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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
troll
To remind everyone how spectacularly bad the BBC's science reporting is?
If you poke about on their site you can find the Have Your Say section relating to this program. It's good to see that the vast majority of posters are not fooled.
Isn't this the same socialist government owned TV station that accused Scientology of being a cult?
Whatever cancer, lukemia, AIDS, or avian bird flu I get from my three cell phones, four wifi routers, two microwaves, and seven televisions, I want more of it.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K