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The SFWs contain Textron’s BLU-108 sub munitions and Skeet warheads equipped with dual-mode passive infrared and active laser targeting sensors that use complex algorithms to detect targets over a lofted trajectory. If no target is detected, one or more of the three safety modes is activated. The first two enable the Skeet to self-destruct eight seconds after launch or within 50 feet above the ground. The third is a built-in redundant time-out feature that renders the weapon inert within minutes of hitting the ground.

“As responsible citizens, we share in the international community’s concern about the need to limit the impact of war on civilian populations, particularly when the battle is over and hazardous unexploded ordnance remains,” the company says. “We are committed to minimizing civilian losses during conflict and eliminating casualties when the fighting is done.”

As with landmines and napalm, cluster munitions are decidedly politically incorrect, and there is a concerted international effort to ban them. Problem is, they’re highly effective, and countries that actually fight wars, like the U.S. and Russia, are loath to give them up.

While 98 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, only 14 have ratified it; Japan being the most recent. Thirty are required for the ban to become legally binding. However, Albania and Luxembourg are on board, so it’s only a question of time.

Cluster bombs are often seeded in the heat of combat, and then forgotten until, in what could be years later, some innocent hoeing his potatoes sets one off. They are generally large bombs that open in mid-flight to scatter dozens or hundreds of smaller sub munitions. In contrast, the SFW’s self-destruct and self neutralization features ensure no unexploded ordinance is left behind, according to Textron.(PDF)

However, a “humanitarian” version of the “cluster bomb” may head-off some objections to their continued production, or at least provide cover for those who want to keep them in the inventory. Billed as safer alternative to cluster munitions, Sensor fuzed weapons (SFW) contain independent self-destruct features based on altitude, time elapsed, and a battery “time-out” that shuts down all functions if no targets are detected within minutes of deployment, according to manufacture Textron Defense Systems. (Video)

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We still get a pitch about a new Facebook app now and again, but truth is, that ship sailed long ago. Most Facebook apps just don’t have the wow factor they once did when the platform was new. With the company’s latest iPhone app update, however, the wow could be coming back on a smaller scale.

So is there room for third-party apps in this new ecosystem? Definitely, and much more so than would have been possible in previous versions.

But Facebook does have a few things going for it–it’s big, popular, and helps Apple sell more iPhones and iPods by being a must-have application. It has also maintained its own directory of applications for the last two years. And like Apple, what applications are able to do within the confines of the service is limited; for mobile versions of apps, those limitations could be even tighter.

Facebook's new look sports specific Facebook app icons that can be rearranged.

These saved items go up on 3×3 grid that can be rearranged and expanded, depending on how many pages and contacts users decide to add. This makes it much simpler to hop back and forth between certain parts of the site–that is, as long as you’ve planned ahead.

To a certain degree, Facebook already put its foot in the door with a version of its Facebook Connect service for iPhone applications. Applications that have implemented it can have their users log in with their Facebook credentials. It also can give the app access to their profile and friends list to pipe information back out. Simply making this information more readily available within the app would make inroads toward standalone apps within it.

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One of the best examples of how this works is the inter-network message system found on Facebook proper. Here you can take advantage of some of the applications you’ve added to expand what you can send in a message as a virtual attachment.

What can be safely assumed is that Facebook would stand to run into the most trouble with Apple’s approval process. Having apps that are installed inside an in-app marketplace means emulating what the iPhone does with its own native application store, which is a big no-no. But again, this is something Facebook could get around by limiting what applications are able to do, be it running in a Web canvas page or simply piping their data through Facebook as an intermediary.

But Facebook could make available new application-programming interfaces, or APIs, that would let developers pipe some of that data to a mobile version too. Third-party applications could then be programmed to work within the confines of the Facebook application itself, meaning that each one could access other official features as they do on the standard site.

To go with those items are standard Facebook features, including a handful of its own first-party applications, such as events, photos, mail, and the all-important live text chat.

What I’m talking about is quite different, though. These are applications within the Facebook app that would have access to other in-app Facebook apps. Would Apple be OK with this kind of functionality? Almost assuredly no. In fact, Apple has basically done the same thing with its own device and APIs–simply letting developers build specialized tools that work within its confines.

How great would this be on the iPhone, considering that you’re unable to access many of the device’s own files or view unsupported attachments? The same goes for accessing other applications within the confines of the Facebook app; ones that let you update your Twitter status, see where your friends have traveled, or play a quick round of Scrabble.

Facebook certainly stands to gain something by keeping people inside of its application, despite the fact that there are currently no ads or paid-for features. Considering that it can never get the latter as part of Apple’s rules, in-application apps that could present more ad space certainly seem like the next best thing when it comes time for Facebook to flip on that advertising switch.

One of the most interesting changes is how the app has been designed to feel very familiar to the iPhone user interface. For instance, no matter what you’re doing on the app, you can touch anywhere on the top of the screen to go back “home.” You can also save shortcuts to a friend’s profile or to one of the social network’s public-facing pages.

Message attachments in Facebook's mail service let you expand upon the base features using third-party services.

In case you missed Thursday’s news, Apple finally got around to approving the third version of Facebook’s iPhone app. It’s a big step up from previous iterations, bringing in a number of features for which users had been clamoring.

Imagine, if you will, a way to sync up with applications you have installed in Facebook, then use them right inside this new iPhone app. This seems like a logical next step, though Facebook’s current system for third-party developers has them build one version of their application–one that works on Facebook’s site.

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The IFPI also didn’t mince words about what would happen if the new Pirate Bay continued to help users download pirated music.

Oliver told Pandeya that he could count IFPI as a friend if he is successful in licensing music from the top record companies.

Last month, CNET News reported that the IFPI planned to intercept any money Global Gaming pays to acquire The Pirate Bay. Copyright owners from the film and music industry allege that Reservella, the holding company that is the listed owner of The Pirate Bay, is controlled by Neij.

Music industry executives in Europe have begun pressuring Global Gaming Factor, the company that intends to buy The Pirate Bay, to turn over to them any money it pays to acquire the site.

“We hope that your discussions with the rights holders reach a mutually acceptable resolution,” Oliver wrote. “IFPI would welcome and give strong support to the launch of a new online service.”

In the spring, a Swedish court found the Web site’s co-founders–Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg–along with Carl Lundstr?m guilty of having made 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via the Piratebay.org Web site. The court sentenced them to a year in jail and ordered them to pay $3.6 million in damages. But Sunde Kolmisoppi maintains that the co-founders haven’t owned The Pirate Bay since 2006.

“We need to warn you that if GGF takes responsibility for The Pirate Bay service in its current form, or if GGF operates The Pirate Bay in any way in violation of applicable copyright law, we will be forced to take legal action.”

Pandeya has said that under his control The Pirate Bay will morph into a legal service that offers content in exchange for users’ computer bandwidth and hard drive space.

Jo Oliver, the general counsel for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), wrote Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming’s CEO, on July 24. Oliver told Pandeya that the group will ask authorities in Sweden to “issue an order prohibiting Global Gaming from paying the purchase sum” to the founders of The Pirate Bay. Oliver added that copyright owners will also ask the government require Global Gaming to turn over information about the acquisition should it go through.

Related: Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.

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Trend Tracker can give you a visual analysis of when each trend became popular, as well as its decline.

To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.

But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

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Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

The map view gives you an hourly playback of the popularity of multiple trends at once.

For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.

TweetDeck also gets a new list of recommended Twitter accounts for users to follow, and the way you add users is particularly elegant: you can add a whole collection of Twitterers in a topic, like “Journalists,” and TweetDeck creates a new column in the interface to follow just those accounts. Unfortunately the process for getting accounts on to the TweetDeck recommended lists is opaque or “editorial” at the moment, although Dodsworth does say he’ll move to a crowd-sourced model shortly.

TweetDeck 0.30 has MySpace support (not shown, because who cares?).

The new 0.30 version of TweetDeck, due out Wednesday, supports MySpace. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

Previously: New versions of Tweetdeck, Seesmic square off

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I’m not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds support for other real-time feeds–Dodsworth mentions Last.fm, Songkick, and Doppler, for example–then I worry about the clarity of TweetDeck’s Twitter experience getting murky.

Although there are some integrations that can work. I welcome TweetDeck 0.30’s improved Facebook support. It now supports photo streams and makes it easy to update Facebook directly from Twitter, among other features. While Twitter and Facebook have different feature sets that make mixing the two networks in one application a little weird, in TweetDeck they run in separate columns and stay nice and separate. (Seesmic Desktop can merge streams from Twitter and Facebook in a single column, quite successfully.)

Other improvements in the new version of TweetDeck include even tighter Bitly integration, down to the app’s automatic and instant conversion of long links to short ones as you type them (cool) and the capability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck to post them to Facebook (also cool). You can also click on a hashtag in a tweet to kick off a new search column for that tag.

In sum, version 0.30 is a decent upgrade to TweetDeck, although the app is approaching feature overload with its continuing addition of new services.

The new version’s user interface appears to be cleaned up. However, it’s really that some options are now hidden in second-level menus.

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, “a browser for the real-time Web.”

And still missing is an option to get a notification sound only on @replies or direct messages. Sometimes I run Seesmic Desktop just for that one feature.

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Pandeya has suggested that he would secure any loans that he got to complete the acquisition with his shares of the company. Whether the shares are worth anything remains a question.

Meanwhile, Pandeya has continually said that the deal for The Pirate Bay would be completed by the end of the month. He has said this despite failing to provide proof to his former exchange that he had the money to acquire the search engine.

Mangold Fondkommission, an independent exchange that specializes in the trading of small and medium-size stocks, issued a press release Wednesday, announcing that Global Gaming’s shares were available for trade.

Hans Pandeya, the company’s CEO and majority owner, has issued so many conflicting and erroneous statements that the Swedish media now refers to anything the company does as a “circus.”

Global Gaming was booted off its former stock exchange earlier this month after exchange officials concluded the company provided false information about its ability to purchase The Pirate Bay.

A spokesman for Mangold confirmed that Global Gaming was trading there but declined to provide additional comment outside of the press release.

Sweden’s Economic Crimes Bureau has said it is investigating possible insider trading that is reportedly connected to a sharp rise in trading of Global Gaming’s shares the week before it announced it would acquire The Pirate Bay.

Global Gaming Factory X, the software maker that has claimed it will acquire BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay, has found a new stock exchange for its shares–a move that can only be described as bewildering.

Sony on Tuesday announced its first e-book reader with built-in wireless capability. The new Reader Daily Edition offers an integrated 3G wireless connection, allowing it to access Sony’s online bookstore as well as yet-to-be-announced newspaper and magazine subscriptions. The unit–which boasts a 7-inch touch screen (displayable in portrait or landscape mode)–will sell for $399 when it debuts in December. Wireless service is provided by AT&T with no direct charge to the customer.

The Sony Reader Daily Edition is coming in December.

We’ll have full hands-on reviews of the Pocket Edition and Touch Edition Readers as soon as they arrive at the office (should be in the next week or two). In the meantime: what do you think? Do these new products and features add up to a Kindle killer? Is $199 still too expensive for an e-book reader? Or are you still waiting for better screens and cheaper titles? Share your thoughts below.

Also of note is the launch of version 3.0 of Sony’s eBook Library software, which now offers support for Macs (as well as Windows). The software is used to move purchased files (as well as other supported content, such as a PDF and Epub files) from the computer to the Reader. (While supported, the PC step won’t be required for the Reader Daily Edition, which can access online content directly.)

The built-in wireless access of the Daily Edition, meanwhile, brings Sony onto a features parity with the Kindle. But even with the touch screen (which the Kindle doesn’t have), the extra $100 versus the Kindle’s current $299 pricetag might be a hard sell to recession-addled shoppers.

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The trio of Sony Reader products reinforces the fact that Sony is not ceding the market to Amazon. Indeed, the company is offering some nice alternatives: a wallet-friendly $200 price point on the entry-level unit and wider file compatibility. Even more enticing to many will be the wealth of free content not available on the Kindle: the Sony Readers can access the hundreds of thousands of public domain Google Books, plus the free library loaners. The library loans are compelling, to be sure, but Epub collections are not comprehensive. On the New York Public Library site, we found notable titles such as Twilight and Freakonomics, but not a lot of other top 10 selections.

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Sony also highlighted its new “open” Epub format, which the company is moving to from its former proprietary BBeB format. While the Epub books at Sony’s store will still be encoded with DRM, it will allow the Sony Reader to also work with files purchased from BooksOnBoard, NetGalley, Powells.com, and any other retailer that adopts the Adobe-backed standard. (Notably, that does not include Amazon (which has its own proprietary Kindle standard) nor Barnes & Noble (which is working on its own Epub flavor for its forthcoming Plastic Logic reader).

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Sony used the launch event at the New York Public Library to highlight some notable new features of its e-book platform. Most notable is the expansion of support for library loans to the Sony Readers. If your local library supports electronic lending, members will be able to download the borrowed books and transfer them to the Reader for 21 days (after which the files expire). Sony is partnering with Overdrive.com to make it easier to search for available books at participating libraries.

The Reader Daily Edition joins the already announced Touch Edition PRS-600 ($299) and Pocket Edition PRS-300 ($199), both of which should be available within the next couple of weeks. With the exception of the wireless connection and larger screen, the specs of the Reader Daily Edition are otherwise in line with that of the Touch Edition: it offers an E Ink Vizplex electronic paper screen with 16 shades of gray.

As it launched a new version of EpiFlu based on the same data that it says is in an “early developmental phase” this week, GISAID claimed in a statement that SIB has illegally misappropriated the initial version of EpiFlu:

Though neither party is commenting further, what with all the legal ramifications, Ron Appel of SIB did say: “We regret that GISAID is diverting users to a new database…It is unfortunate that such an important service as the EpiFlu database is being jeopardized by this legal issue, especially at a time when A(H1N1) influenza 2009 is such an important health issue.”

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In other words, these countries had little–if any–incentive to share data on the flu, and their unwillingness to share was impairing the scientific community’s ability to effectively study the flu’s global patterns.

SIB’s misappropriation of the first database flagrantly violated numerous provisions of SIB’s agreement with GISAID; more importantly, SIB’s illegal actions greatly undermined the usefulness of the first EpiFlu database and threatened the worldwide effort to combat the pandemic H1N1 swine flu, the H5N1 avian flu, and seasonal influenza.

Having two publicly available flu databases could, Scientific American puts it, “undermine the goal of building a central repository to improve the sharing of data on influenza.” The SA article goes on to compare the EpiFlu project to the open-source model:

GISAID has been under contract with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics since 2006 to promote its flu data via a platform called EpiFlu, which has been live since 2008. But since SIB removed access to EpiFlu from the GISAID Web site in July due to alleged late payments, GISAID has been working on developing a new version, now live.

Which brings us full circle to that adorable Linux Penguin, a digital rendering whose 0s and 1s preclude it, as luck would have it, from requiring an avian flu vaccine.

It all started in 2006, when Italian veterinarian and researcher Ilaria Capua announced that the World Health Organization was hoarding crucial information about the H5N1 avian influenza in a private database in Los Alamos, N.M., which only a handful of laboratories could access.

Capua refused to share her research with an organization that did not then share it with the larger scientific community, and she called on other scientists to follow suit. In a March 2006 editorial, the journal Nature joined her cry of outrage with its “Dreams of Flu Data” rebuke:

The SIB-GISAID collaboration on the EpiFlu platform, which features genomic and epidemiological data on tens of thousands of virus samples, until recently seemed to be working smoothly. During the H1N1, or “swine flu,” outbreak, so many sequences were being submitted to the database so quickly that researchers were literally watching clusters of outbreaks in real time.

The free EpiFlu Database has been compared to open-source systems such as Linux.

After several months of strain with the developer of a flu database, the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data launched its own, admittedly less robust database interface on Monday.

Then, in July, SIB removed EpiFlu access from the GISAID Web site, making it available only to users redirected to SIB’s Web site. SIB claims that GISAID had breached its contract by failing to pay its bills on time, thereby relinquishing its rights to the database.

When samples are sequenced, the results are usually either restricted by governments or kept private to an old-boy network of researchers linked to the WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FAO. This is a far cry from the Human Genome Project, in which all the data were placed in the public domain 24 hours after sequencing.

The EpiFlu model is similar to the open-source software model, where programmers can use freely available pieces of code from the Web to build or improve their software. (A prime example of a successful open-source project is the Linux operating system.) Under the terms of EpiFlu access, all users agree to share their own data for free, give due credit when using others’ data, and work collaboratively.

GISAID was formed to address not only the concerns of Capua and colleagues, but also of developing nations claiming that the data-sharing system run by WHO forced them to relinquish intellectual-property rights to their virus samples, which would then be used by private pharmaceutical companies to make patented vaccines, which would then be sold back for profit with a price tag these countries could not afford.

Click to enlarge.

The new feature, tucked away in a settings menu, has the smarts to automatically detect in which language the original document is written. It then opens the translated version in a new window, allowing you to compare and contrast the two side by side, more easily checking whether the translation has bungled any words or phrasing.

This new version can then either replace the original or be saved as a copy, though Google makes no visual indication in your document source list that its contents are in another language.

Google continues to move language translation into more and more of its products. On Thursday, it became a feature of Google Docs, letting anyone do an on-the-spot translation into one of 42 languages.

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In Gmail’s case, users can translate entire messages into one of Google Translate’s supported languages; however, this feature must first be enabled in Gmail’s Labs settings menu.

Over the last six months, Google has been quite busy adding translation to its other products, including its Gmail and Friend Connect services.

The translation implementation in Friend Connect is a little more interesting, as it’s able to unify the language on any comment thread, regardless of how many languages in which the user comments are written.

Why so large? Themes can come with a background image that shows on Chrome’s new-tab page that offers a much greater chance for expressiveness, especially since that page is the default when Chrome launches. That could help Google with its attempt to recruit artists to supply their own themes, as some have done with the iGoogle customizable home page.

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The collection of themes includes Legal Pad, Star Gazing, Transparent (it’s not, on my Windows XP machine), Dots, and Pencil Sketch. One monochromatic theme called Minimal downloads nearly instantly, but Grass, at 1.3MB, takes more time.

Mozilla has its own skinning technology in the works, a plug-in called Personas that launched on Mozilla Labs in March. That head start, coupled with its vastly larger and more engaged external audience, gives it a big lead over Chrome when it comes to getting gussied up.

Google on Tuesday launched a gallery of 29 themes for Google Chrome (requires Google Chrome 3.0 beta for Windows). But Mozilla, while refraining from sniggering, boasted it’s now up to 20,000.

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Mozilla Labs announced Monday that Firefox now has 20,000 Personas, with 10,000 of them arriving in the last 10 weeks.

Cosmetic changes are, well, cosmetic, but a lot of people like them as a way to add some flair to their machines. Many had been pestering Google to add themes support even though Chrome employs a Spartan user interface without much acreage for artistry. Last week’s developer version of Chrome added a “Get themes” button in the Options dialog box, and now Google has flipped the switch to activate the Web page that button points to.

This theme is called Grass.

Google now offers a gallery of themes for its Chrome browser.