China Buying US Directed Sound 'Weapon' 350
holy_calamity writes "The directed sound weapon made by US company ATC is being exported to the Chinese police, despite the public law banning sales of weapons to China. Turns out that such 'non-lethal' technologies are not covered by this law — an omission that may become more widely known if they are used to quell high-profile protests during the Olympics."
Non-lethal? (Score:5, Informative)
The sound weapon being sold may be non-lethal, but who is to say they won't RE the device and make lethal sound weapons. Sound can kill. If you stand next to a speaker when 160db of sound comes out of it, you'll be dead. NASA uses sound to test the tiles on the shuttle, anyone caught inside that tester would be killed instantly when the sound came on.
Re:Might as well make a buck... (Score:3, Informative)
NOTE: I do not support the selling of weapons to anyone and I am making no moral judgments with the below.
World War 1 - The upper-class of Europe gets a bit excitable and millions of people die, although in the long run (after WW2) it effectively removed the European upper-class from power which is a good thing. It had nothing to do with economics whatsoever.
World War 2 - Effectively two wars:
1) Europe - an extension of WW1. Basically, caused by different power bases/ideals vying for the power vacuum left by the removal of the upper-class in Germany, Russia, Austria and a weakening of it elsewhere.
2) The Pacific - Japan, the only non-white skinned empire and great power had limited resources, i.e. steel and oil. The other (white skinned) powers (British Empire, US, Dutch & French) refused to supply the Japanese. This left them two options:
i) Give up on their imperial and economic ambitions.
or
ii) Take it from someone
Their hands were forced into the second option and the entire reason for Pearl Harbor was to knock out the US long enough so they could grab the oil in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) and, hopefully, become strong enough before the US had a chance to re-arm. If the US had not had a colony^M^M^M^M^M^Mterritory called The Philippines, Pearl Harbor would not have been necessary at all.
The entire Pacific war was forced by the other powers refusing to sell the means to make an economy work (and make war), oil & steel, to the Japanese.
I am not justifying any of the actions of any of the governments at the time, just stating happened.
Re:Non-lethal? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Might as well make a buck... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Non-lethal? (Score:5, Informative)
160 dB CANNOT kill. It can rupture your eardrums, but not kill. See, sound is measured in dB SPL - deciBels of Sound Pressure Level. The reference is 0 dB = 20 uPa (micropascals) of pressure.
Do some math, and you'll find out that 194 dB SPL is one atmosphere of pressure. Meaning that 160 dB SPL is about 1/1000th of an atmosphere. You experience more pressure by swimming 0.5 meters under the surface of the water.
160 dB CANNOT kill. Pressures - sounds - of 194 dB cannot kill (that's the pressure level of the NASA sonic test weapons). That's 10 meters under water, one extra atmosphere, and harmlessly encountered on a daily basis by millions of divers.
And for the record, yes I am an acoustician, and yes I have worked on sonic weapons.
Re:Non-lethal? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Non-lethal? (Score:3, Informative)
While it's true that you experience high levels of pressure while diving (up to 5.5bar at ~45m meters, which is somewhat approaching the limit of safe casual diving (it's all about Oxygen/Nitrogen saturation and nothing about pressure though)), the *change* of pressure is negligable.
With sound, the pressure change is several (depending on the pitch of the sound) tens/hundreds/thousands of times *per second*. I'm quite sure that makes a bit of a difference.
Re:Gotta keep them upiddy Tibetans in line. (Score:3, Informative)
For example, see this BBC news report [bbc.co.uk] from 2001 about plastic bullet use, which reports that at that time 17 people had been killed by them.
Re:police = military (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is: the government, at all levels, has in many aspects adopted a philosophy of "perception is reality" In other words, many in government believe that if people *think* that they are being protected then that means that they are, and those people in government are directing their policies to alter PUBLIC PERCEPTION rather than actually doing anything substantial to solve problems. For example, on the Daily Show recently, Doug Fife was promoting his new book. When asked about what the administration did wrong with Iraq, he basically said it was a problem of bad "branding". That's it in a nutshell...
It's like this, if I serve you a steaming pile of shit for dinner, it doesn't matter how much parsely and parmegian cheese I put on it. It doesn't matter if I put a well designed placard next to it that says "authentico spagetti itialiano"...IT'S STILL A PILE OF SHIT
PUBLIC PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY
Re:Yes let's... (Score:3, Informative)
It's the Chinese government's own figures. They have been widely reported. Here are a couple of links and I am sure Google can provide many more. (That tresriogrande troll might want to check a few before shooting his mouth off next time.)
For instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/international/asia/20china.html [nytimes.com]
A paragraph from http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2006/DA_spring_06/china/china_06.html [cpj.org]