As navigation systems in the U.S. (at least in urban areas) have already passed the critical mass point, it seems a more intelligent way to do this would be to use the GPS info from the Nav system itself to record speed (or time between two intersections really) and just use the phone as a Bluetooth bridge to the Internet. Precise updates, no cell tower triangulation approximation needed. Triangulation from the towers is awesome use of already existing information though for sure and was probably a good solution to an initial Chicken or Egg problem.
TomTom takes anonymized location information from mobile phone handsets in The Netherlands, and make traffic reports they call HD traffic.
The handsets are not (necessarily) equipped with GPS chips, but their location is triangulated by the GSM network itself. The mobile network (Vodafone NL) supplies the information to TomTom, who then process it into traffic reports.
They claim to cover 10 times more roadarea than conventional traffic detection that uses inductive loops embedded in the roads. (The conventional system is already quite extensive in The Netherlands, which is a small and densely populated country). I seem to recall TomTom also have some sort of patent.
Wow, what logic was this brilliant moderator using when the parent got moderated a troll?
Moderator: Well, Mr. Artraze, _I_ feel all votes _are_ magically just as beneficial to society always...except when they disagree with how I see things, therefore I'm going to anonymously moderate you down to hide your opinion which is incompatible with my world view and scurry away...
Maybe I missed something and the parent was moderated a troll for a different reason, but I didn't see anything particularly trollish about what he said, just perhaps a less popular opinion.
Because the computer wouldn't know if the text the human responded with was the actual CAPTCHA text.
Guess you could have the same section of text handled by, say 10 people and make the first person wait until the computer has gotten enough verifications from the next 9 users; but it would suck to be that first person.
Anyone know the CAPTCHA/sec rate for a major site (success rate, we want to exclude the botnets)?
No, it can apply to anyone, higher or lower as you will see all over Slashdot. Not related to UID at all. The great-grandparent poster apparently wasn't aware of the meme at all and took offense to someone jokingly using it on him.
Billions are definitely big numbers, but space is definitely expensive. Even the basics cost a lot to do in space, and when you do something extra special, it gets extra 'spensive:)
Bad comparison. Hubble (as the first big space-based optical telescope) was also a pretty _huge_ step in technology (and launch-wise, it's not exactly a micro-sat). Similarly, everything put into developing and launching the first communications satellite cost quite a bit more and did much less than the 100th. The Hubble telescope wasn't a commodity item, so it was economical to over engineer everything. Even the famously out of focus main mirror was amongst one of the smoothest ever made.
If every bolt cost the military $100, the military budget would quickly outstrip the U.S. GDP, dwarfing the already large military budget, so obviously this isn't happening.
Depending on their function, some bolts cost $100, some cost $10, and some cost $0.01. Even outside the military.
Obviously people's lives are at stake in many of these cases, but when it isn't, I wonder if the overall cost of having to do it over due to part failure might be less than doing it "right" the first time. In which case we actually are not doing ourselves a favor by testing to completion.
The "when it isn't" part is already being practiced. Not every bolt the military purchased cost $100. The $100 bolts are being used (presumably) in the situations where failure has a high cost.
You're right, it's made up. While biodiesel is being subsidized with farm subsidies, so is gas which is made from petro and the US is spending billions of dollars daily in Iraq to subsidize petro. If only alternative energy sources got as much subsidies though I'd really prefer all subsidies to be eliminated.
Absolutely agreed with the last half of your last sentence.
I using "diesel" in my example wasn't meant as any sort of reference to biodiesel, I just made up two forms of energy to give you an example as to why subsidies aren't sustainable. I could have called the two items "Blue" and "Orange".
* In the real world, subsidies are often intended to be a temporary measure as a way of hopefully outsmarting the general marketplace.
Not really. Big agribusinesses have gotten billions of dollars in subsidies yearly for many years. So does military and aerospace contractors. Oil get more subsidies in the US, as does mining operations. The US General Mining Act of 1872 allows mining companies to mine public lands for less than pennies on the dollar. That law is more than 100 years old and it's still being used. I wouldn't exactly call that temporary. Farm subsidies are probably as old. But at least the US does not give out as much in subsidies as does the EU and Japan. That's a big reason the World Trade Organization talks failed. Brazil, India, South Africa and many other nations refused to budge on anything else unless the EU, Japan, and US agreed to cut dramatically farm subsidies. The Opium Wars through 1839 to 1860s the British fought in China. To get rid of the trade imbalance the British had with India, they imported tonnes of tea from India, they exported opium from south and southeast Asia into China and were able to make money doing so. So they were able to finance trade in tea. However the Chinese Empress made opium illegal, and the British didn't like that. Fact is is subsidies have distorted trade for hundreds of years.
I'd say as intended to be used, subsidies are meant as a temporary boost...I didn't say they are actually used as intended. I doubt the original authors of the General Mining Act framed it as something that would be in place over a century later.
And I agree, subsidies _certainly_ have distorted trade for hundreds of years.:) Also I hope you didn't read anything into what I wrote before saying that I thought subsidies didn't exist.
The Economist (popular mainstream economics magazine) has an economics dictionary, here it doesn't describe _why_ a subsidy isn't sustainable
Though I don't subscribe to the "Economist", I'm on disability and don't work so I can't afford to, I buy an issue every several weeks. I'll go to a book store and will read it in the cafe and if I like it I'll buy it. Oh, the "Economist" isn't so much mainstream as it is Classical Liberal. Falcon
Ok, I'm guessing from your response somehow I've hit a nerve. I apologize. In any case, do you understand now why most economists wouldn't consider a subsidy as a sustainable solution (even the mining subsidy)?
As for The Economist being mainstream or not, with a 4 million weekly readership, I'd say it's pretty mainstream, irregardless of what label you give it's economic slant (Classical Liberal? Must be a pretty popular view). In any case, I just included a link to where they have definitions of subsidies, since you were asking about the subject. I read the economist maybe twice a year. If that source offended, very sorry.
P.S. If in your condition you go to the effort to read the economist every week, you probably are wider read than I am. If you have anything you would like to share, I'm interested in new reading material.
Ok, without answering directly (it's late, I wanna go to sleep soon:) here's what pops out at me here:
It is readily apparent from Figures 1-3 that all silicon based solar cells in any type of design and placed anywhere in the U.S. will pay for themselves in terms of energy over their lifetime. This is counter to the resilient myth that solar cells will never be viable because they cannot ever make up for their embodied energy. The myth started with an analysis of very early cells and continues today because of the confusion generated by the economically based "emergy" analysis. The payback time ranges from about 1 year for BIPV installations in Phoenix made from high efficiency a-Si (Fig. 3b) to nearly 5 years for low efficiency c-Si in a centralized power plant located in Detroit.
I've never heard of the term "emergy" before (although "exergy", applied in many areas including PV cells plenty). A quick lookup on Wikipedia to find out what "emergy" is and it appears to be a word invented in the '90's. So how did this flawed "emergy" analysis get applied to "very early cells"? Just a quick cognitive disconnect that jumped out at me. Doesn't mean any of what they say is wrong, I haven't read any more of the source at all.
This doesn't mean the panel will pay off in money terms though; what with electricity being so incredibly cheap, while the panel may well pay itself off in terms of energy in 6 years, it may take three or four times that length of time to pay back in money terms. This is of course the significance of this new type of solar panel *IF* they can get the cost down. (Note the weasel word eventually in TFA).
I'd say that reaching production _energy_ parity is reasonable, I haven't kept up on things much at all but that seemed reasonably close, although the paper(?) you quote not-withstanding, I don't know if we're even there yet. Just being the pessimist here, but the power received at the leads to a panel isn't even close to the theoretical summed output of all the cells in that panel. Group "a" may be quoting theoretical cell output reaching parity with production (energy) costs, but group "b" see's that when they try it with actual panels things fall short.
I think when PV real-world-actually produces as much power over it's lifetime as goes into it's manufacturing you will quickly see PV production facilities that are powered by nothing but their own product. Obviously for some reason we don't see this happening out there. We don't even have any manufacturers cheating by using grid power to build a large enough initial array of panels to produce a smaller stream of panels later entirely off grid, much less an honest to goodness bootstrapping of a factory. That would be wonderful marketing for the first factory that could do that, but of course none have. Of course that _could_ easily be explained by the cost as you point out, and I humbly apologize (and celebrate!) if it turns out that a PV cell can already over it's lifetime produce as much power as was used to make it. If things aren't there yet, I suspect they aren't far off, but paying for itself power-wise in 6 years (or 1 year n Phoenix)...if with a 4:1 (or 25:1/Phoenix ideal) power output to power needed ratio like that why don't we see any things like solar powered PV factories?
And of course financial parity like you say is the big deal. If the article is correct and they "eventually" do pull it off, that is great. Probably a way bigger deal than energy parity, anyway.
Thank you for the link, I'll definitely read more into it tomorrow.
Short answer, because the harder you manipulate the market, the harder the market manipulate you (sorry, I know, Soviet Russia joke with inadequate effort, it's late).
Quickly made up numbers: Let's say you have two fuels on the market, one wildly successful (let's call it gasoline), and an alternative not so much (call it diesel). People decide for whatever reason we diesel is better and needs to be used more. Efforts are therefore made to artificially reduced the price of diesel down from it's natural price of $10 a gallon to it's artificial price of $0.01 a gallon by charging the difference to gasoline consumers. In the start when 5% of the fuel market is diesel and 95% of the fuel market is gasoline, this works. But unless something is adjusted* it will crash when scaled. As the market adjusts to the new prices and more diesel is consumed as people start buying cars powered by this alternative fuel en masse, you will have a problem; the natural, actual price to deliver diesel hasn't changed, but you no longer have the cash cow (wildly successful gasoline is no longer wildly successful) to prop diesel up. Either you need to find something else to tax to keep the charade going, or you turn off the subsidies and everyone gets to see what it really costs.
* In the real world, subsidies are often intended to be a temporary measure as a way of hopefully outsmarting the general marketplace. For example, 'photovoltaics currently (1970) aren't even close to being practical so no one is expending any effort into developing them, how can we encourage people to use them which will encourage companies to work on improving the technology?' One popular answer is to subsidize photovoltaics so they _are_ (artificially) competitive, and hope with enough eyeballs looking to outperform each other in a now large market a real breakthrough in their natural competitiveness will be made.
Photovoltaics (and most alternative energy) is subsidized so much from end to end (Research --> Development --> Manufacturing --> Consumer) it isn't even funny. In California the delivered "cost" to the consumer isn't even close to what it actually cost to get it there. The only difference is instead of that one consumer paying the cost, the cost burden was spread across to other people and therefore isn't sustainable; it works fine when 0.3% or whatever of a nations energy production/cost is photovoltaic, but can no longer be done when it is 90%. Again, the hope is that well before that point someone will have made a breakthrough making it actually economical enough to stand up on it's own two feet.
In my personal opinion (and many others, probably most mainstream economists would say something similar) while subsidies in theory could possibly work well, in reality they rarely have the expected consequence the people who created the subsidy hoped for.
After typing all that, I go to google and realize there are way better definitions of why subsidies aren't sustainable:
And if you search google for "tax subsidize photovoltaic" all sorts of things about the current situation come up. Naturally the people who have an interest in selling photovoltaics think subsidies are wonderful and necessary:)
The current generation solar panels have an energy payback time of 6 years in the real world, and typically last for at least 25 years.
25 year lifetime is right on, but 6 year payback is sounds suspiciously-panel-salesmanish _way way way_ optimistic, but who knows, maybe there has been some revolutionary change in photovoltaics in the last couple years.
With subsidies of course, then solar power (ignoring the macro picture) is economical and in a spreadsheet any payback time you like then becomes possible. Of course, in reality this isn't sustainable, all you're doing is shifting the energy cost around, giving you an especially inefficient coal-burning panel instead.
As china showed (and USSR, as well as America), it is easy to shoot a small sat out of the sky. Now put something of that size, and it is literally shooting at the broadside of a barn. And the brilliant pebble approach would work nicely for this.
Suckers! We'd just generate more power from their friggin' laser beam, at China's expense, forcing them to import more oil, driving energy prices up, making orbiting power station overlord (IT) positions just that more valuable.
Just make the main receiver be at geo over USA
A little more seriously, geostationary over the US is significantly south, increasing the distance the beam needs to travel (from already way, way up there..."well past space shuttle range" up there). This may not really be an issue, does anyone know if much energy would be lost as the beam cuts across the atmosphere?
I agree with nuke power on the ground, but a satellite distribution system seems like a huge energy sink. Maybe good for a flexible transmission system, but not a high capacity transmission system. At a certain point efficient ground transmission would make a lot of sense I think.
This is true, the guilty/not guilty part is what I meant in the context of "popularity contest". Bald faced lies in front the jury on the other hand...they have plenty of leeway to decide what her punishment will be.
The job of the jury isn't to decide on the basis of a popularity contest; the decision is...did she break the law or not?
Add that her defense involved some pretty implausible lying (someone spoofed my address, duplicated my machine ID, and sucessfully transferred files with my spoofed address...) she IS pretty stupid.
I think the RIAA tactics are bad, and that they are holding over a business model from a dying era. But that doesn't make it my right to ignore their IP rights, even if their license sucks, is out of date, and they are killing their own industry in the process.
I doubt this ever actually happened in any small California town (but maybe, should be documented somewhere), although it could happen with older switches (much much older). Pretty much any even somewhat modern switch (long before ESS was widespread) in this situation would first fill up it's dialtone capacity. After awhile with a phone off hook (and then giving some time to signal with the loudest obnoxious tone to hopefully get someone's attention) the circuit would be busied out/taken out of service...freeing up some dialtone capacity...to service the next off hook phone...washrinserepeat until all the off hook phones were marked busy and the remaining phones that were on hook would be serviced properly. True that until this process has completed service to _all_ phones (including on hook) connected to that unlucky switch would be out. But we're talking minutes.
In many of these systems (probably not all, the oldest I'm sure weren't sophisticated enough to do anything after marking a circuit down and leave it that way until technician intervention) the circuits flagged down because of "minor" issues like this would be polled slowly in the background...if someone hung their phone back up and it was polled, the circuit would be put back into service. If the CO didn't have some automated system of periodically testing down circuits then it might be awhile before all the "offhook" customers got service again, because a technician would have to manually unbusy the phone after verifying it's back on hook.
Skipped over specifics, I'm tired, and I'm no hardcore phreaker, but I _think_ that is what would happen with 90% of the switches in the automated history of the phone network.
Naturally the modern stuff we have now operates via magic and is next to phrekin unstoppable, I doubt there is any percentage of phones that could be taken offhook that would disable servicing the next phone.
Slashdot Mirror
As navigation systems in the U.S. (at least in urban areas) have already passed the critical mass point, it seems a more intelligent way to do this would be to use the GPS info from the Nav system itself to record speed (or time between two intersections really) and just use the phone as a Bluetooth bridge to the Internet. Precise updates, no cell tower triangulation approximation needed. Triangulation from the towers is awesome use of already existing information though for sure and was probably a good solution to an initial Chicken or Egg problem.
TomTom takes anonymized location information from mobile phone handsets in The Netherlands, and make traffic reports they call HD traffic.
The handsets are not (necessarily) equipped with GPS chips, but their location is triangulated by the GSM network itself. The mobile network (Vodafone NL) supplies the information to TomTom, who then process it into traffic reports.
They claim to cover 10 times more roadarea than conventional traffic detection that uses inductive loops embedded in the roads. (The conventional system is already quite extensive in The Netherlands, which is a small and densely populated country). I seem to recall TomTom also have some sort of patent.
Wow, what logic was this brilliant moderator using when the parent got moderated a troll?
Moderator: Well, Mr. Artraze, _I_ feel all votes _are_ magically just as beneficial to society always...except when they disagree with how I see things, therefore I'm going to anonymously moderate you down to hide your opinion which is incompatible with my world view and scurry away...
Maybe I missed something and the parent was moderated a troll for a different reason, but I didn't see anything particularly trollish about what he said, just perhaps a less popular opinion.
Hopefully meta-moderation will get that guy.
Because the computer wouldn't know if the text the human responded with was the actual CAPTCHA text.
Guess you could have the same section of text handled by, say 10 people and make the first person wait until the computer has gotten enough verifications from the next 9 users; but it would suck to be that first person.
Anyone know the CAPTCHA/sec rate for a major site (success rate, we want to exclude the botnets)?
No, it can apply to anyone, higher or lower as you will see all over Slashdot. Not related to UID at all. The great-grandparent poster apparently wasn't aware of the meme at all and took offense to someone jokingly using it on him.
Heh :)
You do realize it's ok even to comment that CmdrTaco must be new around here on Slashdot, right mr 'leet 852748?
Even so I'd still select a UNIX based pacemaker over a Windows CE one.
Billions are definitely big numbers, but space is definitely expensive. Even the basics cost a lot to do in space, and when you do something extra special, it gets extra 'spensive :)
Bad comparison. Hubble (as the first big space-based optical telescope) was also a pretty _huge_ step in technology (and launch-wise, it's not exactly a micro-sat). Similarly, everything put into developing and launching the first communications satellite cost quite a bit more and did much less than the 100th. The Hubble telescope wasn't a commodity item, so it was economical to over engineer everything. Even the famously out of focus main mirror was amongst one of the smoothest ever made.
If every bolt cost the military $100, the military budget would quickly outstrip the U.S. GDP, dwarfing the already large military budget, so obviously this isn't happening.
Depending on their function, some bolts cost $100, some cost $10, and some cost $0.01. Even outside the military.
Terrible visions trying to visualize what the non-electric hairdryers are like...
Welding torch?
The "when it isn't" part is already being practiced. Not every bolt the military purchased cost $100. The $100 bolts are being used (presumably) in the situations where failure has a high cost.
Absolutely agreed with the last half of your last sentence.
I using "diesel" in my example wasn't meant as any sort of reference to biodiesel, I just made up two forms of energy to give you an example as to why subsidies aren't sustainable. I could have called the two items "Blue" and "Orange".
I'd say as intended to be used, subsidies are meant as a temporary boost...I didn't say they are actually used as intended. I doubt the original authors of the General Mining Act framed it as something that would be in place over a century later.
And I agree, subsidies _certainly_ have distorted trade for hundreds of years.
Ok, I'm guessing from your response somehow I've hit a nerve. I apologize. In any case, do you understand now why most economists wouldn't consider a subsidy as a sustainable solution (even the mining subsidy)?
As for The Economist being mainstream or not, with a 4 million weekly readership, I'd say it's pretty mainstream, irregardless of what label you give it's economic slant (Classical Liberal? Must be a pretty popular view). In any case, I just included a link to where they have definitions of subsidies, since you were asking about the subject. I read the economist maybe twice a year. If that source offended, very sorry.
P.S. If in your condition you go to the effort to read the economist every week, you probably are wider read than I am. If you have anything you would like to share, I'm interested in new reading material.
I've never heard of the term "emergy" before (although "exergy", applied in many areas including PV cells plenty). A quick lookup on Wikipedia to find out what "emergy" is and it appears to be a word invented in the '90's. So how did this flawed "emergy" analysis get applied to "very early cells"? Just a quick cognitive disconnect that jumped out at me. Doesn't mean any of what they say is wrong, I haven't read any more of the source at all.
I'd say that reaching production _energy_ parity is reasonable, I haven't kept up on things much at all but that seemed reasonably close, although the paper(?) you quote not-withstanding, I don't know if we're even there yet. Just being the pessimist here, but the power received at the leads to a panel isn't even close to the theoretical summed output of all the cells in that panel. Group "a" may be quoting theoretical cell output reaching parity with production (energy) costs, but group "b" see's that when they try it with actual panels things fall short.
I think when PV real-world-actually produces as much power over it's lifetime as goes into it's manufacturing you will quickly see PV production facilities that are powered by nothing but their own product. Obviously for some reason we don't see this happening out there. We don't even have any manufacturers cheating by using grid power to build a large enough initial array of panels to produce a smaller stream of panels later entirely off grid, much less an honest to goodness bootstrapping of a factory. That would be wonderful marketing for the first factory that could do that, but of course none have. Of course that _could_ easily be explained by the cost as you point out, and I humbly apologize (and celebrate!) if it turns out that a PV cell can already over it's lifetime produce as much power as was used to make it. If things aren't there yet, I suspect they aren't far off, but paying for itself power-wise in 6 years (or 1 year n Phoenix)...if with a 4:1 (or 25:1/Phoenix ideal) power output to power needed ratio like that why don't we see any things like solar powered PV factories?
And of course financial parity like you say is the big deal. If the article is correct and they "eventually" do pull it off, that is great. Probably a way bigger deal than energy parity, anyway.
Thank you for the link, I'll definitely read more into it tomorrow.
Short answer, because the harder you manipulate the market, the harder the market manipulate you (sorry, I know, Soviet Russia joke with inadequate effort, it's late).
Quickly made up numbers:
Let's say you have two fuels on the market, one wildly successful (let's call it gasoline), and an alternative not so much (call it diesel). People decide for whatever reason we diesel is better and needs to be used more. Efforts are therefore made to artificially reduced the price of diesel down from it's natural price of $10 a gallon to it's artificial price of $0.01 a gallon by charging the difference to gasoline consumers. In the start when 5% of the fuel market is diesel and 95% of the fuel market is gasoline, this works. But unless something is adjusted* it will crash when scaled. As the market adjusts to the new prices and more diesel is consumed as people start buying cars powered by this alternative fuel en masse, you will have a problem; the natural, actual price to deliver diesel hasn't changed, but you no longer have the cash cow (wildly successful gasoline is no longer wildly successful) to prop diesel up. Either you need to find something else to tax to keep the charade going, or you turn off the subsidies and everyone gets to see what it really costs.
* In the real world, subsidies are often intended to be a temporary measure as a way of hopefully outsmarting the general marketplace. For example, 'photovoltaics currently (1970) aren't even close to being practical so no one is expending any effort into developing them, how can we encourage people to use them which will encourage companies to work on improving the technology?' One popular answer is to subsidize photovoltaics so they _are_ (artificially) competitive, and hope with enough eyeballs looking to outperform each other in a now large market a real breakthrough in their natural competitiveness will be made.
Photovoltaics (and most alternative energy) is subsidized so much from end to end (Research --> Development --> Manufacturing --> Consumer) it isn't even funny. In California the delivered "cost" to the consumer isn't even close to what it actually cost to get it there. The only difference is instead of that one consumer paying the cost, the cost burden was spread across to other people and therefore isn't sustainable; it works fine when 0.3% or whatever of a nations energy production/cost is photovoltaic, but can no longer be done when it is 90%. Again, the hope is that well before that point someone will have made a breakthrough making it actually economical enough to stand up on it's own two feet.
In my personal opinion (and many others, probably most mainstream economists would say something similar) while subsidies in theory could possibly work well, in reality they rarely have the expected consequence the people who created the subsidy hoped for.
After typing all that, I go to google and realize there are way better definitions of why subsidies aren't sustainable:
The Economist (popular mainstream economics magazine) has an economics dictionary, here it doesn't describe _why_ a subsidy isn't sustainable, but gives a succinct definition and links to other related concepts:
http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?letter=S#subsidy
The Wikipedia Subsidy entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy#Tax_Subsidy
And if you search google for "tax subsidize photovoltaic" all sorts of things about the current situation come up. Naturally the people who have an interest in selling photovoltaics think subsidies are wonderful and necessary
25 year lifetime is right on, but 6 year payback is sounds suspiciously-panel-salesmanish _way way way_ optimistic, but who knows, maybe there has been some revolutionary change in photovoltaics in the last couple years.
With subsidies of course, then solar power (ignoring the macro picture) is economical and in a spreadsheet any payback time you like then becomes possible. Of course, in reality this isn't sustainable, all you're doing is shifting the energy cost around, giving you an especially inefficient coal-burning panel instead.
Of course not. You would grab the child and pull him or her with extra force, tossing them behind you, to make up for their lesser mass.
I'll go back to my violent game now.
Wrong appliance.
still looked to be into it!
I have a 15Mb DSL circuit.
You insensitive clod.
Suckers! We'd just generate more power from their friggin' laser beam, at China's expense, forcing them to import more oil, driving energy prices up, making orbiting power station overlord (IT) positions just that more valuable.
A little more seriously, geostationary over the US is significantly south, increasing the distance the beam needs to travel (from already way, way up there..."well past space shuttle range" up there). This may not really be an issue, does anyone know if much energy would be lost as the beam cuts across the atmosphere?
I agree with nuke power on the ground, but a satellite distribution system seems like a huge energy sink. Maybe good for a flexible transmission system, but not a high capacity transmission system. At a certain point efficient ground transmission would make a lot of sense I think.
This is true, the guilty/not guilty part is what I meant in the context of "popularity contest". Bald faced lies in front the jury on the other hand...they have plenty of leeway to decide what her punishment will be.
The job of the jury isn't to decide on the basis of a popularity contest; the decision is...did she break the law or not?
Add that her defense involved some pretty implausible lying (someone spoofed my address, duplicated my machine ID, and sucessfully transferred files with my spoofed address...) she IS pretty stupid.
I think the RIAA tactics are bad, and that they are holding over a business model from a dying era. But that doesn't make it my right to ignore their IP rights, even if their license sucks, is out of date, and they are killing their own industry in the process.
In other words, lock the system down as if you AT&T employees as your users.
Permanently? Or just until the switch finished marking those ports as out of service rather than just off hook?
I doubt this ever actually happened in any small California town (but maybe, should be documented somewhere), although it could happen with older switches (much much older). Pretty much any even somewhat modern switch (long before ESS was widespread) in this situation would first fill up it's dialtone capacity. After awhile with a phone off hook (and then giving some time to signal with the loudest obnoxious tone to hopefully get someone's attention) the circuit would be busied out/taken out of service...freeing up some dialtone capacity...to service the next off hook phone...washrinserepeat until all the off hook phones were marked busy and the remaining phones that were on hook would be serviced properly. True that until this process has completed service to _all_ phones (including on hook) connected to that unlucky switch would be out. But we're talking minutes.
In many of these systems (probably not all, the oldest I'm sure weren't sophisticated enough to do anything after marking a circuit down and leave it that way until technician intervention) the circuits flagged down because of "minor" issues like this would be polled slowly in the background...if someone hung their phone back up and it was polled, the circuit would be put back into service. If the CO didn't have some automated system of periodically testing down circuits then it might be awhile before all the "offhook" customers got service again, because a technician would have to manually unbusy the phone after verifying it's back on hook.
Skipped over specifics, I'm tired, and I'm no hardcore phreaker, but I _think_ that is what would happen with 90% of the switches in the automated history of the phone network.
Naturally the modern stuff we have now operates via magic and is next to phrekin unstoppable, I doubt there is any percentage of phones that could be taken offhook that would disable servicing the next phone.