There is a conspiracy theory floating around, and being circulated by people who should know better, that 5G causes [insert ailment here]. Some people take this conspiracy so far as to blame 5G for COVID-19. We need to talk a bit about RF history here. I've been interested in radio frequencies and technology for most of my life, both personally and professionally. When I was a teenager, I became interested in radio scanners and found the radio spectrum fascinating, in terms of all of the information that was literally in the air around us, and the different behavior of different frequency bands. Using my scanner, I could pick up all kinds of signals from police, fire, corporate radio systems, security, and even cordless phones and cellular phones, not that I did so. This led to obtaining my amateur radio license in 1996. As an amateur "ham" radio operator I learned to use VHF and UHF repeaters, direction finding, and volunteered with the county Emergency Manage
I was listening to my favorite podcast today, This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorak and others (pretty much the old TechTV gang when it was an awesome cable channel, before they were bought by G4 and subsequently run into the ground). But I digress... anyway, they were discussing an awesome service called OpenDNS , so of course I decided to check it out when I got back from lunch. Sure enough, this is a very cool, completely free DNS (domain name service). For those of you who don't know, DNS is what converts Internet name addresses (i.e. www.google.com ) to it's actual IP Address (i.e. 208.67.219.230). DNS was created in the early days of the Internet because humans can remember names a lot easier than number combinations. Typically, when you type an address into a web browser, for example, it goes and runs to your Internet Service Provider's DNS server to say "where the heck is google.com?" to which your ISP's DNS server
There is a lot of misinformation out there and hype around the Novel Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. Based on my research of this issue, t here are many people over-reacting, and also many people under-reacting to this threat. At this stage, in March of 2020, the virus has effectively spread to such an extent that containment is not possible. For the latest numbers, check the Johns Hopinks GIS tracking system . As of right now, the total confirmed cases are 116,000, and just over 4000 deaths. If we calculate the death rate from the confirmed cases, we come to roughly 3.5%. That means that based on the confirmed numbers so far, 3.5% of those infected have died. That said , there are probably more cases than this that have not been confirmed or reported, which means that the death rate could be a bit lower on average - perhaps as low as 2.5%, based on some reports. But in some countries such as Italy, the death rate is as high as 5% as the heath care system becomes overwh
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