Adios said:
Logan01 said:
driving through a thunderstorm last night, I had a terrifying thought. With all the computer systems in the Prius, does anyone have a clue what would happen if struck by lightning?
I think it'd just crap out, like most others on the road.
Among computers (desktop, server, mainframe and the like) lightning is the great equalizer, and equal-opportunity oppressor.
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well, a few years ago my apartment building was hit by lightning. At the time I lived on the ground floor of the 3 floor building. The lightning went through the fire alarm system, found the buzzer/alarm in my apartment, and arced over to my husband's computer. He and I were both using our computers, and simultaneously the display on our monitors shrunk to a white pinpoint on a black screen... (The alarm going off simultaneously with the loud thunder and the blue arc was frightening...) Turns out that all 3 of our networked computers were dead... (Yes, all computer equipment and phone line was on a UPS, but that doesn't prevent a direct strike!) After some worried debugging, we found that all of the computers would work if we removed their network cards (which had some fried chips and resistors on them), as apparently the strike traveled through our home network, and found a path to ground through our ungrounded (2-prong) switch. I'm happy that it hit the computer, and not my husband next to it...
In comparison, I know at least one other person who's computer got hit with a lightning strike through the phone line, and that computer didn't make it...
Like with people, it depends on where it hits. Some people may have a heart attack or not survive the internal burns, while others may just have a broken eardrum and survive to be hit by lightning yet another day. (There are people who have been hit more than once... Gosh, I must watch too much of The Weather Channel's "Storm Stories"...)
