The governor of Florida, Rick Scott replaced the prosecutor with the current one who failed so hard. He happened to be a Republican. It's not just Democrats screwing with this case.
Sure, we can see it coming but until it reaches SOHO (the space probe), we don't know how severe it will be. How many times a year do we want to drop the grid when we see an event coming?
We have x-ray intensity and direct observation of the flare.
Well, you can't crank out embedded computers with a machine. But the rest of the gear, even the semiconductor-based stuff can be. A machine shop is not just a place for making screws, but a remarkably flexible manufacturing environment. We don't use them for most things simply because large scale manufacturing is much more economic and reliable.
To start with, you want to control the phase, because that's how you control how much power is flowing (and in which direction -- you don't generally want the power to flow from the grid to the power plant, after all).
That is more complicated. But it's still possible to build them in a machine shop. I grant the first one probably wouldn't be made in a week, but it's not going to take a year. I'm more concerned about components that use semiconductors (such as the "static VAR compensator" which uses thyristors). Again, it's still possible to make such things in a machine shop, but now you need some sort of experience in making and doping semiconductors by hand to specification. There would be a lot of trial and error for that.
They could have as little as an hour notice to an actual event.
Do you have an example of this? I've been hearing of lead times of almost three quarters of a day for the Carrington event (and perhaps longer) and that was apparently because a previous flare had "cleared" a path.
which will be hard to believe for people who think that drought has nothing to do with the Syrian war.
This seems a bit out of the blue. Sure, mismanage your vital infrastructure enough (be it water mismanagement or not taking down your electricity grid in the face of a Carrington event) and yes, you'll screw your society. Sure, it's bad when such things happen, but there's a ready solution - don't do that. Developed world societies (of which Syria is not part) have been pretty good at not doing that.
My view here is that let's look at actual responses to real world emergencies and similar issues. If those start going wrong, then you'll know that you need to stock up on food and ammunition. I wouldn't trust the developed world with economic messes, but they do a fair job with natural disasters.
Going back to the Syrian drought, for me the key symptom is the tremendous mismanagement of water. That alone probably is responsible for the "drought". If you drain the water table, then you eliminate the local contribution to air moisture and rainfall. For a dry region like Syria, that means you're left with what little trickles in with the weather.
There are places in California and Arizona that did this sort of thing with similar results (for example, Owens Valley in California when most of its water was diverted to Los Angeles).
What type of conceptual solutions could be used to protect the whole planet instead of just small patches of people?
Lots of spare parts. Make a grid that can shut down safely under the loading from such solar flares. The more I read of this, the more overblown I think the concerns are.
Oh come on. That's why I proposed making these in machine shops rather than in a manufacturing plant. Because there's a lot more than one machine shop in the US.
Even if that large machine shop is also not getting electricity?
Why would that happen? Get some portable generators and that problem is solved. Solar flares won't nail most electrical equipment unless that happens to connected to the grid and gets fried as a result.
And where does it get the needed materials in such a short time?
We have an industrial society. There's plenty of crap lying around in junk yards and warehouses.
BTW, can you explain how you get to that assumption?
Sure. As I understand it, transformers of this class consist of a pile of wound copper or aluminum wire, usually bathed in some sort of oil or other electrically nonconductive, heat conducting fluid. And they often have to fit in a certain form factor. A machine shop can make something with the right winding number (even if the transformer in question is the size of a refrigerator) and some degree of cooling. It's not going to take as much abuse, but the choice for the short term after such a mess is no power or some power.
A lot of the gear is unusual just due to its size and voltage/current/heat dissipation requirements, but is otherwise similar to smaller scale electrical components. I doubt they'll be able to manufacture computer-controlled gear on the spur of the moment, but manual controlled gear is viable.
I can imagine situations where any of these could potentially be litigated, particularly given the broad sweeping powers of the U.S. federal government established in the past 75 years or so.
I can go litigate against someone because the moon is made of green cheese. I might see the inside of a jail cell as a result for wasting the courts time, but that's a privilege I currently have. Merely claiming a right or any sort of opinion at all in a litigation case means nothing until the judge or jury, depending on the situation, decides that should be a factor in whatever decision is made. Sure, they could decide arbitrarily and sometimes they do go for some pretty flaky arguments.
I can't rule out that some crazy judge or jury decides there's a right to blond hair. And I suppose that could somehow survive a Supreme Court challenge. But being able to do such a thing is not the same as actually doing such a thing. FWIW, the courts don't seem in the habit of inserting frivolous crap into law. They occasional do, but it's a lot less frequent than the trained monkeys in Congress who do all that sort of thing routinely.
The "connection to existing constitutional law" is incredibly tenuous, unless you include the "right to birth control" established only a few years before Roe v. Wade. The "degree of deliberation" I'm not sure what you mean -- do you just mean it took a long time to get to SCOTUS? I mean, you do realize there's a whole cycle of appeals, granting of cert, etc. -- going through the appeals process will take years. It has to. It doesn't mean judges actually sat around and thought about this for "four years." And as to "whether SCOTUS had to rule on the matter," well they chose to rule on the matter, as they chose to rule on gay marriage recently, despite clear precedent that previous such lawsuits had been summarily dismissed "for want of a federal question," despite that the standing issues in the case were very questionable. As Scalia rightly observed -- the majority was positively eager to tell you what they thought about the issue./quote>
The point is that this stuff takes a while. Justices don't just decide on the spur of the moment, "let's make a right to have blond hair". Among other things, someone actually has to bring a case in front of them where such an argument would be relevant. Just because they aren't as diligent as you'd like in adhering to a strict interpretation of the Constitution doesn't mean that terms like "right" have no meaning.
My view is that Roe vs. Wade is somewhat poor law (that has since been fixed somewhat since the original decision). It should have been left to the states to decide (they are supposed to have considerable leeway in such areas, I might add), subject to their own obligations to the US Constitution and their own constitution, but it's not a significant problem that the Supreme Court did what it did.
I do see considerable long term risk in judicial adventurism, but to say that law has no meaning just because of that just doesn't make sense to me.
When did women exactly gain a "right to an abortion"? You might say, "Roe v. Wade." Okay. But in that case the Supreme Court said that this "right" meant that laws against it were unconstitutional -- which means the "right" had to be found somewhere in the Constitution.
So what? Let's look at this. The Roe vs. Wade case took four years from the pregnancy till the trial reached the Supreme Court. The "right" was justified on the basis that it was a consequence of the 14th Amendment. And the conditions under which a pregnancy is allowed to be terminated have been heavily modified over time. So I see several factors that make this something other than an "arbitrary" right - the connection to existing constitutional law, the degree of deliberation, and the fact that the Supreme Court had to rule on the matter.
"the right to have blonde hair", "the right to be infertile", "the right to be able to get a PhD but not pursue it", "the right to drive a car"
Remember this list? Which of these has the Supreme Court declared rights in the sense of abortion? Which has constitutional justification? Which has been deliberated on for years?
It's worth noting here that the UN's "Universal Declaration of Rights" has a lot of frivolous stuff declared as rights. These aren't recognized by the US or indeed most countries. Article 12 is one such. I have the right to troll Slashdot without getting insulted (well slandered in the legal sense) by enraged, mouth-breathing button mashers for it? Do tell.
Article 24 is classic: "Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay." Where's the corresponding right to work as much as you want? Or the third clause of Article 23: "(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection." No I don't think people have a right to these things. Most of the stuff past article 20 is garbage.
So yes, you can have a lot of junk considered "rights" and that is a sort of mission creep that we should be concerned about. But US law is pretty good at resisting that sort of thing and I bet most legal systems that have been around for more than a few decades have similar resistance to such things.
You can say that, but your explanation is merely that "no government" is impossible, not that it is equal to tyranny unless you are choosing to claim that tyranny is impossible as well. That is, after all what equality means, two things that have the same properties to the point that they are indistinguishable by any means.
I'm pretty sure if it were as simple as hand pumping or using a generator to get gas from the storage tanks, then when there are natural disasters, people would do exactly that. However that is not the case.
What do you mean that's not the case? Is there some disaster where they were unable to do this?
And those "good reasons" are? The main argument is arguing that if we ignore solar activity of this magnitude, we can fry a lot of hard to replace stuff. The solution is obvious. Don't ignore it.
Second, I don't buy that it'll take a year to replace such components. My take is that a competent, large machine shop can crank out a replacement inside of about a week. It won't be up to whatever specs they have for those specialized transformers and other components, so don't load it like fresh from the factory equipment. I don't buy that they can't jury rig a functioning grid in a short span of time.
"We've designed our power lines to work efficiently under perfect conditions - long transmission lines, high voltages," Beck says. Unfortunately, those characteristics make the grid particularly vulnerable to a solar storm. So there's a trade-off.
Third, power lines aren't working under anything resembling perfect conditions. A lot of bad things happen to them already, including strong solar storms. The speaker here is just blowing smoke. Sure, long transmission lines are relatively bad when a solar storm hits. But the capability to handle high voltages have the opposite effect, making them more resilient to high voltage effects of solar storms.
Proof: one can arbitrarily extend the existing ones with "the right to have blonde hair", "the right to be infertile", "the right to be able to get a PhD but not pursue it", "the right to drive a car". Which drives the whole concept of "human rights" into sheer meaninglessness.
What do you mean "can arbitrarily extend"? If we don't actually arbitrarily extend human rights, then it appears to me that your proof, such as it is, fails because the premise isn't satisfied. And in practice, we don't arbitrarily extend human rights to whatever the flavor of the day is.
One world government != no state. I don't buy that a really transparent state means no state. You need certain mundane tasks performed such as law enforcement and disaster recovery. Even if you don't want the state doing those things directly, it makes a good coordinator for such efforts.
Only if you do it. And it will only be done if those responsible for it are aware of the danger.
They'll have at least a day or two of warning. Possibly much more. Even if they do nothing to prepare, that's enough time to take critical components off the grid.
And if we're talking about it on Slashdot, then they're aware of it to some degree.
Yes, you would think somebody should have recorded an event like the Carrington auroras, but we do have examples where a large and well developed culture seems to have just stuck their fingers in their ears and ignored the whole plague of miracles/mind-numbing-problem/disaster/end of the world/whatever till it went away.
Or a subsequent pharaoh scrubbed that record clean because it wasn't his plagues and miracles.
A full-blown Carrington Event, like in 1859, could result in many months or perhaps a year without electricity.
Or it might be just a couple of days till the event is over. It apparently is not that hard to protect this sort of equipment against the sort of surges that a Carrington Event would generate.
Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
Depends on which media and scientists we're speaking of. For example, CNBC apparently spent a lot of time selling the Facebook IPO, including all day coverage on the day Facebook hit the stock market. Fox News is notorious for its bias. CNN just airs "live coverage" rather than actual news these days. And just about everyone notices that when news coverage from most sources actually brushes on knowledge that you know, they tend to get it very wrong - often in ways that are convenient for them. Con artists do that.
On the other side, you have "climate change" and the various shenanigans surrounding that. Such as James Hansen's 1998 testimony where they cut the A/C so they could get a great photo op.
Or "climategate", the leakage of emails from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which didn't have much in the way of actual crime (aside from Russian tax evasion and deliberately disobeying the UK Freedom of Information Act). But it did have remarkably bad code for vital tasks, chest thumping climatologists vowing (perhaps seriously perhaps not) to block publication of heretical research (and its subsequent insertion in IPCC records), and discussing concerns with research only in private (eg, the infamous "hide the decline" remark about not including tree ring data after 1960 in climate reconstructions).
In other words, a mask for public consumption which hides a somewhat more biased and human side. Con artists do that too.
Slashdot Mirror
This was political from the get-go.
The governor of Florida, Rick Scott replaced the prosecutor with the current one who failed so hard. He happened to be a Republican. It's not just Democrats screwing with this case.
It would happen again no matter the law or the outcome of the trial. People frequently make bad decisions and sometimes those decisions kill someone.
Sure, we can see it coming but until it reaches SOHO (the space probe), we don't know how severe it will be. How many times a year do we want to drop the grid when we see an event coming?
We have x-ray intensity and direct observation of the flare.
It was Lord of the Fucking Flies for the first week after the storm left.
No, it wasn't. But that is a good point. If you're going to weather a Carrington event - don't do it in New Orleans.
Well, you can't crank out embedded computers with a machine. But the rest of the gear, even the semiconductor-based stuff can be. A machine shop is not just a place for making screws, but a remarkably flexible manufacturing environment. We don't use them for most things simply because large scale manufacturing is much more economic and reliable.
To start with, you want to control the phase, because that's how you control how much power is flowing (and in which direction -- you don't generally want the power to flow from the grid to the power plant, after all).
That is more complicated. But it's still possible to build them in a machine shop. I grant the first one probably wouldn't be made in a week, but it's not going to take a year. I'm more concerned about components that use semiconductors (such as the "static VAR compensator" which uses thyristors). Again, it's still possible to make such things in a machine shop, but now you need some sort of experience in making and doping semiconductors by hand to specification. There would be a lot of trial and error for that.
They could have as little as an hour notice to an actual event.
Do you have an example of this? I've been hearing of lead times of almost three quarters of a day for the Carrington event (and perhaps longer) and that was apparently because a previous flare had "cleared" a path.
which will be hard to believe for people who think that drought has nothing to do with the Syrian war.
This seems a bit out of the blue. Sure, mismanage your vital infrastructure enough (be it water mismanagement or not taking down your electricity grid in the face of a Carrington event) and yes, you'll screw your society. Sure, it's bad when such things happen, but there's a ready solution - don't do that. Developed world societies (of which Syria is not part) have been pretty good at not doing that.
My view here is that let's look at actual responses to real world emergencies and similar issues. If those start going wrong, then you'll know that you need to stock up on food and ammunition. I wouldn't trust the developed world with economic messes, but they do a fair job with natural disasters.
Going back to the Syrian drought, for me the key symptom is the tremendous mismanagement of water. That alone probably is responsible for the "drought". If you drain the water table, then you eliminate the local contribution to air moisture and rainfall. For a dry region like Syria, that means you're left with what little trickles in with the weather.
There are places in California and Arizona that did this sort of thing with similar results (for example, Owens Valley in California when most of its water was diverted to Los Angeles).
What type of conceptual solutions could be used to protect the whole planet instead of just small patches of people?
Lots of spare parts. Make a grid that can shut down safely under the loading from such solar flares. The more I read of this, the more overblown I think the concerns are.
They'll have several days warning if not months of warning (it sounds like the Carrington event was part of a larger episode of solar activity).
Oh come on. That's why I proposed making these in machine shops rather than in a manufacturing plant. Because there's a lot more than one machine shop in the US.
Even if that large machine shop is also not getting electricity?
Why would that happen? Get some portable generators and that problem is solved. Solar flares won't nail most electrical equipment unless that happens to connected to the grid and gets fried as a result.
And where does it get the needed materials in such a short time?
We have an industrial society. There's plenty of crap lying around in junk yards and warehouses.
BTW, can you explain how you get to that assumption?
Sure. As I understand it, transformers of this class consist of a pile of wound copper or aluminum wire, usually bathed in some sort of oil or other electrically nonconductive, heat conducting fluid. And they often have to fit in a certain form factor. A machine shop can make something with the right winding number (even if the transformer in question is the size of a refrigerator) and some degree of cooling. It's not going to take as much abuse, but the choice for the short term after such a mess is no power or some power.
A lot of the gear is unusual just due to its size and voltage/current/heat dissipation requirements, but is otherwise similar to smaller scale electrical components. I doubt they'll be able to manufacture computer-controlled gear on the spur of the moment, but manual controlled gear is viable.
I can imagine situations where any of these could potentially be litigated, particularly given the broad sweeping powers of the U.S. federal government established in the past 75 years or so.
I can go litigate against someone because the moon is made of green cheese. I might see the inside of a jail cell as a result for wasting the courts time, but that's a privilege I currently have. Merely claiming a right or any sort of opinion at all in a litigation case means nothing until the judge or jury, depending on the situation, decides that should be a factor in whatever decision is made. Sure, they could decide arbitrarily and sometimes they do go for some pretty flaky arguments.
I can't rule out that some crazy judge or jury decides there's a right to blond hair. And I suppose that could somehow survive a Supreme Court challenge. But being able to do such a thing is not the same as actually doing such a thing. FWIW, the courts don't seem in the habit of inserting frivolous crap into law. They occasional do, but it's a lot less frequent than the trained monkeys in Congress who do all that sort of thing routinely.
The "connection to existing constitutional law" is incredibly tenuous, unless you include the "right to birth control" established only a few years before Roe v. Wade. The "degree of deliberation" I'm not sure what you mean -- do you just mean it took a long time to get to SCOTUS? I mean, you do realize there's a whole cycle of appeals, granting of cert, etc. -- going through the appeals process will take years. It has to. It doesn't mean judges actually sat around and thought about this for "four years." And as to "whether SCOTUS had to rule on the matter," well they chose to rule on the matter, as they chose to rule on gay marriage recently, despite clear precedent that previous such lawsuits had been summarily dismissed "for want of a federal question," despite that the standing issues in the case were very questionable. As Scalia rightly observed -- the majority was positively eager to tell you what they thought about the issue./quote> The point is that this stuff takes a while. Justices don't just decide on the spur of the moment, "let's make a right to have blond hair". Among other things, someone actually has to bring a case in front of them where such an argument would be relevant. Just because they aren't as diligent as you'd like in adhering to a strict interpretation of the Constitution doesn't mean that terms like "right" have no meaning.
My view is that Roe vs. Wade is somewhat poor law (that has since been fixed somewhat since the original decision). It should have been left to the states to decide (they are supposed to have considerable leeway in such areas, I might add), subject to their own obligations to the US Constitution and their own constitution, but it's not a significant problem that the Supreme Court did what it did.
I do see considerable long term risk in judicial adventurism, but to say that law has no meaning just because of that just doesn't make sense to me.
When did women exactly gain a "right to an abortion"? You might say, "Roe v. Wade." Okay. But in that case the Supreme Court said that this "right" meant that laws against it were unconstitutional -- which means the "right" had to be found somewhere in the Constitution.
So what? Let's look at this. The Roe vs. Wade case took four years from the pregnancy till the trial reached the Supreme Court. The "right" was justified on the basis that it was a consequence of the 14th Amendment. And the conditions under which a pregnancy is allowed to be terminated have been heavily modified over time. So I see several factors that make this something other than an "arbitrary" right - the connection to existing constitutional law, the degree of deliberation, and the fact that the Supreme Court had to rule on the matter.
"the right to have blonde hair", "the right to be infertile", "the right to be able to get a PhD but not pursue it", "the right to drive a car"
Remember this list? Which of these has the Supreme Court declared rights in the sense of abortion? Which has constitutional justification? Which has been deliberated on for years?
It's worth noting here that the UN's "Universal Declaration of Rights" has a lot of frivolous stuff declared as rights. These aren't recognized by the US or indeed most countries. Article 12 is one such. I have the right to troll Slashdot without getting insulted (well slandered in the legal sense) by enraged, mouth-breathing button mashers for it? Do tell.
Article 24 is classic: "Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay." Where's the corresponding right to work as much as you want? Or the third clause of Article 23: "(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection." No I don't think people have a right to these things. Most of the stuff past article 20 is garbage.
So yes, you can have a lot of junk considered "rights" and that is a sort of mission creep that we should be concerned about. But US law is pretty good at resisting that sort of thing and I bet most legal systems that have been around for more than a few decades have similar resistance to such things.
And if we're talking about it on Slashdot, then they're aware of it to some degree.
Great logic. "You've warned us and thus now we are aware. Since we are aware, you should not have warned us."
No, I have to disagree. That's terrible logic. And completely irrelevant to what I wrote. For example, I said nothing about what anyone "should" do.
You can say that, but your explanation is merely that "no government" is impossible, not that it is equal to tyranny unless you are choosing to claim that tyranny is impossible as well. That is, after all what equality means, two things that have the same properties to the point that they are indistinguishable by any means.
I'm pretty sure if it were as simple as hand pumping or using a generator to get gas from the storage tanks, then when there are natural disasters, people would do exactly that. However that is not the case.
What do you mean that's not the case? Is there some disaster where they were unable to do this?
Second, I don't buy that it'll take a year to replace such components. My take is that a competent, large machine shop can crank out a replacement inside of about a week. It won't be up to whatever specs they have for those specialized transformers and other components, so don't load it like fresh from the factory equipment. I don't buy that they can't jury rig a functioning grid in a short span of time.
"We've designed our power lines to work efficiently under perfect conditions - long transmission lines, high voltages," Beck says. Unfortunately, those characteristics make the grid particularly vulnerable to a solar storm. So there's a trade-off.
Third, power lines aren't working under anything resembling perfect conditions. A lot of bad things happen to them already, including strong solar storms. The speaker here is just blowing smoke. Sure, long transmission lines are relatively bad when a solar storm hits. But the capability to handle high voltages have the opposite effect, making them more resilient to high voltage effects of solar storms.
Proof: one can arbitrarily extend the existing ones with "the right to have blonde hair", "the right to be infertile", "the right to be able to get a PhD but not pursue it", "the right to drive a car". Which drives the whole concept of "human rights" into sheer meaninglessness.
What do you mean "can arbitrarily extend"? If we don't actually arbitrarily extend human rights, then it appears to me that your proof, such as it is, fails because the premise isn't satisfied. And in practice, we don't arbitrarily extend human rights to whatever the flavor of the day is.
Money only goes so far. You can rent power, but you can't buy it.
One world government != no state. I don't buy that a really transparent state means no state. You need certain mundane tasks performed such as law enforcement and disaster recovery. Even if you don't want the state doing those things directly, it makes a good coordinator for such efforts.
Only if you do it. And it will only be done if those responsible for it are aware of the danger.
They'll have at least a day or two of warning. Possibly much more. Even if they do nothing to prepare, that's enough time to take critical components off the grid.
And if we're talking about it on Slashdot, then they're aware of it to some degree.
Yes, you would think somebody should have recorded an event like the Carrington auroras, but we do have examples where a large and well developed culture seems to have just stuck their fingers in their ears and ignored the whole plague of miracles/mind-numbing-problem/disaster/end of the world/whatever till it went away.
Or a subsequent pharaoh scrubbed that record clean because it wasn't his plagues and miracles.
A full-blown Carrington Event, like in 1859, could result in many months or perhaps a year without electricity.
Or it might be just a couple of days till the event is over. It apparently is not that hard to protect this sort of equipment against the sort of surges that a Carrington Event would generate.
Deciding the whole of mass media, entering your home for hours every day, is trying to con you, is a much bigger step than deciding a bunch of power companies, scientists, and odd little government agencies you seldom think about (i.e. the National Institute of Standards) are doing it.
Depends on which media and scientists we're speaking of. For example, CNBC apparently spent a lot of time selling the Facebook IPO, including all day coverage on the day Facebook hit the stock market. Fox News is notorious for its bias. CNN just airs "live coverage" rather than actual news these days. And just about everyone notices that when news coverage from most sources actually brushes on knowledge that you know, they tend to get it very wrong - often in ways that are convenient for them. Con artists do that.
On the other side, you have "climate change" and the various shenanigans surrounding that. Such as James Hansen's 1998 testimony where they cut the A/C so they could get a great photo op.
Or "climategate", the leakage of emails from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which didn't have much in the way of actual crime (aside from Russian tax evasion and deliberately disobeying the UK Freedom of Information Act). But it did have remarkably bad code for vital tasks, chest thumping climatologists vowing (perhaps seriously perhaps not) to block publication of heretical research (and its subsequent insertion in IPCC records), and discussing concerns with research only in private (eg, the infamous "hide the decline" remark about not including tree ring data after 1960 in climate reconstructions).
In other words, a mask for public consumption which hides a somewhat more biased and human side. Con artists do that too.