Posts by Henry Wertz

No Linux? Blah

This machine sounds great, except I will not buy a machine with Windows on it.

@First post:

"Proof if it were needed... ...that the public do not want Linux with all these Windows XP netbooks coming out. "

The company not shipping one makes no argument over demand. OTHER models that have a XP and Linux version have had brisk Linux sales.

"There's not even any real argument over price as Windows XP is so cheap and most major OpenSource projects run on Windows as well."

There's not an argument over price. It's $25-35. Or even worse on brit models, 25-35 pounds. I deeply object to sending even MORE money to Microsoft for something I will not use. Either knock a bit off on a Linux model, throw in some little extra hardware.. or hell, just pocket the $25. I'll even be fine with it just going to Asus over knowing it goes to Microsoft (PLUS Microsoft I'm sure falsely using this as proof of Windows' popularity.)

" If there is a Linux version, expect it to come out on lower-spec hardware (seems to be the fashion with these things)."

This would be OK with me. If I got one a little slower, but 10+ hour battery life instead of 9.5.. well 9.5 is already a lot, but I do not really need the "extra" speed. Maybe make a Linux one that they can get the price back down $100 or so.

What a piece...

I have no problem with the phone phreaking. That's some mere youthful indescretion. BUT...

Weigman sounds like a real piece of work though. SWATing? evil. Screwing with some person because they wouldn't have phone sex with you? WTF. Getting pissed and battling William Smith because he "DARED" to close your account for paying for it fraudulently? Get a life.

Kudos to William Smith for taking this piece of crap in.

Not 1 meter...

"I'd bet that's supposed to be one meter, not one mile."

Nope! The test rig already did 30 feet -- that's like 10 meters. If I thought an RFID cloner could be improved *to* 1 meter I wouldn't be so concerned, although near a doorway or whatever that could still collect plenty of tags.

Huh.. and solid fuel?

Huh, I thought it really WAS going to be a rocket blowing up on the pad, with some NASA goon (the bureaucrats rather than the scientists) saying "Guh, it was supposed to do that." What do you know it appears it was a REAL test.

RE: solid fuel?

It's a major problem if the rocket goes off course. Otherwise, it's safe and reliable. There's no "off", but there's ALSO not all this complicated plumbing with liquid oxygen and propellant, no valves, no O-Rings (Challenger's downfall), no problems with the mixture, and so on. They already know how much fuel is needed to get launched so it has that much. From what I've read, the tanks alone for a liquid fuel setup add significantly to the weight, which is a big issue for a launch into space.

If there's an off-course condition, the launch vehicle has basically an ejection system*, then the rocket can be remotely blown up. (*Is the ejection system survivable? It's supposed to be, but is definitely better than being rocketed back into the ground.)

Ugh!

I won't argue if the sentence is too short or not. But, why, WHY the hell do people think they can text while driving?

1) Obviously it's dangerous, they're not looking at the road for extended periods of time. I think everyone here knows that.

2) Texting is store-and-forward, it's not necessary to read a text the second it comes in and fire a response off to it. I've seen people (on a computer, not in the car) Instant Messaging, they will find it totally normal to IM + do something else, making for extended delays when they forget to check IMs and reply to them. I see no reason a text should be held to a higher standard. Seriously, at least wait til you're stopped at a stoplight or something, pull into a parking lot, etc.

Sure it's DRM

Sure it's DRM.. it's not the usual rights restriction code that is meant to prevent copying, but signing binaries and disallowing "modified" binaries to run is indeed DRM. (I would think at least you should be able to mod them all you want in single-user play.. I can of course see not allowing modded bins in Internet play, due to the near-100% probability the mods are for cheating.)

fix BEFORE release?

"But but but, win7 beta 1 is still full of bugs. Multi monitor support is broken, networking flaky, the start menu idea just smells of 'lets copy OSX again'. Do they plan to fix all this BEFORE release?"

Oh of course. But if they don't have time there's always service pack 1. Or service pack 2. Or "Windows 8". Or they can just remove features and say they never intended to have them to begin with. Or blame it on driver problems "Oh, your multi monitor support is broken? Blame (Nvidia/ATI/Intel)." (This is what they did in Vista -- buggy and undocumented video driver code within Vista, rights restriction software preventing a debugger being run on the video drivers the companies are trying to develop, but OH NO, it's NVidia and ATI's fault the drivers were buggy.)

Pointless. But so is other DRM.

Pointless. But so is other DRM. This *IS* DRM, it's just not very strong. The thing is, of course, that "strong" DRM isn't -- every single restriction system has been thoroughly broken. I for one will not add tags to my pages just to follow some hairbrained rights restrictions scheme. It would be amusing if anyone adopted this though, it WOULD at least stop companies wasting time on trying to develop "unbreakable" DRM since that is physically impossible.

Not avoidable

"IMHO, this deer hit could have been avoided. The deer comes out of a small driveway on the left and it is a clearing, not a bunch of trees right up the road. If the driver was actually paying attention, he/she should have ease off the gas while Bambi runs across. Then, the evasive maneuver while braking is to go on the left lane since there was no incoming traffic and the road is straight (clear view ahead, no curves)."

Doubt it! It's really hard to tell from these shots, but in reality, it's probably "deer stood near driveway on the left. Deer ran straight in front of car at stop speed." You DO NOT swerve to avoid deer! 1) Car is very likely to lose control. ESPECIALLY if you "evasive maneuver while braking", that's the WORST way to avoid a deer accident, he car will almost certainly go out of control, and since you brake less than if you just braked, you'll be going faster when you hit the deer or the ditch. 2) Seriously, deer will go from a full run, stop dead in their tracks, and jump backwards, zig-zag, whatever. I've SEEN cars try to swerve around deer, the fuckers will actually jump BACK out in front of the car! 3) Natural selection. I have actually noticed MORE deer here in Iowa recently that see cars, and wait for them to pass, rather than just leaping right out in front as they almost always did in the past. The ones stuipd enough to play chicken here have almost all been run over and not reproduced -- that's evolution in action!

Co2? Dont' forget..

CO2? Don't forget, fossil fuels *also* were plants at one point or another. That said I think burning trash is far better than just tossing it in some landfill.

@Anton: Yep, I remember seeing a photo somewhere of a wood-converted Beetle. Same concept, you don't really *burn* the wood so much as gassify it, and the engine burns that. I remember the gassification made about half the power of gasoline.

Probably not made in Europe

"Isn't most European Dell kit made in Europe, so shouldn't be subject to USD/EUR variations?"

The box is probably put together in Europe. But, motherboards are typically made in China. CPUs and other chips? There's a foundry or two in germany, but I don't know if they make CPUs etc. still or not -- the rest are made mainly in Taiwan and Singapore.

I've stripped apart and put together a few thousand Dells (working at a surplus). I'm certain a Dell Optiplex (the GX240-GX280 at any rate) could be pieced together (including the case from it's individual pieces) in under 5 minutes, and perhaps under 2 minutes, meaning the actual assembly shouldn't affect the price much.

The big questions then, does Dell buy European-built dell CPUs, motherboards, etc. in dollars or euros? (Even if they go direct to europe they may still purchase in dollars I suppose) And how do those two currencies compare presently to taiwanese etc. currency? That's what will affect prices the most.

Of course, I don't have answers for any of this, it could still just be a big ol' fashioned cash grab by Dell.

He *thinks* he has a case

"And why exactly is he sueing Citibank? Should stupidity finally be rewarded?"

Well, he *thinks* he's got a case because he asked the bank if the check had gone through and was told "yeah it's fine". He doesn't ACTUALLY have a case, because the bank deposits checks provisionally then pulls the cash back out if the check proves to be counterfeit, and they are premitted by law to do this for.. 14 days? Maybe 30 days?

He should have known better, this is a standard part of this scam -- checks are not checked on-the-spot, asking the bank "is this real?" doesn't count for anything.

OH no of course not

Oh, no, there's no POSSIBLE way being able to turn off UAC with no user intervention could POSSIBLY be used insecurely.. *rolls eyes*. Get it together microsoft.

What an overreaction

What an overreaction... *shakes head* bloody hell. The incoherency of it really takes the cake... kudos on the excellent flame of the week.

I just hope...

I just hope this Javascript engine's bug fixes don't slow it back down. Years ago, there were a few cases where Mozilla would get for instance a new rendering engine. Oh, it's 500% faster, it just has a few bugs and odd cases it doesn't handle right. Each bug fix (or edge case handled) slowed the rendering engine a little bit, once they got the bugs squashed it was like 10% faster than the old engine.

no investment in networks

"In his Digital Britain report, Lord Carter said givings ISPs the ability to charge for guaranteed service levels to content providers - such as asking the BBC to pay for delivering iPlayer traffic - could promote innovation and investment in networks."

No it won't. As far as I've ever read every ISP in Britain just goes through BT (hadn't one had it's own backbone but gave it up?) ISPs charging BBC might help the ISPs from going under (due to BT's recent change from charging ISPs per-line to also charging a fee based on amount of traffic carried). But it's up to BT to invest in networks or not, BT's ALREADY being paid for traffic, it's clear to me this would therefore not affect network investment or "innovation" at all.

"We do not throttle speeds on our network"

"We do not throttle speeds on our network"

Maybe they should? I'm all for net neutrality, but given not enough bandwidth to go around, if a few people pulling 16mbits/sec 24/7 and the rest are only using it during peak time, I think throttling those few during peak time would be OK (this shouldn't be INSTEAD of upgrades, but a nice stopgap until the upgrades are done.) Personally, when I've been generating heavy traffic I wait overnight for it to finish anyway, I'd have no problem with it slowing down a bit during some peak times if it meant I wasn't hosing people's games.

On the other hand, I've read the argument that for some networks it cost as much or more to install a throttler than it would to just install an adequate network. In which case they better spend on upgrades instead.

Didn't know it was an option...

Well, as I see in the comments, it is, but I didn't know it was even an option to disable. They passed a law like this already in Japan I think, to stop the train hentais from taking up-skirt camera photos with their phones. I haven't tried too hard to look, but I didn't realize there were still noise-free cameras available here.

@Glad...

I agree! Those squishy-fake mouse click noises PISS ME OFF!!! Arghhhh!

Anyway....

Argh!

Obviously, I'm not surprised at all -- when Bushes pals already decided they would break the law, why stop at just breaking it a little?

This is the best reason to cancel out this illegal warrantless wiretapping problem -- they've already been caught red-handed greatly exceeding the (already too wide) scope they claimed they would limit themselves to. With warrants of some type, there will be a paper trail to keep these guys accountable.

Obama? He won't help -- I voted Constitution party, Obama lost my vote when he voted to grant the telecoms immunity for illegally complying with warrantless wiretaps. He talks big but his actual actions show he is not interested in true freedom.

Inflamatory but good points...

This article's a bit inflamatory but has good points. HOWEVER:

1) The exact same could be said about going from like Office 2000 to 2003, or god forbid Office 2007. Or 2000 to XP. Or especially XP to Vista. Things moved, they aren't where they used to be, OMFG!!

Amusingly, I saw this Russian distro, I think it was called "Linux XP". It looked EXACTLY like XP, had firefox with an IE icon and everything; it even had a WGA clone pop up and tell me to send them $50 to register it... hahaha!

More seriously, though, if your users are not real flexible, you can skin a Linux distro to look more windows-like (just as you'd probably have to do going from Windows to a newer version of Windows).

2) @Jared Earle

"The day Linux can ship without needing a terminal is the day it can stand a chance on the desktop. The day you can install Linux on a generic PC and not have to visit the command line. The day your mum can survive the entire life-cycle of a PC without resorting to the shell."

Get off it! Your afraid of anyone ever having to launch a shell in any situation, but Windows admins think nothing of running regedit, manually downloading and running ad-ware cleaners, virus cleaners, etc., running ipconfig -- from a command prompt! -- looking for suspicious files (again from a command prompt!) and on and on. Your mum can't survive the life-cycle of a *Windows* PC without the shell, unless you define the "end of life" as her throwing it out because it's bogged down...

With the likes of Ubuntu the user CAN get normal stuff done without a shell (admittedly you still needed one a few years ago to set things up, but no longer). Unusual stuff, it's easier to say "type this, this, and this" under Linux *OR* Windows than have a super-cluttered GUI that tries to cover every situation, and that's what BOTH do. I should point out, OSX also has Terminal (which gives you a command shell), and people use it, for situations the GUI doesn't cover. No-one argues OSX should ship without Terminal (well, it wouldn't surprise me if Steve Jobs argued against the Terminal at some point... but other than that...)

Not waste of taxes

As Matt says a few posts above, whether this is a waste or not, it's not a waste of *taxes*. The spectrum was auctioned off, and they're taking under 10% of the auction amount to feed into this box program.

Personally, I have cable TV, but I got a USB tuner stick and antenna to try out with my computer... analog reception in my area was nearly impossible for more than about 4 channels (without a large rooftop antenna.. which given the weather here would be destroyed by severe icing, hail, or wind within a year or two.) I've got a large directional indoor antenna (Hovermann) + amp now and am getting 18 channels. Nice! I had to hack a bit to get the driver installed since it's a very new stick, but once installed it's treated like a DVB-T device so mythtv worked right off, including pulling TV schedules straight from the stations (except the 1 station that doesn't transmit program info yet...)

Bots? No. ID theft? yes

In my view, the 250,000 bot net is really not a big deal, if as he claims it did not cause any harm. I mean I certainly wouldn't start one up, but with these windows holes these days, it's not that hard to get a botnet that size. Also, he' s probably right that the bot did not harm the machines it's on. In addition, although ironic, doing it from work is a work issue more than a legal issue.

HOWEVER, the ID theft is a big deal. So he (through his lawyer) gets real weasely and says he "ultimately did not steal much money". Well, OK, he maybe didn't *steal* much money.. this doesn't say if he made tons of money reselling these illegally obtained account infos or not. This is super-greasy and he should get 5 years for this alone.

"Prison is a boys club. All that talk about abuse there is stupidly ill informed. The worst that will happen is he can't talk to women and go out for a pint with his mates."

This depends on the prison, and on if he behaves respectably or not. I know a few people who were inside.. one was in for 2 days presumably at a rougher prison and had to kick the crap out of someone on day one, they tried to "take it from him". The other was in longer (in a different prison) and said people had no problem as long as they treated each other with respect, the ones who were not respectful had problems. So I'm guessing he'll almost immediately try to defraud his fellow inmates, and then they'll abuse him plenty.

I wonder how many of these went offline?

I wonder how many of these actually went offline (or went offline for more than a few minutes). I mean,, how many registrars are actually in Kentucky? In a few other cases, I thought I had read the registrar just cahnged the IP to point to some "UR site has been seized!!!" page, but since the registration was still in the owner's name they just moved it to another registrar and set it back up properly 8-).

Anyway, good that cluefulness prevailed. A domain is obviously not a gambling device.

Second quarter?

1) Second quarter? As many have said, people have been virtualizing XP for years, even using Microsoft's own products (well, VirtualPC became theirs after they bought Connectix). Are they planning some MacOSX-style setup where the XP apps run seamlessly on the desktop (the way it did for OS9?), or is Microsoft just being slow to release?

2) This seems to be a big problem for Microsoft. If someone is going to run their apps in a VM, it gives little reason to run on top of Vista rather than running on something else (OSX or Ubuntu for example.) XP will run on almost every virtual machine system I've ever seen... some like qemu emulate real hardware.. and it's old enough that XP supports it out-of-the-box... others (VMware, I'm looking at you) simulate idealized hardware but there's XP drivers for it.

Yep...

I see three big factors for lower sales

1) Economy. Really, people would overlook the other 2 when they didn't mind spending a few extra bucks, but well... now they do.

2) "Casual games". I don't know if there's more actual casual games than there used to be (I think there are) but there's certainly more awareness of them... there's still going to be games that push the graphics to the limits, but there seem to be a lot more games that basically have "good enough" graphics and focus on the fun and gameplay instead. This will lower sales, gamers may think twice about whether it's worth spending cash on a new video card just to play a few extra games.

3) Moore's law. Any more, even some crap on-board video chipset is good enough to play some reasonable fraction of the graphically intensive games and plenty to do everything else. The days of the "Intel Non-Extreme graphics" (I810 for instance, which barely seemed to handle a 3D screensaver) are past*.

*In most cases. I guess some file and compute servers and the like still come with oddball video chips, figuring the machine will either be headless most of the time or have a Quadro dropped in for serious 3D work.

Sun and Canonical

"Would a company that is going bankrupt be buying companies (see Q-Layer)."

Maybe. Micron bought Gateway's business division just over a year ago, they are broke now. It does happen.

(The basic fact is you're right though, Sun's not as big as they had been in the dot-com boom, but they have cash on hand, they're making cash, and they didn't do any of those stupid "leveraged" arrangements some companies did that screwed them so bad.)

As for Ubuntu Expo.. I'm not too surprised. I mean, the economy and all that will not help. But even not counting that, I'm way into Ubuntu but I just don't think I'd go to an expo for it, unless it was held right in town. Some Windows users get a bit antsy to go to expos and see what's supposed to be coming out, I think due to the long product cycles. Apple has shorter product cycles, but have Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field (for now...) to keep them all excited to go to expos. Ubuntu has neither.. new versions come out at 6 month intervals, so changed from one version to the next are much more incremental.. and Shuttlesworth is cool but he doesn't have the Distortional abilities of Jobs.

I'm with Pev

I saw the first paragraph and was like "Damn that's all Mad Max style."

I don't know the actual situation, but I prefer to think the 3 years is not for the weed, but for thinking it's fine to wack it at 95MPH, and shoot a rifle out the car (probably also doing 90MPH.) I know the roads there are pretty rural, but that shit's not safe.

And, agreed.. it's real rough to not be able to legally drive a car those first 6 months in prison.

So design change or what?

So did they redesign them so a failed power supply will isolate itself, and not blow the whole power bus... or did they just find the early ones had a higher failure rate than they'd like and replace them? The former would be great. The latter helps the immediate problem, but still it wouldn't be too cool if (5+ years down the road) the system goes back from high-availability to low availability as the power supplies age.

EEE model M?

They really should build it into a real keyboard like a model M*. Ugh, chicklet keys. Of course then it'd probably be heavier than quite a few notebooks (let alone netbooks) on the market. The model M would probably have room for the hard disk though 8-).

*Well, IBM and Lexmark don't make model Ms any more, but Unicomp does.

hacker proof?

So, I do certainly think his other claims are umm.. suspect. Yeah.

Hacker and virus proof? Well, if the rest doesn't sound fishy that sure should. Being hacker/virus proof is a matter of application and OS design, not chip design. Of course, if you run any non-x86, most hacks and viruses are x86-specific, but that's not a matter of chip design, it's just market share.

If you run a hypervisor, run a VM under it with your OS of choice... if your OS gets a virus, it's still going to misbehave VM or not. The hypervisor would likely stay clean, but having a VM pwned rather than a OS on bare metal really isn't an improvement in my opinion. But, either way, virtualization is nothing new for the Core 2.

Stack smashing protection, address randomization, and so on (to make hacks and viruses more difficult) as implemented in many modern OSes are not Core 2 dependent. However, if an app were just badly designed it can still be pwned no matter how hardened the system is.

And so on.

Nudity is nudity

"Fine. I don't care. Breastfeeding isn't exactly pornographic, but if the rules state clearly "NO EXPOSED BREASTS" then why should some people be allowed to break those rules just because a baby's hanging off it?"

EXACTLY. I don't have any problems with breast-feeding I guess, but Facebook doesn't allow topal nudity. Your breast is out? THAT IS NUDITY. I would just prefer they allow all the T'n'A the viewer can handle, but they don't.

Women, please, go ahead and just go elsewhere, or put up your own photos on your own site. That is what I do, put my photos up with a photo serving software off my own computer. No censorship whatsoever. And keep in mind, noone is REALLY interested in seeing photos of you breast-feeding your kid.

"And why can men, who have the same EXACT breast structure (except for the milk ducts which are under the skin and therefore never seen anyway), show off their breasts without offense to anyone and nobody asking them to cover their breasts? And don't you dare say size -- there are a lot of (fat) men who would put most women, even well-endowed women, to shame in breast size."

Actually funny you should mention it, I have had people take one look and say "Hey, come on man put your shirt back on! Please!" My man-tits aren't THAT big though, it's my gut that does them in I think 8-).

"buttocks (women are allowed to wear thongs in public)"

but they cannot show the crack or the vag.

Damn!

Well,

1) Site does look pretty interesting at any rate.

2) Fail. People have bid up 300 "FreeBids", which would cost $225 cash money, up to $805.50 so far.

BT...

I think a few people placing the blame towards BT are right. BT doesn't sell the ISPs a xmbit service any more either, they bill them per MB. I'm very surprised no enterprising companies have built out an alternate backbone.

IBM...

Well, IBM did this a little for mainframes. Ship 'em with spare CPUs, you can pay to use them. Or, if a CPU fails*, the OS automatically migrates things to a spare CPU, and an engineer comes out to replace the failed CPU, with 0 downtime. If you need more CPU power, you "buy" more CPUs and some guy just types in a code and turns them on (as long as you don't want a *lot* more CPUs which might involve actually installing some.)

*No worries about the CPU giving bad results *before* it fails. Traditionally, the mainframe CPU would runs two pipelines, with comparator circuits -- so it catches a bad CPU right away when the results don't match. Since everything on mainframes runs in virtual machines, it can then move the VM onto a working CPU.

=============

*BUT*... something like "oh you want to burn a CD? Pay $1 to use your burner", having to pay to use the CPUs you already have, apparently while ALSO paying per hour for the apps you run on those CPUs, is absurd. The patent filing indicates an 8-core box -- for word processing, surfing, etc. they recommend 4 cores, which is absurd... that's just no work at all for a single core to take care of.

Ubuntu will DEFINITELY take care of this problem. And, people say Ubuntu is faster than Windows *now*.. imagine some future point, where Ubuntu sees the 8 cores while Windows-by-the-hour sees 1 core because that's all you've paid for. That'll REALLY make Ubuntu seem faster hahaha.

I bet this could lead to ridiculous situations... maybe someone will be suckered into this, then they can tell their kids doing the homework, "OK write out your paper on this pad of paper first so you know what you're going to type, that computer time is expensive!" I'll sure feel bad for them.

Does Microsoft not realize that there's like $200 PCs now, free competition for most of their software, and people's opinion of MIcrosoft already in the dumps due to Vista -- this is not the time for them to try to nickle and dime their remaining customers. And with $200 or so PCs already available (plus places like where I work selling fully-functional P4 machines for under $100)... I mean, there's just not much room between $200 and $0 for them to squeeze in these machines...

Unsupported machines

"It is getting to the point where the fix for Vista is OS X and the fix for OS X is... Linux!? That will certainly be true for those with the old PPC machines when Apple finally cuts that limb off the tree."

They've ALREADY cut off below 866mhz G4s, and you're guess at the outcome of this is spot on.

Where I work we mainly sell used Dells, but also Macintoshes.. with Ubuntu 8.04 installed on all of them. After seeing some models for sale here with Ubuntu Linux, a surprising number of Mac fans have been asking me about it (the Mac fans have far more interest than the people buying Dells, although some of them have asked about it too). Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 for PowerPC are "unsupported", but work fine once the .iso is tracked down.. the isos are pretty hidden from ubuntu.com, but a direct URL is

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/intrepid/release/ )

They typically do run 10.5 on their boxes that are new enough, but 10.5 has already dropped support for <866mhz G4. (And, apparently if you coax 10.5 to install on a <866, it works but is too slow...) So, on the G4-400s or whatever they have, 10.2/3/4 is losing it's charm, and it's harder to find new software written for 10.2 or whatever, so they decide to try something different.

Well....

Childs definitely wasn't running it right, he really was locking things down far too tight. And not documenting properly.

BUT... from what I've read, Childs is absolutely right, they are incompetent. They spent a lot of time and money looking for a "mystery" terminal server on the network (yes, they couldn't even track their own network well enough to no *which building* it was in). They spent $200,000 up front to basically have Cisco admins clear passwords on various kit, which isn't a real sign of competence -- it's just not that hard to clear passwords on gear you have physical access to. And so on.

I think they could have found *something* to charge Childs with, but given he was hired to admin and secure the network, having it be too secure for them to mess with is in no way tampering. Unless he has a pretty bad lawyer (or there's a lot left out of the news reports) I don't think they have a case.

Well, better than nothing I guess

Better than nothing, I guess. But, "The Navy welcomes an approach that relies more upon scientific research than litigation" kind of contradicts the "The Navy agrees that high-intensity military sonar can injure and kill whales, dolphins and other marine life"

It's good that some outcome came out of this rather than just having the case dropped, but they relied on litigation because, you know, damage was already known to be occuring and scientific research won't stop that while litigation could have. The research might show the extent of damage though... I bet once the research is done, these groups will just refile their suits, and then have actual data showing how serious a problem it is.

My question is, how much damage does it cause? A lightbulb will kill off any insects that fly within like an inch of it, but I wouldn't consider lightbulbs particularly bad (well, I do admit I now have the low-power bulbs, but it's not to help the bugs out, it's to save on the power bill..)... It's a big difference if the sonar is injuring creatures that get within like 50 feet of it, versus if it's injuring and deafening creatures for miles around.