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Sonic 'Lasers' to be Deployed in Hurricane Region
MacDork writes "Wired News is running an article about high powered acoustic technology to be deployed in the hurricane Katrina disaster recovery. Apparently, the technology will allow authorities to communicate with others up to a mile away along with providing a non-lethal means of crowd control. No word on additional busses and shelters..."
how about some frickin sharks ?
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
No word on additional busses and shelters...
*sigh*
I am having a hard time with this one. I think the camel's back was broken sometime last week. What person in their right mind would decide that shooting out the eardrums of an already broken people would be of any tactical use at all?
What a clusterfuck NOLA has become. Buncha dimwit politicians can't wrap their heads around the value of human life, the need for expidited aid for refugees (and how not to treat a refugee like a criminal), so they figure it's best to simply treat it as a run-of-the-mill race-riot.
Good luck with that situation, Uncle Sam, you're gonna need all the luck you can get at this point.
With the response thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole south broke into complete chaos. Might not happen this time, but the water is starting to boil, as is the blood of every American, uniformly.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I wonder what the going exchange rate between high-powered acoustic lasers and, say, MREs and bottled water is at this point.
Mike Hoye
Damn, why didn't I think of that?
Shoot lasers at the hurricane and we can SCARE IT AWAY.. either that or there will be a fierce battle of lasers vs. wind, and we all know lasers are the strongest thing ever.
Fuck. The answer has been here the whole time and we just didn't see it.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
We don't (or didn't) need high-tech toys to control the crowds. Simple, common-sense, things like on-going airdrops of food and water, combined with convoys of buses, and temporary shelters at schools, etc, would have prevented major losses of life in this fiasco.
Sure, news photos of helicopters rescuing people look cool, but helicopters are 100 times as expensive as simple, tried and true tech like small boats.
We had advanced warning (36+ hours) that this was going to happen. Where were FEMA, the NG, Homeland Security, etc?
I'm disgusted and depressed at the bureaucratic mess that allowed this situation to get so out of hand.
Warning: dopey science rant follows!
Man, I wish people would get this right. Sonic laser doesn't make any sense. Can you really call longitudinal waves coherent? There's more to a laser than just high fluence and the ability to be focused. Sonic waves don't even have a particle nature, really, unless you wanted to count the vibrating atoms. Since you can't amplify atoms, you really can't get a sonic laser. Here, let's look at this:
"... like the sonic equivalent of a laser, or spotlight."
That's from the article. A spotlight and a laser really don't have much in common besides producing lots of light. A spotlight isn't coherent, or even monochromatic. It's just really, really "bright." Photons of laser light all have a fixed phase relationship--coherency, basically. This leads to lots of interesting properties like, oh, the entire science of interferometry. More importantly for the purposes of this discussion, lasers are _really really really_ "bright." I'm using "brightness" as a misnomer for fluence, or power through an area: you can get a much higher fluence from a decent laser by reducing area than from a spotlight by increasing power. I wish people wouldn't abuse the term laser so very much.
At the _very_ least, don't say "laser," because the "L" means light, and we're not talking about light here. Say "saser" or something, even though that's meaningless--stimulated emission of sound waves makes no sense under the traditional definition of stimulated emission, which really only applies to photons.
I realize that perhaps the functionality of the equipment makes the "beam" have laser-like properties, but I'm just irritated that "laser" is one of those fancy new buzzwords that the military and businesses like to toss around so much. They seriously degrade the good name of the device and, by doing so, cheapen science and help contribute to the scientific ignorance of the American population.
But in all seriousness, take a look at what's going on down there. There is an insane amount of looting and anarchy, stores are being looted, people are hoarding anything they can find. Hell, even reports of horrible crimes such as rape have been going around, because there is no way to control a mob the size of a city...
The government *is* doing what it can, which isn't much really, the city is flooded, and we're trying to fly as many people out as we can, but in the meantime, we need some order, and a nonlethal method of maintaining order seems very appropriate.
If the USA could manage disaster recovery at least at the rate of a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY they wouldn't need some fancy 'non-lethal' (yeah right) crowd control.
Why control the crowd? God sent His agent, the angel Katrina, to show us the truth of human nature.
People aren't going to learn to change themselves until they are thoroughly disgusted with what they currently are. This is step one.
They don't want to evacuate the remaining residents of New Orleans until they absolutely have to. That much is clear. It is also clear that there are certain prejudices that still exist against those who are poor and those who are black.
What is surprising is that this is actually news to people. This situation regarding the class divide and the racial divide has been a reality in America for hundreds of years and it takes something like this for people to wake up.
What is happening down in New Orleans right now is a tragedy of the highest order. But lesser tragedies of a similar nature occur in all major cities in the United States every single day. The fact that nobody normally bothers to care about such things and are generally ill-informed about them is, perhaps, the greatest tragedy of all.
To me, the people still stuck down in New Orleans represent everybody that America would just as soon forget. Shame on us all. And let us not forget from now on.
Tell me why the idiotic democrat mayor of NOAL did not use the city's buses to evacuate his people?
Why are they sitting half submerged in water?
Oh yeah, it's all Bush's fault.
Why is it that it seems the US is so keen to send in troops: "They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will," Kathleen Blanco said., and test out it's latest anti-civilian weaponry?
It's easy enough for the US to get thousand pound bombs to Iraq, but saving people in its own country seems to take a back seat. Why not use all that money, and technology for good, and help the poor, the elderly, the pregnant, the disabled.
Get your own free personal location tracker
What gets me is, why weren't the buses rolling in to pick up people and give them rides away from these areas before the hurricane hit. As soon as it was obvious that Katrina was aiming for these areas, why couldn't they have used all these buses to to start moving people out.
And why not move in the food and water before the storm hit, and have it already there for those who will need it. I guess foresight and planning ahead no longer applies, even with all the models and predictions concerning hurricane disasters in that area.
Then, too, there will always be some people who will say, "I'm not leaving. I'll just take my chances." Then these same people yell the loudest about not being helped out of the situation they got themselves into. (Note: I am not referring to those too ill or feeble to move, or who just can't for some reason, nor to those who may be too poor to be able to find the means to leave.)
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Sorry, IMHO, any blame here goes from the bottom up.
short answer:
the people that matter were already out of there.
that's also the reason why more resources are spent on protecting property and chasing "looters" than actually helping people.
"In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war."
5 18,372455,00.html
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Mobilizing a Relief-force for 1 million people+ is a lot harder then we've been led to believe. Especially when the damage was so widespread.
A large percentage of those people down there really had no way to get out but walk, and so chose to stay. Yes we should have tried getting all the busses and such there sooner, but I think in all reality we're doing as much as we can.
Sadly there are cases of people shooting at the relief helicopters and looting in a time like this. With relief on the way some of these people are looting guns leaving the food and shooting at the people there to help.
Then with the news coming out about the forced rape situations down in the Dome, I'm starting to wonder if a small minority of stupid people is ruining the press for this.
Its sad to think, but it may be possible with all this bad publicity, and the cries that we're doing nothing may end up becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy.
I assume this is a joke as disaster recovery is one of things the government is good at. Look at the previous hurricanes in Florida and the response they had. Joe Scarborough with MS NBC who went through several hurricanes is Florida was aghast at the ineffectiveness of the response. Please tell me about the free market disaster response alternatives.
Thalasar
The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows. - BoingBoing
Link
If you're relying on the government to rescue you from a natural disaster, you're making a huge mistake. We don't live in a country where the government is expected to wipe the ass of all its citizens. When there's a category 5 hurricane barring down on you, you get the hell out of there. People leaving the city and not just sitting there would have prevented much of the loss of life. Sure a few people here and there didn't have the means to leave, but surely if everyone who could have left had evacuated beforehand, overwhelming all the emergency services would have been avoided. Oh and looting and sniping doctors doesn't help much either.
Using boats to rescue people? Where are you going to get the boats from? Boats are slow and they'd have to be brought in from far away. An area the size of a small country just got leveled after all.
We were expecting a hurricane but instead ended up with broken levees, massive anarachy, a total communications breakdown, etc. NO ONE knew the scope of this disaster until it was too late.
Those elderly patients must have just been stubborn eh!
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In other news, america goes to war against its own population:
Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans
By Joseph R. Chenelly
Times staff writer
NEW ORLEANS -- Combat operations are underway on the streets "to take this city back" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"This place is going to look like Little Somalia," Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. "We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control."
While some fight the insurgency in the city, other carry on with rescue and evacuation operations. Helicopters are still pulling hundreds of stranded people from rooftops of flooded homes.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-107
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Outrageous!
The Governor flatout stated ...I have determined that this incident will be of such severity and magnitude that effective response will be beyond the capabilties of the State and the affected local governments and that supplementary Federal assistance will be necessary."
The assistance was dismal.
The citizens of the USA have just witnessed the complete failure of government on all levels, from local to federal. At every stage of this disaster there has not been a single competent person orchestrating the rescue efforts.
As a result of years of cronyism, privatization, classism, and racism, this has become an unmitigated disaster that one would expect to encounter only in the impoverished third world.
And here is the kicker: it will happen again and again if the public does not rise up and demand a clean sweep.
The entire system needs to be overhauled, from the very foundation of democracy -- secure, honest voting -- to the very notion of government's role in ensuring its citizens have access to shelter, food, and safety at all times and in all situations.
The time to act is now. You should be very angry and you should be demanding accountability and change. Do something before it happens again.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Its not enough that you couldn't send relief until 3 to 4 days AFTER the hurricane hit, but you have to send shit to control the crowds when just giving them more relief would control them anyway. Bush is a sick fuck. Help the people, not deafen them. Flame away Bush loyalists. A lot of the country is pissed off as well, and not just us liberals but even your own kind and everyone in-between. Don't tell me not to point fingers. The GOP and Bush are attempting to do damage control for a situation they could have and should have been able to handle very quickly.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Yep. For people that live outside the US or people that didn't pay attention in Government class in the US, the power for dealing with this is always in the State's hand. The Federal Government built the levees but the power and responsability for requesting funding and for preparing for a disaster is the job of the State.
The National Guards belong to the States until they are Federalized, the NG units in the War on Terror outside the US are Federalized, but the NG units used for guarding airports or disaster ops are State run.
FEMA exists to superceed the US Constitution as to what the Federal Government can do, but FEMA has never used all of it's power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fema
Louisiana also is different governmentally than other States.
Louisiana is the only state whose legal system is based on Roman, Spanish, and French civil law as opposed to English common law. Technically, it is known as "Civil Law," or the "Civilian System."
Byzantine structure of New Orleans politics requires separate governing boards for each levee that is built. The boards get to approve or deny Army Corps of Engineers plans, new levees require new boards and new elections, every election has a system of run-off elections and has to have funding approved.
Mayor Nagin rails against the government for their slow response. Yet, if there is fingerpointing to be done, it has to rest with the local government. If they wanted people out, they should have provided ways for them to get out. They are aware of the tens of thousands of indigents that live in their city. They knew that many live pay check to pay check, having no transportation and immense extended families.
They have only a 1200-1400 police in New Orleans. The Los Angeles Police Department (usually known as the LAPD) is the police department of the City of Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the world with over 9,000 officers and 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of 467 sq miles with a population of around 3.4 million with another 7,000 or so in the LA County Sheriff. New Orleans is 180 sq miles, 1.337 million in the metro area, 500,000 in the city proper. Many men will not serve in the police department due to the rampant corruption which continued inspite of reforms in the late 1990s.
Theft is one of the simplest crimes, satisfying a need without physical harm to someone else. The reason that looting is being suppressed is that as the social order degrades, instances where violations of societal norms are seen to occur without punishment become more acceptable. This furthers the breakdown of order, and the level of the crimes will increase as time goes by and nothing is done. Desperation and fear feed the chaos, and eventually it becomes impossible to control without drastic measures.
Enforcing order in a situation such as this is critical in saving lives, because it provides a sense of returning structure to the lives of the affected people. Without that, further restoration efforts, including returning electricity to the area, become impossible, and more people suffer because food and water remain unavailable and hospitals cannot function.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
... a desperate president thoughtfully strums a guitar while the deep south burns (because movie presidents are either heroes or bill clinton and the deep south is evil); a valient mayor battles the dodgy paper-shuffling governor (because politics stinks, apart from mayors who always clean up towns - kinda like sheriffs) ... and bruce willis as the heroic maveric loner ex-cop who accidently shot his partner/ex-SEAL who accidently led his men to certain death/ex-navy cook who accidently poisoned his captain/ex-JAG officer with a fighter pilot past who accidently shot-down a Serbian general's evil-eyed son. Can bruce save his cute daughter/sexy but unloving wife/cute but dangerously curious son from the floods, terribly black & poor rioters, rape gangs and insane local army unit commander; lead a rag-tag gang of possibly feckless neighbours to safety AND discover the truth behind the hurricaine (a military experiment gone wrong), the sharks (a military experiment gone wrong) and the burst levys (a corporate / military engineers experiment gone wrong)?
Or maybe this was just a huge disaster affecting an area the size of the UK, in a country without a welfare state, where the inequalities in society are trumpeted in the media, and commercial interests (i.e. a waterway near New Orleans that should have been filled in years ago) are always put above the common good (DCMA, Patent Law, etc.)
WAKE UP AMERICA AND SAVE YOUR COUNTRY; MAKE TONY BLAIR YOUR NEXT PRESIDENT
Why send sonic disrupters into the disaster area? Because that way they can be tested without pissing off too many likely voters.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
This post is quite wrong on MANY MANY levels.
" continueing concept amongst blacks that they are "victims" of something that happened centuries ago."
Perhaps you are not aware that until the voting rights act of 1965, black were largely disenfranchised and segregated. Hardly centuries ago.
"What we are seeing in N.O. is the result of socialism in America. I can't count the number of times on T.V. I've seen the poor black people complaining about "what is the government going to do", "where is the government to take care of us", "why has the government let us down." Instead of taking personal responsibility for their actions, they have been conditioned by receiving welfare checks and other government handouts, mainly from the Democratic Party, to not think for themselves."
A vast and very child like generalization. Many of these people are working poor who pay taxes. Many of them don't own vehicles. By call them "welfare recipients" you simply reveal your ignorance. What data is this based on? Knowing what I know about the difficulty of receiving welfare after the welfare reform act I doubt that many of them are welfare recipients.
Take a look at the reponse the government had in regards to Hurricane Andrew - it was much better.
As far as your immigrant success stories - yeah sure people come here and are successful. Usually because they have a great deal of money to begin with. Your quote
some literally "off the boat" at Ellis Island in N.Y.
is quite telling. Ellis Island hasn't been used as an immigration facility for 51 years.
Thalasar
Honestly, it disgusts me how much finger pointing has been going on while there are still people stranded in that hell hole. ALL of these politicians need to get their priorities in order. FIRST, make sure the people stuck there have some food and water to survive on and finish picking up the ones who are stranded (maybe some of those helicopters dropping sandbags on the friggin' levees could be rescuing people still stuck on their rooftops). SECOND, get everybody out of the city. THIRD, plug the levees and start figuring out what to do with this mess. THEN they can all start bickering about who didn't respond quickly enough and who didn't prepare well enough and who should've done something first and should we even bother rebuilding the place. Somebody needs to step up and show some leadership here. It looks like Gen. Honore is the only one who has so far.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Spend much time hungry and on top of a roof?
No, and I don't expect to. Because if I were to live my whole life in a below-sea-level town on a coast that gets hit with hurricanes every year, I'd probably save up the same amount of money it costs to buy one pizza, and put a few liters of water and a couple dozen snack bars in a cheap backpack, along with a $3 flashlight and some toilet paper, and be way, way ahead of the thousands of people in that town that decided not to do anything to help their town have less of a disaster on their hands.
There's no excuse for watching that storm approach for days, and not doing the simplest things to prepare yourself for a Tuesday-through-Thursday wait while the buses and helicopters get lined up. Of course that wouldn't have made everything just peachy for every person - but it would have hugely reduced the stress on the local help that was supposed to be taking care of the local people while other resources moved in. Honestly - it's like being responsible for your own well being is so out of fashion that a little food and water is too much to think about in advance, even as the news and your own city government is screaming at you about it.
Of course, there were thousands and thousands of people who did take care of themselves enough to not slow down emergency workers with other priorities - but those people didn't make for very dramatic sound bites, and since they weren't as ready to bitch about the government, there just wasn't any Pulitzer-winning spin to extract.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A National Disaster is clearly an excellent opportunity to trial new R&D in the field; harsh environmental conditions, long uptime, contingencies at a maximum - like a 'warzone' really. It would seem Bush has chosen to test future battle tech on his own people at home rather than random foreigners or US folk abroad. He doesn't miss a beat does he?
Anyway, I guess these sonic cannons are cheaper than food, shelter and tear-gas or else he surely would have.. nevermind.
The Bush administration is the only administration we've actually got running the country that we can get rid of.
Clinton has been gone for years. I know Bush people don't know how to run a country, just how to make fun of an expresident who retired more popular than practically any president has ever been. I know Bush people don't know how to run a country, just blame Clinton for everything. Because they call facts that show their incompetence, written by anyone, "biased". Well, the facts are clearly biased against the Bush administration (to paraphrase the Daily Show). Whatever resistance Clinton might have had on that one day (nevermind what subsequently was done, like perhaps fully funding it) 10 years ago, before the past 5 years of Bush's rule, Bush certainly did not reverse that cut. He cut it as much as he could. He cut it, even after he's coasted on the coattails of one day in September 2001, when - after the smoke cleared - he climbed on top of a pile of rubble in NYC, and declared with a bullhorn that "everything changed".
The #1 predicted national disaster, terrorist attack on NYC, had come horribly true - though Bush had not prepared for it. In fact, he deprioritized terrorist attacks during that first year of his administration, while looking for an excuse to invade Iraq from day 1. Four years later (minus only two weeks), National Disaster #2, hurricane devastation in New Orleans, has come true. And Bush stayed on vacation in his Texas estate, then made some BS speeches about Iraq in California, then skimmed back to DC giving just a flyover blink to "Lake George" where New Orleans once stood. While his Secretary of State took in Spamalot on Broadway, then shopped for thousand-dollar shoes on 5th Avenue.
I know it's tough to admit that Bush is a miserable failure. That he's created catastrophe everywhere he's worked, in his whole career, but especially in the US and Iraq. I know it's tough to admit you're complicit in his catastrophes, because you voted for him and defended him. But its time to stop the BS apologies for the Master of Disaster. That old "it's Clinton's fault" BS only worked on a small percentage for a while, back around the turn of the century. It's useless now. Cut your losses and hang the blame on the Commander in Chimp now. Help us replace him with someone who can run the country some other way than into the ground. Or watch as Disaster #3, California Earthquake, kills thousands, millions more, cripples more of our ports and energy, all while we're still bogged down in Iraqmire, the Gulf Swamp, and across the nation that has been wallowing in stagnation and distrust since Bush was installed by the Supreme Court in 2000.
Because who knows - the next disaster could be the one that your local government has been sucking Homeland Security dollars away from New York, New Orleans and San Francisco for. And you'll find yourself screaming in the streets for Bush's head, when they stole the money like the New Orleans disaster plan funds, and abandon you the same way. While some other Bush apologist posts lies, blaming Clinton, for abandoning you when your own life is destroyed by a predicted disaster for which you paid tax money for relief.
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make install -not war
Nobody expected things to be fixed in 20 minutes. However, the whole point of disaster response is the response part. There is absolutely no reason why there should be a 5 day period of no response other than pretty words.
The money in the federal budget that goes to homeland security, you know the agency in charge of protecting the homeland, is obviously the biggest shell game in the history of the US govt. If this is what we can expect for a response, is crowd-control weapons being deployed almost as soon or sooner than food and water, than it is a pathetic country indeed. The interstate highway system in this country was developed for EXACTLY this kind of mobilization. Highways and bridges were built wide enough to allow military vehicles to cross the country in an organized fashion.
As far as your 'questions' that you even admit to having no answers to, well they are quite frankly disturbing. Where do you think the money comes to pay the people to drive all those busses around to pick up everyone. Where do you think the money comes from to organize the infrastructure for the eventuality of such a disaster? Obviously you are not aware that the funding stream to enable all of those 'questions' is from the federal govt in the form of 'homeland security grants'. Did New Orleans get any of those? I do know the answer to that, and you should stop being fed your information and learn for yourself. New Orleans did have a plan and countermeasures in place to deal with such a circumstance, however my friend, unless you are paying for these things out of your own pocket it would be to your benefit to realize that these things take a level of financial commitment in order to implement correctly.
As far as 'comparing' disasters, which is woefully innapriopriate, well lets compare them. What was the reposnse time for national guard troops being deployed to all the above incidents you cited? New York, less than one day. San Fran, also less than one day. LA, less than one day. How exactly does this compare to 5 days?
And bush doesnt need anyone to make him look bad. He does just fine on his own. Take some time away from the TV for a few weeks(better months), better yet, go on a vacation to see how people in other parts of the world live. Then come back and watch your TV... unfortunately, the only way for you to see that the government is failing is when it will fail you. I wish you and your family are never in a disaster so catasrophic, that you learn first hand how inept our system of social protections has become. But life is long, and you are just playing the odds if you hope, or think, it cant happen to you.
They probably had plans to test these things somewhere like Iraq, but this situation is even better. Since the feds have fallen down on their job of handling this sort of large-scale problem, they're getting ready to perform the charade of blaming looters and rioters for everything that went wrong, just like they've been blaming terrorists for everything else. Going in waving a big stick is part of that performance, and using it on a few civilians is the perfect "shock and awe" gesture. Bush's zero-tolerance right-wing supporters will be cheering, and ordinary citizens will have one more reason to shy away from any sort of political action that the government might not approve.
Things like water cannons and riot gear are comprehensible threats to protesters, but when the government starts using spooky technology to bring a whole crowd to its knees, genuine sixties-like political unrest will cease to be possible in this country, no matter how appropriate it might eventually become. That's when America will cease to be a "free" country. Because if people are afraid to use their supposed freedoms then they no longer really have them.