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Weapons of War Now Include Lightning Guns
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is running a lengthy article today about Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems, an Indiana-based company that says its developed a nonlethal weapon that shoots lightning bolts. This article is an in-depth look at a company that's stirred up some controversy on Slashdot in the past. From the article: 'Lightning guns, heat rays, weapons that can make you hear the voice of God. This is what happens when the war on terror meets the entrepreneurial spirit.'"
because with the current American administration you get paid very well for attacking people.
The article mentions a "dazzler" laser which is designed to blind enemy combatants. Isn't this illegal under the Geneva Convention? I seem to recall a ban on weapons that blinded people.
got sig?
wait, so your argument is that since we might possibly have a chance of injuring or killing one or more people, we should just injure and kill everyone? yay for logical conclusions
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Well I was thinking about just not shotting them at all.
You know not harming our fellow man and all.
Sure, a Taser, on the rare occasion, can kill someone, but its a much more efficient alternative to a gun.
Similarly, this "non-lethal" lightning bolt is probably far from perfect, but its probably a better alternative. What I don't understand is why we need a lightning bolt when we already have the taser.
Rest assured these high tech toys will not be used on armed combatants, but on peaceful protesters.
Yeah, those G8 protesters out there burning cars, smashing storefronts, and generally destroying everything in sight are just...so...peaceful, aren't they?
There was a time when a protest was something arranged around non-violent confrontation. Today, protests are just another excuse for hooligans to do what they do best: destroy things for the fun of it.
Ghandi had it right: if you want an effective protest, violence is the last thing you should encourage or tolerate. It gives your opponents all the ammunition they need to increase the level of control, force, and invasiveness on those who are protesting. These freaks who are out there slinging rocks and Molotov cocktails are not protesters, they're thugs.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
So, the US sending weapons to the Dominican Republic, where those weapons were diverted to former Haitian death squads does not have US fingerprints on it?
President Aristide being refused additional bodyguards from the US mercenary contractor at a critical time doesn't hint that the US gov't might be involved?
The US bodyguards which Aristide had in Haiti who mysteriously "disappeared" right about the time the US Marines showed up are only a concincidence, huh?
The US Marines forcing Aristide out of his home and onto a US Air Force transport and taking him to a destination that the US gov't refused to tell him -- that was somehow not a "US thing"?
The US has invaded Haiti numerous times and at various times has militarily occupied the country for years. The US gov't supported and backed brutal dictatorships in Haiti. The latest incident is unusual only in that the US conned the French and Canadians -- shame on them -- to go along with the coup, and then later semi-successfully dumped the whole mess onto the UN.
You can't even own high-quality body armor, legally. So I can protect myself with a revolver, rifles, shotguns, but not body armor? Great...
The people of Vietnam did not want US domination and neo-colonialization, and the US lost that war. We lost Vietnam for 2 reasons: We placed political contraints on warriors. They were not allowed to cut off supply routes through supposedly-neutral Laos and Cambodia. Our military leadership started out fighting the wrong kind of war. They assumed that it was a conventional war in which winning the territory was more important than counterinsurgency tactics. This is a lesson our military has learnt extremely well. And don't think I'm merely referring you to someone who is wholly on my side of this issue. COL Hackworth's articles on military.com were highly critical of the way this particular war is being fought. For a primer on what the Vietnam war was like, I would like to refer you to two books by the late COL David H. Hackworth: About Face and Steel, My Soldiers' Hearts. The people of Iraq do not want US domination and neo-colonialization of their country, and the US is losing that war. I'd like to know what makes you think that we're losing the war in Iraq. Deaths? 1800 or so. Compared to the 2500 deaths from the D-day invasion alone, this is hardly a costly war as lives go. Equipment? Equipment is cheap and keeps Americans working. I'm not going to argue with you on our intentions in the war, since you've obviously drunk the Kool-Aid there, but I'm really interested in hearing why you think that we're loxing.
O'l Adam answers your question. What it boils down to, is to prevent war, the defence capability of a country has to be commensurate with its wealth, in order to make an attack by a neighbour unproffitable. Get his book from Project Gutenberg and educate yourself a little.
Oh well, what the hell...
..until someone loses a core brain function.
Everything is potentially lethal. Even carrots. And who says they don't cause severe and/or permanent damage?
What about getting rid of the cause of the anger?
What, so every time an angry mob protests about something, the government has to submit? That's effectively running a country by mob rule, whoever gets the most violent protestors wins.
Or even if they go to the rioting stage, why not ask them to sit down a talk about how you can improve things?
Yeah that'll work. Ten thousand rioters throwing chairs at the police, a policeman picks up a microphone and says "Can you please all sit down..."
Your second mistake is assuming that protestors have legitimate grievances that they're primarily interested in solving peacefully. 90% of them are just along for the ride, they get caught up in the buzz, it's a day out for them, nothing else. The other 10% aren't interested in listening to anyone.
Absolutely. Urban crowd control is the optimum environment for nonlethal weapons. The US military is serious about using nonlethal systems where practical, but they do recognize their limitations.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I disagree. I was recently reading a psychology journal that talked about the psychological profile of suicide bombers and how ideology spreads across social networks. While there is no overall fit for an extremist personality the journal did note that the most extreme fundamentalist views were often held by people between the early teens and young twenties.
It seems that young people are predisposed to pick up ideas based on their social networks (or memes if you will) and take an extreme, unquestioning point of view from that idea. Not suprising when you consider kids strive for identity through their peers and will assimilate whatever ideas their peer's social networks have.
More aware? Maybe. Smarter? Probably not.
those thugs are "agent provocateurs" deliberately planted to give the authorities the opportunity to claim that the protest isn't peacefull. What do think the real fuss is about over that server seizure then??? the servers were hosting photos of undercover policemen... evidence of the agent provocatuer policy
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well I think you guys should start worrying about the likely or actual existing problems[0] rather than worry about someone shooting nukes at you.
;)...
It'll be totally stupid to shoot stuff at the US. If leaders of my country ever even publicly talk about that, I would give medals to the first person to kill them. Which is why practically _nobody_ outside of the US and UK thought that Saddam would shoot stuff at US/UK despite what Bush or Blair said. "Minutes away etc", WMD, all bullshit.
Anyway, if you only had one nuke and you wanted to hurt the US real bad, there are other options to sneaking nukes into the US (even though it shouldn't be too difficult[1]). You could sneak the nukes into some other country and nuke a sensitive target[2], and make it look like the US did it.
After all if the US is stupid enough to have nuked Iraq, the irrational people (the target audience) wouldn't find it hard enough to believe the US was responsible for nuking some other sensitive target[2] soon after.
BTW just poisoning the water supplies could be easier to do, especially if you have suicidal volunteers.
[0] The US is willing to spend billions to select the leaders of Iraq, but somehow can't find the resources to get a decent voting system to pick its own leaders (the leaders of arguably the most powerful nation in the world). Perhaps the voting system is already working well for the leaders, but is it working well for the sheeple? The US Gov has lied so much about the Iraq war and billions have gone "missing" (search: iraq billions audit)... All sorts of dubious US laws are being created. There's so much important stuff you guys should worry and do more about, but I suppose your media doesn't help. I mean why is some drug company being sued for USD200+million just because some guy might have died because of a drug, when nobody seems to be that worried whether millions of people could have been affected by mercury in vaccines. Maybe all that mercury made too many US citizens stupid
[1] Tons of drugs and immigrants get through the US borders all the time.
[2] If you can't figure out what targets I might be referring to, I'm sure not going to tell you.
Nobody (well, nobody except some weirdos like China and so forth) is using weapons (non-lethal or not) against peaceful dissenters. And most of the recent major revolutions in which the good guys won were carried out peacefully.t m
o f_1989
I beg to differ on both counts. Clobbering peaceful protesters happens in western countries too, one example was a police raid after the G8 summit in Genoa a few years ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1460036.s
Considering revolutions, sometimes force is necessary. The Romanian Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_
for instance was quite bloody. And while it can be debated if the new governmen counted as "good guys", getting rid of Ceausescu was probably worth it.
C - the footgun of programming languages
As a member of an allied military the thought of serving with Americans terrifies me. In Afghanistan we have had more soldiers killed by Americans than by Afghans. I've talked to an America Officer who said during a sand storm in Iraq his platoon spent the entire night shooting because they couldn't see what was in front of them. These kind of actions are inexcusable. Just the opinion of myself and many other professional soldiers.