I just finished reading another article about counterfeit goods from China. Not just fashions, but sophisticated technical gear. Common sense should tell us that there is a black market for cell phone simulators that are sold to bad guys instead of government. It is hard to imagine how many of those things are hiding near FBI headquarters, the White House, NSA, and local law enforcement.
I'm sure that government could design phones immune to sniffing, but outside the military they probably don't. Given the FBI's record with handling email technology, I expect that a secure phone engineered for the FBI would weigh no less than 50 pounds. Government and law enforcement uses the same brands of phones as we do.
On a similar theme, I saw an article about a European device that alarms when it detects encrypted radio transmissions nearby of the kind used by their police. It could give warning of an impending raid.
If the heyday of Y2K remediation, I helped set up a push of a SOE to 275,000 distributed PCs in a weekend. It went off without a hitch. Management was happy, but the cries of thousands of employees who lost all their personal files and documents were ignored.
If you are willing to be heavy handed and brutal, you can accomplish miracles. Surely there is no news in that.
I can't resist bragging. We live on a sailboat. We have 200w of solar. Our electric use use is 0.6 kWh per day. 80% of that goes to our 12v refrigeration system. Is this a hardship? No, we live a luxurious life.
I confess, a big part of the secret is that we sail north in the summer to avoid the need for air conditioning and south in the winter to avoid the need for heating.
What is good for utilities is good for homeowners too. Investments in energy conservation have a much higher ROI than investments in electric production, delivery or storage.
I am a blue water sailor. I, and many others like me, would be happy to carry an ADS-B reciever onboard. That is, provided that it draws very little power, and that it gathers data unattended without my active intervention. Statistically, I think cruising sailors would cover a large fraction of the ocean areas of the globe. I believe the probability of a sailing vessel being within 200 miles of MH370s final flight path would be almost 100%.
The caveat being that I can not transmit the data to the Internet until the next time I reach shore and I can find someone who will let me plug in a USB device. That could mean a delay of months up to a year.
Would non-real time information be valuable? Thinking of the MH370 case, the answer must be yes. Not matter what the delay, the information is still valuable to someone. We could also record AIS signals that many vessels already transmit. I receive AIS from up to 40 miles away.
The idea could be etended to (symbolic) notes-in-a-bottle. A million floating ADS-B recorders would eventually reach shore, and some of them may have their data extracted and transmitted, then thrown back into the sea. Would that be worthwhile? Hard to say.
Memories of programming with the 6502 instruction set are so delicious that the only comparable thing to compare it to was my first orgasm.
I actually first did it on a General Electric GEPAC computer in 1966. It had an almost identical instruction set to the 6502, but with 24 bit words. Hip programmers expressed themselves in octal in those days.
The issues, and unintended side effects of The Telephone Consumer Protection Act are more extensive than you probably imagine.I recommend that podcast as TFA for this thread.
The Summary says "Now kick that up to the electric company level, and give them a radio network that tells them which electric provider to get electricity from at what time to get the best (wholesale) price"
That's crazy. There are already organizations called Independent Systemm Operators (ISO) that run real time auctions to do thst function. They have been operating since the 1990s. No radios are needed. They have had high reliability communications methods for many decades.
Few people have working wind-up clocks in their houses any more. At least. It working day in day out. The sounds of ticking clocks at night was soothing.
Also soothing was the sound of the cuckoo clock cuckoopint on the hour.
There is another approach. To my knowledge, it has never been used anywhere in the world.
One monopoly could own, operate, and maintain the poles, wires and fibers. They would be a public utility and be answerable to the public service commission for tarrifs and meeting reliability and availabilty requirements. But they would not provide any consumer service at all. Their customers would be the electric power and communications companies that rent use of the facilities. Perhaps even natural gas and water distribution pipes could be included in the bundle.
It is already true that power and communications utilities outsource a lot of the line construction, operation, and maintenance of distribution to outside contractors, so the change might not be a dramatic as it sounds. It would be primarily a legal change to make these contractors public utilities, with the rights and obligations that go along with their role.
Please correct me if you know of some place where this approach has been applied.
In the early 60s I worked as an exterminator. Our company was hired to fumigate warehouses full of cocoa beans owned by Nestle. They hired every vacant warehouse in New York State to hold those beans. I got to see a lot of warehouses and an unimaginable quantity of beans. The fumigations were strictly precautionary.
I was told that Nestle was taking advantage of low world prices and had bought the the entire world' scrap,of cocoa beans for thst year. In following years, they could either sell them at a profit, or use them up in Nestle chocolate factories.
Second, utility company profit is typically regulated to be a percentage of revenues, and reduced sales (because of conservation, self-generation, or whatever) will reduce power company revenue, but profits will remain at the regulated percentage of revenue.
No. Not a percent of revenues, but rather a percent of investment. A critical difference in this context because falling revenues will not cause falling profits.
One could carry it to the logical extreme. Expect everyone to supply their own power, but charge only a fixed fee to serve as a backup source.
Even in thst extreme case, the public service commission is required to grant rates which proved the utilities a guaranteed return in investment. Investments in transmission and distribution are huge. Return on those investments does not depend on them actually delivering energy all the time.
A death spiral would occur if too many people go completely off grid. But those people will have to learn to live with having power only part time. There are periods in winter where days are short and winds are calm for weeks at a time. In places where it gets to be 20 below, backup,power os dearly needed. (Things are a bit easier in warm, sunny, parts of the country.)
You are also still neglecting the people in high density and high rise housing who can not easily generate their own power. As many as half the population is in that category.
The TFA uses a false model for computing profits. In the USA nearly all electric utilities are regulated monopolies. The government grants them a monopoply for a particular service area. The utility fronts the capital investment (historically up to 20% of all capital investment in the whole country!!! They must raise the capital in the private markets and convince investors to invest in utilites instead of Apple or Alibaba. High returns are needed to attract that money.). The pubic service commission is obligated to allow rates that guarantee the utility a defined return on investment profit. In real life, there is a lot of wiggle room and lots of politics in rate setting, but competitive pressure is not a factor. TFA ignores this.
We could, as a matter of public policy, decide to revoke the monopoly. That would open the door to any competitor, but it would also allow the utility to charge any rate they like without asking permission, and would remove any obligations regarding reliability and quality of service. (Think daily brownouts for anyone who doesn't pay for "premium service" on the hottest day of the year.) It would also open the door for another set of poles and another set of wires running down every street; one set per competitor. NYC was like that in the 1890s, and some places in Asia are like that today with hundreds of wires on every pole and laying over every rooftop.
But a death spiral in which rising rates paid by the remaining non-solar customers drive more and more customers to generate their own power could still be possible. But it would not directly affect utility profits as the TFA claims. The regulated utility business model would be challenged, not the profits of utilities that remain regulated. Those profits are guaranteed by law.
We should also recognize that lots of the population lives in high rise apartments and do not own enough rooftop or yard square feet to use solar panels.
Slashdot Mirror
I just finished reading another article about counterfeit goods from China. Not just fashions, but sophisticated technical gear. Common sense should tell us that there is a black market for cell phone simulators that are sold to bad guys instead of government. It is hard to imagine how many of those things are hiding near FBI headquarters, the White House, NSA, and local law enforcement.
I'm sure that government could design phones immune to sniffing, but outside the military they probably don't. Given the FBI's record with handling email technology, I expect that a secure phone engineered for the FBI would weigh no less than 50 pounds. Government and law enforcement uses the same brands of phones as we do.
On a similar theme, I saw an article about a European device that alarms when it detects encrypted radio transmissions nearby of the kind used by their police. It could give warning of an impending raid.
If the heyday of Y2K remediation, I helped set up a push of a SOE to 275,000 distributed PCs in a weekend. It went off without a hitch. Management was happy, but the cries of thousands of employees who lost all their personal files and documents were ignored.
If you are willing to be heavy handed and brutal, you can accomplish miracles. Surely there is no news in that.
I can't resist bragging. We live on a sailboat. We have 200w of solar. Our electric use use is 0.6 kWh per day. 80% of that goes to our 12v refrigeration system. Is this a hardship? No, we live a luxurious life.
I confess, a big part of the secret is that we sail north in the summer to avoid the need for air conditioning and south in the winter to avoid the need for heating.
What is good for utilities is good for homeowners too. Investments in energy conservation have a much higher ROI than investments in electric production, delivery or storage.
I am a blue water sailor. I, and many others like me, would be happy to carry an ADS-B reciever onboard. That is, provided that it draws very little power, and that it gathers data unattended without my active intervention. Statistically, I think cruising sailors would cover a large fraction of the ocean areas of the globe. I believe the probability of a sailing vessel being within 200 miles of MH370s final flight path would be almost 100%.
The caveat being that I can not transmit the data to the Internet until the next time I reach shore and I can find someone who will let me plug in a USB device. That could mean a delay of months up to a year.
Would non-real time information be valuable? Thinking of the MH370 case, the answer must be yes. Not matter what the delay, the information is still valuable to someone. We could also record AIS signals that many vessels already transmit. I receive AIS from up to 40 miles away.
The idea could be etended to (symbolic) notes-in-a-bottle. A million floating ADS-B recorders would eventually reach shore, and some of them may have their data extracted and transmitted, then thrown back into the sea. Would that be worthwhile? Hard to say.
Memories of programming with the 6502 instruction set are so delicious that the only comparable thing to compare it to was my first orgasm.
I actually first did it on a General Electric GEPAC computer in 1966. It had an almost identical instruction set to the 6502, but with 24 bit words. Hip programmers expressed themselves in octal in those days.
Once again the power grid shrugs off this magnetic storm with a yawn.
But as soon as this storm has passed, a fresh set of scare stories will begin.
"The Power Grid Will Melt When the Next Magnetic Storm Hits."
Asy Ray to write it up in his blog. Ray will be the only one of us still alive in 100,000 years.
Yo quiero Earth.
The Federalist Society recently posted a podcast on this subject.
http://www.fed-soc.org/multime...
The issues, and unintended side effects of The Telephone Consumer Protection Act are more extensive than you probably imagine.I recommend that podcast as TFA for this thread.
The Summary says "Now kick that up to the electric company level, and give them a radio network that tells them which electric provider to get electricity from at what time to get the best (wholesale) price"
That's crazy. There are already organizations called Independent Systemm Operators (ISO) that run real time auctions to do thst function. They have been operating since the 1990s. No radios are needed. They have had high reliability communications methods for many decades.
Few people have working wind-up clocks in their houses any more. At least. It working day in day out. The sounds of ticking clocks at night was soothing.
Also soothing was the sound of the cuckoo clock cuckoopint on the hour.
Before refrigerators, we had an ice box. Under the ice box was a drip pan to catch the melt water.
All night long. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Instead of white icon lights and a chime, some pedestrian crossings used to have mechanical clappers. Clap slow to wait, clap fast to cross.
On a hot summer night when all windows were open (because we had no AC) you could hear those damn clappers clapping from all over the city.
Telling the factory men (and the whole town) that it was time to go home.
http://youtu.be/ABrKlQVNuPE.
I'm drinking coffee right now that I just brewed in my percolator.
That was fun. But he cheated, and dinged the end of line bell manually without reaching the end of line.
My Ford Falcon used to get low voltage. The cure was to whack the regulator with a tire iron.
No special smarts needed.
If you survive, you'll be a grand master fix it person.
There is another approach. To my knowledge, it has never been used anywhere in the world.
One monopoly could own, operate, and maintain the poles, wires and fibers. They would be a public utility and be answerable to the public service commission for tarrifs and meeting reliability and availabilty requirements. But they would not provide any consumer service at all. Their customers would be the electric power and communications companies that rent use of the facilities. Perhaps even natural gas and water distribution pipes could be included in the bundle.
It is already true that power and communications utilities outsource a lot of the line construction, operation, and maintenance of distribution to outside contractors, so the change might not be a dramatic as it sounds. It would be primarily a legal change to make these contractors public utilities, with the rights and obligations that go along with their role.
Please correct me if you know of some place where this approach has been applied.
Mod the parent up.
We are trying to make bulk surveillance harder, not targeted surveillance. By bulk I mean something like 500 million devices, all to be cracked.
In federal elections, state borders can be considered as districts causing the same kinds of distortions.
It would take a pretty thorough rewrite of The Constitution of the USA to eliminate disproportionate weight of citizen votes.
In the early 60s I worked as an exterminator. Our company was hired to fumigate warehouses full of cocoa beans owned by Nestle. They hired every vacant warehouse in New York State to hold those beans. I got to see a lot of warehouses and an unimaginable quantity of beans. The fumigations were strictly precautionary.
I was told that Nestle was taking advantage of low world prices and had bought the the entire world' scrap,of cocoa beans for thst year. In following years, they could either sell them at a profit, or use them up in Nestle chocolate factories.
Second, utility company profit is typically regulated to be a percentage of revenues, and reduced sales (because of conservation, self-generation, or whatever) will reduce power company revenue, but profits will remain at the regulated percentage of revenue.
No. Not a percent of revenues, but rather a percent of investment. A critical difference in this context because falling revenues will not cause falling profits.
One could carry it to the logical extreme. Expect everyone to supply their own power, but charge only a fixed fee to serve as a backup source.
Even in thst extreme case, the public service commission is required to grant rates which proved the utilities a guaranteed return in investment. Investments in transmission and distribution are huge. Return on those investments does not depend on them actually delivering energy all the time.
A death spiral would occur if too many people go completely off grid. But those people will have to learn to live with having power only part time. There are periods in winter where days are short and winds are calm for weeks at a time. In places where it gets to be 20 below, backup,power os dearly needed. (Things are a bit easier in warm, sunny, parts of the country.)
You are also still neglecting the people in high density and high rise housing who can not easily generate their own power. As many as half the population is in that category.
The TFA uses a false model for computing profits. In the USA nearly all electric utilities are regulated monopolies. The government grants them a monopoply for a particular service area. The utility fronts the capital investment (historically up to 20% of all capital investment in the whole country!!! They must raise the capital in the private markets and convince investors to invest in utilites instead of Apple or Alibaba. High returns are needed to attract that money.). The pubic service commission is obligated to allow rates that guarantee the utility a defined return on investment profit. In real life, there is a lot of wiggle room and lots of politics in rate setting, but competitive pressure is not a factor. TFA ignores this.
We could, as a matter of public policy, decide to revoke the monopoly. That would open the door to any competitor, but it would also allow the utility to charge any rate they like without asking permission, and would remove any obligations regarding reliability and quality of service. (Think daily brownouts for anyone who doesn't pay for "premium service" on the hottest day of the year.) It would also open the door for another set of poles and another set of wires running down every street; one set per competitor. NYC was like that in the 1890s, and some places in Asia are like that today with hundreds of wires on every pole and laying over every rooftop.
But a death spiral in which rising rates paid by the remaining non-solar customers drive more and more customers to generate their own power could still be possible. But it would not directly affect utility profits as the TFA claims. The regulated utility business model would be challenged, not the profits of utilities that remain regulated. Those profits are guaranteed by law.
We should also recognize that lots of the population lives in high rise apartments and do not own enough rooftop or yard square feet to use solar panels.