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 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.
21. The Slashdot - Unleashing hordes of un-/poorly-informed armchair scientists|lawyers|doctors|engineers|*, causing chaos and confusion with their variety of often conflicting and/or innacurate information, recipes, opinion, straw-men, and/or social advice.
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
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.
Even though many militaries of the past have been particularly successful because of it.
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.
There, fixed it for you.
Sincerely,
Jack Thompson
You just got troll'd!
I'm afraid that bomb got dropped 28 years ago. And it was a stinker. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/
...."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.
Those WMDs that Iraq had were spooky, you couldn't even see them!
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
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.
I'd quite like to see George Bush fight a war on malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care rather than a war on 'terror'..
which is totally what she said