His post was much more articulate. Also, I would have to say that, if you were trying to say the same thing, you failed utterly.
His point was that my point contained a logical inconsistency, whereas your point, and correct me if I'm wrong here, was that preaching to everyone who one would happen to meet on the streets was a moral imperative, and the refusal of the passerby to listen would necessarily encompass the destruction of their nation, or a 40' drop, depending.
While I view his post as a bit of a logical nit-pick, as he is clearly willfully missing my point of tolerance, I view your post as a good example of the sort of obstinate "I'm right and you're wrong" arrogant, and intractible belief system that I'm talking about. God very clearly spelled out his command to Israel in the OT, and they skipped it, and paid the price. Well and good.
I am unaware of any modern commands so explicitly laid out. All modern imperatives, in fact, seem to be originating with a group of intolerant demagogues who remind me much more of Pharisees than Christians, who preach out of temples with built-in ATMs and gift shoppes, while claiming, with no sense of shame, to be in complete understanding of the mind of god.
Interesting point. I am not, as you seem to be suggesting, an ethical relativist. On the other hand, Christian dogma is so amazingly fragmented it would be difficult to attribute anything like a consistency of belief across the whole of the religion.
My point, thus, is that, where there is doubt, there should be circumspection. I've never heard a defense of murder, for example, that would appeal to a rational audience. On the other hand, biblical passages have in times past been used to justify murder, for example, the Salem Witch Trials.
Now while I hold that anyone who feels strongly that witches should be burned has every right to that belief, I strongly object when they try to impose that belief on a world that disagrees. Likewise with the modern evangelical tradition of deciding, arbitrarily, on what constitues the truth, and then attempting to force that belief on all and sundry. They would certainly expect their beliefs to be honored...indeed recent history can be conclusively shown to demonstrate a tendency on the part of evangelical christians to hysterically denounce any and every action that they feel impinges on the fullness of their belief (e.g The "Holiday Tree" debate, and others).
Now, historically, there has been a way around this impasse of beliefs that I'm going to refer to as laws, which, for the purposes of discussion, we can think of as "enforcable beliefs" that are agreed on by people who otherwise have different belief structures. Now recently, the evangelical types have taken to thinking of any "belief" (be it legal, moral, logical, or scientific) that runs a counter to their own beliefs as less valid, and, indeed, a purely personal attack on their correct beliefs.
Now my argument, if you would call it thus, is simply to point out that, with so much disagreement on the fine points as it were, of their beliefs, it would be wise for them to accept, with some Christ-style holy humility, that other people are also entitled to beliefs, before their hysterical intolerance breeds domestically the very same problems we see all over the world.
The question is, are you giving them the way out, or are you leading them into damnation? You're assuming that your interpretation is the only possible true interpretation, and that therefore you have the right & duty to enforce that interpretation on people who disagree with you. That is incredible hubris.
In the modern day, we see a lot of people judging and throwing stones, and claiming that they're right to do so. Now, I'm no biblical scholar, but I'm pretty sure that both the OT and the NT are pretty specific about people usurping the perogatives that belong to god.
Let me be blunt: It is not given to you to be judge and jury to your fellow man. No one appointed you the sole keeper of god's laws, and nothing makes your interpretation of those laws superior to anothers.
Talking about Sun clients, you're talking about a premium put on service and reliablity. I have Sun machines here that have been running for 4 years without a reboot. Sun ray terminals have a lifespan of ten years or more.
Then contrast that with the absolute cheapest thing Dell can mass produce.
Then think of all the headache that the "extra capabilities" are going to cause. Harddrives to fail. Operating Systems to become corrupt. Local backups to manage. God help you if you have to add any software to it as well, all that gets added directly on to your cost, as does the staff needed to service and support it.
With a thin client system, all that headache is gone. The local machine is completely disposable. There is nothing stored on it at all. If it blows up, all you have to do is plug in a new one. All your data, everything, is stored on the nice server, with a nice raid, and nice managed backups, and an operating system that is not in the position to be fiddled with.
You need half the staff to maintain the system, the system itself runs quick (as it would not with whatever piece of celeron crap dell is selling for 300 bucks), and, even more importantly, you probably won't need to upgrade your terminals to keep your hardware current. Add a new server if things start running slow, and since the terminals are just terminals, they don't need to be replaced.
Thin client is just a better solution unless you're running something that is hugely procesor intensive on the local machines. Even if the setup cost twice as much to set up (hugely unlikely), you'd make it back quick in lower maintenance costs.
Yes indeed, if you correct your child, then you have a point. If you'll reread my above post, you'll find that I have no problem with god correcting someone's misunderstandings.
My problem is with people who think they understand god's mind better than god does. Who are they to judge? Are they not mortal and falliable? In their own minds, the answer is clearly no, which is all kinds of pride and hubris.
(Sorry for the OT thread hijack, but I've got Karma to burn, and I don't feel like letting this one pass)
No, it just means you're a hateful, intolerant, dissapointment to god.
If you really believed that god loved everyone, then you'd have to think he knew something you didn't, and you'd kinda have to keep your nose out of other peoples business. If it's all right with god, it should be all right with you. If it's not all right with god, I don't think he needs your help getting his point across.
On the other hand, if you knew that god loved everyone, and yet you still walked around telling everyone what to do, and how to think, and what to believe...all that says is you think god's a complete moron for loving all the wrong people. You don't trust god's judgement. Think you know better than god.
The only big problem is most people don't really care how sharp their tv is, and most people aren't keen on upgrading their entrie dvd collection, and while they can afford it, it doesn't follow that they will rush out and buy it.
Yea I agree. I don't think it'll outdo the PS2...I think it would be hard to, considering how many big players have stepped up with good offerings.
If they can sell enough though to make it so that all hd tv makers have to build in blu-ray support...that'll be the tipping point, because you'll have two formats, but only one that everyone supports. Consumers get really antsy about stuff like that with multi-thousand dollar purchases.
Anyway, I think the price'll drop pretty quick, and then they'll be competing with the Xbox while having a superior feature set. Of course the xbox release cycle is less, so they can catch up more easily. But if blu-ray is the standard then, ms'll have to liscense it from sony.
Very interesting. I give this a much better chance of success than any of Sony's other crappy format ventures. Psp video...yech.
Oh, I agree with you. Iomega proved the flaw of closed standards. Zip disks could have been the standard for rewritable media, but they kept the standard as tight as possible, media stayed expensive, and hardly anyone bought them. Rambus ram, same story. Minidisk, Beta, PSPv, etc.
I don't know. Their ideological constraints may prohibit them from making the smart choice. They may still pull it out though. I'm going to be following it, mainly because I have absolutely no use for any of the products involved, so I can view it as entertainment.
The short answer is: it doesn't matter if they lose money, because they can afford to. If blu-ray flops and the PS3 does well, then Sony just netted themselves a nice proprietary format for their games.
It's worth it to them to gamble on being the hd standard. The stakes if they win are so huge that they'd be dumb not to risk it. It's not just the disks...It's the disks, the players, the tvs, everything.
You answered your own question. People like to believe that, because Sony is evil, they're going to go bankrupt. They don't want to know the facts.
They hear things like "Huge drop in profits!" and they think, "Sony is losing money" rather than, "Sony is sinking ridiculous money into research, which, even if the PS3 goes into the crapper will still net them billions in terms of new patents and new technology."
Sony's not some fly-by-night software company with no material assets. They're a freaking tech manufacturing giant. Even if you're not buying Sony products, products you're buying have Sony components. They have factories and properties worth billions. They're not going to dry up and blow away.
The first two google results are both 2+ years old, and the very first one talks about profits dropping dramatically to _only_ the 1 billion dollar range.
Big corporations don't die. You have no conception of the actual amount of value that is attached to a company the size of sony. If they never made another product, and switched purely to research and liscensing, they'd still be making a nice profit. They employ more people than a small country.
Yea, they'll look stupid if the PS3 flops, and stupid if blu-ray doesn't catch on. They've looked stupid before. Sony dominates the console market. Last numbers I saw ranked them at SEVENTY PERCENT.
Just because they haven't won one yet, doesn't mean they never will. they're banking on the PS3 to get blu-ray into every home. If it happens, they'll be geniuses. If it doesn't they'll be idiots.
This time, they're trying to do it the right way, which I think is interesting. They're putting the player out before they're putting the media out, and they're attaching cool stuff(games) to the player, which will almost certainly get people buying them. Sure it'll be pricey, but so is a regular computer, and people dump crazy money on them (cue computer vs console arguments).
It only remains to be seen if they can sell enough units to force blu-ray to the standard.
Sure Sony is run by a bunch of jackasses. Sure their PS3 product doesn't seem to match up to the current competition. Sure they're schizoid with regards to their music distribution, etc.
But they are not today, nor in the next 10 years, at all likely to "Self-destruct". This is a corporation, not a political party. They're not losing money at present, and if they pull off the PS3 thing well enough to set blu-ray as the new hd standard (who cares about the games?), their entire board of directors is going to spend the next decade snorting coke and gold dust off the asses of high priced prostitutes.
They're taking the long view in this situation, and I'll be surprised if we'll know how it worked out for a decade or more. The value of owning the dominant video standard cannot be overestimated.
Eh, I agree with you, but that's not the whine I was referring to. I should have been more specific.
The whine that I was referring to, the whine that makes me absolutely irate, is the "I can't ever use another product but the one I'm currently using" whine. I hear it every time someone's software gets upgraded, I hear it every time I replace someone's closed source app with an opensource app (for budget reasons, usually). People fear change, and they are extremely resistant to change, and it annoys me.
Unless you have a bunch of fancy macros in your excel spreadsheets, you can use any of a number of OSS spreadsheets and not have to worry about WINE or anything else. But you can't convince people of that.
Mind you, I think that that type of phish is the most sophisticated type of phish, being both elegant and simple. I "fell" for one of those back in the day, in that I got an email from my bank, and it notified me of some account change, so I immediately and without checking the validity of the link on the email...called my bank on the phone and said, "What the hell is up with this?"
They of course, didn't know anything about it, I checked the link and realized it was false. That was just long term ingrained habit that puleld me out of that one, because it was an excellent phish. But how do you teach those habits of suspicion to a layman?
It's just a security issue. I deal with passwords all day every day, and people are awful with their password security. It just doesn't make any sense to them, and they all think that the consequences for this or that little security breach are harmless, and so when something like this comes along, they fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.
I love WINE (and wine), and I actually like fiddling with WINE (with wine) to run my programs...Expecting this, however, of a non-technical user is like expecting them to perform brainsurgery. They're not going to be able to do it, the instructions we post on how to do it will be too complex for them to follow (anything where skipping a step will break the process will be to complex for them), and they will become embittered and write articles for the WSJ about how over-complex Linux is, when, in reality, the issue is they can't run Excel.
Until WINE is to the point where you don't have to fiddle with it to get it to load Office and run Office flawlessly, we're going to be getting these whiny criticisms.
I'm not an intellectual snob. I don't think a profession is unskilled, just because you get to get your hands dirty.
Skilled work, in my mind, is anything where experience keeps mattering after a year or two. Someone who has been a programmer, or a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a blacksmith for many many years, will have a body of knowledge and skill that could never be reproduced by someone without that experience.
It's tempting to attribute a causal relation to something that could just be coincidence. It's not really past the realm of possibility, so the chance that it is just chance has to be appreciated.
Brain cancer is one of those weird ones. The brain is soft tissue, with a lot of stuff going on in it...There are environmental factors that can lead to brain cancer (eg vinyl chloride), and it can even occur "spontaneously" as it were.
Microwave emissions seem unlikely to cause brain cancer, because it's non-ionizing radiation...Mean's it's less likely to screw with your electrons and cause weird chemical crap. On the other hand, it can cause dielectric heating, which could possibly lead to some scrambling. Seems we'd see a lot more cancer though, if it did cause cancer. Hard to say, however, due to the fact that cell phone popularity has risen so recently.
It acts in a cumulative effect, over a short period. But having a series of chest x-rays one year, and having another set 5 years later, and another set 5 years after that, doesn't mean that after the last set you're suddenly going to have radiation sickness and thyroid cancer.
Besides, I'm not sure where you're going with the comparison to hard radiation. Sure, we're talking electromagnetic radiation here, but cell phone towers don't pump out gamma radiation or x-rays...They pump out much lower frequency microwaves. I would be suspicious to see such a high incidence of cancer coming from microwave exposure, unless there is a problem with that tower.
Radon doesn't make sense because the tumors were clustered on only one floor. Even if the AC was recycling the gas through the building, you'd thing the tumors would have been more spread out.
Of course it's impossible to tell without knowing more about the sample set. There may be some other factor that would be an obvious cause, if the reporters had gone into enough detail.
Still, it's not impossible that you could get a soft tissue tumor from being in close proximity to a high power transmitter for a long period of time, so it shouldn't be ruled out.
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gank: GA-nk, v, to brutally slay or kill, esp. when the slayer has an unfair advantage.
His post was much more articulate. Also, I would have to say that, if you were trying to say the same thing, you failed utterly.
His point was that my point contained a logical inconsistency, whereas your point, and correct me if I'm wrong here, was that preaching to everyone who one would happen to meet on the streets was a moral imperative, and the refusal of the passerby to listen would necessarily encompass the destruction of their nation, or a 40' drop, depending.
While I view his post as a bit of a logical nit-pick, as he is clearly willfully missing my point of tolerance, I view your post as a good example of the sort of obstinate "I'm right and you're wrong" arrogant, and intractible belief system that I'm talking about. God very clearly spelled out his command to Israel in the OT, and they skipped it, and paid the price. Well and good.
I am unaware of any modern commands so explicitly laid out. All modern imperatives, in fact, seem to be originating with a group of intolerant demagogues who remind me much more of Pharisees than Christians, who preach out of temples with built-in ATMs and gift shoppes, while claiming, with no sense of shame, to be in complete understanding of the mind of god.
Interesting point. I am not, as you seem to be suggesting, an ethical relativist. On the other hand, Christian dogma is so amazingly fragmented it would be difficult to attribute anything like a consistency of belief across the whole of the religion.
My point, thus, is that, where there is doubt, there should be circumspection. I've never heard a defense of murder, for example, that would appeal to a rational audience. On the other hand, biblical passages have in times past been used to justify murder, for example, the Salem Witch Trials.
Now while I hold that anyone who feels strongly that witches should be burned has every right to that belief, I strongly object when they try to impose that belief on a world that disagrees. Likewise with the modern evangelical tradition of deciding, arbitrarily, on what constitues the truth, and then attempting to force that belief on all and sundry. They would certainly expect their beliefs to be honored...indeed recent history can be conclusively shown to demonstrate a tendency on the part of evangelical christians to hysterically denounce any and every action that they feel impinges on the fullness of their belief (e.g The "Holiday Tree" debate, and others).
Now, historically, there has been a way around this impasse of beliefs that I'm going to refer to as laws, which, for the purposes of discussion, we can think of as "enforcable beliefs" that are agreed on by people who otherwise have different belief structures. Now recently, the evangelical types have taken to thinking of any "belief" (be it legal, moral, logical, or scientific) that runs a counter to their own beliefs as less valid, and, indeed, a purely personal attack on their correct beliefs.
Now my argument, if you would call it thus, is simply to point out that, with so much disagreement on the fine points as it were, of their beliefs, it would be wise for them to accept, with some Christ-style holy humility, that other people are also entitled to beliefs, before their hysterical intolerance breeds domestically the very same problems we see all over the world.
The question is, are you giving them the way out, or are you leading them into damnation? You're assuming that your interpretation is the only possible true interpretation, and that therefore you have the right & duty to enforce that interpretation on people who disagree with you. That is incredible hubris.
In the modern day, we see a lot of people judging and throwing stones, and claiming that they're right to do so. Now, I'm no biblical scholar, but I'm pretty sure that both the OT and the NT are pretty specific about people usurping the perogatives that belong to god.
Let me be blunt: It is not given to you to be judge and jury to your fellow man. No one appointed you the sole keeper of god's laws, and nothing makes your interpretation of those laws superior to anothers.
Talking about Sun clients, you're talking about a premium put on service and reliablity. I have Sun machines here that have been running for 4 years without a reboot. Sun ray terminals have a lifespan of ten years or more.
Then contrast that with the absolute cheapest thing Dell can mass produce.
Then think of all the headache that the "extra capabilities" are going to cause. Harddrives to fail. Operating Systems to become corrupt. Local backups to manage. God help you if you have to add any software to it as well, all that gets added directly on to your cost, as does the staff needed to service and support it.
With a thin client system, all that headache is gone. The local machine is completely disposable. There is nothing stored on it at all. If it blows up, all you have to do is plug in a new one. All your data, everything, is stored on the nice server, with a nice raid, and nice managed backups, and an operating system that is not in the position to be fiddled with.
You need half the staff to maintain the system, the system itself runs quick (as it would not with whatever piece of celeron crap dell is selling for 300 bucks), and, even more importantly, you probably won't need to upgrade your terminals to keep your hardware current. Add a new server if things start running slow, and since the terminals are just terminals, they don't need to be replaced.
Thin client is just a better solution unless you're running something that is hugely procesor intensive on the local machines. Even if the setup cost twice as much to set up (hugely unlikely), you'd make it back quick in lower maintenance costs.
Yes indeed, if you correct your child, then you have a point. If you'll reread my above post, you'll find that I have no problem with god correcting someone's misunderstandings.
My problem is with people who think they understand god's mind better than god does. Who are they to judge? Are they not mortal and falliable? In their own minds, the answer is clearly no, which is all kinds of pride and hubris.
(Sorry for the OT thread hijack, but I've got Karma to burn, and I don't feel like letting this one pass)
No, it just means you're a hateful, intolerant, dissapointment to god.
If you really believed that god loved everyone, then you'd have to think he knew something you didn't, and you'd kinda have to keep your nose out of other peoples business. If it's all right with god, it should be all right with you. If it's not all right with god, I don't think he needs your help getting his point across.
On the other hand, if you knew that god loved everyone, and yet you still walked around telling everyone what to do, and how to think, and what to believe...all that says is you think god's a complete moron for loving all the wrong people. You don't trust god's judgement. Think you know better than god.
Pride is a deadly sin, remember?
The only big problem is most people don't really care how sharp their tv is, and most people aren't keen on upgrading their entrie dvd collection, and while they can afford it, it doesn't follow that they will rush out and buy it.
Yea I agree. I don't think it'll outdo the PS2...I think it would be hard to, considering how many big players have stepped up with good offerings.
If they can sell enough though to make it so that all hd tv makers have to build in blu-ray support...that'll be the tipping point, because you'll have two formats, but only one that everyone supports. Consumers get really antsy about stuff like that with multi-thousand dollar purchases.
Anyway, I think the price'll drop pretty quick, and then they'll be competing with the Xbox while having a superior feature set. Of course the xbox release cycle is less, so they can catch up more easily. But if blu-ray is the standard then, ms'll have to liscense it from sony.
Very interesting. I give this a much better chance of success than any of Sony's other crappy format ventures. Psp video...yech.
Oh, I agree with you. Iomega proved the flaw of closed standards. Zip disks could have been the standard for rewritable media, but they kept the standard as tight as possible, media stayed expensive, and hardly anyone bought them. Rambus ram, same story. Minidisk, Beta, PSPv, etc.
I don't know. Their ideological constraints may prohibit them from making the smart choice. They may still pull it out though. I'm going to be following it, mainly because I have absolutely no use for any of the products involved, so I can view it as entertainment.
The short answer is: it doesn't matter if they lose money, because they can afford to. If blu-ray flops and the PS3 does well, then Sony just netted themselves a nice proprietary format for their games.
It's worth it to them to gamble on being the hd standard. The stakes if they win are so huge that they'd be dumb not to risk it. It's not just the disks...It's the disks, the players, the tvs, everything.
You answered your own question. People like to believe that, because Sony is evil, they're going to go bankrupt. They don't want to know the facts.
They hear things like "Huge drop in profits!" and they think, "Sony is losing money" rather than, "Sony is sinking ridiculous money into research, which, even if the PS3 goes into the crapper will still net them billions in terms of new patents and new technology."
Sony's not some fly-by-night software company with no material assets. They're a freaking tech manufacturing giant. Even if you're not buying Sony products, products you're buying have Sony components. They have factories and properties worth billions. They're not going to dry up and blow away.
That's probably why the PS2 is still the most popular console...Oh wait...
They're going to keep being evil, no doubt. But don't think it's going to eat their bottom line. It hasn't yet, and it's unlikely to in the future.
The first two google results are both 2+ years old, and the very first one talks about profits dropping dramatically to _only_ the 1 billion dollar range.
Big corporations don't die. You have no conception of the actual amount of value that is attached to a company the size of sony. If they never made another product, and switched purely to research and liscensing, they'd still be making a nice profit. They employ more people than a small country.
Yea, they'll look stupid if the PS3 flops, and stupid if blu-ray doesn't catch on. They've looked stupid before. Sony dominates the console market. Last numbers I saw ranked them at SEVENTY PERCENT.
You forgot about that stupid psp video format.
Just because they haven't won one yet, doesn't mean they never will. they're banking on the PS3 to get blu-ray into every home. If it happens, they'll be geniuses. If it doesn't they'll be idiots.
This time, they're trying to do it the right way, which I think is interesting. They're putting the player out before they're putting the media out, and they're attaching cool stuff(games) to the player, which will almost certainly get people buying them. Sure it'll be pricey, but so is a regular computer, and people dump crazy money on them (cue computer vs console arguments).
It only remains to be seen if they can sell enough units to force blu-ray to the standard.
Sure Sony is run by a bunch of jackasses. Sure their PS3 product doesn't seem to match up to the current competition. Sure they're schizoid with regards to their music distribution, etc.
But they are not today, nor in the next 10 years, at all likely to "Self-destruct". This is a corporation, not a political party. They're not losing money at present, and if they pull off the PS3 thing well enough to set blu-ray as the new hd standard (who cares about the games?), their entire board of directors is going to spend the next decade snorting coke and gold dust off the asses of high priced prostitutes.
They're taking the long view in this situation, and I'll be surprised if we'll know how it worked out for a decade or more. The value of owning the dominant video standard cannot be overestimated.
Eh, I agree with you, but that's not the whine I was referring to. I should have been more specific.
The whine that I was referring to, the whine that makes me absolutely irate, is the "I can't ever use another product but the one I'm currently using" whine. I hear it every time someone's software gets upgraded, I hear it every time I replace someone's closed source app with an opensource app (for budget reasons, usually). People fear change, and they are extremely resistant to change, and it annoys me.
Unless you have a bunch of fancy macros in your excel spreadsheets, you can use any of a number of OSS spreadsheets and not have to worry about WINE or anything else. But you can't convince people of that.
Mind you, I think that that type of phish is the most sophisticated type of phish, being both elegant and simple. I "fell" for one of those back in the day, in that I got an email from my bank, and it notified me of some account change, so I immediately and without checking the validity of the link on the email...called my bank on the phone and said, "What the hell is up with this?"
They of course, didn't know anything about it, I checked the link and realized it was false. That was just long term ingrained habit that puleld me out of that one, because it was an excellent phish. But how do you teach those habits of suspicion to a layman?
It's just a security issue. I deal with passwords all day every day, and people are awful with their password security. It just doesn't make any sense to them, and they all think that the consequences for this or that little security breach are harmless, and so when something like this comes along, they fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.
I love WINE (and wine), and I actually like fiddling with WINE (with wine) to run my programs...Expecting this, however, of a non-technical user is like expecting them to perform brainsurgery. They're not going to be able to do it, the instructions we post on how to do it will be too complex for them to follow (anything where skipping a step will break the process will be to complex for them), and they will become embittered and write articles for the WSJ about how over-complex Linux is, when, in reality, the issue is they can't run Excel.
Until WINE is to the point where you don't have to fiddle with it to get it to load Office and run Office flawlessly, we're going to be getting these whiny criticisms.
And I've been walking around in the sun for 30 years, and I don't have skin cancer yet.
Yet.
It is still way too early to say what the long term effects will be. It could be statisticly insignificant, or it could be huge.
=)
I'm not an intellectual snob. I don't think a profession is unskilled, just because you get to get your hands dirty.
Skilled work, in my mind, is anything where experience keeps mattering after a year or two. Someone who has been a programmer, or a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a blacksmith for many many years, will have a body of knowledge and skill that could never be reproduced by someone without that experience.
Yea...Offtopic. Sheesh.
It's tempting to attribute a causal relation to something that could just be coincidence. It's not really past the realm of possibility, so the chance that it is just chance has to be appreciated.
Brain cancer is one of those weird ones. The brain is soft tissue, with a lot of stuff going on in it...There are environmental factors that can lead to brain cancer (eg vinyl chloride), and it can even occur "spontaneously" as it were.
Microwave emissions seem unlikely to cause brain cancer, because it's non-ionizing radiation...Mean's it's less likely to screw with your electrons and cause weird chemical crap. On the other hand, it can cause dielectric heating, which could possibly lead to some scrambling. Seems we'd see a lot more cancer though, if it did cause cancer. Hard to say, however, due to the fact that cell phone popularity has risen so recently.
It acts in a cumulative effect, over a short period. But having a series of chest x-rays one year, and having another set 5 years later, and another set 5 years after that, doesn't mean that after the last set you're suddenly going to have radiation sickness and thyroid cancer.
Besides, I'm not sure where you're going with the comparison to hard radiation. Sure, we're talking electromagnetic radiation here, but cell phone towers don't pump out gamma radiation or x-rays...They pump out much lower frequency microwaves. I would be suspicious to see such a high incidence of cancer coming from microwave exposure, unless there is a problem with that tower.
Radon doesn't make sense because the tumors were clustered on only one floor. Even if the AC was recycling the gas through the building, you'd thing the tumors would have been more spread out.
Of course it's impossible to tell without knowing more about the sample set. There may be some other factor that would be an obvious cause, if the reporters had gone into enough detail.
Still, it's not impossible that you could get a soft tissue tumor from being in close proximity to a high power transmitter for a long period of time, so it shouldn't be ruled out.
I think I'm going to go with "Blacksmith".