I'm a surveyor, and I use GPS to locate points to within a few hundredths of a foot (a couple centimeters, if you will). So, I don't know if my interpretation is exactly what the article intended, but I saw "tens of meters" and immediately thought "really really bad" and didn't even consider the possibility that the range of variation in "tens of meters" would be significant...

It's interesting how our minds immediately write things off like that... In most other circumstances I think I would have went exactly where you did and asked about the precision.

Something like... if you or I heard that it would cost "several billion dollars" to buy out a particular company, we'd just go "whoa, that's a lot"... but there's a select subset of people who would perk up their ears and say "umm, how much is 'several'?"

Yeah, I'm getting that vibe too... He asks "what would you use this bandwidth for?" then when people answer, he says "well that wouldn't be useful to me" in a way that implies it would be *wrong* for it to be useful for anyone else.

To continue your car analogy, he's like those assholes who go 45 in a 55, then speed up to 70 when you try to pass them, because he thinks the world would be a better, safer place if we all drove 45 or under.

Are alcoholics not "alcohol abusers?" It seems to me that they are defining "abuse" as falling outside of medically approved use, not legal standards.

And again, I don't think that "use and abuse" were being used as lexical replacements for "legal and illegal," but rather "healthy and unhealthy." (In the sense that the current medical establishment has fiat to determine what is and isn't healthy.)

Your connection of the evils of the U.S. legislature to the use of the phrase " drug abuse" by a British science publication is tenuous at best.