There is an article in this week’s “New Scientist” on a proposal to make aircraft in which all the control systems are wireless; rather like Wi-Fi. You can find it at: -
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.300-flybywireless-set-for-takeoff.html
Readers were invited to make comments. I am pasting in my contribution to the thread on the hazards of Wi-Fi. It met with the usual replies (in red) and I felt that I had to respond. I guess this is about as far as we are likely to get to having our stuff on ES published in the “New Scientist”.
If anyone wants to have their say, you are still free to do so; posting is automatic and appears immediately. However, to save wasting your time, you have to type it in the hard way. The site does not accept “cut and paste”.
Dr. Andrew Goldsworthy
Sat Sep 05 15:22:02 BST 2009
by Dr Andrew Goldsworthy
Mon Sep 07 11:11:24 BST 2009 by
Martlark
Mon Sep 07 12:41:41 BST 2009 by
Oji
Tue Sep 08 12:04:59 BST 2009
by Dr Andrew Goldsworthy
They followed his hearse. They hugged his mother, who was in tears.
“I’d never seen anything like that before,” said Rice’s mother, Rosalee Teters. “Rickey … he never thought he was that important to anyone. He never thought he was special.”
But the 53-year-old was part of the Harley brotherhood, and the others know that what happened to him could have happened to any of them.
Rice was killed July 21 on North Congress Avenue, less than three blocks south of the Harley-Davidson manufacturing plant where he worked in Kansas City, North. He and his co-workers were filing home when, according to Kansas City police, a sport utility vehicle pulled past a stop sign in front of his motorcycle.
The SUV driver told police that her view of Rice, and his of her, were obstructed by another car, but co-workers who were driving alongside Rice point to another reason for the fatality: The SUV driver was using her cell phone. She had just received a call, she told police Officer Ron Reilly, who took the report.
Inflaming them more, Rice’s co-workers say she continued talking on her phone after the impact. She drove forward, ran over Rice while she still was on the phone and sat in her parked vehicle talking before ending the call, witnesses said.
The crash that killed Rice reverberated through a work force that has been hammered this year by layoffs. On the Thursday before the Tuesday accident, Harley-Davidson Inc. announced 460 layoffs at its Kansas City plant, which has more than 900 employees.
In the following days, more than 250 people, most of them Harley workers, signed a petition asking that the driver be prosecuted. It’s a start, they said, in pushing for a law to ban cell-phone use while driving.
They said a new Missouri law that prohibits motorists age 21 and younger from sending text messages while driving is an inadequate attempt at regulation.
“He died for one reason only: The other driver was talking on the phone,” said Candis Jerome, whose husband was riding ahead of Rice and who spearheaded the petition. “In our opinion, the cell phone is a form of impairment in the same way driving under the influence is an impairment.”
Rice’s family has hired a lawyer to prepare a civil lawsuit, and Kansas City police plan to present their report to the Platte County prosecutor, who would decide whether to file charges.
The driver of the SUV, a 46-year-old, told The Kansas City Star she had been advised to say nothing.
“I’m very sorry for the loss, of course,” said the woman, who is not being identified by The Star because no charges have been filed.
Rice was a Kansas City native who rode his motorcycle to California’s Redwoods and loved New Zealand’s South Island because it felt old-fashioned and honest, his mother said.
He was a math whiz and was known in his tight-knit workgroup as “Rickipedia” because of his knowledge of trivia. He was planning to start a solar- and wind-energy venture with his best friend if he were laid off from Harley. He had just learned he would be laid off temporarily in September.
He never smoked, hardly drank and almost married once, his mother said.
Amid her grief, Teters was amused that investigators conducted a blood test on her son.
“It’s going to be so squeaky clean. It’s going to scare you to death,” Teters said.
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WiFi not recent news, but useful information.
German Government advises against wi-fi:
http://www.icems.eu/docs/deutscher_bundestag.pdf
Informant: Martin Weatherall
[ http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Wi-Fi
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Wi-Fi
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Goldsworthy ]