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 heating damage. I.e. it's not "ionizing radiation".

Even if it doesn't break molecular bonds by being off-resonance, you can heat with it by exciting motion across the whole molecule in e.g. polar molecules like water (and these are dependent upon frequency as well, since molecules "like to" move (i.e. are resonant) in different ways (different modes) and at different frequencies, hence the FCC power recommendations for ham radio even for wavelengths that are large compared to parts of your body). So you can make up for a lack of efficacy (i.e. by being off-resonance) by throwing more power at it (unless, of course, the molecule is completely non-reacting). So you won't get cancer from it, but you can burn yourself by handling an antenna while it's transmitting or by being too close to one (power density falls off as 1/r^2, so being sufficiently far away is perfectly acceptable and thus why hams can be required to put up fencing to keep people away from antennas).

Of course, wifi transmitters are under 100mW (I think that's the upper limit I've seen) so you can calculate the number of photons being emitted per second, and thus how many photons are being received per second per square meter at some distance from the transmitter, using E=h \nu and the various formulas introduced implicitly above).

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 power, i.e. energy per second (and power density at that, i.e. energy per square meter per second) You get it right, though with "if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons." You can heat with it, though, by exciting motion in e.g. polar molecules (and these are dependent upon frequency as well, since molecules "like to" move (i.e. are resonant) in different ways (different modes) and at different frequencies, hence the FCC power recommendations for ham radio even for wavelengths that are large compared to parts of your body). So you can make up for a lack of efficacy (i.e. by being off-resonance) by throwing more power at it (unless, of course, the molecule is completely non-reacting).

If you click on "Personalize," you get Ubuntu. If you click on the PC itself, you go to a generic page which then forwards to a Windows-only page.

A top-tier vendor has a whopping three notebooks (including one home laptop, one netbook and one business laptop) and two desktops (one home, one business)?

Seriously?!

System76 has five notebooks (two netbooks, three laptops) and six desktops (two nettops, four desktops).

ZaReason has seven laptops (one netbook and six notebooks; there is a netbook which isn't currently shown that's sold out and getting refreshed) and eight desktops (one nettop and seven desktops).

Something odd is going on if significantly smaller companies can offer a significantly larger selection.

there isn't a lot that MS can do except develop their own hardware.

And extort patent protection money from Android vendors, e.g. HTC.http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/28/microsoft-says-android-infringes-on-its-patents-licenses-htc/

My recommendation is to opt in to the HTML5 beta (uses WebM; http://www.youtube.com/html5 ; it seems to occasionally forget that I'm in the beta program) and the forget the rest. :)

Yeah, I was pretty amused by that campaign. My mind kept phrasing it as "The decision engine. From the company that brought you Bob and the Blue Screen of Death...." ;)

I don't care about the stickers. Gimme non-horked ACPI data please. Sure, you don't manufacture the motherboards, but you can provide the OOEMs and OEMs the same sort of incentives that drive their sticker adoption.

They immediately share the new virus information with the other anti-virus vendors, right?

If you're interested, "Systems Programming for Windows 95" is highly enlightening. It's still on my bookshelf, despite being pretty antiquated. It's interesting the convolutions they went through to be almost-but-not-quite DOS.

If it's any consolation, lwn has a nice analysis that contains the following phrase: "the nearly two-month delay between the report and the fix is raising some eyebrows" and ends with the following:

The most unfortunate aspect of the bug is the length of time it took to fix. Not just the two months between its discovery and fix, but also the five years since Delalleau's presentation. We need to get better at paying attention to publicly accessible security reports and fixing the problems they describe. One has to wonder how many attackers took note of the CanSecWest presentation and have been using that knowledge for ill. There have been no reports of widespread exploitation--that would likely have been noticed--but smaller, targeted attacks may well have taken advantage of the flaw.

It's not slashdot, but it does show that Linux/Xorg people are taking the delay seriously and really don't like the delay in this case. There is a more in-depth analysis of what was going on behind the scenes (it's all public information, after all) that you can read when the article goes public in two weeks. Of course, fanboys are going to be fanboys, be they Windows fanboys ("Unfair! MSFT was only given a week to patch it!") or Linux ("Slow news day, lol.") and reality isn't really going to sink past their outer defenses.

Yeah, sort of

Right; that's the meaning of "after a fashion." ;)

I mean, why would you want to turn the ionsphere into a giant antenna?

I do it all the time, after a fashion. It's amateur radio, and we use ionospheric skips to get over the horizon.

Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.'

Spoken like someone who's only used Flash on Windows. I'm pretty sure Mozilla's put in at least the same amount of work optimizing Firefox/HTML5 on Linux as adobe has spent optimizing Flash on Linux. I mean, it's one Saturday afternoon--while watching cruddy movies on the SyFy channel....

You're rather missing the point. Please reread the section you quoted, and particularly look for the part where I mention relying on another party or set of parties. Much like I don't know how to fix the transmission in my car, but I can find someone to fix it for me instead of going to the dealer, with FOSS you can hire (or otherwise convince) someone to do the work for you.