Plenty of people would be interested if you can detect cell phone radiation in a double-blind test. You could look up who did some of the to-date unsuccessful tests and try to contact them.
It's been done already. In one of the studies someone accurately did that 9 out of 9 times. Most others were not much more than chance (though there were other anomolies). The overall conclusion of the study was not affected by this person even though it was virtually impossible to be pure chance. And who actually reads TFA?
Did that cause the researcher to do more experiments? No. Research is seriously biased by corporate funding and politics driven by lobbyists.
Not a "conspiracy," just that money talks and always has. Most scientists are not willing to give up their career. They have families to feed and want to have some chance to continue to do what they enjoy, and maybe get a change to make a real difference someday. They have to pick their battles.
Look what happened to the doctor who insisted that doctors should wash their hands after handling cadavers, before delivering babies. He was attacked and ignored, and it was decades before the reality was accepted. Why?
From Wikepedia: "Specifically, Semmelweis' claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
The findings were ignored because it wasn't _already_ understood how it could happen.
How many times has THAT happened in the history of science? All pioneers get arrows in the back...
Again, the issue is not science per se. It's who is funding and controlling what gets released. This even fools those who understand science because they are fed flawed data, and twisted conclusions from research studies.
And many people here won't like that, because they cling to the belief that anything published as "Science" must be TRUTH. Not in our current society, where corporations overwhelmingly pay for the research. Politics reign in the upper levels of universities too.
Troll? For relating personal experiments and the experience of others here in another thread?
A lot TALK about science here, but often it's more like the OS and editor religious wars. People all over the world want to believe that their group has the corner on The Truth, and anything that threatens what they think they already know is automatically evil and must be silenced before any "dangerous ideas" infect the general population. Don't want anyone thinking for themselves...
I posted a link further down to a university researcher who was an expert in DNA and showed clear DNA damage. Motorola didn't like that... This story was published by a university alumni group.
Whatever is actually happening, we can be sure that electrosensitivty is not actually caused by EM fields. There have been too many studies showing no link.
As I mentioned in my other reply, there are large industry forces which need to be considered when evaluating these studies. You'll also often find that the U.S. studies are all favorable to an industry, and only foreign studies disagree.
Note that he is an expert in DNA and DNA damage was clearly shown from exposure to an actual cell phone.
The aura of science is often used to make people believe exactly what the PTB want them to believe. Remember doctors on cigarette commercials, telling how great they were, while the tobacco companies were very well aware of the dangers? Careful who you believe, and check if they would lose their funding or even their career if they dared report anything which might cost a large corporation money (and or course some politician their campaign funding).
Real life is much messier than we want to believe...
My education is in electronics and I've deeply studied the human body for 30 years. I also understand scientific process quite well, thank you.
I've done many experiments to explore this over the last 10 years. Imagine an experiment where your head is within a foot of a device and you get nearly immediate pressure and nausea. Move the head away from the device and the effect lessens, and eventually disappears past a certain distance. Repeat variations of this experiment hundreds of times over ten years. Immediate effect from the stimulus. No stimulus, no effect. Stimulus is observed to lose effect with distance, quite quickly in fact.
That is precisely what I am talking about. My own direct experience, carefully investigated.
Many of the studies quoted in the link you supplied are difficult to get to actually read, so I can't comment on them. But I can comment on my direct experience over a very long period.
My electronics background certainly helped to understand the likely square-distance effect, and experimenting with headsets. True to theory, BlueTooth headsets are fine (though wired headsets were found to be nearly as bad as having the phone itself next to my head)
Also, I've noticed the same problem being very close to some operating microwave ovens and wireless routers. Both of those were surprises. I just noticed the same familiar feeling and started looking for a reason, and later made the connection.
Move a couple more feet away from the oven and or the router and problem solved. It is related to power, and it is not exactly the same level of sensitivity every day. (though it is always present; and varying sensitivity is to be expected)
I realize whatever it happening does not fit the current theories, but we can't just change the experimental data...
I couldn't help notice a reference in the link you supplied to a test for whether a cell phone was in a bag or not. Please...
There is a huge difference between an idle phone in a bag and talking on one with it sitting right next to your head. The power difference due to the continuous active transmission when speaking into the phone and the square-distance law is HUGE (orders of magnitude). That's just one example of a biased experiment.
I realize that the subjects might have made wild claims the experimenters were trying to verify, but I would not make those claims. The effect I notice is clearly related to transmission power, and below a certain threshold is not consciously noticeable.
I'm okay with a cell phone in my hand while I use a BlueTooth headset, or even with the phone a couple feet from my head. But not much closer. Same with some wireless routers.
Again, I'm talking about my particular experience, which I've carefully investigated over more than 10 years. I'm not making wild claims in general. Though given my experience, I do think there is something to be investigated more carefully. I feel like a canary in a coal mine...
I do also have similar symptoms on anything that spins, or at high altitude. The biological effect is quite similar, though I don't know exactly how or why it happens. I have of course separated these effects out and carefully observed them to all be independently able to cause this effect.
The history of science is littered with evidence being ignored, and the studies showing nothing more than the bias of the researchers. You don't have to try very hard to find examples.
The bias has little to do with real science and everything to do with human beings and their genetic bias toward getting approval from their own group. And being willing to attack those considered outside the group. For reference, see editor wars, OS wars, etc. here in Slashdot...
Again, I'm not making any wild claims of absolute truth, but I know my own body, I know electronics and EM fields, and that _something_ is happening.
What that should do is create curiosity about another subtle effect not yet well understood. But any time there is a huge industry built around something, I get very suspicious about bias. Not that industry lobbyists ever have any power in this country...
I'm encouraged that there are a few here like you which can understand that science is not a fundamentalist religion; or at least shouldn't be...
We can't be certain what might affect biological systems at this point. Simple models of heating might very well be mostly right, but not complete. That has happened a LOT over the years in a number of fields. Newtonian physics works well enough for a most things, but some things require quantum physics to model correctly.
I also would expect that any effects would likely be in things like cell division, as that depends on _information_ and radio signals are informational (non-random). Even at small values, they might be different enough from random background noise in the natural world that our systems don't know how to filter it out properly.
Though it also seems clear that our own cell phones are much more likely to causes trouble than AM radio transmission, unless perhaps you live very close to a very powerful tower. (and some people do)
As was discussed recently here, some people do physically feel the effect of cell phones on their body. I'm one of those people, so I'm certain there is an effect. Exactly what that effect is, I don't know, other than it makes me nauseous if I hold it next to my head for more than a minute or so. I just use a Bluetooth headset and don't have any problems, as long as I don't put the cell phone itself next to my head.
But if I get that strong a reaction with a cell phone next to my head, how I do know what the effect of it being in my pocket is? Could it affect cell division? I don't know, and not a whole lot of people are motivated to find out.
There is a huge industry based on it, with lots of lobbyists, and all of us love the convenience, so we will try to ignore it as long as we can. Just human nature....
Can 7 year olds really post on/. and even get modded +5 Informative? What a place! Now I know how the oppressed people in other countries feel like when they think of coming to the U. S. of A.
If I call someone a "poopyhead" is that worth +5 too?
You must have been blowing the Qt sales guy... We were paying $3330 for a Windows license for one developer. At least the first year. Additional years were $650 support/mainentance.
Any additional platforms were an additional $1650 for the first year, plus half that as well for support/maintenance in subsequent years.
And then there was run-time licenses for Qt Embedded, even with negotiation that meant another $5K up front in addition to developer licenses.
The money adds up pretty fast. And as someone else noted, it made it very difficult to have bring in contract help on a temporary basis.
Still, we use Qt, because it's better than anything else, but we're happy about the new licensing. We do still pay for support, because it seems worth it, but overall, that can be an order of magnitude cheaper if need to just bring in extra help, or add new people, or start shipping Qt Embedded.
You might look at MindTouch (http://www.mindtouch.com/) It was forked from MediaWiki a long while back, and has version management, access control, etc. The Mozilla org just switched developer.mozilla.org to use it.
It seems very well designed, but lately there is a huge push for businesses to pay thousands for the licensed edition. Still, there is a community edition, and the core of it is open source.
Holy shit. Who the hell makes that type of money? I have a PhD from a top-school, and I make 5 digits.
Move out of Nebraska, and go to San Fransisco or New York. But then your expenses will be a LOT more.
Seriously, ignoring the outliers, 6 figures is not unusual in many areas because of the cost of living. But considerably less where homes cost 1/3 as much.
Choosing the right specialty helps too. Not to mention years of experience. You don't get that kind of money just out of school, as the real education starts when you get into the real world.
Are you thinking that the spirit is subject to entropy?
That's a very deep subject, with no definite answers... And very much dependent on one's definition(s) of "spirit."
Besides, it all depends on one's point of view. Maybe from some non-physical point of view (by definition NOT measurable from the physical) overall entropy is actually decreasing. Awareness might be growing to a more structured and sophisticated state.
In trying to define the entire cosmos from the basis of physical instruments, we might be going down a dead end road for really understanding Life.
I can't find a reference right now, but I'm pretty sure recent theories from experts are that most of the known universe is actually NOT physical matter. That seems like a good start to a proper level of humility to me...
At least for the physical body. (technically only when our body is completely decomposed..)
Consciousness might be something else. But we don't have the equipment to measure that, so regardless of anyone's beliefs either way, we just have to wait to pass judgment...
Though some people do pretend that lack of ability to measure is "proof" that we are simply meat machines (among other things). Others think that the brain operates as some kind of quantum communication device with "something else" which is the actual awareness. Interesting concept...
I definitely agree that the brain is a strange place, and memory is most often unreliable. It will make up an appropriate story to try to explain feelings and events. I'm sure it's a survival advantage to try to model the world and make sense of it.
Though in this case, there were physical actions associated with the memory, and because I was going through gears at an rpm I did hundreds of times on that bike, and hit some gravel at the very instant I was shifting gears, I knew the speed I was traveling very closely. (which is why I'm using it as an example). And decisions were made based on an evaluation of the situation.
Until then, I never understood how people could react fast enough during high speed events. My dad told me a story of riding his motorcycle and also going down at about 60 mph, and getting of top of the bike to ride it as it scraped along the pavement. At that speed things happen fast enough, it seemed impossible. But then he saw something coming, and I had no warning until the bike was already far enough out of control there was no way to save it.
I only had about the minimum time for measured human reaction speed available, and I could only decide to purposely put the bike down on its side and push it away with my foot, rather than allow things to finish randomly and perhaps get all tangled up with a 400 lb bike.
I also remember noticing that I was sliding and that I wasn't wearing leathers, and purposely rolling. This started immediately after the bike went down, and from the distance and speed would have been well under 1/2 second from the time of the very first indication that something was wrong (hit some gravel and the bike started to move "wrong")
Guess I'm just saying that the way time flows is not exactly rigid. Either that or I was just going so fast that Relativity comes into play. Must have been that new flux capacitor system I was testing...
Sorry, I had HTML formatting on by mistake, as the preview didn't seem to be working properly yesterday and I had to muck with formatting manually... (and it still never showed me in preview mode what it actually looked like after submitted)
That is the thesis of ONE experiment, involving how many subjects? A video link showed a total of 4. A friend told me he had read this only happens to this degree to a subset of the population. Perhaps 15%.
The subjects of that experiment only estimated their fall as 1/3 longer than observing others. My experience more like an order of magnitude. At the speed I was traveling, it would have been no more than 1/4 second, but the perception was more like 2-3 seconds.
If you read some of the comments to the article you linked to, you'll find that other people have experiences which suggest that something different was going on than the researchers in a contrived experiment measured.
For me, it was not just impulse reaction. There was a thought process, including an evaluation of the situation and choosing the best course of action. This situation was like a faster thought process and perception.
And actually, time itself is sort of an illusion. It's just a comparison of some sequence of events vs some other sequence. Such as the definition of a second being the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock )
(Under the Big Bang theory, time is also a measure of entropy. But not everyone agrees...)
All that said, there is probably also something the idea that these events trigger more brain activity and memory being activated. But from my experience, that's not quite all of it...
In fact as I get older (over 50 now) I notice this effect more and more, such as when something is about to fall and my hand is under it well before it is actually falling. Like some of the commentators on the article you linked to, I had some martial arts training; though it was 30 years ago now. Probably didn't hurt, though it might be that people who pursue that training have something in common. So causality is not established by the training itself.
I attribute it to my mind being more quiet now. Meaning more able to be quiet until needed, like a cat waiting for prey, attentive to its environment. Then a burst of action when needed (though unlike a cat, also capable of sustained bursts of effort for many hours)
And that comes from seeing the "personality machine" for what it is, and not confusing it with who and what I actually am. When the monkey chatter calms down, we are more able to respond to real events rather than imagined ones.
And we can alter the perceived flow of time quite easily.
As Einstein explained: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
And more seriously, some people have had time "slow down" considerably under extreme circumstances. I have had that experience during a motorcycle crash at 60 mph. I have a very vivid recollection of what happened in a split second seeming like slow motion and remembering each perception and thought and action. For all intents and purposes, the flow of time from my perspective was different than normal.
If consciousness is perhaps more than a chemical reaction in a "meat machine" then perhaps there is something else going on in those situations....
The couple percent the CC companies charge is small insurance to make sure that joes website is not able to go in and clear out my checking and/or savings accounts.
Exactly why I don't use debit cards! So what if the bank will _eventually_ replace the money? It's not worth the risk of my checking account being wiped out in the short term.
I just use a credit card and pay it off in full every month. Safe effect, no risk.
Debit cards do not have any advantage for me. But I'm sure there are advantages for those who spend millions of dollars advertising them...
If you are implying that you are of normal BMI (we'll say this is 25) but due to your diet you should be obese (BMI 90) Then you are almost assuredly mis-measuring.
Or you're insisting the research findings must be changed to fit your THEORY.
While it is so nice and tidy to say it's as simple as calories, it just isn't true. As only one factor, among many, recent research has shown that the particular bacteria in a person's gut makes a large difference in how much food is actually absorbed.
Samples from fat mice showed much stronger activation of genes that coded for carbohydrate-destroying enzymes, which break down otherwise indigestible starches and sugars. As a result, these mice were extracting more energy from their food than their lean cousins.
Human metabolism is not a test tube experiment. Life is much more complex than that.
Some deeper understanding of human physiology would make such things obvious. But for some reason when it comes to food, many Slashdotters are quick to trot out junk science theories, and attack anyone one who knows that the real world is not so simple as what their grade school health class teacher told them.
In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased.
And the difference in price between a copy of Word and a copy of FramMaker and RoboHelp for each user?
Wow... accuse someone of not reading his own link, and then you distort it to Microsoft's advantage...
Microsoft had been in _discussions_ to license Stac's technology. They didn't actually DO so!
Microsoft also had examined the source code.
Though somehow they managed to convince the jury it was not "willful" (how many juries, especially in that day understood anything about SW code? Especially with the best lawyers money can buy arguing for the defense?)
Even so, the very article you are pointing at said that Stack WON the suite and was awarded $120 million in damages.
You have a lot of confidence that juries could tell if code had been copied, and seem rather naive about Microsoft's business practices....
I asked about the versioning file system in VMS: why didn't it get implemented in NT?
Because it would be another 15 years before Microsoft really understood what is important in enterprise class systems.
Remember, the state of the art at Microsoft at the time was Windows 3.0, which was mostly DOS with some window dressing. Jumping from 8.3 filenames to versioning file system was too much for the decision makers to comprehend.
What they used every day was DOS essentially. They had no experience with real operating systems. Though to their credit, they did let Dave Cutler and crew build a solid system. Which contrary to many people talking here with no actual experience in the NT kernel are saying, is actually quite a nice system. But then it got corrupted by decisions higher in the stack and the kitchen sink was moved into the kernel rather than leave it small and tight like it was designed to be. But that's not the fault of the original design.
Actually, if you were around back then and taking NT architecture and driver development courses from ex-VMS guys, as I WAS, you'd know that there was a LOT of common concepts, right down to the same names of kernel functions and structures. VMS drivers could almost be recompiled for NT.
And yes, there was a lot of talk about actual code being used. (may not have been Dave Cutler himself, but someone from the DEC team which ended up at MS) At the time it seemed like it was pretty well known as the truth, which would explain why others here are saying MS settled out of court.
You won't find it on the web perhaps, because it was before Al Gore invented the internet, but people had other ways of talking back then. We had Compuserve for instance, and MS conferences where all us driver/kernel geeks congregated and talked.
Just because you can't find "evidence" in print doesn't mean it didn't happen. Happens all the time in lots of industries. Sales people bringing their list of customers, etc. etc.
Given Microsoft's history of stealing anything they can get away with, you really think they wouldn't do so?
Though it's hard to say who approved or knew about what; could have also been one rogue engineer trying to make an impossible schedule...
That's not "full support". It's only partial support. Full support, for a free software advocate, would be for the driver itself to be free. Freedom is a feature of a free operating system, and the Nvidia drivers do not support that feature.
Except from a practical standpoint, in Nvidia's business, exposing every detail of the hardware interface and documenting all the guts of their chips affects their ability to compete in the market. That means less freedom for _them_ to protect their huge investment in R&D.
The driver cannot be separated from the hardware, no matter what your _beliefs_ about how all software _should_ be "free." They are forever connected.
In the real world things are not so black and white as RMS might imagine...
I knew I wasn't being very articulate... Hey, it was late...
My point was not so much about "hate speech" as the concept being tossed around here that it "incites violence," and that any speech which might "incite violence" should be forbidden.
This implies that the people listening are not responsible for their actions. This is like the attitude in some countries that women must cover themselves from head to toe, because the men cannot be responsible for their urges. And in those areas, being raped is deemed the fault of the woman, and often means her family disowns her and her life is ruined.
This is just crazy. We are all responsible for our actions, and free discussion of ideas (as well as artistic expression of those things people tend not to talk about out loud) is fundamental for a democracy to have any chance of working.
I personally have my own internal "hate speech" when I hear other people's "hate speech" but the _government_ can't decide what things are okay to talk about or not. We cannot go down the road to "thought crimes" or even "speech crimes."
The next stop down that road is repression of criticism of the government itself. And history has shown us what THAT means...
** The actual act of violence itself is another thing entirely. **
This is a very, very, slipperly slope to go down.
I recently had the great pleasure of talking in depth about civil rights with one of the former directors of the ACLU, who started his long career in the landmark cases in the 60s.
As a Jew who had family who did not make it out of Germany, he nevertheless once defended the right of Nazis in the US to march in a Jewish area of a town, and even the KKK's right to assemble peacefully and try to get people to listen to their lunacy.
That was incredulous to me, but in listening to him carefully, I realized my own ideas were seriously flawed, and that we can't ever remove some people's right to state their opinions without setting off a process which ends up eventually removing OUR OWN rights.
There really is no middle ground.
It is important to notice that his actions in defending the right of the Nazis and KKK to assemble peacefully and distribute their hate propaganda did NOT mean those groups every got any traction. They pretty much died out.
The point here is to TRUST THE POPULACE to make appropriate decisions, regardless of the screwballs trying to convince them to act insanely.
Really, we don't need a Nanny State to make our decisions for us. The People are supposed to be running things, not politicians. And The People absolutely need the free exchange of ideas to sort out what future they want to build.
We can't restrict the things we don't agree with, just as the voting system on/. is supposed to represent things like whether the comment is (for example) "informative" NOT whether you agree with it or not.
So let's say you were a Jew in Germany as the Nazis were coming to power, and if your speech against the government was not suppressed, you might be able overthrown Hitler before he got too far. Still think free speech which incited violence would be a bad thing?
I'm sure there are historical issues with this particular example, but the point being there are times in history when rising up IS necessary. It is how the United States was formed...
Let the restrictions get started and the next thing you know you have a Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Kent State killings...
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of people would be interested if you can detect cell phone radiation in a double-blind test. You could look up who did some of the to-date unsuccessful tests and try to contact them.
It's been done already. In one of the studies someone accurately did that 9 out of 9 times. Most others were not much more than chance (though there were other anomolies). The overall conclusion of the study was not affected by this person even though it was virtually impossible to be pure chance. And who actually reads TFA?
Did that cause the researcher to do more experiments? No. Research is seriously biased by corporate funding and politics driven by lobbyists.
Not a "conspiracy," just that money talks and always has. Most scientists are not willing to give up their career. They have families to feed and want to have some chance to continue to do what they enjoy, and maybe get a change to make a real difference someday. They have to pick their battles.
Look what happened to the doctor who insisted that doctors should wash their hands after handling cadavers, before delivering babies. He was attacked and ignored, and it was decades before the reality was accepted. Why?
From Wikepedia: "Specifically, Semmelweis' claims were thought to lack scientific basis, since he could offer no acceptable explanation for his findings. Such a scientific explanation was made possible only some decades later when the germ theory of disease was developed by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
The findings were ignored because it wasn't _already_ understood how it could happen.
How many times has THAT happened in the history of science? All pioneers get arrows in the back...
Again, the issue is not science per se. It's who is funding and controlling what gets released. This even fools those who understand science because they are fed flawed data, and twisted conclusions from research studies.
And many people here won't like that, because they cling to the belief that anything published as "Science" must be TRUTH. Not in our current society, where corporations overwhelmingly pay for the research. Politics reign in the upper levels of universities too.
Troll? For relating personal experiments and the experience of others here in another thread?
A lot TALK about science here, but often it's more like the OS and editor religious wars. People all over the world want to believe that their group has the corner on The Truth, and anything that threatens what they think they already know is automatically evil and must be silenced before any "dangerous ideas" infect the general population. Don't want anyone thinking for themselves...
I posted a link further down to a university researcher who was an expert in DNA and showed clear DNA damage. Motorola didn't like that... This story was published by a university alumni group.
No trolls here, move along...
Whatever is actually happening, we can be sure that electrosensitivty is not actually caused by EM fields. There have been too many studies showing no link.
As I mentioned in my other reply, there are large industry forces which need to be considered when evaluating these studies. You'll also often find that the U.S. studies are all favorable to an industry, and only foreign studies disagree.
For another view, which clearly shows what a researcher is up against whose research results threatens an existing large industry, see this:
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/wakeupcall01.html
Note that he is an expert in DNA and DNA damage was clearly shown from exposure to an actual cell phone.
The aura of science is often used to make people believe exactly what the PTB want them to believe. Remember doctors on cigarette commercials, telling how great they were, while the tobacco companies were very well aware of the dangers? Careful who you believe, and check if they would lose their funding or even their career if they dared report anything which might cost a large corporation money (and or course some politician their campaign funding).
Real life is much messier than we want to believe...
How kindly patronizing of you...
My education is in electronics and I've deeply studied the human body for 30 years. I also understand scientific process quite well, thank you.
I've done many experiments to explore this over the last 10 years. Imagine an experiment where your head is within a foot of a device and you get nearly immediate pressure and nausea. Move the head away from the device and the effect lessens, and eventually disappears past a certain distance. Repeat variations of this experiment hundreds of times over ten years. Immediate effect from the stimulus. No stimulus, no effect. Stimulus is observed to lose effect with distance, quite quickly in fact.
That is precisely what I am talking about. My own direct experience, carefully investigated.
Many of the studies quoted in the link you supplied are difficult to get to actually read, so I can't comment on them. But I can comment on my direct experience over a very long period.
My electronics background certainly helped to understand the likely square-distance effect, and experimenting with headsets. True to theory, BlueTooth headsets are fine (though wired headsets were found to be nearly as bad as having the phone itself next to my head)
Also, I've noticed the same problem being very close to some operating microwave ovens and wireless routers. Both of those were surprises. I just noticed the same familiar feeling and started looking for a reason, and later made the connection.
Move a couple more feet away from the oven and or the router and problem solved. It is related to power, and it is not exactly the same level of sensitivity every day. (though it is always present; and varying sensitivity is to be expected)
I realize whatever it happening does not fit the current theories, but we can't just change the experimental data...
I couldn't help notice a reference in the link you supplied to a test for whether a cell phone was in a bag or not. Please...
There is a huge difference between an idle phone in a bag and talking on one with it sitting right next to your head. The power difference due to the continuous active transmission when speaking into the phone and the square-distance law is HUGE (orders of magnitude). That's just one example of a biased experiment.
I realize that the subjects might have made wild claims the experimenters were trying to verify, but I would not make those claims. The effect I notice is clearly related to transmission power, and below a certain threshold is not consciously noticeable.
I'm okay with a cell phone in my hand while I use a BlueTooth headset, or even with the phone a couple feet from my head. But not much closer. Same with some wireless routers.
Again, I'm talking about my particular experience, which I've carefully investigated over more than 10 years. I'm not making wild claims in general. Though given my experience, I do think there is something to be investigated more carefully. I feel like a canary in a coal mine...
I do also have similar symptoms on anything that spins, or at high altitude. The biological effect is quite similar, though I don't know exactly how or why it happens. I have of course separated these effects out and carefully observed them to all be independently able to cause this effect.
The history of science is littered with evidence being ignored, and the studies showing nothing more than the bias of the researchers. You don't have to try very hard to find examples.
The bias has little to do with real science and everything to do with human beings and their genetic bias toward getting approval from their own group. And being willing to attack those considered outside the group. For reference, see editor wars, OS wars, etc. here in Slashdot...
Again, I'm not making any wild claims of absolute truth, but I know my own body, I know electronics and EM fields, and that _something_ is happening.
What that should do is create curiosity about another subtle effect not yet well understood. But any time there is a huge industry built around something, I get very suspicious about bias. Not that industry lobbyists ever have any power in this country...
I'm encouraged that there are a few here like you which can understand that science is not a fundamentalist religion; or at least shouldn't be...
We can't be certain what might affect biological systems at this point. Simple models of heating might very well be mostly right, but not complete. That has happened a LOT over the years in a number of fields. Newtonian physics works well enough for a most things, but some things require quantum physics to model correctly.
I also would expect that any effects would likely be in things like cell division, as that depends on _information_ and radio signals are informational (non-random). Even at small values, they might be different enough from random background noise in the natural world that our systems don't know how to filter it out properly.
Though it also seems clear that our own cell phones are much more likely to causes trouble than AM radio transmission, unless perhaps you live very close to a very powerful tower. (and some people do)
As was discussed recently here, some people do physically feel the effect of cell phones on their body. I'm one of those people, so I'm certain there is an effect. Exactly what that effect is, I don't know, other than it makes me nauseous if I hold it next to my head for more than a minute or so. I just use a Bluetooth headset and don't have any problems, as long as I don't put the cell phone itself next to my head.
But if I get that strong a reaction with a cell phone next to my head, how I do know what the effect of it being in my pocket is? Could it affect cell division? I don't know, and not a whole lot of people are motivated to find out.
There is a huge industry based on it, with lots of lobbyists, and all of us love the convenience, so we will try to ignore it as long as we can. Just human nature....
You must be genuinely retarded.
Can 7 year olds really post on /. and even get modded +5 Informative? What a place! Now I know how the oppressed people in other countries feel like when they think of coming to the U. S. of A.
If I call someone a "poopyhead" is that worth +5 too?
You must have been blowing the Qt sales guy... We were paying $3330 for a Windows license for one developer. At least the first year. Additional years were $650 support/mainentance.
Any additional platforms were an additional $1650 for the first year, plus half that as well for support/maintenance in subsequent years.
And then there was run-time licenses for Qt Embedded, even with negotiation that meant another $5K up front in addition to developer licenses.
The money adds up pretty fast. And as someone else noted, it made it very difficult to have bring in contract help on a temporary basis.
Still, we use Qt, because it's better than anything else, but we're happy about the new licensing. We do still pay for support, because it seems worth it, but overall, that can be an order of magnitude cheaper if need to just bring in extra help, or add new people, or start shipping Qt Embedded.
You might look at MindTouch (http://www.mindtouch.com/) It was forked from MediaWiki a long while back, and has version management, access control, etc. The Mozilla org just switched developer.mozilla.org to use it.
It seems very well designed, but lately there is a huge push for businesses to pay thousands for the licensed edition. Still, there is a community edition, and the core of it is open source.
Holy shit. Who the hell makes that type of money? I have a PhD from a top-school, and I make 5 digits.
Move out of Nebraska, and go to San Fransisco or New York. But then your expenses will be a LOT more.
Seriously, ignoring the outliers, 6 figures is not unusual in many areas because of the cost of living. But considerably less where homes cost 1/3 as much.
Choosing the right specialty helps too. Not to mention years of experience. You don't get that kind of money just out of school, as the real education starts when you get into the real world.
Are you thinking that the spirit is subject to entropy?
That's a very deep subject, with no definite answers... And very much dependent on one's definition(s) of "spirit."
Besides, it all depends on one's point of view. Maybe from some non-physical point of view (by definition NOT measurable from the physical) overall entropy is actually decreasing. Awareness might be growing to a more structured and sophisticated state.
In trying to define the entire cosmos from the basis of physical instruments, we might be going down a dead end road for really understanding Life.
I can't find a reference right now, but I'm pretty sure recent theories from experts are that most of the known universe is actually NOT physical matter. That seems like a good start to a proper level of humility to me...
Death seems to be the end of entropy, doesn't it?
At least for the physical body. (technically only when our body is completely decomposed..)
Consciousness might be something else. But we don't have the equipment to measure that, so regardless of anyone's beliefs either way, we just have to wait to pass judgment...
Though some people do pretend that lack of ability to measure is "proof" that we are simply meat machines (among other things). Others think that the brain operates as some kind of quantum communication device with "something else" which is the actual awareness. Interesting concept...
I definitely agree that the brain is a strange place, and memory is most often unreliable. It will make up an appropriate story to try to explain feelings and events. I'm sure it's a survival advantage to try to model the world and make sense of it.
Though in this case, there were physical actions associated with the memory, and because I was going through gears at an rpm I did hundreds of times on that bike, and hit some gravel at the very instant I was shifting gears, I knew the speed I was traveling very closely. (which is why I'm using it as an example). And decisions were made based on an evaluation of the situation.
Until then, I never understood how people could react fast enough during high speed events. My dad told me a story of riding his motorcycle and also going down at about 60 mph, and getting of top of the bike to ride it as it scraped along the pavement. At that speed things happen fast enough, it seemed impossible. But then he saw something coming, and I had no warning until the bike was already far enough out of control there was no way to save it.
I only had about the minimum time for measured human reaction speed available, and I could only decide to purposely put the bike down on its side and push it away with my foot, rather than allow things to finish randomly and perhaps get all tangled up with a 400 lb bike.
I also remember noticing that I was sliding and that I wasn't wearing leathers, and purposely rolling. This started immediately after the bike went down, and from the distance and speed would have been well under 1/2 second from the time of the very first indication that something was wrong (hit some gravel and the bike started to move "wrong")
Guess I'm just saying that the way time flows is not exactly rigid. Either that or I was just going so fast that Relativity comes into play. Must have been that new flux capacitor system I was testing...
Sorry, I had HTML formatting on by mistake, as the preview didn't seem to be working properly yesterday and I had to muck with formatting manually... (and it still never showed me in preview mode what it actually looked like after submitted)
That is the thesis of ONE experiment, involving how many subjects? A video link showed a total of 4. A friend told me he had read this only happens to this degree to a subset of the population. Perhaps 15%. The subjects of that experiment only estimated their fall as 1/3 longer than observing others. My experience more like an order of magnitude. At the speed I was traveling, it would have been no more than 1/4 second, but the perception was more like 2-3 seconds. If you read some of the comments to the article you linked to, you'll find that other people have experiences which suggest that something different was going on than the researchers in a contrived experiment measured. For me, it was not just impulse reaction. There was a thought process, including an evaluation of the situation and choosing the best course of action. This situation was like a faster thought process and perception. And actually, time itself is sort of an illusion. It's just a comparison of some sequence of events vs some other sequence. Such as the definition of a second being the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock ) (Under the Big Bang theory, time is also a measure of entropy. But not everyone agrees...) All that said, there is probably also something the idea that these events trigger more brain activity and memory being activated. But from my experience, that's not quite all of it... In fact as I get older (over 50 now) I notice this effect more and more, such as when something is about to fall and my hand is under it well before it is actually falling. Like some of the commentators on the article you linked to, I had some martial arts training; though it was 30 years ago now. Probably didn't hurt, though it might be that people who pursue that training have something in common. So causality is not established by the training itself. I attribute it to my mind being more quiet now. Meaning more able to be quiet until needed, like a cat waiting for prey, attentive to its environment. Then a burst of action when needed (though unlike a cat, also capable of sustained bursts of effort for many hours) And that comes from seeing the "personality machine" for what it is, and not confusing it with who and what I actually am. When the monkey chatter calms down, we are more able to respond to real events rather than imagined ones.
And we can alter the perceived flow of time quite easily.
As Einstein explained: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
And more seriously, some people have had time "slow down" considerably under extreme circumstances. I have had that experience during a motorcycle crash at 60 mph. I have a very vivid recollection of what happened in a split second seeming like slow motion and remembering each perception and thought and action. For all intents and purposes, the flow of time from my perspective was different than normal.
If consciousness is perhaps more than a chemical reaction in a "meat machine" then perhaps there is something else going on in those situations....
The couple percent the CC companies charge is small insurance to make sure that joes website is not able to go in and clear out my checking and/or savings accounts.
Exactly why I don't use debit cards! So what if the bank will _eventually_ replace the money? It's not worth the risk of my checking account being wiped out in the short term.
I just use a credit card and pay it off in full every month. Safe effect, no risk.
Debit cards do not have any advantage for me. But I'm sure there are advantages for those who spend millions of dollars advertising them...
If you are implying that you are of normal BMI (we'll say this is 25) but due to your diet you should be obese (BMI 90) Then you are almost assuredly mis-measuring.
Or you're insisting the research findings must be changed to fit your THEORY.
While it is so nice and tidy to say it's as simple as calories, it just isn't true. As only one factor, among many, recent research has shown that the particular bacteria in a person's gut makes a large difference in how much food is actually absorbed.
Samples from fat mice showed much stronger activation of genes that coded for carbohydrate-destroying enzymes, which break down otherwise indigestible starches and sugars. As a result, these mice were extracting more energy from their food than their lean cousins.
http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/human-gut-bacteria-linked-to-obesity/
Human metabolism is not a test tube experiment. Life is much more complex than that.
Some deeper understanding of human physiology would make such things obvious. But for some reason when it comes to food, many Slashdotters are quick to trot out junk science theories, and attack anyone one who knows that the real world is not so simple as what their grade school health class teacher told them.
In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased.
And the difference in price between a copy of Word and a copy of FramMaker and RoboHelp for each user?
Actually, many nutrients are only absorbed if they have a particular charge. Much of "chemistry" is electrical under the hood...
Wow... accuse someone of not reading his own link, and then you distort it to Microsoft's advantage...
Microsoft had been in _discussions_ to license Stac's technology. They didn't actually DO so!
Microsoft also had examined the source code.
Though somehow they managed to convince the jury it was not "willful" (how many juries, especially in that day understood anything about SW code? Especially with the best lawyers money can buy arguing for the defense?)
Even so, the very article you are pointing at said that Stack WON the suite and was awarded $120 million in damages.
You have a lot of confidence that juries could tell if code had been copied, and seem rather naive about Microsoft's business practices....
I asked about the versioning file system in VMS: why didn't it get implemented in NT?
Because it would be another 15 years before Microsoft really understood what is important in enterprise class systems.
Remember, the state of the art at Microsoft at the time was Windows 3.0, which was mostly DOS with some window dressing. Jumping from 8.3 filenames to versioning file system was too much for the decision makers to comprehend.
What they used every day was DOS essentially. They had no experience with real operating systems. Though to their credit, they did let Dave Cutler and crew build a solid system. Which contrary to many people talking here with no actual experience in the NT kernel are saying, is actually quite a nice system. But then it got corrupted by decisions higher in the stack and the kitchen sink was moved into the kernel rather than leave it small and tight like it was designed to be. But that's not the fault of the original design.
Actually, if you were around back then and taking NT architecture and driver development courses from ex-VMS guys, as I WAS, you'd know that there was a LOT of common concepts, right down to the same names of kernel functions and structures. VMS drivers could almost be recompiled for NT.
And yes, there was a lot of talk about actual code being used. (may not have been Dave Cutler himself, but someone from the DEC team which ended up at MS) At the time it seemed like it was pretty well known as the truth, which would explain why others here are saying MS settled out of court.
You won't find it on the web perhaps, because it was before Al Gore invented the internet, but people had other ways of talking back then. We had Compuserve for instance, and MS conferences where all us driver/kernel geeks congregated and talked.
Just because you can't find "evidence" in print doesn't mean it didn't happen. Happens all the time in lots of industries. Sales people bringing their list of customers, etc. etc.
Given Microsoft's history of stealing anything they can get away with, you really think they wouldn't do so?
Though it's hard to say who approved or knew about what; could have also been one rogue engineer trying to make an impossible schedule...
That's not "full support". It's only partial support. Full support, for a free software advocate, would be for the driver itself to be free. Freedom is a feature of a free operating system, and the Nvidia drivers do not support that feature.
Except from a practical standpoint, in Nvidia's business, exposing every detail of the hardware interface and documenting all the guts of their chips affects their ability to compete in the market. That means less freedom for _them_ to protect their huge investment in R&D.
The driver cannot be separated from the hardware, no matter what your _beliefs_ about how all software _should_ be "free." They are forever connected.
In the real world things are not so black and white as RMS might imagine...
I knew I wasn't being very articulate... Hey, it was late...
My point was not so much about "hate speech" as the concept being tossed around here that it "incites violence," and that any speech which might "incite violence" should be forbidden.
This implies that the people listening are not responsible for their actions. This is like the attitude in some countries that women must cover themselves from head to toe, because the men cannot be responsible for their urges. And in those areas, being raped is deemed the fault of the woman, and often means her family disowns her and her life is ruined.
This is just crazy. We are all responsible for our actions, and free discussion of ideas (as well as artistic expression of those things people tend not to talk about out loud) is fundamental for a democracy to have any chance of working.
I personally have my own internal "hate speech" when I hear other people's "hate speech" but the _government_ can't decide what things are okay to talk about or not. We cannot go down the road to "thought crimes" or even "speech crimes."
The next stop down that road is repression of criticism of the government itself. And history has shown us what THAT means...
** The actual act of violence itself is another thing entirely. **
This is a very, very, slipperly slope to go down.
I recently had the great pleasure of talking in depth about civil rights with one of the former directors of the ACLU, who started his long career in the landmark cases in the 60s.
As a Jew who had family who did not make it out of Germany, he nevertheless once defended the right of Nazis in the US to march in a Jewish area of a town, and even the KKK's right to assemble peacefully and try to get people to listen to their lunacy.
That was incredulous to me, but in listening to him carefully, I realized my own ideas were seriously flawed, and that we can't ever remove some people's right to state their opinions without setting off a process which ends up eventually removing OUR OWN rights.
There really is no middle ground.
It is important to notice that his actions in defending the right of the Nazis and KKK to assemble peacefully and distribute their hate propaganda did NOT mean those groups every got any traction. They pretty much died out.
The point here is to TRUST THE POPULACE to make appropriate decisions, regardless of the screwballs trying to convince them to act insanely.
Really, we don't need a Nanny State to make our decisions for us. The People are supposed to be running things, not politicians. And The People absolutely need the free exchange of ideas to sort out what future they want to build.
We can't restrict the things we don't agree with, just as the voting system on /. is supposed to represent things like whether the comment is (for example) "informative" NOT whether you agree with it or not.
So let's say you were a Jew in Germany as the Nazis were coming to power, and if your speech against the government was not suppressed, you might be able overthrown Hitler before he got too far. Still think free speech which incited violence would be a bad thing?
I'm sure there are historical issues with this particular example, but the point being there are times in history when rising up IS necessary. It is how the United States was formed...
Let the restrictions get started and the next thing you know you have a Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Kent State killings...