Welcome to the Buzz Report. I'm Brian Cooley in for Molly Wood. This week, we find porn lurking in
the most unlikley of places, dorks lurking in the usual places, and we finally answer the age-old question -
Do cell phones cause cancer. Well, not really. First, the Gadget of the Week:
I'm sorry, this week no piece of the usual plastic electronic crap could be nearly as cool as the wet &
slippery badasses of the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal program -- commando dolphins and sea lions who
stole the show at a homeland security fest in S.F. Bay.
These guys can do all kinds of ops: Mine sweeping with remote sensors, dropping marker buoys where
they find an underwater threats, even attaching an ankle cuff with a tether line to a terrorist approaching
underwater so they can be reeled in like a big catch.
You know one of these dolphins is gonna' go rogue. You know it.
I've been told "your money's no good here" a few times, but that's usually at a bar after a few too many.
But in this case the only bar nearby was the Genius Bar as a woman at the Palo Alto Apple Store was
turned away from buying a iPad because she only had...cash.
The T-Shirt Team at the store showed her the policy, Limit of two iPads per customer.
No cash. No gift cards. Oral DNA swab required.
Well, ABC 7 reporter Michael Finney dropped in on Ms. Diane Campbell after she got
that dis:
SOT: �Give a sister a break. I�m not going to sell my iPad.�
and all of a sudden the company that calls in police raids realized was about to get its
other eye blackened.
So Steve mobilized their P.R. Dept�s Warm & Fuzzy Unit, which Apple�s kept pretty
hidden the last decade or so, and delivered a *free* iPad to Ms. Campbell and changed
its no-cash policy on the product.
I�m sure she thanked Apple profusely but she might also want to send a thank you card
to Gizmodo, whose door-kicking persecution by Apple is what got them thinking maybe
their next headline should be a positive one.
Oh, and BTW, hold your email Rothschild conspirasists: Turns out it IS perfectly legal to
refuse to take U.S. cash money for a purchase.
Huge dustup at Wikipedia this week: Founder Jimmy Wales was *reportedly* stripped of rank after he
yanked thousands of pornographic images from Wikipedia, fearing they would spook sponsors.
But of course Wikipedia is sort of one big intellectual Summer of Love, so doing stuff unilaterally just isn't
cool, man.
Of course as soon as we heard about this, every monitor at CNET got angled sneakily and we all started
searching for this stuff.
But if Jimmy did pull images that would spook lilly white sponsors, he's not very good at it. I can't *show*
you what's still there, but it's pretty easy to find if you know a little Latin, like this ... and this ... and ... what
is that? OH CHRIST!
Wikipedia denies Wales was knocked down about 10 pegs and says he voluntarily gave up some super
editor privs he enjoyed as co-founder.
Wales was unavailable for comment, as he was locked in his office performing a self flagellation.
The other morning I was having breakfast, watching some TV news show when they went to a story about
Quidditch on college campuses - and I damn near spit out my bourbon: Here were a bunch of jackasses
playing some combination of rugby, soccer and basketball while one of 'em's dressed like a big queen in
gold lame and all the rest are gripping their �broomsticks�.
This is what they do at Hogwarts? This'll give you hogwarts.
Look, when I went to college everyone was playing hacky sack or Ultimate Frisbee. So I know stupid
happens.
But do these guys realize A.) they're not flying and B.) Jimmy Wales is gonna' pull the Quidditch page on
Wikipedia if you keep this up?
Another week, another cell phone radiation study. But this one was the biggest ever, U.N. sponsored and
spanning 13 countries, 10 years, 13,000 users and costing $24 million dollars. The findings? <shrug>.
The mumbo jumbo about "findings are inconclusive", blah blah. Nobody seems to know if these things are
killing us.
Well, let me boil it down for you with just 2 points from the report:
1. People who reported using phones a lot had a 40% higher incidence of a certain kind of brain tumor.
2. Moving the phone as little as 4" from your body reduces the radiation impact to almost zero.
Now you know what to do. And we're now done with these inept phone radiation studies.
That's the Buzz Report, I'm B.C. in for M.W.
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