Slashdot Mirror
Parents Sue School Over Use of Wi-Fi Network
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Both news.com and
Wired are
reporting that an Illinois school district is being sued by parents over their use of
a Wi-Fi network at a local elementary school. Apparently the parents of 5 students
are concerned about potential health risks to their children by the Wi-Fi radio signals.
The parents are seeking class-action status for their suit, which seeks to halt the use
of wireless networks but does not ask for monetary damages. The complete complaint is also available for your reading pleasure on wifinetnews.com." I would never have guessed that the emissions from a wireless network are bad, unlike the healthy emissions given off by the now inescapable cell phones that are everywhere in public.
2.4ghz Cordless phones use the same freq! What are these parents smoking?
keanmarine.com
This is insane. My company rolled out 802.11 a while ago, and they had a few statistics they sent out to address safety concerns.
Stuff like, "Since these run at low transmit power (.03 Watts), it's 1/10-1/20 the power of a cell phone." and "You'd have to hold a body part within 2cm of the antena for 30 minutes while the radio operated continuously at 100% capacity for that time."
Just look at IEEE C95.1 1991, which details the maximum safe exposure for any EM radiation.
Or, gosh, here's a thought... what about OSHA?! They've got a bazillion links on the research involved.
I hope this gets thrown out of the courts faster than you can blink. The last thing students need is to be shoved back into the backwaters of technology.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
expend a significant amount of money to defend themselves against these bogus charges
Unfortunately this appears to be what happens when you combine a society fixated with junk science with a political class ruled by trial attorneys.
The State of Missouri had an issue a bit more than a year ago with a state legislator that was trying to get all communication towers banned. The reason? "It might harm children." A few folks did some research on the legislator pushing the bill and guess who one of his largest financial supporters was? Incumbant local telephone companies (the competition to wireless providers). Save the children unfortunately has become code for political and legal system payola.
Unfortunately this poster touches on the reality of the current US legal nightmare: many defendents cannot afford the fight for what is right due to the complete lack of financial accountability of irresponsible plantiff attorneys and their clients. I'm predicting the school will back out and turn off their wireless devices. Their students will lack the access to information that other students might have. Unless other parents get vocal and oppose this luddite activity, they'll further the progress of their children towards a future job at Burger King.
Per the allegation that the school has been ignoring evidence that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi networks poses health risks, I'd invite the luddite parents and their attorneys to have a radiofrequency engineer show them what the airwaves in the classroom (or better, at home) look like. 802.11b/a/g is background noise compared to many of the narrowband signals out there. Better shut off the FM, AM and TV broadcasters immediately. Throw away that cellphone (you don't hold that anywhere *near* your head, do you?) Better start packing candles in the kids lunch bag... those fluorescent lights are little RF monsters ("to quote: while the intentional radiation of fluorescent light tubes lies in the visible light range, such tubes also generate very low levels of microwave and RF white noise (Mumford, 1949)... microwaves? That's not a classroom lit by fluorescents, it's a Easy Bake Oven from Hell!). Lock up the school TV sets - what do you think that gunnplexer is firing at your eyeballs? Get weather, aviation and police radar shut off immediately (sure hope that speeder doesn't crash into the school bus). And god forbid you have one of those Air Force E-4B 747's fly over your home as they do mine... one of those bastards wipes out my TV amplifier every time it flies over my farm! Heck, we haven't even thought about RF experiments like HAARP that can probably melt a human in milliseconds!
Of course, the final step for the trial attorneys and their luddite clients will be banning the ultimate producer of raw RF. Once that's done, we can all rest assured that no RF deathrays will harm us.
*scoove*
I might care more about this if the district had a legitimate use for wifi. It's an elementary school district, grades K-8. None of the students have laptops, and the majority of the teachers are incapable of using anything other than Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Gradequick.
Now the high school, on the other hand, could benefit from wifi. One student in my math class recently got a tablet PC, and we were talking a couple days ago about how nice it would be if there was a school-wide 802.11b network. Unfortunarly, our school is way behind the times as far as technology goes. We watched laserdiscs the other day in psych.
Money isn't an issue for either of them, though. Both the elementary schools and the high school have more money then they know what to do with. The middle schools just built two new buildings, and the high school got a new $3 million artificial turf football field, an artificial turf soccer field with stadium lighting, and built a parking garage. The issues are stupid parents and stupid administration.
(In case you couldn't tell, I attended the district the lawsuit was filed against)