Oops, strike that. Mixing up the magnitude orders. It should read a few hundred hrs of long haul flight. :blush:

As a physics engineer experienced in the field of radiotherapy and familiar with the techniques mentioned in the /. article as well as certified in radiation safety I am sorry to say that although the radiation dose is reduced, it is only reduced in very specific cases, where it is actually not a real benefit. This technique is not used for normal CT scanning, used to diagnose in your average hospital.
This technique is used for radiotherapy (and mainly for position verification of the organ to be irradiated). Lowering CT dose in such cases is a benefit, but compared to the amount of radiation the person undergoing the treatment receives, to treat his' or hers cancer, it is finite. Apart from that the dose for a Conebeam CT in general is already lower than the dose received by a diagnostic CT scan.
The benefit to using the GPU to do the reconstruction of the conebeam CT is also in the fact that reconstruction and therefor the assessment of the scan can be done quicker, making it less likely that the patient has moved, making it more likely to treat the correct spot. It also makes it possible to more accurately deliver dose and thus sparing surrounding healthy organs and tissue.
To put the received conebeam CT dose in perspective: The biological dose received from on such CT scan is about as high as a few hrs long haul flight (considering the effective dose received per hour as stated by BA).
Regarding the cited article of increased risk in cancer in children: Every person receiving radiation has a risk of getting cancer in the future added to the normal risks of getting cancer (for instance by aging or cosmic radiation).
For children this is far more important as induced cancer is a late effect that takes years to decades before it kicks in. Since the bulk of cancer patients is of higher age (due to the fact that cancer is a age deficiency, mainly) they will most of the times not live long enough to experience the side effects. Since children have a longer live span in front of them compared to adults, we have to be more careful, as because of the larger number of years to life, inherently means a higher risk of late effects induced by radiation.

Twisting the facts... according to the blog they are not stopping development, but are putting it on hold, hopefully to pick it up when Microsoft permits it.

Not that I know of, but perhaps you might have access to a local.cf file in which you can set the score of the rule to a lower value or ignore it by setting the score to 0. Before the update I did this (in my case) by adding the following line to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf: score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0 The new rule however is not released in a new spamassassin release yet, but the rules are pushed through the udpate channels, so perhaps your provider might have received the update. Othwerwise it is wise to inform your provider (as this would affect all the users in a heavy way due to the high score assigned to this test) or switch provider.

In this case it really is as this rule is due to be removed in future releases of SpamAssassin, for details see: https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6271