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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.'"
Best bomb to drop on California: The Nude Bomb
Worst bomb to drop on DC: The Nude Bomb
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They missed a few. Nazi sound and compressed air weapons, the first "shoot around a corner" gun. The "Amerika Bomber" concept that Heinlein liked so much that he based a lot of his future history series around the concept.
The american Gyrojet rocket pistol.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
The Bombarang was developed in the 1970's, and while technically a success, development on the project was canceled due to unforeseen consequences.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
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.
Maybe it's just me, but what I think is the spookiest is not the weapons as such but rather how many of these appear to be explicitely intended for "crowd control".
Now of course, using non-deadly force to stop riots etc. is better than using deadly force. But at the same time, the fact that something isn't deadly - not intended to be, anyway - will also take away people's inhibitions to an extent and make them more likely to actually resort to it.
We're seeing this with tasers already, for example. And in fact, tasers are a good example insofar as that while the manufacturer would like to position them as non-deadly, they in fact are quite so.
What about a lead pipe or a carpenter's hammer? These aren't inherently spooky or scary, they're just tools - but I sure wouldn't want someone to enthusiastically apply either to my skull.
Can you imagine how much pain you could inflict with a standard dinner fork (provided the subject was sufficiently restrained)? Nobody would classify this as a weapon - and it certainly wouldn't inspire fear, until one had been used to pry your fingernails off.
I guess it just goes to show, it's not the weapon you're wielding that counts, it's how you use it...
The gay bomb was fabulous!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
How would you classify those things in a lion's mouth, those things on a bear's feet or that thing a scorpion carries around? They ain't musical instruments, that's for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Even though many militaries of the past have been particularly successful because of it.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.
Ander
@=
By Monty Python: The Funniest Joke in the World
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I get tired of the whole 'man is the ultimate evil' thing, especially since a lot of the people who believe that back it up with baseless information. Plenty of animals, like bears, kill each other (even their young) under the right circumstances. Animals war with one another (amongst their own species) just like us. In fact, Planet Earth has a segment that shows two tribes of gorillas fighting over territory. Likewise, plenty of different species will fight over things such as food or mates.
Of course, a lot of these conflicts end with one party surrendering rather than death, but the same is true of humans. On Killing does a pretty good job of showing how humans have a natural aversion to killing members of their own species (even in times of war) just like any other animal. And plenty of animals other than humans have been known to use tools. I'm too lazy to find the article, but I remember reading, about a year ago, an account of an ape using a bone to test the depth of the water in a river. It's safe to say that they animal kingdom has the same capacity for 'evil' as man. We just happen to be the dominant species and are very self-centered so no one pays attention to what the other creatures of the Earth are up to.
I was once a horse.
...."Have you mooed today?"...
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.
We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected
No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically.
Those WMDs that Iraq had were spooky, you couldn't even see them!
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
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
Fourth paragraph from the bottom, $18 billion annually (for everyone on the planet) on cosmetics:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0111_040112_consumerism_2.html
Iraq, $12 billion a month:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23551693/
Hopefully you are just misinformed.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Drop countless leaflets for Home Re-fi, Viagra, Penis Enlargement, Earn 1000$ a DAY AT HOME, You won a Free Gift Certificate, and help me get my Millions out of Nigeria. Then while all the soldiers are busy trying to sort thru real communications and your leaflets... attack amid the confusion. Even if it didn't work, at least the military would be better funded thru it's enemies ;)
Oh, what pitiful long-haired bullshit is this? Humans are not the be-all and end-all of violence in nature. Sure, we have the intellect to come up with very dangerous things. Sure, there are those dope-arsed enough to use these things. But as general violence in the animal kingdom goes, we're really quite the softies.
Take dolphins, the poster children of New Age flakies, often put up as these supposedly peaceful, gentle, intelligent creatures that could teach us a thing or two about being in harmony with nature. Bollocks. Dolphins are psychos: murder, violence, gang rape including bestiality and that of their own young --- you name it --- are all staples of dolphin behaviour. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of these fuckers without someone standing at the ready with a charged harpoon. Where are the dolphin justice mechanisms? If they're so peaceful and moral, where are the dolphin courts and prisons?
Ducks are just as bad. I was sitting by a pond the other day with about 20 or so ducks there. In the space of about half an hour or so, about six fights broke out, half of which were sexually motivated. In the same amount of time, over a hundred humans must've passed by --- a population in whom not one case of violence or sexual harassment broke out.
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.