Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Did the accident rate increase? (Score 5, Insightful) 367

The main question is if the total accident rate has increased since cell phones became ubiquitous. As far as I know the answer is "no", the accident rate actually went down. "Tied to" doesn't mean "caused", or "increased the chance of". Usually "tied to" is a lazy qualifier from a lazy researcher or journalist.

Comment Two irrelevant statistical numbers (Score 1) 264

The post has two completely irrelevant numbers: 1. fires "about 17 every hour" (why the rate of fires in the whole country important? Many cars -> many fires per hour). 2. "one fire for every 33 million miles" - useless number without providing comparable stats for gasoline cars, and normalizing to the car age, adjusting for causes of fire, etc. C'mon editors and writers, don't be lazy bums - there is enough of this stupid garbage in "mainstream media".

Comment Re:Physical mechanism? (Score 1) 555

Do you have any information about the absolute heating caused? I dunno, but a 4W light bulb is still hot to the touch - not sure I'd want to poke my brain with a 1W heat source.

Here's a simple experiment: wrap you hand around your cellphone antennae and call someone. Do you feel ANY heat? Didn't think so.

There are several problems with your bulb analogy. 1) While human body is almost opaque to the infrared light (i.e. absorbs most of the heat from the bulb) it is almost transparent to radio waves (that's why you don't lose cell phone signal when in a crowd of people). 2) Only a small spot heats up from the bulb - spread the same heat over the whole hand and you'd barely feel it. Spread over the volume of your body and you won't feel anything.

Btw, photons from Bluetooth headset ~3 times more energetic than the ones from your cell phone (2.4GHz vs 850MHz) :) (Still negligible compared to the energy of photons at 300THz for visible light. Remember Herr Planck: E=h_bar*omega...).

Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business (sun.com)

Samrobb writes: According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. According to Schwartz, "We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL."

Slashdot Top Deals

Chemistry professors never die, they just fail to react.

Working...