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Why the hell would important computers which control the power grid be accessable from the internet in any way.

I was working with the USDA Forest Circus when they decided to switch Lotus Notes/Domino as their email system nationally. Notes may be a DB product, but it is certainly marketed as a mail product.

Although I agree that anyone switching to this product strictly for it's mail functions (as they did) is phucked, I have to contest your statement that "there's nothing particularly wrong with Notes/Domino". In spite of the fact that it offers lots of groovy calendaring functions, it's an email client that the users cannot import their personal address books to. Even after I'd converted several outlook and applixware (shudder) address books to tab delimited flat files, the IBM-employee Lotus gurus we'd brought in to facilitate the switchover insisted it couldn't be done.

Did IBM just assume that no one who had used another email client would ever switch to notes? Actually, that may be a fair assessment.

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A bit of background. I work in the Electric Utility industry, so take my comments knowing that bias and that I might have a clue about this stuff. In any event, my comments are my own. My employer doesn't even know I read Slashdot.

• But the construction of new power-generating plants and transmission lines to meet that demand has virtually ground to a standstill in the same period as companies wait to understand the effects of deregulation of the electric utility industry.

Not surprising, actually. However, the reasons for the delays are different for power plants than transmission lines. Power plants are being built these days, as companies react to the incredibly high prices of two summers ago. The market price for energy spiked at about $7-10k/MWh in summer of 1998, in part due to sellers defaulting on energy sales. Transmission lines are very hard to get built, in large part due to the "Not in my back yard" syndrome mentioned by another poster.

• The imbalance threatens to grow even larger in coming months amid projections that electricity demand will grow 17 percent by 2007 as transmission capacity rises only 4 percent.

This is the real problem. There has been and continues to be very little incentive to build new transmission lines. Remember that in nearly all states (perhaps all, I am only aware of the states where we do business) the Transmission system is not being deregulated. As a result, the owners of transmission systems will only be compensated for their investment via the regulatory process.

Finally, I have to comment on this:

• Byron noted that utilities can promise only 99.9 percent reliability--a figure that translates to about eight hours of blackouts a year--while high-tech firms stand to lose millions of dollars from a blackout lasting just a minute.

  "We need 99.9999 percent reliability for e-commerce, and we need more flexibility from regulation to achieve that," he said.

Some (hopefully) useful links:

NERC NERC was formed following the 1966 Northeast US blackout.

Public Utility Home Page

The misc.industry.utilities.electric newsgroup homepage.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Milalwi

(First time poster, long time reader.)

The Federal Government should pay the damages to the citizens. Believe it or not, this is not yet something they've agreed to do.

Then, because federal government money is yours and mine, everyone in the administration should be fired, and the entire department should be dismantled and rebuilt with congressional oversight. It should be tightly supervised for the next decade or so.

None of this will happen, and the people who've lost their houses will be told 'tough shit'. They will be lucky to get the cost of their homes back. Insurance companies will be left holding the bag. They will be forced to raise rates, and the people who should have paid for this disaster in the first place will end up paying for it anyway, while the Government gets off scot-free.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong.

Well, Johan should certainly be talking to the people at APACS, the UK payments system and to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who run Fedwire. They have had cause to think about this thing for a while.

I'll add that, for fairly obvious reasons, there is no technical security information on either of those websites, but I would guess that Jane's would be able to get an in to the people who know.

jsm