Actually Herb - I've researched the approval of aspartame and, believe me, the rats weren't subjected to "a thousand times" more of the stuff than the average schmo is. When taking into account the scale effect, a lot of people are right on the cusp with their consumption of that stuff. I can't say the same for other substances. But, on aspartame, be careful.

(being preachy here, sorry) We thinking people need to continue to think and remain somewhat skeptical of what we're told. A good friend and former coworker of mine (also a very conservative guy) once openly joked at my warning about aspartame ("You gotta die from something!"). He guzzled plenty of diet soda. Sure, the stuff tastes good. A couple months later he had part of his colon removed. Now, a few years later, he's got bladder cancer and is being forced into early retirement (guy's about 54). I keep thinking back about our conversations. He's a great guy, and a founder of a huge Tea Party group here in Cal. I just shake my head... No, I don't base my health opinions on a single case like that, either. Still shake my head, though... This guy is very fit. We share the experience of getting our pilots licenses from the same flight instructor up in the hills many years ago.... He's a good man...

The mind sets of rat irradiaters is somewhat similar to those doing carcinogen research up to the early 1980s as reported in the well researched book "The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie , how environmental politics controls what we know about cancer" by Edith Efron, 1984. There were hundreds of chemicals tagged as carcinogens while only a few had been actually shown to be carcinogens in humans. Today the lists again keep increasing in length again along with big worries about EM, diet, climate, future POTUS, etc without much real evidence.

Astute observations, Herb. +1

Only Dagney has any exposure to mention. Might explain her decision not to stay in the Gulch. ;^)

True.
It's all part of the deal. You live, you die, and your life is recorded as a dash on your tombstone.

"Will more shielding reduce device usability too much?"
No. We design the antenna to radiate in all directions. We try to reduce wasted power absorbed the user's body, but the user's body is < one wavelength away while the base tower > one wavelength, so you have a lot of coupling to the human body.
"Assuming this is an opportunity, what is needed for a free market solution?"
I think first we'd have to find the mechanism. For example, would it be better to have the transmitter run at 1W at a 10% duty cycle or 0.1W at a 100% duty cycle, or does it make no difference? Are certain frequencies better than others? Does it matter if the power is spread out over a large bandwidth?
One idea they're working with is to have nearby phones act as repeaters so your phone could send a lower power signal from the basement to someone right above you with a view of the tower from the window, and that phone could send a lower-power signal too, rather than having the basement-located phone run full power to hit the tower.
Another idea is the old-school concept of having the antenna not embedded in the handset. You'd need a wire or lower-power link connecting the handset to an antenna in a good location.

I think this is most likely baloney. They don't have a mechanism of action for why non-ionizing radiation would cause illness. It seems like they anomaly hunt. They run these studies and look for any difference in the control group vs test group. They don't start with a specific hypothesis. After the fact they go and look for anything that looks anomalous and speculate it could be do to unknown mechanisms.

It would.

But then, cell phones emit less than a watt. You're probably getting hundreds of watts of radiation from your computer screen right now. So I'm not going to worry about it.

Texting while driving?

The Rats in government use them constantly...especially the one in the (off) white house.