oh, and i did read that article. it's not like i don't see your point. i mean, for chrissakes, no one in sf has a land line, so this certainly is something to keep in mind:

"The Health Protection Agency has said that sitting in a wi-fi hotspot for a year results in receiving the same dose of radio waves as making a 20-minute mobile phone call."

HOWEVER.
presently, we don't have free public wifi. we don't have a free, completely open internet connection that can be accessed easily from _any_ location in the city. so, presently wifi is such that, yeah, what's at my house or yours is what i would consider "low level." fine. but at what point do we surpass "low level" and start calling it "high level"? i guess that's what i'm saying.
your article says:

"The type of radiation emitted by radio waves (wi-fi), visible light, microwaves and mobile phones has been shown to raise the temperature of tissue at very high levels of exposure - called a thermal interaction - but there is no evidence that low levels cause damage."

what i'm saying is, how do we regulate this so that we stay at those low levels? how do we make sure that, if it has been proven that heavy exposure _can_ be detrimental, that something on this massive of a scale doesn't put people at risk? and isn't going ahead as planned diametrically opposed to the public interest? yes, with wifi as it is, presently, the risk to public is negligible. but nowhere in the article you cited does it say that studies have been done regarding wide-spread, heavy exposure. and with scientists saying that exposure does cause a risk, it's just a matter of knowing how highly-exposed you have to be to start seeing negative effects, that's a slippery slope toward danger if limits aren't put into place and studies aren't conducted that make it clear that we aren't doing more harm than good.

look, what i'm mostly saying is, science is our friend. let's use it to make sure we don't fuck it up for everyone. we've done that far too many times as it is, and look at the messes we've gotten ourselves into because of it.

~e.