I didn't know how much ordinance they held, but there were a lot more than 26, although IIRC 26 seems about the amount at Utapao. AFAIK (and of course I can't really know, something like that would be a need-to-know basis and I just hauled stuff around the flightline there) none of the B-52s there were armed with nukes.
It could have been that the year I was at Beale they were bringing back BUFs ("big ugly fucker") from Vietnam; the bombing stopped shortly after I got to Thailand and I was there a year. Maybe 26 were all that were armed and the rest were being temporarily stored there, back from deployment from the three Thai bases and afaik bases in other countries in the area.
According to Dr. Odin (that really is his name!), the surgeon who performed my vitrectomy, there are only two causes of detached retinas - a very severe blow to the head, or severe nearsightedness. I was severely nearsighted before I had a lensectomy in my left eye. The danger of a detached retina is still there; the cause of nearsightedness is that the eye isn't perfectly round in a nearsighted person, which puts stress on the retina when the eye moves. So it isn't a design defect, it's a manufacturing defect.
A severe enough blow to the head could more easily cause blindness from brain damage than detaching both retinas. People often get concussions without damage to their eyes.
It's been years since I've had a web page and haven't kept up with the newer language features. If that does give full justification, why aren't the newspapers using it? Paper editions do.
Most of my 4 years I worked my ass off towing stuff on the flightline. Hard work, some of that stuff was really heavy and hard to connect to the pintile hook.
His best story involved someone who thought it would be a good idea to get out with a dishonorable discharge by sitting on top of a Titan missile silo and lighting a joint. I think he got 5 years for it, but they wanted to give him 20
A stupid friend stupidly and illegally brought a gun to base and accidentally shot another friend. Chuck was out of the hospital and healed before Stan's trial was over. Stan was sentenced to 6 months in Leavenworth and a dishonorable discharge.
That's wild, one guy gets 6 months for accidentally shooting someone in the belly button, another gets 5 years for a political statement.
If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.
Yes, I learned quite a bit about Buddhism while stationed in Thailand (the B-52s there weren't nuclear-armed). I was once admonished for swatting at a fly. Oddly, the Thai boxers (surely Buddhist, every Thai I met was) had no problem at all with sending Chinese Kung-fu fighters to the hospital. Thais taught me how to use nunchucks. Practicing was good exercise until I hit myself in the funny bone with one.
Some of the priests did some stuff that was unbelievable.
I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone All my dreams, pass before my eyes, a curiosity Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea All we do, crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind, All we are is dust in the wind
Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky It slips away, all your money won't another minute buy
Yes, you could install an alternate OS even before Windows. I was running FreeDOS for a while before DOS 6.2 came along, it was vastly superior to the DOS 3.3 that came with the computer (on two floppies).
But when you buy a computer it has an OS installed, and that's either Apple or Microsoft.
Anyway, look on the bright side: we aren't currently in a nuclear cold war. It would seem we either actually learned something and aren't repeating it, or got lucky enough for the moment to not make enemies with anyone else who could blow up the world.
Probably both, and it does indeed engender optimism.
Hearing the sonic boom of the B-52s based out of McCord AFB as they passed overhead
The B-52s were (and are) subsonic. I heard the booms, too, from aircraft at Scott AFB, and that was a MAC base. Probably in both cases they were fighters that were stopping off for fuel or something, because cargo and transport planes were subsonic as well.
No, I had no idea how many bombs they held. My job was to drive the pilot to his war machine if the Ruskies attacked.
Best duty I ever had. Fuel, clean, and check out the vehicle and spend the rest of the day reading, playing pinball, shooting pool, and eating damned good chow.
The worst duty I ever had was driving a busload of drunken high ranking officers to town.
"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us," wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. "They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties."
--Only Yestarday, Frederick Lewis Allen (1933)
Some things never change, folks in their twenties are now blaming us geezers, using the same rhetoric that youngster who is now certainly dead from old age used in 1920. Of course, my generation was no different.
Good quote, but I say the optimist is often disappointed and the pessimist is often happily surprised. So I guess if it's something unthinkable you're better off being an optimist, if it's something good you're better off being a pessimist.
I'm personally optimistic that we won't have nuclear war or an asteroid strike. I'm so pessimistic about winning the lottery I won't buy a ticket.
If not, the ideal thing to do would be for the bomb to "self-destruct" without detonating; by injecting chemicals causing the nuclear material to be rendered useless to any adversary, and permanently locking out the detonator assembly.
Sorry, real life doesn't work like that. Chemicals won't stop a nuclear reaction unless the chemicals target the explosive that triggers the fission explosion that triggers the fusion explosion. If it doesn't go off, the enemy has their own new bomb. And the electronics are trivial.
You guys are all laughing about this, But when I was in the USAF I was stationed at Beale, Armageddon Air Force Base. They had more B-52s loaded full of bombs ready to carpet-nuke Russia than you could count. Hundreds of B-52s with dozens or maybe even hundreds of H-bombs each, ready to rain nuclear hell on the commies.
I was 9 in 1961, most of you weren't even born. Many of you wouldn't have been if that thing would have gone off. Laugh about that.
I saw a lot of scary shit in the Air Force, and that was forty years ago. I can't imagine the shit they have now, when I was in the AF a computer took a whole building. Go ahead and laugh, we have more than global warming and asteroids to worry about.
Human error could cause our extinction. Laugh away, guys.
For all the same reasons Linux has trouble breaking into the desktop, Microsoft is having trouble breaking into phones. People are increasingly seeing their phone purchase as a choice between iPhone and Android, seeing one as the default and the other as the alternative, and people generally aren't looking for a second alternative.
With the desktop, you really did have two choices: buy a Windows PC or a Mac.
If Microsoft wants to succeed, it's not enough to be "as good". They have to be significantly better in ways that people care about
Exactly. And not only that, people have to be aware that it exists and exactly HOW it's vastly superior, and so far afaik Windows Phone brings nothing but Microsoft's reputation for bugginess to the table. If it's superior to the other two in any way, their advertising sure doesn't show it.
Ever see a commercial for Linux on TV? Nobody's even heard of it and have no idea their Android phone runs it, let alone knows that it has more features and better ease of use. Every non-nerd I know talks about "that damned computer" when the computer's not the problem, the OS is.
Aren't you the same people who complain when Microsoft fails to support some aspect of HTML5 in IE, rather than complaining to the HTML5 web sites that they aren't supporting IE?
It's idiotic to expect a web site to pander to every crippled browser out there. If the webmaster is writing to W3C standards and the browser won't render the content properly, it's 100% the browser's fault.
Ten years ago on my site, just because I was sick of "best if viewed in IE" I rewrote it so if IE was the user agent I flashed a message "get a browser that doesn't suck" and added a bit of HTML (not javascript, plain HTML) that crashed the visitor's browser.
That If IE5 IF IE6 IF IE7 bullshit is just that -- bullshit. Write to standards, not some monopolists made-up "standards".
I wrote the first several chapters of Nobots straight into slashdot's journal system. Later chapters were in Open Office and copied there. Changed layout quite a bit afterwards. Good luck getting full justification with HTML 5.
Nobots (full book, what's at slashdot is a crude first draft) will be out shortly.
How do you figure? All the retina does is collect photons, convert them to electrochemical signals, and the nervous system transmits them to the brain, where the seeing actually happens.
If your retina were backwards you'd be blind.
I'm still not sure what you mean by backwards; yes, the image on the retina is upside down and the image is backwards, but that's a process of lensing. Take the lens off of your SLR camera, hold the film (or rather, sensor) end close to a white surface, and you'll see a backwards upside down picture on that surface. Like your brain does with the retina input, the camera itself makes it rightside up.
Also, what type of idiot wires up the larynx via the heart?
You remind me of a client I had fifteen years ago who was screaming because a database application I'd written stopped working. It turned out he'd removed some "useless" columns in a table because he could see no use for them. Are you a neurosurgeon, heart specialist, or a larynx specialist? Can you design and build a human being? If not, how are you in any way qualified to question the inner workings?
Computer hardware is a physical, durable object which, if well manufactured, is limited only by capacitor and fan failures.
Moving parts wear out. Connections get corroded. Dust builds up. I've had all sorts of hardware failures in 30 years of owning computers. Hard drives, fans, CPUs, power supplies.
Software is an intangible, constantly changing abstraction which is under constant attack by humans.
It should be designed with that in mind. Good software is.
IF PEOPLE DON'T LIKE M$ the can buy a Mac or (gasp) install GNU/Linux.
Without buying an Apple it's hard to find a computer without Windows preinstalled. Yes, I can install Linux (and do) but most of the 30% of computer owners who are on XP computers can't.
Even if I have no Microsoft whatever on my network, I'm at risk from those millions of unpatched machines. I'm not Microsoft's customer, why should I pay for them to make a profit?
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I didn't know how much ordinance they held, but there were a lot more than 26, although IIRC 26 seems about the amount at Utapao. AFAIK (and of course I can't really know, something like that would be a need-to-know basis and I just hauled stuff around the flightline there) none of the B-52s there were armed with nukes.
It could have been that the year I was at Beale they were bringing back BUFs ("big ugly fucker") from Vietnam; the bombing stopped shortly after I got to Thailand and I was there a year. Maybe 26 were all that were armed and the rest were being temporarily stored there, back from deployment from the three Thai bases and afaik bases in other countries in the area.
According to Dr. Odin (that really is his name!), the surgeon who performed my vitrectomy, there are only two causes of detached retinas - a very severe blow to the head, or severe nearsightedness. I was severely nearsighted before I had a lensectomy in my left eye. The danger of a detached retina is still there; the cause of nearsightedness is that the eye isn't perfectly round in a nearsighted person, which puts stress on the retina when the eye moves. So it isn't a design defect, it's a manufacturing defect.
A severe enough blow to the head could more easily cause blindness from brain damage than detaching both retinas. People often get concussions without damage to their eyes.
It's been years since I've had a web page and haven't kept up with the newer language features. If that does give full justification, why aren't the newspapers using it? Paper editions do.
Most of my 4 years I worked my ass off towing stuff on the flightline. Hard work, some of that stuff was really heavy and hard to connect to the pintile hook.
His best story involved someone who thought it would be a good idea to get out with a dishonorable discharge by sitting on top of a Titan missile silo and lighting a joint. I think he got 5 years for it, but they wanted to give him 20
A stupid friend stupidly and illegally brought a gun to base and accidentally shot another friend. Chuck was out of the hospital and healed before Stan's trial was over. Stan was sentenced to 6 months in Leavenworth and a dishonorable discharge.
That's wild, one guy gets 6 months for accidentally shooting someone in the belly button, another gets 5 years for a political statement.
If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.
Yes, I learned quite a bit about Buddhism while stationed in Thailand (the B-52s there weren't nuclear-armed). I was once admonished for swatting at a fly. Oddly, the Thai boxers (surely Buddhist, every Thai I met was) had no problem at all with sending Chinese Kung-fu fighters to the hospital. Thais taught me how to use nunchucks. Practicing was good exercise until I hit myself in the funny bone with one.
Some of the priests did some stuff that was unbelievable.
-- Kansas
It's only a tiny percentage of Christians (the least educated ones) who don't think evolution is real. Even the Catholic church accepts evolution.
After all, over half of all scientists are religious. It's impossible to deny what one has experienced.
Yes, you could install an alternate OS even before Windows. I was running FreeDOS for a while before DOS 6.2 came along, it was vastly superior to the DOS 3.3 that came with the computer (on two floppies).
But when you buy a computer it has an OS installed, and that's either Apple or Microsoft.
I wasn't talking to you, Grandpa.
Anyway, look on the bright side: we aren't currently in a nuclear cold war. It would seem we either actually learned something and aren't repeating it, or got lucky enough for the moment to not make enemies with anyone else who could blow up the world.
Probably both, and it does indeed engender optimism.
Hearing the sonic boom of the B-52s based out of McCord AFB as they passed overhead
The B-52s were (and are) subsonic. I heard the booms, too, from aircraft at Scott AFB, and that was a MAC base. Probably in both cases they were fighters that were stopping off for fuel or something, because cargo and transport planes were subsonic as well.
Structural weakness. The retina can detatch under mechanical stress.
That's happened to me. A vitrectomy is no fun, but I don't see how having the retina on top would make it stronger.
There's a blind spot where the neurons poke through, requiring an interpolation mechanism in the brain to fill it in.
And the blind spots are in different places in each eye, so it's really only there if one eye is closed. Pretty good hack if you ask me.
No, I had no idea how many bombs they held. My job was to drive the pilot to his war machine if the Ruskies attacked.
Best duty I ever had. Fuel, clean, and check out the vehicle and spend the rest of the day reading, playing pinball, shooting pool, and eating damned good chow.
The worst duty I ever had was driving a busload of drunken high ranking officers to town.
Ah, the younger generation.
--Only Yestarday, Frederick Lewis Allen (1933)
Some things never change, folks in their twenties are now blaming us geezers, using the same rhetoric that youngster who is now certainly dead from old age used in 1920. Of course, my generation was no different.
If it had gone off and you were outside you'd probably have been blinded, and died of cancer within twenty years, along with your neighbors.
This book will scare the hell out of you (I was a teenager when I read it).
Here's a PDF of the book. I wish someone would OCR it.
Good quote, but I say the optimist is often disappointed and the pessimist is often happily surprised. So I guess if it's something unthinkable you're better off being an optimist, if it's something good you're better off being a pessimist.
I'm personally optimistic that we won't have nuclear war or an asteroid strike. I'm so pessimistic about winning the lottery I won't buy a ticket.
In all likelihood they would have just blamed Bush.
Bush was fifteen years old. It was Kennedy's third day in office so they'd probably have blamed either him or Eisenhower.
That's not what Murphy said. Murphy said "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." Look it up on wikipedia.
Maybe it isn't so OT after all. If that 4th switch had failed...
If not, the ideal thing to do would be for the bomb to "self-destruct" without detonating; by injecting chemicals causing the nuclear material to be rendered useless to any adversary, and permanently locking out the detonator assembly.
Sorry, real life doesn't work like that. Chemicals won't stop a nuclear reaction unless the chemicals target the explosive that triggers the fission explosion that triggers the fusion explosion. If it doesn't go off, the enemy has their own new bomb. And the electronics are trivial.
a simple switch on a nuclear bomb failed as it fell to earth, rendering it inoperable. doesn't inspire much confidence for when it is used in war.
We had thousands of them, in B-52s, silos, submarines. So did the soviets. One or two duds wouldn't have saved civilization.
In the alternate universe where the US and USSR had thermonuclear war, most of you would never have been born. Possible nobody would be alive today.
You guys are all laughing about this, But when I was in the USAF I was stationed at Beale, Armageddon Air Force Base. They had more B-52s loaded full of bombs ready to carpet-nuke Russia than you could count. Hundreds of B-52s with dozens or maybe even hundreds of H-bombs each, ready to rain nuclear hell on the commies.
I was 9 in 1961, most of you weren't even born. Many of you wouldn't have been if that thing would have gone off. Laugh about that.
I saw a lot of scary shit in the Air Force, and that was forty years ago. I can't imagine the shit they have now, when I was in the AF a computer took a whole building. Go ahead and laugh, we have more than global warming and asteroids to worry about.
Human error could cause our extinction. Laugh away, guys.
For all the same reasons Linux has trouble breaking into the desktop, Microsoft is having trouble breaking into phones. People are increasingly seeing their phone purchase as a choice between iPhone and Android, seeing one as the default and the other as the alternative, and people generally aren't looking for a second alternative.
With the desktop, you really did have two choices: buy a Windows PC or a Mac.
If Microsoft wants to succeed, it's not enough to be "as good". They have to be significantly better in ways that people care about
Exactly. And not only that, people have to be aware that it exists and exactly HOW it's vastly superior, and so far afaik Windows Phone brings nothing but Microsoft's reputation for bugginess to the table. If it's superior to the other two in any way, their advertising sure doesn't show it.
Ever see a commercial for Linux on TV? Nobody's even heard of it and have no idea their Android phone runs it, let alone knows that it has more features and better ease of use. Every non-nerd I know talks about "that damned computer" when the computer's not the problem, the OS is.
Aren't you the same people who complain when Microsoft fails to support some aspect of HTML5 in IE, rather than complaining to the HTML5 web sites that they aren't supporting IE?
It's idiotic to expect a web site to pander to every crippled browser out there. If the webmaster is writing to W3C standards and the browser won't render the content properly, it's 100% the browser's fault.
Ten years ago on my site, just because I was sick of "best if viewed in IE" I rewrote it so if IE was the user agent I flashed a message "get a browser that doesn't suck" and added a bit of HTML (not javascript, plain HTML) that crashed the visitor's browser.
That If IE5 IF IE6 IF IE7 bullshit is just that -- bullshit. Write to standards, not some monopolists made-up "standards".
I wrote the first several chapters of Nobots straight into slashdot's journal system. Later chapters were in Open Office and copied there. Changed layout quite a bit afterwards. Good luck getting full justification with HTML 5.
Nobots (full book, what's at slashdot is a crude first draft) will be out shortly.
And he put the retinas in backwards too.
How do you figure? All the retina does is collect photons, convert them to electrochemical signals, and the nervous system transmits them to the brain, where the seeing actually happens.
If your retina were backwards you'd be blind.
I'm still not sure what you mean by backwards; yes, the image on the retina is upside down and the image is backwards, but that's a process of lensing. Take the lens off of your SLR camera, hold the film (or rather, sensor) end close to a white surface, and you'll see a backwards upside down picture on that surface. Like your brain does with the retina input, the camera itself makes it rightside up.
Also, what type of idiot wires up the larynx via the heart?
You remind me of a client I had fifteen years ago who was screaming because a database application I'd written stopped working. It turned out he'd removed some "useless" columns in a table because he could see no use for them. Are you a neurosurgeon, heart specialist, or a larynx specialist? Can you design and build a human being? If not, how are you in any way qualified to question the inner workings?
Computer hardware is a physical, durable object which, if well manufactured, is limited only by capacitor and fan failures.
Moving parts wear out. Connections get corroded. Dust builds up. I've had all sorts of hardware failures in 30 years of owning computers. Hard drives, fans, CPUs, power supplies.
Software is an intangible, constantly changing abstraction which is under constant attack by humans.
It should be designed with that in mind. Good software is.
IF PEOPLE DON'T LIKE M$ the can buy a Mac or (gasp) install GNU/Linux.
Without buying an Apple it's hard to find a computer without Windows preinstalled. Yes, I can install Linux (and do) but most of the 30% of computer owners who are on XP computers can't.
Even if I have no Microsoft whatever on my network, I'm at risk from those millions of unpatched machines. I'm not Microsoft's customer, why should I pay for them to make a profit?