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Yeah, we must be crazy tinfoil hat people to reject this!
How about the harmful radiation that this would be emitting? From that far away, who knows how many people you'd be hitting at once.
Scientists are developing an identity verification system that would spot terrorists and pedophiles by scanning their skeletal features and comparing them against a database of stored images. The system could be deployed in airports, sporting events, and other settings vulnerable to criminals and ideally will be able to …
From the tone of your post it's probably better if you just let this one pass you by. seeing as both the comment and the immediate reply went straight over your head, I would just suggest that the post has value to other people whose aforementioned heads are less pointy.
hold on, "Well unless your on about female orgasm research"? any chance you're available to come to parties as entertainment?
Where have we heard this before? It's just Security Theater - it's not so long ago that we were going to ID the bad lads by the way they walked ... except that didn't work and anyone in the gait community could have told them that the idea was a loser from the start.
Now it's "bones" - like that's going to work? Have any of these idiots even bothered to figure out the resolution needed to ID a skeletal abnormality at 50m? Maybe you could get the resolution needed to distinguish one person from another reliably at a couple of metres but that's not going to be anything close to good enough to tell one ankle break from another.
What's next? We can ID people by listening to the sounds they make in the crapper? Slurping noises in noodle shops? I've got it - I'm off to patent a foolproof way to ID terrorists by they way they pick their noses while waiting in the security line at the airport...
No, on second thoughts I'm heading for the crapper - we're all obviously surrounded by idiots.
Actually, that was a real product that sold for over $5,000 a pop - until someone finally got some sense in the audit office and kicked them out on their ear.
Was originally used for "detecting" bombs and drugs... but didn't do any better than random searches. Surprising, eh?
No, it would only spot KNOWN terrorists that you happened to have an x-ray of (or what ever other boogy man they want to use to sell this). Your not going to have much luck spotting a suicide bomber since they are never repeat offenders (unless they are really bad suicide bombers).
And just how are they going to get what is in effect an x-ray from a distance?
This device plan sounds like it was ripped out of the pages of Total Recall. If only we would place more emphasis in copying the parts about travelling to Mars, instead of trying to make people look naked in public, we would probably have a better world for it.
Scientist 1: I'm bored
Scientist 2: It's the silly season - let's thing up something unbelievably moronic and see if we can get a newspaper to run it.
Scientist 1: How about: "The large hadron collider has produced a mini-black hole that is swallowing the moon"?
Scientist 2: Done that.
<repeat for 5 hours>
Year 2000 - It wasn't perfect land of hope and glory and all that, but we had some freedom, privacy & liberty.
Year 2010 - Police State, they try to spy on us at every move, even being stripped naked by scanners is ok for them, and now they don't even care about our health!
The terrorists don't need to destroy our way of life, our own government is doing that for them!
So instead of eating too much and you can't get back into Blighty because the turd at the turnstile doesn't recognise you from the face in your passport, you break a leg and you can't get back into Blighty because the turd of a machine at the turnstile doesn't manage to match your x-ray to the one broadcast by the RFID in your passport. Protest, repeat x-ray until cancer.
New technology and the NHS, a sure winner.
I doubt that they plan to use Xrays, as that produces imagry /behind/ the subject, which means the subject has to stand between the Xray source and some sort of film / imaging device. Clearly that's a bit nuts at 50m.
So they're looking for a wave which will penetrate skin, cloth, etc, reflect off bone with a good resolution, and (probably) not cause any sort of permanent damage. I believe most forms of ionizing radiation wouldn't get past the first two requirements, and obviously not the third.
Good news is that they'd probably be broadcasting on a pretty specific wavelength, so all of those terrorists (I imagine that there must be crowds of them around everywhere by now, with all that people are spending to stop them) just need a pretty simple device to detect when there's a scanner in range. Like your average flashlight or search radar, it'll advertise it's presence to people that are far outside it's bonescan range.