TrevMUN

New Moon 28 was my best shot at it. I also tried KM-Goanna; if I log into my account on LinkedIn that browser can't display anything. Pixiv's front page, logged out, does display, but not any actual pages other than that whether logged in or not. I also have Firefox ESR 52.7.4, Chrome 49, and Advanced Chrome (Chromium 54) but none of them had any luck with these sites, and I didn't expect them to.

It's been a hot minute since I had looked into 360 Extreme Explorer; what's the main difference between the ArcticFoxie and HummingOwl versions? I also remember there had been some effort to go through the code of the browser and the Russian repack to dig out any malware, backdoors, or telemetry. Was there ever a summary of what people found? As interested in this browser as I've been, I've been hesitant to give it a go for those reasons. There's been a huge shift in web development philosophies over the decades. I remember back in the 90s and 00s when web developers prided themselves on being able to write pages in a text editor. Now the big thing is importing entire scripts offsite wholesale. With the browsers I have which use NoScript, it becomes a game of trying to figure out which off-site script does what and if I should unblock it or not. That can be quite annoying when the scripts in question involve very superficial cosmetic stuff that could have been handled within the same domain name ...

Not to mention that it's incredibly tone deaf to lecture someone who's already aware of the challenges posed by sticking with an older operating system or software. As you observed, NotHereToPlayGames, many people here run systems with older operating systems either as a daily driver or in some other capacity. People here already know from experience that they are not going to convince developers to bend over backwards just to support their operating system. So they come to places like this forum, to RyanVM's forums, to Win-Raid and many other communities, because they're seeking potential solutions from likeminded enthusiasts. Many of whom are developers in their own right who do care and are interested in finding solutions. That's why it's condescending to be told things like this, in this community, when asking about the potential benefits and limitations of a solution mentioned in discussions elsewhere on this site: Especially when, as I said earlier, it's done without actually addressing the questions posed. It comes off as if you're really saying "quit whining about your worthless ancient operating system/computer/browser, nobody has to cater to you" when no such expectations were made in the first place. Even if you didn't mean to be condescending, Bruninho, that's how the response(s) came off. Nah, that's more like you being obnoxiously rude and sarcastic. Which, much like the attitude you've had previously, was entirely uncalled for and absolutely unhelpful. No, you didn't. You've completely misread the room, apparently. This topic was not "why can't I access LinkedIn on these browsers," this topic was "what is Polyfill, what can it do and what can't it do." UCyborg provided a much more informative and detailed explanation as to what people were talking about in Roytam1's browsers thread, and he did so without going on about software being "ancient" and "old." I'd say "this topic has run its course" but I'd be interested in hearing UCyborg's findings regarding the sites I mentioned.

Yeah, I'm not expecting it to be a silver bullet. UCyborg made that clear with the example of Web Serial API. Though, I wouldn't know right away which problems are correctable with github-wc-polyfill and which aren't. No worries, it was mainly the other guy. "(x) is old/ancient/dead" responses are a sore spot for me, especially when it's not relevant to the topic. I'd rather a clear-cut explanation of what can and can't be done with a thing rather than a lecture about how foolish it is to keep using a thing because it's old.

Man, thanks for explaning this! I thought I was losing my mind with what these other guys were saying, claiming it's a server-side only thing (not to mention the irrelevant and condescending "your computer and browsers are ancient, accept the inevitable" lecturing) yet seeing people talk about github-wc-polyfill in Roytam1's thread. Try LinkedIn and Pixiv? Both sites have recently blanked out on me. Well, LinkedIn just endlessly shows its loading animation, but Pixiv just goes stark white. Coinbase and BlockFi do the same thing, but only when you try to log in, so those wouldn't be as easy to test.

I don't get the condescension in your response. Was it not apparent that I already acknowledged this in my previous reply? I don't find this attitude helpful at all in trying to understand what Polyfill is or does. You repeatedly use the phrase "old macs, pcs" and "ancient browsers" in your response to me. I think you're making an assumption that I'm trying to access these websites on a Pentium-based machine using IE5 or something. In terms of specs, my machine isn't as old as you may think. And I think it's similarly a mistake to assume the browsers involved are ancient. Personally, if I devoted as much time as Roytam1 does to backporting a browser that's still being developed, I'd be insulted by someone calling it ancient, as if it hadn't received updates and support in over a decade. The issue isn't TLS 1.3. And anyway, I've noticed that older Firefox-based browsers (and offshoots like Pale Moon/New Moon) don't have this problem. Older versions of Chrome/Chromium will report "ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH" if they encounter a site using TLS 1.3, but Firefox-derived browsers will display the page without issue. It's also not a case of HTML5/CSS3 not being understood by the browsers I'm using (I would have had a very hard time developing my site using HTML5/CSS3 if I wasn't able to preview my work as I wrote it). In Roytam1's thread, InterLinked referred to this problem as "breakage-causing JS code." Really, it seems like you're just taking this post as an excuse to lecture about a whole gamut of things unrelated to the topic at hand. I can't speak for others on this topic, but regardless of the operating system I've made a point of installing script and ad blockers on my browsers. I'm particularly fond of NoScript's "don't trust anything inherently" approach.

You'll have to check around for spare case parts I think. From my experience, spare parts for cases is only done for certain models by certain manufacturers. For example: my daily driver, an XP64 machine I call Palouser, has a NZXT Phantom 820 case. Over a decade old by now, the cable management grommets are starting to fall apart and the rubberized coating for some surfaces has degraded, becoming sticky. More concerning though is that one of the case LEDs burned out. When I inquired to NZXT about replacement LEDs or replacement dials for the case lighting controls (which have aforementioned rubberized coating) I was told they don't have replacement parts for the Phantom 820. They couldn't even tell me what sort of LEDs they used, so I have no idea how to replace the LED myself. Meanwhile, a friend of mine gave me a hand-me-down Windows 10 machine with older specs than Palouser that I call Levanter. My friend very heavily Corsair-themed that PC, with the case being (I believe) Corsair Carbide 500R. This case has a broken front panel exposing the interior. I found that Corsair does sell replacement parts, but I've had trouble locating any Carbide 500R parts. (I've certainly found a lot of Carbide 400C, 600Q/C, and 900D parts though ... ) Try checking Antec's site and see if they sell the parts. If they don't appear to do so, try contacting them and asking if they might have parts in stock, or what to do if they can't/won't sell them to you. You might also have luck checking eBay or Craigslist for spare parts or Antec Three Hundred cases being sold for parts. You might get a lot of mileage out of UserBenchmark. That's a site where users test the speed of their components at various tasks and upload the results. You can then compare the aggregate scores of one model against another. Tonight, in fact, I found out something rather embarrassing for AMD: the recently-released RX 6500-XT had been so hobbled in performance in a bid to make it unattractive to cryptocurrency miners that my GTX TITAN X Maxwell outperforms it in many categories, with an "effective 3D speed" that's 36% faster. (Granted, you shouldn't take the RX 6500 XT as an example of all its contemporaries. AMD's RX 6600-XT leaves my TITAN X Maxwell in the dust.) Aside from GPUs you can also check and compare benchmark aggregates for CPUs, RAM, SSDs, and HDDs. Even USB thumbdrives. Since 2020 there has been a chip shortage that's made itself felt across a bunch of industries, even the automotive industry. GPU prices skyrocketed as a result, especially as scalpers and miners swooped in and scooped up loads of stock, leading to some attempts at developing video cards either purpose-built for mining or unattractive to miners to try and keep them from depriving other customers of GPUs. We may finally be seeing the end of this shortage. That all depends on how world events shake out though; the media's already sounding the alarm about another wave of COVID-19 coming out of China, and we may wind up seeing another return to lockdowns and supply chains forcibly brought to a halt, which will just put us back to square one. There's also the fact that the world put most of its eggs in one basket, so to speak, with Taiwan presently producing the lion's share of chipmaking. Something like 60%, I think. If something were to happen to Taiwan, we would all be in for a bad time.

While I agree with the sentiment and I've put that into practice for my own site, major websites appear to have gotten quite lazy, careless, and uncaring about maximizing compatibility. Just tonight I discovered that Pixiv, the Japanese art website, now completely blanks out on all of my browsers including Roytam1's New Moon builds. I've had similar experiences with LinkedIn, BlockFi, and Coinbase. A number of other sites (such as DeviantArt and a British company, Clove Technology) currently implement such unfriendly code to a point that their sites are mostly unusable but not completely so. From the way people talked about it in Roytam1's thread, Polyfill is something we might be able to do "client-side" to address problems casued "server-side."

Without checking for myself (I don't have my login credentials for my Dropbox account handy) that sounds like Dropbox is yet another site that decided to implement code which doesn't work on any browser available to XP. I've experienced the same thing with LinkedIn, BlockFi, and Coinbase. Over in Roytam1's thread on his XP ports for various browser projects, there seems to be some kind of effort to correct this by some other users with Polyfill. But I've had trouble following along with what they're doing.

So in Roytam1's post where he chronicles his work on XP-friendly browsers, I saw a lot of talk of Polyfill. I tried to follow along, but coming into the middle of a long ongoing discussion with no apparent beginning no matter how many pages back I went left me horribly confused as to exactly what it is, how it's used, what it can and can't do and oh no I've gone crosseyed. So I thought the best thing to do would be to get a post specifically about Polyfill going, to untangle the discussion and get up to speed. With that in mind: What exactly is Polyfill? Which browsers can use Polyfill? How do you implement Polyfill into a browser? What can it do and what are its limitations? EDIT: @UCyborg cleared it up for me in this comment! Big thanks to him!

It probably depends on your personal experience with each operating system. For example: I have pretty fond memories of Windows 95 (I even still have the original Windows 95 machine my parents owned right here next to me) but Windows 98 and 98 SE were nigh-unusable nightmares to me. Blue Screens of Death were very common, at least once a day on that machine, usually one every few hours. By contrast, I rarely had BSoDs with XP and XP64. When they do happen (such as when Palouser's RAM fails or how her previous motherboard, a ASUS P5Q-PRO TURBO, developed some kind of thermal stress-related fault) it's almost always because of a hardware issue and not the fault of the operating system. In fact, Palouser had only one BSoD in all of last year. That being said, 98 and 98SE were on a family computer shared by the rest of the household, and my father was quite a bit more careless than I was with his computers. I've been wanting to build a "Bluetooth jukebox PC" themed after vaporwave/retrosynth for a while now, and when I get around to it I plan to have that machine run 98, which is one of the OSes associated with vaporwave and the earliest Windows version that supports Bluetooth, as I understand it.

Just throwing some two cents in here for @BlackOtton, but if you want to make an XP64 system that's as recent as you can get, you could follow what I did with Palouser, my XP64 machine. @XP-x64-Lover located a suite of XP64 drivers for the ASUS X99 SABERTOOTH motherboard. That gets you into 5th gen territory, so you could go all the way up to the Broadwell-E. With Matt's Repository's findings, you could get Windows XP drivers for the nVidia Geforce GTX 970, 980, 980 TI and Titan X. At least until Version 368.81. @bluebolt was able to get an NVMe drive to work as a boot drive for XP64. This would get you up to 2016-level specs. Well, bleeding edge for 2016. As I understand it, the 10xx series of nVidia video cards are still the most commonly used by gamers, partially due to ... well ... the economic forces at play right now. When I overhauled Palouser in 2019 (well, I got started locating parts in 2018, but still) I went balls-to-the-wall. I use Palouser as my do-everything daily driver and workstation, but of course, I am limited by what programs can be made to work on XP64. So she's got an i7-6950X, a TITAN X Maxwell, and 128 GB of RAM. Not the highest-specced RAM, but as I understand it, Intel CPUs of this generation weren't very strongly impacted by RAM speed. I don't know if anyone has had luck with newer hardware. I have heard of people getting XP to run on Ryzen, but aside from a photo I've not seen anyone post instructions on how they did it. EDIT: Well that sucks. I found the guy who said he succeeded at this, but he links to Win-Raid as proof of his accomplishment and the post is gone. There was a whole thread apparently, "XP/W2k3 x86 on Modern Hardware," that had a lot of information on workarounds and compatible drivers which got nuked during a forum database migration and was never restored. On the other hand, there's a thread at Win-Raid titled "XP/W2k3 x64 on Modern Hardware." The first few posts are by someone who claims to have gotten XP64 running on Coffee Lake. That's eighth gen Intel Core CPUs, circa 2017 ... in fact, that's what your machine has, right?

On the XP64 forums @bluebolt detailed efforts to install Windows XP64 on an NVMe drive. He was able to pull it off. Maybe his approach might work to installing Windows 7 on that?

It used to be, back in 2009, that I thought my only real challenge in staying with XP64 would be that I'd not be able to play newer games that use versions of DirectX newer than 9. Then I got firsthand experience with how there's also the issue of API compatibility, i.e. newer versions of Windows having APIs not present in the XP family. Well, now there's something else I hadn't considered which Linus brought up; video cards that say they support a certain version of DirectX doesn't mean they actually support that version flawlessly. DirectX is actually a group of APIs which receive updates of their own, and the collective state of these updates are more or less a type of subversion that Microsoft calls a "Feature Level." In the case of my nVidia GTX TITAN X Maxwell, even though it's said to be compatible with DirectX 12, it only supports up to Feature Level 12.1. That means any programs which require DirectX 12.2 or more wouldn't run with this video card, even if I were to use it with a Windows 10 or 11 install. And that, of course, wouldn't be limited to just games ... any program that uses DirectX for anything. This a more vexing issue for older cards. Many cards a decade old have specs that, on the face of it, should still allow them to run certain current programs and games, and yet they either fail to do so or crash. There are some compatibility layers that convert D3D calls to Vulkan, though, based on Steam Proton. That might work for those who are able to use them.

That reminds me, I really need to look into dust covers for external USB ports. Palouser, my daily driver workhorse, has dust covers for the X99 SABERTOOTH motherboard's own ports ... and the case, a NZXT Phantom 820, has removable dust cover for the top panel. However, the problem there is that I'm always using some of those ports ... and so dust has gotten into the ports I don't use. Beyond that, the Phantom 820 has a lot of mesh that catches some of the dust, and the fans have their own dust covers, though over time dust still does get into the case. I usually try to dust out Palouser once a month, especially now that I've mostly switched from canned air to a DataVac. Far more expensive, but also VERY worth it for most dusting applications. (Canned air would still be better in some specific hard-to-reach detailing though.) But given I'm presently relegated to renting bedrooms, I don't always have the opportunity to take Palouser outside and do some dusting. So, often the computer goes two or three months or more without dusting. In the past when I was living at home, my computer would go up to half a year or more without dusting though ... and whenever I would eventually go through the motions of dusting the poor girl out, so much dust would have accumulated that once I took the family's ShopVac to her, it'd be like someone set off a smoke bomb!

Wanted to give a bit of an update on this topic; after a lot of deliberation, I wound up going with the Fairphone 4 and installing /e/OS on it. I'd spent the past few months doing a lot of research into my options, and I think this might be the best option for me moving forward. I like /e/OS' philosophy of minimizing exposure to Google's data harvesting, and Fairphone's approach to giving users the ability to repair their own phones and replace the battery when required. Of course, by going this route, I was making a reeeeally expensive gamble. Both in trusting that the phone would work on a carrier of my choosing, and that I wouldn't screw up installing /e/OS and bricking a brand new $688 (at least when I bought it, ha ha inflation) phone. There's also the non-trivial issue that Fairphone only ships within Europe (and /e/'s own Murena version of the Fairphone 4 is similarly Europe-only) but I found a British company, Clove Technology, that sells the phone and ships to America. Based on Kimovil's report regarding the Fairphone 4's frequency compatibility with American cellular services, it looked like if I went with somebody who uses T-Mobile or U.S. Cellular, I would have the best odds of success. Which is serendipitous because right now it seemed one of the better deals, similar to what I had with Boost Mobile, is with a T-Mobile service called Mint Mobile. And they've got a pretty detailed coverage map that even details signal strength for varying bands for a given location. It looks as if everywhere I typically go, even on cross-country trips, will have good or fairly good coverage in the bands used by this phone. Fairphone 4 being relatively new, Mint Mobile doesn't list the model at all in their compatibility checker and the site will tell you it's not supported if you check by IEMI. However, given they do support the Fairphone 3 and also offer a low-cost week trial, I figured I'd test my luck that way. Well, I'm happy to report that not only did I not screw up the installation process for /e/OS on the Fairphone 4, but Mint Mobile's SIM card worked without a hitch! I've been able to make calls no problem and coverage seems good. With Fairphone 4 being a 5G phone, this should hopefully last me for as long as the 5G network does. Given the way /e/OS works, I haven't been able to install all the apps I use on my iPhone 5S, but that's why I'm hanging onto that phone. I've found some things to try when my iPhone is no longer able to use those apps.

Dave's right. I did reach out to LinkedIn's support staff on the 12th and submitted a ticket notifying them of this: "Since last week, LinkedIn is no longer usable on any of my browsers and I am completely unable to access any of the features of the site. Attempting to navigate to any page leaves me stuck at the LinkedIn loading animation. One of my browser consoles reported these errors: 'unreachable code after return statement[Learn More] bn6mu4p20im96zhacyvmtecyc:6735 unreachable code after return statement[Learn More] bn6mu4p20im96zhacyvmtecyc:19064 SyntaxError: expected expression, got '.'[Learn More] bn6mu4p20im96zhacyvmtecyc:32717:41 unreachable code after return statement[Learn More] 1lwbhppaad1owcov8hethjyoa:6 ReferenceError: runningTests is not defined[Learn More] 8b1tthssubm76w215rk7nc4o2:2530:14 unreachable code after return statement[Learn More] 1lwbhppaad1owcov8hethjyoa:6'"" Unfortunately, the support staff didn't take this as a bug report. Instead they gave me the usual: telling me to try logging in and out, clear my browser cache and cookies, only use the browsers they support,and the like. Is there anything we can do on our end? Because I doubt these companies are going to fix their own code.

Accidental double post.

I've been having the same problems on Coinbase, BlockFi, and LinkedIn. Coinbase and BlockFi stopped working on New Moon 28 a few months ago. A few days ago LinkedIn stopped working as well. I had ONE tab that was still open which allowed me to still receive and send messages, but this morning Kaiser Permanente's website caused New Moon to lock up and I had to kill the process, which of course meant when I relaunched New Moon that my last remaining LinkedIn tab no longer works. This sucks. New Moon 28 is the browser I turn to when sites stop working on my other browsers.

I've been having the same problems on Coinbase, BlockFi, and LinkedIn. Coinbase and BlockFi stopped working on New Moon 28 a few months ago. A few days ago LinkedIn stopped working as well. I had ONE tab that was still open which allowed me to still receive and send messages, but this morning Kaiser Permanente's website caused New Moon to lock up and I had to kill the process, which of course meant when I relaunched New Moon that my last remaining LinkedIn tab no longer works. This sucks.

I just have my doubts, that's all. That being said, the attempts by Western leaders to influence pro-Western sentiment in Ukraine could back that up. Hindsight being 20/20, what John J. Mearsheimer said (that the West should have promoted Ukraine into becoming a neutral economic power that wouldn't have been seen as a threat to either Russian or Western interests) now seems like it would have been the wiser move. I just looked that up ... huh. If that's true, well, I guess we'll know if things get really serious if Lavrov's daughter returns to Russia to be with her father. Then again, how much authority would someone like Lavrov have in deciding whether or not Russia launches nukes? It seems Putin has ultimate launch authority according to the FAS, and I don't know if anyone could override him if he decides it's nuking time. I also don't know if Putin would care about sparing someone like Lavrov's daughter if he really felt like things got to that point. That'd work, I suppose, for someone who has access to a garden or a yard ... Part of my predicament, I'm stuck in the San Francisco Bay Area renting out bedrooms. Suffice to say, no landlord would let me go that far. And really, unless I can get out of here I think I'd have very low chances of surviving a nuclear exchange. I've noticed a lot of homes out here don't have brick construction, including where I'm at now. Given the observed overpressure effects on buildings I'd expect any such home to be completely destroyed, or at least ruined to a point that it would offer zero protection from fallout. And I'm well within the blast radius of that. Also good advice for long-term storage (I have a TITAN X Maxwell, not the TITAN Black) but my concern was mainly about ensuring that I'd have working electronics on hand after an EMP event. In the event of a nuclear war, even if I lived somewhere that wouldn't be in a blast radius or fallout zone, there wouldn't be enough time to prepare once the nukes fly. For example, the example of submarine-launched nukes right off the coast of an enemy country, you'd have maybe fifteen minutes ... definitely not the time to disassemble a computer. And an EMP attack would likely be the first thing that happens anyway, before anyone realizes s***'s truly hit the fan. That being said, this would be a good idea in the event of a coronal mass ejection. We can see those coming at least a day or two in advance and the NOAA has a Space Weather Prediction Center that keeps an eye on this sort of thing. If we knew we were about to get hit by something that would wreck electronics there'd be enough time to disassemble a computer and store it in something EMP shielded.

Just to start off, I've been spending more time trying to figure out if there's commercially available and viable solutions for shielding electronics against EMP. One of the big problems I've had researching this stuff in the past is that it's hard to find out if any of it's been tested to demonstrate effective shielding, at least for commercial products. For example, the guy in this video claims to have tested some anti-static bags which provide EMP shielding, but he doesn't include footage of him testing those specific bags even though he sells them on his website. It would really suck to have put money down on a product claimed to protect against EMP only to find out too late you'd been had by someone making a quick buck off of you. And do-it-yourself solutions are neither convenient or durable. For example, I've heard you can turn a box or container into an effective faraday cage by wrapping it in three layers each of alternating aluminum foil and something plastic, but there can not be any holes or tears in the foil, and that means if you ever need to get at what's inside the cage you'd have to remake it every time. The U.S. Department of Defense does have a standard for high-altitude electromagnetic protection, MIL STD 188-125, which I found out about from a document by the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. (Check out some of the graphs there, like on page 67 onward, showing what a single 100-kiloton nuke would do to electronics across North America. Or that diagram on Appendix D-2 toward the end, highlighting observed EMP effects during the USSR's K-3 HEMP test with a 300 kiloton nuke.) I may have found something that fits the bill. There's a company called Mission Darkness that sells products that they tout are used by military, law enforcement, and forensic investigation for blocking radio frequencies, or for people concerned about their privacy (like someone nabbing credit card info via RFID) and it turns out that they had a third party compliance laboratory, Keystone Compliance, test some of their products to see if they meet or exceed MIL STD 188-125. They have a page on their site dedicated to this and they also offer Keystone's full report from their EMP test, even listing all the equipment used for each test and the white paper. So I might be looking into getting this to try and protect a few of my devices in case the worst happens and I somehow survive. Granted, if an EMP attack did happen, it would completely wreck our electrical infrastructure as well as any unprotected electronics or batteries. I wouldn't expect to be able to use my electronics, even if they were shielded, unless I also had access to a completely shielded electrical infrastructure. Which I highly, highly doubt. But, at least having shielding for some of my electronics would keep them from being damaged or destroyed and give me hope that at least some of my personal data might survive and be usable if and when we could rebuild our electrical infrastructure. If you've got electronics and/or data you want to ensure might survive electromagnetic funtimes, the products listed there might be a good option. Heck, last year I bought this self-powered light kit from Deciwatt in part due to the craziness in 2020 (rolling blackouts, societal upheaval, etc.) ... I could put it in one of these faraday bags so that if s*** hits the fan, I would still have a means to have light and charge USB-based devices. Assuming I protected them too, of course. I'll say this much, it has been an utter mess trying to keep up with unfolding events as there is a lot of spin being put out there. For one thing, you naturally have the belligerents involved putting out their own spin on events. But you also have the whole charlie foxtrot that is social media, people wanting likes and attention so badly they'll gladly do things like post footage from other past events, or even video game footage (like from ARMA 3) and claim it's from what's happening in Ukraine right now. And even journalists and politicians have gotten in on that game, or been duped by it. And then you have activists for one cause or another doing the same. While I doubt that Ukraine's a sleeper cell for the FSB, I do think Ukraine's membership into EU or NATO would just provoke Russia further. In fact, apparently back in 2015 a political scientist named John J. Mearsheimer had warned that this would happen. And Belarus is abandoning non-nuclear status, allowing Russia to set up nukes there. And Russia's foreign minister said that if World War III happens it will be nuclear, and also called for the United States to recall all American nukes based in Europe. I hope things deescalate, what with the scheduled ceasefire talks soon, but ...

If things got that bad and the American mainland got invaded, I'd probably have no choice but to fight, like what Ukranians are doing right now. But that's the thing about nuclear war, it wouldn't so much determine who wins as so much who survives. Of course, if I were to move out of the way of probable nuclear targets/fallout zones and nuclear war happens, then I would most likely be alive and able to defend whatever's left. It would take an extraordinary set of circumstances, I think, for a nuclear power to launch a conventional invasion of the other that wouldn't be met with nuclear retaliation. I'm not saying this just in terms of NATO vs. Russia, but in general. Sam Gardner talked about this back in 2002 when India and Pakistan seemed likely to come to blows with each other. War colleges in America simulated how such a confrontation would play out for decades. Ever since the U.S. suspected Pakistan had nukes, these simulations typically ended up in a nuclear exchange. And I think a nuclear power wanting to attack America would be more likely to just nuke us outright, rather than attempt conventional warfare first.

Well, if such an order were given, we probably wouldn't have time to wonder. There's an article on William Robert Johnston's website, The Effects of Global Thermonuclear War, which attempted to illustrate what nuclear war would have looked like in 1988 when the nuclear arsenals of America and the Soviet Union were around their peak. Nuclear submarines parked off the coast of the target country can deliver their missiles in fifteen minutes based on his storyboarding of the apocalypse. But before then our only warning of impending nuclear war might be EMP attacks. Johnston hypothesizes nuclear weapons on board satellites being the culprit, but some of the films made in the 1980's like The Day After and Threads have the Soviets detonating nukes high above North America and Europe to achieve the same effect. Either way, I'm sure that modern nuclear attack plans by any of the "nuclear club" still call for blanketing target countries in EMP. And that's something most consumer electronics are not capable of surviving. EMP will fry electronics even if they're powered off and unplugged, and the only way to protect such devices would be through storing them in something that provides EMP shielding. Now I personally have worried off and on about the potential for electromagnetic fun times from a coronal mass ejection causing a geomagnetic storms, like the Carrington Event in the 1800s. To date I really haven't found any easily procurable solutions for storing electronics in something that's EMP shielded. It's not easy as buying a fireproof/fire resistant safe, you usually wind up having to make your own solutions. Anyway, for me it may not matter if nuclear war comes. I don't think I live far enough away from potential blast zones that I would survive the initial attack. Or even if I did I'd probably die from acute radiation sickness from the fallout that would follow. I've wanted to get somewhere out of the way, but I don't have the income to support packing up and moving.