IEEE Spectrum February, 2008 - 5

forum
currents exceeding 8 A.
The neuromuscular-
incapacitating effects of
the Taser are due more
to the effects of these
peak currents than to
the much lower stated
average current.
Larry Fennigkoh
IEEE Member
Milwaukee

I
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10

Tough Tasers

R

egarding the
articles on Taser
guns in the December
issue ["How a Taser
Works"], I suggest
that they left out what
should have been a
very critical part of the
analysis. To consider
the consequences of not
using or having access
to a Taser should be a
necessary part of such
a review.
As a retired peace
officer, I was a victim
of numerous assaults.
For a variety of reasons,
it is axiomatic that
keeping distance from
an assaulting individual
is important. In my day,
the tools were a gun or
a stick. Sticks produce
fractured skulls and
other broken bones,
I assure you. While I do
not know any statistics,
I am comfortable in
asserting that there
is much more danger
from a fractured skull
than from a Taser shot.
Had such a tool been

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * fEbruAry 2008

available in my day, I
would have put fewer
people in the hospital.
Glenn Marin
Whittier, Calif.

T

o say that 1.9 milli-
amperes is the
average current avail-
able from a Taser X26,
while nominally and
technically correct,
completely understates
and misrepresents the
electrical output from
these devices. At pulse
durations of 100 to
140 microseconds and
a pulse-delivery rate of
19 hertz, the duty cycle
of the Taser waveform
is less than 0.3 percent.
As such, the delivered
average current will
be relatively low. I
recently measured
the electrical output
from a Taser X26 into
a series of precision
high-voltage, nonin-
ductive 300-, 1000-,
and 4000-ohm loads
and found that the
median peak currents
approach 4 amperes,
with maximum peak

was very disap-
pointed with the Taser
write-up. The authors
are no doubt very
talented, but engineer
Mark W. Kroll sits on
the Taser International
board, and electro-
physiologist Patrick
Tchou received a "gift"
of test equipment from
Taser. This may explain
why Kroll provides
no details on the four
court cases in which
the Taser was found to
be the primary cause of
death and disparages
three of them. Were
they thrown out of
court on a technicality
or because the Taser
was not to blame? It
also may explain why
Tchou doesn't complain
about a current level

only one-fourth of what
triggers fibrillation in
pigs and doesn't report
on the four fatalities
brought to court. I
expect IEEE Spectrum
to disqualify such one-
sided articles when
dealing with issues as
controversial as the
safety of the Taser.
Martin Lurie
IEEE Member
Newton, Mass.

Playing Clean

I

was a bit dismayed to
read "Playing Dirty"
[December]. What
Richard Thurman
is doing is against
the terms of service
of online games.
Glorifying such actions
in these games is
wrong. It has little to
do with people buying
bling on eBay and more
to do with the fact that
these people destroy the
games. It would have
been better to document
how to combat this in
online gaming and not
treat it as the next big
thing to make money.
Simon O'Doherty
IEEE Member
Dublin

CaTChing a Code

I

n TheIR article "controlled chaos" [December],
Antonio nucci and steve Bannerman described

their proposed early-warning detection of viruses
and worms by measuring the entropy of traffic
on trunk communication lines. That may indeed
protect the network; however, individual computers
would still retain snippets of viral code. The authors
do not address the difficult tasks of identifying the
signatures of those viral codes after an attack on
the network and of purging the malicious code.
Myron Kayton
IEEE Life Fellow, Santa Monica, Calif.
www.specTRum.Ieee.oRg
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2008
