Sure, I "get" the rational answers about clearing your mind and letting your subconscious work on problems and stuff. Then there those other problems. When the network is down for no discernible reason. When it's a "bad day".

Here's a very weird bit of magic to know about. I know how weird this is, but it works. Oh, ye Gods, does it work! I have come to absolutely hate doing it, but, it just [dammit] works.

You won't believe it until you try it, and then you, too, will (a) hate it and (b) see it work.

Get Neil Young's "Live Rust" album. It's live, so studio engineers haven't fixed up all the mistakes.

Instead of hitting notes, Neil... shotguns notes, all around them. For some awful reason he writes songs on the very wobbling top edge of his vocal range. He's just one of those people who should be banned from singing the songs he writes.

The lyrics are really depressing. Cortez is massacring the Mayans. We got Mother Nature on the run. It's better to burn out than to fade away. And his favorite song topic, band people dying of overdoses: Every junkie's like a setting sun. Heard that he died, out on a mainline.

(Neil has not made a 2+2 = ? connection yet. If I were in his band and I had to listen to him every night, both (1) heroin and (2) death would look pretty good.)

I discovered this by accident while coding keyboard and mouse drivers. They were extremely hard. I was desperate. I saw one of those skiier T-shirts that says, "No Pain, No Gain", and I logically inverted it to "If Pain, Gain". I looked through my record albums to find True Pain and there was Neil. Put it on side 3 Repeat and started coding.

Six plus hours and 1,500 lines of 68000 assembly later, I was done coding. I finally ran the AS68 assembler on it, and it said back to me: 0 Errors.

YouHaveGotToBeKiddingMeTheresAlwaysErrors. TyposIfNothingElse.

Floating in a sea of shocked surprise, I linked it and ran it, and my God, the keyboard and mouse code worked the first time.

This does not happen. As Luke Skywalker put it, "That's Impossible!" I've been terrified to touch that code.

The Neil effect has continued to work.

Last time I used Neil was on a laptop that WinXP would not install onto. Tried 3 times, the install hung each time. The guy's son Anthony said, "Dave, why aren't you playing Neil Young?" Good point. I put it on. I explained this to the guy. He looked at me like I was insane. I said, "You don't believe it right now. That's okay. You'll see it. Then you'll believe." With Neil wailing away about his first cigarette, and changing absolutely nothing, the XP install went without a hitch.

All I can say is I tripped over it by accident, I don't know how it works, but damn!, it does work. And you'll start to dislike that album as much as I do. Maybe the cost is listening to something you really don't care for. (I should try rap!)

I'm not making this up.

  -- Dave Small

The article quotes Mark Studness from Verizon.

Mark Studness ?? !!

"Is someone playing silly buggers here?"
  -- Archchancellor Ridcully

This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.

Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.

You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.

I tested hundreds of Mac software applications 'Back In The Day'. A bit more than half of all of them banged onto location 0. About 100% of Microsoft Mac apps crashed. This happened to not (immediately) crash the Mac because the Mac just happened to have RAM mapped there, but, since multiple applications were resident in memory, taking turns shooting at 0.Long, "Difficult to debug problems, often not repeatable, soon arose".
[I do love that phrase; it covers so much agony so concisely].

The Mac had a memory heap structure with "handles", which aimed at "pointers", which aimed at "memory blocks". From time to time, just to amuse developers, the Mac would compress memory to get rid of stale stuff. The handles would be updated but, a zero would go into the pointer you were trusting ...

I was busy teaching the Atari ST 68000 computer to be a Mac at the time. The Atari ST had ROM mapped to locations 0-7. It bus-errored every time someone used a Nil pointer. This looked unsolvable unless I wanted to patch two zillion Mac programs.

I finally looked at the problem in a very, very simple manner, and discovered the IW (instruction word) that had caused the crash was on the stack, and the PC (program counter) was a bit past the crash point due to prefetch. A dim flickering flight appeared over my head. What if I "back up" the PC to the Evil Instruction, disassemble it to get its length [I hear you sigh at the thought of writing a disassembler, but I did], advance the PC to the next instruction (so we're just skipping over "the store into 0.Long" here), put all this on the stack, and treat it like a "normal" exception interrupt ... "Return from Exception."

And it worked! The 68000 came back from a crash!

That one thing made all the difference.

To this day I have wondered, though ... if the Atari ST had ROM there ... what happened to all the data written to location 0?

*grin*

David Small

Well, depending on the reaction (D+D, D+T, T+T), you get different levels of energy, but in general, nearly all of a fusion reaction's energy goes into making very, very energetic neutrons. At above 1 MeV these neutrons can split even "depleted" uranium or U-238. That's why half the energy from a "fusion" bomb is from fissioning the uranium wrapper, and the fission amount has been as large as 7.5 MT (Castle Bravo).

I haven't seen data on what very energetic neutrons do to isotopes like U-233 or other junk left after U-235 fission; that's one detail the article doesn't go into. I'd sure like to know.

Certainly the heat generated could spin a turbine. Which leads me to ask:

"Spent" fuel casks are typically stored underwater for shielding. If they're as radioactive as stated, they really warm the water up. Why isn't this used to generate electricity?

-- Thanks, Dave

The US was a rich country once. We aren't anymore. Making decisions like "no more reactors" got us here.

The basic deal here is that each U-235 atom that splits yield 170 MeV of energy; 1.7 x 10^8. The average chemical reaction yields a few eV. (Source: Los Alamos Primer, Robert Serber)

As a country we can't afford to throw away fuel which is that much more powerful. It's not only stupid, it's cruel.

For example, we have people working in coal mines because we won't build nuclear reactors. Coal mines are not very safe at all.

About 20% of our electricity now comes from 1st generation nuclear reactors. They're being run past their design life. We need to build more just to replace the old ones, and they need to be 1000 Megawatt size. We really should ask the French, because they have had a lot of success in this area.

People are talking about "conservation". They've been talking about that since the first Earth Day, which I remember. When you add a lot more people, you still need more electricity. Without electricity, we go back a hundred years as a civilization.

It's time to make the tough choices instead of letting them go to the next generation by taking no action.

    -- Dave

Well of course the first thing that John Coster-Mullen would have to do is determine what microprocessor family was used on Little Boy. Is it an 8051, Z80, 68000, x386, PIC ? Generally even on OEM parts there's a basic part number. On DIP ROMS there has been a real effort to stay consistent.

John should bear in mind that the working timing of a nuclear bomb is 10 nanoseconds. This makes his microprocessor choices more limited; he'll need some speed here.

Then he needs to get to the code and examine it. If it's in a separate ROM chip this is much easier. For example, I was looking at a flashable EEPROM on a PCI card just yesterday evening and found it had a 29F001-TPC in a nice 32 pin DIP package. 128K x 8 bytes and nice little extras like auto-protection. It's a 120 ns part (from address setup to output enable* and the data pins settled.)

"Little Boy" was not a very efficient bomb at all. It was heavily overengineered. I can remember Ted Taylor calling it a "committee bomb" and a "stupid bomb" in McPhee's book. The committee wanted to make sure it went off and didn't just dig a hole, and hand the Japanese more than a hundred pounds of U-235. If I recall right, and this is just off the top of my head, it yielded only 12.5 kilotons or so.

Robert Serber's "Los Alamos Primer" is really useful here. It takes 10 nanoseconds (one "shake") for a fission to happen ("neutron multiplication time"). "The direct energy release per atom is 170 MeV".

"The energy release of TNT is ~~ 4 x 10^10 erg / gram, or ~~ 3.6 x 10^16 erg / ton.... Hence, 1 kg of U-235 completely fissioned yields about 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent, or ~~ 20 kilotons." [Serber is referring to tons as 2,000 lb tons.]

From this you can see that with a 12.5 kiloton yield, about two thirds of 1 kg of U-235 fissioned, so more or less, plus or minus, about a pound fissioned. Wikipedia says the bomb had 64 kg of uranium and only 600 mg. actually fissioned. I don't understand that number.

To which I can only say, see what happens when you use embedded Windows instead of Linux to drive your timing signals? I can just see it now. The bomb releases, starts falling, and in its microprocessor, it draws The Blue Screen Of Death and halts.

Thanks,

Dave Small

p.s. I really don't know why I wrote this. Maybe it was the coffee this morning.

The high altitude nuclear shots the U.S. did to study the effects (and try for an effective ABM) did indeed kill some early commercial satellites.

This was most embarrassing, even if it was an "effect" to study.

There was an informal understanding between the Soviet and U.S. space program that no one would fire off a megaton at high altitude when there was a spacecraft and crew up there.

I wasn't around for most of the 1950's, but I believe we also managed to EMP Hawaii dark, or at least kill a whole bunch of fuses. But in the 1950's we didn't use much transistor technology; we were busy learning about it and developing it. (Please, I know that some transistorized machines came out in this era; I'm saying we didn't use them to control main power switches.)

Thanks,

Dave

"Oh, please don't turn this into a zombie apocalypse survivalist fantasy! "

No! No! DO turn it into a Zombie Apocalypse Survivalist Fantasy!!! It'll be a heck of a lot more fun to read!

If I may put a vote in ... go find the movie "Fido". Easily the funniest Zombie movie I've ever seen. Stars Carrie-Ann Moss. Yep, that girl from the Matrix ... and she can actually smile! Set in 1950's America after a Zombie Apocalypse ... with a Zombie and a boy named Timmy ...

  -- David

This may look like a signature, but it's only yet another buffer overrun.

I've had very good luck with a couple 6 volt "lantern" batteries, a standard 4-pin disk drive power connector, and a few alligator clips. Connect the 6 V batteries + to -. On the "+" battery, connect its minus to the center two black "ground" leads. Connect the "+" of the "+" battery to the +5 line (red) going to the drive. Finally, connect the "+" of the other battery to the +12V (yellow) wire. So we're supplying ground, +6, and +12. Heck, it has a voltage regulator on +5 ... and it doesn't have long to live anyway.

Plug the drive in. Spin it up. IMPORTANT: Put it so the platters are at 90 degrees to you! In other words, put it so that if the platters explode, they won't hit you. You don't want it sitting on the ground with the platters parallel to the ground; you want them spinning at 90 degrees to the ground and to you.

Hike back a bit and shoot with a heavy slug. A slug from a 12 gauge works fine. All the rotational (angular) momentum is transferred to the frame as the platters stop almost instantly. The drive goes whirl-whirl-whirl, sometimes up in the air!

    I found that the .223 round from an M16A1 was strangely ineffective, but going to full auto made me feel better, and that's the point of all this. [ Yes it's legal to own an M16A1 here if you hop through the paperwork hoops]. Alas, the M16 was a toy I got rid of later ...

9 mm works very well at disassembling the drives, as does .45 cal.

  By the way, there are **absolutely terrific** magnets inside modern drives. Open 'em up and use a little acetone to unglue the magnets. They're the "supermagnets". And if you disassemble the drive with shooting, it is commonly opened FOR you!

          Shooting a disk drive that crashed and lost you a bunch of work is terrific stuff. In Las Vegas there are a couple places that let you bring in your computer or whatever and shoot it with automatic weapons. Hmmmm, maybe I should try an AK-47 someday, that's a .30 cal round...

      *grin*

David Small

Think big.

Take a million car batteries. Yup, lead acid. Why a million car batteries? Because they're so cheap -- we made a hundred million of them last year, and they're one of the best recycling stories out there). Don't be clever. New tech means R&D, and that means unexpected surprises.

Store them in buildings which are above 50 degrees F so that they last a very long time (and certainly not conditions under a hood). Some place near a large interconnect.

Use an inverter, or, just hook the batteries up with IGBT switches to "thermometer" up the voltage, and then back down, making AC.

I'm aware that this is limited storage; the batteries don't like to run at load capacity for long. But also note that Fairbanks has, I believe, 25 megawatts of battery backup.

I'll throw this into the "fresh meat" bowl here ...

  -- Dave Small