Too late, its been done. Guys have been spraying concrete over balloons for years. They use 'em to lift rebar too. Darn.
It isn't that great an idea anyway, you need a different shaped balloon for every kind of space you want to fill. Gets expensive. Be a hell of a lot easier to have the robot do the walls and then do the roof/ceilings/floors by hand. Also the painting, electrical, plumbing etc.
Some things you need humans to do, unless you want to spend a ton of money on programming robots. Last I checked, programmers make more than painters.
Robots rock for repetetive tasks, but as of yet they suck at things you only have to do once. Like installing the kitchen taps or painting window trim. Sure the car makers use robotic painters, but do autobody shops? Nuh uh.
This whole thing reminds me of Thomas Edison's concrete houses. He patented the idea of building the complete house of concrete, stairs, bathtubs and all. There's still a couple of them left in New York. Idea never took off, but it introduced methods we still use today in concrete work. Like concrete counter tops.
This is the same kind of thing. Spraying windows? Doubt it. Spraying plumbing? Gonna leak for sure and you can't fix it. Installing copper or plastic plumbing in a sprayed conduit while the building is going up? THAT will work. A really smart designer will even make it easy to pull replacement wire and plumbing in case something breaks.
There's no way to "spray" or otherwise lay down an unsupported liquid slurry over an open space. Therefor you either have to spray it on the ground and lift it into place, or spray it over a form.
Cheapest, fastest thing I can think of is to use a balloon inside the room. Spray your ceiling from above, then deflate it.
I agree. Intel just released dual core chips, AMD has them already and is about to release quad core chips, plus we have -cheap- dual processor boards available. That'd be eight cores, as soon as AMD releases their new kit.
Even Windows is shipping with SMP available, we have processing capability out the wazoo pretty much. Should be able to handle any AI requirements I'd think and have room to balance your checkbook at the same time.
Some clever lad should be able to design a bot that doesn't do the same thing every single time, eh? Maybe learns to check that blind spot before it sticks its head out. Now THAT would be fun! Better than new eye candy, for sure.
I very much hope that the Bush administration kicks the collective corporate ass of Google, Microsoft, Cisco and whoever else is in on this. It is beyond the pale for US companies to participate in the continuing enslavement of the Chinese by their government.
Ok, this business of privelige vs. right, this is why we "conservative" types have problems with Europeans and other socialists.
In this case, a "conservative" is a guy who expects to be able to do what he wants with a music CD if he pays money for it (short of bootlegging it, of course). A socialist is a guy who is determined to control the manner and amount of use the CD gets AFTER it is sold.
Control freaks, in other words. Freedom or state control of your own property.
The reason he's not responsible for the activites of his customers is called Ownership. The maker or inventor of a product is not responsible for the use his creation is put to after he sells it because he no longer OWNS it. He has no control over it, no knowledge of it's use or condition.
This is a direct result of the concept of private property. If what's mine is mine, in a free society nobody else has any claim to or control over what's mine. If I buy a thing it becomes mine, and all benefits and consequences from its use or abuse become mine also.
Take your issue of selling the tank to Iran. Let us, for the sake of argument, agree with your assertion that the tank maker is responsible for the use his machines are put to by the Iranian government.
Tanks are made of steel. If I make steel and sell it to the tank manufacturer, am I responsible for the tank he sells to Iran as well? How about the miners who dug up the iron ore? How about the caterers who fed the miners? How about the shipping company that delivered the ore?
Private property. Important concept. Personal responsibility, different concept, also important.
This is the same idea as stress induced "tunnel vision", well known to soldiers, cops and hunters. Hunters know it as "buck fever".
Example being the cop focusing on an armed goblin trying to shoot him will often miss other important things, like the old lady standing behind the bad guy, or another bad guy shooting at him.
This appears to be a normal human trait, not a defect. Part of the fight/flight response suite. A tight focus on the enemy is probably one of those evolutionary advantages we got from the dinosaurs.
Good news is tunnel vision can be conquered with a combination of training and experience. Bad news is, cops don't usually get that training. The recent shooting of the Brazillian man in the London subway may in fact be a case of combat induced tunnel vision.
As usual the psych weenies are like 30 years behind the curve. That's what you get when you ignore whole realms of knowledge beacause they are politically incorrect. As the parent noted, Air Force people have known about this since the Korean War.
Have you seen this thing? Its a friggin' golf cart. There are a few of them in my neighbourhood, every time I park next to one I have this urge to tip the bloody thing over.
Rolling coffin. A motorcycle would be safer. At least on a bike you can usually jump off before you hit.
"You already said the delivery system is a beer bottle. WTF?!"
You know, the willfull stupidity of Liberals never fails to amaze me. I'll use smaller words so you can understand.
Obviously one beer bottle full is about 12 ounces. The fatal dose is measured in milligrams. 12 ounces is enough to depopulate and poison an area measuring several acres. That means kill everybody who's there at the time and kill anyone who comes there later. For years. Understand?
The stuff has to be aerosolized to make it spread effectively. This can be accomplished by a variety of methods which I will not describe for obvious reasons. That means you gotta spray it somehow.
Got that, coward boy?
So, its my contention that maybe it would be better to break some laws and shoot some people than let that shit loose in a major city.
As to the rest of your blather, I rest my case. Vile hatred has rotted your brain, assuming you ever had one. I'd suggest you stop drinking the Moveon.org bong water, but I think its too late for you. You're fucked.
You should continue making Iraq a free, democratic country which is friendly with the USA and loves to take US dollars for its abundant oil. It won't take as long as it did in Germany or Japan I'm sure.
The reason the USA and Britian should do this, quite apart from the obvious humanitarian and moral rightness of this course, it will absolutely destroy the House of Saud, and the Syrian Baath Party, and the Lebanese dictatorship, and the Iranian Mullah-ocracy, and etc. without firing a single shot.
The people of the region will see all the happy fat Iraqi people, they will look around their own crappy sand dunes and they will cease to support the dictators. Violently I expect. The likes of the House of Saud will shortly have much better things to do that fund Al Qaeda and Hamas.
So will the Saudi Wahabbi fruitcakes who form the core of Al Qaeda. Their big cheeses will be busy explaining to world wide Islam why they bulldozed almost all of ancient Mecca and Medina and paved it over with concrete.
No American blood or treasure involved outside the current theater of operations. Pure Sun Tzu, flawless victory by not fighting.
Example, Momar Khadaffi who defied Regan and kept on defying him after having his house blown up by the US Navy. Our good friend Momar called up President Bush, good ol' Cowboy George, two days after watching Saddam Hussein being dragged out of a spider hole and turned over actual nuclear weapons to the USA for disposal. Not the makings of bombs, real bombs. That's results.
Funny how only people who hate Bush fail to see the beauty of this plan.
While there may or may -not- have been bulk supplies of chemical and/or bioweapon WMDs in Iraq at the time of the US Coalition invasion, there is absolutely no doubt that there were previously. We know nerve gas was used on Kurdish villages. What can be made once can be made again.
Furthermore, there doesn't have to be very much of the stuff. A beer bottle full of persistent nerve agent dispensed in a handy subway/tube/Metro station will kill hundreds to thousands depending on the delivery system, and cost BILLIONS to clean up. VX gas of the type used in Kurdistan is particularly nasty, it stays in the environment for years unless scrubbed off. Imagine scrubbing the whole friggin' Paris Metro from one end to the other, plus you have to decontaminate the water used, etc. etc. etc.
Now imagine a 45 gallon drum full. In New York.
Getting the picture? If Saddam was willing to slip the Palestinians a few bucks for every suicide bomber (that alone is worth going to war incidentally, Israel is a US ally), with the smoke still rising out of the 9/11 hole can George Bush take the chance that maybe he'll slip Al Qaeda a couple quarts of death juice? Can Tony Blair take that chance? Nuh uh.
So regardless of the legal niceties, Saddam was going down. That was a given. What I find interesting is all the countries lined up against the idea were hip deep in the Oil for Fraud deal with Saddam the Ear Slicer. Puts paid to the idea of the Noble European Left, eh?
At any rate I shouldn't have to explain this kind of thing, its all perfectly obvious. The only explanation I have for the willfull blindness of people like yourself is hate. You hate Bush so much you'd rather see your own country fall to a bunch of hairy assed religious fundys than let Bush have a win.
1. There is no freedom of speech guarantee in Canadian law. Recent hate speech legislation makes it possible for you to get jail time for quoting certain parts of the Bible. Given the bendy nature of law in these parts, they can pretty much do whatever they want in terms of speech if somebody irritates the high and mighty sufficiently. One party state, don't annoy the One Party.
2. ISPs are allowed to block stuff like kiddie porn, but not -required- to do so, mostly because they can't. The ISP can't be held liable for failing to block hate speech on a bulletin board, for example. The government goes after the hosting company instead, or in the case of kiddie porn the sender and the receiver both.
Therefore I expect that Telus can legaly block pretty much anything they want. Stupid of them, because now there's a row about it and the union is making big points, but legal. Probably.
This is the central problem I have with Big Government. The same schmuck who made this decision at Telus has ten thousand clones in government offices. If your ISP starts doing this kind of thing you can just switch companies. If the government does it, as it inevitably will, they just change the laws to suit what they want and you're screwed.
Limited government is good government. The best possible limit is an armed citizenry, because you can't change that with the stroke of a pen.
Nice post, but the point remains. Yes, the raygun IS a weapon and yes, it certainly can be abused by trigger happy a-holes, but as you point out so can the night stick, dog, taser, whatever.
Flag burners are people of a particular political stripe looking to cause an incident with the cops without assaulting the cops first. Suck them into doing something infront of a camera.
Would you rather the cops have something that if used properly causes very little permanent harm, or should they just be issued clubs, dogs and M-16s?
Because one way or another they are going to break up that crowd.
And don't talk to me about trusting government. I'm a Canadian, you Americans are in heaven compared to us. Wanna see crooked cops? Come on up to Toronto.
The point is if they use the raygun and somebody dies, its an accident. 99.93% un-lethal except by unfortunate misadventure. Likewise if you shoot somebody and they -don't- die, that's an accident too. Even pepper spray can be lethal on certain rare people, but not deliberately so. And its a hell of a lot safer than a night stick, right?
The intent is not to kill anybody in a hostile and possibly armed crowd while making the crowd stop fighting. That's a tall order. If this thing can do it, its top notch. It also is not the kind of thing some violent tyranical government is going to waste money inventing.
Should some future offical turn such a weapon on a peaceful group for some nefarious purpose that would be very bad. But not as bad as machine gunning the crowd or beating the crap out of them with sticks, right?
When faced with a government that does things like turning microwave weapons on peaceful demonstrators, the obvious thing to do is depose it. The US government doesn't do that kind of thing as a matter of policy and never has. Well, except for Waco I suppose. Even there 80 kids would be alive if they used the raygun on the Davidians instead of the ATF monkey squad.
The Chicoms swapped out the local soldiers in Tianamen Square who were reluctant to drive over the protester with some non-local boys and we had the Tianamen Square Unpleasantness. There was a revolution about to pop and they squashed it as hard as they could.
Difference between the USA and Chicomland is that Chicoms PREFER live ammo. They don't mind killing a few thousand demonstrators if the rest of the country keep their heads down as a result.
For you to pretend the US and Chinese governments are even remotely similar is so ridiculous its hilarious. No wonder the Democrats can't get elected as dog catcher.
Burning the American flag in America is an announcement that you are an opponent of freedom and justice and basically up to no good. I would think you'd prefer the raygun to being shot by some pissed off citizen myself. Outside Berkley CA people are liable to do that to flag burners.
And by the way. Ghandi was a wild eyed socialist whose "reforms" held back progress in India until the 1980's and killed millions by starvation. Hasn't been a famine in India since the Ghandis were booted out of power. They EXPORT food now. Ghandi was a gold plated imbecile.
Fuck me, what does it take to penetrate with you peaceniks? Its a fucking LESS THAN LETHAL WEAPON. Anything used on a crowd for any reason which is less than lethal is a GOOD thing.
Because in Iraq at the moment there's lots of dedicated Islamonazis running around blowing up innocent men, women, children and little babies. They are too cowardly to take on the US Army or the British Army, but they are quite happy to blow up their fellow Iraqi Muslims.
The crowd control problem comes in when the slightly less dedicated assholes who support the bombers decide to rush a road block, embassy, guard post or what have you. Some of them inevitably use the crowd as cover to fire on US troops, Brit troops, even the new Iraqi Army troops.
So now you've got a bunch of American teenagers in a Bradley or a Humvee, under fire from ten assholes in a crowd of two hundred. You want them to use the fancy ray-gun to flatten the crowd and pick up the ten armed assholes, or would you prefer that they just open fire on the crowd?
Because no matter how much YOU might prefer that the American teenagers take a bullet from the noble freedom fighters, they are not going to do it. Humans are funny that way.
So, superficial burn or bullet to the head? Those are your two choices. Pick one. Idiot.
First post right out the box with this whinging Lefty kant. Good God man, consider the alternative! That would be a.50 cal machine gun.
You've got 1000 pissed off rioters, many of whom are armed with rifles. Water hoses against rifles? Don't think so! Tear gas against rifles? Nuh uh.
So now, finally, the US Army has a (barely) viable alternative to firing on a crowd, and that makes them the bad guys? What's worse, a superficial burn or a bullet to the head? You're an IDIOT.
Re:How to make it suck less? Cut the budget in hal
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
There are two things operating in the education business. First, just because something costs twice as much doesn't make it twice as good.
Second, where there is a big pile of money lying around there will always be people with sticky fingers.
Put another way, the educational system today is a bloated, horrific bureacracy whose primary mission is to increase its own funding. There is no external agency capable of chopping up that bureaucracy, nor will it decrease its own size voluntarily.
Therefore the only reasonable, available method is to cut the budget. The level of education delivered to the children will not change, just the cost of it.
If this sounds heartless, consider the fact that the current system is bankrupting the nation, but the kids can't read when they come out of grade 12. It should be possible to perpetrate illiteracy upon the country's youth at half the price, don't you think?
How to make it suck less? Cut the budget in half.
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
Not kidding. Too many leeches are sucking money out of middle management, school boards, labour relations, building maintenance, etc etc etc. There is HUGE money in education, most of it has nothing to do with actually teaching children. There's probably an average of at least three ancilary staff to every teacher in the system, I have a feeling that number is 'way low.
To improve the situation you must first kill the leeches. Cut the budget in half at the local, provincial (state) and national level When the blood suckers get the message that their sinecure is down the tube, they will move on to greener pastures.
Ending all programs other than core scholarship wouldn't hurt either. Sports is supposed to keep you strong so you can study, not the reverse.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually its why the NRA exists. Big Brother can ignore a court case. He has more trouble ignoring a Colt .45
Too late, its been done. Guys have been spraying concrete over balloons for years. They use 'em to lift rebar too. Darn.
It isn't that great an idea anyway, you need a different shaped balloon for every kind of space you want to fill. Gets expensive. Be a hell of a lot easier to have the robot do the walls and then do the roof/ceilings/floors by hand. Also the painting, electrical, plumbing etc.
Some things you need humans to do, unless you want to spend a ton of money on programming robots. Last I checked, programmers make more than painters.
Robots rock for repetetive tasks, but as of yet they suck at things you only have to do once. Like installing the kitchen taps or painting window trim. Sure the car makers use robotic painters, but do autobody shops? Nuh uh.
This whole thing reminds me of Thomas Edison's concrete houses. He patented the idea of building the complete house of concrete, stairs, bathtubs and all. There's still a couple of them left in New York. Idea never took off, but it introduced methods we still use today in concrete work. Like concrete counter tops.
This is the same kind of thing. Spraying windows? Doubt it. Spraying plumbing? Gonna leak for sure and you can't fix it. Installing copper or plastic plumbing in a sprayed conduit while the building is going up? THAT will work. A really smart designer will even make it easy to pull replacement wire and plumbing in case something breaks.
There's no way to "spray" or otherwise lay down an unsupported liquid slurry over an open space. Therefor you either have to spray it on the ground and lift it into place, or spray it over a form.
Cheapest, fastest thing I can think of is to use a balloon inside the room. Spray your ceiling from above, then deflate it.
I agree. Intel just released dual core chips, AMD has them already and is about to release quad core chips, plus we have -cheap- dual processor boards available. That'd be eight cores, as soon as AMD releases their new kit.
Even Windows is shipping with SMP available, we have processing capability out the wazoo pretty much. Should be able to handle any AI requirements I'd think and have room to balance your checkbook at the same time.
Some clever lad should be able to design a bot that doesn't do the same thing every single time, eh? Maybe learns to check that blind spot before it sticks its head out. Now THAT would be fun! Better than new eye candy, for sure.
I very much hope that the Bush administration kicks the collective corporate ass of Google, Microsoft, Cisco and whoever else is in on this. It is beyond the pale for US companies to participate in the continuing enslavement of the Chinese by their government.
From the blurb: "...at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years."
Question, what happened hundreds of thousands of years ago when we were hunting with sticks in the Olduvai Gorge?
If the current situation is not unique, what makes anybody thing WE are the cause this time?
Clue to the "scientists" raging on against the machine, correlation does not prove causation.
Greenies follow a religion, not science. Flame on, Greenies.
Ok, this business of privelige vs. right, this is why we "conservative" types have problems with Europeans and other socialists.
In this case, a "conservative" is a guy who expects to be able to do what he wants with a music CD if he pays money for it (short of bootlegging it, of course). A socialist is a guy who is determined to control the manner and amount of use the CD gets AFTER it is sold.
Control freaks, in other words. Freedom or state control of your own property.
Ready, choose!
That's because the seller is part of a criminal enterprise, which is different than simple commerce.
The reason he's not responsible for the activites of his customers is called Ownership. The maker or inventor of a product is not responsible for the use his creation is put to after he sells it because he no longer OWNS it. He has no control over it, no knowledge of it's use or condition.
This is a direct result of the concept of private property. If what's mine is mine, in a free society nobody else has any claim to or control over what's mine. If I buy a thing it becomes mine, and all benefits and consequences from its use or abuse become mine also.
Take your issue of selling the tank to Iran. Let us, for the sake of argument, agree with your assertion that the tank maker is responsible for the use his machines are put to by the Iranian government.
Tanks are made of steel. If I make steel and sell it to the tank manufacturer, am I responsible for the tank he sells to Iran as well? How about the miners who dug up the iron ore? How about the caterers who fed the miners? How about the shipping company that delivered the ore?
Private property. Important concept. Personal responsibility, different concept, also important.
This is the same idea as stress induced "tunnel vision", well known to soldiers, cops and hunters. Hunters know it as "buck fever".
Example being the cop focusing on an armed goblin trying to shoot him will often miss other important things, like the old lady standing behind the bad guy, or another bad guy shooting at him.
This appears to be a normal human trait, not a defect. Part of the fight/flight response suite. A tight focus on the enemy is probably one of those evolutionary advantages we got from the dinosaurs.
Good news is tunnel vision can be conquered with a combination of training and experience. Bad news is, cops don't usually get that training. The recent shooting of the Brazillian man in the London subway may in fact be a case of combat induced tunnel vision.
As usual the psych weenies are like 30 years behind the curve. That's what you get when you ignore whole realms of knowledge beacause they are politically incorrect. As the parent noted, Air Force people have known about this since the Korean War.
Have you seen this thing? Its a friggin' golf cart. There are a few of them in my neighbourhood, every time I park next to one I have this urge to tip the bloody thing over.
Rolling coffin. A motorcycle would be safer. At least on a bike you can usually jump off before you hit.
"You already said the delivery system is a beer bottle. WTF?!"
You know, the willfull stupidity of Liberals never fails to amaze me. I'll use smaller words so you can understand.
Obviously one beer bottle full is about 12 ounces. The fatal dose is measured in milligrams. 12 ounces is enough to depopulate and poison an area measuring several acres. That means kill everybody who's there at the time and kill anyone who comes there later. For years. Understand?
The stuff has to be aerosolized to make it spread effectively. This can be accomplished by a variety of methods which I will not describe for obvious reasons. That means you gotta spray it somehow.
Got that, coward boy?
So, its my contention that maybe it would be better to break some laws and shoot some people than let that shit loose in a major city.
As to the rest of your blather, I rest my case. Vile hatred has rotted your brain, assuming you ever had one. I'd suggest you stop drinking the Moveon.org bong water, but I think its too late for you. You're fucked.
You should continue making Iraq a free, democratic country which is friendly with the USA and loves to take US dollars for its abundant oil. It won't take as long as it did in Germany or Japan I'm sure.
The reason the USA and Britian should do this, quite apart from the obvious humanitarian and moral rightness of this course, it will absolutely destroy the House of Saud, and the Syrian Baath Party, and the Lebanese dictatorship, and the Iranian Mullah-ocracy, and etc. without firing a single shot.
The people of the region will see all the happy fat Iraqi people, they will look around their own crappy sand dunes and they will cease to support the dictators. Violently I expect. The likes of the House of Saud will shortly have much better things to do that fund Al Qaeda and Hamas.
So will the Saudi Wahabbi fruitcakes who form the core of Al Qaeda. Their big cheeses will be busy explaining to world wide Islam why they bulldozed almost all of ancient Mecca and Medina and paved it over with concrete.
No American blood or treasure involved outside the current theater of operations. Pure Sun Tzu, flawless victory by not fighting.
Example, Momar Khadaffi who defied Regan and kept on defying him after having his house blown up by the US Navy. Our good friend Momar called up President Bush, good ol' Cowboy George, two days after watching Saddam Hussein being dragged out of a spider hole and turned over actual nuclear weapons to the USA for disposal. Not the makings of bombs, real bombs. That's results.
Funny how only people who hate Bush fail to see the beauty of this plan.
While there may or may -not- have been bulk supplies of chemical and/or bioweapon WMDs in Iraq at the time of the US Coalition invasion, there is absolutely no doubt that there were previously. We know nerve gas was used on Kurdish villages. What can be made once can be made again.
Furthermore, there doesn't have to be very much of the stuff. A beer bottle full of persistent nerve agent dispensed in a handy subway/tube/Metro station will kill hundreds to thousands depending on the delivery system, and cost BILLIONS to clean up. VX gas of the type used in Kurdistan is particularly nasty, it stays in the environment for years unless scrubbed off. Imagine scrubbing the whole friggin' Paris Metro from one end to the other, plus you have to decontaminate the water used, etc. etc. etc.
Now imagine a 45 gallon drum full. In New York.
Getting the picture? If Saddam was willing to slip the Palestinians a few bucks for every suicide bomber (that alone is worth going to war incidentally, Israel is a US ally), with the smoke still rising out of the 9/11 hole can George Bush take the chance that maybe he'll slip Al Qaeda a couple quarts of death juice? Can Tony Blair take that chance? Nuh uh.
So regardless of the legal niceties, Saddam was going down. That was a given. What I find interesting is all the countries lined up against the idea were hip deep in the Oil for Fraud deal with Saddam the Ear Slicer. Puts paid to the idea of the Noble European Left, eh?
At any rate I shouldn't have to explain this kind of thing, its all perfectly obvious. The only explanation I have for the willfull blindness of people like yourself is hate. You hate Bush so much you'd rather see your own country fall to a bunch of hairy assed religious fundys than let Bush have a win.
Good luck with that.
1. There is no freedom of speech guarantee in Canadian law. Recent hate speech legislation makes it possible for you to get jail time for quoting certain parts of the Bible. Given the bendy nature of law in these parts, they can pretty much do whatever they want in terms of speech if somebody irritates the high and mighty sufficiently. One party state, don't annoy the One Party.
2. ISPs are allowed to block stuff like kiddie porn, but not -required- to do so, mostly because they can't. The ISP can't be held liable for failing to block hate speech on a bulletin board, for example. The government goes after the hosting company instead, or in the case of kiddie porn the sender and the receiver both.
Therefore I expect that Telus can legaly block pretty much anything they want. Stupid of them, because now there's a row about it and the union is making big points, but legal. Probably.
This is the central problem I have with Big Government. The same schmuck who made this decision at Telus has ten thousand clones in government offices. If your ISP starts doing this kind of thing you can just switch companies. If the government does it, as it inevitably will, they just change the laws to suit what they want and you're screwed.
Limited government is good government. The best possible limit is an armed citizenry, because you can't change that with the stroke of a pen.
Nice post, but the point remains. Yes, the raygun IS a weapon and yes, it certainly can be abused by trigger happy a-holes, but as you point out so can the night stick, dog, taser, whatever.
Flag burners are people of a particular political stripe looking to cause an incident with the cops without assaulting the cops first. Suck them into doing something infront of a camera.
Would you rather the cops have something that if used properly causes very little permanent harm, or should they just be issued clubs, dogs and M-16s?
Because one way or another they are going to break up that crowd.
And don't talk to me about trusting government. I'm a Canadian, you Americans are in heaven compared to us. Wanna see crooked cops? Come on up to Toronto.
Nothing mechanical is ever perfect. The Tower of Terror ride killed somebody the other day as well, and its supposed to be for fun.
Nope, just with dickbrains such as yourself. Dickbrain.
The point is if they use the raygun and somebody dies, its an accident. 99.93% un-lethal except by unfortunate misadventure. Likewise if you shoot somebody and they -don't- die, that's an accident too. Even pepper spray can be lethal on certain rare people, but not deliberately so. And its a hell of a lot safer than a night stick, right?
The intent is not to kill anybody in a hostile and possibly armed crowd while making the crowd stop fighting. That's a tall order. If this thing can do it, its top notch. It also is not the kind of thing some violent tyranical government is going to waste money inventing.
Should some future offical turn such a weapon on a peaceful group for some nefarious purpose that would be very bad. But not as bad as machine gunning the crowd or beating the crap out of them with sticks, right?
I'm a bigger man than you, monkeyboy. I put my karma on my comments.
When faced with a government that does things like turning microwave weapons on peaceful demonstrators, the obvious thing to do is depose it. The US government doesn't do that kind of thing as a matter of policy and never has. Well, except for Waco I suppose. Even there 80 kids would be alive if they used the raygun on the Davidians instead of the ATF monkey squad.
The Chicoms swapped out the local soldiers in Tianamen Square who were reluctant to drive over the protester with some non-local boys and we had the Tianamen Square Unpleasantness. There was a revolution about to pop and they squashed it as hard as they could.
Difference between the USA and Chicomland is that Chicoms PREFER live ammo. They don't mind killing a few thousand demonstrators if the rest of the country keep their heads down as a result.
For you to pretend the US and Chinese governments are even remotely similar is so ridiculous its hilarious. No wonder the Democrats can't get elected as dog catcher.
Burning the American flag in America is an announcement that you are an opponent of freedom and justice and basically up to no good. I would think you'd prefer the raygun to being shot by some pissed off citizen myself. Outside Berkley CA people are liable to do that to flag burners.
And by the way. Ghandi was a wild eyed socialist whose "reforms" held back progress in India until the 1980's and killed millions by starvation. Hasn't been a famine in India since the Ghandis were booted out of power. They EXPORT food now. Ghandi was a gold plated imbecile.
Fuck me, what does it take to penetrate with you peaceniks? Its a fucking LESS THAN LETHAL WEAPON. Anything used on a crowd for any reason which is less than lethal is a GOOD thing.
Because in Iraq at the moment there's lots of dedicated Islamonazis running around blowing up innocent men, women, children and little babies. They are too cowardly to take on the US Army or the British Army, but they are quite happy to blow up their fellow Iraqi Muslims.
The crowd control problem comes in when the slightly less dedicated assholes who support the bombers decide to rush a road block, embassy, guard post or what have you. Some of them inevitably use the crowd as cover to fire on US troops, Brit troops, even the new Iraqi Army troops.
So now you've got a bunch of American teenagers in a Bradley or a Humvee, under fire from ten assholes in a crowd of two hundred. You want them to use the fancy ray-gun to flatten the crowd and pick up the ten armed assholes, or would you prefer that they just open fire on the crowd?
Because no matter how much YOU might prefer that the American teenagers take a bullet from the noble freedom fighters, they are not going to do it. Humans are funny that way.
So, superficial burn or bullet to the head? Those are your two choices. Pick one. Idiot.
First post right out the box with this whinging Lefty kant. Good God man, consider the alternative! That would be a .50 cal machine gun.
You've got 1000 pissed off rioters, many of whom are armed with rifles. Water hoses against rifles? Don't think so! Tear gas against rifles? Nuh uh.
So now, finally, the US Army has a (barely) viable alternative to firing on a crowd, and that makes them the bad guys? What's worse, a superficial burn or a bullet to the head? You're an IDIOT.
There are two things operating in the education business. First, just because something costs twice as much doesn't make it twice as good.
Second, where there is a big pile of money lying around there will always be people with sticky fingers.
Put another way, the educational system today is a bloated, horrific bureacracy whose primary mission is to increase its own funding. There is no external agency capable of chopping up that bureaucracy, nor will it decrease its own size voluntarily.
Therefore the only reasonable, available method is to cut the budget. The level of education delivered to the children will not change, just the cost of it.
If this sounds heartless, consider the fact that the current system is bankrupting the nation, but the kids can't read when they come out of grade 12. It should be possible to perpetrate illiteracy upon the country's youth at half the price, don't you think?
Not kidding. Too many leeches are sucking money out of middle management, school boards, labour relations, building maintenance, etc etc etc. There is HUGE money in education, most of it has nothing to do with actually teaching children. There's probably an average of at least three ancilary staff to every teacher in the system, I have a feeling that number is 'way low.
To improve the situation you must first kill the leeches. Cut the budget in half at the local, provincial (state) and national level When the blood suckers get the message that their sinecure is down the tube, they will move on to greener pastures.
Ending all programs other than core scholarship wouldn't hurt either. Sports is supposed to keep you strong so you can study, not the reverse.