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Then a U.S. Contractor needs to HIRE this guy for a huge sum of money, perfect this suit and mass produce it! If he could build this on his OWN in his own home, imagine if he was working with others with more sophisticated equipment!

Troy Hurtubise is a modern day genius. This suit, called the Trojan Suit, could protect our troops in the war and greatly reduce casualties and it would be VERY intimidating to the enemy as well.

Original Article

Troy Hurtubise’s Trojan Suit

He’s lost his family and his truck, but not his will to see Canadian soldiers wearing his armored suit.

Troy Hurtubise, 43, is travelling from North Bay to his hometown in Hamilton this week to make preparations for a three-day tour of Ontario war memorials. He plans to gather signatures on a petition pressing Ottawa to test the effectiveness of the Trojan suit he created in his home lab.

Hurtubise became an Internet sensation last winter when he introduced the suit and put it up for auction on eBay, drawing media attention worldwide.

The Trojan takes design inspiration from movies and video games and puts it into light armour that Hurtubise says is bulletproof. The suit offers 95 per cent head and body coverage, and also features such extras as a helmet ventilation system, arm-mounted pepper-spray, magnetic sidearm holsters, and even a crotch-mounted, pull-down clock.

When the suit failed to draw any substantial eBay bids, Hurtubise ran out of money and his family was evicted from their home. Hurtubise said his 16-year marriage crumbled under the stress. He sold his pickup and gave his wife the proceeds to start up in a new home, and now it’s just him and the suit.

He’s planning to visit three war memorials daily between Saturday and Monday, arriving at the cenotaph in Hamilton’s Gore Park at 9 a.m. Saturday, and wrapping up at the National War Memorial in Ottawa at 3 p.m. Monday.

He plans to walk “a soldier’s mile” to each memorial wearing the Trojan suit, then stop and salute.

At each stop over the three-day tour, he’ll be gathering signatures on a petition he hopes to present at the Parliament buildings also on Monday.

Here is the blurb from it on Wikipedia…

In early 2007, Hurtubise made public his new protective suit which was designed to be worn by soldiers. Calling it the “Trojan”, Hurtubise describes it as the “first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.” Weighing in at 40 lbs, he claims that the suit can withstand bullets from high powered weapons (including an elephant gun). Hurtubise claims that he has been unable to test the suit against live ammunition because no one is willing to shoot him in it.

The suit has many features including a solar powered air system, recording device, compartments for emergency morphine and salt, and a knife and gun holster. He estimates that the cost of each suit to be roughly $2,000 if mass produced. It has been called the Halo suit, after the fictional MJOLNIR battle armor the Master Chief character wears in the Xbox game.

In early February, after failing to receive any offers to buy the Trojan, Hurtubise - now bankrupt from the expense of creating the suit - was forced to put the prototype up for auction on eBay in the hopes that it would bring in enough money to sustain his family. Unfortunately for Hurtubise, the auction’s reserve bid was not met. There was a raffle for the suit on the Mission Trojan website, who’s goal is to raise money for further prototypes and testing of the Trojan Suit to demonstrate its abilities for military applications. The suit was won by Sara Markis of West Palm Beach, Florida.

Besides this suit, Troy also has invented other things that in conjunction with this could advance modern day war fighting and law enforcement to the next level.

1313 Paste

One of Hurtubise’s latest projects has been the creation of a new paste that he’s called 1313 and believes could be put to good military use. It is a mixture of all his previous concoctions applied to a kevlar fiber pad and then subjected to high pressure for the period of a day in a press. The result is a board or tile-like panel. The panel is placed in layers with other materials such as tiles. The resulting composite material can withstand a direct assault by shotgun slugs, rifle fire, and enough high explosive to demolish a car, yet is quite inexpensive to manufacture.

At an enthusiastic demonstration taped by Daily Planet, Troy displayed its capability to a Canadian military observer. In one of Troy’s demonstrations, the composite material was placed in cushions meant to be placed over the outside of a Humvee. In the tests, the material successfully blocked explosive charges greater than those of a rocket propelled grenade, although they were not shaped charges, and was able to block shot after shot on exactly the same point of impact by a sniper rifle (which is a feat no material in use by the U.S. nor any other military has matched in public demonstrations).

It is Troy’s desire to see military vehicles, currently in service in Afghanistan, equipped with such protection in order to stand up to a landmine explosion, which has already claimed the lives of Canadian soldiers serving there. That, along with his younger brother serving in the Canadian military, inspired the creation of 1313.

I got home this evening and docked my iPhone to get the 1.1.4 update… The docking started up iTunes and notified me that the update was available, so I went ahead and started it.

The normal upgrade procedure started and I went about my browsing during the install.  It seemed to take a bit longer (probably adding the framework for the SDK) and it rebooted as usual.

I noticed the signal was low when I unlocked the keypad and the signal didn’t get better (I usually have 3 bars or so).   So I went ahead and rebooted the phone again and it came up to this screen…

I went ahead and connected it, it synced successfully, but STILL came back to this screen every time.  Then I took out and reseated the SIM card…………… Nothing.

CONCLUSION:

I was getting ready to call Apple Support, then I realized that before I started the update,  the Apple Update asked me to update iTunes and a Leopard Graphics fix… After updating iTunes, rebooting, then syncing the phone with the NEW version, it kicked right in and activated it.

MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE iTUNES TO THE LATEST BEFORE UPDATING TO 1.1.4!

Disclaimer:  I did originally have a Jailbroken 1.1.1 then went to 1.1.3, before reverting back to 1.1.2 (Jailbroken) and then back to 1.1.3 full to get the new features.  So, I’m not sure if this could have caused any of this.  Since it is fixed now, I figured it was NOT the cause. 

Blackberries have been out since approximately 3:30pm Monday. All carriers are affected since all Blackberry email is dependent upon RIM’s servers being operational for email to be received.

The whole model is a bit silly in my opinion and since this isn’t the first time this has happened, RIM should rethink their architecture a bit to allow fallback of some kind or at least have multiple redundant locations to allow service continuity.

I am glad I went with an iPhone instead of a Blackberry since iPhones aren’t tied to the manufacturer like the Blackberry is. Believe it or not, iPhone owners are on a much longer leash. There is not a single service on the iPhone that would become “Unavailable” if Apple were to have a network issue. Apple was smart enough to simply put a standard POP3/IMAP client on the phone that accesses the user’s mail server directly via WiFi or EDGE.

Companies, instead of investing HUGE (and I mean HUGE) amounts of money into the Blackberry Enterprise Server, should simply open up a secure IMAP port and allow users to retrieve their email from iPhones. Eventually Apple will probably update the mail.app to allow direct MAPI or RPC over HTTPS type connections to interface with corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers.

This is as simple as configuring a few services and opening/securing some ports whereas BlackBerry Enterprise Servers licenses cost as much as $60,000 for 1000 users and many tens of thousands for additional CALs. For a large company, the cost JUST for the licenses could cost > $100,000. That’s not including the cost of the administrators to install it, maintain it, and additional hardware to support it and lost productivity due to outages of the manufacturer’s infrastructure.

Just configure IMAP/MAPI, open some ports and buy an iPhone! :-)