I might not believe in the scary monster from Redmond as much as some more zealous FSF and OSI lovers, but please! Do you actually think billg is paying SCO to do this?
That would open MS to so much litigation (and possibly more prosecution) if one person talked, or a crafty reporter found the paper trail or money trail linking the two.
If you're just going to make crap up, at least make it reasonable.
We are talking about a company that has been caught forging "grass roots" letters to lawmakers, although I still can't decide which part was worse, forging letters from living people who could raise an objection, or the ones from dead people who obviously couldn't have written the letters themselves.
We are talking about a company that tried to pass off faked videos to a federal judge.
We are talking about a company that was using a unix server to host a site saying no one in their right mind would use unix.
We are, in short, talking about a company that makes Nixon look honest and prudent.
I will agree, the claim that Microsoft is behind SCO is unreasonable. It is far too safe, simple and straight forward for them. When they shoot themselves in the foot it is generally a lot more convoluted.
Ah, young enough that you still probably remember what sleep was like. *smile*
But where is the data that shows microwaves at the frequency and power level used for power transmission have absolutely no effect on the human body? There must be some otherwise how could anyone be convinced it's safe?
Not really. For example, I think Hoover dam is safe, even though I know that water in the quantities and pressure used to generate power could easily kill me.
Without going in to all the details (which I don't claim to know), there are a number of things that make the situation much less dire that you paint it.
You don't have to worry about the total power, only the power that enters your body. One would expect that they wouldn't run the beam along at ground level, if only because of simple greed: ground level is cluttered enough to scatter away most of the useful power, meaning you'll have to spend a lot more generating it in the first place. For a variety of reasons they may also have it very difuse.
You don't have to worry about the power that passes through your body, since it had no effect; you only have to worry about the portion you absorb. Again, anyone setting up a system to beam power is going to try their best to stay away from frequencies that are likely to be absorbed by (say) water, since all sorts of things like rain, humidity, etc. will cause enormous losses.
You don't have to worry about the power that is absorbed by your skin. Skin is great stuff. An adult's skin can absorb on the order of one horsepower of electromagnetic radiation without increasing cancer risks beyond the range of normal lifestyle variations. (And, for somewhat subtle reasons, if you are going to absorb any of the power you will likely do it with your skin.)
Also cells have electro-mechanical structures...definitely been shown to use "electricity" in the common term of it, like wires, not communication...
You are talking about ion channels here, not about bulk flow of electrons. In any case, the characteristic frequencies are much, much lower than the microwave range. Roughly, this is about like worrying that opening and closing the curtains on your windows several times a day will cause (or prevent) global warming.
The one thing you can lump about "radiation" is that to much of any wave length will hurt you, x-rays, light or microwaves, I can hardly see that the frequency would matter at all...
Again, this is where some science education would help. Energy depends on frequency, as does the absorbtion by any given material, and the likelyhood that it will reach you in the first place. A few things to think about:
Radio stations.
The cosmic background microwave radiation.
Some galactic sources pour out a great deal of radiation at frequencies in the one-cycle-every-few-hundred-thousand-years. We can't even detect them, any more than we can see/hear contenental drift.
Flashlights are safe, but you can make a dangerous laser powered by a flashlight battery. You might also be able to make some sort of flashlight battery powered don't-try-this-at-home-kids microwave device (in some cook-meat frequency).
-- MarkusQ
Re:If you think math textbooks are bad...
on
FDL Math Textbooks?
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· Score: 1
He makes a big deal that just about everything taught is wrong, but then doesn't provide any evidence or facts as to what the truth is!
Can you give an example? All of the examples I looked at looked fine.
I'll have to be brief myself (and hope it doesn't come across as terse); I'm typing in the dark with a sleeping baby nearby.
You are confounding many things that are physically different but similar in name. A few examples:
Radiation. There are many different types of radiation; electromagnetic waves, various sub-atomic particles, etc. They are all called "radiation" becuase they radiate from a source. But lumping them all together to reason about as a class makes about as much sense as lumping all yellow objects together. Yes, some yellow berries are poisonous, but that doesn't mean that lemons are dangerous to eat without further testing.
"Metals" This word is used in at least three different ways: 1) by solid state physics, as a state of matter (like crystal, or gas) 2) by chemists, as a sub-division of the periodic table, or 3) by cosmologists, to mean everything but hydrogen (which, by the way, chemists class as a metal). Your body contains 2-metals by microwaves consistantly interact strongly with 1-metals.
Electricity. Our bodies "use electricity" in the sense that the distribution of charged ions in our nerves (for example) changes over time and space to convey information. But (dumb movies like "the matrix" notwithstanding) our nerves do not act like wires or carry a current.
I stand by my earlier comment: take some real science courses and you will save yourself a whole lot of worry--or at least, help you redirect it to more useful targets.
Thanks. I'll check it out. The most concrete thing I had seen todate was the deposition posted on the web. So far, none of this looks as bad as people are making out (if they were to lock people up for traveling to foreign countries or lieing to their friends almost all of us would be behind bars). But I do not doubt that there is much more that we don't know yet.
As are you. I suspect that it's because we are both more interested in the truth than in winning.
The issue at hand is not physics or chemistry alone, but how the body reacts to these things.
Fair enough. But just as I have a spam filter that drops any e-mail containing certain patterns of phrases, allowing me to spend more time on the ones that I'm more likely to be interested in, you can use science as a sort of claim filter to weed out a lot of bunk and thus let you spend more time on the concerns that are more likely to be valid.
Science teaches you to ask questions like "If X is true, what else would have to be true?" These second order effects are often much easier to test than the origonal claims, and thus very effective for weeding out bunk. For example, for it to be true that the majority of the aluminum we consume comes from manufactured goods, we would have to consume a very small amount of dust and dirt.
The big kicker in the mercury / autism theory is that the coorelation between different groups (getting the same or different types of shots) doesn't hold up, but there is a stong coorelation between the rate of diagnosis and the public awareness and breadth of the diagnostic criteria. Thus the most likely explanation is that there are not in fact more people with autism, but rather in the past many people with boarderline autism (e.g. Bill Gates, according to several articles) went undiagnosed.
In the same way, AIDS didn't magically appear in the 1980's; we just started realizing what it was.
Might be a little too early in the morning. This guy is just a resonance of D_s+, which...is made up of c & s_bar...Charmed particles have been around for a while now.
Duh. Thanks. I should learn not to try to think physics on my way back to bed from a diaper change. (Better yet: I shouldn't stop and check e-mail/slashdot either.)
From the article, it sounds as if this particle would exhibit naked charm (and naked (anti-)strange as well I assume). This seems astounding to me (at a quarter to five AM at least). Last I heard that sort of thing was on mother nature's short list of no-nos.
"indisputable" in this context probably means that those trying to dispute the evidence risk sharing a cell with Mr. Hawash soon thereafter.
*laugh* Good point. Since most of there case seems to rest on him giving money to people that the government disagrees with, I suppose even donating to his defense fund (if there is one) could be risky.
I share many of your concerns with our present situation. However, I feel that you are being led off on into a huge maze of false trails by your lack of scientific thinking. Yes, corporations lie, as do politicians. And yes, they do so to further their own interests. But that doesn't mean it is safe to assume that everything said by someone in power or authority is automatically false; if you do so, you can be mislead as easily as if you unquestioningly accepted everything they said as true.
Learn some chemistry; not from popularizations, but from text books. Leran some physics, and some math, an above all try to get the nack of the scientific / sceptical mindset.
You can still work to expose what we both agree is bad, but you will be able to choose your targets much more effectively.
I'd not seen that the United States was looking to take over other countries to send American Peoples there to settle and have 16 kids a family and out-breed the "Untermensch".
Their comparison seemed to be more to the US statements that we want "peace in our time" while at the same time we are launching a series of unprovoked attacks on smaller countries. (Unprovoked, they argued, because neither Afganistan or Iraq have done anything to the US other than stand in the way of our oil interests; the Saudis (SP?) have much closer ties with the 2001 hijackers (almost all of who were Saudi) and North Korea poses a much more credible threat.)
I only brought this up because it was the closest thing I've encountered to a serious comparison between the US and a country of that era.
I know it's fun to consider the United States as bad as the Soviet system.
But it's not at all accurate.
No one is seriously saying that the US is presently as bad as the soviet system became (the closest thing, I've seen is a few people pointing out similarities between our present foreign policy and that of early nazi germany).
But consider: the soviets didn't just get up one morning, send all those people off and kill them in one fell swoop before lunch. They sent one person, and then another, and then another, and then another...the MO of a state that does not respect the rights of its citizens is much more like that of a serial killer than of a suicide bomber.
The big problem is, just like with serial killers, once they've done it a few times, it gets easier and easier for them to justify (at least to themselves). You violate a handful of people's rights here, a few dozen there, maybe take a few liberties with the rights of a few hundred more for standing up for the first lot...and pretty soon you're talking about a serious human rights problem. That is the reason for the outrage.
I think some general science courses may help you (or at least reduce your anxiety levels). A lot of the media's ludite "scare the ignorant public" stuff that you are citing doesn't stand up to much scrutiny with a little critical thinking & some basic science background.
For example:
the US, where 75% of the worlds aliminum
The earth's crust is about 8% aluminum. So the vast majority of the aluminum you ingest comes from ordinary dust and dirt.
aluminum (proven to be linked to alzhiermers
Linked to, maybe, cause of, no. This theory was briefly popular several years ago, but did not stand up to closer scrutiny.
but I do know from common sense that if I hop the power up and make it into a beam to go 20 miles, we aren't talking the same amount of power.
Consider NASA's long-distance space probes. They can be heard from billions of miles away, and yet they are very low power and very, very low risk. There are all sorts of ways to increase range without increasing power, such as finer tuning, better antenna design, phase and polerization tricks, differential signal coding, etc.
dosages of mercury, a known toxin to humans, was far beyond "safe" levels, and injected directly into the childs body with no benefit of natuarl filter system, like skin.
Mercury isn't all that toxic. The salts of mercury are generally very toxic. So having mercury directly injected may well be much safer than absorbing it through your skin (where what you would be getting would be the salts).
As an aside on those shots: even if the claims that are being made are true (and I do not believe they are) it might still be better to get the shots (taking a small risk) to avoid the much larger risk of the illnesses they are designed to prevent.
If there are countless cases against an industry all over the same issue, it sounds like there must be some pretty compelling data lying around to show that the cases have merit.
You could use exactly the same argument to defend the salem witch hunts, or nazi germany (the jews must be guilty, look how many of them are getting arrested).
Some of the happiest entrepeneurs I've spoken to keep that way precisely because they stayed the hell away from V.C. money and funded their companies in other ways.
Whole hearted agreement. One of my favorite tricks is to find something that you can do or make well, that people want, and sell it to them for more than it costs you to do or make it. Then (this is the realy clever part) keep the extra money. You can use it to advertise, or improve the company in various ways, or even give it to your employees or shareholders as a kind of "thank you".
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If I had to choose between taking investment capital and getting poked repeatedly with a sharp stick, I'd want to take a close look at the stick first. That way it wouldn't seem like I was shunning the VCs just because I hate them and everything they stand for.
To be honest, I am not a doctor, just cause I can't understand what one guy says doesn't mean it wrong. Can you understand the research that prooves that microwaves "don't" cause cancer? Can you specifically debunk each statement that you call jargon babble?
You are missing the point. If someones says "X-factor n-gonal logic fishstick humbug, therefore I'm right!" there is nothing to debunk. I am not saying that it is wrong (e.g., a meaningful claim that, as it turns out, is false); I am saying it is meaningless babble, and thus neither true nor false.
Using lots of big words doesn't make something science. Science isn't about jargon. Science is about clear, testable claims which are then tested to validate or invalidate the claims.
So a court 14 years ago already determined that just power lines themselves are hazardous,
Again, this misses the point. The courts have no power to decide what is "the truth." You could have a case that said five was an even number, and take it all the way to the highest court in the land, and win, and five would still be odd. How do I know? Because when I divide five by two I have one left over. The claim that five is even fails the most basic test and is therefore false.
Another example of this type of cover up is there are numerous nation wide class action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies concerning a proven link between vaccines and autism.
Ditto with lawyers. I know that they have filed all these lawsuits claiming that there is a link, but that doesn't mean that these is in fact a link. You could have a billion lawyers claim something, and that wouldn't make it true.
In this case, the evidence says that it isn't true, and so I conclude that the lawyers are just exploiting public fear to grab some bucks.
Now, tell me you totally and completely trust _all_ of the sources that say microwaves have no possible effect on humans.
I never said this. Microwaves clearly have effects on humans. But do they have significant effects at the levels emited by (say) 802.11b hubs? I seriously doubt it. I believe that, given enough water, you will die. I also believe that it is safe (and in fact a good idea) to drink some water every day. Neither of these means that I believe that water has "no possible effect on humans."
Your prescription that we should consider new technology to be harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite is dogmatic and, by definition, based on the absence of evidence.
I did not say that a new technology should be considered harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite. In fact, I gave an example (swimming in benzine) where I would be willing to accept that it was hazerdous in the absence of any studies.
You bet it is, and it isn't enough of a stumbling block: many new products and compounds are being released with no safety testing.
Mostly because it makes more sense to focus the limited time we have to test things on those that are more likely to be dangerous.
Again, what's wrong is not your statement that microwaves are harmless,
Again, what is wrong is your failure to read. I never said that microwaves are harmless. What I did was ask the original poster where they saw the tests showing that they caused cancer, because I hadn't seen it. And, I might add, dispite all the people attacking me, I still haven't.
What's wrong with your statement is not so much about whether microwaves are harmful (I don't think they are, at least compared to many other hazards), it's the general attitude.
Many people have a problem with an attitude that puts more weight on facts than on dogma or unsupported statements. That's why faith based belief systems are so much more popular than doubt based belief systems.
Fear of the unknown is one of the big stumbling blocks. You are correct, microwaves could cause cancer. They could also cause terrorist atacks. They could reduce my grades, or make my ice cream taste funny. They could attract evil creatures from the planet Dacron, or they could give me super powers. It might seem that I would be safer if I didn't do anything with microwaves, or power lines, or cell phones, or trains that move over 35 MPH, or foreigners, or anything else until I make sure that none of these bad things I've heard are true.
But in fact, if I tried to live that way, I would quickly starve to death. So instead, I have this attitude that I am open to hearing about things (even things that directly contradict my deepest beliefs) but I don't accept them until there is a plausible reason to do so.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. By "plausible reason" one of the things I mean is a reason that does not involve the magnitude of the consequences. Saying "if frogs rise up and eat all mammals every hundred years, it would be very bad" is not a plausible reason for believing that frogs do in fact do that.
So you dispute the state of California's long term study that showed a slight increase around high power lines of, I believe, autism?
What is your beef with that study? Aside from grabbing people and forcing them in homes with high energy fields, you're not going to get a much cleaner study.
I haven't seen that study. Can you tell me where you saw it? In any case, the diagnostic criteria for autism are so vague these days that it would take more than "a slight increase" to mean much.
Forcing people to live near power lines wouldn't make the studies any better; in fact, they would likely make them worse. What would help is looking at other groups that don't live near power lines and systematically ruling out alternative explanations.
And one serious problem with these theories is that the "high energy fields" in homes near power lines aren't all that high energy. Many people are routinely exposed to much higher EMF using, say, an electric drill or playing with one of those "positive ion generators" (remember, dipole moment, etc. fall off with the inverse third or forth power of distance). Why aren't these people considered to be even more at risk?
Then again, I doubt your thinking is much higher than a scientist claiming that ghosts don't exist.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. I didn't say the poster was wrong, I asked where the poster got the information. Even if they said "it just seems reasonable to me" and was able to give a good explanation of their reasoning, I might buy it. (For example, if someone told me that swimming in benzine was likely to cause cancer, I might buy it, even if there were no studies done--on the other hand, I might argue that you wouldn't live long enough to get cancer, so...)
I will be willing to believe in ghosts, unicorns, chemtrails, Santa Clause, and anything else you can think of whenever it turns out that the are the best explanation for something; that means, though, that someone will have to come up with a way to rule out "people just making up stories" since that's often by far the best explanation.
I think that the power wire example should be required reading for everyone on how easy it is to assume that correlation means causation, and how easy it is to get the direction of the causation wrong too.
Agreed. The chemical leaching example was the only case of verified causation I've come across, despite I don't know how many claims (IIRC, they were able to correct for all sorts of other factors by doing matched demographic control groups consisting of people who lived near power lines using newer insulation materials, and with people who had worked with the material but did not live near power lines).
Micro-payments, if-and-when they become widely acceptable, will make so many things possible it boggles the mind. The internet is sitting about where the brick-and-mortar (or at the time, cloth-and-tentpole) economy sat before the invention of money: when all trade is barter, many mutually advantageous transactions don't occur because the overhead cost is too high. If all you have to pay with are goats, and you want to buy something worth a milli-goat, what to you do?
Online creditcard payments are the goats of the internet.
Come on, people that work around microwave antennas do have higher incidences of cancers.
I am aware of cancer clusters around some high voltage power lines that was traced to chemical compounds (used in the insulators, IIRC), but no responsible studies that link microwave antennas to cancer. (I use the qualification "responsible" because I have seen "studies" by the cell-phones-are-killing-us wackos that make the claim, but their methods were so flawed it was funny.)
Slashdot Mirror
I might not believe in the scary monster from Redmond as much as some more zealous FSF and OSI lovers, but please! Do you actually think billg is paying SCO to do this? That would open MS to so much litigation (and possibly more prosecution) if one person talked, or a crafty reporter found the paper trail or money trail linking the two. If you're just going to make crap up, at least make it reasonable.
We are talking about a company that has been caught forging "grass roots" letters to lawmakers, although I still can't decide which part was worse, forging letters from living people who could raise an objection, or the ones from dead people who obviously couldn't have written the letters themselves.
We are talking about a company that tried to pass off faked videos to a federal judge.
We are talking about a company that was using a unix server to host a site saying no one in their right mind would use unix.
We are, in short, talking about a company that makes Nixon look honest and prudent.
I will agree, the claim that Microsoft is behind SCO is unreasonable. It is far too safe, simple and straight forward for them. When they shoot themselves in the foot it is generally a lot more convoluted.
-- MarkusQ
I have a 3 mo old myself,
Ah, young enough that you still probably remember what sleep was like. *smile*
But where is the data that shows microwaves at the frequency and power level used for power transmission have absolutely no effect on the human body? There must be some otherwise how could anyone be convinced it's safe?
Not really. For example, I think Hoover dam is safe, even though I know that water in the quantities and pressure used to generate power could easily kill me.
Without going in to all the details (which I don't claim to know), there are a number of things that make the situation much less dire that you paint it.
Also cells have electro-mechanical structures...definitely been shown to use "electricity" in the common term of it, like wires, not communication...
You are talking about ion channels here, not about bulk flow of electrons. In any case, the characteristic frequencies are much, much lower than the microwave range. Roughly, this is about like worrying that opening and closing the curtains on your windows several times a day will cause (or prevent) global warming.
The one thing you can lump about "radiation" is that to much of any wave length will hurt you, x-rays, light or microwaves, I can hardly see that the frequency would matter at all...
Again, this is where some science education would help. Energy depends on frequency, as does the absorbtion by any given material, and the likelyhood that it will reach you in the first place. A few things to think about:
- Radio stations.
- The cosmic background microwave radiation.
- Some galactic sources pour out a great deal of radiation at frequencies in the one-cycle-every-few-hundred-thousand-years. We can't even detect them, any more than we can see/hear contenental drift.
- Flashlights are safe, but you can make a dangerous laser powered by a flashlight battery. You might also be able to make some sort of flashlight battery powered don't-try-this-at-home-kids microwave device (in some cook-meat frequency).
-- MarkusQHe makes a big deal that just about everything taught is wrong, but then doesn't provide any evidence or facts as to what the truth is!
Can you give an example? All of the examples I looked at looked fine.
-- MarkusQ
I'll have to be brief myself (and hope it doesn't come across as terse); I'm typing in the dark with a sleeping baby nearby.
You are confounding many things that are physically different but similar in name. A few examples:
- Radiation. There are many different types of radiation; electromagnetic waves, various sub-atomic particles, etc. They are all called "radiation" becuase they radiate from a source. But lumping them all together to reason about as a class makes about as much sense as lumping all yellow objects together. Yes, some yellow berries are poisonous, but that doesn't mean that lemons are dangerous to eat without further testing.
- "Metals" This word is used in at least three different ways: 1) by solid state physics, as a state of matter (like crystal, or gas) 2) by chemists, as a sub-division of the periodic table, or 3) by cosmologists, to mean everything but hydrogen (which, by the way, chemists class as a metal). Your body contains 2-metals by microwaves consistantly interact strongly with 1-metals.
- Electricity. Our bodies "use electricity" in the sense that the distribution of charged ions in our nerves (for example) changes over time and space to convey information. But (dumb movies like "the matrix" notwithstanding) our nerves do not act like wires or carry a current.
I stand by my earlier comment: take some real science courses and you will save yourself a whole lot of worry--or at least, help you redirect it to more useful targets.-- MarkusQ
Thanks. I'll check it out. The most concrete thing I had seen todate was the deposition posted on the web. So far, none of this looks as bad as people are making out (if they were to lock people up for traveling to foreign countries or lieing to their friends almost all of us would be behind bars). But I do not doubt that there is much more that we don't know yet.
-- MarkusQ
Well, you are a reasonable person to debate with.
As are you. I suspect that it's because we are both more interested in the truth than in winning.
The issue at hand is not physics or chemistry alone, but how the body reacts to these things.
Fair enough. But just as I have a spam filter that drops any e-mail containing certain patterns of phrases, allowing me to spend more time on the ones that I'm more likely to be interested in, you can use science as a sort of claim filter to weed out a lot of bunk and thus let you spend more time on the concerns that are more likely to be valid.
Science teaches you to ask questions like "If X is true, what else would have to be true?" These second order effects are often much easier to test than the origonal claims, and thus very effective for weeding out bunk. For example, for it to be true that the majority of the aluminum we consume comes from manufactured goods, we would have to consume a very small amount of dust and dirt.
The big kicker in the mercury / autism theory is that the coorelation between different groups (getting the same or different types of shots) doesn't hold up, but there is a stong coorelation between the rate of diagnosis and the public awareness and breadth of the diagnostic criteria. Thus the most likely explanation is that there are not in fact more people with autism, but rather in the past many people with boarderline autism (e.g. Bill Gates, according to several articles) went undiagnosed.
In the same way, AIDS didn't magically appear in the 1980's; we just started realizing what it was.
-- MarkusQ
Might be a little too early in the morning. This guy is just a resonance of D_s+, which...is made up of c & s_bar...Charmed particles have been around for a while now.
Duh. Thanks. I should learn not to try to think physics on my way back to bed from a diaper change. (Better yet: I shouldn't stop and check e-mail/slashdot either.)
Hey, at least I wasn't coding in my sleep.
-- MarkusQ
From the article, it sounds as if this particle would exhibit naked charm (and naked (anti-)strange as well I assume). This seems astounding to me (at a quarter to five AM at least). Last I heard that sort of thing was on mother nature's short list of no-nos.
-- MarkusQ
"indisputable" in this context probably means that those trying to dispute the evidence risk sharing a cell with Mr. Hawash soon thereafter.
*laugh* Good point. Since most of there case seems to rest on him giving money to people that the government disagrees with, I suppose even donating to his defense fund (if there is one) could be risky.
-- MarkusQ
I share many of your concerns with our present situation. However, I feel that you are being led off on into a huge maze of false trails by your lack of scientific thinking. Yes, corporations lie, as do politicians. And yes, they do so to further their own interests. But that doesn't mean it is safe to assume that everything said by someone in power or authority is automatically false; if you do so, you can be mislead as easily as if you unquestioningly accepted everything they said as true.
Learn some chemistry; not from popularizations, but from text books. Leran some physics, and some math, an above all try to get the nack of the scientific / sceptical mindset.
You can still work to expose what we both agree is bad, but you will be able to choose your targets much more effectively.
-- MarkusQ
I'd not seen that the United States was looking to take over other countries to send American Peoples there to settle and have 16 kids a family and out-breed the "Untermensch".
Their comparison seemed to be more to the US statements that we want "peace in our time" while at the same time we are launching a series of unprovoked attacks on smaller countries. (Unprovoked, they argued, because neither Afganistan or Iraq have done anything to the US other than stand in the way of our oil interests; the Saudis (SP?) have much closer ties with the 2001 hijackers (almost all of who were Saudi) and North Korea poses a much more credible threat.)
I only brought this up because it was the closest thing I've encountered to a serious comparison between the US and a country of that era.
-- MarkusQ
I know it's fun to consider the United States as bad as the Soviet system.
But it's not at all accurate.
No one is seriously saying that the US is presently as bad as the soviet system became (the closest thing, I've seen is a few people pointing out similarities between our present foreign policy and that of early nazi germany).
But consider: the soviets didn't just get up one morning, send all those people off and kill them in one fell swoop before lunch. They sent one person, and then another, and then another, and then another...the MO of a state that does not respect the rights of its citizens is much more like that of a serial killer than of a suicide bomber.
The big problem is, just like with serial killers, once they've done it a few times, it gets easier and easier for them to justify (at least to themselves). You violate a handful of people's rights here, a few dozen there, maybe take a few liberties with the rights of a few hundred more for standing up for the first lot...and pretty soon you're talking about a serious human rights problem. That is the reason for the outrage.
-- MarkusQ
Great. Glad to hear that you know so much about the case. Could you perhaps share with the rest of us this "indisputable" evidence?
-- MarkusQ
I think some general science courses may help you (or at least reduce your anxiety levels). A lot of the media's ludite "scare the ignorant public" stuff that you are citing doesn't stand up to much scrutiny with a little critical thinking & some basic science background.
For example:
the US, where 75% of the worlds aliminum
The earth's crust is about 8% aluminum. So the vast majority of the aluminum you ingest comes from ordinary dust and dirt.
aluminum (proven to be linked to alzhiermers
Linked to, maybe, cause of, no. This theory was briefly popular several years ago, but did not stand up to closer scrutiny.
but I do know from common sense that if I hop the power up and make it into a beam to go 20 miles, we aren't talking the same amount of power.
Consider NASA's long-distance space probes. They can be heard from billions of miles away, and yet they are very low power and very, very low risk. There are all sorts of ways to increase range without increasing power, such as finer tuning, better antenna design, phase and polerization tricks, differential signal coding, etc.
dosages of mercury, a known toxin to humans, was far beyond "safe" levels, and injected directly into the childs body with no benefit of natuarl filter system, like skin.
Mercury isn't all that toxic. The salts of mercury are generally very toxic. So having mercury directly injected may well be much safer than absorbing it through your skin (where what you would be getting would be the salts).
As an aside on those shots: even if the claims that are being made are true (and I do not believe they are) it might still be better to get the shots (taking a small risk) to avoid the much larger risk of the illnesses they are designed to prevent.
If there are countless cases against an industry all over the same issue, it sounds like there must be some pretty compelling data lying around to show that the cases have merit.
You could use exactly the same argument to defend the salem witch hunts, or nazi germany (the jews must be guilty, look how many of them are getting arrested).
-- MarkusQ
Whole hearted agreement. One of my favorite tricks is to find something that you can do or make well, that people want, and sell it to them for more than it costs you to do or make it. Then (this is the realy clever part) keep the extra money. You can use it to advertise, or improve the company in various ways, or even give it to your employees or shareholders as a kind of "thank you".
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If I had to choose between taking investment capital and getting poked repeatedly with a sharp stick, I'd want to take a close look at the stick first. That way it wouldn't seem like I was shunning the VCs just because I hate them and everything they stand for.
To be honest, I am not a doctor, just cause I can't understand what one guy says doesn't mean it wrong. Can you understand the research that prooves that microwaves "don't" cause cancer? Can you specifically debunk each statement that you call jargon babble?
You are missing the point. If someones says "X-factor n-gonal logic fishstick humbug, therefore I'm right!" there is nothing to debunk. I am not saying that it is wrong (e.g., a meaningful claim that, as it turns out, is false); I am saying it is meaningless babble, and thus neither true nor false.
Using lots of big words doesn't make something science. Science isn't about jargon. Science is about clear, testable claims which are then tested to validate or invalidate the claims.
So a court 14 years ago already determined that just power lines themselves are hazardous,
Again, this misses the point. The courts have no power to decide what is "the truth." You could have a case that said five was an even number, and take it all the way to the highest court in the land, and win, and five would still be odd. How do I know? Because when I divide five by two I have one left over. The claim that five is even fails the most basic test and is therefore false.
Another example of this type of cover up is there are numerous nation wide class action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies concerning a proven link between vaccines and autism.
Ditto with lawyers. I know that they have filed all these lawsuits claiming that there is a link, but that doesn't mean that these is in fact a link. You could have a billion lawyers claim something, and that wouldn't make it true.
In this case, the evidence says that it isn't true, and so I conclude that the lawyers are just exploiting public fear to grab some bucks.
Now, tell me you totally and completely trust _all_ of the sources that say microwaves have no possible effect on humans.
I never said this. Microwaves clearly have effects on humans. But do they have significant effects at the levels emited by (say) 802.11b hubs? I seriously doubt it. I believe that, given enough water, you will die. I also believe that it is safe (and in fact a good idea) to drink some water every day. Neither of these means that I believe that water has "no possible effect on humans."
-- MarkusQ
Rhapsody in blue (try it on a piano some time).
-- MarkusQ
I asked for a responsible source. Not a bunch of pseudo-jargon babble.
-- MarkusQ
Your prescription that we should consider new technology to be harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite is dogmatic and, by definition, based on the absence of evidence.
I did not say that a new technology should be considered harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite. In fact, I gave an example (swimming in benzine) where I would be willing to accept that it was hazerdous in the absence of any studies.
You bet it is, and it isn't enough of a stumbling block: many new products and compounds are being released with no safety testing.
Mostly because it makes more sense to focus the limited time we have to test things on those that are more likely to be dangerous.
Again, what's wrong is not your statement that microwaves are harmless,
Again, what is wrong is your failure to read. I never said that microwaves are harmless. What I did was ask the original poster where they saw the tests showing that they caused cancer, because I hadn't seen it. And, I might add, dispite all the people attacking me, I still haven't.
-- MarkusQ
What's wrong with your statement is not so much about whether microwaves are harmful (I don't think they are, at least compared to many other hazards), it's the general attitude.
Many people have a problem with an attitude that puts more weight on facts than on dogma or unsupported statements. That's why faith based belief systems are so much more popular than doubt based belief systems.
Fear of the unknown is one of the big stumbling blocks. You are correct, microwaves could cause cancer. They could also cause terrorist atacks. They could reduce my grades, or make my ice cream taste funny. They could attract evil creatures from the planet Dacron, or they could give me super powers. It might seem that I would be safer if I didn't do anything with microwaves, or power lines, or cell phones, or trains that move over 35 MPH, or foreigners, or anything else until I make sure that none of these bad things I've heard are true.
But in fact, if I tried to live that way, I would quickly starve to death. So instead, I have this attitude that I am open to hearing about things (even things that directly contradict my deepest beliefs) but I don't accept them until there is a plausible reason to do so.
-- MarkusQ P.S. By "plausible reason" one of the things I mean is a reason that does not involve the magnitude of the consequences. Saying "if frogs rise up and eat all mammals every hundred years, it would be very bad" is not a plausible reason for believing that frogs do in fact do that.
So you dispute the state of California's long term study that showed a slight increase around high power lines of, I believe, autism?
What is your beef with that study? Aside from grabbing people and forcing them in homes with high energy fields, you're not going to get a much cleaner study.
I haven't seen that study. Can you tell me where you saw it? In any case, the diagnostic criteria for autism are so vague these days that it would take more than "a slight increase" to mean much.
Forcing people to live near power lines wouldn't make the studies any better; in fact, they would likely make them worse. What would help is looking at other groups that don't live near power lines and systematically ruling out alternative explanations.
And one serious problem with these theories is that the "high energy fields" in homes near power lines aren't all that high energy. Many people are routinely exposed to much higher EMF using, say, an electric drill or playing with one of those "positive ion generators" (remember, dipole moment, etc. fall off with the inverse third or forth power of distance). Why aren't these people considered to be even more at risk?
Then again, I doubt your thinking is much higher than a scientist claiming that ghosts don't exist.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. I didn't say the poster was wrong, I asked where the poster got the information. Even if they said "it just seems reasonable to me" and was able to give a good explanation of their reasoning, I might buy it. (For example, if someone told me that swimming in benzine was likely to cause cancer, I might buy it, even if there were no studies done--on the other hand, I might argue that you wouldn't live long enough to get cancer, so...)
I will be willing to believe in ghosts, unicorns, chemtrails, Santa Clause, and anything else you can think of whenever it turns out that the are the best explanation for something; that means, though, that someone will have to come up with a way to rule out "people just making up stories" since that's often by far the best explanation.
-- MarkusQ
I think that the power wire example should be required reading for everyone on how easy it is to assume that correlation means causation, and how easy it is to get the direction of the causation wrong too. Agreed. The chemical leaching example was the only case of verified causation I've come across, despite I don't know how many claims (IIRC, they were able to correct for all sorts of other factors by doing matched demographic control groups consisting of people who lived near power lines using newer insulation materials, and with people who had worked with the material but did not live near power lines).
-- MarkusQ
Yes!
Micro-payments, if-and-when they become widely acceptable, will make so many things possible it boggles the mind. The internet is sitting about where the brick-and-mortar (or at the time, cloth-and-tentpole) economy sat before the invention of money: when all trade is barter, many mutually advantageous transactions don't occur because the overhead cost is too high. If all you have to pay with are goats, and you want to buy something worth a milli-goat, what to you do?
Online creditcard payments are the goats of the internet.
-- MarkusQ
Yep. Use only Maxtor. That way you should be able to get 8%.
-- MarkusQ
Come on, people that work around microwave antennas do have higher incidences of cancers.
I am aware of cancer clusters around some high voltage power lines that was traced to chemical compounds (used in the insulators, IIRC), but no responsible studies that link microwave antennas to cancer. (I use the qualification "responsible" because I have seen "studies" by the cell-phones-are-killing-us wackos that make the claim, but their methods were so flawed it was funny.)
-- MarkusQ