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I have been a follower of John Dvorak's articles on PC Magazine for a long time. His column comes out like clockwork, but his Opinions page was not updated for weeks. A little searching found an article on Medium from John himself. He says that he was released for his article that was critical of the forthcoming 5G system, and the magazine went so far as to replace his article with a pro-industry article. You can read John's story here.
A sad sign of the times where advertising rules everything.
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John C. Dvorak Released from PC Magazine
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rleigh on Monday October 15 2018, @09:24AM (9 children)
I'm still somewhat unsure about the long-term effects of microwave radiation. There are lots of people who will tell you that it's perfectly safe because it's such low power. And for the most part I'm sure they are correct. However, interesting science is always in the edge cases. What about constructive interference patterns, long-term cell damage and indirect effects? I've read some articles correlating the spread of cell towers with insect population decline. Might be utterly wrong, but maybe there is a correlation. Undesirable consequences may not be obvious or easy to detect.
I'm no luddite, I even have a PhD, but history has shown plenty of things which were considered safe in their day which were later shown to be rather dangerous, and it's still early days for the long-term effects to be fully known and understood. There's plenty of economic interest for it to be promoted as safe, and very little to do the opposite, as it always has been for previous inventions despite their true safety record.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 15 2018, @01:26PM (4 children)
We have the technology to generate and manipulate EM waves over a range of power with a bazzilion zeros, more than almost any engineering thing out there. Cell phones are pretty weak EM radiation to save energy and get great battery life, but if you tolerate a power cord, then power levels enormously higher are no big deal. Look at the total power output of just one analog TV transmitter 24x365 vs every hand held phone in a large town added together, decades of radar, all that.
Also creationism and vitalism are myths.
Combining the two, if there were non-thermal effects of EM radiation for life and biochemistry in general, given how incredibly well we can manipulate power levels zillions of times higher, we would be applying those effects to do weird non-thermal stuff with inducing genetic mutations for genetics research, or synthesizing biochemical stuff. But no such effects exist at vastly higher power levels and intensities.
You can do interesting thermal-effect EM stuff. A thousand times the power directed at popcorn kernels will eventually heat them up and pop them. Thats about it.
(Score: 1, Troll) by rleigh on Tuesday October 16 2018, @07:19AM (3 children)
I'm aware of all of this. But... don't you ever stop to think that you're being rather blazé about the rightness of your opinion and that maybe, just maybe, there may be some subtlety we've not noticed? One thing doing a PhD did was give me a big dose of humility. It made me realise that no matter how much I thought I understood, there was an absolutely vast amount I didn't. The creationism slur was totally uncalled for. All I'm saying is that it's the height of hubris to assert we completely understand things and that there couldn't possibly be some as yet undiscovered downside. There might be.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:36AM (2 children)
The problem is you're looking at it from a generalist perspective vs my EE-ish perspective.
The existing physics simply will not be denied... if cell phones caused cancer (via ... what biochemical path? There doesn't seem to be one...) then the average lifespan of a transmission site broadcast engineer or industrial induction heating technician would be a mere couple months. Welders would die within weeks. Radar avionics technicians would never live long enough to retire. Pragmatically it doesn't happen. But theoretically other than thermal effects blasting EM waves is about as interactive with chemistry as a neutrino beam.
I will admit that people mushing weird plastics into their hands and faces IS somewhat new, so if the plastic in "iphone glass" or "iphone case plastic" causes skin cancer after 50 years I would not be surprised (because that kind of thing is a known predictable historical analogy).
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:08PM (1 child)
Actually, my background includes EM and imaging work. There are all sorts of interesting phenomena which can occur and change the characteristics of EM radiation. What about second and third harmonic generation, which can change the effective frequency and hence power? I've personally used second harmonic generation in collagen to do deep imaging of physical structures. What about interactions with dense body tissues such as bone and cartilage? What about localised hotspots due to constructive interference. There are a lot of factors to consider, and I don't pretend to know it all.
Now, any problems are not so huge as to cause immediately obvious problems, that's clearly true. However, the long-term effects are yet to be fully characterised. And there may be subtle effects we are yet to discover.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @09:46AM
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 or more can never be certain.
Arrogant simpletons with a modicum of related experience will always be cock sure...
(Score: 4, Touché) by EvilSS on Monday October 15 2018, @02:42PM (1 child)
There is also a correlation between the number of cell towers and the rise in global temperatures over the past 40 years or so. Heck, there is also a correlation between the number of cell towers and my own personal health issues. Every year there are more towers and every year I have more and more aches and pains.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:38AM
Every year they put up more towers, and as a direct result every year I age one more year older. Its Russian meddling with the aging process, I tell ya.
(Score: 2, Troll) by bob_super on Monday October 15 2018, @04:29PM (1 child)
> history has shown plenty of things which were considered safe in their day which were later shown to be rather dangerous
You look anxious about something. I'm all out of leeches, but I can recommend some radium suppositories. We can follow them, the mercury ointment, and the lead pills dissolving inside you with my X-Ray machine.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 15 2018, @05:39PM
Leeches are actually pretty safe. And maggots are often better at safely debriding than any other current approach. But there's little profit in them, and people find them disgusting.
Just because a treatment fell out of fashion, don't assume that it was ineffective or dangerous. *Sometimes* that was the reason.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.