poster of their weapons. "We could do so much more than the big companies." He pointed to the Raytheon booth. "These guys are burning your hand at 10 feet away with $50 million worth of research."
He gestured to the StunStrike. "We've got $10,000 worth of research in that thing, and we can do the exact same thing."
Pausing, he added, "Okay, we haven't been through all the studies and testing because we haven't had all the money to put into it."
Bitar's concerns are not just about big companies like Raytheon, but also about his nemesis Ionatron, a start-up backed partly by investment from the CIA venture capital fund. Ionatron, whose weapons are based on a similar concept for channeling lightning, was founded in 2002, and its stock is now worth more than half a billion dollars on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Unlike Bitar, who won his early contracts through a competitive process, Ionatron's most significant contract, for $12.6 million, came through a congressional line item, which typically requires high-level lobbying. Another difference from XADS: Ionatron would like the nonlethal lightning guns to be, if necessary, lethal.
But both companies face an age-old problem with harnessing lightning: It is notoriously difficult to control. Making it go straight and far requires breaking down the air, like drilling a path through wood for a nail. Creating this path for any more than a few feet presents a formidable challenge.
Bitar's idea for doing this, like Ionatron's, is to use pulsed lasers to create a conductive path ahead of the lightning. A pioneer in this method is a New Mexico-based physicist named Jean-Claude Diels. The Belgian-born scientist says he started his research not to build "zap guns," as he calls them, but to prevent deaths from lightning, which kills on average 67 people a year in the United States, according to the National Weather Service. But the military was never terribly interested in his work, he said, and nonmilitary funding for research is hard to come by these days.
Now caught in a bind, Diels takes money from Ionatron. He doubts it would be possible to shrink the weapon down to the size of a pistol, although he believes a portable system, such as one mounted on a car, is possible.
"It's taking a disturbing turn," Diels said with a sigh. "I feel a little bit like the German scientists of the Third Reich, who have no option but to do this research because that's what the government funds."
What's wrong with the idea of a stun gun? "This nonlethal technology, I mean, aimed at electrocuting a crowd of protesters?" he said. "That's not really appetizing, I must say."
As the spectators at FPED thinned out, Bitar started to pack up, and Fry went to get the car. They'd be back in town the next week for another show, but Fry needed to return home for an exam: He's getting a master's degree in theology and peace studies. On the way out, Fry looked back at the weapons bazaar and shook his head.
Toward the front, a banner for Hawaiian Shaved Ice had fallen askew.
Perhaps what makes U.S. military trade shows seem so incongruous is that they treat their market -- war and terrorism -- as if it were plastics, medical supplies or textiles. And Bitar is just another entrepreneur. Despite his lack of big orders, back in Indiana a couple months later, he enthused over his company's progress. Field reports from Iraq on his dazzlers were "stellar," he said, and several Pentagon offices had placed small trial orders. A European television crew wanted to follow him around for six months.
The Pentagon also is preparing for the first time to buy large numbers of commercial dazzlers from several manufacturers and give them to troops in Iraq. Gayl, the Pentagon official who has supported Bitar's work, cautions now that he is concerned that some companies, including XADS, are making lasers so intense that they would permanently blind the people they target. The XADS lasers "are way out of line," Gayl said recently.
Bitar adamantly disagrees that his lasers will cause permanent blindness, saying they are eye-safe, if used properly. It's a key point for his company, since the StunStrike weapon has slipped to the back burner, and the dazzlers' time appears to have arrived. Bitar said he was negotiating with what he called a major supplier for the military and law enforcement on a new version of XADS's dazzler. The PD/G-105 is a souped-up laser that would be twice as powerful as the ones Bitar sold at the Burger King back in January.
The supplier, Bitar said, was looking at orders in the tens of thousands.
"It'll totally kick butt," he said.
Sharon Weinberger is writing a book about the Pentagon and fringe science, to be published by Nation Books next year.
source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301227_pf.html
# posted by dark master : 8/29/2005 09:44:00 AM
0 comments 
Since the day television was invented, TV technology has certainly been refined quite a bit, but the core concept has remained the same. Even today most of the televisions are built on the age old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology which no doubt has been modified to make bigger, better screens to give a larger crisper picture and subsequently, a much better viewing experience. There are limitations to CRT that are being felt increasingly as the need for higher resolution televisions increase each day. For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines. Compare this to at least 1024x768 resolution that we are used to seeing on our desktops and you can see why there is such a hue and cry about finding a whole new system for televisions.
The search and the subsequent research has led to quite a lot of technologies and standards being spewed out of labs, and of course add to that the conundrum of interlaced, progressive, high-definition and other such standards. Needless to say, you have nice soup that no one is sure consists of what exactly. At CoolTechZone.com, we have been doing a technology series to bring to you the various options that are available, and one of the strongest contenders is Plasma Display. The most amazing aspect of plasma TVs, apart from the new attractive technology they use instead of the mundane CRT, is that they are the same size or larger than the largest CRTs with their width averaging approximately four inches.
Principle:
If you have any idea as to how a television works, you will know that RGB or Red, Green and Blue are the three basic colors that combine in various amounts to give you all the colors in the spectrum. The core concept in plasmas is the same: manipulation of the RGB elements to display an image on the screen.
So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity. This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity. Plasma can be produced if a gas is energized enough to split the molecules into positive and negatively charged ions. Mostly, the plasma displays use a mixture of noble gases like Neon and Xenon.
Imagine you have plasma inside a covered vessel (this is not entirely possibly but just for the sake of an example, imagine…). When electricity is passed into the plasma, the electrons from the current (free electrons moving around is basically how current travels) collide with the inert atoms and result in the ionization (ionization signifies that the atom no longer consists equal number of positively and negatively charged particles but one or the other has the upper hand) of the atom.
The negatively charged ions are attracted towards the positive electrode of the battery while the positively charged ions are attracted towards the negative electrode of the battery. While the particles are moving towards the appropriate battery terminal, they may or may not collide with each other. If they do collide, then it leads to the dropping of electrons from one state of energy to another, which results in releasing light photons in the process (If you have read our Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) Technology: An Overview, you already know how the LED lights produce light photons. The concept is pretty similar here.).
Now the problem in plasma (unlike OLED) is that the light photons thus released belong to the Ultraviolet band and are therefore invisible to human eyes. This was where researchers got hitched until someone came up and suggested that they use these UV photons to incite visible light photons. Now to better understand this concept, lets look at how a normal plasma display is constructed.
Construction:
The plasma televisions of today use Xenon and Neon gases inside. There are two sheets of glass that sandwich between them, thousands and thousands of tiny little cells filled with a mixture of Xenon and Neon. Each of these cells can be considered a pixel and is further divided into three sub-pixels or cells, each making up one of the three colors (Red, Green or Blue). Along the glass plates, these cells are surrounded by electrodes on both sides; the electrodes along the glass plate at the rear are called address electrodes. The electrodes in the front are of course made of transparent material (to facilitate seeing the emitted photons, of course) and are covered in insulating material to prevent conduction of electricity outside the display, which would otherwise give users a disturbing shock.
Both electrode sets, in conjunction with each other, span the entire screen creating a grid similar to active matrix displays. In order to ionize the gas in any cell, electric current is passed through the electrodes forming the cell a few thousand times within a second. Each time a different colored cell is charged, this charges the atoms and converts them to ions and facilitates the release of UV photons due to the ionic collision.
The inside wall of the cell is meted with a special treatment of a phosphor coating. This is done to exploit the phosphors property of giving out light when it comes in contact with other light.
Since the UV photons are released inside the cell, they hit this phosphor and one of the phosphor’s electrons gets an energy boost and heats up, thus jumping to a higher energy state. Since the hit from the photon is not a continuous process, in the sense that once it has hit an electron, that electron will not get additional energy, the electron comes back to its original state and gives up some of the energy it has which is of course released in the form of a light photon, only this time, they are in the visible spectrum.
The concept of RGB is attained by coating three sub-cells (remember how each cell in the matrix was sub divided into three smaller cells?) with red, green and blue coatings respectively, so whichever color is required, that sub cell is charged. Of course, if you need more colors, you’ll need to mix and match the RGB cells to give the final color to the pixel. This process is repeated cell after cell and pixel after pixel to give you the final brilliantly bright picture that you see on a plasma TV.
This in essence is how plasma TV displays images. An interesting offshoot of this technology is the great viewing angle. This is because each pixel is lit up individually from within, which ensures that we are able to view it from most angles.
The main advantage apart from the great viewing angle is the fact that the displays are amazingly slim and have the most awesome flaunt value in your living or TV room, however, the style comes at a pretty steep price with a 42-inch screen costing you between $1500 to $2000.
Plasma technology definitely holds great promise for the future but as with all "emerging" technologies, prices need to come down for mass acceptance, which is required for mass production, faster market adoption rate and overall product costs. However, until prices are somewhat lower than they are currently, hopefully manufacturers will refine and advance Plasma TVs to make them a desirable option.
source:http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1733&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=2
# posted by dark master : 8/29/2005 09:38:00 AM
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The Biggest Threat to Microsoft Might Not Be Those G-men at All, but Apple
By Robert X. Cringely
Standing in line at the bank not long ago, I was behind a young man who insisted on maintaining a distance from the person in front of him of about 10 feet. The queue was perhaps 20 feet long and right in the middle was this 10-foot gap. I was in no hurry, I thought. That gap was not going to cause me to get to the teller more than a second or so later than I might if the gap was closed. No problem.
Only it WAS a problem. As the minutes passed that gap started to drive me insane. Finally I asked the kid to move forward.
"It was making you crazy, right?" he asked, clearly enjoying the moment.
Which brings me to Google.
What the heck Google is up to is a favorite topic of conversation this week in high tech circles. What's driving this is a combination of things including the new Google Toolbar, Gtalk, but most especially the company's announcement that it will shortly sell another $4 billion in shares. What does Google plan to do with all that money, people are wondering?
Nothing at all.
It's just a hunch of mine, but with more than $2.5 billion in cash already on-hand, I don't think Google has any plans at all for that extra $4 billion. The company just knows that this is the time when it can probably get the most money for the least stock EVER, so selling a few million extra shares now is just a cheap insurance policy against some later day when Wall Street might not be so enamored of the giant search company.
Yes, Google could buy Skype with that kind of money, but Google won't buy Skype. Google prefers to build rather than buy. And when they do buy, what they are buying is market position, and generally at a fairly low price. I don't expect any multi-billion-dollar acquisitions by Google, whether for cash or stock. Larry and Sergey know too well the story of Yahoo's boneheaded purchase of Broadcast.com, making Mark Cuban an instant billionaire and an affliction on both reality TV and the NBA. I blame Yahoo for that, and Google is working hard to learn from Yahoo's mistakes.
What Google WILL do is roll-out incremental products at a blinding pace. Not long ago, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin explained to me that rapid development is an important key to market dominance.
"What you want to do," he said, "is listen to your customers and bring out every two weeks improved versions that would each take your competitor two months to complete. That's when you are on a rocket -- they can't keep up so they can't compete. They lose hope and pretty soon you have the market pretty much to yourself."
That pace of technical development, which probably isn't sustainable for long at any company, isn't POSSIBLE at all at more mature companies like AOL, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft. That adolescent energy is the mojo that makes a startup scarier to Bill Gates than a mature competitor. He knows that if Microsoft ever takes a big dive, it will be because of a Google, not a Yahoo, and certainly not an AOL.
Google plays on its technical reputation even though, if you look closely, it isn't always deserved. Many Google products haven't been revved since they were introduced. And while some Google products are excellent, some aren't, too.
Google likes to play the Black Box game. What are they DOING in all those buildings with all those PhDs? I'm sure they are doing a lot that will change the world, but just as much that will never even be seen by the world. For the moment, though, it doesn't matter because Google can play the spoiler. They offered a gigabyte of e-mail storage, for example, at a time when they had perhaps one percent the number of e-mail users as a Hotmail or Yahoo. And by limiting the Gmail beta, they avoided the suffering of both those other companies when they, too, had to increase their storage allocations, but for tens of millions of real users.
Now Google will do something similar for chat and VoIP with Gtalk, pushing the others toward an interoperability that undermines the hold each company thinks it has on its users.
Google likes being a mystery, too. They are famously paranoid, sure, but they'd be a lot less paranoid if it didn't make them famous. Google, like Microsoft, is a brand built at least partially on envy, which you know is a sin. But at Google, at least, they seem to get a lot of pleasure from that sin.
So are they really buying-up all the dark fiber in an effort to build their own Internet? Are they really going to build a data center in Oregon that uses so much power it needs to be next to a hydroelectric dam? Who knows? Who cares? Google needs ever more bandwidth, sure, so dark fiber makes sense to buy when it is probably as cheap as it is ever going to get. And those 30 acres on the Columbia River don't ever have to become anything since they've already paid for themselves by driving Microsoft and the others a little crazy with wondering.
Google is like that kid ahead of me at the bank, driving others mildly insane and enjoying every minute.
Microsoft is totally obsessed with Google because Bill Gates is obsessed with Google. In a way, Bill needs a bogeycompany like Google to motivate the troops, since they are no longer being wowed by Microsoft's stock performance. Not long ago, I spoke with someone from MSN who said the mood there was so tight that his co-workers were acting like "mad dogs."
Bow-wow.
But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google's corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn't supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.
I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won't be all that surprised if they don't. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.
So it could be that Google isn't the Microsoft-killer many people -- including Gates and Ballmer -- fear the company is. Going a step further, it is even possible that Gates's conviction that he'll eventually be taken down by a startup is wrong, too.
Here's where I go out on a limb, but I think Microsoft's clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect. Yes, Apple is about to take Microsoft to the woodshed when it comes to Internet movie distribution. Yes, Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn't even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain -- the PC platform, itself.
What could Apple do to take down Windows, with or without the help of Intel?
What seems to me to be the answer came to me this week from a reader who had a disruptive idea that I gleefully embellished.
Here are the clues. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn't want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year.
Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version -- OS 10.4 -- on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?
It wouldn't kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn't hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple's store.
Like that kid in line at the bank, it would drive Bill Gates crazy.
source:http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050825.html
# posted by dark master : 8/29/2005 09:32:00 AM
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