Kinda the same here: I use my trusty T3 for ebooks...isilo for straight text, repligo for pdf. Being able to easily read a book one handed (no page flipping) and carry along at least ten books (+reference books, dictionaries etc) have actually made me prefer my palmpilot to normal books (except for textbooks).
Still, I prefer my cellphone as a seperate entity...it's so much handier for when I need to relay information to someone on the other end of the phone.
I always love these rants: my brother thinks the same thing. But there is one thing you forget: Google is now a public company; a corporation. Expecially at the time just before IPO, their whole business was public...you wanted to know how Google got it's money? You shoulda read the prospectus and assorted extra materials. You read anything about a 'pre-emptive investment department' operating on webbased intel? No, you didn't, nor anything even slightly similar.
Wow: you are shortsided. Especially for a copmpany like google, if they go all-male, who is going to provide the human-interaction insight? There is a point of view which women bring to the game (as well as other things, like influencing the corperate cultere) which men just can't provide...especially when we're talking geeks. A female geeks perspective to UI, and maybe even just to the basic question of 'what would be a usefull thing to do with all that information we have' is worth the minor hassle of maternity leave. As for the rest of it: times they are a changing. Give it five to ten years, and a guy saying 'I'll be an hour late for work, 'cos I have to drop off the kids' or something similar will be de rigeur. And a dad who doesn't go to school meetings to find out how his kid is doing? Gives a bit of insight into how americans raise their kids.
"Since women (on average) do not put in the same hours, risk, dedication and sacrifice that men do"
The only thing which rings true is the hours (sacrifce is redundant...'s the same thing in this context); they'll put in equal risk and dedication.
You know, I'm surprised at this: there's one source all others refer to, and it's being looked over. YOUR GOVERNMENT PUBLISHES IT'S FIGURES! THEY ARE OFFICIAL (or as official and trustworthy as they'll ever get) AND THEY ARE AVAILABLE FOR FREE, ONLINE! Check this link
Sure. I bet not even some kids in the bronx see that much 'action'...and you, a self-confessed nerd who posts on/. do better than cops? I'm sorry if I seem sceptical, but even if what you say is true, there has to be something wrong with your attitude that you get jacked 6 times in the last 5 years: you're making yourself a target.
Actually, Tron featured a shitload of hand-animated (as in old school Disney style) rendered stuff. Still, there was a little actual 3d computer rendered stuff in there...enough to obviate the patent.
I think you'd do well to read the actual legislation being proposed (or at least a better edited version): the bill is supposed to take care of paid-for blogging (ie the recent case of a blogger getting money from the gov'ment to spread propaganda for their new healthcare [or was it education?] plan) and the like. It's not meant to 'regulate the internet', as the/.-headline makes you want to believe.
"when normal, honest people have the guns, the criminals are more afraid to use theirs"
Urban legend, or in less euphemistic language: a lie. Ask the first police officer you see if this istrue. Better yet, go have a look at crime statistics to see how wrong you are. Then, for a real blast, have a look at the difference between gun-related (and overal) crime in countries which have strict gun laws and the US. Last time this came up it took me ten minutes to google a reliable source (which means: not the NRA).
BTW: what usually happens is that when a victim has a weapon, the situation rapidly escalates, leaving the criminal (who has nothing to lose...he wouldn't be robbing you if he did) no choice but to get violent or run away. Criminals tend to get violent, leaving the victim quite fucked up, as a rule. The once-in-a-thousand case of the victim actually managing to draw his weapon on the criminal (who usually already has his weapon out) just tells you that 999 victims got shot.
I think you're trivialising your country's problems. You mention education: something which is fundamentally broken in the US (unless you have money) and which the government is in no hurry to fix ('no child left behind' is just making matters worse). Seems like no one wants the general populace to be educated... Anyway, the abolition of basic human rights (as happens in Guantanamo) coupled with the lack of habeus corpus and the right to legal representation have basically broken your status as a free country: lack of the last two can be thought of as the definition of a police state.
Then there is the fact that money is considered free speech. This, coupled with the lobbying industry (a whole industry dedicated to/bribing/ the government!!!) means that a) people with money have more than one vote and b) corporations have a say in government...a government which supposedly is by and for the people, with no mention of corporations.
And then there's the media, which has transformed from something which gives you the news to a spin delivery system. Face it: Clearchannel, the FCC and Fox have made it so that no scandal breakes which can hurt the people it is protecting. With all the crap going on Iraq, the Taiqan shitstrorm coming up, the mayor economic problems in the US, the failing education, the selection of convicted felons and suspected felons (Negroponte!) for high offices...and what's on t.v.? A single euthanesia story which the courts throw out. Which is rather remarkable, because it does three things: it gets Bush to finally 'appeal to his christian base' whilst at the same time (but then this is underreported on) he gets to push government interference on personal matters (and here's me thinking the Republicans where anti big gov'ment)...but more importantly, more pressing and important issues are just swept under the media-blanket.
So, yeah, I'd say your country is due for revolution. And I say that as a foreigner who thinks your foreign policy is shit and has made the world a much more unsafe place (meaning I have a much higher chance of getting blown up than I used to when I travel...but then, so few americans travel abroad that it doesn't really matter, does it?). But most of all I say it as foreigner looking a country where people shout 'freedom' and 'terror' whilst having the fear of god put into them by their leaders and their "put us on orange alert 'cos we're down in the opinion polls" and their freedoms curtailed (free-speech zone? WTF? PATRIOT ACT with no sunset clauses? Torturing a national policy? Curtailing free speech by selfcencorship and half million dollar FCC fines? Constant hints getting dropped that Roe v Wade is about to get dropped? Abstinance only programs over condom use? No sex-ed? Goddamn creationism over evolution?).
Really, you have no clue how bad your country is down the toilet if you think that "normal people running against career politicians" have any chance whatsoever nowadays. You need money and lots of it to even consider running...and that money can only be had by getting into bed with special interests in the US. Your democracy is broken...and if Diebold blackboxes are the tools by which you count your democratic vote, you/have/ to know that by now.
Have you heard of the DMCA? I wouldn't be surprised if John got hauled in on account of this. Now I'm not saying he should be, just that I wouldn't be surprised.
...and most of it's computing power is dedicated to parcing the code realtime to get around that hardcoded 60 frames per second Carmack put in...so 70 fps/is/ actually pretty impressive:P
I'm sorry, but Meetch's post has no basis in actual knowledge of the subjects he's talking about.
Meech, I was gonna rip appart your post nearly sentence by sentence...but what I'll say is this: go get a great big book on calculus and read it (try a book by Stewart). Discover for yourself what 'rotation' really means in the mathematical sense. Then get a general introductory text to special relativity, and read that, so you have an understanding of what dimensions actually mean, and get acquianted with something called space-time. Finally, go get a book (I recomend Griffiths) on quantum mechanics, so you know how probability is used by physicists and you'll stop talking about 'movement through time and space relative to probability'.
Your kind of ignorance is dangerous: it might lead people who honestly don't know about this stuff to think you even have an inkling of an idea of what you're talking about, when you most obviously don't. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it.
" A comparable PC with equivient RAM, disk space, firewire, built-it wireless and bluetooth costs the same or more."
Excuse me, but what planet are you living on? Lemme break it down: 200 for a 21" CRT (I'm using photoshop, so CRT), 50 for a case, 50 for keyboard/mouse, 150 for a motherboard with firewire and all the other standard ports, 200 for a top-of the line cpu and 200 for a gig of ram. Plus 300 for a decent vid card and 50 for a wifi and a bleutooth dongle. Oh, and a 200 gig SATA HD for 100 and a DVD double layer burner for 50. That adds up to (200+50+50+150+200+200+300+50+100+50=)1350. And that's for everything top quality (top brands, no no-nam ram or whatever), new (not like I don't have a decent monitor lying around anyway, same for keyboard and trackball and a tablet, and canabalising the ram [and maybe that lian case too] from my old machine) and at much inflated, top-of-my-head prices. And that's not even considering that I can just upgrade each single part mentioned here by itself whenever I get the cash for it. Oh, and I haven't even looked into getting a decent price on the web or some kind of other pc-pre-build-maker deal.
You know who should do a Discworld movie and actually be able to pull it off? The guys who do the Harry Potter movies. I think they're just about the only ones who could pull off the style and keep the books intact.
The main difference between Pratchet and Asprin is that Asprin is just funny; Pratchet on the other hand is deeply funny. By that I mean that to fully appreciate Pratchet you need to know certain things: like Latin, or heraldry or quantum physics, to get the full efect of some of his jokes and puns (actually most of his humor works that way; one good example is Unseen University...it's only after reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver did I realise Pratchet was riffing on the Invisible College, the precursor to the Royal Society). Plus there's some mayor commentary going on on modernday life on an anecdotal level. Asprin just does not have that; hell Aprin doesn't even have a simple theme (in the literary sense) going on in any of his MYTH books. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the MYTH series...it's just that it's like penny romance novels against Pratchet's more mature, 'real' literature.
I guess a great first-discworld-movie would be 'Mort'. It can stand alone, has the full atmosphere and has scenes which would translate absolutely marvelously to movies. Plus it has anything a hollywood exec insists be in a movie, including a love interest:)
As for Gilliam's effort to get Good Omens done...I think he's still trying to scare up a budget, last I heard.
And then of course there's Sweden, where everyone can go to university for free...including foreigners! Sure, they pay a lot of tax, but the end result is that they have a lot less crime, a very high percentage of literacy and education and free healthcare...resulting in the fact that the money they have left is nearly all discretionary (after food and rent).
As soon as 3dsmax and photoshop ship for linux, I'll be on linux. But not before that happens. And don't say 'well just sue WINE' or something like that...that just adds a level of complexity I can't be bothered getting used to.
And no: GIMP is no substitute, and neither is MAYA ('cos I don't have the time to retrain).
So the question for me is: who has the clout to get Discreet and Adobe to convert their apps to linux?
This is sadly too true: the moment campaign contributions were classified as 'free speech', the rich people effectively had more than one vote, and democracy as most people understand it these days has gone down the toilet in the US.
With all the wierd shit going down, I really don't get why there hasn't been more demonstrations or even a revolution across the pond...
"A number of studies have been done on the biological effects of background EMR"
True...but:
"and they indicate that any effect, if it exists at all, is very small."
Who paid for those studies? Yup...the studies which turn up something are usually done by government agencies. Too bad so very few have been done by tuly impartial agencies. The problem is that most studies which have turned up nothing have circumspect funding, ie by large companies (like cellphone companies and other cariers...look at for example powerline studies). Plus of course, as twenty Noble laureates confirm as well as countless other scientists, most of the government studies done in the US during Bush' presidency are tainted anyway.
"It's possible there is some effect that we haven't turned up yet, but it's ridiculous to claim that we have "no idea" what effect it has."
Kinda true: most studies concerned with EM have turned up that you can significantly alter the output of the brain (concious perception) through EM radiation. The problem is that these studies have consistently been using direct applications of large-ish amounts of EM (mostly as a spin off of the cancer/powerline clustering correlation). There has been very little !unbiased! research on the lower levels of EM energy as used for cellphones, microwaves and tv-over-ether-frequencies. Which is strange in and of itself.
Not only that, but a slight disposition towards grouchyness is not something most studies are looking for or can even quantify well enough with the current research tools available in psychology. So we know the obvious effects which occur when we use exceptional amounts of energy...but it is very far from ridiculous to claim that we know very little about the effects cellphone towers, wifi et all have on psychology, other than that it probably doesn't cause cancer in mice.
Yeah...'cos you know and have read studies which authoritatively tell you that all that energy has no effect whatsoever on that completely understood human brain.
It's one thing to dis tinfoil-hatters, it's another to discount something we have little understanding of, especially now that we can never again have an adequate control group. We can't get a group of people together and cut them off from man-made EM radiation...you'd have to lock 'em up in faraday cage for a long period of time. And we can't use prisoners, 'cause their psychology is usually screwed up anyway...so that leaves us without a control group to compare with.
So, sure, we've been wandering around with the universes EM radiation around us for millenia...but it's only the past century or so that we've been filling up the ether with our own...and only about 10 years sinbce we've really been surrounding ourselves with it in the form of mobile phones. And we have no idea what effect this stuff has on us (it might make us just a little grouchy, or a little horny...we have no fucking clue!).
However, we do know that the stuff can affect us quite severely. A while back, in the Netherlands, TNO (dutch national science institute kind of thing) published a report that proved that UMTS (GSM add-on data system kinda thing) masts lead to diziness, lack of concentration and headaches. The report (to my knowledge) has never been refuted. And UMTS has been rolled out in the Netherlands even so.
Funny thing is, tinfoil hats might actually help one day:)
Heh..I replied to the dupe thread on the galactic flash before I even realised this thread was up. I swear the association must have been accidental or subconsious:) Anyway, I thought I'd post it here as the other thread is likely to be dupe-flamed into oblivion:
"Even though it's a dupe, this is the first time I saw this story. Now I know I'm thinking of correlations in the wild, but 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts is a large amount of energy.
Two days earlier, there was a massive earthquake. I wonder what part of the planet was facing the direction of the flash at that time? Who knows, we might have detected our first gravity wave...space-time might deform about 2 days in 50.000 years faster than light:)"
Even though it's a dupe, this is the first time I saw this story. Now I know I'm thinking of correlations in the wild, but 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts is a large amount of energy.
Two days earlier, there was a massive earthquake. I wonder what part of the planet was facing the direction of the flash at that time? Who knows, we might have detected our first gravity wave...space-time might deform about 2 days in 50.000 years faster than light:)
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda the same here: I use my trusty T3 for ebooks...isilo for straight text, repligo for pdf. Being able to easily read a book one handed (no page flipping) and carry along at least ten books (+reference books, dictionaries etc) have actually made me prefer my palmpilot to normal books (except for textbooks).
Still, I prefer my cellphone as a seperate entity...it's so much handier for when I need to relay information to someone on the other end of the phone.
I always love these rants: my brother thinks the same thing. But there is one thing you forget: Google is now a public company; a corporation. Expecially at the time just before IPO, their whole business was public...you wanted to know how Google got it's money? You shoulda read the prospectus and assorted extra materials. You read anything about a 'pre-emptive investment department' operating on webbased intel? No, you didn't, nor anything even slightly similar.
So either put up (evidence) or shut up.
Wow: you are shortsided. Especially for a copmpany like google, if they go all-male, who is going to provide the human-interaction insight? There is a point of view which women bring to the game (as well as other things, like influencing the corperate cultere) which men just can't provide...especially when we're talking geeks. A female geeks perspective to UI, and maybe even just to the basic question of 'what would be a usefull thing to do with all that information we have' is worth the minor hassle of maternity leave.
As for the rest of it: times they are a changing. Give it five to ten years, and a guy saying 'I'll be an hour late for work, 'cos I have to drop off the kids' or something similar will be de rigeur.
And a dad who doesn't go to school meetings to find out how his kid is doing? Gives a bit of insight into how americans raise their kids.
"Since women (on average) do not put in the same hours, risk, dedication and sacrifice that men do"
The only thing which rings true is the hours (sacrifce is redundant...'s the same thing in this context); they'll put in equal risk and dedication.
Well, in many countries it's possible to buy politicians (call it 'lobbying' and it's legal, too!)...I just wonder if it's a buyers or sellers market?
You know, I'm surprised at this: there's one source all others refer to, and it's being looked over. YOUR GOVERNMENT PUBLISHES IT'S FIGURES! THEY ARE OFFICIAL (or as official and trustworthy as they'll ever get) AND THEY ARE AVAILABLE FOR FREE, ONLINE! Check this link
Sure. I bet not even some kids in the bronx see that much 'action'...and you, a self-confessed nerd who posts on /. do better than cops?
I'm sorry if I seem sceptical, but even if what you say is true, there has to be something wrong with your attitude that you get jacked 6 times in the last 5 years: you're making yourself a target.
Actually, Tron featured a shitload of hand-animated (as in old school Disney style) rendered stuff. Still, there was a little actual 3d computer rendered stuff in there...enough to obviate the patent.
I think you'd do well to read the actual legislation being proposed (or at least a better edited version): the bill is supposed to take care of paid-for blogging (ie the recent case of a blogger getting money from the gov'ment to spread propaganda for their new healthcare [or was it education?] plan) and the like. It's not meant to 'regulate the internet', as the /.-headline makes you want to believe.
"when normal, honest people have the guns, the criminals are more afraid to use theirs"
Urban legend, or in less euphemistic language: a lie. Ask the first police officer you see if this istrue. Better yet, go have a look at crime statistics to see how wrong you are. Then, for a real blast, have a look at the difference between gun-related (and overal) crime in countries which have strict gun laws and the US. Last time this came up it took me ten minutes to google a reliable source (which means: not the NRA).
BTW: what usually happens is that when a victim has a weapon, the situation rapidly escalates, leaving the criminal (who has nothing to lose...he wouldn't be robbing you if he did) no choice but to get violent or run away. Criminals tend to get violent, leaving the victim quite fucked up, as a rule. The once-in-a-thousand case of the victim actually managing to draw his weapon on the criminal (who usually already has his weapon out) just tells you that 999 victims got shot.
I think you're trivialising your country's problems. You mention education: something which is fundamentally broken in the US (unless you have money) and which the government is in no hurry to fix ('no child left behind' is just making matters worse). Seems like no one wants the general populace to be educated...
/bribing/ the government!!!) means that a) people with money have more than one vote and b) corporations have a say in government...a government which supposedly is by and for the people, with no mention of corporations.
/have/ to know that by now.
Anyway, the abolition of basic human rights (as happens in Guantanamo) coupled with the lack of habeus corpus and the right to legal representation have basically broken your status as a free country: lack of the last two can be thought of as the definition of a police state.
Then there is the fact that money is considered free speech. This, coupled with the lobbying industry (a whole industry dedicated to
And then there's the media, which has transformed from something which gives you the news to a spin delivery system. Face it: Clearchannel, the FCC and Fox have made it so that no scandal breakes which can hurt the people it is protecting. With all the crap going on Iraq, the Taiqan shitstrorm coming up, the mayor economic problems in the US, the failing education, the selection of convicted felons and suspected felons (Negroponte!) for high offices...and what's on t.v.? A single euthanesia story which the courts throw out. Which is rather remarkable, because it does three things: it gets Bush to finally 'appeal to his christian base' whilst at the same time (but then this is underreported on) he gets to push government interference on personal matters (and here's me thinking the Republicans where anti big gov'ment)...but more importantly, more pressing and important issues are just swept under the media-blanket.
So, yeah, I'd say your country is due for revolution. And I say that as a foreigner who thinks your foreign policy is shit and has made the world a much more unsafe place (meaning I have a much higher chance of getting blown up than I used to when I travel...but then, so few americans travel abroad that it doesn't really matter, does it?). But most of all I say it as foreigner looking a country where people shout 'freedom' and 'terror' whilst having the fear of god put into them by their leaders and their "put us on orange alert 'cos we're down in the opinion polls" and their freedoms curtailed (free-speech zone? WTF? PATRIOT ACT with no sunset clauses? Torturing a national policy? Curtailing free speech by selfcencorship and half million dollar FCC fines? Constant hints getting dropped that Roe v Wade is about to get dropped? Abstinance only programs over condom use? No sex-ed? Goddamn creationism over evolution?).
Really, you have no clue how bad your country is down the toilet if you think that "normal people running against career politicians" have any chance whatsoever nowadays. You need money and lots of it to even consider running...and that money can only be had by getting into bed with special interests in the US. Your democracy is broken...and if Diebold blackboxes are the tools by which you count your democratic vote, you
Especially since that internet thingy was originally developped to be decentralised and able to withstand a 'nukular' attack.
:P)...
Seems something went wrong after ARPAnet screwed the pooch (or FIDOnet
Have you heard of the DMCA? I wouldn't be surprised if John got hauled in on account of this. Now I'm not saying he should be, just that I wouldn't be surprised.
...and most of it's computing power is dedicated to parcing the code realtime to get around that hardcoded 60 frames per second Carmack put in...so 70 fps /is/ actually pretty impressive :P
I'm sorry, but Meetch's post has no basis in actual knowledge of the subjects he's talking about.
Meech, I was gonna rip appart your post nearly sentence by sentence...but what I'll say is this: go get a great big book on calculus and read it (try a book by Stewart). Discover for yourself what 'rotation' really means in the mathematical sense. Then get a general introductory text to special relativity, and read that, so you have an understanding of what dimensions actually mean, and get acquianted with something called space-time. Finally, go get a book (I recomend Griffiths) on quantum mechanics, so you know how probability is used by physicists and you'll stop talking about 'movement through time and space relative to probability'.
Your kind of ignorance is dangerous: it might lead people who honestly don't know about this stuff to think you even have an inkling of an idea of what you're talking about, when you most obviously don't. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it.
" A comparable PC with equivient RAM, disk space, firewire, built-it wireless and bluetooth costs the same or more."
Excuse me, but what planet are you living on?
Lemme break it down: 200 for a 21" CRT (I'm using photoshop, so CRT), 50 for a case, 50 for keyboard/mouse, 150 for a motherboard with firewire and all the other standard ports, 200 for a top-of the line cpu and 200 for a gig of ram. Plus 300 for a decent vid card and 50 for a wifi and a bleutooth dongle. Oh, and a 200 gig SATA HD for 100 and a DVD double layer burner for 50. That adds up to (200+50+50+150+200+200+300+50+100+50=)1350. And that's for everything top quality (top brands, no no-nam ram or whatever), new (not like I don't have a decent monitor lying around anyway, same for keyboard and trackball and a tablet, and canabalising the ram [and maybe that lian case too] from my old machine) and at much inflated, top-of-my-head prices. And that's not even considering that I can just upgrade each single part mentioned here by itself whenever I get the cash for it. Oh, and I haven't even looked into getting a decent price on the web or some kind of other pc-pre-build-maker deal.
You know who should do a Discworld movie and actually be able to pull it off? The guys who do the Harry Potter movies. I think they're just about the only ones who could pull off the style and keep the books intact.
The main difference between Pratchet and Asprin is that Asprin is just funny; Pratchet on the other hand is deeply funny. By that I mean that to fully appreciate Pratchet you need to know certain things: like Latin, or heraldry or quantum physics, to get the full efect of some of his jokes and puns (actually most of his humor works that way; one good example is Unseen University...it's only after reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver did I realise Pratchet was riffing on the Invisible College, the precursor to the Royal Society).
Plus there's some mayor commentary going on on modernday life on an anecdotal level. Asprin just does not have that; hell Aprin doesn't even have a simple theme (in the literary sense) going on in any of his MYTH books. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the MYTH series...it's just that it's like penny romance novels against Pratchet's more mature, 'real' literature.
I guess a great first-discworld-movie would be 'Mort'. It can stand alone, has the full atmosphere and has scenes which would translate absolutely marvelously to movies. Plus it has anything a hollywood exec insists be in a movie, including a love interest :)
As for Gilliam's effort to get Good Omens done...I think he's still trying to scare up a budget, last I heard.
And then of course there's Sweden, where everyone can go to university for free...including foreigners! Sure, they pay a lot of tax, but the end result is that they have a lot less crime, a very high percentage of literacy and education and free healthcare...resulting in the fact that the money they have left is nearly all discretionary (after food and rent).
I really respect a system like that.
As soon as 3dsmax and photoshop ship for linux, I'll be on linux. But not before that happens. And don't say 'well just sue WINE' or something like that...that just adds a level of complexity I can't be bothered getting used to.
And no: GIMP is no substitute, and neither is MAYA ('cos I don't have the time to retrain).
So the question for me is: who has the clout to get Discreet and Adobe to convert their apps to linux?
This is sadly too true: the moment campaign contributions were classified as 'free speech', the rich people effectively had more than one vote, and democracy as most people understand it these days has gone down the toilet in the US.
With all the wierd shit going down, I really don't get why there hasn't been more demonstrations or even a revolution across the pond...
"A number of studies have been done on the biological effects of background EMR"
True...but:
"and they indicate that any effect, if it exists at all, is very small."
Who paid for those studies? Yup...the studies which turn up something are usually done by government agencies. Too bad so very few have been done by tuly impartial agencies. The problem is that most studies which have turned up nothing have circumspect funding, ie by large companies (like cellphone companies and other cariers...look at for example powerline studies).
Plus of course, as twenty Noble laureates confirm as well as countless other scientists, most of the government studies done in the US during Bush' presidency are tainted anyway.
"It's possible there is some effect that we haven't turned up yet, but it's ridiculous to claim that we have "no idea" what effect it has."
Kinda true: most studies concerned with EM have turned up that you can significantly alter the output of the brain (concious perception) through EM radiation. The problem is that these studies have consistently been using direct applications of large-ish amounts of EM (mostly as a spin off of the cancer/powerline clustering correlation). There has been very little !unbiased! research on the lower levels of EM energy as used for cellphones, microwaves and tv-over-ether-frequencies. Which is strange in and of itself.
Not only that, but a slight disposition towards grouchyness is not something most studies are looking for or can even quantify well enough with the current research tools available in psychology. So we know the obvious effects which occur when we use exceptional amounts of energy...but it is very far from ridiculous to claim that we know very little about the effects cellphone towers, wifi et all have on psychology, other than that it probably doesn't cause cancer in mice.
Yeah...'cos you know and have read studies which authoritatively tell you that all that energy has no effect whatsoever on that completely understood human brain.
:)
It's one thing to dis tinfoil-hatters, it's another to discount something we have little understanding of, especially now that we can never again have an adequate control group. We can't get a group of people together and cut them off from man-made EM radiation...you'd have to lock 'em up in faraday cage for a long period of time. And we can't use prisoners, 'cause their psychology is usually screwed up anyway...so that leaves us without a control group to compare with.
So, sure, we've been wandering around with the universes EM radiation around us for millenia...but it's only the past century or so that we've been filling up the ether with our own...and only about 10 years sinbce we've really been surrounding ourselves with it in the form of mobile phones. And we have no idea what effect this stuff has on us (it might make us just a little grouchy, or a little horny...we have no fucking clue!).
However, we do know that the stuff can affect us quite severely. A while back, in the Netherlands, TNO (dutch national science institute kind of thing) published a report that proved that UMTS (GSM add-on data system kinda thing) masts lead to diziness, lack of concentration and headaches. The report (to my knowledge) has never been refuted. And UMTS has been rolled out in the Netherlands even so.
Funny thing is, tinfoil hats might actually help one day
Heh..I replied to the dupe thread on the galactic flash before I even realised this thread was up. I swear the association must have been accidental or subconsious :) Anyway, I thought I'd post it here as the other thread is likely to be dupe-flamed into oblivion:
:)"
"Even though it's a dupe, this is the first time I saw this story. Now I know I'm thinking of correlations in the wild, but 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts is a large amount of energy.
Two days earlier, there was a massive earthquake. I wonder what part of the planet was facing the direction of the flash at that time? Who knows, we might have detected our first gravity wave...space-time might deform about 2 days in 50.000 years faster than light
Even though it's a dupe, this is the first time I saw this story. Now I know I'm thinking of correlations in the wild, but 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts is a large amount of energy.
:)
Two days earlier, there was a massive earthquake. I wonder what part of the planet was facing the direction of the flash at that time? Who knows, we might have detected our first gravity wave...space-time might deform about 2 days in 50.000 years faster than light