And as far as it's sense of sight is concerned, the rest of the world would not exist.
Ever heard of view-holes? We only need about a quarter-inch diameter hole to get a nearly 180 degree field of view. Cameras can do the exact same thing, often times with less.
I don't know if you know this, but it's a lot harder to see a little dot a quarter-inch in diameter floating in space than it is to see a 6' tall person or a 10' by 15' tank, or whatever the hell ends up getting cloaked.
Taking care of visibility out is downright EASY. You simply need a very small (in size) light collector just outside the effect of the light bender.
That's 8 years old, a lot of those concerns have been addressed.
However, it still takes Tier 1 ISP's switching over to cascade everything else, until then it's pointless. They haven't done that yet, so we'll have IPv4 for a while still.
They'll be forced to change this position if we approach the end of allocatable IPv4 addresses and the Tier 1 players still aren't willing to play ball.
If that happens, IPv4 won't be going away from another decade or more, as there are billions of addresses tied up by these giant holders.
I don't really see why it's surprising, they are a large, old company. Large companies at the birth of the Internet tended to pick up Class A's and B's, and used them.
126 * 28 days = 3,528 days, or just over 9 years, and that's only by re-allocating wasteful Class A's currently in use.
9 years is a lot more than a few months.
That's also the problem with these extrapolations, because as the addresses become more scarce the assignment rate slows down. When IPv4 addresses were first being handed out, they were given at a rate of 5-10 Class A's a week. We're down to one a month now, in a year it will be one Class A every two months, if that.
It would buy a few months and the resources are better invested in the transition to IPv6.
You're obviously not very good at business, because with any change the conversion to a new system is never worth it until the cost to maintain the current system is as expensive or at least very close to the same cost. Right now for the Tier 1 ISPs, the backbone of the internet, it is still significantly cheaper to extend IPv4 than to make the switch to IPv6. Doing so could cost them hundreds of millions, if not billions in manpower costs (the hardware should be pretty much there already).
It Just Works just as well on a Class A private network as a Class A public network. The difference being, of course, that you only need a couple public addresses as gateways for the private network, freeing up about 16 million public addresses.
Models are only as good as the data you put into them. As the recent financial crisis should demonstrate, it's extremely difficult - if not downright impossible - to predict human behavior over any extended period of time.
We were supposed to run out of addresses 4-6 years ago, but we found ways around that. Predictions of two years ago put the end of IPv4 at this year, and yet we have two years left. Very strange, is it not?
Frankly, we could burn up the rest of the addresses tomorrow if we wanted, but that won't happen. The pain felt in the IPv6 switch is highest at the Tier 1 ISP level and dissipates as it moves down the chain. It is virtualy painless for the end-user, but it will be an extremely expensive move for the Tier 1 folks, and unfortunately the internet doesn't go IPv6 until the Tier 1's go IPv6. They are going to put this off as long as they can, and they'll surely get very creative about doing so.
There is also a lot of waste in the current setup, as it gets close to crunch time the waste will be squeezed out, further extending the life of IPv4.
Basically, you won't see IPv6 until the cost to switch to IPv6 is lower than the cost to extend IPv4. So far, they aren't even close, it is still MUCH cheaper to extend IPv4 a while longer than to switch the entire infrastructure to IPv6, but the two are slowly getting closer with every passing day.
You realize that based on the rate of consumption a couple of years ago we were supposed to run out of addresses by 2010.
Now based on the current rate of consumption we are supposed to run out of addresses some time in 2012.
I think it's safe to say you can't accurately predict how soon we'll run out of address by basing it on the current rate of consumption, because it is fairly obvious that the rate of consumption changes as we approach the end.
I estimate that within 10 years but not sooner than 5 we will run out of IPv4 addresses, and within 20 years we will have switched to IPv6.
$50 says my estimate is more accurate - if less precise - than TFA.
and it's probably going to be cheaper to start getting IPv6 out there now rather than at crunch time.
We already are, all new PCs in the past few years are IPv6 capable, and most high-end routers and switches have been able to handle it for even longer than PCs have. We are fast approaching the point where there will be a very small number of people left behind by an IPv6 switch, and that can be handled with NAT.
The thing is, at the top level switching from IPv4 to IPv6 is akin to having to destroy the old rail-road tracks before you can build the mag-lev line. Doing so is extremely expensive in many ways, even if they don't have to buy a single piece of hardware.
You also can't start implimenting it piece by piece until ALL the big ISPs impliment it piece by piece. One company can't really do anything without cooperation from the others, so it ends up being a case of each company waiting for another to jump. Right now nobody is jumping, but when the pressure becomes great enough they'll all be jumping almost at once, and you'll see the ISPs spend massive amounts of money to get switched over.
It's for this reason that I suspect they are going to make IPv4 last a long, long time. Two years is a minimum estimate, I'd wager they'll manage to hold off the switch to IPv6 for another 4-6 years.
That doesn't matter at all with trademarks. Case in point is the fact that Google will be trademarking "Nexus One" (it's already in the works). It's all about usage and context and association with a product. The Android and then Nexus One is pretty obviously a nod to Dick's work. The question is, is anybody going to confuse the Nexus One cell phone with PKD's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Google, with the "Android" OS and "Nexus One" phone is an obvious reference to PKD's work. The Cisco data center switch is just a use of the word Nexus as a product name, there are thousands of them out there and they are not all clever references to PKD's book.
That said, the estate still doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Why can't anybody take a damn compliment any more? Seriously!
F'ing lawyers will go after people when they know they have no case, hoping that people who don't know their rights will buckle.
Debt collectors operate almost exclusively on this principle. Often times they have little to no legal right to collect your debt, but most people don't know that and will cave even when they don't need to pay.
That doesn't really matter for trademarks. For example, a "chilie" is both a type of pepper, and a country in South America. Yet, "Chilies" is a registered trademark when it comes to restaurants. You can't name your restaurant "Chilies", or even "Chilly's" or "Chilly" or "Chilie" or "Chilies Place" or whatever, because it would cause people to confuse your restuarant with the trademarked restaurant.
It's the use of the word in context, and it has to relate to a conflict of commerce. You can even lose the trademark on your own, unique brand names if it becomes too popular. Kleenex has lost its trademark, even though that is a family name, because it has been largely adopted by the public to mean -any- facial tissue, not just Kleenex brand tissues. Same happened to aspirin, thermos, yo-yo, escalator, zipper, you name it.
So it's all about context and usage. Nexus is perfectly fine for a cell phone trademark because Nexus is not used to describe cell phones. If we called all phones "nexus" then there is no way you could claim a trademark on it. As it is it only describes one cell phone, so it is ripe for a trademark.
Incidentaly, PKD's estate needs a competing product with which Google's phone could be confused in order for them to have any kind of trademark infringement case. As far as I know, they have not been making any phones lately, so I don't think they have anything.
The only other avenue would be copyright, and they have even less of a case there, for exactly the reasons you describe.
Why should they have to? They were being flattering to an artist they obviously admire, the estate can go pound sand if they can't take a compliment when it is presented.
Dick's estate here, frankly, are a bunch of jackasses.
No, sorry. First, trademarks do not have to be registered to be valid, they just have to be associated with a particular brand. If you set up RingDev's Restaurant and I then set up RingDev's Restaurant over the street, then you can argue in court that I am trying to pass off my restaurant as being associated with your.
However, the unregistered trademark for your local restaurant "Chilly's", which was established 20 years ago, is trumped by the registered trademark of the national chain "Chillies", and you have to give up the name when Chillies starts to think about maybe putting a restaurant up in the same town.
However registered trademarks trump unregistered trademarks every time.
Plus there is no common market here, so there is no infringement. It's certainly not copyright infringement either.
What the hell ever happened to plain old flattery? Why does everything have to be an insult and a grievance? It's an obvious homage to Dick's work, why not accept it as such?
People are way too money hungry and lawsuit-happy these days, it's pathetic.
Registered trademarks also trump common law trademarks.
A local restaurant here called "Chilly's" was forced to change its name because "Chilies" was moving in to town and they had the registered trademark. Their's was "bigger" essentially, more recognized than the local commonlaw established trademark.
Again, though, it only applied because they were both competing restaurants, and people would be confused by a "Chilly's" and a "Chilies".
Books to cell phones doesn't exactly run up against the same issues.
Following this logic, my understanding would be that since a book has universal reach, anything in it can be defended without a proper trade mark file in the US. Or am I eating my foot here?
You'd be eating your foot there, the trademark for a book would be its title, not anything in its content.
The best the author can claim here is copyright infringement, which is obviously not the case.
Seriously, what ever happened to good old fashioned flattery? One of the most well known tech companies in the world is using your character names to sell its product, I mean come on! That's awesome!
It's not like the guy was going to market a cell phone or mobile operating system any time soon. That happens to be all the Google trademarks apply to.
Christianity as I understand it, is descended from Catholicism, as Catholicism is descended from Judaism.
Your understanding is incorrect.
The Catholic Church claims the Apostle Peter as its founder. There were, however, ten other Apostles who began the spread of Christianity (Judas, of course, commited suicide instead of seeking redemption, cutting the total to 11 from 12). Within a few hundred years, the Catholic church became the dominant church in Europe, but it was by no means the only Christian church, simply the largest.
It also has the distinction of being one of the oldest Christian denominations. You could technically say that the Protestant denominations stemmed from Catholicism, but it would be about like saying Athiesm stemmed from Theism - Protestantism was a rejection of Catholicism and a return to the roots of Christianity. This is why the Bibles of the Protestant denominations of Christianity contain only the books written by the Apostles and the first few great missionaries who came behind them. The Catholic Bible is supplimented by a number of various books of tradition that have been passed down through the centuries, which other denominations don't ascribe to. The customs of the priesthood in Catholicism are also very, very different from other Christian denominations. The idea that the Pope speaks the word of God directly, for example, is not found in most other Christian denominations.
That said, you can usually simply cut away parts of Catholicism and get one of the various Protestant denominations, because they are built on the same foundation.
If your interpretation of Christianity was looser, rather than tighter, you would have ignored the differences and stuck to the similarities. But you did not do that, hence the argument. The idea of transsubstantiation is almost exclusively a Catholic or Catholic based idea. MOST people who read the passage where Christ broke bread with his deciples and said "This is my body, do this in rememberance of me" recognize that he was making a metaphore, and the point is to remember his sacrifice not get caught up in eating the body of Christ. Obviously that's not what happened the first time, why would it be happening now? It was essentially a Papal decree that made transubstantiation doctrine, for no real reason, and it's that sort of thing that led to Martin Luther founding the Protestant church. Essentially the only denominations that believe in transubstantiation are denominations that originated by churches that were catholic in doctrine, but for one reason or another were cut off from the main church. Russian Orthodox is like this, and is very very similar to Catholicism because of it.
If you want proof of how different the denominations are, and why you can't simply lump them all together as you did, go have Mass at a Catholic church and then run down to Baptist or Pentacostal church (Baptist and Pentacostal are themselves almost opposites) for a service. You will see what almost two different religions. Then run over to a Mormon church, which is as different from Protestant as Protestant is from Catholic.
The differences are so great that many in each group do not consider the others to be truly Christian, and that instead they still need salvation.
And seemingly the biggest problem compared to other EM-radiation is that your body simply cannot recognise the "new kinds" of radiation it's exposed to.
You mean the "new kinds" which have existed since the dawn of time? You realize we are pummeled with various wavelengths of EM radiation from all over the universe, not the least of which come from our own Sun, right? The Earth's magnetic field keeps out the nastiest high-frequency stuff for the most part, but the lower level stuff gets through. That's how radio telescopes work - they grab the sub-visible EM radiation from all over the galaxy that hits the planet and inundates us with EM radiation.
Hey guess which end of the scale cell phone radiation is in? It's not the high frequencies, it's in the low frequencies.
And of course EM radiation can affect our cells, but the lower the frequency the less energy it has, and the less damage it does. For example, even a few hours of exposure to UV radiation will start destroying our cells - a sunburn is the body's desperate attempt to save those cells and prevent further damage. However, drop just a little ways into the visible spectrum and suddenly EM radiation does virtually nothing to our bodies but stimulate vitamine D production in the skin.
Drop it even further and the EM radiation has even less of an effect, eventually getting into the range of cell phone signals.
Believing that cell phone radiation must be harming us even though there is no evidence is foolishness. The light emitted by a flashlight is thousands of times more potent than a cell phone signal, and emits a higher frequency of EM radiation which is closer to the dangerous radiations of UV, X-ray, and Gamma-Ray, and yet we aren't terrified of flashlights.
The idea that cell phone signals could cause damage is nonsensical, so it had better have some good, strong evidence behind it before I start believing it. So far the only good evidence behind it has shown a small positive effect.
is it safe to say that having a phone to your head for X hours/day has some kind of effect?
The inconsistant and often contradicting studies mean it is very much not safe to say that. Every study (or most anyway_ would have to show an affect and simply disagree on details in order for that to be the case.
For all we know (and what I actually suspect) is that cell phone usage has little to no actual affect on us physically.
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And as far as it's sense of sight is concerned, the rest of the world would not exist.
Ever heard of view-holes? We only need about a quarter-inch diameter hole to get a nearly 180 degree field of view. Cameras can do the exact same thing, often times with less.
I don't know if you know this, but it's a lot harder to see a little dot a quarter-inch in diameter floating in space than it is to see a 6' tall person or a 10' by 15' tank, or whatever the hell ends up getting cloaked.
Taking care of visibility out is downright EASY. You simply need a very small (in size) light collector just outside the effect of the light bender.
Duh.
That's 8 years old, a lot of those concerns have been addressed.
However, it still takes Tier 1 ISP's switching over to cascade everything else, until then it's pointless. They haven't done that yet, so we'll have IPv4 for a while still.
Dumb sounds mean, we'll just call it Dynamic, what a sexy word that is! We can add exclamation points too, to make it even more exciting!
Dynamic! Name System, or D!NS!
Which, of course, is absolutely friggin retarded.
They'll be forced to change this position if we approach the end of allocatable IPv4 addresses and the Tier 1 players still aren't willing to play ball.
If that happens, IPv4 won't be going away from another decade or more, as there are billions of addresses tied up by these giant holders.
I don't really see why it's surprising, they are a large, old company. Large companies at the birth of the Internet tended to pick up Class A's and B's, and used them.
Are you surprised IBM has a Class A?
126 * 28 days = 3,528 days, or just over 9 years, and that's only by re-allocating wasteful Class A's currently in use.
9 years is a lot more than a few months.
That's also the problem with these extrapolations, because as the addresses become more scarce the assignment rate slows down. When IPv4 addresses were first being handed out, they were given at a rate of 5-10 Class A's a week. We're down to one a month now, in a year it will be one Class A every two months, if that.
It would buy a few months and the resources are better invested in the transition to IPv6.
You're obviously not very good at business, because with any change the conversion to a new system is never worth it until the cost to maintain the current system is as expensive or at least very close to the same cost. Right now for the Tier 1 ISPs, the backbone of the internet, it is still significantly cheaper to extend IPv4 than to make the switch to IPv6. Doing so could cost them hundreds of millions, if not billions in manpower costs (the hardware should be pretty much there already).
It Just Works just as well on a Class A private network as a Class A public network. The difference being, of course, that you only need a couple public addresses as gateways for the private network, freeing up about 16 million public addresses.
Models are only as good as the data you put into them. As the recent financial crisis should demonstrate, it's extremely difficult - if not downright impossible - to predict human behavior over any extended period of time.
We were supposed to run out of addresses 4-6 years ago, but we found ways around that. Predictions of two years ago put the end of IPv4 at this year, and yet we have two years left. Very strange, is it not?
Frankly, we could burn up the rest of the addresses tomorrow if we wanted, but that won't happen. The pain felt in the IPv6 switch is highest at the Tier 1 ISP level and dissipates as it moves down the chain. It is virtualy painless for the end-user, but it will be an extremely expensive move for the Tier 1 folks, and unfortunately the internet doesn't go IPv6 until the Tier 1's go IPv6. They are going to put this off as long as they can, and they'll surely get very creative about doing so.
There is also a lot of waste in the current setup, as it gets close to crunch time the waste will be squeezed out, further extending the life of IPv4.
Basically, you won't see IPv6 until the cost to switch to IPv6 is lower than the cost to extend IPv4. So far, they aren't even close, it is still MUCH cheaper to extend IPv4 a while longer than to switch the entire infrastructure to IPv6, but the two are slowly getting closer with every passing day.
You realize that based on the rate of consumption a couple of years ago we were supposed to run out of addresses by 2010.
Now based on the current rate of consumption we are supposed to run out of addresses some time in 2012.
I think it's safe to say you can't accurately predict how soon we'll run out of address by basing it on the current rate of consumption, because it is fairly obvious that the rate of consumption changes as we approach the end.
I estimate that within 10 years but not sooner than 5 we will run out of IPv4 addresses, and within 20 years we will have switched to IPv6.
$50 says my estimate is more accurate - if less precise - than TFA.
and it's probably going to be cheaper to start getting IPv6 out there now rather than at crunch time.
We already are, all new PCs in the past few years are IPv6 capable, and most high-end routers and switches have been able to handle it for even longer than PCs have. We are fast approaching the point where there will be a very small number of people left behind by an IPv6 switch, and that can be handled with NAT.
The thing is, at the top level switching from IPv4 to IPv6 is akin to having to destroy the old rail-road tracks before you can build the mag-lev line. Doing so is extremely expensive in many ways, even if they don't have to buy a single piece of hardware.
You also can't start implimenting it piece by piece until ALL the big ISPs impliment it piece by piece. One company can't really do anything without cooperation from the others, so it ends up being a case of each company waiting for another to jump. Right now nobody is jumping, but when the pressure becomes great enough they'll all be jumping almost at once, and you'll see the ISPs spend massive amounts of money to get switched over.
It's for this reason that I suspect they are going to make IPv4 last a long, long time. Two years is a minimum estimate, I'd wager they'll manage to hold off the switch to IPv6 for another 4-6 years.
I haven't read The Rest of the Robots, but I, Robot was itself a compilation of Asimov's short stories with a light connecting plot added over top.
If The Rest of the Robots is the same I absolutely MUST get it.
That doesn't matter at all with trademarks. Case in point is the fact that Google will be trademarking "Nexus One" (it's already in the works). It's all about usage and context and association with a product. The Android and then Nexus One is pretty obviously a nod to Dick's work. The question is, is anybody going to confuse the Nexus One cell phone with PKD's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Dick's estate still hasn't got a leg to stand on.
Google, with the "Android" OS and "Nexus One" phone is an obvious reference to PKD's work. The Cisco data center switch is just a use of the word Nexus as a product name, there are thousands of them out there and they are not all clever references to PKD's book.
That said, the estate still doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Why can't anybody take a damn compliment any more? Seriously!
F'ing lawyers will go after people when they know they have no case, hoping that people who don't know their rights will buckle.
Debt collectors operate almost exclusively on this principle. Often times they have little to no legal right to collect your debt, but most people don't know that and will cave even when they don't need to pay.
That doesn't really matter for trademarks. For example, a "chilie" is both a type of pepper, and a country in South America. Yet, "Chilies" is a registered trademark when it comes to restaurants. You can't name your restaurant "Chilies", or even "Chilly's" or "Chilly" or "Chilie" or "Chilies Place" or whatever, because it would cause people to confuse your restuarant with the trademarked restaurant.
It's the use of the word in context, and it has to relate to a conflict of commerce. You can even lose the trademark on your own, unique brand names if it becomes too popular. Kleenex has lost its trademark, even though that is a family name, because it has been largely adopted by the public to mean -any- facial tissue, not just Kleenex brand tissues. Same happened to aspirin, thermos, yo-yo, escalator, zipper, you name it.
So it's all about context and usage. Nexus is perfectly fine for a cell phone trademark because Nexus is not used to describe cell phones. If we called all phones "nexus" then there is no way you could claim a trademark on it. As it is it only describes one cell phone, so it is ripe for a trademark.
Incidentaly, PKD's estate needs a competing product with which Google's phone could be confused in order for them to have any kind of trademark infringement case. As far as I know, they have not been making any phones lately, so I don't think they have anything.
The only other avenue would be copyright, and they have even less of a case there, for exactly the reasons you describe.
Why should they have to? They were being flattering to an artist they obviously admire, the estate can go pound sand if they can't take a compliment when it is presented.
Dick's estate here, frankly, are a bunch of jackasses.
No, sorry. First, trademarks do not have to be registered to be valid, they just have to be associated with a particular brand. If you set up RingDev's Restaurant and I then set up RingDev's Restaurant over the street, then you can argue in court that I am trying to pass off my restaurant as being associated with your.
However, the unregistered trademark for your local restaurant "Chilly's", which was established 20 years ago, is trumped by the registered trademark of the national chain "Chillies", and you have to give up the name when Chillies starts to think about maybe putting a restaurant up in the same town.
This actually happened where I live.
Dick's estate also has no trademark on the Nexus-6, it's part of a fictional story for heaven's sake, there is no product!
However registered trademarks trump unregistered trademarks every time.
Plus there is no common market here, so there is no infringement. It's certainly not copyright infringement either.
What the hell ever happened to plain old flattery? Why does everything have to be an insult and a grievance? It's an obvious homage to Dick's work, why not accept it as such?
People are way too money hungry and lawsuit-happy these days, it's pathetic.
Registered trademarks also trump common law trademarks.
A local restaurant here called "Chilly's" was forced to change its name because "Chilies" was moving in to town and they had the registered trademark. Their's was "bigger" essentially, more recognized than the local commonlaw established trademark.
Again, though, it only applied because they were both competing restaurants, and people would be confused by a "Chilly's" and a "Chilies".
Books to cell phones doesn't exactly run up against the same issues.
Following this logic, my understanding would be that since a book has universal reach, anything in it can be defended without a proper trade mark file in the US. Or am I eating my foot here?
You'd be eating your foot there, the trademark for a book would be its title, not anything in its content.
The best the author can claim here is copyright infringement, which is obviously not the case.
Seriously, what ever happened to good old fashioned flattery? One of the most well known tech companies in the world is using your character names to sell its product, I mean come on! That's awesome!
It's not like the guy was going to market a cell phone or mobile operating system any time soon. That happens to be all the Google trademarks apply to.
Christianity as I understand it, is descended from Catholicism, as Catholicism is descended from Judaism.
Your understanding is incorrect.
The Catholic Church claims the Apostle Peter as its founder. There were, however, ten other Apostles who began the spread of Christianity (Judas, of course, commited suicide instead of seeking redemption, cutting the total to 11 from 12). Within a few hundred years, the Catholic church became the dominant church in Europe, but it was by no means the only Christian church, simply the largest.
It also has the distinction of being one of the oldest Christian denominations. You could technically say that the Protestant denominations stemmed from Catholicism, but it would be about like saying Athiesm stemmed from Theism - Protestantism was a rejection of Catholicism and a return to the roots of Christianity. This is why the Bibles of the Protestant denominations of Christianity contain only the books written by the Apostles and the first few great missionaries who came behind them. The Catholic Bible is supplimented by a number of various books of tradition that have been passed down through the centuries, which other denominations don't ascribe to. The customs of the priesthood in Catholicism are also very, very different from other Christian denominations. The idea that the Pope speaks the word of God directly, for example, is not found in most other Christian denominations.
That said, you can usually simply cut away parts of Catholicism and get one of the various Protestant denominations, because they are built on the same foundation.
If your interpretation of Christianity was looser, rather than tighter, you would have ignored the differences and stuck to the similarities. But you did not do that, hence the argument. The idea of transsubstantiation is almost exclusively a Catholic or Catholic based idea. MOST people who read the passage where Christ broke bread with his deciples and said "This is my body, do this in rememberance of me" recognize that he was making a metaphore, and the point is to remember his sacrifice not get caught up in eating the body of Christ. Obviously that's not what happened the first time, why would it be happening now? It was essentially a Papal decree that made transubstantiation doctrine, for no real reason, and it's that sort of thing that led to Martin Luther founding the Protestant church. Essentially the only denominations that believe in transubstantiation are denominations that originated by churches that were catholic in doctrine, but for one reason or another were cut off from the main church. Russian Orthodox is like this, and is very very similar to Catholicism because of it.
If you want proof of how different the denominations are, and why you can't simply lump them all together as you did, go have Mass at a Catholic church and then run down to Baptist or Pentacostal church (Baptist and Pentacostal are themselves almost opposites) for a service. You will see what almost two different religions. Then run over to a Mormon church, which is as different from Protestant as Protestant is from Catholic.
The differences are so great that many in each group do not consider the others to be truly Christian, and that instead they still need salvation.
And seemingly the biggest problem compared to other EM-radiation is that your body simply cannot recognise the "new kinds" of radiation it's exposed to.
You mean the "new kinds" which have existed since the dawn of time? You realize we are pummeled with various wavelengths of EM radiation from all over the universe, not the least of which come from our own Sun, right? The Earth's magnetic field keeps out the nastiest high-frequency stuff for the most part, but the lower level stuff gets through. That's how radio telescopes work - they grab the sub-visible EM radiation from all over the galaxy that hits the planet and inundates us with EM radiation.
Hey guess which end of the scale cell phone radiation is in? It's not the high frequencies, it's in the low frequencies.
And of course EM radiation can affect our cells, but the lower the frequency the less energy it has, and the less damage it does. For example, even a few hours of exposure to UV radiation will start destroying our cells - a sunburn is the body's desperate attempt to save those cells and prevent further damage. However, drop just a little ways into the visible spectrum and suddenly EM radiation does virtually nothing to our bodies but stimulate vitamine D production in the skin.
Drop it even further and the EM radiation has even less of an effect, eventually getting into the range of cell phone signals.
Believing that cell phone radiation must be harming us even though there is no evidence is foolishness. The light emitted by a flashlight is thousands of times more potent than a cell phone signal, and emits a higher frequency of EM radiation which is closer to the dangerous radiations of UV, X-ray, and Gamma-Ray, and yet we aren't terrified of flashlights.
The idea that cell phone signals could cause damage is nonsensical, so it had better have some good, strong evidence behind it before I start believing it. So far the only good evidence behind it has shown a small positive effect.
is it safe to say that having a phone to your head for X hours/day has some kind of effect?
The inconsistant and often contradicting studies mean it is very much not safe to say that. Every study (or most anyway_ would have to show an affect and simply disagree on details in order for that to be the case.
For all we know (and what I actually suspect) is that cell phone usage has little to no actual affect on us physically.
They've since stopped referring to it as Crainal Warming, instead calling it Lobal Change.
"Branial" is not a word. Sorry to ruin your joke, it was otherwise very chuckle-worthy.