What if, instead, you stored the hydrogens on chains of carbons? I bet you could come up with some that would be energetic, yet relatively inert (comparatively speaking) at normal temperatures and pressures. I think liquid phase would be best.
This seems to be in jest but I actually agree. The use of elemental hydrogen is a sharp boom and shock wave waiting to happen. Even solid state pellet storage states make me wonder whether sudden ignition would be a calamity one could run away from.
(Despite Hollywood effects) liquid hydrocarbons give more of whoosh than a building-flattening kablam. So long as you're not drenched in them it tends to be survivable.
But burning releases those little carbons. Personally I'm not put off by that because we could use LFTR energy to harvest carbon from CO2 from atmosphere directly to bond with those hydrogens, as they are released we'd at least achieve carbon parity. But it would be a really slow process. If CO2 neutrality is a goal it might be better to take carbons from matter to make our fuel as we always have, and build separate (but even more massive) CO2 atmosphere sequestration scrubbers.
Until we have electric trans-atlantic pasenger air transport in six hours, we'll need more than just nukes.
Transport fuel especially air and ocean needs to remain chemical, even nuclear advocates are pretty unanimous on this.
0. LFTR for electricity and process heat ASAP 1. use oil, while it lasts 2. use synfuel made from coal or natural gas, using Fischer-Tropsch and LFTR heat source 3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets
With number 3 we have attained a state of complete, virtually limitless energy with extremely small footprint of Thorium mining, zero CO2 emissions and zero use of agriculture for energy production. Oh, and we can make limitless amounts of ammonia-based fertilizer with hydrogen separated from water and atmospheric nitrogen.
No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
GOOD ONE. But it's already too late. The last of the content disappeared years ago. Everything is being served from Squid proxies. If you don't believe me check the Last-Modified time on this page. See how it is, like, this very minute? That means there is a coverup in progress.
There's just no way to satify you people, is there?
I thought they meant In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All Servers Will be Obtained from Bankrupt Cloud Providers.
So if you hold on to your existing autonomous infrastructure today... in three years you will be able to upgrade your server very cheaply!
If we can convince everyone to hold on to their existing autonomous infrastructure starting right now... we won't even have to wait three years! Those sad little cloud service pound puppies will start hitting the market in months.
In light of this I have decided to hold on to my own autonomous infrastructure for one more day. Now it's your turn.
I'm as green as anyone, but lordy that was some one-sided summary Hugh. Can I at least ask for some other numbers, such as the number of bird kills resulting from pollutants dumped out by the big coal fired plants in Ohio?
Sure but it's not Hugh's job to deliver information jello to your bedside and spoon it into your mouth. It is not enough to have an idea (bird kills other industries information needed) you have to get out of bed and take a biiig streeetch and jump off into the Internet to fetch it yourself. Then you summarize it in a few paragraphs with links to your sources, flavor it with your opinion and drop it here on the table.
Not twist it into an insult of someone else, like you're the kid who yells Mom back into the room because she put too few raisins in the oatmeal.
Now there, you've got a bit of extra information on your chin, let's wipe it off. That's better!
An excellent and inspiring article from a versatile and eloquent organic and computational chemist and it is delightful to see fun mentioned in the annals of the stuffy Nobel-folk. Fun hardly ever survives the peer review process these days.
But. From TA,
An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover -- suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations -- was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country.
Oh yes oh best beloved, Admiral Rickover was the Father of the light water reactor, the Naval taskmaster who imperiled his military career to apply direct agitation to his superiors -- on the idea that a nuclear reactor might some day power great submarines and ships. He slew the Lernaean Hydra that was the military establishment of the day, not the whole thing, just a few heads that got in his way. He seized the reins and cracked the whip, mustered the almost-Hippies of Los Alamos to yoke them as Oxen of Science. In toil, occasional obscenities and hot water... the Light Water Reactor was born! To become the fiery horse with a speed of light, a cloud of dust, the USS Nautilus! Even Walt Disney was impressed.
But Rickover did not invent the thing. In fact, he was also kind of a jerk.
Fast forward to 1973. Two prototypes of Uranium molten salt reactors had been built to prove that fission and breeding could occur in this 'dry' chemical environment that would have amazing inherent safety advantages, especially for widely deployed commercial reactors.
But Weinberg had become obnoxious. His conviction that Light Water Reactors had unresolved safety issues prompted him to remark on the topic publicly, and it created a bit of a stir amongst those who had thought that Atoms for Peace was a unified voice, and we were harnessing the atom in the best possible way.
But privately all he wished to do was complete his work on the Liquid Salt Thorium Breeder and present it. He was sure that the wisdom of this approach would be obvious to all, especially when it had become reality.
In 1973 Admiral Rickover was given his fourth star and was everyone's Nuclear Darling. He had his Nuclear Navy, he had his Liquid Metal Fast Breeder and the ear of President Nixon.
It would have been a most appropriate time to honor the contribution of his former colleague Weinberg, whose diligent work had helped bring him to the pinnacle of his career. You could buy a billion dollars' worth of stuff with a few hundred million in those days, and the Cold War (and its chilly cousin Atoms for Peace) were integral essential of the federal funding machine. Rickover was no idiot and his public speeches centered on the Navy's perfect record and its attention to safety. He was no idiot and was surely aware of the advantages of using molten salts. A single phone call would have been all it took.
But he was a jerk.
Admiral Rickover it was who took the fun out of building nuclear reactors.
Next question?
For the rest of the story, and it is an amazing one, strap yourself down and clamp your eyes open for two hours to endure Tho
[...] Hidalgo state Health Minister Pedro Luis Noble said earlier Friday the men suffered from skin irritations and dizziness, but that none were in serious condition. Only one was vomiting, a sign of radiation poisoning.
[...] "It's quite an operation and it is in the process of being planned," he said. "It's highly radioactive, so you cannot just go over and pick it up. It's going to take a while to pick it up."
With nothing inhaled or ingested and with proper treatment, even the 16-year old is likely to be fine. So long as the free radicals are mopped up, the infection is cured, the gut bacteria brings out its dead and recovers... and (remote possibility) some bone marrow is transplanted, it is completely survivable.
As to the real chances of this fellow developing a long term cancer or anemia, Marie Curie died in 1934 from radiation induced anemia some 15 years after WWI where she stood at the business end of many mobile X-ray units (invented by her). Some 30 years after she and her husband had stared experimenting with the properties of radioactivity, even hosting "radium lawn parties" at home. The life long exposure Madam Curie received was immeasurably immense, and yet to survive to the age of 66... well, it should put things in perspective about the resilience of the human body AND the remote possibility of fatal cancers.
Much of our data is based on the health effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and those who succumbed soon after. While these poor souls' conditions were very well recorded, it is impossible to accurately gauge the total rad-count received as it was a combination of exposure, inhalation and ingestion, their total dose could have been a magnitude higher than was ascribed to their condition, which leads to over-estimation of radioactive danger.
Chernobyl amazed medical science by the number of people who received intense exposures, and survived.
Madam Curie's husband did not succumb to radiation, he was killed when he was run over by a horse drawn cart. So the moral of the story is, don't go nuts worrying about radiation. Watch out for spooked horses.
You are beating up a staw man. I never said there is no acceptable risk or even that low doses of radiation are not acceptable in some situations.
Truly sorry about that. I do skitter about and fly off with my agenda hanging out sometimes.
I do appreciate the quandary faced by diagnosticians and those trying to establish occupational exposure guidelines, these measurements do matter. There was a time when even shoe stores had fluoroscope X-ray machines children would play with after school, emitters were much stronger and few doctors used lead aprons. Some hypothesis -- preferably a provable one -- is necessary. The "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" is a good effective dose of common sense intended to become a policy and legal framework, but what numbers and equations will we plug into it?
It may be that for every hundred workers exposed to some small level of radiation -- aside from the horde that is happy with playing it really safe, there may be some dozen who are actively hoping that allowable 'safe' limits can be raised, with sound supporting reasons, so they do not have to live with the regulatory Sword of Damocles hanging so close above their heads. I would be one of those. Nuclear energy sounds a lot safer than some of the potentially lethal hazards I face daily.
You are right to pose there might be a non-linear risk curve hidden in the noise (of low dose risks). There are proposals to reconcile low-dose adjustments to LNT in such a way that it does not present such a hard 'barrier' when conflating dose with mortality, and (perhaps, me guessing) from a consensus that in a field of exponential or even quadratic relationships, drawing a straight line through anything more complicated than cow-counting is uncomfortable.
As you might guess, finding evidence of hormesis was astounding and is a hot research potato. But an ecological study done by an outspoken Bernard_Cohen is mentioned on the DREF page, emphasis mine:
"Efforts to confirm directly the effects of indoor radon have led to mixed and highly controversial conclusions. One class of studies, termed ecological studies, looks for correlations between the average radon level in a region and the lung cancer fatality rate. In the largest and best known of these studies, covering 1,729 counties in the United States, Bernard Cohen finds the county-by-county lung cancer rates to be inversely correlated with average radon levels. Although many readers have interpreted this study as suggesting hormesis, Cohen limits his conclusions to saying that the results refute the linearity hypothesis. This study covered most of the US population, and therefore the statistical uncertainties are small
For exampe, it is the predominant scientific opinion that radiation is harmful at all levels. While this subject to discussion, your first blog simply claims this is a myth. Therefor it is misrepresenting the state of scientific knowledge and I would personally not trust this source even a little bit.
Lissen up party people! DJ Galileo is in the house!
Do you choose your area of residence upon careful consideration of a map showing natural background radiation sources, which vary significantly? Would you refuse a medical procedure such as an X-ray? Have you ever refused to spend 4 hours in an airplane at 30,000 feet? If any of these are a NO, then whilst in the comfortable state of belief in the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNT) you are living your life on a principle that there is such thing as 'acceptable risk'.
A precautionary principle (in the case of LNT, agreement to apply the model despite hard evidence) can seem like a wise thing to do when faced with unknowns. But when public policy is built on such a hypothesis, or it is bought and sold as 'fact', life can become very dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense of mad science, but mad statistics.
It's just a way to 'hide' the noise of inconclusive studies and leave the scientific job unfinished.
What of 'acceptable benefit'? I would challenge anyone come up with any argument against the widespread adoption and use of nuclear technology that cannot be directly correlated into an argument as against the use of fire itself. Something that does not boil down to, because I like the one thing but not the other. ___
Energy is fire. Fire is life. We can neither afford nor want to be thrown back to the stone age. There is more than one way to do nuclear energy. Please set aside these three hours, Act I -- Our Friend the Atom [1957] Act II -- Thorium Remix [2011]
How about we send Hocus here to help clean it up for 2-3 years, and then see what he has to say. I bet $10 it wont be the same.
Sure, why not? But unfortunately for me, there is no shortage of willing people with my skill level and no call for such help. There is not even any need to move a great many people through the site to perform brief but extremely dangerous tasks such as were faced by the Liquidators of Chernobyl.
"In a shrinking economy you will find more people willing to face the risks and just get it done. There is a real shortage these days of people and methods that just get out there and do things.
Seriously, I would be willing to go there and take a higher than occupationally permitted cumulative dose of radiation to help them cask the fuel and transport it, reduce the plant to rubble and turn this intricate and beautiful industrial complex into an ugly, desolate public park with horrid little shrubs, useless fountains and despicable art. I'd demand a high wage that would deliver enough money for that span to set my life on a much better course.
We have ways to handle and safely transport highly radioactive substances. Those that exist and better ways we would invent. Life without risk is not worth living, and a world without risk-takers is a world bereft of heroes. Would that be a better world?
The real problem is that there is nowhere to ship and store the casks of waste, so the good people of San Diego country cannot obtain the closure they desire at any price."
I am confident that Japan will find a safe place to store the Fukushima fuel, reactor parts and even the most irradiated rubble and topsoil. The press will stir a furor over it but the people in charge will see it is done and done properly.
I envy them that, and for shame. In the United States nuclear energy has been done properly for years, except for one thing -- the one thing that our government promised plant operators it would do, and did not do -- provide a safer place to store spent fuel than the plants themselves.
Will Davis' Atomic Power Review has scaled down its Fukushima coverage as of late, but in the archives you will find some detailed articles with week-by-week coverage.
I am held AGHAST by the biblical-level hysteria that is circulating about Fukushima these days. It is being served up and replicated with the relish of the street-corner preacher with an end-of-world sign. Every die-off of fish is related (ignore the Atlantic), the melting starfish (never mind it's happening worldwide), from mammals to narwhals there is some serious confirmation bias being stirred.
The computer model plume of currents has DEATH arriving at the United States West coast; mere detection of miniscule amounts of Cesium -- which science is capable of to an extraordinary level of precision -- is being fronted as a radioactive death sentence.
There seems to be no deference to expert or even medical opinion on true risk factors; and in the tired vein of disaster porn, any appeals to consider such generates a (predictable) backlash of conspiracy coverup allegations. At times it is literally a no-think zone.
Radioactivity is the new whipping boy of disaster porn.
NO-HYPE Fukushima information:
Fukushima Accident Updates. Leslie Corrice has done an excellent job chronicling the accident from 2011. Following the latest posting thread backwards in time (some 60 pages so far) is a detailed account you will find nowhere else.
Fukushima Accident Commentary Leslie Corrice again, exhibiting a level of journalistic integrity that is fast-fading on today's news and Internet sources, has maintained a separate thread of personal opinion and commentary. It is as fascinating a read as the last, here you will find topics of politics, culture and status and observation of the Fukushima victims' compensation fund and resettlement.
Rod Adams' Atomic Power Review has scaled down its Fukushima coverage as of late, but in the archives you will find some detailed articles with week-by-week coverage.
[...] Now cellular is a totally different game altogether. Cellular companies are subscribers of the phone network, not really a part of it. They run their own infrastructure and don't directly participate in SS7 for routing.
Yup, the POTS Bell System was open with its information sharing (pride of accomplishment) and maps and stats are out there. But for cellular topics there sure are a bunch of Anonymous Cowards in this thread with insightful comments. No doubt because their openness and opinion does not necessarily reflect their employer's.
Now if some AC should happen to post a link to a pastebin hosted map showing CO/HLR CELLULAR facilities for each of the major providers, we'd all be able to get a handle on what state (sorry or satisfied) of disaster preparedness we have achieved, so it could be identified as a 'challenge to solve' and be addressed.
Oh I almost forgot. If you are concerned about the vulnerability of utilities maintained by private companies these days, you are potentially a terrorist threat. How bloomin' convenient for them.
I spent 8 years on the 5ESS DSIG crew installing new COs and working on the SS7 protocol.
Hats off to you! Network is where I most wanted to be years ago when I was at The Phone Company, but at the time I was so good at the Data Processing side (carrier settlement and toll billing) I was stuck there. Like a puppet on a chain.
Note we are not talking about straight launch codes (the envelopes etc.) This was an additional safeguard, a component in the message link (as in un-squelch) layer between SAC and silo.
I learned of this years ago, and since I've tracked the sentiment and reaction to it. How we thoughtfully react to this idea might be crucial to our survival and evolution as a species. Why? It hinges on personal responsibility. Time and again it is portrayed as a farce, a madcap circus-like adventure in the absurd. Or sternly, a waste of money and resource, a breech of protocol, a crime. A mistake. I'm not so sure. This was no mistake. The existence of such robotic barriers in c3i mechanisms breeds a dangerous complacency.
It is my view that the '00000000' PAL code as implemented not only performed well -- it actually added a significant edge to our species' survival impossible to achieve any other way.
Every time a technician would open the little door and inspect the combination at the start of their tour of duty, to ensure it was all zeroes... they'd say "Well this certainty isn't a factor. We'd better be on our toes!" Humans on their toes. The extra little edge. All the assurance we could ever hope to survive. Delivered: I THANK YOU, PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK. No joke.
When judging a system's insecurity by the strength of its passwords, it helps bear in mind such lock-out systems as implemented, may themselves fail or be subverted to achieve an undesirable result. The movie 'Failsafe' illustrates this well.
00000000 kept humans 'in the loop' while making them gravely aware of their personal responsibility to properly authenticate and verify orders.
Please +mod P/GP and THANKS for the delightfully readable go-round on a complex topic. The NSS Wiki Page links to so many tangent issues and general-telecom defs it's hard to get a grip. If only when you follow Wikipedia links a voice would whisper, "You're getting warmer!" "Getting colder."
So I am gathering that should some hypothetical community or city region wish to impose upon cell providers a base requirement that their services as provided are locally autonomous, allowing native subscribers to talk -- the requirement is there must be a mobile switching center (MSC) driving the towers capable of maintaining enough end-to-end connections the area would need, and if the Home Location Register (HLR) is out of area -- at least a quiescent HLR platform with a (selective) mirror database mirror that could go live and be manually loaded as necessary.
Bear in mind the basic 'emergency' capability I'm trying to define involves only homed cells dialing each others' local assigned numbers, no number translation or PTSN interface.
I am diving into this cell issue because I think most folks off the street honestly believe that local cell towers doth a working communications system make. At least within the area where others' MSISDN are similar to theirs. And drawing from the expectations of the Bell era... why wouldn't it?
Clouding the issue is when people treat the mere repairability of a system under optimum conditions as some sort of 'solution' to disaster preparedness, as if it is only measured in time. In a disaster get everything everywhere working again for everybody exactly as it was. Problem solved!
But what if the parts required to get something working again -- at least locally -- turns out to be impossible because there never were enough parts to for a complete system in the first place?
It is my hope that a framework for defining and asserting autonomous operation can be devised so it becomes a matter of standard practice just as for Bell System Practice guidelines. A series of steps towards autonomy that can be reduced to cost/benefit.
AC: It's not 1876 any longer. These days, we have so many alternatives that voice-only communication should be the very, very last resort in all situations. For business transactions of any sort, websites or email are better. For keeping in touch with friends and family, it's obvious that email, social media and family gatherings are better. For quickly getting in touch with somebody, send an SMS.
But can your SMS do this?
I wish... I wish the kitchen faucet wouldn't drip all day! I wish that refrigerator door would close and stay closed! I wish I had a stove whose pilot light was always lit. And furthermore... A kitchen phone at hand when friends call up to chat a bit! [ring] Hello Sue this is Mary how are you, bye? (They say your kitchen dazzles every eye!) A brand new sink, a built-in oven, a new refrigerator and a phone! A kitchen phone! A bright red phone! Gotta go g'bye g'bye g'byeeee..... See ya later!
Many thanks to the ACs who addressed my question on the autonomy of isolated cell towers, to wit:
AC: A cell tower requires more infrastructure to actually complete a call than what is on the tower itself. The brains are located more centrally, like in the nearest CO. If a CO is taken out, it's bad for the area... and the local cell towers. If a CO is NOT taken down, it has all the infrastructure required in order to complete calls for its local area, which is what the OP stated -- even if that CO is segregated from every other one. COs are also more hardened than a tower can be and have more batteries and likely has a local generator. In the northeast blackout (2003), keeping cell towers powered required moving generators around to each tower in order to keep them running for a few more hours.
AC: I would add that the systems running voice, data, and SMS are crazy complicated and can fail in many, many more ways than POTS. I managed the auth systems and data core for a cell service, and it seemed like a damn miracle the thing worked at all.
So we have a cell Central Office layer that is regional and connectivity to it would be necessary for individual towers to complete calls. Let me extend the Q to ask: is there some standard practice that confines geographic placement of COs to a certain radius? How many of these (as opposed to mere towers) would we find on a map, if such a map was available? I presume that if a CO was isolated no one could roam-in because the necessary central inter-carrier auth could not be completed, but what of existing subscribers? Would a CO facility, even if it was restarted from power down, retain enough subscriber data to bring its 'native' users in the local area to the point where that can complete calls to each other?
Sorry about the Wheeler (FCC Chairman) booboo in the summary. Brain fart.
AC: Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Good question, although I Sens an odd bit of d3r1s1ve m0ckery from yous.
Because it was built that way. Your local bell telephone exchange was designed to stand alone and not just provide electricity to operate telephones. From that single building It completes calls between its own subscribers and those in other directly-connected exchanges, even if long haul circuits are down.
But in the digital subscriber age we are starting to see roll-outs of nationwide services that only appear to be local. They demonstrate sudden, surprising, even shocking failure. Router restarts, failures to push software updates, failure to connect to centralized RADIUS servers, failure to complete DSL login and even failure of DNS lookup within the telco's own Internet can cause confusion and backlogs that disrupt IP phone service.
I grant that no mob with torches has ever marched up to the Phone Company and demanded that they pull the plug to prove that the service they provide is resilient to inter-network failure.
In fact, these vulnerabilities extend to the use of local; electrical power. I have known a few people who buy in to these IP-phones supplied by the local cable company who are shocked to discover that it stops functioning soon after their electricity goes out. And it's not just a house thing, a MERE few hours into an ice storm many pole-mounted cable company amplifiers that rely on city power depleted their (may I say, 'dipshit'?) battery packs and whole neighborhoods lost their phones regardless of whether they had emergency power.
Meanwhile the POTS providers who had sunk a larger investment into provisioning their remote buildings, carried enough batteries to keep going for a couple of days.
What we have here is a general attention to infrastructure and disaster preparedness in the interest of rolling out things that work almost as well, most of the time.
In order to make real-world use of this model, the health care industry would have us load catapults with doctors and medicines and fling them into Africa.
They're on the right track but with their health care model they're backing the wrong horse. How and when exactly did that endemic sickness that must be countered, arise?
Let's take a look at the world according to cholera [cases reported to WHO 2007-2009]. Cholera flourishes where masses of people have converged on areas without sufficient infrastructure to support them. They often do this in an attempt to escape rural poverty. It also flourishes along major rivers, such as the Ganges and historically the Thames, again where infrastructure for water filtration and sewage treatment is lacking.
Electricity means clean water and waste processing. Cholera hates electricity.
That is because with electricity comes deeper wells, better filtration, distribution, active media filtration of surface sources and sewage treatment with water effluent ready for discharge into rivers -- along with the basics such as refrigeration for food and medicine. It was infrastructure and not better health care that eliminated the threat of cholera in North America, and other diseases besides.
And by electricity I mean real base load electricity, the power to run distribution and filtration plants and whole villages and cities. A full square meal of energy, not the 'energy happy meal toys' that are too often envisioned by North Americans as gifts to Africans -- a solar panel here or a wind turbine there, to run some tiny apartment fridge in some clinic somewhere, or a single LED light, sometimes. Solutions we could not and would not tolerate for ourselves.
The human race (at our favored levels of population density) has evolved past the point where a natural state of good health can be maintained without access to bulk electricity, which equates to drinkable tap water. This is a greater factor than access to doctors or medicine.
Obama is making the right noises about Africa with his $7 billion pledge to help Africa lift itself out of darkness with new sub-Saharan infrastructure. Remember -- this $7 billion is is NOT your hard-earned taxpayer dollars, which are all going toward repayment of interest on our national debt. This is magical unicorn money that will come from World Investment Funds and Bank perpetual money machine that is backed by International Corporate Banks that bought shitloads of worthless paper that were bailed out by Bushobama with the Fed minting virtual money that saved the banks' balance sheets from ruin, and Treasury Bonds purchased by the Chinese who have said fuck-it and have decided to give Africa their time and especially their money directly, some of which would ultimately come from us as repayment on debt to China with China becoming Africa's direct partner in infrastructure instead. This does not make sense on so many levels.
I think the United States is presently screwed on Energy but not in the conspiracy sense. It is this awful mental condition where we have lost sight of 'big electric' and 'big water' infrastructure as something we are truly vested in, regardless of whether we personally own stock in it.
I think it is why discussants in these forums never seem to discuss topics of coal, nuclear and natural gas production of electricity at any length -- and spend so much more time on the minutia
In the movie Conspiracy Theory (1997) Jetty Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is obsessed with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and does not know why (she swallowed the fly). His apartment is full of unread copies. It turns out that the spooks who monkeyed with his mind planted the suggestion to purchase copies of it because the relative unpopularity of the book made it an excellent way to track his movements electronically.
Today there is discussion on this thread of people who feel compelled to download these torrents, and the possibility of being traced by some shadowy well-connected organization while doing so.
Bring on the evil MK-ULTRA mastermind, Captain Jean Luc Picard.
[Walking through a metal detector] Jerry Fletcher: Why is this thing safe for me and not for my keys?
Jerry Fletcher: July eighth, 1979, all the fathers of Nobel Prize winners were rounded up by United Nations military units, all right, and actually forced at gunpoint to give semen samples in little plastic jars, which are now stored below Rockefeller Center underneath the ice skating rink...
The backbone taps with dark-fiber would have been some fancy, new expensive all 'digital exchange' upgrades back in the early 1980's. Telcos worldwide that had always been tight/happy with regional copper and layers, over priced data serves suddenly did expensive national upgrades to new tech....
Yeah, the early 1980s was an exciting time. Subscriber line cards with chipsets that took over the rudiments of call placement such as accepting digits, maintaining virtual 'four-wire' connections over an address bus. Rollout of the #5ESS digital switch which became the world standard. Our local telephone company was the last (and only I think) wholly owned by ITT so we became guinea pigs for their prototype ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch. The 1210 was a sweet machine that was almost completely event-driven, one platform could handle class 3/4/5: operator positions, trunking and subscribers. Some several hundred tons of crossbar switches were taken out and all of a sudden we had dial tone in 0.5 second. From the Caribbean we could ring a phone in Brooklyn faster than someone could clickety-click crossbar a local call from Manhattan.
But even in the 80s the NSA would be unable to even approach what is possible today. Although switching centers were going digital, the total number of interconnected continental mesh points was still large. This in a time where OC-3/12 were massive circuits, regional telcos were multiply connected, satellite was still handling the much-smaller bulk of calls between coasts, voice and data were separately provisioned and broken out in racks along the way. If you called across the country you always got your whole 64kbits for voice. Your fax machine would always work. Modem BBS calls were reliable and practical. This was guaranteed by Bell Standard Practices. May they Rest In Peace.
In the 1990s it was that the massive packetization of voice began, and telcos began retiring those expensive regional connections in favor of fewer, larger pipes that handled exclusively digital traffic. Cell providers paved the way for gibblefart almost-good enough compression, but even they have retired their cross country terrestrial microwaves for leased fiber. Even today's landline connections are packetized at the source and streamed cell-like. Packets arrive on time most of the time -- but due to regional stresses and voice/internet sharing, not all the time.
Which means that if they place a tap on these massive fiber conduits the NSA gets better voice quality than you do. They can hear a pin drop in Utah. How unfair is that??
I am interested what the crypto staff, mil and govs of other countries where thinking when they handed US/UK crypto to their mil/gov/banks/telcos/industry/legal systems. Did they not have the skills to test, know to look deeper, any understanding of what they where handing in bulk to other countries (UK?US and others)? Yet they seemed to be able to keep the Soviet Union out...
The former Soviet Union was broke. I believe that when all the Cold War memoranda are declassified a final picture will emerge of a Supreme Soviet posturing nervously with a relatively small number of viable missiles, against an American 'evil empire' whose build-out of aggressive capability could only be towards one goal: preemptive strike and invasion. You see, from a strictly Socialist viewpoint they could not commit entirely to the idea that spending money was the only purpose, there had to be some credible threat. Otherwise it could only be that the US was ape-shit crazy. We now know we were the crazy ones because a really aggravated and talkative Moscow cab driver is on record as saying so.
NSA has evolved considerably from those years. Where they had been required to move personnel around the globe to locate themselves where the traffic was... now with technology there are more US desk jobs and via shadow satellite and dark fiber, the traffic is brought home to them.
Slashdot Mirror
What if, instead, you stored the hydrogens on chains of carbons? I bet you could come up with some that would be energetic, yet relatively inert (comparatively speaking) at normal temperatures and pressures. I think liquid phase would be best.
This seems to be in jest but I actually agree. The use of elemental hydrogen is a sharp boom and shock wave waiting to happen. Even solid state pellet storage states make me wonder whether sudden ignition would be a calamity one could run away from.
(Despite Hollywood effects) liquid hydrocarbons give more of whoosh than a building-flattening kablam. So long as you're not drenched in them it tends to be survivable.
But burning releases those little carbons. Personally I'm not put off by that because we could use LFTR energy to harvest carbon from CO2 from atmosphere directly to bond with those hydrogens, as they are released we'd at least achieve carbon parity. But it would be a really slow process. If CO2 neutrality is a goal it might be better to take carbons from matter to make our fuel as we always have, and build separate (but even more massive) CO2 atmosphere sequestration scrubbers.
Until we have electric trans-atlantic pasenger air transport in six hours, we'll need more than just nukes.
Transport fuel especially air and ocean needs to remain chemical, even nuclear advocates are pretty unanimous on this.
0. LFTR for electricity and process heat ASAP
1. use oil, while it lasts
2. use synfuel made from coal or natural gas, using Fischer-Tropsch and LFTR heat source
3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets
With number 3 we have attained a state of complete, virtually limitless energy with extremely small footprint of Thorium mining, zero CO2 emissions and zero use of agriculture for energy production. Oh, and we can make limitless amounts of ammonia-based fertilizer with hydrogen separated from water and atmospheric nitrogen.
(Nothing but win. Think of me as the hyper 'Trix Rabbit' of Thorium)
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk. Sincerely, the kids from the future.
Dear kids,
Extremely small volumes of waste needing safe storage for only ~300 years is probably the best we can do. Shall we do it -- or will you prefer to be sharpening sticks to hunt among the silent rusted remnants of wind turbines?
Sincerely, LFTR
Yeah, I have a passionate side too. And I like to take long walks in the park. And it's not just about 'climate change', it's about survival.
Every little bit helps though.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
No you fool! Forget privacy, there's a bigger danger! If these trends continue, we'll upload the last existing server to the cloud and shut down the server, only to realize that the cloud was on servers! THE INTERNET WILL JUST DISAPPEAR!
GOOD ONE. But it's already too late. The last of the content disappeared years ago. Everything is being served from Squid proxies. If you don't believe me check the Last-Modified time on this page. See how it is, like, this very minute? That means there is a coverup in progress.
There's just no way to satify you people, is there?
I thought they meant In Three Years, Nearly 45% of All Servers Will be Obtained from Bankrupt Cloud Providers.
So if you hold on to your existing autonomous infrastructure today... in three years you will be able to upgrade your server very cheaply!
If we can convince everyone to hold on to their existing autonomous infrastructure starting right now... we won't even have to wait three years! Those sad little cloud service pound puppies will start hitting the market in months.
In light of this I have decided to hold on to my own autonomous infrastructure for one more day. Now it's your turn.
Or an atomic chain reaction
I'm as green as anyone, but lordy that was some one-sided summary Hugh. Can I at least ask for some other numbers, such as the number of bird kills resulting from pollutants dumped out by the big coal fired plants in Ohio?
Sure but it's not Hugh's job to deliver information jello to your bedside and spoon it into your mouth. It is not enough to have an idea (bird kills other industries information needed) you have to get out of bed and take a biiig streeetch and jump off into the Internet to fetch it yourself. Then you summarize it in a few paragraphs with links to your sources, flavor it with your opinion and drop it here on the table.
Not twist it into an insult of someone else, like you're the kid who yells Mom back into the room because she put too few raisins in the oatmeal.
Now there, you've got a bit of extra information on your chin, let's wipe it off. That's better!
An excellent and inspiring article from a versatile and eloquent organic and computational chemist and it is delightful to see fun mentioned in the annals of the stuffy Nobel-folk. Fun hardly ever survives the peer review process these days.
But. From TA,
An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover -- suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations -- was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country.
Oh yes oh best beloved, Admiral Rickover was the Father of the light water reactor, the Naval taskmaster who imperiled his military career to apply direct agitation to his superiors -- on the idea that a nuclear reactor might some day power great submarines and ships. He slew the Lernaean Hydra that was the military establishment of the day, not the whole thing, just a few heads that got in his way. He seized the reins and cracked the whip, mustered the almost-Hippies of Los Alamos to yoke them as Oxen of Science. In toil, occasional obscenities and hot water... the Light Water Reactor was born! To become the fiery horse with a speed of light, a cloud of dust, the USS Nautilus! Even Walt Disney was impressed.
But Rickover did not invent the thing. In fact, he was also kind of a jerk.
On US Patent 2,736,696 you will see four names: Eugene P Wigner, Leo A Ohlinger, Gale J Young, Alvin M Weinberg. Weinberg was rightfully proud of his contribution to help solve the Navy's propulsion problem, but as a protégé of Wigner he had also learned that in the thermal spectrum Thorium was a good performer and with the right chemistry it could breed a self-sustaining fissile reaction. So with several chemists they began work in that direction (nuclear airplane yadda yadda) built what non-chemists called, 'the chemists' reactor'.
Fast forward to 1973. Two prototypes of Uranium molten salt reactors had been built to prove that fission and breeding could occur in this 'dry' chemical environment that would have amazing inherent safety advantages, especially for widely deployed commercial reactors.
But Weinberg had become obnoxious. His conviction that Light Water Reactors had unresolved safety issues prompted him to remark on the topic publicly, and it created a bit of a stir amongst those who had thought that Atoms for Peace was a unified voice, and we were harnessing the atom in the best possible way.
But privately all he wished to do was complete his work on the Liquid Salt Thorium Breeder and present it. He was sure that the wisdom of this approach would be obvious to all, especially when it had become reality.
In 1973 Admiral Rickover was given his fourth star and was everyone's Nuclear Darling. He had his Nuclear Navy, he had his Liquid Metal Fast Breeder and the ear of President Nixon.
It would have been a most appropriate time to honor the contribution of his former colleague Weinberg, whose diligent work had helped bring him to the pinnacle of his career. You could buy a billion dollars' worth of stuff with a few hundred million in those days, and the Cold War (and its chilly cousin Atoms for Peace) were integral essential of the federal funding machine. Rickover was no idiot and his public speeches centered on the Navy's perfect record and its attention to safety. He was no idiot and was surely aware of the advantages of using molten salts. A single phone call would have been all it took.
But he was a jerk.
Admiral Rickover it was who took the fun out of building nuclear reactors.
Next question?
For the rest of the story, and it is an amazing one, strap yourself down and clamp your eyes open for two hours to endure Tho
"Six people tested for possible radiation exposure have been released from hospital but remain under detention as suspects in the theft of a truck carrying highly radioactive cobalt-60, officials said Friday. Of the detained men, ages 16 to 38, only the 16-year-old showed signs of radiation exposure and he was in good health
[...] Hidalgo state Health Minister Pedro Luis Noble said earlier Friday the men suffered from skin irritations and dizziness, but that none were in serious condition. Only one was vomiting, a sign of radiation poisoning.
[...] "It's quite an operation and it is in the process of being planned," he said. "It's highly radioactive, so you cannot just go over and pick it up. It's going to take a while to pick it up."
With nothing inhaled or ingested and with proper treatment, even the 16-year old is likely to be fine. So long as the free radicals are mopped up, the infection is cured, the gut bacteria brings out its dead and recovers... and (remote possibility) some bone marrow is transplanted, it is completely survivable.
As to the real chances of this fellow developing a long term cancer or anemia, Marie Curie died in 1934 from radiation induced anemia some 15 years after WWI where she stood at the business end of many mobile X-ray units (invented by her). Some 30 years after she and her husband had stared experimenting with the properties of radioactivity, even hosting "radium lawn parties" at home. The life long exposure Madam Curie received was immeasurably immense, and yet to survive to the age of 66... well, it should put things in perspective about the resilience of the human body AND the remote possibility of fatal cancers.
Much of our data is based on the health effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and those who succumbed soon after. While these poor souls' conditions were very well recorded, it is impossible to accurately gauge the total rad-count received as it was a combination of exposure, inhalation and ingestion, their total dose could have been a magnitude higher than was ascribed to their condition, which leads to over-estimation of radioactive danger.
Chernobyl amazed medical science by the number of people who received intense exposures, and survived.
Madam Curie's husband did not succumb to radiation, he was killed when he was run over by a horse drawn cart. So the moral of the story is, don't go nuts worrying about radiation. Watch out for spooked horses.
You are beating up a staw man. I never said there is no acceptable risk or even that low doses of radiation are not acceptable in some situations.
Truly sorry about that. I do skitter about and fly off with my agenda hanging out sometimes.
I do appreciate the quandary faced by diagnosticians and those trying to establish occupational exposure guidelines, these measurements do matter. There was a time when even shoe stores had fluoroscope X-ray machines children would play with after school, emitters were much stronger and few doctors used lead aprons. Some hypothesis -- preferably a provable one -- is necessary. The "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" is a good effective dose of common sense intended to become a policy and legal framework, but what numbers and equations will we plug into it?
It may be that for every hundred workers exposed to some small level of radiation -- aside from the horde that is happy with playing it really safe, there may be some dozen who are actively hoping that allowable 'safe' limits can be raised, with sound supporting reasons, so they do not have to live with the regulatory Sword of Damocles hanging so close above their heads. I would be one of those. Nuclear energy sounds a lot safer than some of the potentially lethal hazards I face daily.
You are right to pose there might be a non-linear risk curve hidden in the noise (of low dose risks). There are proposals to reconcile low-dose adjustments to LNT in such a way that it does not present such a hard 'barrier' when conflating dose with mortality, and (perhaps, me guessing) from a consensus that in a field of exponential or even quadratic relationships, drawing a straight line through anything more complicated than cow-counting is uncomfortable.
A Dose Rate Effectiveness Factor (DREF) attempts to half risk per unit dose at low doses or low dose rates (or both) from its point on the linear scale. Arbitrary but probably closer to reality. NASA takes it down to the organ level and calculates a career limit. Add to that cancers that may lie dormant, held in check by the body's own immune responses and you have a lot of 'noise' and extra screening to sift through.
Maurice Tubiana, MD has compiled an excellent 'fact check' on LNT The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data which summarizes many sources (167 ref citations!) to conclude that there is no (small) elephant in the living room. He even covers nine studies that suggest that low does may exhibit Hormesis (a beneficial effect).
As you might guess, finding evidence of hormesis was astounding and is a hot research potato. But an ecological study done by an outspoken Bernard_Cohen is mentioned on the DREF page, emphasis mine:
"Efforts to confirm directly the effects of indoor radon have led to mixed and highly controversial conclusions. One class of studies, termed ecological studies, looks for correlations between the average radon level in a region and the lung cancer fatality rate. In the largest and best known of these studies, covering 1,729 counties in the United States, Bernard Cohen finds the county-by-county lung cancer rates to be inversely correlated with average radon levels. Although many readers have interpreted this study as suggesting hormesis, Cohen limits his conclusions to saying that the results refute the linearity hypothesis. This study covered most of the US population, and therefore the statistical uncertainties are small
For exampe, it is the predominant scientific opinion that radiation is harmful at all levels. While this subject to discussion, your first blog simply claims this is a myth. Therefor it is misrepresenting the state of scientific knowledge and I would personally not trust this source even a little bit.
Lissen up party people! DJ Galileo is in the house!
Do you choose your area of residence upon careful consideration of a map showing natural background radiation sources, which vary significantly? Would you refuse a medical procedure such as an X-ray? Have you ever refused to spend 4 hours in an airplane at 30,000 feet? If any of these are a NO, then whilst in the comfortable state of belief in the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNT) you are living your life on a principle that there is such thing as 'acceptable risk'.
A precautionary principle (in the case of LNT, agreement to apply the model despite hard evidence) can seem like a wise thing to do when faced with unknowns. But when public policy is built on such a hypothesis, or it is bought and sold as 'fact', life can become very dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense of mad science, but mad statistics.
It's just a way to 'hide' the noise of inconclusive studies and leave the scientific job unfinished.
What of 'acceptable benefit'? I would challenge anyone come up with any argument against the widespread adoption and use of nuclear technology that cannot be directly correlated into an argument as against the use of fire itself. Something that does not boil down to, because I like the one thing but not the other.
___
Energy is fire. Fire is life. We can neither afford nor want to be thrown back to the stone age.
There is more than one way to do nuclear energy. Please set aside these three hours,
Act I -- Our Friend the Atom [1957]
Act II -- Thorium Remix [2011]
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
How about we send Hocus here to help clean it up for 2-3 years, and then see what he has to say. I bet $10 it wont be the same.
Sure, why not? But unfortunately for me, there is no shortage of willing people with my skill level and no call for such help. There is not even any need to move a great many people through the site to perform brief but extremely dangerous tasks such as were faced by the Liquidators of Chernobyl.
Besides, I beat you to it, while discussing the decommissioning of the San Onorfe plant here at Slashdot. What I said then bears repeating as it applies equally to Fukushima:
"In a shrinking economy you will find more people willing to face the risks and just get it done. There is a real shortage these days of people and methods that just get out there and do things.
Seriously, I would be willing to go there and take a higher than occupationally permitted cumulative dose of radiation to help them cask the fuel and transport it, reduce the plant to rubble and turn this intricate and beautiful industrial complex into an ugly, desolate public park with horrid little shrubs, useless fountains and despicable art. I'd demand a high wage that would deliver enough money for that span to set my life on a much better course.
We have ways to handle and safely transport highly radioactive substances. Those that exist and better ways we would invent. Life without risk is not worth living, and a world without risk-takers is a world bereft of heroes. Would that be a better world?
The real problem is that there is nowhere to ship and store the casks of waste, so the good people of San Diego country cannot obtain the closure they desire at any price."
I am confident that Japan will find a safe place to store the Fukushima fuel, reactor parts and even the most irradiated rubble and topsoil. The press will stir a furor over it but the people in charge will see it is done and done properly.
I envy them that, and for shame. In the United States nuclear energy has been done properly for years, except for one thing -- the one thing that our government promised plant operators it would do, and did not do -- provide a safer place to store spent fuel than the plants themselves.
Atomic Power Review is written by a guy named Will Davis. It says so on the right sidebar. Who is Rod Adams?
Oops, clipboard snafu, it ate a whole paragraph and a link. There were supposed to be two links,
Rod Adams hosts Atomic Insights blog and The Atomic Show podcast. He has some very good coverage of Fukushima and its aftermath and lately he has been taking fear-mongers Robert Alvarez and Arnie Gundersen to task.
Will Davis' Atomic Power Review has scaled down its Fukushima coverage as of late, but in the archives you will find some detailed articles with week-by-week coverage.
I am held AGHAST by the biblical-level hysteria that is circulating about Fukushima these days. It is being served up and replicated with the relish of the street-corner preacher with an end-of-world sign. Every die-off of fish is related (ignore the Atlantic), the melting starfish (never mind it's happening worldwide), from mammals to narwhals there is some serious confirmation bias being stirred.
The computer model plume of currents has DEATH arriving at the United States West coast; mere detection of miniscule amounts of Cesium -- which science is capable of to an extraordinary level of precision -- is being fronted as a radioactive death sentence.
There seems to be no deference to expert or even medical opinion on true risk factors; and in the tired vein of disaster porn, any appeals to consider such generates a (predictable) backlash of conspiracy coverup allegations. At times it is literally a no-think zone.
Radioactivity is the new whipping boy of disaster porn.
NO-HYPE Fukushima information:
Fukushima Accident Updates. Leslie Corrice has done an excellent job chronicling the accident from 2011. Following the latest posting thread backwards in time (some 60 pages so far) is a detailed account you will find nowhere else.
Fukushima Accident Commentary Leslie Corrice again, exhibiting a level of journalistic integrity that is fast-fading on today's news and Internet sources, has maintained a separate thread of personal opinion and commentary. It is as fascinating a read as the last, here you will find topics of politics, culture and status and observation of the Fukushima victims' compensation fund and resettlement.
Nuclear Industry source: Nuclear Street tag: Fukushima
Rod Adams' Atomic Power Review has scaled down its Fukushima coverage as of late, but in the archives you will find some detailed articles with week-by-week coverage.
Do add more!
- visit lonely corners of the Internet that will ASTOUND them.
- treat them to simple joys that will GLADDEN THEIR HEARTS.
- then close your eyes so they can't see you.
- then just log off, leaving them to WONDER.
If you want a map of all the [[wire-line]] COs -- they are here : http://www.dslreports.com/coinfo
[...] Now cellular is a totally different game altogether. Cellular companies are subscribers of the phone network, not really a part of it. They run their own infrastructure and don't directly participate in SS7 for routing.
Yup, the POTS Bell System was open with its information sharing (pride of accomplishment) and maps and stats are out there. But for cellular topics there sure are a bunch of Anonymous Cowards in this thread with insightful comments. No doubt because their openness and opinion does not necessarily reflect their employer's.
Now if some AC should happen to post a link to a pastebin hosted map showing CO/HLR CELLULAR facilities for each of the major providers, we'd all be able to get a handle on what state (sorry or satisfied) of disaster preparedness we have achieved, so it could be identified as a 'challenge to solve' and be addressed.
Oh I almost forgot. If you are concerned about the vulnerability of utilities maintained by private companies these days, you are potentially a terrorist threat. How bloomin' convenient for them.
I spent 8 years on the 5ESS DSIG crew installing new COs and working on the SS7 protocol.
Hats off to you! Network is where I most wanted to be years ago when I was at The Phone Company, but at the time I was so good at the Data Processing side (carrier settlement and toll billing) I was stuck there. Like a puppet on a chain.
Note we are not talking about straight launch codes (the envelopes etc.) This was an additional safeguard, a component in the message link (as in un-squelch) layer between SAC and silo.
I learned of this years ago, and since I've tracked the sentiment and reaction to it. How we thoughtfully react to this idea might be crucial to our survival and evolution as a species. Why? It hinges on personal responsibility. Time and again it is portrayed as a farce, a madcap circus-like adventure in the absurd. Or sternly, a waste of money and resource, a breech of protocol, a crime. A mistake. I'm not so sure. This was no mistake. The existence of such robotic barriers in c3i mechanisms breeds a dangerous complacency.
It is my view that the '00000000' PAL code as implemented not only performed well -- it actually added a significant edge to our species' survival impossible to achieve any other way.
Every time a technician would open the little door and inspect the combination at the start of their tour of duty, to ensure it was all zeroes... they'd say "Well this certainty isn't a factor. We'd better be on our toes!" Humans on their toes. The extra little edge. All the assurance we could ever hope to survive. Delivered: I THANK YOU, PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK. No joke.
When judging a system's insecurity by the strength of its passwords, it helps bear in mind such lock-out systems as implemented, may themselves fail or be subverted to achieve an undesirable result. The movie 'Failsafe' illustrates this well.
00000000 kept humans 'in the loop' while making them gravely aware of their personal responsibility to properly authenticate and verify orders.
Please +mod P/GP and THANKS for the delightfully readable go-round on a complex topic. The NSS Wiki Page links to so many tangent issues and general-telecom defs it's hard to get a grip. If only when you follow Wikipedia links a voice would whisper, "You're getting warmer!" "Getting colder."
So I am gathering that should some hypothetical community or city region wish to impose upon cell providers a base requirement that their services as provided are locally autonomous, allowing native subscribers to talk -- the requirement is there must be a mobile switching center (MSC) driving the towers capable of maintaining enough end-to-end connections the area would need, and if the Home Location Register (HLR) is out of area -- at least a quiescent HLR platform with a (selective) mirror database mirror that could go live and be manually loaded as necessary.
Bear in mind the basic 'emergency' capability I'm trying to define involves only homed cells dialing each others' local assigned numbers, no number translation or PTSN interface.
I am diving into this cell issue because I think most folks off the street honestly believe that local cell towers doth a working communications system make. At least within the area where others' MSISDN are similar to theirs. And drawing from the expectations of the Bell era... why wouldn't it?
Clouding the issue is when people treat the mere repairability of a system under optimum conditions as some sort of 'solution' to disaster preparedness, as if it is only measured in time. In a disaster get everything everywhere working again for everybody exactly as it was. Problem solved!
But what if the parts required to get something working again -- at least locally -- turns out to be impossible because there never were enough parts to for a complete system in the first place?
It is my hope that a framework for defining and asserting autonomous operation can be devised so it becomes a matter of standard practice just as for Bell System Practice guidelines. A series of steps towards autonomy that can be reduced to cost/benefit.
AC: It's not 1876 any longer. These days, we have so many alternatives that voice-only communication should be the very, very last resort in all situations. For business transactions of any sort, websites or email are better. For keeping in touch with friends and family, it's obvious that email, social media and family gatherings are better. For quickly getting in touch with somebody, send an SMS.
But can your SMS do this?
I wish...
I wish the kitchen faucet wouldn't drip all day!
I wish that refrigerator door would close and stay closed!
I wish I had a stove whose pilot light was always lit.
And furthermore...
A kitchen phone at hand when friends call up to chat a bit!
[ring] Hello Sue this is Mary how are you, bye?
(They say your kitchen dazzles every eye!)
A brand new sink, a built-in oven,
a new refrigerator and a phone! A kitchen phone!
A bright red phone!
Gotta go g'bye g'bye g'byeeee.....
See ya later!
Many thanks to the ACs who addressed my question on the autonomy of isolated cell towers, to wit:
AC: A cell tower requires more infrastructure to actually complete a call than what is on the tower itself. The brains are located more centrally, like in the nearest CO. If a CO is taken out, it's bad for the area... and the local cell towers. If a CO is NOT taken down, it has all the infrastructure required in order to complete calls for its local area, which is what the OP stated -- even if that CO is segregated from every other one. COs are also more hardened than a tower can be and have more batteries and likely has a local generator. In the northeast blackout (2003), keeping cell towers powered required moving generators around to each tower in order to keep them running for a few more hours.
AC: I would add that the systems running voice, data, and SMS are crazy complicated and can fail in many, many more ways than POTS. I managed the auth systems and data core for a cell service, and it seemed like a damn miracle the thing worked at all.
So we have a cell Central Office layer that is regional and connectivity to it would be necessary for individual towers to complete calls. Let me extend the Q to ask: is there some standard practice that confines geographic placement of COs to a certain radius? How many of these (as opposed to mere towers) would we find on a map, if such a map was available? I presume that if a CO was isolated no one could roam-in because the necessary central inter-carrier auth could not be completed, but what of existing subscribers? Would a CO facility, even if it was restarted from power down, retain enough subscriber data to bring its 'native' users in the local area to the point where that can complete calls to each other?
Sorry about the Wheeler (FCC Chairman) booboo in the summary. Brain fart.
AC: Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Good question, although I Sens an odd bit of d3r1s1ve m0ckery from yous.
Because it was built that way. Your local bell telephone exchange was designed to stand alone and not just provide electricity to operate telephones. From that single building It completes calls between its own subscribers and those in other directly-connected exchanges, even if long haul circuits are down.
But in the digital subscriber age we are starting to see roll-outs of nationwide services that only appear to be local. They demonstrate sudden, surprising, even shocking failure. Router restarts, failures to push software updates, failure to connect to centralized RADIUS servers, failure to complete DSL login and even failure of DNS lookup within the telco's own Internet can cause confusion and backlogs that disrupt IP phone service.
I grant that no mob with torches has ever marched up to the Phone Company and demanded that they pull the plug to prove that the service they provide is resilient to inter-network failure.
In fact, these vulnerabilities extend to the use of local; electrical power. I have known a few people who buy in to these IP-phones supplied by the local cable company who are shocked to discover that it stops functioning soon after their electricity goes out. And it's not just a house thing, a MERE few hours into an ice storm many pole-mounted cable company amplifiers that rely on city power depleted their (may I say, 'dipshit'?) battery packs and whole neighborhoods lost their phones regardless of whether they had emergency power.
Meanwhile the POTS providers who had sunk a larger investment into provisioning their remote buildings, carried enough batteries to keep going for a couple of days.
What we have here is a general attention to infrastructure and disaster preparedness in the interest of rolling out things that work almost as well, most of the time.
In order to make real-world use of this model, the health care industry would have us load catapults with doctors and medicines and fling them into Africa.
They're on the right track but with their health care model they're backing the wrong horse. How and when exactly did that endemic sickness that must be countered, arise?
Let's take a look at the world according to cholera [cases reported to WHO 2007-2009]. Cholera flourishes where masses of people have converged on areas without sufficient infrastructure to support them. They often do this in an attempt to escape rural poverty. It also flourishes along major rivers, such as the Ganges and historically the Thames, again where infrastructure for water filtration and sewage treatment is lacking.
Now look at the world according to (lack of) access to electricity [Numbers in Millions and % of People without access to Electricity, 2008. Source: WHO & UNDP]
Electricity means clean water and waste processing.
Cholera hates electricity.
That is because with electricity comes deeper wells, better filtration, distribution, active media filtration of surface sources and sewage treatment with water effluent ready for discharge into rivers -- along with the basics such as refrigeration for food and medicine. It was infrastructure and not better health care that eliminated the threat of cholera in North America, and other diseases besides.
And by electricity I mean real base load electricity, the power to run distribution and filtration plants and whole villages and cities. A full square meal of energy, not the 'energy happy meal toys' that are too often envisioned by North Americans as gifts to Africans -- a solar panel here or a wind turbine there, to run some tiny apartment fridge in some clinic somewhere, or a single LED light, sometimes. Solutions we could not and would not tolerate for ourselves.
The human race (at our favored levels of population density) has evolved past the point where a natural state of good health can be maintained without access to bulk electricity, which equates to drinkable tap water. This is a greater factor than access to doctors or medicine.
Obama is making the right noises about Africa with his $7 billion pledge to help Africa lift itself out of darkness with new sub-Saharan infrastructure. Remember -- this $7 billion is is NOT your hard-earned taxpayer dollars, which are all going toward repayment of interest on our national debt. This is magical unicorn money that will come from World Investment Funds and Bank perpetual money machine that is backed by International Corporate Banks that bought shitloads of worthless paper that were bailed out by Bushobama with the Fed minting virtual money that saved the banks' balance sheets from ruin, and Treasury Bonds purchased by the Chinese who have said fuck-it and have decided to give Africa their time and especially their money directly, some of which would ultimately come from us as repayment on debt to China with China becoming Africa's direct partner in infrastructure instead. This does not make sense on so many levels.
I think the United States is presently screwed on Energy but not in the conspiracy sense. It is this awful mental condition where we have lost sight of 'big electric' and 'big water' infrastructure as something we are truly vested in, regardless of whether we personally own stock in it.
I think it is why discussants in these forums never seem to discuss topics of coal, nuclear and natural gas production of electricity at any length -- and spend so much more time on the minutia
In the movie Conspiracy Theory (1997) Jetty Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is obsessed with Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and does not know why (she swallowed the fly). His apartment is full of unread copies. It turns out that the spooks who monkeyed with his mind planted the suggestion to purchase copies of it because the relative unpopularity of the book made it an excellent way to track his movements electronically.
Today there is discussion on this thread of people who feel compelled to download these torrents, and the possibility of being traced by some shadowy well-connected organization while doing so.
Bring on the evil MK-ULTRA mastermind, Captain Jean Luc Picard.
[Walking through a metal detector]
Jerry Fletcher: Why is this thing safe for me and not for my keys?
Jerry Fletcher: July eighth, 1979, all the fathers of Nobel Prize winners were rounded up by United Nations military units, all right, and actually forced at gunpoint to give semen samples in little plastic jars, which are now stored below Rockefeller Center underneath the ice skating rink...
The backbone taps with dark-fiber would have been some fancy, new expensive all 'digital exchange' upgrades back in the early 1980's. Telcos worldwide that had always been tight/happy with regional copper and layers, over priced data serves suddenly did expensive national upgrades to new tech....
Yeah, the early 1980s was an exciting time. Subscriber line cards with chipsets that took over the rudiments of call placement such as accepting digits, maintaining virtual 'four-wire' connections over an address bus. Rollout of the #5ESS digital switch which became the world standard. Our local telephone company was the last (and only I think) wholly owned by ITT so we became guinea pigs for their prototype ITT/Alcatel 1210 switch. The 1210 was a sweet machine that was almost completely event-driven, one platform could handle class 3/4/5: operator positions, trunking and subscribers. Some several hundred tons of crossbar switches were taken out and all of a sudden we had dial tone in 0.5 second. From the Caribbean we could ring a phone in Brooklyn faster than someone could clickety-click crossbar a local call from Manhattan.
But even in the 80s the NSA would be unable to even approach what is possible today. Although switching centers were going digital, the total number of interconnected continental mesh points was still large. This in a time where OC-3/12 were massive circuits, regional telcos were multiply connected, satellite was still handling the much-smaller bulk of calls between coasts, voice and data were separately provisioned and broken out in racks along the way. If you called across the country you always got your whole 64kbits for voice. Your fax machine would always work. Modem BBS calls were reliable and practical. This was guaranteed by Bell Standard Practices. May they Rest In Peace.
In the 1990s it was that the massive packetization of voice began, and telcos began retiring those expensive regional connections in favor of fewer, larger pipes that handled exclusively digital traffic. Cell providers paved the way for gibblefart almost-good enough compression, but even they have retired their cross country terrestrial microwaves for leased fiber. Even today's landline connections are packetized at the source and streamed cell-like. Packets arrive on time most of the time -- but due to regional stresses and voice/internet sharing, not all the time.
Which means that if they place a tap on these massive fiber conduits the NSA gets better voice quality than you do. They can hear a pin drop in Utah. How unfair is that??
I am interested what the crypto staff, mil and govs of other countries where thinking when they handed US/UK crypto to their mil/gov/banks/telcos/industry/legal systems. Did they not have the skills to test, know to look deeper, any understanding of what they where handing in bulk to other countries (UK?US and others)? Yet they seemed to be able to keep the Soviet Union out...
The former Soviet Union was broke. I believe that when all the Cold War memoranda are declassified a final picture will emerge of a Supreme Soviet posturing nervously with a relatively small number of viable missiles, against an American 'evil empire' whose build-out of aggressive capability could only be towards one goal: preemptive strike and invasion. You see, from a strictly Socialist viewpoint they could not commit entirely to the idea that spending money was the only purpose, there had to be some credible threat. Otherwise it could only be that the US was ape-shit crazy. We now know we were the crazy ones because a really aggravated and talkative Moscow cab driver is on record as saying so.
NSA has evolved considerably from those years. Where they had been required to move personnel around the globe to locate themselves where the traffic was ... now with technology there are more US desk jobs and via shadow satellite and dark fiber, the traffic is brought home to them.