Mark Pilgrim Is Right Again

This time, he’s right about the irrational act of buying an iPhone if you want to, you know, actually own the hardware:

Buy it for what it is, or don’t buy it at all. Your choices don’t get any more granular than that. Apple has been unwaveringly clear that the iPhone is theirs. Not yours, not Ambrosia’s, not J. Random Hacker’s. You may own the hardware, but you only have a limited license to use the software, and an ongoing contract to use the network. If you don’t like those terms, your only recourse is to shop somewhere else to begin with.

Idiots.

Despite the stupid comments made by the Sony exec, the boneheads in the Duluth jury found in favor of the RIAA in the first-ever filesharing trial. There’s still likely to be an appeal, but the verdict simply defies all logic.

Wow. How much more screwed could the music industry get?

Microsoft is apparently selling DRM-free MP3s in their Zune store.

So, now we have iTunes/EMI doing it, eMusic doing it, Amazon doing it, Microsoft doing it, and Radiohead doing it. Even so, the music industry at large is still completely clueless, to the point that Techdirt just responded to a Viacom speech with a post titled “Viacom wrong on almost every thing”. Their list:

  • Viacom sees DRM and watermarking as the solution to piracy;
  • Viacom thinks copy protection will encourage innovation and creative output;
  • Viacom sees easy copying of data as a problem that needs solving;
  • Viacom thinks ISPs should be filtering traffic;
  • Viacom is opposed to network neutrality;
  • Viacom wants the Feds to fight their copyright battles overseas for them;
  • and on and on and on.

With that kind of decision making, it’s hard to see how they’re still in business — well, not really: they stay in business by raping musicians and such, but still.

Another fine represenative of the recording industry showed her wisdom to the world, byt eh way, by telling a bunch of whoppers in her testimony in the RIAA file-sharing trial. Again, it’s Techdirt with the story. Click through on both of these; they’re worth your time.

Gondryism

So, last night the accumulated Heathen tribe gathered at our Offsite Film, Drum, and Violin Headquarters for food and cinema; this week’s pick was The Science of Sleep.

Without really trying to, we’ve actually managed to track the intertwining careers of writer/director Michel Gondry and his sometime collaborator Charlie Kaufman. “Sleep” is a Gondry-only joint, but on two prior occasions Gondry has directed Kaufman scripts: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which we (and all right-thinking people) loved, and Human Nature, which we’ve missed somehow. It doesn’t take a particularly astute observer to note Gondry’s interest in the subconscious and unconscious aspects of our minds.

Kaufman, with other directors, is responsible for such gems as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, so it’s sort of fun to use these data points to plot out what constitutes Gondry+Kaufman, and what elements occur only in their solo work; a clear element in common is an interest in the idea of consciousness, both above and below the awareness water-line.

This game gets easier when one factors in Gondry’s short-form work in music videos, most famously with Bjork, for whom he did “Human Behavior” and (our favorite) Bachelorette. He’s also responsible for the Foo Fighters clip for Everlong, which includes a visual shared with Stephane’s dreams in “Science of Sleep.”

(Something we didn’t realize: Gondry directed David Chappelle’s Block Party, which only intensifies our desire to see it.)

In any case, Gondry has two more bits coming up, though neither involve Kaufman. Set for 2008 release is Be Kind Rewind, starring Jack Black and Mos Def. (Click through for a synopsis and you’ll understand our enthusiasm; squint a bit and you can still see Gondry’s obsession with perception and consciousness.) Following that, presumably, is the adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s Master of Space and Time, currently said to be “in development.”

For his part, Kaufman will direct his own work for the first time Synecdoche, New York, also in development.

We can’t wait.

The music wars are over. Radiohead wins.

Radiohead‘s much-ballyhooed approach to the release of their upcoming new record is precisely what the RIAA fears most. The bad news for them is that it’s going to happen more and more.

Briefly, as of 10 October, fans will be able to download a digital version of the record from their web site and pay any amount they wish, from nothing on up. A special edition of the album, which comes with two CDs, two heavyweight vinyl records, some extras, and the option to download as well, is on sale for about $80 (priced in pounds, so that’s subject to drift) and will ship in time for Christmas. It’s a one-two combo that the labels can’t match: the music is (nearly) free, but there’s a nice pile of extras that fans will line up to pay a premium for.

(Dear Intarwub: Please buy us the special edition for Christmas. KTHXBI.)

Good News, Bad News, and Big News: SabanWatch Week 5

Well, boys, the day started normally enough with two game outcomes that warm our Heathen hearts: Charlie’s Irish dropped to 0 and 5 against the still-undefeated (yet unranked) Purdue, 33 to 19. They’re completely helpless, and will likely remain so for a while: the next three Notre Dame games are UCLA, #7 BC, and #2 USC. Welcome to the land of 0 and 8, Charlie. (They did manage to notch a passing TD this week, and (as we’ve said) no one can take that away from them.)

To add to this righteousness, we travel to the wilds of Illinois to see Joe Pa get whipped again, this time by Illinois to the tune of 27-20. This one gives the Illini their first win against a “ranked” team since 2001, though if anything ever deserved as asterisk in the annals of sport, it’s this distinction. Formerly ranked 21, the Lions dropped off the list on the “strength” of this loss.

These two may have been the only two “normal” outcomes all Saturday, since by now you’ve heard of the huge passel of upsets we saw. #3 OU got topped by Colorado; #7 Texas fell to KSU; and somehow Urban Meyer couldn’t get it done against Auburn. Another top-10 team, Rutgers, also fell (to unranked Maryland, 34-24), but that’s less surprising given the overall punyness of the Big East. The upset that almost happened was with USC, who only barely escaped unranked Washington 27-24. More on this later.

Comes now the bad news: Somehow, Saban managed to blow what should have been a win against the Seminoles, who walked away with a 21 to 14 win and their first-ever victory over the Tide. We reckon FSU and Bowden wanted it more, but it still bites — and, of course, it hurts the Nick Saban PointsPerMillion calculation. Our winning points total falls to 53 after deducting the 7 point margin here, so the new value is 1.656. Let’s get this value up, Nicky! Times a-wastin’!

Finally, the big news: The AP sees LSU in the top spot, dropping USC to #2, then Cal, Ohio State, Wisconsin, South Florida (!), BC, Kentucky, the fallen Gators (still the highest-ranked team with a loss), and Oklahoma. Texas falls to 19; Rutgers is in at 21. USAToday sees it a bit differently, but even there LSU’s only 30 points from the top spot (1483 vs. 1454).

We are amused

We were wholly unaware that “steampunk” existed as a musical genre, but it pleases us anyway. Via Warren Ellis, we find the amusing site of Abney Park, a steampunk band with an elaborate backstory, and an airship named Ophelia.

We’re certain the shows must involve a great deal of amusing stagework, but, alas, they’re in Seattle.

Dear Immigrants: Please leave. We’ll keep your cash.

Check out the story of Pedro Zapeta, who saved $59K, only to have the Feds snatch it and refuse to give it back, presumably on the ground that hey, he’s South American — must be a drug mule!

Jesus. Zapeta made errors — he’s illegal, and was unaware of the $10K cash issue — but the way our government is treating him is absurd and grotesque. He worked hard for his money, and now the only way he has any hope of getting it back depends on the pro bono kindness of strangers. Here’s a great bit:

Robert Gershman, one of Zapeta’s attorneys, said federal prosecutors later offered his client a deal: He could take $10,000 of the original cash seized, plus $9,000 in donations as long as he didn’t talk publicly and left the country immediately.

Zapeta said, “No.” He wanted all his money. He’d earned it, he said.

So True It Hurts

Today’s Worse Than Failure is actually a meditation on the Mythical Business Layer in software; it’s a concept often hauled out in “enterprise” situations. Here’s a great quote, on the subsidary concept of a code-free “rules engine” supposedly set to encapsulate all the business logic:

Yes, I realize that the Enterprise Rules Engine — the ultimate example of a soft-coded business layer — has become my go-to example for bad software. But it’s for good reason. The ERE truly represents the absolute worst kind of software. It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.

We realize this post appeals to — and is understood by — a tiny fraction of our audience, but we’re pretty sure that tiny subset is nodding in furious agreement already. Don’t miss what they have to say on persistence, either; the Waterloo of any framework is typically the database, and it hasn’t escaped the notice of the author.

Great.

So, Vonage lost another ruling, which means we may end up having to change phone providers sometime.

Here’s what happened: Vonage made a success of VOIP precisely because it’s not an incumbent carrier. It has nothing to do with patents, and in fact if Vonage had a deeper bankroll we feel pretty sure they could prove that. Sprint, for its part, doesn’t even really care about the patents: they just want Vonage out of the marketplace precisely because Vonage did something they couldn’t or didn’t do: have success with VOIP.

As soon as Vonage goes under, if they fail, expect Sprint and the remaining oh-how-we-hate-’em telcos to offer some kind of crippled, locked-down, drastically less useful VOIP product that will cost more than Vonage’s offering. Further expect no one to enter the marketplace for fear of lawsuits from these telcos for quite some time.

As Techdirt put it in the link above:

[The incumbent carriers suing Vonage] were unable (and unwilling) to create the services that people wanted — and now they want to shut down the company that actually did innovate — and they’re likely to succeed. That’s not how the patent system is supposed to work.

Dept. of Seriously Evil Insurance Companies

So, pregnant woman has coverage with Blue Cross in Kansas City. Said woman endures the heartbreak of a miscarriage. Said insurance company denies the claim on the grounds that “elective abortion” isn’t covered.

Woman verifies with hospital that the paperwork was coded correctly, and then discovers that, apparently, this branch of Blue Cross routinely denies coverage for miscarriages on these grounds. Shades of Rainmaker, anyone?

We’re hoping Consumerist stays on top of this, and that the actual media get involved soon.

Sigh.

Our cousin is still an idiot. At least he’s leaving the House.

Full text of letter, in case the Jackson paper loses it:

September 25, 2007

Pickering’s TV act would suppress artistic freedoms

Someone from the Department of Human Services needs to visit 3rd District U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering’s home immediately. His children are in danger. I am not exactly sure of the details, but apparently his household televisions are on at all hours of the day, switching uncontrollably to programs that would otherwise be locked out by a V-Chip.

Rep. Pickering has apparently exhausted his options and introduced the “Protecting Children From Indecent Programming Act.” This bill would make the FCC take action for any broadcast with even a single “obscene” word or image.

While I applaud Pickering’s efforts to act as my legal guardian, I already have a father, and he introduced me to an amazing tool in the battle against the television demons – the remote control. Amazingly enough, when faced with inappropriate programming, I can use this device to either turn off my television or change the signal in such a way that another “channel” is shown on the screen.

Certainly, he has tried the remote control before going so far as to introduce legislation aimed at suppressing artistic freedoms. I am positive he has even tried to manually turn the television off, set the Parental Password so his children would be safe to watch television while he apparently has plopped them in front of it and left them, and even gone so far as remove the televisions from his home.

In the interest of these poor children, something must be done to ensure they are no longer exposed to this obscenity that comes on television at hours past what most parents set as bedtime. Please. Won’t you think of the children?

Emily Evans
Hattiesburg

(No, we’re not kidding. His father is more (in)famous, but they’re both our cousins; our great-great-grandparents are (were) Chip’s great-grandparents. Thanks for the heads-up, Triple-F.)

Vindication for our phone choice

Apple has made it abundantly clear that having unofficial software, or having unlocked the phone you spent $500 on, may well result in subsequent software updates turning your phone into an expensive paperweight, and you’ll be SOL on the warranty.

Let’s be clear: They’re doing this deliberately. It’s not a “it might happen” and it’s not a “whups! we didn’t realize 3rd party devs were using that!” kind of thing; they’re actively going to break your iPhone if you’ve put software on it they don’t like — which, at this point, means anything that it didn’t come with.

Fuck that. The 8525 we’re using may be clumsy and awkward, but at least it’s OURS. Open platforms uber alles.

Charming

Here’s something that surprises us: Thunderbird can’t seem to find the content for any email sent to us by a client who uses Groupwise. We see the mail, and we see (empty) attachments, and can even view the (encoded, illegible) source, but there’s no way to read the mail.

Outlook has no such trouble. Content pops right up.

Way to Fail!

Update: It turns out, “show attachments inline” will “fix” this. But still: Icky for both Tbird and GW.

Whups.

So, for about a month, our ATM receipts have consistently shown that the bank thinks there’s been about a grand more in the Heathen Coffers than we think there should be. We chalked it up to someone sitting on a check somewhere, or several someones, and figured it would even out eventually.

As we reviewed our record of last month’s with Quicken, we found the issue. We like the neighborhood crepe place. They’re good, but they’re not THIS good:

Fatfingered entry

The bank’s version of this transaction is a much more factual $9.12.

Sabanwatch Week 4

Ah well. Tide expectations were probably too high, but at the end of the day we view the squeaker OT loss to Georgia as an acceptable outcome despite the pre-game hype and, yes, our own starry-eyed what-ifs earlier this week. Sure, Saban could’ve gone for two on that final TD, but the statement of a revitalized program has been made.

Sadly, this hurts our Nick Saban Points Per Million Index. Let’s review: We’re four games in, and picked up 46 points week 1, 14 week 2, 3 in week 3, and -3 this week, bringing the total back to an even 60. That gives us a NSPPM of 1.8750.

Our Attorney points out something interesting in re: the Ole Miss – Florida game, which is that Meyer was supposedly down 5 starters. This may put the Rebel’s apparent strength in perspective. He’s also right that the stats on the Texas Tech – OSU game were out of this world for Tech, but even 646 passing yards don’t matter if you don’t get more points than the other guys.

Finally, we were remiss yesterday in not giving credit where credit’s due. Notre Dame may be 0 and 4, and they may be on the 2nd longest losing streak in school history (6!), and they may have allowed 30 points in every one of those losses, but they did manage an offensive TD for the first time this season in their loss to Michigan State, and no one can take that away from them. Not only that, they had positive rushing yards for the first time this year, too!

Next up for the Hapless Irish: Unranked but undefeated Purdue, who have so far put up at least 45 points a game this year. Then comes UCLA, BC, and USC before Navy. It could get ugly.

Just making things clear

We should note that the MIT student arrested for having a “hoax bomb” at Logan Airport this week was NOT in fact trying to get through security. She was at the airport to pick up a friend, not to take a flight, so she wasn’t subject to TSA’s tender ministrations. The cops took it upon themselves to arrest her anyway — again, even after ascertaining that her sweatshirt posed no threat to anyone, and was in fact an engineering project.

Pre-Sabanwatch Football Rundown: Week 4

Still-overrated Louisville (18 AP/19 USAT) bent over for unranked Syracuse this afternoon in a sloppy meltdown of a game. Go Big East! At least this’ll keep the UL partisans from whining about a shot at the title come Christmastime; even if 2-loss squads have a shot by then, surely the Powers That Be will insist that the losses be to quality squads and not to the unranked likes of Kentucky or Syracuse.

Today’s surprise? Ole Miss gave UF a run for their money in Oxford, but the Gators escaped 30 to 24. Are the Rebs better than we thought, or did Florida just underestimate them?

Joe Pa’s overrated Lions (ranked 10 in both polls, at least until today) fell to the unranked, can’t-beat-App State Michigan Wolverines, 14 to 9. Traditionally, Penn State is second only to the Irish in unearned ranking, since both delight in building scheduling a fall filled with creampuffs. Maybe this will be the year we get ’em both off the lists before Halloween. (Amusingly, people are now suggesting that Michigan might well win the Big 10 despite the 1-AA loss in the opener, which is just wacky.)

Speaking of the Irish, they’ve widened their measure of Fail by losing to Michigan State IN South Bend, 31 to 14. Welcome to the land of 0 and 4, Notre Dame! Who wants to set the over/under on Weis’ tenure?

The big show this afternoon was of course LSU – South Carolina, as noted, and it went down as predicted. The final score — 28 to 16 — makes it look closer than it was; the Cocks got their last TD off a really sloppy facemask by an LSU defender as he sacked the South Carolina quarterback. We’re sure Coach Miles will have him run some extra sprints this week to atone. LSU gets the week off next Saturday (well, it’s Tulane), but they’re looking strong enough to garner a few more votes this week.

How we know college football is more fun that the pros: LSU’s 3rd touchdown, just before the half. They faked a field goal with more style than we’ve ever seen. The footage has to show up on YouTube. Also, LSU has a wee football leprechaun in Trendon Holliday. He’s tiny, but DAMN that fella can run.

We’re off for other activities for the evening, so we’ll miss the Alabama-Georgia matchup; supposedly, Third Party Contract Oil’s gonna text us updates. We hope. Failing that, there’s Tivo.

The AP are Stupid, as are these airport cops

The first line of this story is amazing:

BOSTON – An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

It was only a “fake bomb” if anything that is not in fact a bomb can be legitimately termed a “fake bomb.” What she was wearing was a piece of tech art that did in fact have circuity and a battery, but the girl’s an MIT EE student. They do things like that.

By AP logic, apparently, our CAT is a “fake bomb.” So’s our cell phone, our computer, our iPod, our briefcase, our watch, and our left foot. Dumbasses.

N.B., too, that we’re talking about Boston, the same city that went absolutely bugfuck crazy over some other “fake bombs” that turned out to be promo devices for a movie. Here, just as before, the cops made no attempt to determine if she was a threat; they just arrested her.

More over at BoingBoing, including a photo of the garment in question:

Looks like the “improvised electronic device” consisted of a circuit board and a common battery that caused her sweatshirt, which had painted writing on it, to light up. Authorities referred to the paint as “putty.”

The hoodie reads “Socket To Me / COURSE VI.” A BB commenter familiar with MIT stuff says, “Course VI means she majors in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science.”

This is yet another example of absurd hysteria that very nearly got an innocent student killed. That is, by the way, the angle the police are taking — they don’t see anything wrong with having arrested someone who wasn’t committing any crime. They have, of course, charged her with “possession of a hoax device,” so apparently the Boston folks haven’t learned their lesson yet. In a comment at BB, Teresa Nielsen Hayden said:

Boston has a long dishonorable history of overreacting to unfamiliar objects, then claiming they were “hoax devices,” which are illegal under Massachusetts law. This is nonsense. A hoax bomb is something that a reasonable person could believe was a bomb, and which its owner claims is a real bomb in order to scare or coerce people in its vicinity.

Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him — as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics — and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a “hoax device.”

[…]

(Just a month after the Great Mooninite Scare, the Boston Bomb Squad managed to come up with an encore: they blew up a traffic measuring device that had been put in place by the Boston Transportation Department.)

Judging from their record, charging someone with possession of a hoax device is Boston’s way of announcing that they’ve once again mistaken some harmless bit of electronic gear for a bomb.

As always, security expert Bruce Schneier has more, including a link to a better shot of the obviously benign device — it’s a breadboard, some LEDs, and a 9-volt, for crying out loud.

Thanks, VMWare!

For a while now, folks in the Mac world have been agog about Parallels Workstation, a tool that allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows in a virtual machine, thereby allowing Macs access to whatever Windows-only software they need to run, but in a protected environment where Windows malware can’t hurt the rest of the machine. It’s a good tool.

Eventually, VMWare released a competitor, and given their background in virtualization, Fusion quickly became a better (more stable, more efficient) tool than Parallels. We bought a copy with our new MacBook Pro.

Well, said MacBook Pro developed an early fault, so it had to be swapped. No problem; moving machines in the Mac world is dead easy. There’s no need to reinstall software packages from disks or disk images, since the proper way to handle apps on a Mac is to create an “application bundle” that looks and acts like an executable, but is in fact a special class of directory containing the app and all its support libraries, executables, etc. What doesn’t go in the bundle is any sort of configuration information; that gets stuck in either your home directory’s ~/Library folder (for user settings), or in the computer’s own /Library folder (for global settings). It’s a nice, neat system, and one that makes managing a given machine MUCH simpler than the morass of crap you deal with on a Windows box.

Well, comes now VMWare, who are apparently eager to fuck it all up. When we tried to fire up VMWare today for the first time on this new computer, it behaved as expected and requested we paste in our license again. Several apps have asked for this in the last few days because license codes and authentication are stuck in the computer’s /Library folder, which we didn’t bother carrying over — it just wasn’t worth the hassle, since we have all the codes handy anyway, and the standard Apple behavior is that anything missing in Library should be reconstituted from the application bundle. (Remember, we have our personal settings in our own ~/Library, so we didn’t walk away from those.)

Except plugging in the code didn’t work. VMWare just sat there, doing nothing — no error or anything. We called the support line and got a singularly clueless drone who knew zero about Macs despite working support for a Mac product; his first suggestion was that we uninstall and reinstall (how Windows! And ironic, considering what came later!). It was us, actually, who discovered the problem: in our Mac’s console log, we found VMWare errors complaining of a path not found.

2007-09-21 14:30:19.062 vmware[4078] launch path not accessible

Yup. VMWare apparently sticks things it can’t afford to lose in /Library, and standards be damned. The support drone also told us that — get this! — Fusion also sticks some executables in /Library, such as its uninstall routine and a few other goodies. “That’s just how we designed our software,” he says.

The mind boggles.

There are guides for this sort of thing, you know. It’s not just an oral tradition. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and VMWare, for whatever reason, chose poorly. We’re now waiting for the 160 megabyte download to finish so we can re-install the one package brain-dead enough to require it. Thanks, VMWare! Not even Microsoft screws up on the Mac this well!

Football Preview

It’s a big weekend this time around: Unbeaten 3rd-ranked LSU faces Steve Spurrier’s new-and-improved Gamecocks in Baton Rouge, and Nick Saban faces the uncertain strength of Georgia in Tuscaloosa.

Spurrier may yet turn South Carolina into a real football power, but that this isn’t the year — even without factoring in the home field advantage, the squad Les Miles is building at LSU could very well end up in the championship game in January. We don’t figure the Gamecocks are ready for that quite yet. (Florida, the other potential title contender in the SEC, should roll to an easy victory this week against Ole Miss, so look for the top 3 spots to stay more or less the same next week, barring any bizzaro upsets.)

As for the Tide, this game is sort of make or break for Saban. They’re doing well, and had a big win against Arkansas last week — it can’t be said enough that they managed a come-from-behind victory for the first time in 22 games last Saturday — so they should be confident. If he escapes here, he’s got a great chance at not dropping a game until much later in the year: we figure that the next three after Georgia (FSU, Houston, and Ole Miss) should be wins, and he’s got a better than even chance against Tennessee. LSU’s a problem (11/3), but after that lie only Mississippi State, UL-Monore, and an already-shown-to-be-troubled Auburn. It could be a very good year for the Tide, since it’s hard to see more than two losses IF they take Georgia. In the spirit of keeping a positive attitude, then, we’ll pick Alabama to take Georgia, no spread.

This week also has a meaningless game: Penn State-Michigan. JoePa hasn’t beaten Michigan in 11 years, and we don’t look for them to start this week. Oh, and Notre Dame will lose, too, dropping to 0-4 against Michigan State.

Aggieball Update

Coach Fran dropped another one last night when his Aggies — ranked 20th in the AP! — got bitchslapped by unranked Miami 34 to 17; all 17 of the Ag points occurred in the 4th quarter, which strongly suggests Fran couldn’t move the ball at all against the first string Hurricanes.

Eat it, Fran.

Creeps.

The Telcos would like very much to be legally immunized against any lawsuit related to their ongoing violations of pretty much every privacy law on the books at the behest of the Feds.

Gee, can YOU think of ways this can be misused?

Raytheon has helpfully created a pain gun, and carry around a tabletop version (presumably for the gom jabbar) at trade shows.

Its makers claim this infernal machine is the modern face of warfare. It has a nice, friendly sounding name, Silent Guardian.

I am told not to call it a ray-gun, though that is precisely what it is (the term “pain gun” is maybe better, but I suppose they would like that even less).

And, to be fair, the machine is not designed to vaporise, shred, atomise, dismember or otherwise cause permanent harm.

But it is a horrible device nonetheless, and you are forced to wonder what the world has come to when human ingenuity is pressed into service to make a thing like this.

Silent Guardian is making waves in defence circles. Built by the U.S. firm Raytheon, it is part of its “Directed Energy Solutions” programme.

What it amounts to is a way of making people run away, very fast, without killing or even permanently harming them.

That is what the company says, anyway. The reality may turn out to be more horrific.

I tested a table-top demonstration model, but here’s how it works in the field.

A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a Jeep.

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation – similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker – that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

[…]

One thing is certain: not just the Silent Guardian, but weapons such as the Taser, the electric stun-gun, are being rolled out by Britain’s police forces as the new way of controlling people by using pain.

And, as the Raytheon chaps all insist, you always have the option to get out of the way (just as you have the option to comply with the police officer’s demands and not get Tasered).

But there is a problem: mission creep. This is the Americanism which describes what happens when, over time, powers or techniques are used to ends not stated or even imagined when they were devised.

With the Taser, the rules in place in Britain say it must be used only as an alternative to the gun. But what happens in ten or 20 years if a new government chooses to amend these rules?

It is so easy to see the Taser being used routinely to control dissent and pacify – as, indeed, already happens in the U.S.

And the Silent Guardian? Raytheon’s Mac Jeffery says it is being looked at only by the “North American military and its allies” and is not being sold to countries with questionable human rights records.

Note the bold last bit. We reckon the use of torture and black sites by our own government means that at least some “questions” have been raised about the U.S.’s own human rights record, but presumably this doesn’t trouble the Raytheon boys in the least. How long before some Cheney disciple decides it’s even safer than waterboarding, and figures he’ll use it to interrogate supposedly “high value” detainees?

(Via MeFi.)