I think the big concern is power lines picking up huge voltage spikes that fry power supplies everywhere. It would be interesting to see how good surge protectors are all over the country. I suspect a lot of them will fail to deliver on their stated promises. I do think these scenarios where an EMP goes off and suddenly everybody has to hunt for game in the woods with bows and arrows is silly though. It would damage a lot of equipment and require a lot of work to repair, but society is more resilient than people think.
Actually, most Boeings do still have a mechanical connection between the stick and the control surfaces. The most modern ones are fly by wire only, but older planes like 737s, 747s, 757s, and even 767s still have a mechanical link that the pilots can attempt a hail mary with. Airbus planes have been fly by wire only for some time though. Also note that these vehicles are rated for lightning strikes, which is not terribly dissimilar than a EMP and they don't fall out of the sky when hit by lightning bolts.
I think that article is counting every infant in an ICU, everybody on medical devices, and maybe every pacemaker in the US? I guess this assumes the EMP is strong enough that it actually damages the equipment (and that surge protectors are worthless) so the normal backup power generators are not effective. It's sometimes hard to figure out where the numbers are coming from when talking about scaremongering articles like this.
Most cars power breaks are powered by engine vacuum and a completely mechanical linkage. Tesla owners and some people with Hybrids might be in trouble, but even then the e-brake should still work. They'll be able to stop even in the event of a total computer shutdown in the car. Loss of power steering won't kill too many people either, the mechanical linkage is still there and while your steering is heavy, you probably weren't making sharp rapid maneuvers when the EMP hit anyway. Even an old grandma can muscle her car over to the side of the road while it's still moving (steering once stopped maybe not, but by then who cares?)
Aircraft have the biggest problem. They're highly computerized and the failure mode is fatal. Plus, even if the aircraft aren't disabled, the loss of ATC in todays crowded skies would be a huge issue. Trying to get all of the planes down safely would be a monumental task.
My experience with splitters is that they were much faster than doing it by hand, but we were always splitting stuff that required a wedge and multiple strikes because the interlocking fibers would hold the log together (and snap back if you pulled the wedge) until you had pounded practically all the way through the wood. Of course sometimes we got some nice dry poplar and we would be finished with the whole tree in a couple of hours, but usually the wood we were splitting was just awful.
I can't imagine the guy in this video doing the same with some choke cherry logs.
Yeah, my impression of the video is that he's making wood that's easy to split even easier. On something like scrub pine, that axe would probably be a nightmare. I really don't need a breathtakingly expensive maul to split dry birch.
I still use my TI-85 I got back in the 90s. The nice thing is that it's not too different than a "modern" TI calculator, and it lasts forever on a set of AAAs. I'll probably pass it down to my son when he's going to take the SATs or something.
Microsoft seems to have taken the other track now. They are still bringing the Windows experience to the tablet, but they've revamped the windows experience to be the kind that works well on touchscreens, some say to the detriment of the mouse and keyboard crowd.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw Tablet Computer prototypes come up every couple of years. Sometimes they would even make it to market, where they hit with a resounding thud thanks to their horrible clunky OS choices, lack of applications, and hardware limitations. Apple tinkered with the iPad for years before finally releasing it, waiting until the infrastructure grew up to make the device practical. They actually worked on the iPad before the iPhone.
Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.
Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way in the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips.
Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".
It's the first computer many people had access to, and especially the first computer they could actually program themselves. In an era where PCs cost thousands of dollars, a C64 cost only a couple hundred. Parents could afford them and the default shell was a BASIC prompt. Plus, it had built-in hardware to support making games (sound chip, sprite generator, joystick port) which made interesting to the kids first learning how to program on it.
If you love them, get them all backed up on to a HDD ASAP, and make sure your HDD is backed up regularly as well. You can fit an insane number of C64 floppies on a modern HDD, so keeping the images around won't take much space at all. The only way to really preserve data long term is to maintain it by bringing it with you as you upgrade.
If the system accepted any bad password, then I could believe that it's a return code checking bug. But I would also be questioning Microsoft's code review standards quite heavily. A system that accepts only a string full of spaces as a password only makes sense if one of the return codes is "Error: Bad password: all spaces" and it somehow looks like a success code. That is not likely.
Seriously, grasping at straws. What's the new talking point going to be when less than 1% fail to make their first payment?
I know an Obamacare success is a disaster for some people, but the administration set modest and realistic goals and largely met them.
A bunch of the really bad abuses perpetrated by insurance companies are now illegal, and many more people have access to affordable preventative care. Insurance company profit margins are effectively capped if they can't find ways to be exceptionally creative with the accounting. What a disaster.
You're confused. That's the old pre-Obamacare system. With the ACA you can't be dropped just because you get sick. You can't even be denied new coverage because you're already sick. There are other ways to be injured than in your car or on the job too, and most home insurance doesn't cover medical. If you have a $50 copay for a standard visit, then your plan isn't valid under the ACA and you've lost it anyway.
It's seriously amazing how many people want to return to the halcyon days of last year, like medical coverage outside of employer provided plans was a total clusterfuck and the sheer number of uninsured people with previously treatable but now catastrophic medical conditions that they couldn't pay for contributed to a relentless double digit increase in medical costs across the country.
Believe it or not, some parts of the US have reverted to for-pay fire protection. If you don't pay, your house burns down. Tennessee for example. The homeowner was furious that the fire department wouldn't save his home, but that's the gamble you take when you opt out of coverage.
This case doesn't really apply to medical care however, because if you show up in the sick or injured to an ER, doctors ethically have to treat you. They can't just throw you out on the street and let you die, even though that's what would be most "fair" when you opt out of insurance.
I just saw the nice new box on my W2 that shows "employer health insurance" payments. It was about five times what I would have paid out of my own pocket for my health care last year. Had my employer been legally allowed to hand me that money directly and allow me to pay as I go, I'd be several thousand dollars ahead of the game.
Yep, and then you would get cancer, run out of money after two weeks, and die.
If you could guarantee that you'll never get sick or injured, then insurance would be a waste of money. It's all about risk management. Hospital bills are ruinous (fun fact: they're the #1 cause of Bankruptcy in the US) which makes going without insurance risky. Worse, if you got injured and brought into an ER they would still operate on you, and then everybody else would have to share the burden (plus a big chunk of other fees associated with the inefficiency of trying to bill someone without insurance) anyway. So you're just being a selfish jerk really. You're not paying your fair share, but still expect to be treated when you get sick or injured.
If Libertarians were willing to just die on the street properly when they ran out of money after a simple injury, then the system would be cheaper for everybody. But they never follow through on this.
Don't worry, that reactionary care will be a lot more expensive, so he's more likely to hit his deductible and actually use his insurance. Preventative care can so cheap in comparison that it doesn't make nearly enough profit.
The worst part is, they removed the single payer option in order to bring over some Republican votes, and in the end no Republicans voted for it. IMHO, they should have put the single payer option back in there if Republicans weren't going to go for it anyway. What would they do, vote to repeal it a 52nd time?
Yes, but you try getting a proper single payer healthcare system through Congress. Senators are already bought and sold by the healthcare middlemen, there's no political will to fix the problem.
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I think the big concern is power lines picking up huge voltage spikes that fry power supplies everywhere. It would be interesting to see how good surge protectors are all over the country. I suspect a lot of them will fail to deliver on their stated promises. I do think these scenarios where an EMP goes off and suddenly everybody has to hunt for game in the woods with bows and arrows is silly though. It would damage a lot of equipment and require a lot of work to repair, but society is more resilient than people think.
Actually, most Boeings do still have a mechanical connection between the stick and the control surfaces. The most modern ones are fly by wire only, but older planes like 737s, 747s, 757s, and even 767s still have a mechanical link that the pilots can attempt a hail mary with. Airbus planes have been fly by wire only for some time though. Also note that these vehicles are rated for lightning strikes, which is not terribly dissimilar than a EMP and they don't fall out of the sky when hit by lightning bolts.
I think that article is counting every infant in an ICU, everybody on medical devices, and maybe every pacemaker in the US? I guess this assumes the EMP is strong enough that it actually damages the equipment (and that surge protectors are worthless) so the normal backup power generators are not effective. It's sometimes hard to figure out where the numbers are coming from when talking about scaremongering articles like this.
Most cars power breaks are powered by engine vacuum and a completely mechanical linkage. Tesla owners and some people with Hybrids might be in trouble, but even then the e-brake should still work. They'll be able to stop even in the event of a total computer shutdown in the car. Loss of power steering won't kill too many people either, the mechanical linkage is still there and while your steering is heavy, you probably weren't making sharp rapid maneuvers when the EMP hit anyway. Even an old grandma can muscle her car over to the side of the road while it's still moving (steering once stopped maybe not, but by then who cares?)
Aircraft have the biggest problem. They're highly computerized and the failure mode is fatal. Plus, even if the aircraft aren't disabled, the loss of ATC in todays crowded skies would be a huge issue. Trying to get all of the planes down safely would be a monumental task.
Where do you 3D print computer chips? Use the right technology for the job man.
My experience with splitters is that they were much faster than doing it by hand, but we were always splitting stuff that required a wedge and multiple strikes because the interlocking fibers would hold the log together (and snap back if you pulled the wedge) until you had pounded practically all the way through the wood. Of course sometimes we got some nice dry poplar and we would be finished with the whole tree in a couple of hours, but usually the wood we were splitting was just awful.
I can't imagine the guy in this video doing the same with some choke cherry logs.
Yeah, my impression of the video is that he's making wood that's easy to split even easier. On something like scrub pine, that axe would probably be a nightmare. I really don't need a breathtakingly expensive maul to split dry birch.
In general, anything with an optical drive is not going to be on the list of most dependable electronics 20 years later. Optical drives are crap.
I still use my TI-85 I got back in the 90s. The nice thing is that it's not too different than a "modern" TI calculator, and it lasts forever on a set of AAAs. I'll probably pass it down to my son when he's going to take the SATs or something.
Microsoft seems to have taken the other track now. They are still bringing the Windows experience to the tablet, but they've revamped the windows experience to be the kind that works well on touchscreens, some say to the detriment of the mouse and keyboard crowd.
At McDonalds, this is probably an accurate perception, and only if you skip (or go very light on) the dressing. Even their yoghurt is questionable.
Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".
It's the first computer many people had access to, and especially the first computer they could actually program themselves. In an era where PCs cost thousands of dollars, a C64 cost only a couple hundred. Parents could afford them and the default shell was a BASIC prompt. Plus, it had built-in hardware to support making games (sound chip, sprite generator, joystick port) which made interesting to the kids first learning how to program on it.
translates to:
file= open(firstavailablefile());
sleep(disksize(firstavailablefile()) / 1000);
read(file, memory, disksize(firstavailablefile()));
If you love them, get them all backed up on to a HDD ASAP, and make sure your HDD is backed up regularly as well. You can fit an insane number of C64 floppies on a modern HDD, so keeping the images around won't take much space at all. The only way to really preserve data long term is to maintain it by bringing it with you as you upgrade.
You found two examples of cases where the preventative care ended up being overzealous, and concluded that all preventative care is a bad idea?
If the system accepted any bad password, then I could believe that it's a return code checking bug. But I would also be questioning Microsoft's code review standards quite heavily. A system that accepts only a string full of spaces as a password only makes sense if one of the return codes is "Error: Bad password: all spaces" and it somehow looks like a success code. That is not likely.
Seriously, grasping at straws. What's the new talking point going to be when less than 1% fail to make their first payment?
I know an Obamacare success is a disaster for some people, but the administration set modest and realistic goals and largely met them.
A bunch of the really bad abuses perpetrated by insurance companies are now illegal, and many more people have access to affordable preventative care. Insurance company profit margins are effectively capped if they can't find ways to be exceptionally creative with the accounting. What a disaster.
You're confused. That's the old pre-Obamacare system. With the ACA you can't be dropped just because you get sick. You can't even be denied new coverage because you're already sick. There are other ways to be injured than in your car or on the job too, and most home insurance doesn't cover medical. If you have a $50 copay for a standard visit, then your plan isn't valid under the ACA and you've lost it anyway.
It's seriously amazing how many people want to return to the halcyon days of last year, like medical coverage outside of employer provided plans was a total clusterfuck and the sheer number of uninsured people with previously treatable but now catastrophic medical conditions that they couldn't pay for contributed to a relentless double digit increase in medical costs across the country.
Believe it or not, some parts of the US have reverted to for-pay fire protection. If you don't pay, your house burns down. Tennessee for example. The homeowner was furious that the fire department wouldn't save his home, but that's the gamble you take when you opt out of coverage.
This case doesn't really apply to medical care however, because if you show up in the sick or injured to an ER, doctors ethically have to treat you. They can't just throw you out on the street and let you die, even though that's what would be most "fair" when you opt out of insurance.
Yep, and then you would get cancer, run out of money after two weeks, and die.
If you could guarantee that you'll never get sick or injured, then insurance would be a waste of money. It's all about risk management. Hospital bills are ruinous (fun fact: they're the #1 cause of Bankruptcy in the US) which makes going without insurance risky. Worse, if you got injured and brought into an ER they would still operate on you, and then everybody else would have to share the burden (plus a big chunk of other fees associated with the inefficiency of trying to bill someone without insurance) anyway. So you're just being a selfish jerk really. You're not paying your fair share, but still expect to be treated when you get sick or injured.
If Libertarians were willing to just die on the street properly when they ran out of money after a simple injury, then the system would be cheaper for everybody. But they never follow through on this.
Don't worry, that reactionary care will be a lot more expensive, so he's more likely to hit his deductible and actually use his insurance. Preventative care can so cheap in comparison that it doesn't make nearly enough profit.
The worst part is, they removed the single payer option in order to bring over some Republican votes, and in the end no Republicans voted for it. IMHO, they should have put the single payer option back in there if Republicans weren't going to go for it anyway. What would they do, vote to repeal it a 52nd time?
Yes, but you try getting a proper single payer healthcare system through Congress. Senators are already bought and sold by the healthcare middlemen, there's no political will to fix the problem.