Slashdot Mirror
The World's Spookiest Weapons
DesScorp writes "Popular Science has a piece on some outrageous ideas for weapons; some came to fruition, and others didn't. And while some of the weapons (atom bombs, chemical weapons, bats with bombs strapped to them that seek out homes and buildings at night) are truly frightening, some of them are also kind of silly, such as the Gay Bomb, and the Frisbee bomb that was labeled the 'Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition.'"
The screens were covered with grids of fine wire. The pecking would cause a horizontal wire to touch a vertical wire, completing a circuit and providing the course correction to the bomb's electronics.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
But if you drop them, won't they just remain in orbit?
Yes, absolutely. It is impossible to just "drop" something on earth from
a stable orbit - remember: You are already constantly falling.
Or will a tiny push be enough to get them down to earth?
I'd expect them to be rocket propelled rods to a certain extent.
Targetting will be a bitch though: You'd have to do a more or less controlled
reentry (tip forward, or the earodynamic breaking would mess with your speed) on
an arced trajectory, and very precisely hold on to your trajectory - even very
minor errors will make the rod completely miss the target.
The whole thing sounds interesting as an idea, but gets complicated very quickly as you
start thinking about an implementation.
I suppose this is true. I think it's partially because of becoming desensitized and not allowing it to affect onself too much because of the flood of these messages. Numbers also are meaningless to many; if one would report 3000 people being killed, noone would react. If one would give 1 person a face (documentary, reportage, ...) people would feel affected and connected. (disgust, confusion, empathy, ... depending on what's being brought across.)
This connection would fade over time though, as it's not related to one's own life. If someone in your family or environment dies, you're confronted with his or her absence on a regular base. The memory of some flickering screen is less strong and doesn't integrate or reconnect as strongly with your frame of reference as your own, direct experiences.
Perhaps it's a good coping and survival mechanism, to be able t shrug it off. If I wouldn't be able to shrug of the news I hear every day, I'd be unable to live my life; I'd be saving puppies and bulls in Spain, protecting seals on the north pole, trying to end world hunger, giving Russian futureless boys perspective to lower the crime rates, start an organisation to help people with difficult personal problems, fight at the side of the innocent in Iraq, protest at the White house for more US citizens rights, would pound my fist on the table in the parlement, reform the police, reshape the educational system, take away the need for fugutives to emigrate, spend my life finding cures against AIDS and cancer, shelter all the homeless, and build rockets to fly to Mars. (because that would be cool)
If I sum it up, it's almost like news is there to give you a feeling of helplessness, and accept the fact your influence in the world is limited and puny.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Just look at the current situation in the US: the neocon start a war for the 'good' of 'merica and its net effect is that the US economy now belongs to China. Talk about being patriots !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
ust look at the current situation in the US: the neocon start a war for the 'good' of 'merica and its net effect is that the US economy now belongs to China. Talk about being patriots !
That's not really correct. Much as I dislike the present Administration, the reality is that our government and our private sector sold out to China long before Bush & Co. took office. I agree, there's a substantial amount of high treason involved, but you can't lay this at our President's feet. Well, not all of it, anyway. Hell, Bill Clinton was partly responsible for what has become the largest transfer of scientific knowledge and technological capability from one nation to a hostile totalitarian state in the history of Mankind. Kinda makes you wonder whose side either of these two men is really on. Not ours, that's for sure.
Even then, you have to go back farther than the previous Administration: this process really began back in the seventies. It's only accelerated to point of economic ruin for the United States within the past fifteen years or so. People don't fully understand the way China looks at the these things: they take a generational approach to foreign affairs. I don't know when the decision was made to take us out of the equation, but there's no doubt that once it was made they followed through with it. Look, the Russians tried the frontal approach: it didn't work, and their Empire eventually collapsed of its own weight, but China is not making that same mistake. They realized that behind the vaunted American military was a capable industrial engine, and that they'd never gain any traction over us until they removed our ability to create wealth and support our military.
China's leaders may be evil and corrupt by our standards, but they most certainly aren't stupid, and are rapidly taking care of their only real obstacle to world domination, the United States, by using the greed and avarice of our elected and corporate leaders as a weapon. It's working, and probably working better they they ever expected.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There are some pretty good arguments that we actually live in one of the least violent times in human history. With the 24 hour News cycle and instant global communications, we now see and hear about bad things from all over the world. The earthquake in China would have only been a small blurb in a western paper 50 years ago and would have been almost unknown in the western world 100 years ago. Darfur wouldn't have been an issue to anyone outside of Africa 100 years ago. I would say that rather than turning a blind eye to atrocities, we are paying ever closer attention. The total numbers of atrocities may be going up, but the number per capita is going down, after we reach our global peak population (predicted for 2070) then the amount of global violence should decline as humans become ever more civilized and our populations slowly decline.
We are all just people.