The Next Level?

Here's an interesting Empire North page

While it would be disturbing news, I haven't yet decided on it's accuracy. So far, I have found that Empire North was listed at the mentioned exhibition.

certainly doesn't sound real, but i wouldn't be surprised!

how would one go about deactivating one of those? cramming themselves in a microwave oven?

wow ... if this is true it would indeed be one step further on a road we might not want to take ... yet it may well seem to be the only visible road nowadays /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
bernhard

P.S.: the one thing that makes me wonder if it is false is the "mosquito-like" pain ... it should be much more painful if a chip is shot under your skin, even if the chip is miniscule /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon3.gif

Well I suppose you can consider yourself "popular" if the doc finds multiples of these in your body!!! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

While I don't doubt the technology availablility, there's some logistics that make it appear doubtful. For one thing, as Kiessling noted, the "mosquito like" pain doesn't seem probable.

I'll be seeing what I can find. Websites and such stories are too easily produced. Something doesn't ring true; but then, maybe that's only what I want to think.

A couple of things point pretty clearly to this being a spoof:

Effective range ..... 1100 meters
Caliber ............. 0.11x8mm

Even a rutamentary knowledge of the aerodynamics of projectiles would suggest that you cannot achieve that kind of range with a projectile that size.

I found sites that treat it as factual, and sites that treat it as a hoax. Neither really offered much concrete to dispute or support it, other than opinion. I did find one though, outlining the efforts of one Jakob Boeskov of Empire North and how he prides himself on getting into expositions with high tech hoaxes.

It's conclusive enough for me.

I'd consider it a hoax for a number of reasons.
1). Physical Size. GPS has very low Effective radiated power, that implies a need for an antenna on the order of 1/4 wave. At 1500Mhz, 1/4 wave is about 5cm, so an antenna with the largest dimension appreciably less than 5cm isn't workable.
2). GPS involves a substantial signal processing capability, that requires power. These are complex chip sets. If you look at the Casio GPS watch, even with a batter larger than the entire package, it gets about 2 hours battery life, and that is without a transmitter. It drives an LCD, but LCD's are static devices, they need trivial power.

The Casio is pretty close to the lower limit on GPS receiver size.

In short, there are serious mismatches between the antenna requirements for GPS, the power requirements for a GPS receiver, the physical size of the receiver, and the power requirements for a transmitter. This of course completely ignores the fact that the entire assembly needs to survive a 100+g acceleration while inside that tiny package, and the deceleration it gets when it hits someone/something.

Another problem is how to control the penetration when it hits the "target". Not enough and the person will notice it and pull it out. Too much and it could cause injury or even death. I have less trouble believing in a rail gun* than I do in something like this.

* The device I speak of was in a movie with Arnold Scharzenegger. It fired microscopic aluminum projectiles at near light speed velocities using the "mass driver" principle. Basically, the "bullets" were charged, and then magnetically accelerated along a rail to tremendous velocities. It would work in theory, but you would still need a way to store a lot of energy to power everything. If you could store that much energy, you may as well just use a very large semiconductor laser (i.e. one which could be pulsed in the high kilowatt range). As some of these convert close to 50% of electrical energy into laser light, you would have a very formidable weapon. However, you face the same problem as the rail gun, namely what to use for a power source. A battery light enough to be carried in a reasonable sized weapon would only have enough energy for a few "kills", at best. There are plenty of good technical reasons why we're still using projectile weapons in a age where all the futurists predicted there would be laser guns. Maybe in a decade or two this will finally come to fruition when power sources orders of magnitude more compact than batteries are invented.

I happen to know they are real... I saw one in A Sci-Fi movie awhile back. I think it used Alien Technology.
Seems like the Hero caused it to malfunction with a TV remote in a hotel by repeatedly pushing the power on and off or might have been the up and down buttons. I fell asleep after that so I missed the ending. It Starred nobody I ever heard of.
Topper /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Mattheww50 summed-up the physics very well! 10-20 years, it might be another story! (But then, think of what "smaller and brighter" will mean for us. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif )
Edit: as Doug S said re the sectional density/exterior ballistics of the "dart," effective range would be more like 15 feet!
Larry

Interesting concept - I liked this part:
[ QUOTE ]
Sometimes it is difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the all important image of the state. Instead EMPIRE NORTH suggests to mark and identify a suspicious subject on a safe distance, enabeling the national law enforcement agency to keep track on the target through a satellite in the weeks to come.

The ID SNIPER rifle was presented by Empire North in Beijing at the China Police 2002 exhibition.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nothing like a bit of paranoia and ad copy that reads like new-age communist propoganda to get the masses excited.

It's interesting that the projectile is allegedly roughly 80 times longer than it is in diameter. 110 microns is nonsense - some hairs have greater diameters. Dunno about the ballistics (I've seen pine needled embedded in trees after volcanic eruptions, tornados, etc), but power just kills the whole thing - no way you're going to run a GPS receiver and transmitter in something that small.

Oh - check out the spelling of the "group" field from a screenshot. Misspellings are fun sometimes.

They won't really need any thing like an implant, as these become more prominent. Facial recognition software and anyone that looks similar to a suspect will themselves become suspect.

As far as chips go, everyone will be sporting RFID chips in their clothing soon. Then when some of the marketing firms learn they can tie together RFID references in the same way they tie together cookies from different websites, they'll produce a profile and trip log every time you go out.