Well citizens cannot be kept there without just cause. The detainees (the few that are left) are "Enemy Combatants".
Well, in point of fact, until the supreme court ruling the other day, they essentially could, insofar as the determination was left up to the executive with no judicial oversight. Thankfully, that has been remedied.
They eat well, have a roof over their heads and are unable to participate in terrorist organizations. I dont fully agree with their detention, but it could be worse, they might have just been shot instead of captured.
I certainly don't know for a fact that what you're saying is untrue (it may well be correct), but I don't see how we can be sure. We're talking about people who were held incommunicado (at least until now) without any independant oversight (whether that would be a good idea is a different question). Furthermore, denying people proper sleep, exposing them to extreme temperatures, and giving them "less paletable food" were authorized forms of interogation, according to the Washington Post. So, while it's true (as far as anyone knows) that they're not getting electro-genital torture or something, let's not pretend they are nice and comfy. They are being treated with a lower level of respect and comfort than either domestic criminals or POWs.
Abu Ghraib prisoners were abused, not tortured like they were when Saddam was in power. Their abusers should and will be punished. Their is a fine line between abuse and torture.
No, they did not live up to Saddam, but many of the things they did are considered unacceptable forms of coersion by the US military, because they are too close to "torture" as seen under international law. Some of the things done clearly weren't torture, but others may qualify depending on what definition you use. It is not clear.
Anything you order is free sir. Don't worry, it's clean sir.
Your sure this isn't a test, sir? You were in here last Tuesday, standing right where you are now. You asked, "how good is security?" It's excellent sir, tight as a drum.
You said if anyone came asking, we'd have to mod him down, even you. This is a powerful gesture, sir.
You can set it to display a little icon in the status bar at the bottom when it has blocked a popup. I think that's actually the default setting (at least in Linux). Also, you can set it to accept popups from that site specifically.
Well, another point to consider is whether the person will have any way in hell to judge if the CA is trustworthy. I mean, I've added CAs to my browsers before but only from organizations I know personally (like my university). Before today if I were asked to add CAcert Inc. to the list of CAs in my browser I would have declined, because I would have had no idea whether they were trustworthy.
If you can't be sure the CA is trustworth, then what good are the certificates? Admittedly, having the browser makers determine this probably isn't such a great idea either, but they most likely have a better idea than I do.
According to Time Magazine, gasoline accounts for 44% of US oil consumption. Diesel fuel, heating oil account for another 19%. Plastics procution is buried somewhere in the "other products" category, which accounts for only 15%. So while I can't say off hand exactly how much petroleum is used for plastics, I CAN say that at least about three times as much is used for gasoline.
Look, you're right that it's a multifaceted problem. Probably heating and electricity production (in which oil plants play a non-negligable roll) are even bigger concerns than plastic; however, gasoline is the largest single contributor.
More over, gasoline consumption is probably one of the easiest areas in which to make significant improvement. Unless you build your home or make major, costly, renovations, efficient heating and cooling can be fairly difficult. There are some simple things you can do, but you can only make so much headway. Electricity consumption is much the same situation, and effecting how it's produced is a more long term project.
On the other hand, it's quite easy for most people (who don't need to do major hauling for construction or farming) to buy a vehicle with nearly twice the fuel efficiency of many SUVs, so realistically this is the best way to attack the problem in the short term on an individual level. So, to me saying "oh what about plastics and heating, etc." still is a pretty flimsy excuse for making such a wasteful choice.
Or you can download any of the ten zillion tweaking utilities for windows? how come, btw, when a tweaking utility for Linux is released, it's a cool added bit of functionality that makes Linux even more kickass than it already was... but when a tweaking utility is released for windows it's a kludgy fix to add functionality that obviously SHOULD've been there in the first place?
Well, I can't speak for others, but for me it would be the amount you paid for Windows (either directly or through your computer manufacturer). It sure as hell better have the functionality you want.
Hell, I even bought one of my distros, and it was still less than one fifth the price. So in exchange for that and having a relatively worm free OS that doesn't work to invade my privacy via DRM, I'm will to give a bit of leeway in terms of not having every single feature I want.
In fact, many if not most people that study education these days believe that having student's lead their own activities is the best way. There are many forms of this sort of teaching methodology, from what people call socratic methods to "learning by inquiry". Generally, this school of approaches is characterized by saying the teacher should be "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage." Systematic testing shows this to have significantly better results than traditional teaching methodologies.
I'm not saying this wiki is really analogous, just that your analogy doesn't really work as an argument against it.
Yeah, and motorcycles get even better milage, but that's because they're small. The value of hybrids is that you can ride in something a bit more comfortable and less of a death trap (maybe) than a Geo Metro or a Ford Fiesta and still get that great milage.
My friend has a Prius that also gets 45-50 mpg on a regular basis. I'm not sure what was advertised for that car, but it's still a bit improvement over most automobiles.
You know, it's funny, but when I worked at NASA, all the scientists I knew (who worked on neither Hubble nor ISS), thought Hubble produced good science and ISS was a waste of time. All the physicists I know at my University seem to think the same. Take it for what you will.
I think that for most professors, bad online reviews would be more of an annoyance than a serious liability. As another poster pointed out, these would likely not be what would be used in any tenure reviews, and then there's the fact that at many universities teaching reviews only nominally figure in to career advancement. It's not that I think it's good to have a bunch of false, libelous reviews up, it's only that I think in general the students need more protection than the professors.
I have seen first hand that some professors who are asked to teach courses are incompetant for such a task. More than that, I have actually had contact with faculty members about whose sanity I genuinely wondered, and there have been cases of professors with documented mental problems teaching classes and treating their students very poorly as a result. So, while there are plenty of good professors, there are also those who are incompetent, unstable, or just regard their teaching obligations as a joke. A bad professor has much more ability to damage the academic career of a student than a single review has to effect the career of a professor, so it seems to me that such a site is more than reasonable.
From the article, "GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password". So they were protected (perhaps not too well), and it was a vulnerablity that let the GOP in.
I think most readers here support hackers as in programmers and technology enthusiasts, but not hackers (or crackers if you have it ESR's way, appropriate in the case of the GOP) as in people who break in to computer systems to spy on people or vandalize their systems. I think we all respect people's right to privacy...or most of us anyway.
It really all depends on whether it's a bet you can afford to lose. It's true that on average they win out, but it's about protecting yourself from an eventuality that you would not be able to deal with, e.g. paying for expensive repair/replacement of a laptop you really need for your day to day life.
I have to disagree. When I do a google search, I still usually find something useful on the first page. That's something I couldn't say for any of the search engines pre-google. I think there are more useless commercial sites that come up, and some of that is due to PageRank manipulation, but I also think that has been overplayed. I think much of the reason is that there are a lot more commercial sites on the web now, because, unlike around the time of google's inception, the web is now a major venue for business. So we should only expect more commercial hits. In short, it was much easier to find a bunch of fan sites before, because the web was mostly fan sites (well, and porn).
As others have pointed out, most of these so called problems can be easily solved by improving your search queries. Learn to exclude terms. Things really aren't a lot worse now than they were before, and google is still a perfectly useful search engine. The fact that they also have the news and usenet seaches makes them even more amazing. Often times a usenet search is more fruitful than a web search. Google still works just fine; the sky is not falling, chicken little.
BTW: How about making a new post each time rather than recycling old posts from old stories?
I'm not sure your example of "installing" mozilla is substantively different than the way an ordinary user could "install" many peice of software in Linux, namely put them in your home directory and run. You only need root access if the program needs to run as a different user (esp. root) or to put it in a place like/usr/bin, because often users can't write there. It seems the only difference is that OS X lets you put this new software in with all the software installed by the admin. That's not good (because then there're indistiguishable to a cursory examination), but not so bad.
I would think a bigger question is whether you can modify or replace existing programs. It sounds like and answer is yes, and that IS bad news. Another question is, can you cause the program you've added to run automatically for other users (or by root at next boot)? I don't know. I haven't used OS X enough.
Um, metamoderate and deal. Or else set your prefs so you don't see "funny" posts. I mean, it's a community moderated site. If it is getting modded up, people in general want it modded up, so there's no use complaining.
Well, I think this is part of what he mentions in the paper about the ability of groups outside the polling place to check your reciept for validity. So the idea would be that, much as happens now, each party would have people at each polling place. They'd offer to check people's receipts for them. This would give them an idea of if the receipt batch was accurate.
Now as for the processing by the trustees to get to the tally batch, that would depend on the accuracy of the recording of the processing that is mentioned. As long as you setup a mechanism where the people recording proof of the processing of intermediate batches can be trusted not to be in collusion with the trustees then it should be safe. I guess the bottom line is that this is pretty good at detecting fraud as long as somebody is honest. If no one is honest then it's unlikely that any system will protect you and still protect voter anonymity.
As for dead people voting, etc, from what I read of the paper, this doesn't protect against that any more than the current systems; however, I think the point of this proposal was to aleviate problems of trust in the voting machine mechanism and tampering with that. It was not meant to solve old school voting fraud problems and it doesn't.
Well, it seems to me that am improved method would be to have a touch screen voting system that records the vote eletronicly but prints out the scantron sheet as the reciept. This would just be names with yes or no, essentially, something any voter can look at and verify (perhaps with a card explaining the meaning of the yes and no dots). Then they feed this reciept into an optical scanner which checks the vote on the card. If the optical card matches the recorded touch screen vote then the vote is accepted. If they don't match then you have to start over again. This means that:
There will be a paper trial that could be rechecked later, but only in the event that it's shown there's a software problem or reason to beleive the votes in the touch screen system were tampered with.
The voter can be sure there's a record that actually records their vote.
You can't take away any proof of the way you voted. If you still have the reciept then the vote is not counted.
Now that system if far from fool proof, but it is better than the system in use at the moment. I don't think this is better than Rivest's system. That system is much more robust against attacks. The only advantage of this system would be that it's readily understood by everage people with no knownledge of mathematics or cryptography. The processing of reciept batches in Rivest's model will likely seem like magic to most people. Anyway, I don't really propose this seriously as a system, just a refinement of the parent's idea. I do have misgivings about asking people to trust a system they don't really understand, no matter how cryptographically secure, but then I guess we do this all the time with technology.
So it seems like there must have been a few new technologies for generating electricity in the last 150 years. Many people mentioned that nuclear power plants use steam driven turbines, an old method of producing electricity; however, I have read about some that heat a conducting liquid and then the energy is converted into electricity using magnets and the Lorentz force. This must be fairly new, since it probably couldn't even have been understood until the mid to late 17th century. I've certainly never really heard of people using this sort of method until more recently.
Also, what about photovoltaics and like technologies in solar cells. Clearly, those must have been around since before 1905 (when Einstein explained the effect); however, I'd guess they are newer than 150 years old.
What about fuel cells? Getting energy from converting oxygen and hydrogen into water (or a similar reaction with methenol or whatever) is not a new concept, but using a membrain to harness the electrical energy seems to be a fairly new idea. Unless you don't consider it to be different from a battery.
I'm not sure the claim is false, but it seems quite dubious.
I too have been puzzled by this, but I think part of the issue may be one of scarce resources. When I emailed them about using Ogg Vorbis at one point, the email said basically, "We'd like to but we really don't have the resources to do it."
As far as why they don't offer their broadcasts for download, there's less of an excuse for that. First, I think they make money off of selling tapes. Now you can say, "but they should be worried about distributing it, not proffitting," but they have to maintain their revenues somehow if they want to produce more in the future. Still, part of the motivation seems to be to protect their intellectual property, and that seems to be the completely wrong mindset for public radio.
I also worked at NASA doing astrophysics and bearly even saw a windows machine the whole time. A few individuals (mostly those who did outreach work for the mostly windows using public) has Windows and I think there was one public one for running Powerpoint.:) Other than that is was all Solaris/SunOS/Digital Unix for older computers and almost exclusively Linux and MacOS for newer computers. And most of the ftp and web servers there will also running on some flavor of *nix.
Well, provided it is in the right part of the spectrum, the human body might have a relatively low absorbtion rate. Certainly, when we think microwaves, we think microwave oven, but that's only a small part of the microwave spectrum.
The more important point, though is that this may actually cause far less ambient electromagnetic radiation than normal power lines. Ordinary power lines carrying AC current are basically like large antennae (though if properly designed, they are hopefully not very good antennae). They generate radio frequency signals that go off in every direction (actually primarily perpendicular to the lines), which you know if you try to listen to AM radio underneath them. Depending on how they do it, a microwave beam could actually be quite well columnated, so that virtually all energy is sent directly toward the reciever. Certainly, if they used a maser this would be the case, but they probably won't. Remember, too, that they have an interest it making it very well columnated, because that increases the efficienty of the mechanism.
Since you should be able to columnate the beam pretty well, the main issue would seem to be stuff that might get in the way and scatter the beam: air (obviously), dust, flying animals (like cows from a catapult), and perhaps most importantly, water vapor. If you're worried about getting cooked, think about this: The human body is mostly water, as are most other animal bodies. In order to cook well, a microwave oven must be in the right range of the spectrum to heat water efficiently, which they do (efficient being a relative term). This beam must go through air that has water vapor in it and even rain. It must be designed so all that water is not a problem, meaning it probably must be designed so that it would not really "cook" an animal very well.
So, really, this beam shouldn't cook things and anyway there should really be very little leakage if designed correctly. I mean, I wouldn't go and stand in it, but it's probably not so dangerous for the reason you bring up. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's really a good idea from an engineering standpoint, and there's the other question of what happens if it gets misalligned or if somehow something does get in the beam that deflects a significant amount of it (like something metal). Anybody ever play SimCity 2000?:) I'm not saying it's not dangerous, just that this EMF stuff is probably not the main problem.
BTW, as far as I know there is no credible scientific evidence that electromagnetic radiation from power lines causes cancer (or other health effects). There were some studies that suggested it years ago, but last I heard they had all been refuted by newer, more extensive studies. I'm not aware of the scientific credentials of your "science fair experiments", nor am I a biologist, so I can't evaluate that evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in point of fact, until the supreme court ruling the other day, they essentially could, insofar as the determination was left up to the executive with no judicial oversight. Thankfully, that has been remedied.
I certainly don't know for a fact that what you're saying is untrue (it may well be correct), but I don't see how we can be sure. We're talking about people who were held incommunicado (at least until now) without any independant oversight (whether that would be a good idea is a different question). Furthermore, denying people proper sleep, exposing them to extreme temperatures, and giving them "less paletable food" were authorized forms of interogation, according to the Washington Post. So, while it's true (as far as anyone knows) that they're not getting electro-genital torture or something, let's not pretend they are nice and comfy. They are being treated with a lower level of respect and comfort than either domestic criminals or POWs.
No, they did not live up to Saddam, but many of the things they did are considered unacceptable forms of coersion by the US military, because they are too close to "torture" as seen under international law. Some of the things done clearly weren't torture, but others may qualify depending on what definition you use. It is not clear.
Is this a test sir?
Anything you order is free sir. Don't worry, it's clean sir.
Your sure this isn't a test, sir? You were in here last Tuesday, standing right where you are now. You asked, "how good is security?" It's excellent sir, tight as a drum.
You said if anyone came asking, we'd have to mod him down, even you. This is a powerful gesture, sir.
Eh, didn't the poster say it did not have a working CD drive?
You can set it to display a little icon in the status bar at the bottom when it has blocked a popup. I think that's actually the default setting (at least in Linux). Also, you can set it to accept popups from that site specifically.
Hope that helps.
Well, another point to consider is whether the person will have any way in hell to judge if the CA is trustworthy. I mean, I've added CAs to my browsers before but only from organizations I know personally (like my university). Before today if I were asked to add CAcert Inc. to the list of CAs in my browser I would have declined, because I would have had no idea whether they were trustworthy.
If you can't be sure the CA is trustworth, then what good are the certificates? Admittedly, having the browser makers determine this probably isn't such a great idea either, but they most likely have a better idea than I do.
According to Time Magazine, gasoline accounts for 44% of US oil consumption. Diesel fuel, heating oil account for another 19%. Plastics procution is buried somewhere in the "other products" category, which accounts for only 15%. So while I can't say off hand exactly how much petroleum is used for plastics, I CAN say that at least about three times as much is used for gasoline.
Look, you're right that it's a multifaceted problem. Probably heating and electricity production (in which oil plants play a non-negligable roll) are even bigger concerns than plastic; however, gasoline is the largest single contributor.
More over, gasoline consumption is probably one of the easiest areas in which to make significant improvement. Unless you build your home or make major, costly, renovations, efficient heating and cooling can be fairly difficult. There are some simple things you can do, but you can only make so much headway. Electricity consumption is much the same situation, and effecting how it's produced is a more long term project.
On the other hand, it's quite easy for most people (who don't need to do major hauling for construction or farming) to buy a vehicle with nearly twice the fuel efficiency of many SUVs, so realistically this is the best way to attack the problem in the short term on an individual level. So, to me saying "oh what about plastics and heating, etc." still is a pretty flimsy excuse for making such a wasteful choice.Well, I can't speak for others, but for me it would be the amount you paid for Windows (either directly or through your computer manufacturer). It sure as hell better have the functionality you want.
Hell, I even bought one of my distros, and it was still less than one fifth the price. So in exchange for that and having a relatively worm free OS that doesn't work to invade my privacy via DRM, I'm will to give a bit of leeway in terms of not having every single feature I want.
Sounds a lot like the system they use on another little site I know. And often it works pretty well. Some very good writing gets done there.
In fact, many if not most people that study education these days believe that having student's lead their own activities is the best way. There are many forms of this sort of teaching methodology, from what people call socratic methods to "learning by inquiry". Generally, this school of approaches is characterized by saying the teacher should be "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage." Systematic testing shows this to have significantly better results than traditional teaching methodologies.
I'm not saying this wiki is really analogous, just that your analogy doesn't really work as an argument against it.
Yeah, and motorcycles get even better milage, but that's because they're small. The value of hybrids is that you can ride in something a bit more comfortable and less of a death trap (maybe) than a Geo Metro or a Ford Fiesta and still get that great milage.
My friend has a Prius that also gets 45-50 mpg on a regular basis. I'm not sure what was advertised for that car, but it's still a bit improvement over most automobiles.
How did they pass up a chance for an article name like that?
You know, it's funny, but when I worked at NASA, all the scientists I knew (who worked on neither Hubble nor ISS), thought Hubble produced good science and ISS was a waste of time. All the physicists I know at my University seem to think the same. Take it for what you will.
I think that for most professors, bad online reviews would be more of an annoyance than a serious liability. As another poster pointed out, these would likely not be what would be used in any tenure reviews, and then there's the fact that at many universities teaching reviews only nominally figure in to career advancement. It's not that I think it's good to have a bunch of false, libelous reviews up, it's only that I think in general the students need more protection than the professors.
I have seen first hand that some professors who are asked to teach courses are incompetant for such a task. More than that, I have actually had contact with faculty members about whose sanity I genuinely wondered, and there have been cases of professors with documented mental problems teaching classes and treating their students very poorly as a result. So, while there are plenty of good professors, there are also those who are incompetent, unstable, or just regard their teaching obligations as a joke. A bad professor has much more ability to damage the academic career of a student than a single review has to effect the career of a professor, so it seems to me that such a site is more than reasonable.
From the article, "GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password". So they were protected (perhaps not too well), and it was a vulnerablity that let the GOP in.
I think most readers here support hackers as in programmers and technology enthusiasts, but not hackers (or crackers if you have it ESR's way, appropriate in the case of the GOP) as in people who break in to computer systems to spy on people or vandalize their systems. I think we all respect people's right to privacy...or most of us anyway.
Do you feel the same way about car insurance?
It really all depends on whether it's a bet you can afford to lose. It's true that on average they win out, but it's about protecting yourself from an eventuality that you would not be able to deal with, e.g. paying for expensive repair/replacement of a laptop you really need for your day to day life.
I have to disagree. When I do a google search, I still usually find something useful on the first page. That's something I couldn't say for any of the search engines pre-google. I think there are more useless commercial sites that come up, and some of that is due to PageRank manipulation, but I also think that has been overplayed. I think much of the reason is that there are a lot more commercial sites on the web now, because, unlike around the time of google's inception, the web is now a major venue for business. So we should only expect more commercial hits. In short, it was much easier to find a bunch of fan sites before, because the web was mostly fan sites (well, and porn).
As others have pointed out, most of these so called problems can be easily solved by improving your search queries. Learn to exclude terms. Things really aren't a lot worse now than they were before, and google is still a perfectly useful search engine. The fact that they also have the news and usenet seaches makes them even more amazing. Often times a usenet search is more fruitful than a web search. Google still works just fine; the sky is not falling, chicken little.
BTW: How about making a new post each time rather than recycling old posts from old stories?
I'm not sure your example of "installing" mozilla is substantively different than the way an ordinary user could "install" many peice of software in Linux, namely put them in your home directory and run. You only need root access if the program needs to run as a different user (esp. root) or to put it in a place like /usr/bin, because often users can't write there. It seems the only difference is that OS X lets you put this new software in with all the software installed by the admin. That's not good (because then there're indistiguishable to a cursory examination), but not so bad.
I would think a bigger question is whether you can modify or replace existing programs. It sounds like and answer is yes, and that IS bad news. Another question is, can you cause the program you've added to run automatically for other users (or by root at next boot)? I don't know. I haven't used OS X enough.
Um, metamoderate and deal. Or else set your prefs so you don't see "funny" posts. I mean, it's a community moderated site. If it is getting modded up, people in general want it modded up, so there's no use complaining.
Well, I think this is part of what he mentions in the paper about the ability of groups outside the polling place to check your reciept for validity. So the idea would be that, much as happens now, each party would have people at each polling place. They'd offer to check people's receipts for them. This would give them an idea of if the receipt batch was accurate.
Now as for the processing by the trustees to get to the tally batch, that would depend on the accuracy of the recording of the processing that is mentioned. As long as you setup a mechanism where the people recording proof of the processing of intermediate batches can be trusted not to be in collusion with the trustees then it should be safe. I guess the bottom line is that this is pretty good at detecting fraud as long as somebody is honest. If no one is honest then it's unlikely that any system will protect you and still protect voter anonymity.
As for dead people voting, etc, from what I read of the paper, this doesn't protect against that any more than the current systems; however, I think the point of this proposal was to aleviate problems of trust in the voting machine mechanism and tampering with that. It was not meant to solve old school voting fraud problems and it doesn't.
Well, it seems to me that am improved method would be to have a touch screen voting system that records the vote eletronicly but prints out the scantron sheet as the reciept. This would just be names with yes or no, essentially, something any voter can look at and verify (perhaps with a card explaining the meaning of the yes and no dots). Then they feed this reciept into an optical scanner which checks the vote on the card. If the optical card matches the recorded touch screen vote then the vote is accepted. If they don't match then you have to start over again. This means that:
Now that system if far from fool proof, but it is better than the system in use at the moment. I don't think this is better than Rivest's system. That system is much more robust against attacks. The only advantage of this system would be that it's readily understood by everage people with no knownledge of mathematics or cryptography. The processing of reciept batches in Rivest's model will likely seem like magic to most people. Anyway, I don't really propose this seriously as a system, just a refinement of the parent's idea. I do have misgivings about asking people to trust a system they don't really understand, no matter how cryptographically secure, but then I guess we do this all the time with technology.
So it seems like there must have been a few new technologies for generating electricity in the last 150 years. Many people mentioned that nuclear power plants use steam driven turbines, an old method of producing electricity; however, I have read about some that heat a conducting liquid and then the energy is converted into electricity using magnets and the Lorentz force. This must be fairly new, since it probably couldn't even have been understood until the mid to late 17th century. I've certainly never really heard of people using this sort of method until more recently.
Also, what about photovoltaics and like technologies in solar cells. Clearly, those must have been around since before 1905 (when Einstein explained the effect); however, I'd guess they are newer than 150 years old.
What about fuel cells? Getting energy from converting oxygen and hydrogen into water (or a similar reaction with methenol or whatever) is not a new concept, but using a membrain to harness the electrical energy seems to be a fairly new idea. Unless you don't consider it to be different from a battery.
I'm not sure the claim is false, but it seems quite dubious.
I too have been puzzled by this, but I think part of the issue may be one of scarce resources. When I emailed them about using Ogg Vorbis at one point, the email said basically, "We'd like to but we really don't have the resources to do it."
As far as why they don't offer their broadcasts for download, there's less of an excuse for that. First, I think they make money off of selling tapes. Now you can say, "but they should be worried about distributing it, not proffitting," but they have to maintain their revenues somehow if they want to produce more in the future. Still, part of the motivation seems to be to protect their intellectual property, and that seems to be the completely wrong mindset for public radio.
I also worked at NASA doing astrophysics and bearly even saw a windows machine the whole time. A few individuals (mostly those who did outreach work for the mostly windows using public) has Windows and I think there was one public one for running Powerpoint. :) Other than that is was all Solaris/SunOS/Digital Unix for older computers and almost exclusively Linux and MacOS for newer computers. And most of the ftp and web servers there will also running on some flavor of *nix.
Well, provided it is in the right part of the spectrum, the human body might have a relatively low absorbtion rate. Certainly, when we think microwaves, we think microwave oven, but that's only a small part of the microwave spectrum.
The more important point, though is that this may actually cause far less ambient electromagnetic radiation than normal power lines. Ordinary power lines carrying AC current are basically like large antennae (though if properly designed, they are hopefully not very good antennae). They generate radio frequency signals that go off in every direction (actually primarily perpendicular to the lines), which you know if you try to listen to AM radio underneath them. Depending on how they do it, a microwave beam could actually be quite well columnated, so that virtually all energy is sent directly toward the reciever. Certainly, if they used a maser this would be the case, but they probably won't. Remember, too, that they have an interest it making it very well columnated, because that increases the efficienty of the mechanism.
Since you should be able to columnate the beam pretty well, the main issue would seem to be stuff that might get in the way and scatter the beam: air (obviously), dust, flying animals (like cows from a catapult), and perhaps most importantly, water vapor. If you're worried about getting cooked, think about this: The human body is mostly water, as are most other animal bodies. In order to cook well, a microwave oven must be in the right range of the spectrum to heat water efficiently, which they do (efficient being a relative term). This beam must go through air that has water vapor in it and even rain. It must be designed so all that water is not a problem, meaning it probably must be designed so that it would not really "cook" an animal very well.
So, really, this beam shouldn't cook things and anyway there should really be very little leakage if designed correctly. I mean, I wouldn't go and stand in it, but it's probably not so dangerous for the reason you bring up. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's really a good idea from an engineering standpoint, and there's the other question of what happens if it gets misalligned or if somehow something does get in the beam that deflects a significant amount of it (like something metal). Anybody ever play SimCity 2000? :) I'm not saying it's not dangerous, just that this EMF stuff is probably not the main problem.
BTW, as far as I know there is no credible scientific evidence that electromagnetic radiation from power lines causes cancer (or other health effects). There were some studies that suggested it years ago, but last I heard they had all been refuted by newer, more extensive studies. I'm not aware of the scientific credentials of your "science fair experiments", nor am I a biologist, so I can't evaluate that evidence.