Absolutely -- you can get RF burns from holding antennas, and you can obviously see the results of massive radars (e.g. putting a gerbil in a microwave).
What we're arguing about is the signal strength and duration (and to some extent, where on the person the radiation is administered; hands are pretty tolerant compared to brain or torso), and the conversion factor to biological effect (which varies by frequency).
With modern radios, you've also got duty cycle -- your cellphone isn't transmitting full-time.
I'm basically not afraid at all about "tower" signals as a member of the public. I wouldn't stand in a microwave point to point beam. I also wouldn't want a 5W HT radio next to my head (or groin) for high duty cycle use, but I'm ok with holding it in my hand with a hands-free kit.
The people who vote you down for saying some types of non-ionizing radiation can be bad are actually worse scientists than if you were to say all (non-ionizing or ionizing) radiation is a huge problem. We have positive evidence that some radiation is really bad, and some is sort of bad; we have a bunch of negative confirmations that low levels of many kinds of radiation aren't likely to be very bad, and certainly aren't super-bad, but the exact borderline isn't known, and varies, and a 0.01% increase in cancer with zero benefit is more of a concern to me than a 1% increase in cancer with massive benefit (e.g. a CT for trauma where you'd otherwise be likely to die).
(Incidentally, my fear of ~200 wifi devices transmitting in the milliwatts on 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz or on a flight is approximately zero -- especially since it's unclear how many would actually be using the service at any given time, and it's a pretty large volume.)
Plan 9 certainly has some cool ideas, but I have a really hard time believing that a project that originated in the 80s and has yet to "make it" in any meaningful sense is really the way of the future.
Because (sadly) compatibility with the existing software ecosystem and support for common hardware is king, at least if we're talking about a general purpose OS. Who cares about your project if it can't run the N million line behemoth the modern web browser is? With all its deps...
But I'd really love to have an OS that sweeps the pile of legacy cruft we've built up and replaces it with something simpler & smaller. In a sense Plan 9 is just that. But I'm sure one can go further down that road.
Some of Google's internal architecture is inspired by plan9, e.g., gfs. Plan9 also included a language called Aleph which has today evolved into golang.
Union mounts have been particularly interesting: something plan9 implemented, but no one else has successfully.
I have a hard and interesting job. I do navigation & autonomous control systems for large mining vehicles. A couple of notes...
1. You want to do R&D. Developing new things is fun; maintaining existing things is boring. However, "getting in" to R&D positions is difficult without #2:
2. Domain knowledge. We almost never hire based on programming skill alone. Programming is a prerequisite, but specific expertise (guidance, navigation & control systems in my case) is the real value you need to bring. Graduate degrees are one way (but not the only way) to move in this direction.
Apple actually did die. Think about what happened: They spent 400M to buy NeXT, and after a transition period, they started selling things called Macintoshes that were actually NeXT machines.
In reality, Apple was acquired by NeXT in a reverse-takeover, and NeXT decided to maintain the Apple and Mac-related brands. It’s more nuänced than that, but effectively that’s what happened.
Apple is an interesting case because they effectively threw away everything and started fresh with their newly acquired technology and people.
There are some parallels with RIM's QNX acquisition, but RIM seems to be afraid to throw away the old. You can't milk the cow and have it on the barbecue too.
>but RIM seems to be afraid to throw away the old.
They aren't going to say that they're abandoning the current platform, they'd Osborne themselves if they did. That doesn't mean that the company isn't throwing all of it's efforts into next year's phone.
Apple sold a lot of bondi blue iMacs before OS X was ready, they wouldn't have survived to ship OSX if they hadn't.
> Apple sold a lot of bondi blue iMacs before OS X was ready, they wouldn't have survived to ship OSX if they hadn't.
Hardware that provides an upgrade path to new systems is one thing, but RIM released a major revision to BBOS more than a year after the QNX acquisition. I believe the previous CEOs even stated they have no plans to abandon BBOS. Which means that many bright minds are going to be working on it, instead of putting focus on the QNX system.
Imagine if Apple had continued to work on OS9 into OS10 for the iMac line and had another team working on OSX for PowerMacs. That is essentially what RIM has been doing.
You're forgetting your history. Apple bought NeXT in early 97, the iMac came out in early 98, OS 9 came out in late 99 and OS X didn't ship in beta until 2000.
Obviously Apple was working on Pink/Copland all through the 90's, then Rhapsody/OS X since early 97. They didn't ship OS X for _3 whole years_, all the while losing market and mindshare to Wintel.
RIM stating that they aren't abandoning the current form of BB OS is to me equivalent to Apple shipping bug fixes for OS 8 (i.e. OS 9) and Carbon support in OS X (blue box), except in RIM's case they are declaring software/service support for BB OS because they understand that smartphone buyers are on a 3 year cycle imposed by the carriers.
I'm not trying to defend RIM's failure to execute, but it's a difficult, multi-year process to ship a new platform without nuking the company. In my mind their biggest failure is that they should have bought QNX in 2007, not 2010.
Usually if I input an address into Google maps, it places a marker somewhere near the actual address. If I use street view it seems to point me in a random direction and usually not toward the address I wanted. I think this is aimed at that.
If you don't know what the arrows represent then you maybe don't understand what tomography is after all.