A lot of times a programmer is stuck without those tools for any number of reasons. A lot of times people are stuck with spaghetti code which there is no documentation or design pattern to work with. I think your answer is assuming that the planets are aligned and we live in a utopia. Do you have any suggestions for people who have to deal with reality?
Doxygen. With the proliferation of open source projects, "no tools" is no longer a valid excuse.
Now, I'm not saying that doxygen is going to be able to unravel all his code for him, but it's a good start, and it's free. It may not help much if there's absolutely no structure (a 5,000 line main(), for example) but most code isn't quite that bad.
If his boss doesn't approve of that one in particular, this wikipedia article has many others to choose from.
And finally if his boss says, "No, you're supposed to be a whiz kid, you figure it out with the tools I gave you," the correct answer is to raise one finger in salute and find a job without a batshit-crazy manager.
Let me get this straight... they "Rented" the camera by buying it at Fry's and returning it?
I'm sure some people will defend this tactic, but its stuff like this that causes awesome return policies at stores to be restricted, and prices to go up. (as recently happened at CostCo)
Yeah, I was pissed at them when I read this too. I hope that when Fry institutes a 20% open-box charge on returns, that everybody look this guy up and send him a thank you note. Wrapped around a bowling ball.
A little secret. This decision was not written by the judge. It is what is termed a "prepared order" written by the winning party's lawyers, and given to the judge. When you win a case, one of the "spoils of war" in a trial court is you usually get to write the order for the judge. Oh the judge is free to change it, and sometimes does. Sometimes they edit the document, and other times the changes are just handwritten, but make no mistake, this order was written by Plaintiff's attorneys and given to the judge.
I wasn't talking about the decision (and definitely not about this one in particular,) I was talking about trials, and the judge who has to sift through all this crap. I think the vast majority of judges are very smart people, and are usually full of common sense (even though a few seem to be making decisions based on politics rather than law.) They have to put up with a torrent of whiny liars and lawyers that I'd have no patience for. If their courtrooms were TV shows, I'd be changing the channel or at least reaching for the mute button, neither of which would serve justice at all. I think judges do a great job.
In this particular case, I think everyone here is arguing about the stupidity of the slashdot headline instead of the legal decision. No DNS requests were ruled illegal. One specific jerk was making zone transfer requests of another clueless jerk. Clueless jerk 2 filed suit against annoying jerk 1 to stop it. Judge listened to a bunch of blah-blah, held his nose and agreed with clueless jerk 2. Slashdotter incorrectly assumes DNS had anything to do with the lawsuit, and posts inflammatory headline. Slashdotters rush to judgment based on analysis of the technologies involved, while forgetting that the judge ruled against a specific annoying jerk, not against a technology.
That's not at all true. The judges I've had dealings with have been damn smart people.
What you're forgetting is that in most court cases, the defendant is there for one of two possible reasons: they really weren't responsible, or they were responsible but are now lying about it. And the plaintiff or complainant is there to make sure something "legal" happens in their favor, and they're not above lying to get their desired outcome, either. Usually there's a lot of both. That means the judges are professionally sitting at the mouth of a never ending river of bullshit, and they have to keep control of the situation.
It's not that judges can't or refuse to understand the technology; it's that the cases are about the people, which is where their focus must remain. The computer didn't act of its own accord. It operated under the direction of its owner. The question of "was there malicious intent?" has nothing to do with DNS or any other logic-based technology and everything to do with the two guys standing in the courtroom.
These days it takes no arms to pump gas. Long ago when self-service was first started in our state, the pumps used to have the automatic hold-open levers removed requiring the customer to stand there. But several years back, the hold-open levers were returned, so now you don't have to manually hold the nozzle.
Not that I ever did anyway, I used to just wedge the gas cap under the handle to hold it open.
Oh, it's not nearly that simple. Sure, the counter candy (along with the other profitable stuff near the cash registers) is there for impulse purchasers, but there is a much bigger science to laying out a store than just "make people spend time", and a much more complex set of rules.
A lot depends on the store: some stores strongly believe the Piggly Wiggly model that says you make more money by putting "necessities" (diapers, toothpaste, whatever) at the back so that you'll impulse buy your way to and from the goods you need. Other choices are constrained by logistics and architecture: milk, deli and frozen goods are frequently kept at the back simply because the coolers have to be mounted with their service doors facing the loading docks. Other stores have different goals, and lay out their floor plans accordingly.
Most stores work long and hard with layouts. There's always a set of compromises to be made, and frequently original assumptions about traffic and shopping patterns turn out to be either wrong, or customers change their behaviors over time.
For example, some Apple stores used to have the Genius Bar located along the middle of the side wall, with the cash registers along the far back wall, and the "family room" for the kids somewhere in between the two. It looked great from the front door, and on paper. But placing the geniuses there led to large crowds of non-geniuses in the middle of the store waiting for the geniuses, blocking traffic to and from the cash registers at the rear. Worse, people were leaving the registers with large, awkward boxes tromping past piles of squirrelly children and negotiating the crowds. Their newer store layouts feature the genius bar along the back wall, and they moved the receipt printers/registers nearer to the front doors. Employees (who are theoretically more careful than random customers) now carry the clumsy boxes from the back rooms carefully past the piles of children to the waiting customers at the front of the stores, who now only have to pay and then leave.
Not that they'll remove the on-pump TVs (that must have been a huge capital investment) but our local Holiday store at least turned down the volume after enough people complained.
I still take the opportunity while pumping gas to clean the windows and/or check the oil, and make it a point to ignore the extra commercials. But the original reason I switched to this station is they are the only ones in the neighborhood to offer low-sulfur gas. As far as I know that hasn't changed, so they'll keep my business for now.
As far as I know, Medco doesn't provide comprehensive patient pharmaceutical information. I think all they do is offer the data sheet for foovoline, the one that warns you against taking it with blahmacillin. But they don't check to see if you have a prescription for blahmacillin or not. That's still up to your pharmacist, and unless you explicitly tell him or her, he or she has no way of knowing that you're getting blahmacillin from the pharmacy across the street.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. But my understanding of Medco (they're my company's prescription provider) is that they only pay the bills and sell the data sheet service.
The last I heard, the NSLU2 will NEVER spin down the hard drives. This may accelerate the wear on the bearings, and cause premature failure. Drives also consume more power while spinning.
Actually, what I learned a long time ago (in a technology-land far, far away) is "never shut down your equipment." The only times hard drives and other computer hardware experience physical wear is startup, shutdown, and under G force loads.
A spinning platter running on new bearings essentially maintains bearing-on-lubricant-on-bushing contact the entire time it is on, and has zero wear. But when the platter is spun down, the bearings will of course stop. At that time the bearings "poke through" the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact. Over time the weight of the platters on the bearings will cause microscopic deformations to be created on the surfaces of the bearings. These no-longer-round bearings then have high spots that also poke through the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact while the drive is spinning. This becomes a source of vibration, which leads to more metal-on-metal contact, causing wear.
There are other physical reasons to not shut down your computer, too.
Surge currents are a problem. They occur in a hard drive because a stopped motor takes much more torque to spin up than a running motor. That means that a component which is spec'd to carry the running current of the motor, say 80ma, has to temporarily provide startup current of perhaps 200ma. Most components can handle that much extra current for a very small amount of time, but a marginal component may fail under the extra stress. Avoiding power surges maximizes the life of those components
There is another source of wear that people often ignore, and that is thermal stress. Powering equipment up causes it to heat up, expanding the materials it's made of. And all materials have different coefficients of expansion -- aluminum expands quite a bit more per degree than steel, and both expand much more rapidly than ceramics and fiberglass. When a computer is powered off and cools down, everything shrinks at its own rate -- traces on the circuit boards, soldered joints, the case, the screws holding the heat sink to the motherboard, the gold wires connecting the chip package to the die, everything. That's the only mechanical wear these otherwise solid state components will ever have. The more heating/cooling cycles, the more often they will tug at each other, causing wear.
However, many things have changed since I learned this stuff. The technology of hard drives is vastly different than it was when I learned this; especially the properties of the lubricants that are now used. Also, cheap hard drives may have poor bearings to start with, and may already be vibrating when you purchase them (sound is a good way to detect this -- a good drive is a silent drive.) Hardware designers who are building quality equipment specify components with the capacity to handle the thermal and electrical stresses. And energy efficiency is of concern to everyone. But unless it's really crap gear, I'd suggest that powering down to attempt to preserve the longevity of your equipment might not be the appropriate answer.
Well, I RTFA, so I'd like to pick a nit or three. First, note that this guy did NOT destroy medical records. He destroyed absolutely "nothing". He was a complete and utter failure at being a logic bomber (does that make him an illogic bomber, perhaps?)
Next, he was attempting to delete records at Medco, who is essentially an insurance firm and not an actual "health care provider". This means the records would have contained data like "how much did we pay out for prescription X?" and not scheduling "your next chemotherapy treatment is for drug Y on date Z." Sure if Medco started double-charging me for prescriptions or not picking up the tab after my co-pay, I'd be mad, but I probably wouldn't be dead.
Finally, TFA even states the worst case scenario would have been the loss of drug interaction data being delivered to the pharmacist in a timely fashion. But pharmacists are already trained in drug interactions, and don't actually need the computer to remind them. In this particular case, it sounds like the consumer's drug information pamphlet wouldn't have been printed. Yes, I consider that a very serious problem, but it's only one step in the chain of protection. So the real worst case was that if it didn't print, my pharmacist would have had the responsibility to explain to me that "foovoline can't be taken with blahmacillin, and should be taken two hours after eating."
I'm not saying the guy wasn't total slime and doesn't deserve his sentence (he was trying to cripple his company, after all.) But you are attempting to have him personally hung for crimes he did not commmit. That's a typical prosecution tactic to sway a jury, but it's not based on facts.
Do you know why that error message was numbered as "Msg 15281" and not "Msg 6"? Because the hole wasn't plugged for many, many years. Prior to that all of the extended stored procedures were 100% visible to the SA account.
The default installation of MSDE or MSSQL 2000 creates an SA account with an empty password, and is installed as an NT service with local admin rights.
From this you can determine that everyone who installs an MSDE-based product (the Office 2000 suite, especially Visio) creates a built-in admin exploit. There are likely still thousands of these installations out there.
Machining screws isn't so bad, but if the some guy starts hand filing and grinding his own screws to a perfect mirror polish, watch out...
Many moons ago I was the "gofer" for our school's one act play. The lead character was going to use a prop broom as a crutch, so the teacher in charge told me to shorten the wooden screw-in handle of the broom. I cut the stick down, and spent the afternoon hand-carving a new screw thread into the bare wood that fit perfectly in the broom head. I was really proud of that carving. But the handle was still a few inches too tall, so the teacher told me to cut it shorter. And this time, he told me to just cut off the plain end. D'oh!
Sure, the aliens tell us "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE", and which moon is the first one the Russians are heading for? Exactly.
I've bought six Kenmore appliances from Sears over the past couple of years. No problems, and apart from one overly aggressive salesman, no hassles. And when the refrigerator they delivered didn't fit our space (the left door wouldn't open in the recessed spot in which we had placed it) they politely and quickly exchanged it for a single-door model, giving us full credit for the exchange. Their delivery and installation crews showed up when they said they would. And the appliances work as advertised.
On top of that, most of the appliances we replaced were 20 year old "entry level" (a.k.a. cheapest) Sears appliances that were still 95% functional. Only a few small things had broken, such as the clock/timer on the oven, and we rationalized that into an excuse to modernize our kitchen and laundry. We felt we received good value from our original investments in them, and we have had no problems with the new appliances.
I also have had very good luck with a large number of Craftsman hand tools. And their service on my gas powered string trimmer was prompt and completed without problems.
My wife also likes the convenience of being able to return online orders of Land's End products at the local Sears store.
From a satisfied customer perspective I have no complaints about Sears. And if they are treating their employees unfairly, they have hidden it from me very well.
MS bought into the nonsense of software as a service.
How can you say such a thing? Services are reliable! Everything is reliable these days. The network never goes down, the servers never go down, the drives never crash, the equipment's never taken offline for maintenance, the certificates never expire, the DNS hosts never get redirected, the security policies are never changed in the middle of the freakin' day (oh, that's a fun one!), the databases always replicate, the bandwidth is never saturated, latency is always zero, and the application software itself is flawless.
Hang on just a sec, there's a unicorn taking a leak on the rainbow on the next cloud over. "Get off my damn cloud, you freaks!"
There could be any of a dozen causes keeping you up:
If you don't normally use an alarm clock but a specific need for one to wake up for a specific event, you were possibly preoccupied with the next day's event.
You may have had an uncomfortably strange lump under your pillow.
Were you at home, or on the road or in a hotel? Most people sleep "differently" when not in their own bed.
Does your phone emit an ultrasonic whine?
You might subconsciously be worried about the RF you believe you are exposing yourself to.
If you had a hand beneath the pillow while you slept, it might have made contact with the unfamiliar texture of the phone.
There are a lot of very plausible reasons that don't involve a two-second-handshake-pulse-every-9-minutes, emitting a maximum of 600mW of RF energy near your head.
You could try your own experiment -- have someone randomly set your phone to either "airplane mode" or "regular mode" while you continue to use it as an alarm clock. In the morning they'd have to restore your phone to regular mode so you wouldn't know which way you slept with it. They would record their settings while you recorded your sleep patterns. After a month or so, correlate the two and figure out if RF made any difference in your sleep.
I've decided that LG won the format war. I bought their SuperBlu HD-DVD/BluRay/DVD/everything player for a couple of reasons. First, the TV has only two HDMI inputs and I use one for cable, leaving me with only one for a disc player. I could have purchased an HD-DVD player plus a BluRay player plus an HDMI switch for about the same amount of money, only with a much crappier form-factor.
What really drove this was the Wife Acceptance Factor. She didn't want to monkey around with all the different boxes, and she didn't want to have to figure out which shelves to browse in the movie section -- she wants to just buy a movie and not worry about whether we can watch it or not.
The LG player is quite nice, but I hate being an early adopter for stuff like this, because I just know something incompatible will happen in a few years. It does have an ethernet cable that can theoretically update the player, but how much incentive will LG really have to continue to keep me happy two years from now?
Slashdot Mirror
Doxygen. With the proliferation of open source projects, "no tools" is no longer a valid excuse.
Now, I'm not saying that doxygen is going to be able to unravel all his code for him, but it's a good start, and it's free. It may not help much if there's absolutely no structure (a 5,000 line main(), for example) but most code isn't quite that bad.
If his boss doesn't approve of that one in particular, this wikipedia article has many others to choose from.
And finally if his boss says, "No, you're supposed to be a whiz kid, you figure it out with the tools I gave you," the correct answer is to raise one finger in salute and find a job without a batshit-crazy manager.
It'd take a miracle.
Yeah, I was pissed at them when I read this too. I hope that when Fry institutes a 20% open-box charge on returns, that everybody look this guy up and send him a thank you note. Wrapped around a bowling ball.
Dude! You're getting a shock!
Everyone was wondering in advance what could possibly be as cool to launch as the iPhone. Apparently, 'nothing' was the correct answer for this year.
That's fine, that just means next year's announcement should be bigger by comparison.
Please, won't someone think of the glow-in-the-dark kitties?
I wasn't talking about the decision (and definitely not about this one in particular,) I was talking about trials, and the judge who has to sift through all this crap. I think the vast majority of judges are very smart people, and are usually full of common sense (even though a few seem to be making decisions based on politics rather than law.) They have to put up with a torrent of whiny liars and lawyers that I'd have no patience for. If their courtrooms were TV shows, I'd be changing the channel or at least reaching for the mute button, neither of which would serve justice at all. I think judges do a great job.
In this particular case, I think everyone here is arguing about the stupidity of the slashdot headline instead of the legal decision. No DNS requests were ruled illegal. One specific jerk was making zone transfer requests of another clueless jerk. Clueless jerk 2 filed suit against annoying jerk 1 to stop it. Judge listened to a bunch of blah-blah, held his nose and agreed with clueless jerk 2. Slashdotter incorrectly assumes DNS had anything to do with the lawsuit, and posts inflammatory headline. Slashdotters rush to judgment based on analysis of the technologies involved, while forgetting that the judge ruled against a specific annoying jerk, not against a technology.
What you're forgetting is that in most court cases, the defendant is there for one of two possible reasons: they really weren't responsible, or they were responsible but are now lying about it. And the plaintiff or complainant is there to make sure something "legal" happens in their favor, and they're not above lying to get their desired outcome, either. Usually there's a lot of both. That means the judges are professionally sitting at the mouth of a never ending river of bullshit, and they have to keep control of the situation.
It's not that judges can't or refuse to understand the technology; it's that the cases are about the people, which is where their focus must remain. The computer didn't act of its own accord. It operated under the direction of its owner. The question of "was there malicious intent?" has nothing to do with DNS or any other logic-based technology and everything to do with the two guys standing in the courtroom.
These days it takes no arms to pump gas. Long ago when self-service was first started in our state, the pumps used to have the automatic hold-open levers removed requiring the customer to stand there. But several years back, the hold-open levers were returned, so now you don't have to manually hold the nozzle.
Not that I ever did anyway, I used to just wedge the gas cap under the handle to hold it open.
A lot depends on the store: some stores strongly believe the Piggly Wiggly model that says you make more money by putting "necessities" (diapers, toothpaste, whatever) at the back so that you'll impulse buy your way to and from the goods you need. Other choices are constrained by logistics and architecture: milk, deli and frozen goods are frequently kept at the back simply because the coolers have to be mounted with their service doors facing the loading docks. Other stores have different goals, and lay out their floor plans accordingly.
Most stores work long and hard with layouts. There's always a set of compromises to be made, and frequently original assumptions about traffic and shopping patterns turn out to be either wrong, or customers change their behaviors over time.
For example, some Apple stores used to have the Genius Bar located along the middle of the side wall, with the cash registers along the far back wall, and the "family room" for the kids somewhere in between the two. It looked great from the front door, and on paper. But placing the geniuses there led to large crowds of non-geniuses in the middle of the store waiting for the geniuses, blocking traffic to and from the cash registers at the rear. Worse, people were leaving the registers with large, awkward boxes tromping past piles of squirrelly children and negotiating the crowds. Their newer store layouts feature the genius bar along the back wall, and they moved the receipt printers/registers nearer to the front doors. Employees (who are theoretically more careful than random customers) now carry the clumsy boxes from the back rooms carefully past the piles of children to the waiting customers at the front of the stores, who now only have to pay and then leave.
I still take the opportunity while pumping gas to clean the windows and/or check the oil, and make it a point to ignore the extra commercials. But the original reason I switched to this station is they are the only ones in the neighborhood to offer low-sulfur gas. As far as I know that hasn't changed, so they'll keep my business for now.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. But my understanding of Medco (they're my company's prescription provider) is that they only pay the bills and sell the data sheet service.
Of course, there is the counter example of Rosie O'Donnell, I think she does have a moon orbiting her.
Or did you mean "stars" like in "nebulae"?
Actually, what I learned a long time ago (in a technology-land far, far away) is "never shut down your equipment." The only times hard drives and other computer hardware experience physical wear is startup, shutdown, and under G force loads.
A spinning platter running on new bearings essentially maintains bearing-on-lubricant-on-bushing contact the entire time it is on, and has zero wear. But when the platter is spun down, the bearings will of course stop. At that time the bearings "poke through" the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact. Over time the weight of the platters on the bearings will cause microscopic deformations to be created on the surfaces of the bearings. These no-longer-round bearings then have high spots that also poke through the lubrication layer, causing metal-on-metal contact while the drive is spinning. This becomes a source of vibration, which leads to more metal-on-metal contact, causing wear.
There are other physical reasons to not shut down your computer, too.
Surge currents are a problem. They occur in a hard drive because a stopped motor takes much more torque to spin up than a running motor. That means that a component which is spec'd to carry the running current of the motor, say 80ma, has to temporarily provide startup current of perhaps 200ma. Most components can handle that much extra current for a very small amount of time, but a marginal component may fail under the extra stress. Avoiding power surges maximizes the life of those components
There is another source of wear that people often ignore, and that is thermal stress. Powering equipment up causes it to heat up, expanding the materials it's made of. And all materials have different coefficients of expansion -- aluminum expands quite a bit more per degree than steel, and both expand much more rapidly than ceramics and fiberglass. When a computer is powered off and cools down, everything shrinks at its own rate -- traces on the circuit boards, soldered joints, the case, the screws holding the heat sink to the motherboard, the gold wires connecting the chip package to the die, everything. That's the only mechanical wear these otherwise solid state components will ever have. The more heating/cooling cycles, the more often they will tug at each other, causing wear.
However, many things have changed since I learned this stuff. The technology of hard drives is vastly different than it was when I learned this; especially the properties of the lubricants that are now used. Also, cheap hard drives may have poor bearings to start with, and may already be vibrating when you purchase them (sound is a good way to detect this -- a good drive is a silent drive.) Hardware designers who are building quality equipment specify components with the capacity to handle the thermal and electrical stresses. And energy efficiency is of concern to everyone. But unless it's really crap gear, I'd suggest that powering down to attempt to preserve the longevity of your equipment might not be the appropriate answer.
Next, he was attempting to delete records at Medco, who is essentially an insurance firm and not an actual "health care provider". This means the records would have contained data like "how much did we pay out for prescription X?" and not scheduling "your next chemotherapy treatment is for drug Y on date Z." Sure if Medco started double-charging me for prescriptions or not picking up the tab after my co-pay, I'd be mad, but I probably wouldn't be dead.
Finally, TFA even states the worst case scenario would have been the loss of drug interaction data being delivered to the pharmacist in a timely fashion. But pharmacists are already trained in drug interactions, and don't actually need the computer to remind them. In this particular case, it sounds like the consumer's drug information pamphlet wouldn't have been printed. Yes, I consider that a very serious problem, but it's only one step in the chain of protection. So the real worst case was that if it didn't print, my pharmacist would have had the responsibility to explain to me that "foovoline can't be taken with blahmacillin, and should be taken two hours after eating."
I'm not saying the guy wasn't total slime and doesn't deserve his sentence (he was trying to cripple his company, after all.) But you are attempting to have him personally hung for crimes he did not commmit. That's a typical prosecution tactic to sway a jury, but it's not based on facts.
The default installation of MSDE or MSSQL 2000 creates an SA account with an empty password, and is installed as an NT service with local admin rights.
From this you can determine that everyone who installs an MSDE-based product (the Office 2000 suite, especially Visio) creates a built-in admin exploit. There are likely still thousands of these installations out there.
Many moons ago I was the "gofer" for our school's one act play. The lead character was going to use a prop broom as a crutch, so the teacher in charge told me to shorten the wooden screw-in handle of the broom. I cut the stick down, and spent the afternoon hand-carving a new screw thread into the bare wood that fit perfectly in the broom head. I was really proud of that carving. But the handle was still a few inches too tall, so the teacher told me to cut it shorter. And this time, he told me to just cut off the plain end. D'oh!
At least they can't say they weren't warned.
On top of that, most of the appliances we replaced were 20 year old "entry level" (a.k.a. cheapest) Sears appliances that were still 95% functional. Only a few small things had broken, such as the clock/timer on the oven, and we rationalized that into an excuse to modernize our kitchen and laundry. We felt we received good value from our original investments in them, and we have had no problems with the new appliances.
I also have had very good luck with a large number of Craftsman hand tools. And their service on my gas powered string trimmer was prompt and completed without problems.
My wife also likes the convenience of being able to return online orders of Land's End products at the local Sears store.
From a satisfied customer perspective I have no complaints about Sears. And if they are treating their employees unfairly, they have hidden it from me very well.
How can you say such a thing? Services are reliable! Everything is reliable these days. The network never goes down, the servers never go down, the drives never crash, the equipment's never taken offline for maintenance, the certificates never expire, the DNS hosts never get redirected, the security policies are never changed in the middle of the freakin' day (oh, that's a fun one!), the databases always replicate, the bandwidth is never saturated, latency is always zero, and the application software itself is flawless.
Hang on just a sec, there's a unicorn taking a leak on the rainbow on the next cloud over. "Get off my damn cloud, you freaks!"
- If you don't normally use an alarm clock but a specific need for one to wake up for a specific event, you were possibly preoccupied with the next day's event.
- You may have had an uncomfortably strange lump under your pillow.
- Were you at home, or on the road or in a hotel? Most people sleep "differently" when not in their own bed.
- Does your phone emit an ultrasonic whine?
- You might subconsciously be worried about the RF you believe you are exposing yourself to.
- If you had a hand beneath the pillow while you slept, it might have made contact with the unfamiliar texture of the phone.
There are a lot of very plausible reasons that don't involve a two-second-handshake-pulse-every-9-minutes, emitting a maximum of 600mW of RF energy near your head.You could try your own experiment -- have someone randomly set your phone to either "airplane mode" or "regular mode" while you continue to use it as an alarm clock. In the morning they'd have to restore your phone to regular mode so you wouldn't know which way you slept with it. They would record their settings while you recorded your sleep patterns. After a month or so, correlate the two and figure out if RF made any difference in your sleep.
What really drove this was the Wife Acceptance Factor. She didn't want to monkey around with all the different boxes, and she didn't want to have to figure out which shelves to browse in the movie section -- she wants to just buy a movie and not worry about whether we can watch it or not.
The LG player is quite nice, but I hate being an early adopter for stuff like this, because I just know something incompatible will happen in a few years. It does have an ethernet cable that can theoretically update the player, but how much incentive will LG really have to continue to keep me happy two years from now?
Invites to the cave will be marked BYOPBF, by the way. (Bring Your Own Precious Bodily Fluids.)