Agree with this one. It regularly happens to me, as well.
I mean, I can sort of live with messages from people using Windows containing some sort of elongated lowercase j where, I learned years ago, they had inserted a smiley face and mistakenly assumed that this would be universally seen as such, but it's a whole different game where we're trying to be compact and logical, by using certain symbols such as brackets etc.. only to find one's correspondent is puzzled by the emotions conveyed by some round-headed Simpsons faces rendered by their email clients instead of what we meant. Not to mention the shame of apparently unpaired brackets.. Sorry for the long sentences: I'm in a hurry..

Referring to my erratum, seconds after that post:

> Erratum to avoid jokes about language proficiency:
>and *with* even less language proficiency
> I*t* makes me *not* want Net Neutrality

> Or are you suggesting the world should be ASCII only?

I agree that we should make sure that our legacy of >5000 years of written language can be represented using whatever means of communications are currently in vogue. This is covered by Unicode/UTF. Great, so far.

However, I'm also suggesting that during those 5000+ years of written, and what is probably about a million years of spoken language, we have developed words, some of which express emotional state and attitude, inperfectly, of course, but please refer to the Great Poets in any culture. It can be done, and it has been done exquisitely by some.

Humans have been struggling to express their emotions in words, for millenia, and we're making progress.. Therefore, I loathe seeing all those subtle possibilities of expression replaced by a small subset of visual babytalk, taking us back to the level of grunting and shrieking, basically.

Bottom line of what I'm trying to say is: There are plenty of baby-faces in the standards already. If some group (you mention the Japanese) want to occasionally forego their magnificent written culture and make baby-faces at each other: why not: The technology is already there and they have been known to do far crazier things over there. What I don't think we need is to *standardise* some visual NewSpeak to dumb down *everyone's* communications.

> What about all those BBS/ANSI characters from zillions of documents from the 80s?
Yeah, what about them? They can all be represented. What's your point? I've been using :-) and :-( and ~%-} and such for decades. They're no replacement for the appropriate choice of words! There's no reason to formalise them!

Oh speaking of which, I confess to sneaking in control characters on BBS chat systems, I also confess to sneaking in UTF symbols into XMPP chat systems (my nick "had 5 stars"). That was cute for all of 30 minutes. Today, when I see that email that despairs of it's own lack of contents by using some graphical UTF-8 in the Subject:, I have pity on the author (but not on the message itself).

WKR,
-f

Erratum to avoid jokes about language proficiency:

and *with* even less language proficiency
I*t* makes me *not* want Net Neutrality

Oh great, more tiny pictures chosen by some arbitrary process, so that everyone's expression becomes more the same and more like the plastic people in soap operas, and even less language proficiency. A whole generation of TV-watchers and Social Media Addicts already talks that way, and now we want to have symbols so we can express THAT more efficiently in WRITING? Exactly what we need..

I make me don't want Net Neutrality after all. I'm now willing to pay for an Internet fast lane that requires an IQ test.

Oh but wait.. Apple.. right.. who cares..

> Whoa - And the dastardly RIGHT-WING controlled media has covered it ALLLL up!!!!

No, the companies are. I've been corrected, in an earlier reply, on the fact that there are many real trade secrets involved in fracking. But that was not my point in the first place. And yes, the environmental and health issues surrounding fracking have been widely covered up. They must have been, or I would expect noone would tolerate fracking, anywhere!

Now about "right-wing" and "left-wing" those are just what I call "pro wrestling" terms: They are intended to give the illusion of choice, but in the industrialised world today, those wings are often both attached to the same fuselage, forming one plane, and piloted by one group.

> It's important to point out that McCarthy was right - there really were Communists in the State Department.

I'm sure there were. But am I reading correctly that you are reducing the whole phenomenon to "communists in the state department"???

So.. if the entire McCarthy era red scare witch hunt was really just about "communists in the state department", I'm curious to hear how you would describe the extermination camps of WW2, for example.

> Some conservatives regard the term as inappropriate and deprecate > what they say are myths created about McCarthy.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)

Indeed.

> You don't know what you're talking about.
That is an understatement: I don't know the ins and outs of petrochemical processes, at all. But that was not my point and I apologize for not making it clearer. My point was that I consider ANY investment in fossil fuels, of ANY level of sophistication to be a waste of money, that should have been spent in R&D on sources of emergy viable towards the future.

Now, I understand from your comment that you *do* know what you're taking about. So would you kindly share with us a few key figures about the fracking process, such as how much of what is pumped in, how much of it is recovered, and where the rest goes. I can find some stuff online, but if I quote that I suspect I'll get accusations of bad research and following propaganda, so.. enlighten us, please.

Thanks,
-f

> The technology revolution that is "fracking" has created billions in
> wealth for states like Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio and Wyoming.

This smells (PI) like corporate propaganda to me.

> Chinese firms are "aggressively" engaged in industrial espionage
> conducting espionage against innovative US firms

riiight.. McCarthy, anyone? And.. innovative?? Innovation? Involving fossil fuels? The only trade secrets they are likely protecting is the toxicity and environmental impact of fracking. So the next logical step is that the chinese or whoever steal the "secrets", realise how stupid phracking is, then cancel any such plans at home and invest massively in renewables.

So this is great news. The fracking disaster will end with the US.

-f

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not, except on the sports.
I agree not everyone can run wires all over the place, and that most studies are biased.

But that not everyone can run wires is like saying not everyone gets to escape air pollution: It's not fair, but it doesn't make air filters bad, or ridiculous.

Most studies are biased, but consider which bias is more likely: one forced by a billion-dollar wireless industry, or one invented by a bunch of scientists crying in the desert desperately risking their grants and careers trying to warn everyone ?

At what age did your friends start working on cell phone sites? The problem is especially acute for young children. But it's also a bit of a strange argument: We all know about the 95-year old uncle who has smoked all his life and is still going strong. There's always the exception, and there are many other factors at play in human health.

Tell me what you mean regarding that nuclear plant? It's a much different type of radiation.. I'm at 68.8 Km from the nearest nuclear power plant. It's such a small country that just about everyone is closer than 50 miles from one :-)

While I certainly believe your experiment with the cigarette, and would expect cellphones, which are much closer (and much more powerful) to have worse effects, just like you would, it is far from certain that we may continue to rely on dose-response in the case of modulated microwaves. In some cases, lower exposure got worse results: some cellular defense mechanism failed to trigger at very low doses but damage still occurred.

> You seem to be missing the fact that the sun produces more than just >visible light. Low-frequency RF, HF, UHF, VUHF, you name it -- the
> sun produces a ton of radiation of every wavelength, including the
> same type that a phone produces. If you walk outside, you will get
> hit by a thousand > times as much as a phone could ever produce.

That is not true on many levels. While the sun outputs a lot of
radiation at many walelengths, it does not produce all of these in equal
amounts, and while the bands we're talking about here (>800Mhz to say
4Ghz) are not absorbed much by the atmosphere, in the end, the amount of
energy reaching the earth's surface is still not that much.

The sun produces microwaves in several, specific bands, related to
different phenomena in different layers, but the most-studied appears to
be the 2.8Ghz solar flux.

For example, in the

Penticton/Ottawa
2800 MHz Solar Flux .. graph you see a peak at about 30 x 10^-22 W/m2 of 2800Mhz solar flux.

That's .000000000000000000003 Watt per square meter at its peak.

I took out my flux
density meter. It has a range between 0.0 and 2000.0 uW/m2 in the
800Mhz to 2.5Ghz range.

This makes sense because the most conservative norms at this point (the
norms that I'm using), the 2008

BAUBIOLOGISCHE RICHTWERTE (German) have less than 0.1 uW/m2 as an ideal situation
for a bedroom.

I have a general background radiation in that range of about .2 uW/m2 in our garden, in the radio-shadow of the house opposed to the nearest Cell Mast. the HFE35C has a speaker so I can hear an impression of modulation of what I'm pointing the directional antenna at. Mostly, it's Wifi, GSM, 3G, etc.. which I've
learned to recognize.

The neighbour's Wifi, after some careful targetting, is about 7 uW/m2 on
the first floor, through the open window facing them.

That's .000007 Watt/m2 measured through at least one solid wall and
about 15 meters of air.

That's 2.3*10^15 (2,333,333,333,333,333) times the microwave flux from the sun at it's peak, at 2.8Ghz.

When I take any of our laptops and enable the Wifi, at one meter from the device I'm off the HFE35C's scale (greater than 2000 uW/m2).

A cell phone registers as a kind of explosion and is obviously, many time off the scale. Most cell towers, in line of sight, are, as well, from 50m or more.

So those are worse than 6.6*10^17 more intense than solar microwaves at
close range.

But all of this doesn't even really matter. Even if the sun would irradiate the surface with effectively the same or higher amounts of microwaves, I would still not expect much or any biological effects becasue of the type of modulation (not) occurring on the sun's microwaves. Unmodulated microwaves have biological effects only though thermal effect, and that has been proven to be negligeable at low exposures.

If you bother to read the research, it's the MODULATION that gets everyone worried today: Biological effects occur for low-level HF exposure when the RF is modulated, especially with square waves.. e.g. digital data.. What is a laughably safe dose for thermal effect (solar, Wifi, DECT, Bluetooth, ..) suddenly shows serious impact when modulated with square waves..

Best Me With Research, not Ridicule.
It's a lot of work and I'm going to give up if I get more lazy answers.

> There is far more radiation outside in sunlight than your pathetic WiFi router could *EVER* bathe you in.
> Go figure.

I sure hope so, or we would be in a bit of a global predicament :-)

But as you might discover when doing a bit of research, there are many types of radiation, and the biological effects are not the same for all these types (go figure :-)).

For sunlight, these have been studied much better than modulated microwaves have ever been, and this has shown some hazards, which is why noone finds parasols, protective substances to rub onto the skin, and finding shade a strange thing to do. Now some folks are concerned about modulated microwaves, even at the low doses you're trying to make fun about, and I would prefer to stay our of that particular sun until there are some definitive answers about that.

-f

> Hey....how else am I supposed to watch football when I poop?
Don't even get me started on ball sports..

> Ever consider someone who works from home, and works on a computer?
Yeah.. because that's what I do 6 days out of 7.

> What's the point of not being in the office if you're still tethered to a location to work
Quiet, fresh air, own music, company, not commuting for hours, etc.. Also the wiring is just about everywhere.. I mean: I don't work on the ceiling, in the toilets, bathroom, entrance hall, etc.. nor do I really want to. Referring to your opening remark: I hate watching sports..

> Maybe I want to...I don't know...sit outside on a nice day and do some work.
And I do so at every occasion. There are Ethernet and power plugs at various spots in the garden..
most of these spots are still below 4uW/m2 in terms of microwave exposure, so I don't worry much about that, and I love being outside. We don't want to get to a point where we lock ourselves up: That would represent far too high a social cost.

> You're just one of those paranoid tin-foil hat types who probably only feels secure in a cubicle
I was wondering when the TFH would come up. As a matter of fact, I have refused jobs that required me to sit in a cubicle or on any type of open space with lots of noisy people, for years. So, no, sorry, don't feel secure in a cubicle.. Quite the opposite. Besides, those offices commonly have Wifi, DECT, lots of BT devices and colleagues on cell phones.. So not really my favourite place for that reason also.

> Technology has allowed us to no longer be tied to a terminal..or a room...or a building...or even a populated location
So.. because I've solved my particular needs for workspace freedom using wires, and you have solved it using microwaves, I'm more tied than you are? And how does the capability of that technology to work "anywhere" make it desirable or useful to do so? And especially: is that perceived freedom worth the health risks? If I were a rescue-worker, I would happily risk working with a microwave-based comms device on my head for hours, because in some situations, it's just safer to do that than to lose contact with your colleagues. But I believe those are extraordinary circumstances.

> I probably wouldn't want to associate with a paranoid job like you in the first place..
Sorry to hear that. I would humbly suggest you have a good night's sleep and read up on some modern research on biological effects of RF, and perhaps come back to this discussion afterwards.

-f

:-) it may be STP, but I doubt it does much extra :-)