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Ray Gun Puts Voices Inside Your Head
Sportsqs writes "The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads."
Futurama lifted that almost word for word from Isaac Asimov's Dreaming is a Private Thing.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I see enormous benefits in this technology.
1. Listening to music as loud as you want while not forcing it on others
2. Rocking out to the loudest concert in history without anyone outside the venue hearing a whisper of it (on second thought, the RIAA might require this, so maybe it's not so good)
3. Throwing a gigantic party with great tunes while letting the geezer next door -- who never listens to anything harder than Captain and Tennille -- get his beauty sleep
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Hmm...
Now avoiding TFA like the plague, it occurs to me that "shockwaves" within the skull able to cause hydrostatic pressure loads comparable to 120+ decibels (is that loud enough for ya?) hitting your eardrums might just damage something other than eardrums.
But lets not even think about the fine possibilities such as massive damage on the cellular level - just consider the overpressures that could be set up within blood vessels. It will be interesting to see if there is any increase in "massive cerebral hemorrage" as a cause of death going forward.
Or an increase in the wearing of hats by the political class anytinme they give a speech :)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
...up until recently, generations of police officers learned how to use physical force to gain compliance. And generally speaking they knew how to do it with minimal force and maximal compliance -- a friend who is a 2nd generation police officer had his father demonstrate some of the techniques, and it was fairly amazing how well he could hurt me without actually "hurting" me (ie, leaving lasting marks, breaking bones, bruising, etc.)
The gripe my friend the cop has is that with all the touchy-feely policing (and the expensive court payouts) they have, you really can't gain compliance through physical force the way you used to be able to, so they are largely left with their guns and their tasers. And since the tasers aren't lethal, they're somehow considered "OK" to use for any problem solving short of killing someone.
I think they should start allowing the police to carry saps and clubs again as well as teach them physical force and stop letting them use a taser as a universal problem solver.