Slashdot Mirror
British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs
judgecorp writes "Britain's Channel 4 screened Blackout, a drama about a cyber-attack which crashes the national power grid. The show was silly enough, with a strong message about the dangers of lighting candles in such a situation, but the Twitter responses were even better. The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."
don't put power grids on the open internet. DUH.
In the eighties the BBC had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads. It's on youtube, you won't enjoy it.
Thank God for morons. I needed a laugh!
The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid.
A friend of mine was getting ready to get in his car one day and noticed the neighbor woman was having an issue with her car. He stopped over and asked what was wrong and she said it wasn't doing anything when she turned the key. He tried and noticed she didn't have any dash lights or anything and explained that it may have been a dead battery. She said to him "I thought cars ran on gasoline?"
Of course they're humorless. They would much rather have humour.
You need to adjust the time scale a bit - the drama showed the near-collapse of civilisation taking a matter of days.
And here come spoilers:
- One of the things I liked was the show of futility at the end. One of the characters, desperate for food and water for his child, resorts to looting a shop. He films and inventories everything, intending to repay once the crisis is over. Instead he finds another survivor huddling inside, one even more desperate and terrified than he is, who immediately goes into a confused panic and beats him to death - not because this unexpected lurker is trying to steal food himself, but because he is startled, paranoid and on a hair-trigger after the few days of hell he has just endured. The final shot of the scene is of the attacker's face as he realizes what he just did.
- The survival enthusiast, a prepper who treats the whole event with glee that his precautions were proven worthwhile, starts out by stockpiling water and checking food reserves - confident that he is ready. The drama here comes not from the survival efforts he takes, but how his family handle them. He's been irritating them for years with his 'freakish' behavior of keeping stockpiles, asking to move to the country and insisting on teaching them how to purify dirty water, and now he has a chance to shine. But far from becoming the hero he envisioned, his wife craves normalcy so much she can't stand his infuriating cheerfulness and efforts to help. She rejects all of his advice out of hand, tearing the family apart as all rationality is lost - even accusing him of poisoning their daughter with his home-sterilized water, and just shouting over him he explains he hasn't even opened that bottle yet. That's a family fight done well: There are two sides to the argument, and each one is incapable of even understanding why the other is upset.
This isn't a drama about the power cut. That's just a device. This is a drama about urban populations in crisis conditions, and it would be valid no matter what the crisis is - power cut, flooding, riots, collapse of government, even prolonged heavy snow. It's a story of human nature as sociary crumbles: Desperate, often irrational, the facade of morality gradually giving way to the simple instinctive need to protect one's self and one's family no matter the cost to others.
Think about how dumb the average person is. Then realize that half the population is dumber than that.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Al right, joke's on us. I just read the /. submission title again:
"British TV Show 'Blackout' Triggers Online LOLs"
STOP THE PRESSES! SOME SHOW TRIGGERS LOLS!! I can see timothy scrambling like a madman to get this thread out of the submission queue and onto the front page. This in the running for the most ridiculous title I've ever seen here, even worse then the gloriously daft "OMG PONIES LOL!!!"
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
If the grid goes down the whole network goes down with it. Towers, exchanges, switches, relays, the lot.
Your phone would become a tiny tablet without any connection to anything. Not entirely useless, but not much use. Then the battery would go.
Even though it's much less satisfying, try feeding them into the chipper shredder head first.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There's an American show called Blackout from 2012 where they take people extremely likely to freak out, put them in a pitch black room, and have them touch random things or find things or whatever. It has fake (and real) spiders and dogs and people and slime and is generally completely hilarious. It's all a game show so naturally it's timed and the fastest person wins.
In the week that we lost power following the Alabama Tornado outbreak there were people driving around offering their food to strangers. The only acts of desparation were driving long distances to unaffected areas to purchase ice or generators. I'd say it would take a bit longer than a week for society to collapse in places that aren't already impoverished.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
To.
To who?
No, "To whom".
Anyone read Hyundai's tweet? That's not far off, Hyundai. Last time the power was out for 3 days here due to a tornado, we hooked an 800W inverter up to our Chevy S10 and idled it like a generator for at least 20 hours to power our retail computers. Really, it can be any brand car though, lol. Generator = $a lot High wattage inverter = $100-ish USD + car you already have Also, 16 gallon gas tank in the car. What's up now, generator sellers? Lol.
The cellular and phone networks in the US actually have batteries and generators to power them so people can use them when power is out to report those outages. For the POTS network I think the backup is federally mandated, not sure on the cell network.
The cellular backups only last for a day or two, at most. In the northeast we lost power from hurricane Sandy last year for a few days, and the cellular networks didn't last all that long. Fortunately, they're also high on the priority list for restoring power, so they were some of the first things to come back.
I think it was inspired a lot by the London riots - a few days of fights and looting with no really apparent cause. What started as a minor police incident somehow lead to three days of chaos in the streets. It scared a lot of people simply for being so inexplicable and unexpected.
-1 we already have a way to deal with this sort of thing
if some of us lazy asses would mod the submission queue, maybe crap like this could be avoided.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I also think it'd likely take more than a week. But you also have to remember that the tornados while devastating were rather tightly localized. If your entire country or the world is affected you'd likely see a much worse outcome. There wouldn't be any influx of aid workers and supplies from unaffected areas.
How does that work then, given that analogue (sic for the UK) ETACS phones were withdrawn in the UK on 31st May 2001?
Or are you talking about some kind of walkie-talkie thing?
Or are you just trolling?