They sure will. If you can give me a 30% reduction in ticket price but a 10 hour flight instead of an 8 hour one across the atlantic that would be fine by me.
Yes, I know you mention the Atlantic. However. Consider my Chicago to NYC trip for the 2600 H.O.P.E. convention.
In theory, a 4 hour flight or whatever. In practice, an hour of traffic to get to airport, you're supposed to get there 2 hours earlier. On the other side a nice hour long commute from airport to hotel. Total door to door, 8 hours.
Or I could take the train (which I did) hop on at dinner time, leisurely meal, wake up in NYC before lunch. Lets say 12 hours.
In this case, leisurely luxury travel on the train was a non-financial choice.
Now if they slow the plane down to take 6 hours, maybe more. Suddenly Amtrak is a serious competitor (Amtrak!). Heck my own car would be a competitor.
If your flight from new york to LA took an extra half hour and cost 30% less, i don't think anybody would complain
For scheduling reasons, moving the same amount of cattle will now take something like 8% more aircraft. That means that several internal empires will need to expand by at least 8%, in some cases much more. Hourly crew costs and massive management overhead always scales super-linearly. Financing costs for 8% more planes on less revenue will demand a higher interest rate, so financial costs will increase super-linearly.
If an airline did the "slowdown" thing for marketing to "save the planet" they're going to have to increase ticket costs at least 10% merely to break even financially.
I don't know the minimal velocity (and corresponding fuel consumption rates) to keep a 737 aloft, but I suspect it's well below cruising speed.
Best rate of climb speed "Vx" is found in the POH pilots operating handbook. Despite all kinds of available simulators, why is it not available via google? Who knows.
Rule of thumb is about twice V2 speed (or in the case of a 737, about V2+150). V2 being about 150 knots depending on how heavily loaded.
Airfoils can be engineered to be most efficient at a certain speed. Also they're attached to the airframe at a certain angle, so flying at a non-optimal AoA means increased fuselage (body) drag.
All this science aside the answer is about 300 knots for any large passenger A/C of similar aerodynamic design and vaguely similar size. Kind of like how all similar size ocean liners "go about the same speed".
They sure will. If you can give me a 30% reduction in ticket price but a 10 hour flight instead of an 8 hour one across the atlantic that would be fine by me.
Doesn't work exactly like that. Levitating a million pounds of aluminum costs a certain amount per unit time, no matter how slowly you move it. Also the hotel loads of pressurizing, electricity, air conditioning, hydraulics, all are mostly invariant. And cost of inflight food/entertainment increases linearly with flight duration.
The real killer, however, is financial.
To simplify, lets assume the plane instantly loads and departs and magically requires no maintenance nor cleaning. That means the 8 hour flightplan makes 3 trips per day. And the 10 hour flightplan (drumroll as slashdotters get out their HP-48 calculators) makes 2.4 flights per day.
So, your 10 hour flightplan, in addition to lowering revenue by 30%, lowers total DAILY revenue, just due to scheduling by (3-2.4)/3 = 20%. Now you can play games with percentages all day, but be careful adding them or applying one on top of another. Even worse, To continue shipping the same number of bodies around in their current cattle car style, they need 20% more planes. And 20% larger maintenance facilities to process 20% more planes. And 20% more management overhead to supervise the 20% increase in staff. And a 20% higher bond/rent payment to pay for those planes.
And some people simply don't enjoy sitting in a cattle car. So they'll spend a little more dough to avoid it.
I would casually estimate that slowing the planes down with that discount would lower revenues "about" 50% while increasing expenses across the board roughly 25%. Profit margins are low enough that its unlikely any airline could survive that.
If anything, to survive, an airline that slows down "to save the planet!" is going to have to increase ticket costs modestly.
Here, you're talking about the effect of a cell phone on the person holding it -- the phone-to-brain distance r is small
Fair enough, I'll see your argument and raise it. How about nerve to nerve interference? Nerve to skin cell? Contact interval is much more severe being constant 24x7 since before birth. There should be a dramatic difference in say, skin cancer levels directly over the spine vs an area with few nerves. But there isn't. There should be a dramatic difference in skin cancer levels between skin with lots of nerves and skin with few. But there isn't. Cardiac electrical rhythms causing lung cancer? I think not. Nerve cell unit area density should correlate directly and strongly with tumor location, but it doesn't.
It's a valid point that some people carry RF transmitters around almost constantly, though a lot of those use different frequencies.
Fair enough, I'll see your argument and raise it. The AMPS analog cell phone frequencies were taken away from the top of the UHF TV channel spectrum. Not "different frequencies" but actually reassigned, reused frequencies. Cell phones operate at 600 mW, aka about a half watt. Your theory is there is some "effect" from that particular frequency of EM radiation that causes brain cancer. Lets say its a believable result if it increases the odds by 1 in a million. Thats a couple hundred extra brain cancers per year, far in excess of any claim, but I'll give generously concede. Now, thousands of UHF TV transmitter engineers, techs, ops, tower workers, spend/spent 40 hours per week (far in excess of cell exposure) in constant UHF TV fields ranging up to 1 megawatt. Lets assume the ever popular linear dose theory. So, thousands of UHF TV transmitter folks are exposed to a one-in-a-million cancer causing signal at almost 2 million times the intensity... Some multiplication later, and every single UHF TV engineer / tech / op / tower climber dude should have died of brain cancer within six months of being hired. Yet, they don't. There are plenty of career folks with amazing lifetime theoretical dosages whom expire of a heart attack after 40 years on the job.
The inherent problem with all "RF causes cancer" arguments is they assume there are not thousands to tens of thousands of control cases with exposure intervals orders of magnitude higher, field intensities literally millions of times higher, and lifetime-dosages orders of magnitude higher. Either tens of thousands of "industry" people have to drop like flies, which they don't, or the real true impact has to be in the single digit deaths per trillion range.
There is actually a paper on the medical basis for thinking that cell phone radiation could cause brain cancer.
"A" paper. Not exactly authoritative.
freely admits that there's no evidence suggesting that the proposed mechanism actually functions or that cell phones actually cause cancer.
Well, "A" paper says something could happen, but it almost certainly does not happen.
Maybe in pure benchmarks, but try comparing the speed when CPU utilization from other tasks is non-trivial...
Drives are slow enough, and multi-core CPUs are fast enough, that processing drops into the noise. Google some recent testing... fully saturated drives at 1% CPU use are not unusual claims. Or rephrased, doing software raid under worst case CPU use and best case drive thruput situations might cause up to one percent slowdown, theoretically, although no one will ever see that in the real world.
The situation with software raid drives is exactly where network firewalling was maybe a decade ago... In the olden days a PC-XT 16 bit 8 MHz bus could be fairly well saturated by a 100 meg ethernet. So "everyone knows" that firewalls need special dedicated expensive gear. But the folks with PCI buses and early pentiums running linux knew that they could do line rate no problem. For years I ran a desktop 486 fanless and underclocked to 25 MHz to firewall line rate 10 meg ethernet with ipchains, never getting much above 33% CPU or so, and the old timers simply refused to believe it was computationally possible, or I was faking it or something...
Now I will concede the point that small SOHO NAS boxes have notoriously underpowered CPUs... But good luck finding one that supports more than one installed drive, much less full RAID-5.
Both backscatter X-ray and millimeter wave scanners cause cancer
False. I know quite a bit about RF and millimeter wave is harmless. Just the typical american content-free knee jerk response of don't understand = scared. Go ahead, just try to provide any logical explanation other than "I don't understand physics therefore mm-wave must be evil".
15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte?
Yes, yes I did. I notice your very high six digit UID. Now when my father's employer paid something like $20K for a 5 meg DASD the size of a filing cabinet when I was a little kid, I never imagined I could buy my own personal "winchester disc" for less than "a buck a meg" but I finally did that on sale around 1990-ish timeframe. At that point you kind of get the idea that increasing capacity is a way of life. And its been that way for decades.
I had to toss a perfectly good Mac G4, just because Apple stopped supporting it, and its ancient Safari 2 browser could no longer render the web properly.
Stick Debian-PowerPC on it, install the latest firefox (aka iceweasel) on it, and go go go?
Not a bad noob reference. Its funny in a quaint way how it squeals about root LVM... that hasn't been a serious problem since like the Clinton administration. I know I've got vanilla out of the box Debian boxes from like half a decade ago with root LVM, just not an issue.
It does suck in the "Why" section, in that all it does is list "What" it can do.
Assuming the prerequisite of understanding what Xen/KVM/VMware does, think about how it wedges a layer in between the OS and the CPU so you can pool, combine, snapshot, transfer, share, shrink, expand, what the OS sees as "its" CPU. LVM does the same thing, except living between the partition table and the physical hardware. The analogy is LVM is to disks, like KVM/Xen/Vmware is to CPUs. I kind of enjoy this paragraph, I think its the best description of LVM I've ever read, and not just because I wrote it...
I'm not familiar with LVM. Mind giving a quick "noob's guide on what you should know"?
Its a "pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps" thing. He was trying to make a "funny". So, on my AMD64 from like five years ago, running linux 2.6 from like five years ago, I can theoretically provision a 8 Exabyte LVM logical volume (LV) which would seem to mean a 4TB LV is small potatoes. But LVs live inside PVs (simplification). All you gotta do, is use fdisk to create a honking big 4TB physical volume partition with type 8E. Oh wait, the problem was fdisk doesn't work. A real knee slapper. But not as funny as trying to use NTFS or windows on it.
Actually the real answer is you physically reconfigure your disks (how?) to make two little 2TB PVs then combine them into a VG (volume group) then put the 4 TB LV inside the VG. Then next year, when your collection of pr0n is like 3.9 TB, you buy a new 10 TB drive, add it to the VG, and remove the old drives from the VG. How you expand the LV to use the new space is your problem but it probably involves our old pal ext2resize or whatever appropriate.
I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.
Wikipedia brain tumor page "Apart from exposure to vinyl chloride or ionizing radiation, there are no known environmental factors associated with brain tumors."
Vinyl Chloride is the monomer that is polymerized into PVC. Once polymerized its inherently harmless, no reactive double bonds left, that being the definition of polymerization (more or less). Not an issue for American made products, well, at least since the 70s/80s, but Chinese quality control is not exactly the best. Plenty of real research with strong statistical results from real MDs. I would not fool around with something made of polymerized VC unless I trust the manufacturer literally with my life (i.e. not Chinese).
On the other side you've got a couple flakes that don't understand 1/r^2 or what a wavelength is, but they're sure the cellphones are bad via some mystical non-scientific experience, and wonder of wonders most of them are looking for money from rich corporations or trying to gain fame or power.
The main problem with the theoretical basis of RF cancers is it must follow 1/r^2 laws... if theres a detectable effect from wimpy 600 mW handsets, then cops, firemen, ham radio guys, RF engineers, transmitter techs, radar techs, they should all be dropping at a several orders of magnitude rate compared to the general public. But they never have and currently don't... Even assuming theres something mystical or numerological about cell phone frequencies and waveforms, if a 600 mW handset a couple hours a week is barely measurably dangerous, then being a celltower base station tech 40 hours a week at a hundred watts or so must be a guaranteed immediate death sentence, like cancer and death to 100% of personnel exposed within a year. But it isn't, its not even measurable.
There are folks whom will never let scientific reasoning stand in the way of a strong belief, and not just as regards the cellphone issue.
Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."
People with UNDIAGNOSED very early stage brain cancer might have problems functioning in society, equals less likelihood of cell phone ownership. Not implausible at all.
Don't forget to put a "control" lab monkey next to a Chinese made kids toy.
Polymerized plastics are vaguely believed to be safe, unless they're the scare tactic of the month like plastics containing BPA. Partially unpolymerized monomers are vaguely dangerous. Some of the initiators / mold releases / dyes / lead paints used in the plastic industry are downright hazardous. Basically, if its plastic, and it smells when it's new out the of package, its probably dangerous to your health. The only question is how dangerous.
cell phone radiation isn't causing some massive epidemic of brain cancer
Even if there were a high percentage of brain cancers from phone users, how would you tell the difference between cancer caused by RF wave, which has no theoretical basis or past proven medical experience/documentation, or cancer caused by weird plastics, weird dyes, lead paint, weird petrochemical outgassing from the plastic phones, which has a reasonable scientific biological basis for causing cancer, and unfortunately plenty of medical experience/documentation?
As an experiment, I've started wearing red-tinted wrap-around sun glasses 2 hours before bedtime.
If you try this and it has any effect, positive or negative, I'd like to hear about it.
Talk to home darkroom photographers (chemical prints, enlargers, etc). Also talk to astronomers, whom like that red light. I've done both, never personally experienced the "effect" nor heard rumors of other film photographers or astronomers being sedated by their red light...
I've heard there's "red-light" areas in some cities where not too much sleeping is going on in bed. I suggest further research, maybe get a grant to fly to Amsterdam?
Although urban lighting has always been with us, we have not (yet?) recognised it as a disruptive influence.
You city slickers can shut off your lights, but what should us country hicks do about moonlight? Only sleep one week per month?
Also you city slickers can have "silent" rooms but us country hicks whom have gone camping, hear a rock concert of bugs, birds, and nocturnal critters. Seriously loud at times!
Everything urban is not necessarily bad strictly because its urban, and "natural" is not inherently good, despite enviro-loon propaganda.
Guess it depends on the person because even though I have had a computer in my bedroom since before I was born I have never had a problem sleeping anywhere or any time.
If you get a girlfriend she will put all those computer things away at night. You also get to have sex and cuddle and spoon her, making it really easy to fall a sleep. It's the easiest and simplest fix.
Is one of them "girlfriend" things still the easiest and simplest fix, if you're married?
Slashdot Mirror
They sure will. If you can give me a 30% reduction in ticket price but a 10 hour flight instead of an 8 hour one across the atlantic that would be fine by me.
Yes, I know you mention the Atlantic. However. Consider my Chicago to NYC trip for the 2600 H.O.P.E. convention.
In theory, a 4 hour flight or whatever. In practice, an hour of traffic to get to airport, you're supposed to get there 2 hours earlier. On the other side a nice hour long commute from airport to hotel. Total door to door, 8 hours.
Or I could take the train (which I did) hop on at dinner time, leisurely meal, wake up in NYC before lunch. Lets say 12 hours.
In this case, leisurely luxury travel on the train was a non-financial choice.
Now if they slow the plane down to take 6 hours, maybe more. Suddenly Amtrak is a serious competitor (Amtrak!). Heck my own car would be a competitor.
If your flight from new york to LA took an extra half hour and cost 30% less, i don't think anybody would complain
For scheduling reasons, moving the same amount of cattle will now take something like 8% more aircraft. That means that several internal empires will need to expand by at least 8%, in some cases much more. Hourly crew costs and massive management overhead always scales super-linearly. Financing costs for 8% more planes on less revenue will demand a higher interest rate, so financial costs will increase super-linearly.
If an airline did the "slowdown" thing for marketing to "save the planet" they're going to have to increase ticket costs at least 10% merely to break even financially.
I don't know the minimal velocity (and corresponding fuel consumption rates) to keep a 737 aloft, but I suspect it's well below cruising speed.
Best rate of climb speed "Vx" is found in the POH pilots operating handbook. Despite all kinds of available simulators, why is it not available via google? Who knows.
Rule of thumb is about twice V2 speed (or in the case of a 737, about V2+150). V2 being about 150 knots depending on how heavily loaded.
Airfoils can be engineered to be most efficient at a certain speed. Also they're attached to the airframe at a certain angle, so flying at a non-optimal AoA means increased fuselage (body) drag.
All this science aside the answer is about 300 knots for any large passenger A/C of similar aerodynamic design and vaguely similar size. Kind of like how all similar size ocean liners "go about the same speed".
They sure will. If you can give me a 30% reduction in ticket price but a 10 hour flight instead of an 8 hour one across the atlantic that would be fine by me.
Doesn't work exactly like that. Levitating a million pounds of aluminum costs a certain amount per unit time, no matter how slowly you move it. Also the hotel loads of pressurizing, electricity, air conditioning, hydraulics, all are mostly invariant. And cost of inflight food/entertainment increases linearly with flight duration.
The real killer, however, is financial.
To simplify, lets assume the plane instantly loads and departs and magically requires no maintenance nor cleaning. That means the 8 hour flightplan makes 3 trips per day. And the 10 hour flightplan (drumroll as slashdotters get out their HP-48 calculators) makes 2.4 flights per day.
So, your 10 hour flightplan, in addition to lowering revenue by 30%, lowers total DAILY revenue, just due to scheduling by (3-2.4)/3 = 20%. Now you can play games with percentages all day, but be careful adding them or applying one on top of another. Even worse, To continue shipping the same number of bodies around in their current cattle car style, they need 20% more planes. And 20% larger maintenance facilities to process 20% more planes. And 20% more management overhead to supervise the 20% increase in staff. And a 20% higher bond/rent payment to pay for those planes.
And some people simply don't enjoy sitting in a cattle car. So they'll spend a little more dough to avoid it.
I would casually estimate that slowing the planes down with that discount would lower revenues "about" 50% while increasing expenses across the board roughly 25%. Profit margins are low enough that its unlikely any airline could survive that.
If anything, to survive, an airline that slows down "to save the planet!" is going to have to increase ticket costs modestly.
Here, you're talking about the effect of a cell phone on the person holding it -- the phone-to-brain distance r is small
Fair enough, I'll see your argument and raise it. How about nerve to nerve interference? Nerve to skin cell? Contact interval is much more severe being constant 24x7 since before birth. There should be a dramatic difference in say, skin cancer levels directly over the spine vs an area with few nerves. But there isn't. There should be a dramatic difference in skin cancer levels between skin with lots of nerves and skin with few. But there isn't. Cardiac electrical rhythms causing lung cancer? I think not. Nerve cell unit area density should correlate directly and strongly with tumor location, but it doesn't.
It's a valid point that some people carry RF transmitters around almost constantly, though a lot of those use different frequencies.
Fair enough, I'll see your argument and raise it. The AMPS analog cell phone frequencies were taken away from the top of the UHF TV channel spectrum. Not "different frequencies" but actually reassigned, reused frequencies. Cell phones operate at 600 mW, aka about a half watt. Your theory is there is some "effect" from that particular frequency of EM radiation that causes brain cancer. Lets say its a believable result if it increases the odds by 1 in a million. Thats a couple hundred extra brain cancers per year, far in excess of any claim, but I'll give generously concede. Now, thousands of UHF TV transmitter engineers, techs, ops, tower workers, spend/spent 40 hours per week (far in excess of cell exposure) in constant UHF TV fields ranging up to 1 megawatt. Lets assume the ever popular linear dose theory. So, thousands of UHF TV transmitter folks are exposed to a one-in-a-million cancer causing signal at almost 2 million times the intensity... Some multiplication later, and every single UHF TV engineer / tech / op / tower climber dude should have died of brain cancer within six months of being hired. Yet, they don't. There are plenty of career folks with amazing lifetime theoretical dosages whom expire of a heart attack after 40 years on the job.
The inherent problem with all "RF causes cancer" arguments is they assume there are not thousands to tens of thousands of control cases with exposure intervals orders of magnitude higher, field intensities literally millions of times higher, and lifetime-dosages orders of magnitude higher. Either tens of thousands of "industry" people have to drop like flies, which they don't, or the real true impact has to be in the single digit deaths per trillion range.
There is actually a paper on the medical basis for thinking that cell phone radiation could cause brain cancer.
"A" paper. Not exactly authoritative.
freely admits that there's no evidence suggesting that the proposed mechanism actually functions or that cell phones actually cause cancer.
Well, "A" paper says something could happen, but it almost certainly does not happen.
Maybe in pure benchmarks, but try comparing the speed when CPU utilization from other tasks is non-trivial...
Drives are slow enough, and multi-core CPUs are fast enough, that processing drops into the noise. Google some recent testing... fully saturated drives at 1% CPU use are not unusual claims. Or rephrased, doing software raid under worst case CPU use and best case drive thruput situations might cause up to one percent slowdown, theoretically, although no one will ever see that in the real world.
The situation with software raid drives is exactly where network firewalling was maybe a decade ago... In the olden days a PC-XT 16 bit 8 MHz bus could be fairly well saturated by a 100 meg ethernet. So "everyone knows" that firewalls need special dedicated expensive gear. But the folks with PCI buses and early pentiums running linux knew that they could do line rate no problem. For years I ran a desktop 486 fanless and underclocked to 25 MHz to firewall line rate 10 meg ethernet with ipchains, never getting much above 33% CPU or so, and the old timers simply refused to believe it was computationally possible, or I was faking it or something...
Now I will concede the point that small SOHO NAS boxes have notoriously underpowered CPUs... But good luck finding one that supports more than one installed drive, much less full RAID-5.
Both backscatter X-ray and millimeter wave scanners cause cancer
False. I know quite a bit about RF and millimeter wave is harmless. Just the typical american content-free knee jerk response of don't understand = scared. Go ahead, just try to provide any logical explanation other than "I don't understand physics therefore mm-wave must be evil".
X-ray, in comparison, is not good for you.
It is already over now, to put more data onto a magnetic HD you add more platters or increase the radius, that's all.
I believe I've found your dream hard drive:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html
The best part is the 305-RAMAC CPU inherently provides that "smooth vacuum tube sound" when decoding mp3s...
15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte?
Yes, yes I did. I notice your very high six digit UID. Now when my father's employer paid something like $20K for a 5 meg DASD the size of a filing cabinet when I was a little kid, I never imagined I could buy my own personal "winchester disc" for less than "a buck a meg" but I finally did that on sale around 1990-ish timeframe. At that point you kind of get the idea that increasing capacity is a way of life. And its been that way for decades.
I'm guessing what Seagate really did was come out with a 750GB platter, that can be used to produce a 3GB drive with 4 of those platters.
Minor nitpick but that would be a 6TB drive. Probably 2 dual sided platters at 0.750TB per side.
(a hardware RAID ..... but you get massive speed increases).
Hasn't been true since like the 90s. Linux software raid is always quicker, and far more interoperable and standardized.
I had to toss a perfectly good Mac G4, just because Apple stopped supporting it, and its ancient Safari 2 browser could no longer render the web properly.
Stick Debian-PowerPC on it, install the latest firefox (aka iceweasel) on it, and go go go?
Not exactly a "noob's" guide, and it hasn't been updated in awhile, but: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
Not a bad noob reference. Its funny in a quaint way how it squeals about root LVM... that hasn't been a serious problem since like the Clinton administration. I know I've got vanilla out of the box Debian boxes from like half a decade ago with root LVM, just not an issue.
It does suck in the "Why" section, in that all it does is list "What" it can do.
Assuming the prerequisite of understanding what Xen/KVM/VMware does, think about how it wedges a layer in between the OS and the CPU so you can pool, combine, snapshot, transfer, share, shrink, expand, what the OS sees as "its" CPU. LVM does the same thing, except living between the partition table and the physical hardware. The analogy is LVM is to disks, like KVM/Xen/Vmware is to CPUs. I kind of enjoy this paragraph, I think its the best description of LVM I've ever read, and not just because I wrote it...
I'm not familiar with LVM. Mind giving a quick "noob's guide on what you should know"?
Its a "pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps" thing. He was trying to make a "funny". So, on my AMD64 from like five years ago, running linux 2.6 from like five years ago, I can theoretically provision a 8 Exabyte LVM logical volume (LV) which would seem to mean a 4TB LV is small potatoes. But LVs live inside PVs (simplification). All you gotta do, is use fdisk to create a honking big 4TB physical volume partition with type 8E. Oh wait, the problem was fdisk doesn't work. A real knee slapper. But not as funny as trying to use NTFS or windows on it.
Actually the real answer is you physically reconfigure your disks (how?) to make two little 2TB PVs then combine them into a VG (volume group) then put the 4 TB LV inside the VG. Then next year, when your collection of pr0n is like 3.9 TB, you buy a new 10 TB drive, add it to the VG, and remove the old drives from the VG. How you expand the LV to use the new space is your problem but it probably involves our old pal ext2resize or whatever appropriate.
I think brain cancer caused by the RF radiation (which does have an unproven theoretical basis) has a stronger argument behind it than getting brain cancer from touching a cell phone.
Wikipedia brain tumor page "Apart from exposure to vinyl chloride or ionizing radiation, there are no known environmental factors associated with brain tumors."
Vinyl Chloride is the monomer that is polymerized into PVC. Once polymerized its inherently harmless, no reactive double bonds left, that being the definition of polymerization (more or less). Not an issue for American made products, well, at least since the 70s/80s, but Chinese quality control is not exactly the best. Plenty of real research with strong statistical results from real MDs. I would not fool around with something made of polymerized VC unless I trust the manufacturer literally with my life (i.e. not Chinese).
On the other side you've got a couple flakes that don't understand 1/r^2 or what a wavelength is, but they're sure the cellphones are bad via some mystical non-scientific experience, and wonder of wonders most of them are looking for money from rich corporations or trying to gain fame or power.
The main problem with the theoretical basis of RF cancers is it must follow 1/r^2 laws... if theres a detectable effect from wimpy 600 mW handsets, then cops, firemen, ham radio guys, RF engineers, transmitter techs, radar techs, they should all be dropping at a several orders of magnitude rate compared to the general public. But they never have and currently don't... Even assuming theres something mystical or numerological about cell phone frequencies and waveforms, if a 600 mW handset a couple hours a week is barely measurably dangerous, then being a celltower base station tech 40 hours a week at a hundred watts or so must be a guaranteed immediate death sentence, like cancer and death to 100% of personnel exposed within a year. But it isn't, its not even measurable.
There are folks whom will never let scientific reasoning stand in the way of a strong belief, and not just as regards the cellphone issue.
Results for some groups showed cellphone use actually appeared to lessen the risk of developing cancers, something the researchers described as "implausible."
People with UNDIAGNOSED very early stage brain cancer might have problems functioning in society, equals less likelihood of cell phone ownership. Not implausible at all.
Put a lab monkey next to an active mobile phone
Don't forget to put a "control" lab monkey next to a Chinese made kids toy.
Polymerized plastics are vaguely believed to be safe, unless they're the scare tactic of the month like plastics containing BPA. Partially unpolymerized monomers are vaguely dangerous. Some of the initiators / mold releases / dyes / lead paints used in the plastic industry are downright hazardous. Basically, if its plastic, and it smells when it's new out the of package, its probably dangerous to your health. The only question is how dangerous.
cell phone radiation isn't causing some massive epidemic of brain cancer
Even if there were a high percentage of brain cancers from phone users, how would you tell the difference between cancer caused by RF wave, which has no theoretical basis or past proven medical experience/documentation, or cancer caused by weird plastics, weird dyes, lead paint, weird petrochemical outgassing from the plastic phones, which has a reasonable scientific biological basis for causing cancer, and unfortunately plenty of medical experience/documentation?
Correlation Causation...
Somewhere along the line, these blue LEDs became some sort defacto choice for any electronic manufacturer I have bought from recently.
Look on the bright side, my new(-ish) electric blanket has a dull green LED that is invisible after sunrise. Is the blanket on? Who knows!
As an experiment, I've started wearing red-tinted wrap-around sun glasses 2 hours before bedtime.
If you try this and it has any effect, positive or negative, I'd like to hear about it.
Talk to home darkroom photographers (chemical prints, enlargers, etc). Also talk to astronomers, whom like that red light. I've done both, never personally experienced the "effect" nor heard rumors of other film photographers or astronomers being sedated by their red light...
I've heard there's "red-light" areas in some cities where not too much sleeping is going on in bed. I suggest further research, maybe get a grant to fly to Amsterdam?
Although urban lighting has always been with us, we have not (yet?) recognised it as a disruptive influence.
You city slickers can shut off your lights, but what should us country hicks do about moonlight? Only sleep one week per month?
Also you city slickers can have "silent" rooms but us country hicks whom have gone camping, hear a rock concert of bugs, birds, and nocturnal critters. Seriously loud at times!
Everything urban is not necessarily bad strictly because its urban, and "natural" is not inherently good, despite enviro-loon propaganda.
Waking up screaming and shitting in my pants every couple of hours.
Apparently, yet another 3rd shift coworker here on Slashdot. Its even worse when it happens in long boring meetings.
Guess it depends on the person because even though I have had a computer in my bedroom since before I was born I have never had a problem sleeping anywhere or any time.
Do you work third shift here?
If you get a girlfriend she will put all those computer things away at night. You also get to have sex and cuddle and spoon her, making it really easy to fall a sleep. It's the easiest and simplest fix.
Is one of them "girlfriend" things still the easiest and simplest fix, if you're married?
This is just a diagnostics test. It won't kill anyone.
Hopefully you'll never be in the market for a blood sugar test kit.