Here is a scary thought....

[Rochard]

Imagine if a solar storm slams earth and all computers are destroyed, with a four - six year recovery time..... It almost happened:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03..._days_in_2012/

[freecartoonporn]

i would stop Imagining.

[Harmon]

I've been meaning to work on my tan...

[Tootourist2014]

Originally Posted by Rochard

Imagine if a solar storm slams earth and all computers are destroyed, with a four - six year recovery time..... It almost happened:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03..._days_in_2012/

I knew this already, since it was one of those black forecasts for the
"end of the world", hence even the Gov did preps...

[notinmybackyard]

Originally Posted by Rochard

Imagine if a solar storm slams earth and all computers are destroyed, with a four - six year recovery time..... It almost happened:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03..._days_in_2012/

In other words,

The United States military wants new Electro Magnetic Pulse toys. So they create yet another hysteria about the world coming to an end in order to keep the dummies scared and dumb.


Their lies no longer surprise me. What does is that unlike the boy that cried « WOLF » one too many times, they seem to be able to do it over and over... And each time they are believed.

[John-ACWM]

Interesting story, didn't know about it.

[mikesouth]

The likelihood of that happening is pretty much non existent really...some older satellites are maybe vulnerable but these days power companies and such (at least in the first world) know (Thanks to NASA and NOAA) when solar flares are coming and where they will hit as well as when... allowing the power companies to reduce power on the lines to prevent blackouts that have happened in the past.

In other words your power would go long before it took out your computer most likely

[2MuchMark]

Originally Posted by Rochard

Imagine if a solar storm slams earth and all computers are destroyed, with a four - six year recovery time..... It almost happened:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03..._days_in_2012/

No worries, Rochard. These kinds of things happen all the time. The sun is constantly expelling charged particles, but we are protected from it by the earth's magnetic field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_field

Originally Posted by notinmybackyard

In other words,

The United States military wants new Electro Magnetic Pulse toys. So they create yet another hysteria about the world coming to an end in order to keep the dummies scared and dumb.

Not quite. It's news by lazy reporters and or news agencies that blow this kind of thing way out of proportion. Scary news reports get more clicks and views. Keeping people scared (used to?) make people buy more stuff such as junk, rations, gold, etc. Sure the military wants new weapons but putting scary stories in the news isn't the way they would get them.

Originally Posted by John-ACWM

Interesting story, didn't know about it.

Happens very often. Go to http://spaceweather.com to learn more.

[L-Pink]

Electro Magnetic Pulse ?

"One Second After" Very interesting book about the biggest real threat to America. A threat so worrisome that it's the number one concern of the US Strategic Command.


Quote from the books afterword;

"It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when"

General Eugene Harbiger
USAF
Former Commander-in-Chief
US Strategic Command

Edit: maybe this is why the US is so worried about a missing airliner


.

[Maqua]

Interesting read

[Andrezza]

We sometimes forget, that we're only shit in this fucking universe.....

[seeandsee]

i would lost my mind

[signupdamnit]

I don't think they said it would destroy most computers on the surface. Only that it would make them crash. If that was the thought I would be interested in the theory.

Kind of OT but who here runs ECC memory? I have it here. If it saves me from one crash it's worth the extra $20.

Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research[1] has shown that the majority of one-off ("soft") errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read/write them.

There was some concern that as DRAM density increases further, and thus the components on chips get smaller, while at the same time operating voltages continue to fall, DRAM chips will be affected by such radiation more frequently?since lower-energy particles will be able to change a memory cell's state. On the other hand, smaller cells make smaller targets, and moves to technologies such as SOI may make individual cells less susceptible and so counteract, or even reverse, this trend. Recent studies[2] show that single event upsets due to cosmic radiation have been dropping dramatically with process geometry and previous concerns over increasing bit cell error rates are unfounded.

The spacecraft Cassini?Huygens, launched in 1997, contains two identical flight recorders, each of which contains 2.5 gigabits of memory in the form of arrays of commercial DRAM chips. Its engineering telemetry reports the number of (correctable) single-bit-per-word errors and (uncorrectable) double-bit-per-word errors. In the vicinity of Earth, and when the sun is "quiet", it reported a nearly constant single-bit error rate of about 280 errors per day. The maximum hourly error report from Cassini?Huygens in the first month in space was 3072 single-bit errors per day during a weak solar flare. If the flight recorders had been designed with EDAC words assembled from widely-separated bits, the number of (uncorrectable) multiple-bit errors should average less than one per year. [3]

Work published between 2007 and 2009 showed widely varying error rates with over 7 orders of magnitude difference, ranging from 10−10?10−17 error/bit·h, roughly one bit error, per hour, per gigabyte of memory to one bit error, per millennium, per gigabyte of memory.[2][4][5] A very large-scale study based on Google's very large number of servers was presented at the SIGMETRICS/Performance?09 conference.[4] The actual error rate found was several orders of magnitude higher than previous small-scale or laboratory studies, with 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per megabit (about 2.5?7 × 10−11 error/bit·h)(i.e. about 5 single bit errors in 8 Gigabytes of RAM per hour using the top-end error rate), and more than 8% of DIMM memory modules affected by errors per year.

The consequence of a memory error is system-dependent. In systems without ECC, an error can lead either to a crash or to corruption of data; in large-scale production sites, memory errors are one of the most common hardware causes of machine crashes.[4] Memory errors can cause security vulnerabilities.[4] A memory error can have no consequences if it changes a bit which neither causes observable malfunctioning nor affects data used in calculations or saved. A 2010 simulation study showed that, for a web browser, only a small fraction of memory errors caused data corruption, although, as many memory errors are intermittent and correlated, the effects of memory errors were greater than would be expected for independent soft errors.[6]

An example of a single-bit error that would be ignored by a system with no error-checking, would halt a machine with parity checking, or would be invisibly corrected by ECC: a single bit is stuck at 1 due to a faulty chip, or becomes changed to 1 due to background or cosmic radiation; a spreadsheet storing numbers in ASCII format is loaded, and the digit "8" is stored in the byte which contains the stuck bit as its eighth bit; then a change is made to the spreadsheet and it is saved. However, the "8" (00111000 binary) has silently become a "9" (00111001).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_me...lem_background

I'm not sure how much ECC would help during a solar storm like this but one would think it would help at least a little bit.

[_Richard_]

Originally Posted by mikesouth

The likelihood of that happening is pretty much non existent really...some older satellites are maybe vulnerable but these days power companies and such (at least in the first world) know (Thanks to NASA and NOAA) when solar flares are coming and where they will hit as well as when... allowing the power companies to reduce power on the lines to prevent blackouts that have happened in the past.

In other words your power would go long before it took out your computer most likely

nonexistent? it has happened before within the last 200 years

and since it melted telegraph wire and turned the sky red.. i think we have a little more to worry about than 'older satellites'

[michael.kickass]

You can't really believe what the news say, they may forecast a solar storm and it might as well be just a lie.

[bronco67]

Things like this make me want to own a gun again. You know...just in case I might need it to keep the hordes of marauders away from my house.

[deltav]

Originally Posted by _Richard_

nonexistent? it has happened before within the last 200 years

and since it melted telegraph wire and turned the sky red.. i think we have a little more to worry about than 'older satellites'

This. It's human nature to discount stuff like this that only happens once every 15+ generations or whatever - if we don't understand the risks firsthand we just keep on truckin despite what scientists might warn about.

During that 1859 storm you could see in the aurora in fucking CUBA and north of that it brightly covered the entire sky so you could read at night without any other light. So yeah, safe to say we've seen nothing like it in modern times, i.e. now that we basically depend on electricity and computers for everything. It would cause total chaos.

But who am I to talk, I live in a city built on silt beds that's overdue for a huge earthquake, and my old house would get wiped dafuq out. If there's a big Pacific NW earthquake and I stop posting here, it's because I got buried under tons of rubble.

[CurrentlySober]

My scariest thought, would be that I woke up in the morning, and my ass had healed / sealed up...

[notinmybackyard]

Originally Posted by **********

Not quite. It's news by lazy reporters and or news agencies that blow this kind of thing way out of proportion.

Keep that in mind the next time you read a news story about how Québec is racist against anglophones.

[Rochard]

Originally Posted by bronco67

Things like this make me want to own a gun again. You know...just in case I might need it to keep the hordes of marauders away from my house.

This is the only reason I have firearms. I don't need them for home protection; I live in a safe town, one of the safest in California. (Eight safest city in California really.) But in the event society breaks down.... I'm ready.

I was really concerned there for a while during the recession when my neighborhood was becoming a ghost town due to the all of the deserted houses.