Slashdot Mirror
Long Island Town Enacts Tough Cell Tower Limits
crimeandpunishment writes "They're getting tougher on towers on Long Island. The town of Hempstead, NY has imposed some of the toughest cell phone tower restrictions in the country. The ordinance prohibits wireless equipment within 1,500 feet of homes, schools, day care centers, and houses of worship, unless the company can prove absolute need. A spokesman for Verizon says, 'It's not unheard of for towns to have issues, but this is extreme,' and says this makes 95 percent of the town off limits to future antenna construction." With internet access by 3G, 4G and WiMax getting ever more common, I suspect that not everyone in the town will appreciate blocking out the companies that provide it.
"Radio signal strength decays exponentially. "
No, it decays geometrically.
Exponential decay would be of the form P=An^d, where "d" is the distance, and A and n are constants.
The formula for free space losses is of the form P=Ad^2 - a geometrical loss.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Wow, where do I start... Let's keep it short.
First, this country is not a democracy, even though we espouse the democratic concepts. It's something called a representative republic. If your school failed to teach you that, or you failed high school civics, then go look it up, I'm sure wikipedia has an article on it.
Second, no town or person can do "whatever they want". If they could, it would be an anarchy and there would be no town ordinances in the first place. Don't forget that they have to follow rules as well (state & federal), and if you let people do whatever they want, they will eventually do stupid or unfair things that just hurt themselves or other people. (Remember slavery? It's an extreme example, but totally valid to represent what happens when you let the 'majority' do what they want.)
Third is the communist thing. We'll ignore the original utopian concept that communism was meant to be and go with the more modern variant based on the old Soviet Union and the current China. Hmmm, a government setting a restrictive rule that limits both corporate endeavors and public access to communication utilities/resources. Yep, that qualifies as modern communism. But that's the opposite of your declaration... Yeah, speaking of failing high school civics, I think we've got your number.
Just a small note on utopias. There are many different utopian theories, and they are all interesting but fatally flawed. I don't believe in the possiblity of any form of utopia existing until after all of humanities basic psyche has been severely altered, and that isn't happening any time soon, if ever.