Hah. Unless they've changed it since I last saw it (around 1993 or so), somewhere in a ritzy suburb outside Denver, Colorado, up on a mountain ledge with good line-of-sight to a sparsely populated but wealthy area, is a fake house. The antenna is disguised in the "roof", and the "house" is a fancy jacket around the cinderblock hut containing the cellular equipment.
Everybody wants good cell phone coverage; nobody wants the tower.
Wrong. How would the black box be any different than keeping a journal? As I said before, the car is your property (just like the journal) and is protected via the same rights.
You might want to check with former Senator Bob Packwood or Unabomber Ted Kaczynski before you boldly state that the U.S. legal system will respect the privacy of your journals. Today the court system barely even recognizes your right to keep private records; your odds of keeping private the data collected by a "flight recorder" attached to your car are, precisely, zero.
Your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights have been withering away for almost a century. If they were enforced as the Founders intended, it would be impossible for the IRS to collect income tax; the government's search and seizure powers were reinforced in every major 20th century court decision on the subject, and by now your right not to hand over information to the government is barely even recognized, much less enforced by the legal system.
Keeping a black box would not be any different than keeping a journal; your error is to believe that your journal is somehow protected. It's okay if you want to believe that -- but I wouldn't count on it, and I certainly wouldn't expect a U.S. court in this day and age to acknowledge my right to withhold the data recorded by a "black box" on my car.
Not so fast. The requirement was that your parser translate variable names to "VAR######", where ###### is an integer incremented for each unique variable name. If the input contains variables named Tom, Dick, Harry and VAR909090, then your output had better have VAR000001, VAR000002, VAR000003 and VAR000004, or your crummy parser is going to break my post-processing code.
If the original requirements had said "VAR######, where ###### is a unique six-digit integer", then your parser might not need to rename variables that are already in this format -- but when your parser encounters a source file with variables named Tom, Dick, Harry and VAR000002, the output had better not be VAR000001, VAR000002, VAR000003 and VAR000002.
Points off for both professor and student, and show your work next time.:-)
(Oh, and a real requirements writer would specify whether the integers in question started with 000000 or 000001, unless said writer wanted the developers to use the tongs.)
With the "Last 5 second" black box I don't see much of a threat to privacy.
How about a threat to your Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination? Taken to its logical conclusion, this box would allow your car to testify against you in court.
Huh? Declaration of Independence is a declaration, one-sided document that indicates a position and places no obligation on anyone.
...except that said document takes the position "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these [rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it," and uses that position to justify the existence of the United States Government. Some people believe that taking this position places certain obligations upon the U.S. government, namely that the government must honor said rights, or else lose its moral authority to govern.
You might want to re-read the Declaration of Independence before making any more broad, sweeping statements about it; it's not just a list of complaints about British rule. It also contains some fundamental declarations about the role of government and the rights of the individual, and those declarations, in principle and practice, remain in force.
Most people in this country [sic] are monotheistic, and since majority rules we have "In God we Trust".
Most people in the USA are Christians, too, and since majority rules, we're outlawing Judaism and Islam next week!
Or not. The U.S. Bill of Rights acknowledges certain rights of the individual that cannot be taken away by any government under any circumstances -- further, the Declaration of Independence proclaims that when a government denies these rights, the people have the right to overthrow it. From the Declaration:
[...] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. [...]
In other words, I don't care how many people vote that you'll become a Methodist, or be forbidden to own firearms, or that the book you wrote should be banned. The will of the majority is not sufficient to deprive you of these rights. In fact you are inseparable from these rights: You cannot be deprived of them, period.
If you want to live in a country where the government thinks it can deprive you of your unalienable rights, go to China. (Of course, this is a separate issue from the question of whether an atheist has an unalienable right not to hear other people recite the words "under God" in a public space; I can buy the argument that says no one should be required to endorse a religion, but I think we're off the deep end here.)
I don't know what your personal religious beliefs are, but I hope that you can recognize that making children declare that the United States is a nation under God is an infringement of their free exercise of religion if they are not religious, or do not believe in God.
Agreed, but what relevance does this have to the case at hand? This man filed suit not because his daughter was forced to declare anything, but because she had to hear the words "under God" as the other children recited them. At no point was the daughter compelled to recite, save perhaps by peer pressure; if the teacher had required her to recite the Pledge, then the man would have a stronger case and your argument would apply.
For instance, Palladium might allow you to send out e-mail so that no one (or only certain people) can copy it or forward it to others.
The scene: Late 2005. A user is reading e-mail on a Palladium-equipped computer.
User: "Computer, open e-mail #37."
Computer: ["tah-dah!" noise] "This e-mail is protected by digital rights management. You will not be able to copy it or forward it to others."
User: "Riiight. Copy the contents of e-mail #37 to the Clipboard, and paste it into a new message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: "Take a screenshot of the e-mail, feed it to my OCR software, and paste the results into a new e-mail message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: [sighs] "Use text-to-speech to read the article, record the speech, use speech recognition to decode the recording, and paste the results into a new message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: [Picks up a digital camera and points it at the screen]
Camera: [beep] "Palladium OS for Cameras 2.0 has detected DRM-protected material in the viewfinder. Please point the camera away from the material, or the camera will shut down automatically."
User: [Throws camera across the room, picks up pen and paper, begins to write a longhand copy]
Ink Pen: [beep] "Palladium OS for Ink Pens has detected an attempt to copy DRM-protected material. Please desist immediately, or the pen will automatically run dry."
User: [Screams, stabs finger with pen, begins copying the e-mail in blood]
Paper: [beep] "Palladium OS for Digital Paper has detected--"
User: [Tears paper to shreds, begins writing on the wall in blood....]
Moments later the DRM Police arrive -- having been tipped off by all the equipment -- and find the user huddled in the corner, laughing maniacally and muttering "I did it! I did it!" Fortunately, the DRM Police can't read the writing on the wall (their Palladium-equipped sunglasses polarize whenever they look that way), and the case is eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
Well, "underground" in this context may mean "beneath a layer of dust and rubble that the sandstorms have been piling up for years on top of the frozen sea." If so, melting the ice may put the current "surface" underwater, in those areas -- not because the water level rises, but because the rubble sinks.
I'd agree that the "500 meters" statistic is probably oversimplifying an accurate statistic in the original, something to the effect that the total estimated volume of water on Mars is (500 m * surface area of Mars). That's not the same as saying that Mars would turn into WaterWorld if we melted the ice.
Um, no. You need enough nitrogen to set up the proper nitrogen/oxygen mix in your living space, but after that you don't need any more -- you don't consume any nitrogen when you breathe, so it doesn't need replacing. You'll have to pump in new O2 and filter out the CO2, but this is not an unsolvable problem.
Pure oxygen at normal air pressure creates health problems after about 24-30 hours; at higher pressures pure oxygen becomes toxic. You can breathe pure oxygen at lower pressures without any major health effects, but then you run into fire safety issues (i.e., Apollo I).
I neglected to include the link to the Mars Direct Home Page in my original article, so here it is now. Needless to say they've thought of these things in their proposal.
In 1990, Robert Zubrin and David Baker of Martin Marietta and Owen Gwynne of NASA developed Mars Direct, a plan that would allow permanent colonization of Mars within ten years, at a cost of approximately $30 billion. The plan uses rockets that are only slightly more powerful than Saturn V's, doesn't require building a space station or an orbital shipyard, and has half the payload requirements of a "traditional" round-trip Mars mission.
The trick is to go there in two steps:
Send an unmanned ship containing an unfueled return vehicle, six tons of hydrogen, and a chemical catalyst. Use the catalyst and the Martian atmosphere (primarily CO2) to create methane and water from the hydrogen (CO2 + 4H2 --> CH4 + 2H2O, exothermic). Store the methane for later use as rocket fuel. Elecrolyze the water to create oxygen gas (for later use as, well, oxygen) and more hydrogen, which you re-use to make more methane and water. This reaction eventually produces 24 tons of methane and 48 tons of oxygen; the plan calls for making an additional 36 tons of oxygen by reducing CO2.
So far we've hauled six tons of hydrogen into space, thrown it at Mars, and used it to produce over 100 tons of rocket fuel, which is now sitting in a depot on Mars. Compare this to the cost of hauling 200 tons of rocket fuel into space, much less sending that much mass on a round trip to Mars.
Three years later, launch the manned rocket. With the return vehicle and fuel already on Mars, your manned vehicle only needs enough fuel to get there, and doesn't need the ability to lift off from Mars again; in fact, the vehicle is designed to become a permanent, habitable fixture of the Martian landscape. Your first rocket has already explored the territory with a few roving robot probes, and is even providing a landing beacon.
At the same time as the manned vehicle launch, launch a second unmanned rocket, identical to the first. This is your redundant backup for the incoming astronauts, in case the fuel depot springs a leak while they're in transit; at worst they'll have to wait for the second chemical factory to ramp up production, but otherwise you can have a complete failure of the first rocket and still be safe.
Spend 1.5 years on Mars. No need to worry about getting home before your fuel runs out, because you're making more fuel as you go; you brought enough food supplies to last at least three years (and will leave some behind as a backup for the next manned mission, just in case), and you're producing oxygen and water faster than you can consume them.
Get in the return vehicle and go home. Repeat the cycle until you've colonized Mars.
The problems with Mars Direct fall into two broad categories: It requires a small nuclear reactor (smaller than the typical nuclear submarine's) to provide the initial power supply for the first unmanned lander, which makes the anti-nuclear lobby go nuts. The second problem is that Mars Direct doesn't scratch enough backs within the NASA bureaucracy to get funded: It bypasses the need for space stations, lunar landings, orbiting space fleets, warp drives, etc., and thus doesn't get support from any of the intra-NASA groups that want their pet project funded instead.
The reasons we haven't been to Mars have nothing to do with practicality or affordability: Getting to Mars is achievable with current technology, and could be done for the cost of a steel tariff. It's all about politics and votes -- if half a million people marched on Washington to demand a Mars mission, we'd be there by 2010.
Whenever I am asked for an email address from an non-reputable site, I simply give a fake one such as wigglebroggle@frogtoggle.com.
Making up domain names still pollutes the namespace, though -- imagine if people made up telephone numbers the same way. Why not use example.com instead?
The example.com, example.net and example.org domains are reserved by IANA for use in testing and documentation; they're the equivalent of a telephone 555 prefix, only less obvious. See RFC 2606, or visit the example.com web page.
As a self-proclaimed RF expert, can you tell me what the SI units are for "Watts per moment"?
The SI unit is the joule, which is one watt of power radiated for one second. If you want to be picky about it, I should have written that you absorb two joules for every second you spend outdoors, but for most people watts are a unit of measurement they encounter every day, whereas joules are a painful memory from their last physics exam, so I stuck with watts. Sue me.
Next week I'll tackle the issue of how <EM> means "emphasis" (and not "em dash") when writing a Slashdot article, and how easy it is to accidentally hit the Submit button instead of Preview.
I'm an RF expert.:-) If you'll allow me to make a few rough assumptions (namely, that your body's surface area is about one square meter), I'll explain why you shouldn't worry much about radiation hazards of 802.11b products.
Whenever you're exposed to direct sunlight, your body absorbs about 400 watts of electromagnetic radiation. About 398 of these watts (99.5%) fall into the visible light, infrared, and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum; the remaining two watts include radio waves, X-rays, microwaves and gamma rays.
Let me say this again: You absorb roughly two watts of X-rays, radio waves, gamma rays (Hulk smash!) and microwaves for every moment you spend outdoors. For that matter, most buildings are not that effective at stopping radio waves and microwaves, so you're probably getting a watt or two from the sun all day long, even when indoors.
By comparison, the microwave exposure from an 802.11b product is typically 0.1 watts or less, as the previous poster indicated. The 802.11b device may concentrate more power in a smaller area, but the power levels are still insignificant there's simply not enough power here to "cook" anything, no matter how long the exposure.
("Long-term exposure to low-level radiation" is another FUD generator. Most people understand the difference between heating a steak 300 degrees for one hour, and heating a steak one degree for 300 hours -- but use the words "long-term radiation exposure" to describe the latter, and everybody gets nervous. A typical WiFi card is about as hazardous as a flashlight, and almost certainly less hazardous than exposure to direct sunlight, but as soon as we start using words like "microwaves" and "radiation" the FUD sets in.)
Someone needs to organize a well-publicized "pirate" day. Buy an MP3 player or some blank CD-Rs, or anything that gets "taxed" in this way. Contact the news media, and say since you've already paid the price for piracy, you're gonna go out in front of some huge media chain and give out copies of a ripped-n-burned popular CD (choose a band you don't like:P) in front of the cameras.
We need to have this day whether Canada passes its tax or not. We need to have it in Boston, Massachusetts, at the site of the original Boston Tea Party; ideally we need to find a ship with some pallets of shrinkwrapped CDs on board, and dump them over the side. Call it the Boston MP3 Party, and use it to point out that people are paying the RIAA $20 for music that should only cost around $3.
(And don't start bleating to me about how the RIAA needs $20 per CD to "cover its costs." The RIAA is a bloated, inefficient cartel with a business model that has gone the way of the buggy whip. The DMCA is the recording industry's Endangered Species Act -- it's as if a congress of dinosaurs voted to outlaw mammals and asteroids.)
The Boston Tea Party was a heroic act of civil disobedience against a state-sponsored monopoly -- a monopoly that obtained favorable legislation to preserve its own profit, sought to control distribution, and leveraged its power to drive competitors out of business. 229 years later, here we are again; we just need another Sam Adams (the man, not the beer) to get the ball rolling.
Two weekends ago Bugs Bunny on Broadway played to a sold-out audience at the Sydney Opera House -- the Sydney Orchestra played Milt Franklyn and Carl Stalling's arrangements of The Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening and a dozen other cartoons, with the Chuck Jones animation projected on a screen behind them. The conductor noted that a single Warner Brothers cartoon (Long-Haired Hare, the one where Bugs the conductor is tormenting an opera singer) contains music from 15 classical composers, and that more people have heard Wagner's most serious work of music with the lyric "kill the waa-bit" than without....
Cell phones are unlikely to converge on a "world-wide" technology standard, for a variety of reasons -- the market dynamics are more "NTSC vs. PAL" than "VHS vs. Beta". The majority of cell phone users rarely take their phone out of the city where they initially sign up for service, much less travel to foreign countries, so the pressure on the industry to come up with a world-wide standard is minimal. Besides, Iridium already went there and went bankrupt.
Technologically speaking, all three of the competing cellular "standards" (CDMA, TDMA and GSM) will converge on CDMA as they move to 3G -- but they'll do it in different and incompatible ways. This is mainly because the different standards favor different companies (GSM favors the European companies -- Ericsson and Nokia -- while CDMA favors U.S.-based Qualcomm and Lucent), each of whom has a greater interest in extending its dominance of a technology than in converging to a single standard.
CDMA-based networks will also (probably) get some first-to-market advantages with high-speed data... but since no one's figured out what cellular high-speed data is good for yet, there may not be much of an advantage here. Interactive video is an idea whose time never came -- the technology has been available since the 1970s, but consumer demand has been steady at zero. Portable web surfing doesn't look like a killer app either, and the telcos haven't found a pricing model for wireless data that matches what consumers are willing to pay for it.
Cellular telephone networks have a central hub (the mobile switching center) and several hundred spokes (the cell site towers with antennas). The cell sites don't talk directly to each other, so the MSC is a single point of failure for the entire network: Take it out, and the whole network is off the air.
However, there is no single point of failure for all wireless networks in the Manhattan area. If an attack destroyed Verizon's central switch, Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless and other networks in the area would not be affected. As it happened all three networks lost cell sites in the WTC attack, but the impact of losing a cell site is much less significant than losing a switch.
Even a satellite-based telephone network will have a ground-based central office where the satellite calls are put through to the land-line network. You can design a peer-to-peer network that doesn't have a central point of vulnerability, but this is not the design of our wireless or wireline telephone networks -- their design principle is to put all the eggs in one basket, and then reinforce the hell out of the basket. (The 5ESS switches used in Verizon's network average about one minute of downtime every five years, and that includes earthquake, flood, fire, power failure, etc. One of the two switches on the seventh floor of 140 West Street was still in working order when the repair crews arrived.)
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody wants good cell phone coverage; nobody wants the tower.
Not so fast. The requirement was that your parser translate variable names to "VAR######", where ###### is an integer incremented for each unique variable name. If the input contains variables named Tom, Dick, Harry and VAR909090, then your output had better have VAR000001, VAR000002, VAR000003 and VAR000004, or your crummy parser is going to break my post-processing code.
If the original requirements had said "VAR######, where ###### is a unique six-digit integer", then your parser might not need to rename variables that are already in this format -- but when your parser encounters a source file with variables named Tom, Dick, Harry and VAR000002, the output had better not be VAR000001, VAR000002, VAR000003 and VAR000002.
Points off for both professor and student, and show your work next time. :-)
(Oh, and a real requirements writer would specify whether the integers in question started with 000000 or 000001, unless said writer wanted the developers to use the tongs.)
How about a threat to your Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination? Taken to its logical conclusion, this box would allow your car to testify against you in court.
You might want to re-read the Declaration of Independence before making any more broad, sweeping statements about it; it's not just a list of complaints about British rule. It also contains some fundamental declarations about the role of government and the rights of the individual, and those declarations, in principle and practice, remain in force.
Most people in the USA are Christians, too, and since majority rules, we're outlawing Judaism and Islam next week!
Or not. The U.S. Bill of Rights acknowledges certain rights of the individual that cannot be taken away by any government under any circumstances -- further, the Declaration of Independence proclaims that when a government denies these rights, the people have the right to overthrow it. From the Declaration:
In other words, I don't care how many people vote that you'll become a Methodist, or be forbidden to own firearms, or that the book you wrote should be banned. The will of the majority is not sufficient to deprive you of these rights. In fact you are inseparable from these rights: You cannot be deprived of them, period.
If you want to live in a country where the government thinks it can deprive you of your unalienable rights, go to China. (Of course, this is a separate issue from the question of whether an atheist has an unalienable right not to hear other people recite the words "under God" in a public space; I can buy the argument that says no one should be required to endorse a religion, but I think we're off the deep end here.)
Agreed, but what relevance does this have to the case at hand? This man filed suit not because his daughter was forced to declare anything, but because she had to hear the words "under God" as the other children recited them. At no point was the daughter compelled to recite, save perhaps by peer pressure; if the teacher had required her to recite the Pledge, then the man would have a stronger case and your argument would apply.
The scene: Late 2005. A user is reading e-mail on a Palladium-equipped computer.
User: "Computer, open e-mail #37."
Computer: ["tah-dah!" noise] "This e-mail is protected by digital rights management. You will not be able to copy it or forward it to others."
User: "Riiight. Copy the contents of e-mail #37 to the Clipboard, and paste it into a new message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: "Take a screenshot of the e-mail, feed it to my OCR software, and paste the results into a new e-mail message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: [sighs] "Use text-to-speech to read the article, record the speech, use speech recognition to decode the recording, and paste the results into a new message."
Computer: [beep] "Access denied."
User: [Picks up a digital camera and points it at the screen]
Camera: [beep] "Palladium OS for Cameras 2.0 has detected DRM-protected material in the viewfinder. Please point the camera away from the material, or the camera will shut down automatically."
User: [Throws camera across the room, picks up pen and paper, begins to write a longhand copy]
Ink Pen: [beep] "Palladium OS for Ink Pens has detected an attempt to copy DRM-protected material. Please desist immediately, or the pen will automatically run dry."
User: [Screams, stabs finger with pen, begins copying the e-mail in blood]
Paper: [beep] "Palladium OS for Digital Paper has detected--"
User: [Tears paper to shreds, begins writing on the wall in blood....]
Moments later the DRM Police arrive -- having been tipped off by all the equipment -- and find the user huddled in the corner, laughing maniacally and muttering "I did it! I did it!" Fortunately, the DRM Police can't read the writing on the wall (their Palladium-equipped sunglasses polarize whenever they look that way), and the case is eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
I'd agree that the "500 meters" statistic is probably oversimplifying an accurate statistic in the original, something to the effect that the total estimated volume of water on Mars is (500 m * surface area of Mars). That's not the same as saying that Mars would turn into WaterWorld if we melted the ice.
Pure oxygen at normal air pressure creates health problems after about 24-30 hours; at higher pressures pure oxygen becomes toxic. You can breathe pure oxygen at lower pressures without any major health effects, but then you run into fire safety issues (i.e., Apollo I).
I neglected to include the link to the Mars Direct Home Page in my original article, so here it is now. Needless to say they've thought of these things in their proposal.
The trick is to go there in two steps:
Send an unmanned ship containing an unfueled return vehicle, six tons of hydrogen, and a chemical catalyst. Use the catalyst and the Martian atmosphere (primarily CO2) to create methane and water from the hydrogen (CO2 + 4H2 --> CH4 + 2H2O, exothermic). Store the methane for later use as rocket fuel. Elecrolyze the water to create oxygen gas (for later use as, well, oxygen) and more hydrogen, which you re-use to make more methane and water. This reaction eventually produces 24 tons of methane and 48 tons of oxygen; the plan calls for making an additional 36 tons of oxygen by reducing CO2.
So far we've hauled six tons of hydrogen into space, thrown it at Mars, and used it to produce over 100 tons of rocket fuel, which is now sitting in a depot on Mars. Compare this to the cost of hauling 200 tons of rocket fuel into space, much less sending that much mass on a round trip to Mars.
Three years later, launch the manned rocket. With the return vehicle and fuel already on Mars, your manned vehicle only needs enough fuel to get there, and doesn't need the ability to lift off from Mars again; in fact, the vehicle is designed to become a permanent, habitable fixture of the Martian landscape. Your first rocket has already explored the territory with a few roving robot probes, and is even providing a landing beacon.
At the same time as the manned vehicle launch, launch a second unmanned rocket, identical to the first. This is your redundant backup for the incoming astronauts, in case the fuel depot springs a leak while they're in transit; at worst they'll have to wait for the second chemical factory to ramp up production, but otherwise you can have a complete failure of the first rocket and still be safe.
Spend 1.5 years on Mars. No need to worry about getting home before your fuel runs out, because you're making more fuel as you go; you brought enough food supplies to last at least three years (and will leave some behind as a backup for the next manned mission, just in case), and you're producing oxygen and water faster than you can consume them.
Get in the return vehicle and go home. Repeat the cycle until you've colonized Mars.
The problems with Mars Direct fall into two broad categories: It requires a small nuclear reactor (smaller than the typical nuclear submarine's) to provide the initial power supply for the first unmanned lander, which makes the anti-nuclear lobby go nuts. The second problem is that Mars Direct doesn't scratch enough backs within the NASA bureaucracy to get funded: It bypasses the need for space stations, lunar landings, orbiting space fleets, warp drives, etc., and thus doesn't get support from any of the intra-NASA groups that want their pet project funded instead.
The reasons we haven't been to Mars have nothing to do with practicality or affordability: Getting to Mars is achievable with current technology, and could be done for the cost of a steel tariff. It's all about politics and votes -- if half a million people marched on Washington to demand a Mars mission, we'd be there by 2010.
Making up domain names still pollutes the namespace, though -- imagine if people made up telephone numbers the same way. Why not use example.com instead?
The example.com, example.net and example.org domains are reserved by IANA for use in testing and documentation; they're the equivalent of a telephone 555 prefix, only less obvious. See RFC 2606, or visit the example.com web page.
The SI unit is the joule, which is one watt of power radiated for one second. If you want to be picky about it, I should have written that you absorb two joules for every second you spend outdoors, but for most people watts are a unit of measurement they encounter every day, whereas joules are a painful memory from their last physics exam, so I stuck with watts. Sue me.
Next week I'll tackle the issue of how <EM> means "emphasis" (and not "em dash") when writing a Slashdot article, and how easy it is to accidentally hit the Submit button instead of Preview.
Whenever you're exposed to direct sunlight, your body absorbs about 400 watts of electromagnetic radiation. About 398 of these watts (99.5%) fall into the visible light, infrared, and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum; the remaining two watts include radio waves, X-rays, microwaves and gamma rays.
Let me say this again: You absorb roughly two watts of X-rays, radio waves, gamma rays (Hulk smash!) and microwaves for every moment you spend outdoors. For that matter, most buildings are not that effective at stopping radio waves and microwaves, so you're probably getting a watt or two from the sun all day long, even when indoors.
By comparison, the microwave exposure from an 802.11b product is typically 0.1 watts or less, as the previous poster indicated. The 802.11b device may concentrate more power in a smaller area, but the power levels are still insignificant there's simply not enough power here to "cook" anything, no matter how long the exposure.
("Long-term exposure to low-level radiation" is another FUD generator. Most people understand the difference between heating a steak 300 degrees for one hour, and heating a steak one degree for 300 hours -- but use the words "long-term radiation exposure" to describe the latter, and everybody gets nervous. A typical WiFi card is about as hazardous as a flashlight, and almost certainly less hazardous than exposure to direct sunlight, but as soon as we start using words like "microwaves" and "radiation" the FUD sets in.)
We need to have this day whether Canada passes its tax or not. We need to have it in Boston, Massachusetts, at the site of the original Boston Tea Party; ideally we need to find a ship with some pallets of shrinkwrapped CDs on board, and dump them over the side. Call it the Boston MP3 Party, and use it to point out that people are paying the RIAA $20 for music that should only cost around $3.
(And don't start bleating to me about how the RIAA needs $20 per CD to "cover its costs." The RIAA is a bloated, inefficient cartel with a business model that has gone the way of the buggy whip. The DMCA is the recording industry's Endangered Species Act -- it's as if a congress of dinosaurs voted to outlaw mammals and asteroids.)
The Boston Tea Party was a heroic act of civil disobedience against a state-sponsored monopoly -- a monopoly that obtained favorable legislation to preserve its own profit, sought to control distribution, and leveraged its power to drive competitors out of business. 229 years later, here we are again; we just need another Sam Adams (the man, not the beer) to get the ball rolling.
Definitely worth seeing if you get the chance.
Technologically speaking, all three of the competing cellular "standards" (CDMA, TDMA and GSM) will converge on CDMA as they move to 3G -- but they'll do it in different and incompatible ways. This is mainly because the different standards favor different companies (GSM favors the European companies -- Ericsson and Nokia -- while CDMA favors U.S.-based Qualcomm and Lucent), each of whom has a greater interest in extending its dominance of a technology than in converging to a single standard.
CDMA-based networks will also (probably) get some first-to-market advantages with high-speed data... but since no one's figured out what cellular high-speed data is good for yet, there may not be much of an advantage here. Interactive video is an idea whose time never came -- the technology has been available since the 1970s, but consumer demand has been steady at zero. Portable web surfing doesn't look like a killer app either, and the telcos haven't found a pricing model for wireless data that matches what consumers are willing to pay for it.
Cellular telephone networks have a central hub (the mobile switching center) and several hundred spokes (the cell site towers with antennas). The cell sites don't talk directly to each other, so the MSC is a single point of failure for the entire network: Take it out, and the whole network is off the air.
However, there is no single point of failure for all wireless networks in the Manhattan area. If an attack destroyed Verizon's central switch, Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless and other networks in the area would not be affected. As it happened all three networks lost cell sites in the WTC attack, but the impact of losing a cell site is much less significant than losing a switch.
Even a satellite-based telephone network will have a ground-based central office where the satellite calls are put through to the land-line network. You can design a peer-to-peer network that doesn't have a central point of vulnerability, but this is not the design of our wireless or wireline telephone networks -- their design principle is to put all the eggs in one basket, and then reinforce the hell out of the basket. (The 5ESS switches used in Verizon's network average about one minute of downtime every five years, and that includes earthquake, flood, fire, power failure, etc. One of the two switches on the seventh floor of 140 West Street was still in working order when the repair crews arrived.)