[QUOTE=BrainGlutton"95-GHz millimeter waves" – what are those, microwaves? Infrared?[/QUOTE]
Microwaves.
Microwaves.
And they could blind you, if you looked towards the source for more than three seconds?
Bullshit. It’s not for getting ones jollies. Get over yourself. Stop making Rush look right.
I doubt if much ‘control’ will result from the use of these relatively novel devices.
Damage your cornea, but that’s at power level of 2 watts per square centimeter. I took a quick look for the operational power of the beam, and came up empty. I’d expect it to be TENS of watts, but I could easily be wrong. Are there any high frequncy engineers in GD these days?
So what do want to do then? You don’t like rubber bullets, tear gas or clubs and you don’t want the ray gun?!? What do you propose? We send a bunch of kittens in to lick the crowd into submission? Also, do you think that the people over there are that dense that they would assume we have magic powers or something?
The shitstorm over there needs to be controlled plain and simple. I really think we should leave and let them control it but thats not a very popular idea…
Hell no! Have you ever felt a cat’s tongue? Imagine if that got in your eye!
The shitstorm is of our own making. The only moral thing for us to do is fuck off.
I think that’s an absolutely immoral thing to do - start shit and then just pack up and leave? I agree that this is our mess but that means we are morally obligated to help clean it up. Also according to international law if we invade another country we are responsible for keeping order until that country is back on its own two feet.
As far as the microwave gun goes, it’s part of the work at developing weapons that can be used to keep people away with as little risk of permanent injury or death as possible. It’s “less lethal” not “non lethal”. Since the military is dealing with more and more situations where they’ve got a big crowd of civilians pressing in and highly agitated crowds often result in riots and people getting hurt and killed, something that makes it extremely unpleasant to be there is a better alternative than to start shooting. There are also devices intended to induce hellacious diarrhea, throw slippery foam to make it hard to stand let alone charge, etc (those are seperate items btw). Unpleasant and probably would result in some injuries but better than current alternatives. Until we’ve got somebody who can stand up and calmly talk a crowd into dispersing, I’m all for anything that saves lives, no matter whose.
Good to know! Imagine if they weren’t separate items! :eek:
Your sarcasm would be oh-so-much more biting if the assumptions stated above were both supported by what you quoted and weren’t explicitly contradicted by a later post of mine in this very thread. Care to address an argument that I actually made?
Forgot to address this:
Ignorant, not dense.
Judging by media reports, many of the Iraqi people don’t understand our technology and attribute impossible powers to it.
Iraqis aren’t stupid, they’re not going to think we’re using magic powers. Most of them are just as familiar as the average American with how technology works.
I assume you have a cite about Iraqis attributing impossible powers to technology?
It’s been widely reported, and examples aren’t hard to find…
For example, one commonly-held belief among Iraqis was that the wrap-around sunglasses worn by US troops allowed them to see through womens clothing.
Here’s an excerpt from a CSM article:
Here’s a New York Times article where an Iraqi engineering student speculates on the cooling subsystems built into American underwear:
The link in the OP wouldn’t work for me so forgive me if this is answered in it.
Is this tech. deployed anywhere else in the world? Has it been used for crowd control somewhere else?
Call me cynical but is there a chance this is just some business using the situation in Iraq and the fact that the politicians and military are grasping at straws to try and get the place under control to run a pilot with these “Agony Rays”? Much better to find out they kill people with hearth problems in Iraq than outside a political conference or a G8/9 summit.
This strikes me as being a typical urban legend. Lots of Americans believe there’s a little pill that can replace a whole tankful of gas. It doesn’t make them all imbeciles.
Well it’s a good thing I didn’t call them imbeciles, then, huh?
I said that many Iraqi’s attributed impossible powers to US technology, and that those who did were ignorant. I said this a mere 4 posts before yours. Admittedly, I didn’t explicitly say that only the Iraqi’s who held ignorant beliefs like those I was discussing were ignorant, but I would hope that would be obvious.
Iraq has been a shitstorm of one sort or other throughout living memory.
No cite available offhand, but I vaguely recall reading an anecdote in Time magazine last summer about the American forces keeping peace in Baghdad. One soldier had pretended to treat his digital watch as a portable lie detector, and used his play-acting to get more “desirable” answers from the folks he questioned on the streets.