I figured that when they are finally hungry, they really hungry and right now.

COPS probably isn't going to air this one Detroit SWAT member Joseph Weekley: 'It's my gun that shot and killed a 7-year-old girl', but they was there filming.

Seems "No warming for 17 years" is pretty solid;

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.

The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).

IPCC Railroad engineer Pachauri acknowledges ‘No warming for 17 years’

AR5 is due out soon, it's likely to be a game changer.

Most predators use a chomp and shake technique, while avoiding puncture wounds is a good thing, having a 14 foot shark shake you like a rag toy is going to spoil your day

I'm surprised you don't get our alerts, I get a lot of "Welcome Abroad" messages from AT&T when my cell jumps to a Canadian tower driving home.

It was probably more appropriate for Martin than Zimmerman, even if Martin was the banger wantabe I figure he was and actually intending to burgle every house on the street he was walking down, that still doesn't justify the use of deadly force against him.

The CME that caused the Carrington Event followed a preceding CME that "cleared the path" which allowed the CME to arrive in just 17 hours.

During the Carrington event, the aurora was so bright people thought it was dawn and you could read newspapers by their light. The Aurora could be seen in Cuba and Hawaii.

The problem is telluric currents, electrical current induced in the conductive layers of the Earth and in long conductors either on or under the surface.

A time-varying magnetic field external to the Earth induces telluric currents—electric currents in the conducting ground. These currents create a secondary (internal) magnetic field. As a consequence of Faraday's law of induction, an electric field at the surface of the Earth is induced associated with time variations of the magnetic field. The surface electric field causes electrical currents, known as geomagnetically induced currents (GIC), to flow in any conducting structure, for example, a power or pipeline grid grounded in the Earth. This electric field, measured in V/km, acts as a voltage source across networks.Geomagnetically induced current

These telluric currents can be caused when a solar mass ejection strikes the Earth's magnetosphere and deflects it. During the Solar storm of 1859,

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases shocking telegraph operators.[7] Telegraph pylons threw sparks. [8] Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[9] Solar storm of 1859

;
During the Soviet Test 184, a 300 kilotons was detonated at an altitude of 290 km (180 mi)

For one of the K Project tests, Soviet scientists instrumented a 570-kilometer (350 mi) section of telephone line in the area that they expected to be affected by the pulse. The monitored telephone line was divided into sub-lines of 40 to 80 kilometres (25 to 50 mi) in length, separated by repeaters. Each sub-line was protected by fuses and by gas-filled overvoltage protectors. The EMP from the 22 October (K-3) nuclear test (also known as Test 184) blew all of the fuses and fired all of the overvoltage protectors in all of the sub-lines.[15]

Published reports, including a 1998 IEEE article,[15] have stated that there were significant problems with ceramic insulators on overhead electrical power lines during the tests. A 2010 technical report written for Oak Ridge National Laboratory stated, "Power line insulators were damaged, resulting in a short circuit on the line and some lines detaching from the poles and falling to the ground."[17]Nuclear electromagnetic pulse

So yes not only can your generator get fried if it is connected to AC neutral and ground, but that is not the worst of it. Think the wildfires happening out west are in Colorado and Arizona are bad, imagine arcing powerlines dropping of the poles all over the continental US and Canada.

In a normal weather storm induced blackout things generally work once the downed power-lines are repaired, in a space weather induced blackout, there are tremendous current loops transformers exploding, lines melting, electronics frying; things are not going to work.

Hello World isn't so bad

  IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
            PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
            PROCEDURE DIVISION.
                    DISPLAY 'Hello, world'.
                    STOP RUN.

Even Hello, OS/360 circa 1972 is

    001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
    002 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'.
    003 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    004 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
    005 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-360.
    006 OBJECT-COMPUTER. IBM-360.
    0065 SPECIAL-NAMES.
    0066 CONSOLE IS CNSL.
    007 DATA DIVISION.
    008 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
    009 77 HELLO-CONST PIC X(12) VALUE 'HELLO, WORLD'.
    075 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    090 000-DISPLAY.
    100 DISPLAY HELLO-CONST UPON CNSL.
    110 STOP RUN.

We did flowcharts in Basic and Fortran, but COBOL was IPO charts (Input, Process, Output) and module diagrams for us; oh we did psudeocode of the modules, psuedocoding COBOL is really tough because cobol is so wordy.

I thought they was porting it to Ada.

Army in the 70's, advance pay between basic and AIT, resulting in 3 months without a pay check and another 3 months for all of the corrections, re-corrections and over-corrections to stablize.

COBOL is a high-level language that had the first compilers in 1960 running essentially the same program on both RCA and UNIVAC computers. Usualy some changes may have to be made in the CONFIGURATION SECTION. but other than that the compiler and the Operating system takes care of it. The problems I'd imagine happening is some of it is written in pre-ANSI COBOL 68, most in ANSI COBOL 68, a fair amount in COBOL 1974 and a smattering of COBOL 1985; so a lot can depend on how strict the compiler is. I imagine every time Congress changes the tax code, the military gets a pay raise or contributory entitlement change; some COBOL programers develope PTSD and the program gets an orphaned module or two. After several decade on maintence and changes it probably a nightmare figuring out what gets used and whats never called.