There seem to be a couple of problems inherent in the tech field of prosthetic design. First and foremost of them is that comparatively few people need artificial limbs, so not enough of them are manufactured at once to bring the cost down. A second problem is that because so few people tend to need them, designs don't seem to improve very rapidly. When enough of anything are not constructed, there isn't enough pressure for bugs to be ironed out rapidly, nor for designs to evolve in positive directions so relatively simple advances may not appear soon. Business and industry …

Earlier this week some parts of the Net lit up as a result of a discussion thread (which is just now beginning to make its rounds outside of the 3D printing community. A gunsmith going by the handle Haveblue is said to have run off a .22 calibre pistol on a home 3D printer and fired a couple of magazines worth of ammunition with it for testing. The media's already saying that 3d printing is now firmly in the realm of criminal activity, which is no surprise because that kind of headline is guaranteed to get eyes on articles.

Here's …

Unless you're dealing with the federal government, it has long been a given that the police can't enter and search the place you live without a properly filed and signed search warrant, as guaranteed by the fourth amendment to the US Constitution, which reads thus: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Sounds …

Yeah, yeah, this is late. Work before blog and all that.

Last year bulletproof windbreakers hit the private security market, with all of the usual implications that personal protection brings. Now a company with the unusual name of Bladerunner has perfected bulletproof hooded sweatshirts that are supposedly proof against 9mm rounds. Called the L300 Defender, this hoodie combines teen fashion with a relatively new fiber called Dyneema, which is supposed to be thinner than the Kevlar thread used to manufacture bulletproof vests but just as strong. The inventor of the L300 and owner of Bladerunner, one Barry Samms, says that …

I haven't been writing about the beginning of the presidential campaign season because I've been busy with other things, but I thought that this should be spread around a bit more widely... Barack Obama's security detail ordered on-duty police officers at a rally in Dallas, Texas to stop searching attendees for weapons as they filed in.

You read that correctly, the were told to stop looking for weapons. D.W. Lawrence, Deputy Police Chief of Dallas went on the record as saying that the order 'apparently' came down from the US Secret Service because they wanted to "speed up the …

Remember around this time last year when the US Navy started testing railguns as ship-mounted weapons? BAE Systems has developed an even more powerful magnetic linear accelerator weapon for testing called the 32-MJ LRG (which stands for "32-megajoule Laboratory Rail Gun" - I guess the person in charge of naming experimental weapons was hired by the federal government to name the PATRIOT Act). The experimental weapon is about the size of an airport x-ray machine, and probably masses about as much. It doesn't fire explosive rounds but then again it doesn't have to. If you can throw a projectile at eight …

For years, HERF weapons (high energy radio frequency) have been the stuff of science fiction and urban legends of the hacker underground. The underlying premise is simple: Integrated circuitry is vulnerable to various forms of radio frequency emissions, and such interference can either disrupt the functioning of or outright destroy circuitry. In theory, these weapons are relatively easy to construct with a decent grasp of electronics and high voltage electrical engineering with readily available parts, but actual examples of such are rarely verified. Personally, I've heard some tales coming out of a certain hacker con in the west (which was …

In Tiajuana, Mexico, there is a shakedown and purge of the police department underway due to allegations of corruption. As a result, the police have been disarmed so that their weapons can be used in ballistics tests to see if any were used in a number of murders linked to drug cartels and re-issued slingshots and ball bearings as weapons. They're crude, and definitely underpowered when compared to a pistol, but anything small and hard moving very fast is going to put a hurt on you if and when it hits.

A weapons test at the Naval Surface Warface Centre made the news yesterday because a heretofore novel device was successfully tested: A railgun, more technically referred to as a Gauss-effect linear accelerator. Railguns are, conceptually, pretty simple devices: A ferrous projective rests inside a set of conductive metal rails, through which an electric current passes. When a sufficiently large pulse of electricity passes through the rails, the projectile goes out of the business end of the device at high velocity. Whatever is hit by the projectile either ceases to exist or has a very, very large hole through it due …