Why would they cause cancer (any more than wifi/general EM radiation)? It's not ionising radiation as far as i know and short bursts of exposure to any sort of radiation is fine - people live in Chernobyl without any side effects and the background radiation level there is substantially above the norm.

Do you understand the difference between EM radiation and particle radiation? Unfortunately the difference between the "radiation" fallout from nuclear weapons and disasters and the "radiation" from cell phones is lost on the media. Particle radiation is high-energy particles of matter, e.g. alpha particles, that smash into atoms and molecules and cause damage at the molecular level to your DNA.

EM radiation is pure emitted energy. Light is EM radiation. Heat is EM radiation. Microwaves and radio signals are EM radiation. The wavelength of cell phone radiation is so long (between 10 and 30 cm) that it is literally impossible for it to interact with single molecules and cause damage to your DNA. However, at that wavelength it can still transfer heat, like a microwave oven.

The notion that cell phone radiation causes cancer directly, as in through genetic damage, is ludicrous. It would only be able to cause cancer by causing localized heating of parts of your brain which may set into effect a cascade of effects that may manifest as cancer. However, I think this is unlikely.

As for sperm counts, I think carrying a cell phone in your pocket is about bad for your sperm count as would be carrying around one of those chemical warm packets or wearing tighter underwear--the extra heat is the only culprit.

re 4: You might be surprised where idiots nest.

Given that Pluto orbits at close to 1/1000th of a lightyear from the Sun (up to 7 billion km versus about 10 trillion km in a lightyear), I think if there were a companion star at 1/2 a lightyear, we'd probably have been able to infer its presence by its gravitational disturbance on the outermost planets' orbits. Also, most binary systems have very tight orbits between the companion stars--a binary system with 1/2 a lightyear distance might be even more unusual than a unary star system.

I suppose it is possible the Sun has a companion out there, but seems very unlikely to me.

GC has been around longer than OO.

Hitler is going to be pissed!

PISSED!

I'm unclear on what part of the government would be "supporting" a failing company by allowing a private acquisition to occur. It's not like Oracle is asking the government to pump money into Sun. That would be supporting.

On the other hand, it's seems relatively obvious that by preventing this the EC is doing everything possible to make Sun and Oracle both less competitive. Whose being anti-competitive again? Do you think that maybe IBM, SAP, HP, and others are actually benefitting from the gridlock? They've been soaking up Sun customers for months now.

That's a moronic inference. The balance of our nuclear energy comes from low-enriched uranium specifically made for reactors, not from detonable bombs.

They were just adjusting Mars' orbit for the next shot. Now vee have dem vere vee vant dem!!

No, actually, Russia has about 13,000 warheads.

Right, the pictures of the big bad Israelis bulldozing Palestinian homes make for such great propaganda that the inconvenient fact that the Palestinian authority actually bulldozes _far more_ Palestinian homes than Israel ever has (or that Israel actually bulldozes Israeli citizens homes built on disputed land as well) gets completely overlooked.

Yet when Israel cedes land unilaterally back to the Palestinians, or releases hundreds of terrorist prisoners in exchange for peace, it gets not peace, but demands for its destruction.

You can make rationalizations all day long but when it comes down to it, I am certain that if the Palestinians had 50-100 nuclear devices they would not show the same restraint. Israel would be ash in seconds.

Israel probably has 50-100 nuclear warheads, likely for more than three decades. Yet in the numerous times that it was attacked by its neighbors, had its borders violated by suicide bombers and terrorist kidnappers, and having suffered tens of thousands of rockets launched from the West Bank and Gaza over the years, it has not used one.

I don't remember any neo-cons with pitchforks at these rallies.

Brian Kernighan would retort,

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

C++ seems to be language of choice for geniuses to hang themselves these days.

That definition is actually wrong (if you quoted it correctly), and that book is not a standard CS textbook on programming languages or type systems. I prefer Milner's definition of type safety which he summarized as "A well-typed program cannot go wrong." Notice this is a statement about programs, not languages. When you consider the actual definition of type safety for a language--that given formally defined evaluation rules and type rules for the language, it can be proven that no execution of any well-typed program will encounter a type error--it is clear that the only definition of type safety that matters is static type safety. Few languages achieve type safety, and almost none achieve static type safety.

In reality nearly all languages are hybrids and perform some static checks and some dynamic checks. Typically, though not always, this means that a particular "safe", "statically typed" language cheats the above definition by simply defining semantics for a dynamic check failure and thus not considering it an "error".

Java is a mostly statically typed language, whereas Python is a mostly dynamically typed language. After all, both languages enforce a number of rules on programs at compile time, and both perform dynamic safety checks of one kind or another.

I remember we used to have this things called "phonebooks" or something. It required opening a "book" and binary searching....and remembering street names. Can't be bothered with that now. Oooh silly cats on youtube! Huh? Oh shit, browser went down, can't change my clothes. Better lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. God I wish this ceiling had better resolution.