Several problems with this setup:
1. The room would have to be tightly sealed so the SPL would be sufficient to move the window, failing that:
2. The sound source would have to be very near the window
3. The laser source would have to be highly focused and the window would have to be just such an angle to catch the reflection
4. If the window weren't sturdy, the incident beam would reflect far out of the range of the photo-receptor
5. If a fan or furnace (or anything that moved more air than a pair of lungs) were operating in the room, the impact of the voice on the window would be lost in the background noise.

All that said, it's still pretty cool. It's just not very effective.

"Bob, what's that bright red light shining in the corner of the window?"

mercury isn't dangerous - look at T1000. he was a fine strappin young fella til T2 came along with his firey furnace malarky.

DOPPLER-"None of your "points" matter because unless you are a subject expert your opinions mean nothing."
Faith in god, faith in experts, faith in yer fucking shoe, does common sense, and your OWN ability to process data ever come into play?? Experts are so-called, so paid, so what. Give me enough cash and I'll find you a cabal of experts....fuck em!
ZAMNIGHT-"All I see is a tragedy played out over and over with people repeatedly seeking a reason for it. It's almost the denial stage of grieving that finding the towers were demolished, rather than official reasons, changes the fact that they are gone. I do think there's a steaming pile in all of this but I doubt that it is in how the buildings collapsed."

Denial?? Yes. Denial that the possibility exists, is an idiot's wallow. Why label anyone a conspiracy nut, before facts are in? Does it need that cozy and comfortable "OFFICIAL" stamp to ring true or plausible? A nut in this case is someone that does not want to deal with a dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing world.....there are still folks who believe in the fairy tale of "Oswald, the Lone Gunman"...just as there are still men alive who know the truth about what happened. But the supreme omnipotenece of our wonderful country, has locked the files till 2025, when all who would be held responsible, will have led their lives out in full.
This one may be no different....if enough folks like those here who trust in the spin, the diversion, the "EXPERTS", and the false hope, that this country has a chance in hell at lasting another 100 years, clicking along, business as usual....

Our government did not "DO IT", the government is a tool, just like her peoples, in a game bigger than folks want to believe......Truth being stranger than fiction is predictable, moreso now, as we spiral downward...then up...then down....

Just like Wobal Glorming, humans have everything and nothing to do with it at all......Cyclical Phenom. Theo is as frustrated with folks for not copping to the "FACT" of global warming, but all the "FACTOR" are never addressed by the devout.....its a goddamn religion, with devout, and tithers, just like a Southern Baptist congregation....

Solar-what about the blast furnace called the sun?
What about the natural phenom that produces greenhouse gas?

Humans are a drop in the freekin bucket, and humanity has waaaayyyy more to worry about than what he is doing to the physical world......

The real problem is who is actually muddling the argument on climate change. The line of diction coming from the fringe and the corporate sponsored media has been of the following nature, that global warming is not caused by man, it's natural and doing anything about it will only mean famine and death for the American economy. Suddenly global warming is up to debate, the most recent data figures and scientific consensus become 'debatable'?

Who exactly has to lose from environmental laws? The American corporations that have for years swinged by on deregulation and stringent fights against goverment legislation and control when it comes to the safety of the society. Examples? Oh seat belts until Ralph Nader, cigarettes until the late 90s practically, these companies don't want to suddenly change overnight, they will fight environmental legislation with tooth and nail because it cuts into profitability, because they know it will take them alot of reinvestment to modernize instead of actually giving away large bonuses the size of small goverment budgets to their departing CEOs.

To say that global warming doesn't happen is to have a lack of basic common understanding about the world, that what effects occur in micro scale occur in macro scale as well, ask anyone who has been to L.A. about the smog that covers the city so much so that it's nearly impossible to see the famous Hollywood sign from most locations of the city, California tried to institute stricter emission laws, you can find out for yourself what happened with that. Ask anyone who has seen an oil tanker spill its guts all over a pristine bay and basically poison life there. Visit the cities in America built on expanses of flat concrete that just burn daily because there is nothing to take the heat of the sun away, the concrete just absorbs it and radiates it right back pushing the temperatures higher then they should normally be.

Now ask yourself what will happen in 50 to 100 years time, how will life be when population will be larger, there will be less fuel to power our nice sleek SUVs of today, and more reliance on dirty fuels like coal as seen in China at the moment, no more oil to burn for energy supplies. The blame now is being laid at the 3rd world, the 3rd world has said that time and time again that it is willing to adopt modern technologies. So obviously the solution is just to give up and burn the furnace for a bit longer. The cities will need to expand, suburbia will press further and further out into the lands. Drive around any US state today, almost row after row of nearly identical neighborhoods, with their own complexes of cinemas, fast food and Starbucks. All they need. Civilizations end because the means to sustain them end. We are reaching the end of our oil economy, lots of alternatives are being thrown about but really they don't understand that most alternatives actually really on a oil based economy to sustain them. Such that investment needs to be now, instead of later when resources will be tighter and harder to attain. Most probably by then there will be small scale energy wars over control of oil wells and other sources of energy.

Frankly why do I bother. Nothing will really happen until shit starts really hitting the fan and our complacency in the current comforts will give way to urgent need for assuring survival. The free people sleep.

Great post!

I have friends who helped with their legal fight for return. The case really exposed a very nasty, cruel and uncaring side of the British government.

Paradise Cleansed by John Pilger 10/11/04 - 'The Guardian'

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory" that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried."

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.

In the first months of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did not cover their debts.

The behavior of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart, a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities; the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they are "unbelievable".

In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation, with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we" as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize his illegal attack on Iraq.

Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win." "


Finally in 2006 Lord Justice Hooper and Mr Justice Cresswell ruled that orders made under the royal prerogative to prevent the return of the Chagos islanders to their homes were unlawful. They described as "repugnant" the action to exile the population of the islands. "The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said.

But the government are appealing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6333223.stm) and the right of return is still being denied!

(sorry for long post - but this one really gets to me!)