Fuck them, they ruin everything they get their greedy little mitts on; latest example is one of my favorite Firefox extensions, FoxyTunes. They were bought out by Yahoo! and subsequently had to replace the lyrics query that went to the open LyricWiki with Y!Music, which hardly contains any lyrics to the songs I listen to. Oh, and of course Yahoo! Music doesn't allow you to upload lyrics you transcribed yourself. I've started hating Yahoo! with a really serious passion lately...
Considering the economic wreckage that "science and empiricism" have delivered to the door, I wouldn't be too proud of traditional economic schools of thought right now.
Funny, we over here in Europe have the same information, the same empirical data available and are applying the same scientific principles, and it seems to work for us...
So, if the problem is people getting wrong readings from shoddy counters - why not set some standards for accuracy and reliability for Geiger counters and enforce them? Don't you have any organization in America that would be responsible for the correct calibration and accuracy of instruments like those? Like the ones that make sure that, for instance, scales in grocery stores are weighing the correct amount? Just pass a law that makes it illegal to produce and / or sell an instrument that doesn't work reliably enough, demand that everyone can turn in old, unreliable counters for the selling price to their vendors and fix the problem this way.
I don't know, some of those gadgets seem... well, not really thought through:
Apple Remote: you wave left and right it to turn up or down sound. Great. How do I change channels from 7 to 33? Why are there four remotes in one basket?
Maximus keyboard: heard too much about it to say it's complete vaporware, but the functionality keeps being reduced every time I hear about it. Plus, compare the low-res images from the side keys with the "regular" keycaps which seem to have a much higher resolution - I don't think that's realistic.
Nonobject: WTF? Why, oh why would I need a camera to film what's behind it? I know what's behind my camera! Me! Because I do the photographing! What the hell were they thinking? To get at least some use out if you would have to hold this camera sort of sideways in front / beside your head, looking at the display at an angle... If I really need to photograph what's in front of me and the scenery behind me, I can turn around and take a second picture! Gods, this is stupid...
Duofone: well, ok, granted, pretty original - but I don't know exactly how they'll handle the seam in the middle, where two LCDs not quite touch. I imagine if this problem had been solved we'd look at much, much cheaper lcd screens comprising several seamlessly connected subunits.
Toast Messenger: ok, a funny novelty item. But quite useless for its intended purpose (I can't imagine you get anywhere near the resolution of "pen on paper" with "burnmarks on toast") and aside from writing "I love you, honey" I don't think there is any situation in which a message on toast is superior to a note written on paper ("Yes, Mr. Wilkinson, we got your order. Let me check my toast...").
Dual Music Player: ok, points for originality. But injury risks aside - I would think it pretty dangerous for the CD to be played this way. For one thing my mobile players tend to accumulate dust, fluff and grit due to being carried around in backpacks, pockets and shopping bags, and those would probably produce nice scratches(and not the radial ones that the software can erase).
Vaio Zoom: nice toy, probably incredibly overpriced. What's the advantage of a screen that's transparent when turned off? Look in front of you. Imagine this screen was a pane of glass. Do you prefer this view to a black rectangle? And what's with the ecstatic repetition of "holographic" (quote: "Even the mouse buttons are holographic!")??? First, I don't think this words means what you think it means. Second, I don't want mouse buttons that are glowy (presumably what they mean). Why should I? I don't have eyes in my fingers, and I don't look at the mouse when moving it, I look at the screen, where the cursor is! Stupid blingy manager toy...
Visual Desktop Charger: ok, nice idea. But on the other hand I don't mind creating a physical link to charge my phone or mp3 player - I would guess this thing uses inductive coupling of some kind, which is much, much less efficient than an ordinary copper cable.
Laser Keyboard: interesting idea, but I heard they're terrible to use - no tactile feedback, and you finger start to hurt if you hit a flat, solid surface the same way you type on a keyboard.
Omaura HTPC: so it's a computer case. Which is flat. And wide. Which is important because... it has to fit below a huge giant flatscreen on the wall. Because extension cables don't exist in this world. And you have to get really, really close to those giant screens, and you couldn't if you had one of those giant big tower jobs blocking you.
Hi-Tech Office: Eclipse Partitioning System: don't know about that one. I've worked for some time in an office with ~20 people, and cubicles see,ed to solve most of the problems just fine; plus, I really don't think I'd like to spend half of my day under a giant Cone of Silence.
EmTrace's PS100 Photoskin Frames: it's a tiny monitor with some storage attached. Big whoop. If I really needed something with a tiny
I'd really like to know, too - especially since some people really have clearly not understood what a "tag" is supposed to be.
It is not a way of answering a question asked in the submission text! There is nothing more useless than those "yes", "no", and "maybe" tags cropping up every single time a question mark shows up.
It is not a tool to correct spelling errors! Ok, I'd actually prefer some direct feedback system for that that doesn't get buried as "off-topic" in a comment 150+ down the line, but the tag system is not intended to be used as a notification tool. Especially if the mistake does get corrected, and the tag now consists of an arbitrary out-of-context word.
If you have to give "clever" tags, please, please make sure you get at least the spelling right. This story was tagged "sluethinadvertising"(sic), which I assume to be a very poor attempt at a pun; but even then it's probably supposed to be "sleuth"! If you can't even spell words from your own language, you have no business in adding tags!
"A penny for your thoughts", quite literally. What's with this obsession with "intellectual property"? I have thought of many, many things. I have used these thoughts to create physical objects from raw maerials, to compose texts, to extend these notions and to combine them, to create new, previously un-thought thoughts. And it never occurred to me that I should pay the people that inspired those mental processes, nor did it occur to me to ask for remuneration for those thoughts I in turn shared with my environment. How can anyone claim ownership of a phrase, a collection of words, a simple idea like this and ask for rent?
This is getting more and more absurd. If you can let people get away with the claim that they "own" the words "one cent", where can we expect them to stop? Is there any reason they could not claim that the word "one", as an essential part of that phrase, is also their property? I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, I'd really like to hear an argument that could apply to "one cent" but not to "one".
That is an example of what I like to call "conflation of evils". An action can be
morally wrong (going against your own personal conscience)
legally wrong (going against codified law)or
sinful (going against your religious beliefs)
Watching child pornography is illegal in all relevant legal systems, and not reporting someone to the authorities could be considered a crime of omission or obstruction of justice. It might be sinful, depending on your religion. It is probably considered morally wrong by the majority of people.
The problem I see with the dilemma posed by the article is that he tries to conflate these areas and to get a mental map that divides things neatly into The Right Thing(TM) and The Wrong Thing(TM). I think this approach vastly over-simplifies things; take file-sharing, for instance: many instances are illegal since they break copyright law. Yet I wouldn't think it is immoral, since the laws appear to be unjustly slanted against consumers. I couldn't say how religions see the issue (the closest I could find was a quote from the Bible: "go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor" which seems to speak out against hoarding property), so I won't make a qualified judgement on that.
But it should be clear that this is a complex issue, and people trying to frame it in terms of "right" and "wrong" without specifying the framework they're using makes a good answer almost impossible.
If you have to pay someone not to do something that's harmful to me that's not "staying neutral". That's "accepting a bribe".
How are they guaranteeing that the other networks their traffic is routed through will play ball? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know it only takes one robber-baron to squat in the way and throttle traffic that displeases him / isn't paid for. Unless the ISP can prove that only their lines used from start to finish point their "net neutrality" fee means squat as long as any one provider can break the system.
I really don't think you guys should start going down that slippery slope...
The article is so full of I-want-to-bash-my-head-against-the-wall idiotic ideas that I really don't know where to start.
So I'll just pick one tiny quote:
Would-be complainants are also advised not to trawl for obscene Web sites, noting that "men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic addiction." Identifying Internet smut, the site advises, is best left to professional law enforcement personnel.
Who have to be blind, deaf eunuchs. Because that's the only way to be sure.
Dammit, I have to add one thing:
Mr. Peters said he was confident that officials would eventually assume their responsibility and go after what he described as a prime threat to society, the growth on the Internet of sexual material involving consenting adults.
Ok... what exactly is wrong with consentingadults??? How can you get any more puritan than that? Is he really that much out of touch with reality that he can even begin to think that there's anything wrong with that and furthermore, that HE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT???
Ahemm... sorry, but the degree of mental retardation needed to keep such views in today's society keeps astounding me.
Here are, just off the top of my head, a couple of reasons why I think that's a really stupid idea:
You have to consciously enter a PIN to give it away - unless you're fooled by a complete rebuild of an ATM, you're not likely to enter this particular number anywhere else; but you show your face to everyone in the street, making it trivial to get several photographs of it and even do a 3D reconstruction if desired.
You can enter a number at a keypad even if severely impaired and under pretty unfriendly conditions (outside ATM in heavy rain, when you're wearing gloves and are a little under the effect of both a cold and cold medicine, say). It's a pretty fool-proof, accessible way of entering a small amount of data. Facial recognition, on the other hand, requires - unless there have been vast advances - very good lighting, a clear image of the face not obscured by sunglasses, intensive make-up or bruises, and no vast changes in hair style or beard growth.
Image recognition is cost intensive, energy intensive and computationally expensive; a keypad of the highest level, secure and proof against vandalism will cost what? A couple of hundred bucks at most? To get facial recognition you need light sources that don't interfere with the cameras, the cameras themselves, complex software behind them and - also very important - you need large amounts of data on the facial features. Granted, it might be easy to compress them to a couple of hundred kb's if you're willing to sacrifice some accuracy, but compare that with the four or five byte you need to store a PIN!
Problem of false negatives and false positives: when I enter a PIN I can usually get it right on the first try; I usually only run into problems when I confuse it with the PIN from another card. Entering it wrongly has happened maybe once or twice in my life, as far as I remember. Now, what are the chances that the facial recognition software will correctly identify me 99.99999% of the time? And how big is the risk that it might mistake another person for me?
Another thing: right now I can hand my credit card to my brother, tell him to pick me up a little cash from an ATM and give him my PIN and card. Will there be provisions made for you to authorize other people, like your spouse? How many? For how long?
I think it's strange that so many people seem to think just because something is newer it is automatically better than the old technology / method / tool. Don't get me wrong, I love progress - but increasing the failure points of a known and working (if not perfect) system seems like a strange idea to me...
In addition to your point, I really can't understand the reasoning behind the bleeping. I mean, what do they expect? How are people supposed to react to the bleeped word? "F*bleep*? What did he say just now? Fun? Farm? Fart? Oh, if only I knew!"
I mean, what exactly is gained by this? Are American children so stupid they can't make the connection between "f*bleep*" and "fuck"? "Daddy, why did that man just buzz? Is buzzing a bad thing?"
Is there anyone in the world stupid enough to look at one of these broadcasts, hear a censored word and genuinely be happy, not knowing what the original text was?
...and use emotionally charged words. "Piracy" does sound so much better than "copyright infringement" even though it has nothing to do with rape, pillage and plunder on the high seas; so why not call their tactics "terrorism"? All right, it would mean lowering ourselves to their level - but as long as they are allowed to do this with impunity, why shouldn't we?
GP is probably alluding to "orifice" = "an opening (as a vent, mouth, or hole) through which something may pass" (according to Webster), which is pronounced roughly the same.
Meanwhile, Joel Wiseman bought a Mac MINI and wonders why Sixbit and Sixpack spent all the time and money on systems dedicated to trying to grab content from a stream, when they could spend less of both just buying songs individually on demand.
He uses the extra time and money saved to read books. Oh, so you save money by buying stuff? I'm not entirely clear on how that is going to work...
I must respectfully disagree. I'm a German, and Germany has placed considerably limits on so-called "free speech"; and I'm fine with that. Why should I give holocaust deniers and nazi propagandist the right to be heard? And please don't trot out the old canard of "they'll be after your free speech next" - those limits have been in place since about 1946, and I don't know of any case when they were abused to censor other political speech. Feel free to enlighten me with examples to the contrary.
In case you didn't know, you might already be in possession of a device that allows you to see infrared light: if you take a digital camera (even a simple phonecam will do) and look at the front of a tv remote when you press one of the buttons, you'll see a bright light flashing that's invisible to the naked eye. It's a great way to see if you need to replace the batteries or if the remote has not survived that drop from the table...
I also wondered if it might not be possible to build a (relatively) cheap light banner using IR LEDs - it would be black to the human eye but show up clearly through the viewscreen in your digicam or phonecam.
*sigh* Of course you're right. That's what you get from posting very very late at night.. I hereby retract all my earlier statements and claim the exact opposite. All previous mistakes must now be considered null and void, and the universe must shape itself to accommodate this new reality.
Just to add to your comment: I really hate it when I notice that the computer is doing something only a computer can. I don't mean looking at my stats, but just using its speed and the fact that it doesn't have to go through a graphical interface like me. It's what has turned me off most real-time strategy games; even if I designate keyboard shortcuts to groups of my troops, I still cannot simultaneously order my tanks to go to siege position, my scouts to withdraw and fake a side attack, my artillery to start bombarding an area in front of my troops while at the same time fighting an insurrection at the other end of the map and controlling the flow of the resources...
And it bothers me when a computer manages to do just that. If I could micro-manage every single one of my foot soldiers, I would be able to let them attack until only one health point is left and then cycle them for fresh ones, too; but I can only command that many different platoons before it overwhelms me. Giving the computer a fighting chance is ok, but I don't like to be reminded constantly that I could play so much better if only I could control them better, without going through the low-bandwidth channel of keyboard and mouse.
If you count the arms of a thousand people, it's possible that there will be an amputee among them; thus the mathematical average (1999 arms divided by 1000 people, for instance) will come to a number slightly smaller than two. If you try to calculate the average number of arms from the total population of the world, you'll get a number also lower than two, since amputees or people born without arms will outnumber genetic defects where people are born with more than two. Therefore, most people have more than the "average" number of arms, since 2 > 1.99999...
It's a classical example of showing why in statistics other measures are used than just the mathematical average; there is, for instance, the median which will give you the value that shows up most often in a given sample. The median number of arms of humans is, indeed, two.
Hey, I'm German, we've been taught repeatedly that trying to start wars is a Bad Idea(TM), and I've come round to the same conclusion a long time ago. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate - if it is not possible to detect when such a weapon is used it becomes far to easy for those at the muzzle end of those things to pretend that they are, in fact, being used. Just imagine if police showed up at a peaceful protest - if the crowd started shuddering back, pretending to be hit by rubber bullets, it would be obvious if the police was not shooting. The same thing goes for tear gas and water jets. But this "invisible ray weapon" could easily be used as a propaganda tool against the police: just drop in front of some tv cameras and start jerking around, pretending to be in agony. Those images will cast a very bad light on the police forces even if no one actually fired the weapon! How are you going to prove that you did not fire an invisible ray that doesn't leave any marks on the victims?
My point is that it would be extremely unwise to deploy such a weapon since it would make a great propaganda tool for the other side, whoever that is!
Just imagine there is a peaceful protest somewhere in Iraq, and the armed forces show up with such devices but don't use them. Arrange to have five or six people in the field of fire on a certain signal suddenly scream "Ahhh! It burns! They're attacking!" and pretend to be in pain. The opinion will turn against the Americans even if they didn't activate the device! Great publicity stunt for the opposing side.
I had to get back to the 2.0 version, since the new one kept crashing and freezing the computer. Shouldn't this have been checked more thoroughly? About half of the postings up right now seem to be about it not working correctly...
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck them, they ruin everything they get their greedy little mitts on; latest example is one of my favorite Firefox extensions, FoxyTunes. They were bought out by Yahoo! and subsequently had to replace the lyrics query that went to the open LyricWiki with Y!Music, which hardly contains any lyrics to the songs I listen to. Oh, and of course Yahoo! Music doesn't allow you to upload lyrics you transcribed yourself. I've started hating Yahoo! with a really serious passion lately...
So, if the problem is people getting wrong readings from shoddy counters - why not set some standards for accuracy and reliability for Geiger counters and enforce them? Don't you have any organization in America that would be responsible for the correct calibration and accuracy of instruments like those? Like the ones that make sure that, for instance, scales in grocery stores are weighing the correct amount? Just pass a law that makes it illegal to produce and / or sell an instrument that doesn't work reliably enough, demand that everyone can turn in old, unreliable counters for the selling price to their vendors and fix the problem this way.
"A penny for your thoughts", quite literally. What's with this obsession with "intellectual property"? I have thought of many, many things. I have used these thoughts to create physical objects from raw maerials, to compose texts, to extend these notions and to combine them, to create new, previously un-thought thoughts. And it never occurred to me that I should pay the people that inspired those mental processes, nor did it occur to me to ask for remuneration for those thoughts I in turn shared with my environment. How can anyone claim ownership of a phrase, a collection of words, a simple idea like this and ask for rent?
This is getting more and more absurd. If you can let people get away with the claim that they "own" the words "one cent", where can we expect them to stop? Is there any reason they could not claim that the word "one", as an essential part of that phrase, is also their property? I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, I'd really like to hear an argument that could apply to "one cent" but not to "one".
- morally wrong (going against your own personal conscience)
- legally wrong (going against codified law)or
- sinful (going against your religious beliefs)
Watching child pornography is illegal in all relevant legal systems, and not reporting someone to the authorities could be considered a crime of omission or obstruction of justice. It might be sinful, depending on your religion. It is probably considered morally wrong by the majority of people.The problem I see with the dilemma posed by the article is that he tries to conflate these areas and to get a mental map that divides things neatly into The Right Thing(TM) and The Wrong Thing(TM). I think this approach vastly over-simplifies things; take file-sharing, for instance: many instances are illegal since they break copyright law. Yet I wouldn't think it is immoral, since the laws appear to be unjustly slanted against consumers. I couldn't say how religions see the issue (the closest I could find was a quote from the Bible: "go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor" which seems to speak out against hoarding property), so I won't make a qualified judgement on that.
But it should be clear that this is a complex issue, and people trying to frame it in terms of "right" and "wrong" without specifying the framework they're using makes a good answer almost impossible.
- If you have to pay someone not to do something that's harmful to me that's not "staying neutral". That's "accepting a bribe".
- How are they guaranteeing that the other networks their traffic is routed through will play ball? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know it only takes one robber-baron to squat in the way and throttle traffic that displeases him / isn't paid for. Unless the ISP can prove that only their lines used from start to finish point their "net neutrality" fee means squat as long as any one provider can break the system.
I really don't think you guys should start going down that slippery slope...So I'll just pick one tiny quote: Who have to be blind, deaf eunuchs. Because that's the only way to be sure. Dammit, I have to add one thing: Ok... what exactly is wrong with consenting adults??? How can you get any more puritan than that? Is he really that much out of touch with reality that he can even begin to think that there's anything wrong with that and furthermore, that HE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT???
Ahemm... sorry, but the degree of mental retardation needed to keep such views in today's society keeps astounding me.
- You have to consciously enter a PIN to give it away - unless you're fooled by a complete rebuild of an ATM, you're not likely to enter this particular number anywhere else; but you show your face to everyone in the street, making it trivial to get several photographs of it and even do a 3D reconstruction if desired.
- You can enter a number at a keypad even if severely impaired and under pretty unfriendly conditions (outside ATM in heavy rain, when you're wearing gloves and are a little under the effect of both a cold and cold medicine, say). It's a pretty fool-proof, accessible way of entering a small amount of data. Facial recognition, on the other hand, requires - unless there have been vast advances - very good lighting, a clear image of the face not obscured by sunglasses, intensive make-up or bruises, and no vast changes in hair style or beard growth.
- Image recognition is cost intensive, energy intensive and computationally expensive; a keypad of the highest level, secure and proof against vandalism will cost what? A couple of hundred bucks at most? To get facial recognition you need light sources that don't interfere with the cameras, the cameras themselves, complex software behind them and - also very important - you need large amounts of data on the facial features. Granted, it might be easy to compress them to a couple of hundred kb's if you're willing to sacrifice some accuracy, but compare that with the four or five byte you need to store a PIN!
- Problem of false negatives and false positives: when I enter a PIN I can usually get it right on the first try; I usually only run into problems when I confuse it with the PIN from another card. Entering it wrongly has happened maybe once or twice in my life, as far as I remember. Now, what are the chances that the facial recognition software will correctly identify me 99.99999% of the time? And how big is the risk that it might mistake another person for me?
- Another thing: right now I can hand my credit card to my brother, tell him to pick me up a little cash from an ATM and give him my PIN and card. Will there be provisions made for you to authorize other people, like your spouse? How many? For how long?
I think it's strange that so many people seem to think just because something is newer it is automatically better than the old technology / method / tool. Don't get me wrong, I love progress - but increasing the failure points of a known and working (if not perfect) system seems like a strange idea to me...In addition to your point, I really can't understand the reasoning behind the bleeping. I mean, what do they expect? How are people supposed to react to the bleeped word? "F*bleep*? What did he say just now? Fun? Farm? Fart? Oh, if only I knew!"
I mean, what exactly is gained by this? Are American children so stupid they can't make the connection between "f*bleep*" and "fuck"? "Daddy, why did that man just buzz? Is buzzing a bad thing?"
Is there anyone in the world stupid enough to look at one of these broadcasts, hear a censored word and genuinely be happy, not knowing what the original text was?
The Fourth Law is the most important: "Any attempt to arrest a senior OCP officer^W^W Republican party member results in shutdown".
...and use emotionally charged words. "Piracy" does sound so much better than "copyright infringement" even though it has nothing to do with rape, pillage and plunder on the high seas; so why not call their tactics "terrorism"? All right, it would mean lowering ourselves to their level - but as long as they are allowed to do this with impunity, why shouldn't we?
GP is probably alluding to "orifice" = "an opening (as a vent, mouth, or hole) through which something may pass" (according to Webster), which is pronounced roughly the same.
He uses the extra time and money saved to read books.
Oh, so you save money by buying stuff? I'm not entirely clear on how that is going to work...
I must respectfully disagree. I'm a German, and Germany has placed considerably limits on so-called "free speech"; and I'm fine with that. Why should I give holocaust deniers and nazi propagandist the right to be heard? And please don't trot out the old canard of "they'll be after your free speech next" - those limits have been in place since about 1946, and I don't know of any case when they were abused to censor other political speech. Feel free to enlighten me with examples to the contrary.
In case you didn't know, you might already be in possession of a device that allows you to see infrared light: if you take a digital camera (even a simple phonecam will do) and look at the front of a tv remote when you press one of the buttons, you'll see a bright light flashing that's invisible to the naked eye. It's a great way to see if you need to replace the batteries or if the remote has not survived that drop from the table...
I also wondered if it might not be possible to build a (relatively) cheap light banner using IR LEDs - it would be black to the human eye but show up clearly through the viewscreen in your digicam or phonecam.
So, how much is that in real temperature? Like, 35 degrees C or something?
*sigh* Of course you're right. That's what you get from posting very very late at night..
I hereby retract all my earlier statements and claim the exact opposite. All previous mistakes must now be considered null and void, and the universe must shape itself to accommodate this new reality.
Just to add to your comment: I really hate it when I notice that the computer is doing something only a computer can. I don't mean looking at my stats, but just using its speed and the fact that it doesn't have to go through a graphical interface like me. It's what has turned me off most real-time strategy games; even if I designate keyboard shortcuts to groups of my troops, I still cannot simultaneously order my tanks to go to siege position, my scouts to withdraw and fake a side attack, my artillery to start bombarding an area in front of my troops while at the same time fighting an insurrection at the other end of the map and controlling the flow of the resources...
And it bothers me when a computer manages to do just that. If I could micro-manage every single one of my foot soldiers, I would be able to let them attack until only one health point is left and then cycle them for fresh ones, too; but I can only command that many different platoons before it overwhelms me. Giving the computer a fighting chance is ok, but I don't like to be reminded constantly that I could play so much better if only I could control them better, without going through the low-bandwidth channel of keyboard and mouse.
If you count the arms of a thousand people, it's possible that there will be an amputee among them; thus the mathematical average (1999 arms divided by 1000 people, for instance) will come to a number slightly smaller than two. If you try to calculate the average number of arms from the total population of the world, you'll get a number also lower than two, since amputees or people born without arms will outnumber genetic defects where people are born with more than two. Therefore, most people have more than the "average" number of arms, since 2 > 1.99999...
It's a classical example of showing why in statistics other measures are used than just the mathematical average; there is, for instance, the median which will give you the value that shows up most often in a given sample. The median number of arms of humans is, indeed, two.
Hey, I'm German, we've been taught repeatedly that trying to start wars is a Bad Idea(TM), and I've come round to the same conclusion a long time ago.
I'm just trying to play devil's advocate - if it is not possible to detect when such a weapon is used it becomes far to easy for those at the muzzle end of those things to pretend that they are, in fact, being used. Just imagine if police showed up at a peaceful protest - if the crowd started shuddering back, pretending to be hit by rubber bullets, it would be obvious if the police was not shooting. The same thing goes for tear gas and water jets.
But this "invisible ray weapon" could easily be used as a propaganda tool against the police: just drop in front of some tv cameras and start jerking around, pretending to be in agony. Those images will cast a very bad light on the police forces even if no one actually fired the weapon! How are you going to prove that you did not fire an invisible ray that doesn't leave any marks on the victims?
My point is that it would be extremely unwise to deploy such a weapon since it would make a great propaganda tool for the other side, whoever that is!
Just imagine there is a peaceful protest somewhere in Iraq, and the armed forces show up with such devices but don't use them. Arrange to have five or six people in the field of fire on a certain signal suddenly scream "Ahhh! It burns! They're attacking!" and pretend to be in pain. The opinion will turn against the Americans even if they didn't activate the device! Great publicity stunt for the opposing side.
I had to get back to the 2.0 version, since the new one kept crashing and freezing the computer. Shouldn't this have been checked more thoroughly? About half of the postings up right now seem to be about it not working correctly...