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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 product is called "The Who".
someone to go deaf or partially deaf? Will the UK compensate someone for that life-long disability? I thought the government was suppose to protect the people, not harm them in the name of corporate interests. The more reason to boycott The Olympics this year. Thankfully I'm not in/from the UK.
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?
...while conducting detainee operations (prison guard) in Iraq. It's basically a five-hundred watt directional speaker shaped like a big flat disc that can play back a shrieking wave (sounds like a modulated sawtooth from what I can remember) that's so loud that you'll feel your bones rattle if it's pointed at you - even from a hundred meters away. While we usually used it as a big megaphone, the disruptive tone was really only effective in surprise or as a threat. In compounds where certain idiots used the LRAD repeatedly, the detainees eventually learned to ignore it.
Athletes are considered corporate cattle with reduced rights.
Viewers are considered potential terrorists with weapons aimed at them.
People still watch/attend the Four Year Games because?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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
The terrorists must really be loving this. They don't even have to do anything anymore to get the public terrorized - the 'security forces' are taking care of that for them! They don't even have to make half-credible bomb threats anymore - the {Ministry|Department} of Defense will just make threats up for them!
The terrorists aren't winning. They already won.
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.
How well would a good set of earplugs or even construction style earmuffs protect against the sound of this.
A few years ago, a neighbor who wanted to buy the duplex half I was living in tried to chase me out. The first I knew about it was coming from deep sleep to full alertness in the early hours of every morning, with my heart pounding as though I'd just been shocked awake. It was devastating to my sleep patterns.
The first few times it happened, I had no idea what was happening. I thought I had some medical or psychiatric condition developing, but then one night I stayed awake but quiet until about 2am, when the wake-up trick happened. While I was awake, the jolt felt weird, but not unbearable, a little like standing near loudspeakers at a rock concert, but silent.
I was lucky, and had a full studio of sound and electronic gear, so over the next couple of nights I identified that the pulse was ultrasonic. A bit of research led me to these things, so I bought one of the quad transducer kits to see if it was the culprit, which it was. I did some experimenting, and found that while earmuffs do attenuate the sensation a little, the "body-throb" is still disturbing. If you don't control your mind, it really does produce a sense of alarm.
Once my neighbor realized she'd been twigged, she switched from the single wake-up pulse to random attacks with the sweep and nausea modes. It was bearable, but wasn't pleasant, so I called the police and tried to explain it to them. They were polite, and spoke to the neighbor, but decided the only laws which might have been contravened were noise limits. I asked the council noise inspectors to check, but their meters aren't capable of detecting ultrasonic.
In the end, the authorities didn't know how to deal with it, but the neighbor stopped using the device anyway, probably because of all the fuss.
TLDR: They'll use ultrasonics which cause a sensation of fear and alarm. It's manageable by individuals, but a mob will almost certainly run.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."