A scary-wonderful weapon...

[Dannyalcatraz]

It leaves me speechless!

Silence Gun: Strange weapon of the future immediately quiets you, whether you like it or not | Technology News Blog - Yahoo! News

 

[jonesy]

All you'd need to counter that is earplugs. Or just fingers in your ears.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Or the gift of gab...

 

[MarkB]

An alternative design would be to pick up the speaker's audio, then play it inverted at your own location, cancelling out his voice so that he can talk as much as he wants without you hearing him, whilst you can still hear everyone else.

Basically, the MMO /ignore command for the real world.

 

[El Mahdi]

I've tried this before on my wife using the mute button on the tv remote...it didn't work. (To be fair though, she's tried on me more than a few times also...)

But now I can get a real mute button. Sweeeeet!


(though I'm pretty sure my wife would seriously hurt me if I did...)

 

[El Mahdi]

An alternative design would be to pick up the speaker's audio, then play it inverted at your own location, cancelling out his voice so that he can talk as much as he wants without you hearing him, whilst you can still hear everyone else.

Basically, the MMO /ignore command for the real world.

Well, it would work to a certain extent, but not entirely. You still have reflected sounds that are coming off of walls, objects, etc. And it would invert all sounds coming at you from that direction, not just the person you want to cancel out.

Besides, noise cancelling headphones already do this for the most part.