Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi 287
St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont. is the latest Canadian school to decide to save its students from the harmful effects of Wi-Fi by banning it. Schools from universities on down have a history of banning Wi-Fi in Ontario. As usual, health officials and know-it-all scientists have called the move ridiculous. Health Canada has released a statement saying, "Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones. It is widely used across Canada in schools, offices, coffee shops, personal dwellings, as well as countless other locations. Health Canada continues to reassure Canadians that the radiofrequency energy emitted from Wi-Fi equipment is extremely low and is not associated with any health problems."
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, we should not simply block the sun. We should switch it off.
* It runs on nuclear (fusion) power.
* It generates radioactivity.
* It is responsible for many cases of skin cancer.
* It is the power source for hurricanes, which cause lots of damage.
* Its radiation plays a major role in the chemical processes which cause the ozone hole.
* It is already known that one day it will destroy the Earth.
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
No. The sun does not have sufficient mass to overcome degeneracy pressure and collapse into a black hole.
And even if it did, the resulting black hole would be the same mass as the sun, so the Earth would maintain orbit. People tend to think black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners and just grab anything and everything; they're not.
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Well, we should not simply block the sun. We should switch it off.
* It runs on nuclear (fusion) power.
* It generates radioactivity.
* It is responsible for many cases of skin cancer.
* It is the power source for hurricanes, which cause lots of damage.
* Its radiation plays a major role in the chemical processes which cause the ozone hole.
* It is already known that one day it will destroy the Earth.
Not to mention all that, but it's vile radiation spawned and provided nutrition for some of the worst atrocities the solar system has ever seen! Hitler! Pol Pot! Al Qaeda! American Idol!. We need to switch it off lest it's reign of terror continue!
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Here you go!
http://www.who.int/uv/intersunprogramme/en/ [who.int]
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Re:Wait a minute... (Score:4, Insightful)
Breaking News: (Score:3, Insightful)
People refuse to do things that their doctors say are safe!
For our next story people insist that the things doctors say are bad for you are actually the best things to do ever!
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If my doctor was that stupid I wouldn't listen to them either.
Walking in the sun for a few minutes send more radiation into your body than spending 8 hours at a computer. Should they ban playing in sunlight for the kids, too?
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We've got that covered. [healthguidance.org]
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Uh... it's a bit unclear if you're understanding the situation here.
"If my doctor was that stupid I wouldn't listen to them either."
If your doctor were how stupid? The only mention of doctors here is that the doctors say there is no medical basis for a ban. Based on the rest of your post, surely you mean to criticize the people who ignore the doctors' advice and ban WiFi anyway - which is exactly what GP said - right?
Oh, and for the record, doctors do advise strict limits on sun exposure now. That's what
Re:Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a Doctor (Doctor of Chiropractic)
Honest truth: the Medical Industry wants to make a society of dependant sheep. Sheep that go for their regular checkups (ca-ching) and buy the Big Pharma meds (ca-ching)
Eat well, exercise and get regular chiropractic adjustments to keep your nervous system functioning at peak efficiency. You'll never get heart disease or cancer.
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I'm a Doctor (Doctor of Chiropractic) ... You'll never get heart disease or cancer.
Two names:
Anyway, my uncle was all into health food, exercise, acupuncture, etc and died of cancer in his 50s.
Re:Breaking News: (Score:4, Insightful)
Chiropractic health professionals either deal with the skeletal system or with bullshit. Some of them you walk into the office, they know everything about all ligaments, tendons, joints, bone structure, etc; and they can throw you under an X-ray and point out all the stress points from your posture and all long-term damage done from you always sitting wrong. They can also supply physical therapy, nudging the joints here and there to straighten things out that have gone a bit awry.
The bullshit artists are the ones that want you to believe all ailments are cured by chiropractic practice, which the parent seems to be.
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Re:Breaking News: (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not true. They're scientifically proven to be effective at pain relief, at a minimum. I'm not willing to take it so far as the other claims, but if you're out of whack and in pain, they can certainly help you. "NOTHING" is proven false. Look it up.
they are "scientifically proven" to be as effective as placebo at treating subjective symptoms. It's basically the same effect as having your mommy kiss your booboo. You've received "treatment" from a "doctor", and now you "feel better". Some people are willing to grant the stamp of effective to placebo treatments, I am not.
Chiropractic fails utterly at treating anything that can actually be measures objectively, and that's on top of the entire PREMISE of the treatment being scientifically unsound.
The best you can hope for from a visit to a chiropractor is the equivalent of a massage, except that you're virtually guaranteed not to get a happy ending.
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A doctor that prescribes ineffective pain medications and then gropes at anti-depressants is not a doctor who has a real understanding of the patient's ailment.
"Beating" the doctor in a case like that should not be regarded as surprising, something that you have to explain away.
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Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is not the basis of good medicine. It just means time passed and you got better.
Except that my condition was not static when I went to see my doctor. It was deteriorating. And it continued to deteriorate despite the treatment. The doctors only response was to suggest that since my problem was upsetting me, I should take anti-depressants and find a new job that didn't require physical activity.
Chiropractic treatments produced limited immediate relief, and gradual long-term improvement. At this point, I can tell when I need to go back for a check up (a few times year), and I get predi
Re:Breaking News: (Score:4, Funny)
That's why he posted as AC, of course.
The last thing you want is a bunch of angry chiropractors after you. Those guys can snap your neck like THAT.
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I beg to differ with you. I've been to a few chiropractors over the years on strong suggestions of my friends. I did it mostly to shut them up.
Apparently my back is invincible (except for the chronic pain). They can bang, jump, and pound on my upper back, and nothing happened. Well, after a while it ends up with me saying "If you don't stop that, I'm going to get up and kick your ass."
My neck is pretty close to the same.
I don't think I'm that much of a toug
Re:Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)
Chiropractors are not doctors. They're phonies with made-up degrees. You might as well call a gardener a doctor. Actually, a gardener probably has a greater degree of knowledge of biology than a chiropractor.
Re:Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)
Skeletal engineer then? :p
Re:Breaking News: (Score:5, Insightful)
No... crackpot.
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He he. Whoosh.
Yeah, the AC's post was pretty well done. It took me to the end to decide he wasn't serious. The rest of the way through I was picturing Alan from "Two and a Half Men."
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The chiropractor I visit provides me relief and improved health. He studies new techniques and gains new knowledge regularly, even monthly. He gets a lot more ongoing education than any 'gardener' I'm aware of, even the professional applicator I know well - that's pesticide and herbicide sprayer, for those of you who haven't needed to hire one.
The stereotype of chiropractors as quacks is out of date by at least 30 years in my personal experience, and probably 100 years in reality.
I never beleived in them
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There are still plenty of chiropractors out there shilling crap. The two in my town are all into the latest in greatest in quackery like chelation therapy and magnetic body scans.
You're giving money to crooks and nutbars. Congrats for your small part in pushing medicine back a 1,000 years.
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Chiropracty is founded on bullcrap. Yes, I'm sure there are better witchdoctors than others, but they're all still witch doctors.
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Eat well, exercise and get regular chiropractic adjustments [...] You'll never get heart disease or cancer.
And how much of that will be due to the last, rather than the first two items?
Jesus, you sound like the adverts for sugar-laden cardboard which claim their product is "part of this healthy breakfast"..
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I think I saw a low flying... wait there it goes again... WHOOooSH!
(at least I, and a handful of mods, certainly found the GP to be 100% tongue-in-cheek)
Good call... (Score:2)
Rational decision by school administration? (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are plenty of things we should be immunizing children against, such as HPV, but we aren't because of politics.
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There's an HPV vaccine?
Also that's not something we need to worry about. (No sex.)
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed there is, in fact I believe there are 2 of them. Mind you they only protect against a few varieties of HPV (with some overlap between the two I believe) but the ones covered include the ones that have the greatest chance of causing cervical cancer.
These vaccines have only been tested on women (no reason to believe they don't work on men, but last I checked that was off label) and your insurance generally wont cover the vaccine if you are over a certain age.
Sure, no reason to give the vaccine to 2 year olds, but kids get sexually active fairly early in life and cervical cancer is pretty bad, so why not vaccinate. I know if I had daughters I would have them vaccinated.
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, despite the fact that it can prevent cancer we still have opposition to it.
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You think school WiFi is as important to the childrens' well-being (and/or that of their society) as immunications?
If not, find a better argument.
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case it's probably not worth dealing with them over something as insignificant as WiFi, but figuring out when something is important enough to fight for is the difficult question.
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:5, Insightful)
or you could tell them they are being stupid and ignore their hysterics. That is more straight forward and takes less time. Not to mention you can still use WiFi.
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Of course banning wifi is silly but I applaud the school for listening to the majority of the parents. I just wish local schools allowed parents so much control over what the schools do, pretty sure parents wouldn't have voted to allow the school to spy on students through webcams [slashdot.org]
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"pretty sure parents wouldn't have voted to allow the school to spy on students through webcams"
Are you sure? Based on the overprotectiveness of the average parent these days, I suspect a good portion of them would probably be interested in getting a copy of the surveillance software for themselves. You know, just in case.
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Was it a true majority or the parents, or just a majority of the Nutcases that bothered to appear at the meeting?
I prefer not to live under a "tyranny of the majority", thank you very much.
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I agree. "Parents at St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont., voted to ban Wi-Fi transmitters, after some students reported feeling ill after they were installed." Of course banning wifi is silly but I applaud the school for listening to the majority of the parents.
I have to question that article. I spent quite a bit of time in the Meaford area, and while the locals might not be the smartest folk in Canada, they're not a pack of knuckle-dragging troglodytes, either. As a gut-reaction, I'd say it's much more likely that the PTA is either lying through their teeth, or when they talk about "voting" they're referring to the 5 or 6 yokels who happen to show up for PTA meetings rather than the populace as a whole. Either way, I'd love to see more detail on how exactly th
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...pretty sure parents wouldn't have voted to allow the school to spy on students through webcams [slashdot.org]
No, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if parents voted to allow something like "the inclusion of usage monitoring and access control software on all school-supplied laptop computers", would you?
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Yes, let's applaud the schools for listening to the dumbest people in the district. Parents will consistently agree to the most idiotic conservative ideas out of mindless protectionism.
The correct response to a popular call to ban Wi-Fi would have been: "Do you have cordless/cell phones at home ? Yes ? Well then GO FUCK YOURSELVES"
What's worse, the unproven potential risk of getting cancer from radio waves ? Or terminal stupidity caused by chickenshit parenting and fearful education ?
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Right. Given the choice between educating people and giving in to their irrational fears ..... give in, every time! Oh noes, here comes another solar eclipse! Duck and cover!
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>>>the (often irrational) fear that some people (e.g. parents) have of wifi is real
I thought the purpose of Educators was to erase irrational fears through endorsing/sharing of knowledge, NOT to kowtow to those fears. - It appears to me the administration is as dumb as the parents - i.e. embracing superstitious nonsense ("Wifi is bad - it must be banned").
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Yes, the most important lesson a school could teach is the proper response when ignorant of something, is fear, and the ignorant fearmongers position makes them morally superior to all others thus we must subject everyone to the tyranny of the (ignorant) minority.
What could possibly go wrong when our childrens role models, model that behavior?
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Anxiety disorders and phobia of technology is not a reason to ban something. Should we cater to all the folks with agoraphobia, and ban the outdoors?
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Honestly banning wifi makes no sense.. If there are any residential houses in the area (which there most likely are) then the kids are being 'bombarded' anyways. In the range of my house there are at least a dozen wifi networks and I would say the majority of houses in an urban dwelling are the same. So even if there are health dangers, their kids are constantly exposed.
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not a solution to anything. It's giving in to baseless and irrational fear, which does nothing but promote baseless and irrational fear.
This is why I have a black cat. It keeps stupid people out of my house.
Re:Rational decision by school administration? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you could try to demonstrate how wifi is utterly harmless. Those who consistently refuse to listen can take their snowflakes out of school if they want.
Wired FAIL? (Score:2)
Re:Wired FAIL? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because the average person is an uneducated half-wit, who can be scaremongered by cranks and crooks (look at the whole MMR vaccine-autism "controversy").
If people are that concerned about radiation, then I suggest they move into salt mines and pray to whatever deity they hold dearest that neutrinos do indeed only interact weakly with other matter.
Fucking stupid rubes. What a pack of retards.
Re:Wired FAIL? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't tell them the rock is radioactive.
Re:Wired FAIL? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's okay, but this quote is WAY better:
"A group of Ontario parents dubbed the Simcoe County Safe School Committee believes Wi-Fi transmitters in schools may be responsible for a host of symptoms their kids show -- from headaches to an inability to concentrate -- all of which disappear on weekends."
In grade eight my mother noticed that I tended to be sick on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Rather than blaming the t-ness of those days, she correctly deduced that those were the days I had health class with the evil principal.
I wonder how many of those kids have wifi at home?
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>>>"plug the computers back in with hardwires"
Hardwires emit radiation Mr. and Mrs. Dumb Parent.
problem (Score:2)
So they want someone to prove that it ISN'T harmful.
But is there any proof that it IS harmful?
Sure, it's normal to ban something if it's been proven to be harmful, but I can't think of anything that hasn't been banned because there's no proof that it isn't harmful.
Why is this edit box so god dang narrow?
Re:problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem with that is that everybody seems to want to start with the position that "this is safe unless you can irrefutably prove otherwise", and they go ahead and load everything up with chemicals/whatever and assume it's safe. Which does lead to stuff that you might expect to be dangerous being used until someone can prove it is dangerous. Pharma companies do it all the time, and, have been proven to have lied about risks they knew were there. Think Thalidamide, for instance.
I don't always trust people when they say "oh, sure, this radioactive corn with spiders-silk genes must be perfectly healthy there's no proof to the contrary". The companies introducing these things want us to believe that their chemicals are safe, but it's all discovered after-the-fact.
Assuming everything is safe generally leads to companies pursuing profit with absolutely no regard for if their product is safe. Then they get the rules changed so they're not actually required to tell you about what's actually in it because it hasn't yet been proven to be a possible risk. I wouldn't trust Monsanto on any claims they make about product safety, and I think that to a certain extent, companies should be doing more testing before they release it to the market.
You can go ahead and eat the experimental green goo -- personally, I'd rather they had to put it on the label so I could choose, instead of just saying that it hasn't been proven harmful. It's too damned late by the time they 'discover' that a something we've never tested is, in fact, dangerous.
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Though even thalidomide has valid uses. It came up in the news again in the past few years. (The capsules have a circle-slash over an icon of a pregnant woman.)
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and they go ahead and load everything up with chemicals/whatever and assume it's safe.
Oh, noes, not chemicals! Those evil scary chemicals will kill us all! Ban dihydrogen monoxide before it's too late!
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>>>Why is this edit box so god dang narrow?
To test the intelligence
of posters to see which
ones is Hard Return
every line and which
ones are smart enough
to use Slashdot's built-
in word-wrap system.
.
>>>But is there any proof that it IS harmful?
Unfortunately there is a lot of proof that WiFi is harmful, but it's mostly manufactured evidence by the same crackpots that want to see it get banned. The same crackpots who claim they've "proved" an engine can run forever, or that cars can roll uphill
It's not the energy (Score:3, Interesting)
As usual, Health Canada gets it wrong.
It's not that the signal is low energy, it's that the radiation is not at a frequency that can do any damage.
They could boost the power to the point where it boiled the water in your cells. That's what it would take to do damage, because the wavelength is too long to break chemical bonds. That's the neat thing about quantum mechanics; if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.
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That's the neat thing about quantum mechanics; if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.
Well then theres quantum tunneling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling [wikipedia.org]
The good news is that ten to the negative 99th and the billion times more likely ten to the negative 90th are, for all practical purposes, both zero. You got yer heart in the right place but simplified the details a bit.
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They didn't get it wrong. Their statement is perfectly correct. It's also more relevant than your reason.
Ionizing radiation doesn't give you headaches and inability to concentrate that goes away on weekends. Exposure to RF at microwave oven, heating-up-your-brain levels could do so a lot more plausibly than ionizing radiation.
Re:It's not the energy (Score:4, Interesting)
Ionizing radiation doesn't give you headaches and inability to concentrate that goes away on weekends. Exposure to RF at microwave oven, heating-up-your-brain levels could do so a lot more plausibly than ionizing radiation.
Hmmm, not really. Most peoples brains are very well provided with blood vessels. Good luck cooking a living mammal brain.
On the other hand, your eyes cornea has very little cooling capacity. Its not difference of a few percent, its a difference of a couple orders of magnitude. Cooked corneas are not transparent, as a generation or two of radar repairmen accidents have unfortunately proven.
Blasting enough RF to cause heatstroke like effects to the brain over a long term period, are almost certainly high enough to cause instantaneous permanent blindness.
Suddenly blind people don't really pay attention to a slight headache.
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Microwave oven: 500-1000W (low-power oven; article mentions up to 2000W http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven [wikipedia.org])
(also note that it is concentrated within its shielding, i.e. the microwave, so the power density is quite huge in there)
Wifi: up to 1W ("normal" is 0.03W: http://www.fcc.gov/pshs/techtopics/techtopics10.html [fcc.gov])
So by comparing a wifi transmitter to a microwave oven, you're glossing over the fact that the microwave is at *least* 500x the power of the wifi transmitter (highest 802.11n power and lo
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E = h \nu
"It's not that the signal is low energy, it's that the radiation is not at a frequency that can do any damage"
Given that you say "boost the power to the point where it boiled the water in your cells" I think you're confusing energy (h \nu where nu is the frequency) and power, i.e. energy per second (and power density at that, i.e. energy per square meter per second)
You get it mostly right, though with "if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons." You mean breaking bonds, not
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>>>the wavelength is too long to break chemical bonds
So how long are WiFi's waves? And how "short" do they need to be to cause damage?
Aside - It's somewhat ironic that Shortwave Radio is called "shortwave" when the waves are actually much longer than the waves used by AM, FM, or TV.
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So how long are WiFi's waves? And how "short" do they need to be to cause damage?
About 13 cm. Roughly about 4 times the required electrical length of your antenna, which may be shaped different due to style/marketing. Also vertical stacked antennas provide more gain so you might end up with a multiple of 13/4 cm.
The phrase you don't know to google for is "electromagnetic spectrum". The short answer is wavelengths in the vaguely hundreds of nanometers range aka UV light.
Aside - It's somewhat ironic that Shortwave Radio is called "shortwave" when the waves are actually much longer than the waves used by AM, FM, or TV.
Not entirely wrong, if you ignore the "AM" part. And the historical development of radio, etc.
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So in case it's not clear... (Score:4, Informative)
The Canadian government is saying "Whoa, seriously, people, wi-fi won't kill you."
It's the crazy admin folk in charge of these specific schools that are making the rest of us look bad.
health effects. no. education effects, definitely (Score:3, Interesting)
While the health argument is nonsense, there are a lot of very good reasons to ban wifi in public schools. If the school doesn't have a laptop policy then the students probably shouldn't use them, too much to go wrong, both on a support end and on the student effectively using the tools side of things. I went to both public and highschool in ontario, admittedly, quite a few years ago, but there wasn't really any time except maybe lunch that we would have had anywhere suitable to want a wifi connection anyway. You were either in class, and supposed to be paying attention to the front of the room, or on your way home. And if you actually needed internet access for something legitimate, well there were lots of computers around you had access to. Installing and running a wifi network if it doesn't fit with how the school operates seems unnecessary.
This school in question only goes to grade 6 it looks like. I sort of think that 10-11 year olds probably shouldn't have laptops at school, or smartphones or any of the other modern wifi connected gadgets which sap attention and productivity from the rest of us. They aren't really ready for that responsibility, both in value of stuff or in time management. Highschool might be different, but in public school you get a couple of 15 minute breaks, and some time at lunch, otherwise you aren't supposed to be there. In grade six they're still learning to measure angles with protractors and learning to guess the meanings of words they don't know (source: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/grade6.html) . Looking up angle on wikipedia and finding formal definitions using trig functions seems like it's probably going to do more harm than good. Even if you want to argue a grade 6 kid might be ok with a laptop, grade 4 and 5 are pretty young to be using wireless devices on their own initiative.
On top of all that you get into issues of what has access to the network, and how do you enforce that policy, and if you're going to provide access how do you make it fair for students without the financial means to get laptops etc.
Like I say, in a school that only goes to grade 6 it's a bit different than the usual primary schools that go to grade 8 or a highschool or the like. 8 and 9 year old kids are still learning to write on lined paper, they aren't really ready for constant internet access, and by the time they are, they aren't at this school anyway.
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You don't think kids should be allowed to use laptops and the best way to accomplish that is to ban wifi?
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It sounds like they're using wifi as a shortcut to hook up the lab computers. No need to run a zillion cables, just drop a wireless router in the lab somewhere.
Having once wired my high school with ethernet, it actually sounds like an excellent idea. Even better when you consider that the ceiling tiles in my high school were made with asbestos.
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lets say you want to give every classroom in a school a computer. You can either run cable to every classroom and set up multiple drops so the computer can be in different places, or you can blanket the entire school in a wifi network.
Now sure, some schools had wires in place from before wifi was common, but if you were trying to retrofit an old school wifi would probably look pretty appealing.
Did they run out of tin foil? (Score:2)
I think the fear of wifi and just anything generating signals or god forbid magnetism is worse than the actual effects of it.
What about all the satellites beaming down radio waves at GHz frequencies? surely that does some harm? who's for a tinfoil umbrella?
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Wait, I thought magnetism was good for us? Isn't that how Q-Ray turns industrial waste into attractive and healthful ionizing bracelets?
Not sure this belongs in 'idle' (Score:3, Insightful)
Anti-scientific 'ban everything' movements are the flipside of the pro-CO^2 believers. People who think they intuitively know more than those who study that field in particular who have research to back up their claims.
It's a failing of our education system that more people don't understand science, the concept. You don't need to understand all the branches of science. You just need to know that 'my kid complains of headaches at school' does not mean you can pin the blame on WiFi without any further tests.
Just some background (Score:3)
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Yeah, it's called Parliament. :-P
But, seriously, I'm sure that all of the other provinces have groups that try to push equally stupid things.
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This was probably caused by the same idiots that are trying to push non fluoridated water on us (http://www.waterloowatch.com/). Ontario for some reason seems inundated with quacks and people that think they know whats best for us recently regardless of their education.
Ok, at risk of defending jackassery, I gotta respond to that. "push non flouridated water on us"? Water isn't naturally flouridated to any reasonable level, the flouridation is added. It's flouridated water that is being "pushed" on people because they're not give the choice. It may be well below the level of toxicity, but asking to not be exposed to a toxic chemical just because some people refuse to brush their goddamn teeth isn't exactly a radical position.
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Must be the nuclear reactors. ;)
Irrational beliefs (Score:5, Insightful)
OK /. help me match the list of irrational beliefs with the county.
Canadians think RF affects the body in a non-thermal way, which is hilarious.
South Koreans believe in fan death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death [wikipedia.org]
(North Koreans don't have the electricity to run the fans...)
USA has all kinds of irrational beliefs vaguely revolving around religion, abstinence education works, creation science etc.
Any other "funny" ones?
Laptops give off major EM radiation (Score:2)
Try holding your AM radio close to your laptop (or desktop computer for that matter).
Right now the health effects of various kinds of EM fields or various kinds of modulations of fields,
if those health effects exist, appear to be below the threshold at which
our current population health studies can reliably detect the correlations or
causal effects.
So we are left in the uncomfortable position of saying "we don't know", and we don't even
have any well-founded probabilistic guesses.
When you are in a "we don't k
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Actually, there's these things called "physics" and "biology". When you understand them, you are able to demonstrate that "electrosensitives" are full of shit.
Or should I get just as much consideration for a theory that orange light causes can
What Wifi? (Score:2)
I occasionally visit various schools to play badminton in the gym. The schools are on their own grounds and usually have one or two WiFi hotspots set up. Contrast that to downtown (Vancouver BC), where I walk around checking the iPod for WiFi hotspots and am usually in range of twenty or so. Compared to the downtown core (or even the suburbs where every house has it's own hotspot) schools are a relatively WiFi-free zone.
I'm fine with this... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see a problem with a lack of wifi in schools (with an exception for College/University, and only in designated areas), but not because of any supposed medical reasons.
What reason would any grade-school kid need wifi access for, anyways? What device would a grade school kid have that would even have use for wifi? A laptop? Why would a grade school kid have one? Even if they did, what use would the make of it in school (on a regular enough basis to warrant a wifi network)? A wifi enabled cell phone? Y
Not the firstCommunity battles microwave tower (Score:3, Interesting)
iBurst Microwave tower in Craigavon link [derrenbrown.co.uk]
Step 1: iBurst erects broadband microwave tower in community.
Step 2: Community forms a 'Task Force' for hearings on health complaints "several rash cases were presented in person and by photo... Headaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns, especially with some of the children". Residents give testimony that symptoms only subside when they leave the area of the tower, and symptoms return when they return to their homes around the tower.
Step 3: iBurst attends meeting and listens to documented health complaints with great interest, and responds Oh by the way, we turned the tower off more than 6 weeks ago. Idiots.
Find the witch! Burn the witch!
Find the witch! Burn the witch!
Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn the witch!
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Re:Summary wording (Score:4, Insightful)
What's even more ridiculous is the loaded wording of the summary.
I think he was being sarcastic...
Re: (Score:2)
At least we'd like to hope so.
Re: (Score:2)
It's samzepus. I'm thinking it was deliberate, to troll readers. That's pretty much the only way he knows to get summaries.
Where there's blame, there's a claim (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see it now, parents suing for past 'damage' caused by wifi.
Re:ignorance is too common (Score:4, Insightful)
Since there's been studies where these "electrosensitives" were placed in Faraday cages, but told they weren't in one, still had symptoms, and when they were placed in places they were told blocked signals, but didn't, and still "got better," yeah, I think that it's okay to think people like that are full of shit.