Slashdot Mirror
Britain Bringing Out 'Sonic Gun' For Olympics Security
skipkent writes with news that Britain is planning to use high-tech, non-lethal sonic weapons to provide security at the Olympics this summer. The Ministry of Defense says they intend to use the devices primarily as giant loudspeakers. But if they find themselves in need of a way to disperse crowds, the weapons can project sound up to 150 decibels, causing physical pain within a few hundred meters. "It has been successfully used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates." The maximum range for alarms and warnings is 3km. "Police and military planners say they are preparing for a range of security threats at the Olympics including protesters trying to disrupt events and attacks using hijacked airliners."
The more I read about preparations, the less I want to attend.
Sounds like it will be a lot more pleasant to watch at home.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The Olympics was supposed to be an event promoting amateur sports competition to solidify friendship and peace between nations.
Now we have:
1. Increasingly, highly paid professional athletes, not amateurs; and even the "amateurs" are often exceptionally well-funded and de-facto full-time athletes.
2. National pride of the host nation, where the Olympics is supposed to show off their greatness at least as much as promote any sort of friendship between nations (admittedly, this is an old trend, at least dating back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics).
3. Extensive commercialization of the entire event, with whole shady networks of construction/sponsorship/etc. deals, even extending to weird brand-exclusivity rules that would make it illegal for you to wear a shirt with the wrong logo.
4. Extensive security procedures and apparatus, which makes the event as a promotion of international friendship and peace fall a bit flat... peace under the watch of heavily militarized police is a pretty empty kind of peace.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
ordinary people can see the games in FTA HD on like 24 channels so they can sit at home and not pay for tickets.
Everyone from the UK has paid for the games and they were very expensive too.
The ticket that are for sale are way out of the price range of normal honest working people yet the ticket prices don't even nearly cover the cost of the thing, taxpayers got soaked for the rest. The whole thing is an insane waste of money and turning London into North Korea for some misguided idea of 'security' is doubly insane.
Is torture being declared legal now in the UK? Because that's what this is.
Sustained noise levels this loud will cause completely irreversible hearing damage, and the damage will only worsen with each passing second that the noise level is sustained. Even the loudest that rock concerts get is generally at about 120db or so (which even that can also problematic for sustained periods). I respect that they are trying to keep the peace here, but at what cost?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't think politicians are usually stupid.
Politicians at upper levels are highly motivated people. They have a singular focus, to further their careers... which is closely tied to money and influence. So you look at a poor/silly "remedy" for something like this and think, "that's stupid". The problem is, you're evaluating it against the stated goal.
Figure out what the real goal is, be it the appearance of having done something high-tech to protect the people, or influence with manufacturers, or prestige among people that might be able to get you on some important committee... and then you'll usually find that it makes perfect sense.
Even the ones that are genuinely pretty stupid are surrounded by people that aren't, and know how to use them. Otherwise they never would've made it to where they are. They just don't do stuff like this because they think they're helping in the best way possible.
As someone who's experienced some tinnitus from just going to some shows, these horrify me.
I'm horrified about idiots being put in charge of some detainment facilities and given "non-lethal" weapons to use against the inmates.
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