Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq

team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds' is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."

Coming to America

[nokilli (759129)]

It's only logical. Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated, which means that future efforts on the part of the citizenry to protest the increasingly hateful policies of this government will become more and more confrontational, and which in turn sees the government resorting to ever more punitive policies in response.

Prediction: the ray-gun is on the streets in America in time for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

I can't wait to hear what they consider to be acceptable levels of casualties as the result of using this thing on people.

The thing I regret most in this life is that of all the science fiction movies I loved watching as I grew up, Soylent Green [imdb.com] ends up being the one that most closely depicts the future.

(I'd rather take my chances on the Nostromo.)
--
Why didn't you know? [tinyurl.com]

Re:Coming to America

[iamdrscience (541136)]

Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated,

Since when are riots considered peaceable assembly? This thing is designed, like teargas, beanbag guns, rubber bullets, etc. to disperse riots. Now I'm not saying that that's all they'll be used for, certainly there are instances where the line is grey and the police in charge of these devices have inappropriately chosen to use them, but there is a valid reason for them to be developed.

I'm glad that devices like these exist because as much as it's important for people to peaceably assemble, if a mob of people gets rowdy and starts destroying peoples' property en masse, they have abused their right and ought to be dispersed.

Re:Coming to America

[nokilli (759129)]

Absent the trend in placing new and more onerous restrictions on where, when and how many people are allowed to peaceably assemble, I might agree with you.

Re:Coming to America

[chrish (4714)]

That's it, Citizen, you just earned yourself a trip to the Freedom Zone!

Re:Coming to America

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

It's designed to be used against people. How does it sort out the "rioters"? Is it any better than the cops at the NYC RNC convention last year, who swept up everyone on the streets, regardless of their "peacable" status? Or any of the other mass arrests I've ever heard of, where my friends, or their friends, have been picked up, even when just caught on the other side of the street, on their way to work?

Have you ever been in a public demonstration? The actual treatment of your rights - ignoring them - is enough to wake up practically anyone. Especially when you see how different it is from TV and the movies. This raygun is going to get abused even worse than batons and tear gas, because its effects are mostly invisible. So the person leaning on the trigger, farther away from the action, won't be as inhibited by feeling personal responsibility. This thing is a nightmare from hell for people who actually care about exercising freedom, rather than just hiding behind a police fantasy, fearing for their property over crowds that will never threaten them.

The answer is: TINFOIL!

[notany (528696)]

Tinfoil. Tinfoil hat, dungarees, under your normal clothes. And you can carry tinfoil placards that reflect microwaves back to police.

Re:The answer is: TINFOIL!

[notany (528696)]

Yeah. I tried to put tinfoil in the microwave. The point is that if you wrap tings in tinfoil, it won't let microwawes in.

All the outside special effects, sparks and lightning, just make the demonstrators look like they have been attaced by The Dark Lord of Sith (tm). Great way to get prime time TV-coverage for the cause.

Re:Coming to America

[Biomechanical (829805)]

This isn't a counter-argument to either you or the next comment up, merely an observation of a rally I was in several years ago.

It was a rally for the decriminalization (sp?) of cannabis.

We sang songs, smoked dope (quite illegaly) with a couple of coppers on the job watching us, and generally just annoyed people by holding up traffic and chanting corny slogans.

The few people I noticed who did try to get everyone all fired up and bloodthirsty got one of two things - the first few were, very inconspicuously, beaten up by a couple of the bigger, "gentle giants" in the crowd, and the other wankers were shoved straight into the arms of the police, who arrested the dickheads for "assaulting an officer", with a wink and a smile from the rest of us.

We'd decided on having a peaceful rally, with some civil (polite too) disobedience by our pot smoking, and we'd kept that peace through some subtly violent methods. There was no damage to property, nor people who weren't being morons.

We were Brisbanites, quietly, seriously, exercising our possible - still dunno if there's anything in the books that says we're entitled to it - right to peacefully assemble and express our displeasure at the government, and that's what we did, and because we were civil-minded, peaceful folk, we beat mary-hell out of the dumb fucks that tried to ruin it for us and then we handed them over to the police while wearing big, doped smiles.

It was a pleasant day.

Re:Coming to America

[by Anonymous Coward]

Amen, everyone properly inside the free speech cages will be shielded from the microwaves completely.

Re: Coming to America

[zoney_ie (740061)]

Course not. Sure didn't some big world superpower give him a load of help in the 1980s?

Re: Coming to America

[kalel666 (587116)]

I know this is one of those things that "everybody knows", that the US armed Saddam in the 80's, but the facts speak otherwise. Yes, we supplied Iraq with monies and arms, but we were far behind those paragons of International virtue like:

USSR 17503 50.78%
France 5221 15.15%
China 5192 15.06%
Czechoslovakia 1540 4.47%
Poland 1626 4.72%
Brazil 724 2.10%
Egypt 568 1.65%
Romania 524 1.52%
Denmark 226 0.66%
Libya 200 0.58%
USA 200 0.58%

But don't take my word for it. Refer to the report from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) here: http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/Trnd_Ind_IRQ_Im ps_73-02.pdf [sipri.se]

If you're going to blame the US for something, go ahead, but a least blame us for something legitimate.

Re:Coming to America

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

Protest != Riot
Riot != Protest

Re:Coming to America

[Total_Wimp (564548)]

Yes, it is.

The reason is that assembling to call the government to task for the wrongs they've done is instantly reclasified as rioting and pillaging.

Boston tea party. A bunch of guys rioted and pillaged to decry the wrongs of the government.

Rodney King verdict riots. A bunch of people rioted and pillaged to decry the wrongs of the government.

What's the difference? Was one violent and the other peaceful? Did one involve property damage while the other did not?

How about the WTO protests in Seattle that were broken up with rubber bullets and tear gas? Were they causing property damage? Were they pillaging?

And then of course there's all the pillaging that was going on in Tiananmen square.

Whenever you have a government force putting down "riots", you better take some time to figure out why so many people are so god damned upset. Calling them a bunch of pillagers is moste definately missing the point.

TW

Re:Coming to America

[anaesthetica (596507)]

Your moral equivalency is really quite striking.

Everyone has the right to assemble peaceably to protest what they consider a grievance against our duly elected and representative government.

The Boston Tea party did not protest against a democratic and elected government, but against a monarch taxing unrepresented citizens.

The Rodney King rioters damaged and looted the property of their fellow private citizens in protest of government action. That's completely unjust to those that had their homes and stores wrecked. A march, a rally, fiery public speeches, petitions, a sit-in at the court or city hall--all of these would have been acceptable. But the rioters damaged their neighbors in their anger at the government, and such action is rightfully stopped. It is one thing to protest against a monarch and another to protest against an elected and accountable government.

WTO protesters in Seattle were not uniformly non-violent. Many private citizens, once again, had to pay the price for someone else's anger at the government. That's fundamentally unjust, that I might have my property destroyed by someone angry, not at me, but at the government.

Tiananmen square was certainly peaceful to begin with, although I don't doubt that as it went on the protesters engaged in provocation with the police. But, you cannot draw equivalency between protest in a public square against a totalitarian government and protest in the streets of LA against an elected government's decision which involves destruction of private homes and stores. There is no moral equivalence there, whatsoever.

Re:Coming to America

[JudicatorX (455442)]

Because shotguns permanently maim and/or kill

Because shotguns can't be used by one or two people against tens of thousands.

Because shotguns aren't (usually) used to deny large crowds their fundamental right to assemble in peaceful process.

Because shotguns weren't developed for crowd 'control'.

Because before George "Fucking Haliburton" Walker Bush there were no "Free Speech Zones", and hence no "No-free-speech zones".

Re:Coming to America

[by Anonymous Coward]

put in place by a democracy

Well, Nazi Germany started out as a representative democracy, too.

But I didn't realize we were supposed to give people a hard time about their sigs.

The fact is, crap like this is bad. I don't care how violent a small minority of Iraqis are. There is no sense in burning them and giving them cancer just for being in a crowd.

And yes, if it were applied domestically, crap like this would be just as bad. The grandparent raises a good point. Recent attitudes of law enforcement towards political protesters post Patriot Act have been alarming. Add this "ray gun" crap, and you've got something bad.

Maybe the grandparent shouldn't have singled out the RNC '08 convention, (would that offend you less?) but he is definitely right.

In my opinion, anyone who sees a distinction between using this in Iraq and using it in the USA is extremely ignorant, naive, or worse. People are people, regardless of nationality. There are a few bad apples in Iraq but the majority are normal people like you or me. Something like this has far too much potential for misuse.

Re:mod these trolls down.

[grumpygrodyguy (603716)]

Why the heck are mods modding this flame-war up!?!

What could be more on-topic than a flame-war?

Re:Right... I'm sure that's it

[arodland (127775)]

Government, as an institution, is supposed to exist to solve (or at least mitigate) the people's problems.

The average person, when placed in a position of power, wishes to use that power to improve his own situation. Such a person, in a government position finds that the best way to increase his personal power is to increase the size and importance of his domain of power -- which, as we've seen, is based upon "solving" some problem that the people have.

The best method they've found so far is to create the problem with one hand while solving it with the other. Move more responsibility from the people to the government, and justify more work. Create more complications and loopholes in the tax codes, and work harder to bust tax evaders. Make more things illegal, and make law enforcement look good. It's a justification to do more, to take more of your money for your own good. It is evil. It's a million acts of small, petty evil in the guises of kindness and service.

As to the bit about the Republicans -- it's been said before that the US is run by two parties: the party of Evil and the party of Stupidity. I agree with that assessment, but I think that the roles change day-to-day. Neither one is any better than the other.

So...

[einstienbc (825770)]

Wheres mine?

Health implications

[JemVai777 (411658)]

I Wonder whether its usage can contribute to cancer down the track?

Re:Health implications

[Tezkah (771144)]

I Wonder whether its usage can contribute to cancer down the track

... only if you use it to light your cigarette. =)

Re:Health implications

[carldot67 (678632)]

It's hard to say.

All cells have a fundamental shock response to heating as well as to UV and other stimuli. They produce various repair enzymes that wander around doing useful stuff like refolding damaged proteins and relinking damaged DNA.

The problem is they sometimes get it wrong leading to mutations or regulation imbalances. Heating also changes the shape of proteins. Go higher than 42C for many animal proteins and they cease to work properly, in some cases permanently until they are replaced (there is a natural turnover).

Now since proteins are involved in genetic switchgear and regulation I can easily see the possibility of one delicate subsystem going out of whack: growth factors, receptors, messengers, polymerase initiation factors, repressors etc. If one or more of these go wrong you _can_ have unregulated cell growth. aka Cancer.

This would be particularly true for children or individuals with a pre-existing disposition.

Numbers are hard for me to take a stab at without data and mammalian heat-shock isnt my field (although my degree in molecular biology is a good start).

However, and as most people would suspect, unnatural stimuli given often enough to a large enough sample will eventually throw up something bad in individual cases at a rate higher than a control group. Its a statistical certainty.

What "how often", "eventually" and "large enough" and "something bad" mean in relation to the weapon are anyone's guess. And I think thats a problem. You can find all this out for Aspirin, so why not the weapon?

On balance, if you get tagged by this thing once due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time then the chances are it's not going to harm you long term. That said, I would really, really steer clear of it. It sounds like a nightmare.

Speaking from a social viewpoint, I personally think its a dangerous escalation. If the authorities start firing this at people then it can surely only be a matter of time until they start firing back.

Re:Health implications

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

Given that the only depleted uranium rounds are only fired from 25, 105, and 120mm guns, if you got hit by one cancer ought to be the last thing on your mind. Personally, I'd be much more concerned with keeping myself in one piece, or barring that at least in as few as possible.

Re:Health implications

[plumby (179557)]

It means that the level of uranium 235 (compared to U234/U236) is reduced to below the levels found in nature. It is around 60% as radiocative as natural uranium, and once inside the body has exactly the same effects as natural uranium (mostly lung/kidney damage). Not as dangerous as enriched uranium it's true, but still not particularly nice stuff.

"non" lethal?

[by Anonymous Coward]

• Interesting that they focus on the non-lethal aspect. I'd suspect the military would also be interested on whether you could turn up the power a bit, and you have a lethal ray gun that can hit lots of people at once.
• Wonder if the volunteers of which the article speaks were found in a similar way that earlier human radiation 'volunteers' [doe.gov] were found.
• Wonder if making people feel like they're being burned alive counts as torture?

Wow this is stupid

[vectorian798 (792613)]

But New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes. In another test they were also told to remove metal objects such as coins from their clothing to prevent local hot spots from developing on their skin.

In real life obviously there are going to be people wearing lenses or carrying metal objects so what gives???

Is Iraq just the guinea pig for our experiments now?

While I certainly support non-lethal weapons in use of riot dispersion, this does not seem safe at all (and certainly, I do not want to be aimed at with microwaves!)

Little Waves in an Ocean of Hate

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

That's the way to win "hearts and minds" of people angry at the US occupation forces: zap them with rayguns. We'll teach them how the 21st Century US welcomes them with "compassionate conservatism", by frying them with rayguns. After sizzling whole towns, there's no way they'll ever listen to insane jihadists telling them that the Great Satan has burned them with hellfire, that we're all better off in a medieval fiefdom under god. Yeah, sticking Iraqis into a microwave oven is exactly the way to get them to calm down, stop their civil war, and break out those flowers they're supposed to be greeting us with.

Re:Little Waves in an Ocean of Hate

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Well, some Americans now remember that Nixon revealed in tapes before the 1972 elections that he was backing the South Vietnamese only long enough to win reelection, then he was dropping them like a napalm bomb. Which he did, to the cheers of the hippies. If third-rate burglars like G. Gordon Liddy hadn't given the press and prosecutors the kind of easy meat they needed to nail Nixon, he would have claimed he pulled out of Vietnam as the "peace president", and sent his Chinese ambassador, George Bush Sr, to a landslide election in 1976.

Now that Bush Jr is in front of the camera, they're not making any of those mistakes again. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who "lost Vietnam" by officiating over the fall of Saigon, has been sure not to let any bodies get counted, let alone televised. President Vice President Cheney learned, while on Nixon's staff, to stay in the privacy of the president's shadow, letting him speak whatever the political genius whispers in his earbuds.

But it's all so similar to Vietnam, which was so mostly successful for the Republicans, with such clearly identifiable mistakes. This time, though, the press knows they can grab the limelight like Woodward and Bernstein, and turn minor careers into popular myths, guaranteed lifetimes of selling books and being hailed as geniuses. That's why they're howling for Rove now, after 5, 25 years of watching that reptile get away with literal murder (or accessory to).

Personally, I remember Watergate, and I really remember Iran/Contra. It's not an echo: it's the same creeps, with the same playbook, updated from their Superbowl losses to work with some new blood. Blood all over their hands.

Re:Little Waves in an Ocean of Hate

[quarkscat (697644)]

Methinks you need to turn the clock back just a bit more.

Think about the Republican Eisenhower/Nixon plan for the liberation of Communist Cuba, AKA the Bay of Pigs Fiasco that "failed" because Democrat JFK wouldn't furnish "air support". The Republicans have made use of Cuban-American expatriates in covert operations ever since that time, including terrorist bombings and air piracy against Cuban civilian aircraft. They played a part in repeated attempts to assassinate Castro, which may have been a direct cause of JFK's death. The Cuban-Americans were also part of the CREEP "team" that buglarized the Watergate offices of the DNC. They were called upon again as part of the "tiger teams" that got directly involved in the war against the Sandanistas. And it was a Cuban-American on the IT staff of the Senate Republicans that "broke into" the Senate Democrats' fileservers, and then released damaging emails and "position papers" to the press in 2002.

So, it really is all the same players, and with similar but updated playbooks, but the same dirty tricks. With brother Jeb Bush as the governator of Florida , is it any wonder that President George Bush has promised amnesty and SS benefits to illegal aliens who have increasingly flooded across our still unsecured after 9/11/2001 southern border. The Cuban-Americans have proven to be capable and willing covert partners of neo-Con(artist) Republicans. No doubt Dubya&Co. expect similar support from the illegal Mexicans.

Re:Little Waves in an Ocean of Hate

[quarkscat (697644)]

With the (literally) tons of money being spent on the Iraq war, including new "high technology" answers to the wrong geopolitical questions, there is a convergence of "Rumsfeld" technology coming.

Picture 20 or 30 thousand less American troops in Iraq in 2006, replaced with remote controlled DARPA challenge robots with these microwave "rayguns" mounted aboard. Along with the already effective and deadly remotely piloted UAVs riding "shotgun" overhead. All being controlled by US military (or contractors) in nicely air conditioned facilities in Qatar. Everything from "crowd control" to "riot dispersal" to killing insurgents, all without the loss of American solder's lives protested in silent memorial on PBS.

Considering the penchant for the Dubya regime to "cookie cutter" patch the same problems in different venues, I would expect this very same technology to be applied to the control of domestic American insurg^H^H^H^H^H^Hprotestors in the same time-frame.

That's a relief

[legLess (127550)]

From the article:

Burn injury is prevented by limiting the beam's intensity and duration.

Well thank god for that. We all know the customary restraint of law enforcement and military personnel will prevent any civilian injuries,

Wouldn't this be foiled

[ostsJoe (756449)]

by tin foil?

Re:Wouldn't this be foiled

[Boricle (652297)]

I suspect that what happens then is that they use the "less-lethal" tool first - anyone left standing, or with shiny foil face masks are then categorised as "combatants" and "more-lethal" tools are then used.

The trick will be to incorporate the foil into some unobtusive clothing, dress up like a woman in head-to-toe covering (otherwise it will look strange if you are in full head covering). Or maybe a member of the Klan with some sun-glasses on. That'd be unobtrusive (not). Any kind of full body covering will do. Cow costume..., Scuba gear, ummm....

Of course the fact that you are not running away screaming might still be a bit of a clue.

Probably won't do much for improvised explosives though.

...which reminds me, I must remember to wrap my passport in foil..

So many questions

[Valacosa (863657)]

My first thoughts:

• How wide-focus is this? Would police be able to use this on the street without frying everyone?
• Could some sort of protection be made against this? (Portable Faraday cage, maybe?) If not, what's to prevent one of these falling into the black market and eventually being used on Police?
• So Iraq has become the population-control guinea pig. What's even better is that this will probably be viewed by police as a magical dissent-eliminating ray. It's not. If people can't peacefully protest (or even riot), dissent is just forced underground, causing it to be made manifest more anonymously, more unexpectedly, and likely more distructively. Instead of more protests or riots, we have more things like...say...roadside bombs.
  
  Wait, isn't that terrorism? Using this thing could increase terrorism? Fucking wonderful.

"Nonlethal" at the sandia article

[hobotron (891379)]

Nonlethal weaponry is a horseshit myth.

The term they should have used (and what law enforcement uses now, after more than a few wrongful death lawsuits, is the term of "Less lethal". Did any of the Kirtland Air Force Base participants have a pre existing heart condition? I bet they didnt let pregnant women participate.

Im so glad that when every time one of these proportedly nonlethal weapons pops up its run under a FULL and accurate barrage of labratory and set up tests, which almost never reveal the compounding issues that lead to death in real world enviroments.

The news.com article asks a few of the many lurking questions to this system. We all know this device is going to Iraq to go through real world testing before its used here in the US. Someone is counting on all the "little kinks" that are more than likely deadly will be ironed out under the public eye.

I find it highly ironic that our testing of this indescriminant weapon will be used in our even more indescriminant war.

Terrorists dont use large crowds as weapons, if you stop and think at why this weapon would be needed, its ultimately crowd control on our home front. Now why would we need that? Lakers winning again? I highly doubt it. Someone had a plan when they initated and funded the development of this, and it doesnt look like a good one.

Iam certain

[jd (1658)]

..it is possible to devise a genuinely non-lethal weapon. The problem is, I doubt anyone would buy it if such a thing really existed. In order to be truly non-lethal, it would need to operate on some principle other than extreme shock or total immobilization.

I'm surprised they haven't deployed water cannons over there - those would seem to be infinitely less lethal than machine-guns or even this microwave laser they're proposing. However, given the heatwaves and lack of electricity for cooling, there's a danger people would riot just to cool down.

Of course, a lot of the dissaffection is as a result of a lack of amenities in an extremely unforgiving climate. On that basis, it would probably be much more cost-effective simply to give every household their own generator and supply them with fuel until the power situation has been stabilized. Probably kill a whole lot fewer people, too. Might even win a few friends.

For the safer parts of the country, they could even run a water delivery service. Drop off a 20 or 50 gallon tank in the morning at the front door, picking up the empties in the process. No different than what a million milkmen do every day in England - except the getting shot at part, and the size of the bottles.

That wouldn't eliminate problems, but it would reduce a LOT of the tension. And if you reduce the tension, you reduce the risk of riots and other violent protest. Containment is better done by meeting legitimate complaints, rather than suppressing them. Suppressing them only risks building the tension up more, which increases the risk of massive confrontation.

Things are bad enough, over there, why go out of our way to make things worse, when it is cheaper, easier and quicker (not to mention more ethical) NOT to?

We have lost the war on Iraq

[by Anonymous Coward]

We have given up on winning their hearts and minds, instead we will cook their hearts and minds with experimental ray-guns. God Bless America!

Why is it ...

[chrispycreeme (550607)]

with all our technology, science, power and resources, all we seem to do is come up with more and more fucking evil disgusting ways of hurting people? This is fucking sick.. Does nobody else see this?

Freedom Ray

[HunkaHunkaBurninLove (411198)]

This will nicely wrap up our hearts-and-minds campaign.

they've used this in Miami

[pirateshot (900237)]

I have anti-globalization activist friends who were in Miami in 2003 protesting the FTAA meeting going on at the time. They tell me that the cops (other than having their own embedded journalists, getting extremely favorable corporate media coverage, beating people senseless and blinding some people with pepperspray) used some sort of microwave weapon on them and it made them throw up. For more info on that protest, check out a movie called the Miami Model http://www.ftaaimc.org/miamimodel [ftaaimc.org].

Re:they've used this in Miami

[basic0 (182925)]

I'd never heard of this "microwave weapon" until now, but you may be referring to the "Long Ranged Acoustic Device" which has been in use by police and military for years now. Apparently, with the right sound frequency, it's able to cause nausea and disorientation within seconds. More info can be found here [infowars.com]

Re:they've used this in Miami

[Khyber (864651)]

You are right, it was indeed the weapon you describe.

It's been known for quite some time now that using waves of sound can do all kinds of things to the human body. Using stereo-separated soundwaves of differing frequencies, you can create a harmonic that your brain respods to. This has been shown to make people sick, or make them feel better and give relief from a headache. It's also shown to be possible to make people hallucinate, put them to sleep, pep them up, and more. Our skulls and brains respond rather well to nice resonating frequencies. Kudos for you bringing this up. Makes me wish I could post and mod at the same time.

Testing "intolerable heat" - in NEW MEXICO?

[evilandi (2800)]

Lemme see if I've got this straight.

They tested a system to find out whether people were experiencing intolerable heat in New Mexico?

Surely in New Mexico, all you have to do is just stand in the sun?

Re:Talked about earlier...

[Rei (128717)]

No, they'd rather people not shoot protesting crowds. If the crowds are using lethal force or threatening the position of our troops, our troops will use lethal force back with or without our magic ray gun.

Seriously, from a practical standpoint, what will happen the first time we fire this thing into. say, one of al-Sadr's regular 10k+ angry-mob protests? Everyone with glasses risks going blind; everyone with metal on them gets burns. Everyone with a pacemaker risks getting their heart stopped. It'd be almost a guaranteed new Sadrist revolt, plus easily increasing other Shia and widespread Sunni insurgency recruiting, while not killing any insurgents. Of course, the effects don't apply just to the crowd; beams keep on going.

But lets take this further than the obvious anger that the US using some sci-fi style technology on a country that has no ability to resist it would inspire. Everyone who gets cancer within a few months of such a usage within half a dozen blocks of the site will blame it on the US's new "pain-ray". Everyone who miscarries? The same. Everyone who gets a headache, who has a heart attach, who comes down with a nasty disease... it'll all get blamed on the device.

Strategically, this is an awful decision.

Re:Totally Inappropriate Slashdot Article

[The Wooden Badger (540258)]

Tell me about robots, new types of air-conditioner and spacecraft but keep this weapons crap out of here - we geeks are pretty much pacifists and don't care about this stuff.

Yeah! tell me about Quake, and Doom, and Half Life, and Counter Strike, and Halo, and Unreal...

Re:Totally Inappropriate Slashdot Article

[pandrijeczko (588093)]

Yeah! tell me about Quake, and Doom, and Half Life, and Counter Strike, and Halo, and Unreal...

We geeks are also pretty good at distinguishing fantasy from reality.

Besides, Counter Strike is the only game you list that has any basis of fact, all the others are in totally fictional environments.

The whole point of violence in games, particularly with kids, is you don't stop them playing these games because they are just fun pure and simple. It's bad parents that use PS2s and XBoxes as "babysitters", leave their kids on them for hours on end and don't spend time with them balancing out in-game violence with real-life love and attention.

So let's have none of this "game violence" BS...

Re:Totally Inappropriate Slashdot Article

[lxs (131946)]

we geeks are pretty much pacifists and don't care about this stuff.

You misspelled apathetic.

Seriously, this attitude is why crappy patents and laws like the DMCA are passed uncontested. It's all very nice living with blinkers on your eyes, ignoring the real world, but don't go crying when that world rudely intrudes on your own life.

If you really were a pacifist, then you should be extremely interested in the ways states have of hurting dissenters, since this thing could be used against you or your fellow humans (but not while you're locked in your bedroom playing Everquest)
Not to mention that inhumane weaponry like this is the best propaganda tool for those opposing war.

Re:Hearts and Minds

[pegasustonans (589396)]

Is this part of the battle for "winning hearts and minds"?

No, it's the battle for cooking them up with Worcestershire sauce.

Re:Potentially lethal?

[Grym (725290)]

The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?

Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her [boston.com]. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!

The thing in the article covers an entire area. Do you think the operator is going to check and make sure that nobody in the crowd is wearing glasses, jewelry, or contacts? That's impossible!

Even in theory, this isn't a non-lethal weapon at all... It's quite obvious that this is intended as a means of disarming (have we forgotten that guns/knives are metal?) and/or killing large groups of people immediately without collateral damage; just like a neutron bomb [wikipedia.org], only more controllable and cheaper.

-Grym

Re:This WILL cause lots of nice CANCER.

[Dahan (130247)]

GHz is not a measure of energy.

True, but the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. E = hf, where h is Planck's constant. That's why hard ultraviolet light (~1 PHz or 1,000,000GHz) has enough energy to knock electrons out of orbit and cause mutations in DNA, while 95 GHz microwaves do not have enough energy to do so, no matter how many photons you crank out.