Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

@ai6yr That's 'Murrica for you.

@CiaraNi At first I thought it said "Beware the Girls". Probably good advice, also.

@europesays Give the Ukrainians whatever they need.

Russia has been saber-rattling and itching for a showdown for decades. During the first Iraq war, Russia had thousands of observers in Iraq to see how their hardware fared against Western hardware. It was obliterated. It was a joke, a rout. They went home, told what they saw, and the Soviet Union collapsed.

So they want a rematch. Okay. Give it to them and they will collapse again, suddenly.

This is the pattern in Russia. Russian government has a long history of no resilience because of corruption from the top down. It's the epitome of a third-world country. And bear in mind that Russia's entire economy is about the same size as Spain's. (No offense to the Spaniards intended.) They are a paper tiger with some nukes that mostly don't work because...corruption. (Plutonium pits are valuable. Sell 'em.)

@N4JAW @skccgroup Nice! Hey, I know that frequency. ;-) 73 de KW2P

@karlauerbach @lauren Hahaha. Great story.

@lauren @karlauerbach Yes. "Emergency Pull" it was called on IBM installations. I've pulled it several times out of curiosity, but not at the big installation at Mellonics. Lol.

@DemocracyMattersALot Cops who think this is good idea would do well to study some history. Trump's thugs also. In particular, they should study the history of the "Brownshirts" in 1930s Germany and what happened to them.

@BrianJopek They would all fail. But they would be fine with that and not surprised because MAGA doesn't like the existing system of government and wants something else. They don't want democracy because it never ever gets them what they want.

@karlauerbach @lauren Yes. I imagine a light pen would be difficult to implement today.

Back when I laid hands on that that running Sage machine at SDC (around March 1969 I think) I was 15 had been programming for about 6 months. Hah. And I was already an electronics geek. It was science fiction come to life to place the light pen over a blip on the big round screen and flight info would appear on a small CRT to the right.

And I puzzled over how this thing worked. Looked at the end of the pen, which had a small lens. Wtf? My mentor explained that the pen contained a light sensor not a light source. The CRT is scanning, of course, and when the beam passed under the tip of the pen a pulse was produced, locating the position of the pen.

Derp. Obvious, once you get the idea. Easy peasy.

With today's active TFT LCDs a light pen is probably not doable.

My mentor, who taught me quite a lot about programming and algorithms worked for RAND and wrote some of the software that ran on the Sage. He had access and invited me to check it out.

I was fortunate with mentors. Years later I had already done logic design for a while. And then I met Al Harano, who was one of the designers of the little RTL computer that flew on the Apollo. He took me under his wing, fixed a large design I had done (poorly), taught me some basic rules, and for the rest of my career every hardware logic design I ever did worked flawlessly first time. I owe a lot to those guys. It's all about discipline and not bending the rules.

@HopelessDemigod Hahaha. I like it
--Conan the Grammarian

@ai6yr If you'd like a somewhat detailed explanation to clear up your confusion, let me know.

The graphic you show is of a radiation storm, which has nothing to do with a G4 geomagnetic storm.