"Fried, hard"

No, not eggs, electronics.

Wired magazine reports that the EMPACT conference began on September 8th, in in Niagara Falls, New York.

It’ll fry pace makers, destroy iPhones, and turn laptops into useless paperweights. It’s the scariest thing most people outside the Washington Beltway have never heard of: electromagnetic pulse weapons.

s*i*g*h

Okay, look, I know I'm a geek, but I guarentee you, Ms Wired, that non-Beltway Bandits and even non Science Fiction fen are familiar with the concept, as witness the Wikipedia artcile linked to in the quote:

An electromagnetic bomb or E-bomb is a weapon designed to disable electronics with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that can couple with electrical/electronic systems to produce damaging current and voltage surges by electromagnetic induction. The effects are usually not noticeable beyond 10 km of the blast radius unless the device is nuclear or specifically designed to produce an electromagnetic pulse. Small nuclear weapons detonated at high altitudes can produce a strong enough signal to disrupt or damage electronics many miles from the focus of the explosion. During a nuclear EMP, the magnetic flux lines of the Earth alter the dispersion of energy so that it radiates very little to the North, but spreads out East, West, and South of the blast. The signal is divided into several time components, and can result in thousands of volts per meter of electromagnetic energy ranging from extreme negative to extreme positive polarities. This energy can travel long distances on power lines and through the air.

Electromagnetic bombs have been featured in a number of novels, movies, video games and television shows.

Well, okay, so it's geek fair. Newt Gingrich is going to be there, and Mike Hiuckabee is givcing the keynote speech, fer Pete's sake!

Anyway. I'm still trying to figure out how similar a Coronal Mass Ejection like I talked about in my previous post (here) is to an Electromagnetic Pulse. Sure sound similarly devasting...