1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".
2. And the current administration is the strongest proponent of lifting those restrictions on gun control.
3. The counter-party is blocking the appointment of new judges to replace retiring officials. Sounds like being against speedy trials to me.
4. Thank you Clinton for using executive orders to confiscate land and turn it into federal parks.
You're right, we need to clean out half of congress... but we will argue about which half needs to go.
For the last national election, 2002 Voting Age Population Study using public data (derived from Census data, but not done by the US census dept)
2000 US census is 281 million people, Voting-Elligible population estimate of 195 million, puts it at ~ 70%. From total votes, the turnout was 56% of VEP (in a highly contested election with highest turnout in recent years), so the vote represented 39% of the US population.
Which is about right, when you think of it, records show only 40% of the US population supported independence from britain in 1776 (10% against and 50% neutral). But that's how it is in republics; freedom to vote also means freedom to withold your vote... would you rather be fined for not voting like you can in europe?
Let's see if we can get an example for ya. Imagine you had a computer and a working printer, connected by a cable. It's one of these closed source jobs, where you don't know the communications protocol, just that it works. Now, have an accident, and chop the cable in half. Looking at the ends, you find that the designer went the easy route and none of the cables are colored (more efficient when you dont need that production stage, after all).
Now, imagine you have 5,000 "wires" running in parallel, and you're getting close to the spinal cord bundles estimate of the minimum associated with useful locomotion. Except these aren't wires, they're more like optical connections, where once severed the "ends" begin to "scar" making future reconnection more difficult.
The two systems you describe are fundamentally different from the design of this alarming system. In fire or safety, the "reading" is the voltage of the closed loop wire itself; 12 volts connected, 0 volts open.
Now imagine if you have a layer in between; you want to monitor the fire status of a complex of warehouses from a single room several miles away. Analog/Digial the signals to all of the individual buildings, transport the data to a common computer, and view the data there. Figure you have several hundred buildings you're watching at once, and now you're getting closer in scale to how the grid dispatchers get their data.
Now imagine that the computer's software back at the main station reads all these meters, and if a line's open (say you're tracking window openings for security), it writes an alarm to a text log on the screen; on a good day, you don't get any alarms. Now suppose the driver that writes the alarms to the screen hangs; since you werent expecting any alarms, you're not that concerned that you aren't seeing anything. That's pretty much what caught FirstEnergy for those 3 hours that afternoon, while the system was failing and they didn't realize they needed to act.
I disagree, government is never the answer if you want something truely fixed. There are plenty of rules in place on how to maintain a reliable system, rules formed by the industry itself as "best practice" procedures; not to mention that there's already an alliance called NERC for US & Canada who's supposed to be managing it. A similar government commission FERC exists for setting USA policy only. Thirdly, there's another coallition called NAESB who sets the common standards for energy markets.
What doesn't exist is legally binding penalties on those who don't follow the "best practices" on how to run a control area. (Why can't we sue our utility company like we could any other private industry? Government.) Most of FirstEnergy's failures documented in the final report were not because there weren't any rules in place, it's that they weren't obeying the procedures already laid out; procedures that would have notified neighbors they were having issues, giving them time to rebalance the energy flows. This is a change that's been in the big "energy bill" for the last 4 years as the Senate sits and refuses to act on it, as the Democrats won't have anything to do with Republican proposed bills. The politicians have been arguing about Standard Market Design for 3 years, no progress. Private industry realized it needed common market rules for better efficiency and cost savings, so it's been implementing it themselves. If you leave things to the government, they argue and argue and nothing gets done.
The recent proposals, including the IEEE paper you link to, want to mandate additional collection equipment on every utility company in North America, so that one (government, of course) agency can collect all the data and have the big picture view. Well, in the next two years thanks to private industry advances brought on by deregulation, we may be down from hundreds to maybe 10 private institutions called Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that will have the same big picture of vast swaths of the USA, with no government involvement whatsoever. That's the path I'd rather see.
Oddly enough, while writing a comment to another user's message, I threw some info in google to learn about FirstEnergy's EMS system, and found this other SecurityFocus story in Feburary 2004, which gives more raw facts than this newer story.
"DiNicola said Thursday that the company, working with GE and energy consultants from Kema Inc., had pinned the trouble on a software glitch by late October and completed its fix by Nov. 19..."
"With the software not functioning properly at that point, data that should have been deleted were instead retained, slowing performance, he said. Similar troubles affected the backup systems. " This dovetails well with why the testers had to "slow" their testing to make the race condition appear.
SCADA systems transport data samples. My company's system collects from several hundred thousands of meters, about half of which are expected to send in a sample about once every 10 seconds, some as fast as once every two seconds. The concept is that you have a communications buffer that collects the data, the link writes to the memory while the other EMS applications (about a dozen) read from the memory.
Now admittedly, FirstEnergy's system is a little smaller in territory, but I wonder if their mergers over the recent years (Cleveland Electric and Ohio Edison became FE, and then proceeded to take Toledo Edison and GPU of PA) have outpaced the collection capabilities of their mainframe (which was already at the end of its life and was scheduled to be replaced). That could account for some of the "slowing" that the G.E. testers said they had to do to make the race condition appear.
From the perspective of New York, they saw a surge race through their system East to West, through the choke point into Canada at Niagra station. NY constantly has problems with IMO not following schedules, and from their perspective, this was yet another incident of bad reliability control across the border.
What they didnt know is that the energy was routed through the southern bit of Canada along the lake area, back into the USA in Michigan, to feed all of the communities along the southern shores of the great lakes. The reason this happened is that the coastal towns became electrically isolated from southern ohio because of failures in FirstEnergy territory. I don't think to this day FE has accepted full responsibility for their roles in the failures, something I think should be done with a good house-clearing in their company...
"The Cyber Analysis sub-team was led by the CERT(R) Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). This team was focused on analyzing and reviewing electronic media of computer networks in which online communications take place. The sub-team examined these networks to determine if they were maliciously used to cause, or contribute to the August 14, 2003, outage. Specifically, the SWG reviewed materials created on behalf of DHS's National Communication System (NCS). These materials covered the analysis and conclusions of their Internet Protocol (IP) modeling correlation study of Blaster (a malicious Internet worm first noticed on August 11, 2003) and the power outage. This NCS analysis supports the SWG's finding that viruses and worms prevalent across the Internet at the time of the outage did not have any significant impact on power generation and delivery systems. The team also conducted interviews with vendors to identify known system flaws and vulnerabilities."
I can't get too specific, but basically the problems were related to bad code in their EMS (Electricity Management System); they were scheduled for an upgrade and were trying to squeeze one more summer of operations out of it. Bad sensor readings threw bad data into their primary servers, and when they flipped to the backup, the same bad input dropped it too. While they were rebooting, more events were queueing up, which only added to the confusion that the dispatchers were looking at old data thinking it was new. This made the F.E. guys disregard AEP's early detection of the line trips. Let's just say it didn't get better from there.
Environmental Issues are not self-regulated; "fortunately" (tongue-in-cheek) we have the government to police it for us. Bulk power generators are very regulated on emissions, even to the point that generators will take outages for "opacity" indicating they have reached their "pollution credit" limit and can't generate electricity anymore.
Market Monitoring, however, is self-regulating, and so far has proven to be a critical source of improvement. They are tasked with finding market power issues, and defusing them so noone has unfair advantages over any other players. For the east coast players, PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE... California ISO used to have one, until they dismantled their market, not sure what happened to it. S.E.Trans (~4 states in SouthEast) agreements fell apart. ERCOT (Texas) is pretty well along (I seem to recall a market overhaul brought on by recommendations on local pricing), and MISO was going to start a market, but after the blackout decided to delay theirs... and the rest of the country is barely ready to de-regulate.
I fear more about the regulated utilities, because they operate in a closed fashion, socializing the cost of their problems over all their customers, and preventing outside entities from building improvements in their systems...
Noo... if you're not a member of a country, and you try to enter without papers, then why the hell are they obligated to let you enter?
Nothing is written in the US constitution that says the US has to take you no matter what, in fact, Article I Section 8 is very vague on what the government does period. The Naturalization Act of 1795 says to only legalize citizens who have "... behaved as a man of good moral character, attached to the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the same..."
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cover letting in people who want to fly planes into buildings packed with other citizens... So I'm more than happy to let the government keep those kinds of people out.
In 2003, a report was generated for 1998 data, where I found a quick stat of 96.2% of households has at least one phone, 36.3% has at least once cell phone (of 102,652,000 households). US Population in 1998 was est at 269,094,000.
Your ASF video feed runs anywhere from 8 to 30 frames per second (lets assume 30 fps, broadcast standard). Mach 7 is 2.382 km/s, and Mach 10 is 3.403 km/s (lets assume it's a marginally successful test at Mach 7). A little algebra and you've got 71.46 km per frame, or 44.4 miles per frame.
Where am I going with this? 44 miles per frame is a pretty good clip. It really makes me wonder (when you watch the clip) that any person could recognize enough land marks over the flight path for the images to have any impact, especially given how compressed the images would be. I just found that in the clear air of the midwest USA, the average visibility is 140 miles. So, in 3 frames (1/10 of a second), you've covered the farthest landscape a person would normally be familiar with.
Suppose you want a 2nd live feed... How are you going to transmit the data out of the plane? I'm pretty sure that nothing ground based can do it, so you need a satellite or something to receive the broadcast, but then you have to worry about targeting. With that much trouble, you might as well keep the recorded data on board and download it after the flight. In which case, you'd still only need one feed on the website.
The whole point of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light within all reference frames is that all events in absolute spacetime occur at the same rate of passage of time; it is the observation that is time shifted proportional to the acceleration frame of the observer. What you describe as a "speed of events" is the relative passage of time for an accellerate observer with respect to absolute spacetime.
Also, to be pedantic, what you describe is a "null" set, not "zero".:)
The whole point is that your one trillion dollars figure is wrong. There's no use trying to justify it.
"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up"...
Start with Bush Sr's initial project proposal for $400 to $500 billion. Adjust for today's inflation (x1.6) = $640 to $800. Then the reporter adjusted it to $1 trillion for no reason at all. When confronted, his reponse was "Oh well". The initial project proposal was for a combined moon base + mars base project, over a life cycle of 30 years. And it was based on a different deployment method; replace the original proposal rockets with modern Delta 2s at 1/4th the cost. So, you have one reporter fabricating a number, and dozens of major "news" sources reproduced the faulty figures.
Yes, our society will discover great things in the process of developing our extraterrestrial bases... I for one am looking forward to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree.
1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".
2. And the current administration is the strongest proponent of lifting those restrictions on gun control.
3. The counter-party is blocking the appointment of new judges to replace retiring officials. Sounds like being against speedy trials to me.
4. Thank you Clinton for using executive orders to confiscate land and turn it into federal parks.
You're right, we need to clean out half of congress... but we will argue about which half needs to go.
In fact, it is the routers and/or software which doesn't implement the stack according to spec...
So you're saying Windows might be safe from this bug after all?
For the last national election, 2002 Voting Age Population Study using public data (derived from Census data, but not done by the US census dept)
2000 US census is 281 million people, Voting-Elligible population estimate of 195 million, puts it at ~ 70%. From total votes, the turnout was 56% of VEP (in a highly contested election with highest turnout in recent years), so the vote represented 39% of the US population.
Which is about right, when you think of it, records show only 40% of the US population supported independence from britain in 1776 (10% against and 50% neutral). But that's how it is in republics; freedom to vote also means freedom to withold your vote... would you rather be fined for not voting like you can in europe?
Let's see if we can get an example for ya. Imagine you had a computer and a working printer, connected by a cable. It's one of these closed source jobs, where you don't know the communications protocol, just that it works. Now, have an accident, and chop the cable in half. Looking at the ends, you find that the designer went the easy route and none of the cables are colored (more efficient when you dont need that production stage, after all).
Now, imagine you have 5,000 "wires" running in parallel, and you're getting close to the spinal cord bundles estimate of the minimum associated with useful locomotion. Except these aren't wires, they're more like optical connections, where once severed the "ends" begin to "scar" making future reconnection more difficult.
I think it's called "telnet"...
The two systems you describe are fundamentally different from the design of this alarming system. In fire or safety, the "reading" is the voltage of the closed loop wire itself; 12 volts connected, 0 volts open.
Now imagine if you have a layer in between; you want to monitor the fire status of a complex of warehouses from a single room several miles away. Analog/Digial the signals to all of the individual buildings, transport the data to a common computer, and view the data there. Figure you have several hundred buildings you're watching at once, and now you're getting closer in scale to how the grid dispatchers get their data.
Now imagine that the computer's software back at the main station reads all these meters, and if a line's open (say you're tracking window openings for security), it writes an alarm to a text log on the screen; on a good day, you don't get any alarms. Now suppose the driver that writes the alarms to the screen hangs; since you werent expecting any alarms, you're not that concerned that you aren't seeing anything. That's pretty much what caught FirstEnergy for those 3 hours that afternoon, while the system was failing and they didn't realize they needed to act.
I disagree, government is never the answer if you want something truely fixed. There are plenty of rules in place on how to maintain a reliable system, rules formed by the industry itself as "best practice" procedures; not to mention that there's already an alliance called NERC for US & Canada who's supposed to be managing it. A similar government commission FERC exists for setting USA policy only. Thirdly, there's another coallition called NAESB who sets the common standards for energy markets.
What doesn't exist is legally binding penalties on those who don't follow the "best practices" on how to run a control area. (Why can't we sue our utility company like we could any other private industry? Government.) Most of FirstEnergy's failures documented in the final report were not because there weren't any rules in place, it's that they weren't obeying the procedures already laid out; procedures that would have notified neighbors they were having issues, giving them time to rebalance the energy flows. This is a change that's been in the big "energy bill" for the last 4 years as the Senate sits and refuses to act on it, as the Democrats won't have anything to do with Republican proposed bills. The politicians have been arguing about Standard Market Design for 3 years, no progress. Private industry realized it needed common market rules for better efficiency and cost savings, so it's been implementing it themselves. If you leave things to the government, they argue and argue and nothing gets done.
The recent proposals, including the IEEE paper you link to, want to mandate additional collection equipment on every utility company in North America, so that one (government, of course) agency can collect all the data and have the big picture view. Well, in the next two years thanks to private industry advances brought on by deregulation, we may be down from hundreds to maybe 10 private institutions called Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that will have the same big picture of vast swaths of the USA, with no government involvement whatsoever. That's the path I'd rather see.
Oddly enough, while writing a comment to another user's message, I threw some info in google to learn about FirstEnergy's EMS system, and found this other SecurityFocus story in Feburary 2004, which gives more raw facts than this newer story.
"DiNicola said Thursday that the company, working with GE and energy consultants from Kema Inc., had pinned the trouble on a software glitch by late October and completed its fix by Nov. 19..."
"With the software not functioning properly at that point, data that should have been deleted were instead retained, slowing performance, he said. Similar troubles affected the backup systems. " This dovetails well with why the testers had to "slow" their testing to make the race condition appear.
SCADA systems transport data samples. My company's system collects from several hundred thousands of meters, about half of which are expected to send in a sample about once every 10 seconds, some as fast as once every two seconds. The concept is that you have a communications buffer that collects the data, the link writes to the memory while the other EMS applications (about a dozen) read from the memory.
Now admittedly, FirstEnergy's system is a little smaller in territory, but I wonder if their mergers over the recent years (Cleveland Electric and Ohio Edison became FE, and then proceeded to take Toledo Edison and GPU of PA) have outpaced the collection capabilities of their mainframe (which was already at the end of its life and was scheduled to be replaced). That could account for some of the "slowing" that the G.E. testers said they had to do to make the race condition appear.
From the perspective of New York, they saw a surge race through their system East to West, through the choke point into Canada at Niagra station. NY constantly has problems with IMO not following schedules, and from their perspective, this was yet another incident of bad reliability control across the border.
What they didnt know is that the energy was routed through the southern bit of Canada along the lake area, back into the USA in Michigan, to feed all of the communities along the southern shores of the great lakes. The reason this happened is that the coastal towns became electrically isolated from southern ohio because of failures in FirstEnergy territory. I don't think to this day FE has accepted full responsibility for their roles in the failures, something I think should be done with a good house-clearing in their company...
Page 133:
"The Cyber Analysis sub-team was led by the CERT(R) Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). This team was focused on analyzing and reviewing electronic media of computer networks in which online communications take place. The sub-team examined these networks to determine if they were maliciously used to cause, or contribute to the August 14, 2003, outage. Specifically, the SWG reviewed materials created on behalf of DHS's National Communication System (NCS). These materials covered the analysis and conclusions of their Internet Protocol (IP) modeling correlation study of Blaster (a malicious Internet worm first noticed on August 11, 2003) and the power outage. This NCS analysis supports the SWG's finding that viruses and worms prevalent across the Internet at the time of the outage did not have any significant impact on power generation and delivery systems. The team also conducted interviews with vendors to identify known system flaws and vulnerabilities."
I can't get too specific, but basically the problems were related to bad code in their EMS (Electricity Management System); they were scheduled for an upgrade and were trying to squeeze one more summer of operations out of it. Bad sensor readings threw bad data into their primary servers, and when they flipped to the backup, the same bad input dropped it too. While they were rebooting, more events were queueing up, which only added to the confusion that the dispatchers were looking at old data thinking it was new. This made the F.E. guys disregard AEP's early detection of the line trips. Let's just say it didn't get better from there.
Your fears are born of ignorance; have no worry.
Environmental Issues are not self-regulated; "fortunately" (tongue-in-cheek) we have the government to police it for us. Bulk power generators are very regulated on emissions, even to the point that generators will take outages for "opacity" indicating they have reached their "pollution credit" limit and can't generate electricity anymore.
Market Monitoring, however, is self-regulating, and so far has proven to be a critical source of improvement. They are tasked with finding market power issues, and defusing them so noone has unfair advantages over any other players. For the east coast players, PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE... California ISO used to have one, until they dismantled their market, not sure what happened to it. S.E.Trans (~4 states in SouthEast) agreements fell apart. ERCOT (Texas) is pretty well along (I seem to recall a market overhaul brought on by recommendations on local pricing), and MISO was going to start a market, but after the blackout decided to delay theirs... and the rest of the country is barely ready to de-regulate.
I fear more about the regulated utilities, because they operate in a closed fashion, socializing the cost of their problems over all their customers, and preventing outside entities from building improvements in their systems...
Repeat after me, We are all free thinkers...
We are all free thinkers...
Unless he was counting Dargo as the hunk. But then, I'm not into tentacle pr0n.
Noo... if you're not a member of a country, and you try to enter without papers, then why the hell are they obligated to let you enter?
Nothing is written in the US constitution that says the US has to take you no matter what, in fact, Article I Section 8 is very vague on what the government does period. The Naturalization Act of 1795 says to only legalize citizens who have "... behaved as a man of good moral character, attached to the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the same..."
I'm pretty sure that doesn't cover letting in people who want to fly planes into buildings packed with other citizens... So I'm more than happy to let the government keep those kinds of people out.
... and a pony?
In 2003, a report was generated for 1998 data, where I found a quick stat of 96.2% of households has at least one phone, 36.3% has at least once cell phone (of 102,652,000 households). US Population in 1998 was est at 269,094,000.
Ah, we may not be able to locate the exact position of the trophy, but we can now determine the probability of its position and velocity!
fudge. :)
2.38203 kmps / 30 fps, not 2.38203 kmps / (1/30 fps)
Your ASF video feed runs anywhere from 8 to 30 frames per second (lets assume 30 fps, broadcast standard). Mach 7 is 2.382 km/s, and Mach 10 is 3.403 km/s (lets assume it's a marginally successful test at Mach 7). A little algebra and you've got 71.46 km per frame, or 44.4 miles per frame.
Where am I going with this? 44 miles per frame is a pretty good clip. It really makes me wonder (when you watch the clip) that any person could recognize enough land marks over the flight path for the images to have any impact, especially given how compressed the images would be. I just found that in the clear air of the midwest USA, the average visibility is 140 miles. So, in 3 frames (1/10 of a second), you've covered the farthest landscape a person would normally be familiar with.
Suppose you want a 2nd live feed... How are you going to transmit the data out of the plane? I'm pretty sure that nothing ground based can do it, so you need a satellite or something to receive the broadcast, but then you have to worry about targeting. With that much trouble, you might as well keep the recorded data on board and download it after the flight. In which case, you'd still only need one feed on the website.
The answer is 42.
The whole point of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light within all reference frames is that all events in absolute spacetime occur at the same rate of passage of time; it is the observation that is time shifted proportional to the acceleration frame of the observer. What you describe as a "speed of events" is the relative passage of time for an accellerate observer with respect to absolute spacetime.
:)
Also, to be pedantic, what you describe is a "null" set, not "zero".
Yes. For instance, the discussion of the relativity of spacetime involves Itchy and Scratchy dueling on a moving train.
The whole point is that your one trillion dollars figure is wrong. There's no use trying to justify it.
"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up"...
Start with Bush Sr's initial project proposal for $400 to $500 billion. Adjust for today's inflation (x1.6) = $640 to $800. Then the reporter adjusted it to $1 trillion for no reason at all. When confronted, his reponse was "Oh well". The initial project proposal was for a combined moon base + mars base project, over a life cycle of 30 years. And it was based on a different deployment method; replace the original proposal rockets with modern Delta 2s at 1/4th the cost. So, you have one reporter fabricating a number, and dozens of major "news" sources reproduced the faulty figures.
Yes, our society will discover great things in the process of developing our extraterrestrial bases... I for one am looking forward to it.
Brain powered exoskeleton legs...
:)
I can think of nothing more pertinent to "balance" than the act of walking.