Could Wi-Fi be bad for your health?

Wi-fi isn't but you are a danger to yourself and others.

Sorry, just joined. I removed my question because I just realized that this question is already being discussed on a may 21 thread. I will follow it there.

Some newsreader companies refer to "joining" when you select a specific newsgroup as one of your favorites. People that don't know think that joining means joining!

Airman Thunderbird hath wroth:

There are some web blogs that "gate" alt.internet.wireless. None charge for membership, but some do insert advertising. A few that I know about:

There are probably others...

Exactly, I came in through google. It's got a userfriendly interface.

lifeisfun hath wroth:

We must have different ideas of what constitutes user friendly. Cluttering 1/4th of the screen with advertising and crudely re-wrapping the text to fit, is not my idea of user friendly.

Personally, I prefer various usenet news readers. I've been using Forte Agent for a long time and have not seen any reason to switch.

The big advantage to me is that the entire screen is devoted to content or formatted in a useful way (i.e. multiple windows for cut-n-paste). With a few keystrokes (or mouse clicks), the usual header, message list thread, and navigation junk, are just gone.

That's another reason that I detest blogs and most HTML interfaces. They emphasize form over content. They look great. There are avatars, wiggly icons, HTML formatting, inline photos, garish signatures, cleaver names, copious quotes, and plenty of search and navigation aids. If there's any room left on the screen, maybe a little content, but just a little. What I've noticed is that most posting to blogs consist of "one line" cute comments, which are of little value. For the occasional posting where the author has properly researched the problem and expounded on the topic with details, the blog again emphasizes form over content and re-formats the long posting into an unreadable mess. While I do think there's some merit in encouraging brevity, methinks the blogs and HTML interfaces take it to an un-necessary extreme.

Sounds Like it's alot better than google. Anything looks good to me because the last time I posted to any of these groups I did not have a GUI and I was using DOS. If i end up doing more of this maybe I should invest in that software. Thanks

lifeisfun hath wroth:

Well, my recommendation for using Forte Agent is based solely on its text based features. I don't do binaries or images which are other aspects of usenet. I also haven't tried many alternatives. (I also use "tin" for Unix). You might want to try some others and see which newsreader works best for you. Comparisons and reviews:

Hmmm. I don't mean to defend Google, but in fairness I don't see anything resembling advertising when I view news groups on their web site. (Maybe my browser is filtering them?)

-- Joel

default hath wroth:

You're partially correct. If you widden the page by eliminating the navigation (tree) window on the left, the right hand column turns into non-advertising navigation links such as "about this group" and "edit my subscription". That's what you're probably seeing.

However, if you hit "options" on the dark grey title bar, and select "view as tree", you get a mess of sponsored links and related pages on the right. That's what I mean by advertising. I like to see the thread tree, so I get the advertising and a narrow reformatted center column for the text.

Well, I guess I haven't been paying attention. It now wraps at column

78 on my 20" screen. That's about right. My previous complaints about badly reformatted text in the narrow column mode seems to have been greatly improved. I still don't like it, but the reformatting is much better than when I last had to use Google for everything (around Jan 1, 2007 when Newsguy moved their servers and nothing worked correctly for weeks). Anyway, over half the screen is navigation and advertising. Whatever is left, is relegated to content.

Incidentally, Google also has Google Reader:

which does much the same thing, but is based on an RSS reader instead of a newsreader. It will read alt.internet.wireless newsgroup fed from Google Groups, WirelessForums.org, or others. It does a nice job of displaying content, but there's no threading. It's just one big long list of messages. It does have some nice organization options, tags, sorting, summaries, etc. However, it uses the Google Groups reader to display the actual message. Sigh.

default wrote in news:135q3vrp9h76228 @corp.supernews.com:

What browser do you use ? If it's FireFox, there's a great extension for it called AdBlockPlus.

It blocks *almost* all advertising. (I'm guessing it works mainly for ad servers).

AB+ will block the add, and you can set it to leave the space on the page where the ad was, or it will collapse the space and use it for the page if necessary.

I don't think wifi is that bad, cellphones are more powerful than wifi and they're "safe".