At 10:59 PM 2/18/2011, J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Hysterical. I'm glad that particular madness is mostly over.
Me too. Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a particularly grim schoolday.
Yeah. Al-Qaeda and their ilk were really wimpy terrorists compared to forty years of "we can blow up the world N times over and we've got the crazy generals to do it!" nuclear terrorism. I was a kid during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one of my neighbors had dug up their back yard to put in a bomb shelter. It was really freaky the first time I heard the Emergency Broadcast System come on the radio in the ?early 90s? and say "this is not a test" - they were using it for flood warnings during a storm, which is a sensible thing to do, but before that it had always been "this is a test of the 'let you know that the Russians and Americans are trying to blow up the world' alarm system", whether it was EBS or CONELRAD or whatever, so by the time they got to the "flooding" part, I'd already mentally been through the "WTF? The politicians haven't been saber-rattling at each other, is this some surprise attack? How fast can I get home to my wife?" panic attack. They'd probably been using it that way for several years, just not at times I'd been driving with the car radio on.