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Journalist Gets Blasted By the Pentagon's Pain Ray — Twice
dsinc writes "Wired's Spencer Ackerman voluntarily subjected himself to what the U.S. military calls the Active Denial System, an energy weapon commonly known as the 'Pain Ray' that turns electricity into millimeter wave radio frequency and blasts targets with heat. He describes it thus: 'When the signal goes out over radio to shoot me, there’s no warning — no flash, no smell, no sound, no round. Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they’ve been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure. I’m getting blasted with 12 joules of energy per square centimeter, in a fairly concentrated blast diameter. I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam.'"
The device has been tested now on over 11,000 people, with only two serious injuries to show for it. However, the device has limitations: rainy weather decreases its effectiveness, and its "boot-up" time is 16 hours, making it useless for breaking up unexpected, impromptu mobs.
Boots faster than windows...
What electrical components take 16 hours to boot up?
What mechanical operation requires 16 hours of prep?
Any insight? I read the article, and it had very little in the way of information.
Would a foil suit help? Can we reflect it back at the source somehow?
Ok, I get that this baby is running on beta hardware. But 16 hours? Can anyone here venture a guess as to why? No matter how sllloooowww the CPUs, or how inefficient the code, 16 hours isn't plausible.
So, it must refer to something the hardware is doing. Still, 16 hours? Thermodynamics is normally quicker than that for a machine that can fit on a truck. That's an awfully long time for it to be heating up or cooling down.
Any RF engineers here know a reason for this? My best guess is that components of this device rely on superconductivity, and require very slow peltier coolers to bring the operating temperature down to the range of operation. I've seen radios sold on ebay that use superconductors for parts of the RF elements.
If you ever go to a protest where you expect the government to use one of these on you, bring a buch of corner reflectors.. They can be bought in boat stores, or made cheaply out of paper lined with aluminum foil, and they will send the "pain ray" right back at the operator.
Given the weird operational profile, I can see this being used for psy-op. Flashing people with pain from afar, seemingly for no reason. Is that too MK-ULTRA to think about?
Sounds less effective, most costly, and more dangerous then tear gas.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Everybody knows that you can't get that perfect warmth without tubes.
Depends on your frame of reference. Something that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away may not have happened here yet. If it happened 5m years ago (their time) in a galaxy 5.1m lightyears away then it's still 100,000 years in our future.
Hey, you started it.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information? We can torture people without leaving permanent physical injury, just like with the heat ray. So do we as a society really have moral qualms about torturing people because of the pain, or is it purely a pragmatic decision based on the low signal to noise ratio of intelligence from tortured prisoners?
The device has been tested now on over 11,000 people, with only two serious injuries to show for it.
Doesn't sound like an effective weapon to me.
Sixteen hours warmup might be far too long for use as crowd control, but it's plenty of time for use in interrogations.
Umm, no it's still in the past; we just have to wait until we get to see it.
The proper resistance mantra is:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear... I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Please, do explain to us what simultaneity means in galaxies separated by 5.1 million light years.
That's at least one major lawsuit per protest broken up. Good luck getting any major civilian police force to risk that. The only place this has any use would be a battlefield, where lawsuits are irrelevant.
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There was an instance of non-lethal weapon abuse by a Boston policeman who shot a Red Sox reveler with a projectile that's supposed to only cause the sensation of burning, like pouring hot sauce on the skin. It's like a targeted remote pepper spray. Problem is, the policeman hit this poor woman in the eye. She died as a result of the injury.
The words "non-lethal weapon" should more accurately be written as "not-usually-lethal weapon". A weapon designed to hurt enough to seriously distract everyone it is used against cannot be non-lethal in all cases, given the wide range of physiologies found in humans, and the wide ranges of unanticipated potential uses. While one might argue whether the officer in question above should have aimed at this student's head (if the weapons are so inaccurate that they cannot be controlled well enough to avoid hitting someone in the head, or if the officer was inadequately trained or prepared to do so, then that is another matter entirely), because he did hit her in the head that must therefore be an anticipated use. Thus this particular paintball-like weapon, and by extension, all non-lethal weapons, must be considered less lethal, but certainly not non-lethal.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Last time I slapped on a baklava, it took me an hour to get the honey and nuts out of my beard.
5.1 million ly is not that far, actually (twice the distance to Andromeda). A galaxy at that distance would be in our local group, and it's redshift will be dominated by it's local motions, not the Hubble flow.
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
Sixteen hours? Anyone else picture Goku charging up the Kamehameha attack on Dragonball Z?
The reporter said that the injuries that were sustained were 2nd degree burns because the people didn't get out the way quick enough.
But what if you can't get out of the way? If you are trapped you could easily sustain 2nd or 3rd degree burns over quite a bit of your body - and that sort of thing is potentially lethal.
This device is non-lethal in the sense that a bullet is non-lethal. I shoot someone in the hand they probably don't die. I shoot someone in the head and they will probably die.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
ex: a pulse of light is shot from the Earth to the moon. The pulse takes ~12 seconds to arrive.
Closer to 1.3 seconds...
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam
The person who was injured in the testing was overexposed. So if used outside the lab your going to have injured people. People will fall down and if the machine is ran to long they will be burned. This is similer to the LRAD system that uses sounds instead of microwaves. It has already been used by law enformcement and has caused hearing loss on someone who fell down.
Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
So with these things resistance really is futile.
So you're basically saying, like Obi-Wan, that it depends on "your point of view"?