If it's a nation planning an invasion . . . an advance team from the PRC
Wow, that's a bit of a stretch. Have you been watching re-runs of 'Red Dawn'? Good grief. Are they supposed to march across the Behring Straight, or what? Even the Canadians are a more likely invader than the Chinese.
Once a week each team member checks an innocuous web site, such as Joesimportedfoods.com. Maybe order something once in a while. Every week check a link, which every week returns a 404 error or maybe some innocent photo. Finally one week a photo, maybe of Joe, shows up with a clock and a calendar in the background. Just for good measure subtract some number, like 123 hours, from the date/time. Somehow I doubt the NSA would be able to catch that.
No, really you don't need to be attacking 'most vulnerable' points, just some random thing that moves a lot of energy through the grid. Excess stress capacity has been dramatically reduced to save on the costs of constructing new lines, and a decade of maintenance and tree trimming budget cuts will ensure that the stress gets distributed poorly. Large substations are clearly marked on hiking maps and often on state road maps as well, so they're not hard to find. Even if they were, an afternoon's drive following high tension lines will lead an attacker to them. All you need is some really bad imbalances in the system at multiple points. It's not designed to handle that, and proposals to adjust the system to be more flexible are consistently vetoed by executives as too expensive to the short term revenue to be worthwhile. (after all, they'll have cashed out their stock options and moved on to another company by the time it becomes important).
This stuff isn't rocket science, getting people into the country would be the most difficult part of the whole thing (and thousands of almost-illiterate Mexicans manage that every month). Once here they settle into life washing dishes or cutting grass, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and buy a used car, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and live quietly, the same as any other illegal immigrant.
Was going to reply to your post above, before it got trolled so badly. Good grief.
This sort of action is the nightmare scenario of electrical system engineers. Got talking to one as I swapped out his PC for a new one a few years ago (why the hell Mathlab takes so long to install is beyond me), and was appalled to hear his opinion of the state of the North American electrical grid. A score of attackers, spread randomly around the country, armed with deer rifles and some other easy to acquire/fabricate tools (which I won't name but you can undoubtedly guess) could take down the entire grid. And then keep it down for days or weeks, no suicide attack or special training necessary and almost no chance of the initial attack being stopped or detected early. All the reading that I've done since then has just confirmed that for me.
As you said, the large transformers and relays are all custom made, with backorder times ranging from 3 months to 2 years. Very few sites maintain more than one spare, since they're supposed to last 20+ years without replacement, and they're not interchangeable in most cases. This isn't rocket surgery either, anyone trained in electrical system engineering will see the exact same vulnerabilities and come to the same conclusion. If the terriers aren't attacking us RIGHT NOW it's because they don't want to, and if that's the case then they're something totally different than what we're being led to believe.
Actually it should be on Rummy and whoever at the Shrub State Department (Rice, I think) decided to farm out the protection of embassies and strategic consulates to mercenaries. They used to be guarded by US Marines, now embassies are guarded by Blackwater (or whatever its name is today) and consulates are guarded by the local lowest bidder. If a mob attacks a detachment of Marines the next thing that happens is a fleet of helicopters full of pissed off rednecks armed to the teeth shows up. If a mob attacks a couple of security guards their supervisor, once he has been woken up, has to figure out who he can call in to do some overtime.
That's always been a cute fairy tale put forward by the Pentagon fantasy factory, but it's never been true. The military assisted in the space race, especially in the beginning when they had the only functional launchers, but the necessities of space exploration quickly surpassed the really rather primitive needs of the military. The Apollo 1 booster was already larger and more powerful than any ICBM would ever need to be, and took so long to assemble, prep and fuel that it could never be useful as a weapon. The Pentagon never needed a booster powerful enough to send a 700 kilo spacecraft to the edge of interplanetary space, much less send two spacecraft and an electric car to the moon, nor did the Kremlin.
Von Braun and Korolev worked on military projects during the first part of their because that was the only way they could get funding. They achieved their greatest accomplishments working on the civilian programs. Von Braun made no secret that the Moon had always been his goal, and Korolev upbraided a Kremlin general that wanted to usurp some of his funding by telling him, "These rockets are much more important to our future than your missiles."
Considering that we only recently have figured out that we can't even detect around 9/10 of the matter and energy in the universe I think that there is quite a lot we don't understand.
It would be fitting if the banksters were sent to live in the Projects in LA or Chicago, so that they could actually experience what their manipulation of the economy did to real people.
Unfortunately it will almost certainly NOT be the jobs of the executives that are at risk, most likely the heads that will fall are those of the IT guys who tried to tell them that the site wasn't ready.
Internal combustion? Take along oxygen and you should be able to burn the atmosphere.
A balloon wouldn't need any fuel, and there are designs to change buoyancy of the balloon so that it could descend to the surface and sample, and then re-ascend.
Yes, and the Dakota had a much shorter wheel base as well. I had never seen the need for 4-wheel drive before and didn't really understand why some people thought it was necessary until then. Since there aren't any mountains in Michigan until that point I had always figured if you were a competent driver that 4-wheel drive was a waste of money.
No idea what your first line is about, I assume it's something to do with a TV program?
Yeah, the Rabbit pickup was a VW Rabbit with a pickup body and a reinforced rear suspension. IIRC the carrying capacity was pretty much identical to the Toyota Hi-Lux pickup of the same time period. It drove like a Rabbit, which means it was comfortable, responsive, and that you couldn't get it stuck no matter how hard you tried. Truck had 185,000 miles on it when I bought it, I beat the hell out of it for two years and had to replace brake pads and a wheel bearing (maybe front rotors too, don't remember). I didn't have the diesel version so didn't get the 45 mpg, but since there aren't any hills to speak of in Michigan the engine was perfectly adequate.
I grew up in Michigan, had relatives that worked on the assembly lines, and made car parts for a time. You could beat the oil pans we made for Toyota and Volkswagen on the floor without denting them. You could twist the Ford ones out of square in your hands. The US car companies send people to scrap yards to look at vehicles with more than x-many miles on them. If all the parts are worn out except (for example) the starter and the master brake cylinder they will go to the manufacturers of those parts and tell them, "You're overbuilding these parts, which means you're charging us too much, so our next part order will be 10 percent less per item."
My dad's remodeling business had an F-150 and a 6-cylinder Dakota. Any time it snowed and we had a job off the beaten path we would hook up the trailers to the trucks and head as far as the turn-off. We would have to drop the trailer off the Ford there and come back for it with the Dodge after dropping the other trailer off at the job site. Fairly often the damn F-150 would also need a tow or a push as well. We hated that damn thing.
Interesting. Ford apparently thinks that SlashDot is worth sending a marketing drone to monitor the discussion. That's the second or third of these copy/pastas in this thread.
This is Ford we're talking about, the company that has never managed to build a vehicle that didn't get stuck in 4 inches of snow and rust through in just a couple of winters, even when they were still designing and building in Michigan. If this were Volvo, Volkswagen or Toyota that might be a reasonable expectation, but Ford? Not so much.
"Other commodities", like foodstuffs. Speculators have driven millions to the edge of starvation by raising food prices out of reach of the world's poor. A couple of years ago the price of rice tripled, even though the world's farmers had record harvests. The price rise was directly attributable to speculators, and reportedly some boast about that on their resumes.
No, it's Ford. They'll just bolt the pieces together and expect to be able to sell you a new truck in a couple of years. Then five years down the road they'll announce a recall that is only redeemable by original owners.
Seriously? I thought Detroit had learned that lesson already a couple of times, they have to learn it again? Guess I shouldn't be surprised, Ford never even managed to build a truck that didn't get stuck in 4 inches of snow, even when they were still manufacturing in Michigan.
We garden a lot in the summer and are pretty much continually remodeling our house so I need a pickup with some regularity. My 4-cylinder 2002 Toyota Tacoma truckette is perfectly adequate for what I do, and in all honesty is probably adequate for what 75 percent of pickup owners do. Mileage is around 28-30 mpg, and it's a frack of a lot more pleasant to drive than any F-150 ever made. Unfortunately 2002 was the last year that the Tacoma was still a small pickup, the 2003 Tacoma was almost as large as the 2002 Tundra.
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If it's a nation planning an invasion . . . an advance team from the PRC
Wow, that's a bit of a stretch. Have you been watching re-runs of 'Red Dawn'? Good grief. Are they supposed to march across the Behring Straight, or what? Even the Canadians are a more likely invader than the Chinese.
Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of.
They're expensive, and almost the entire electrical network is run by private industry focused on short term goals. IOW, there aint' none to speak of.
Once a week each team member checks an innocuous web site, such as Joesimportedfoods.com. Maybe order something once in a while. Every week check a link, which every week returns a 404 error or maybe some innocent photo. Finally one week a photo, maybe of Joe, shows up with a clock and a calendar in the background. Just for good measure subtract some number, like 123 hours, from the date/time. Somehow I doubt the NSA would be able to catch that.
No, really you don't need to be attacking 'most vulnerable' points, just some random thing that moves a lot of energy through the grid. Excess stress capacity has been dramatically reduced to save on the costs of constructing new lines, and a decade of maintenance and tree trimming budget cuts will ensure that the stress gets distributed poorly. Large substations are clearly marked on hiking maps and often on state road maps as well, so they're not hard to find. Even if they were, an afternoon's drive following high tension lines will lead an attacker to them. All you need is some really bad imbalances in the system at multiple points. It's not designed to handle that, and proposals to adjust the system to be more flexible are consistently vetoed by executives as too expensive to the short term revenue to be worthwhile. (after all, they'll have cashed out their stock options and moved on to another company by the time it becomes important).
This stuff isn't rocket science, getting people into the country would be the most difficult part of the whole thing (and thousands of almost-illiterate Mexicans manage that every month). Once here they settle into life washing dishes or cutting grass, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and buy a used car, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and live quietly, the same as any other illegal immigrant.
Was going to reply to your post above, before it got trolled so badly. Good grief.
This sort of action is the nightmare scenario of electrical system engineers. Got talking to one as I swapped out his PC for a new one a few years ago (why the hell Mathlab takes so long to install is beyond me), and was appalled to hear his opinion of the state of the North American electrical grid. A score of attackers, spread randomly around the country, armed with deer rifles and some other easy to acquire/fabricate tools (which I won't name but you can undoubtedly guess) could take down the entire grid. And then keep it down for days or weeks, no suicide attack or special training necessary and almost no chance of the initial attack being stopped or detected early. All the reading that I've done since then has just confirmed that for me.
As you said, the large transformers and relays are all custom made, with backorder times ranging from 3 months to 2 years. Very few sites maintain more than one spare, since they're supposed to last 20+ years without replacement, and they're not interchangeable in most cases. This isn't rocket surgery either, anyone trained in electrical system engineering will see the exact same vulnerabilities and come to the same conclusion. If the terriers aren't attacking us RIGHT NOW it's because they don't want to, and if that's the case then they're something totally different than what we're being led to believe.
Trombone? If Joe is bad enough that he has to go out into the woods to practice that might be considered justifiable homicide . . .
Actually it should be on Rummy and whoever at the Shrub State Department (Rice, I think) decided to farm out the protection of embassies and strategic consulates to mercenaries. They used to be guarded by US Marines, now embassies are guarded by Blackwater (or whatever its name is today) and consulates are guarded by the local lowest bidder. If a mob attacks a detachment of Marines the next thing that happens is a fleet of helicopters full of pissed off rednecks armed to the teeth shows up. If a mob attacks a couple of security guards their supervisor, once he has been woken up, has to figure out who he can call in to do some overtime.
That's always been a cute fairy tale put forward by the Pentagon fantasy factory, but it's never been true. The military assisted in the space race, especially in the beginning when they had the only functional launchers, but the necessities of space exploration quickly surpassed the really rather primitive needs of the military. The Apollo 1 booster was already larger and more powerful than any ICBM would ever need to be, and took so long to assemble, prep and fuel that it could never be useful as a weapon. The Pentagon never needed a booster powerful enough to send a 700 kilo spacecraft to the edge of interplanetary space, much less send two spacecraft and an electric car to the moon, nor did the Kremlin.
Von Braun and Korolev worked on military projects during the first part of their because that was the only way they could get funding. They achieved their greatest accomplishments working on the civilian programs. Von Braun made no secret that the Moon had always been his goal, and Korolev upbraided a Kremlin general that wanted to usurp some of his funding by telling him, "These rockets are much more important to our future than your missiles."
Considering that we only recently have figured out that we can't even detect around 9/10 of the matter and energy in the universe I think that there is quite a lot we don't understand.
It would be fitting if the banksters were sent to live in the Projects in LA or Chicago, so that they could actually experience what their manipulation of the economy did to real people.
The kind that skimps on guard staff to improve profits, mostly.
Unfortunately it will almost certainly NOT be the jobs of the executives that are at risk, most likely the heads that will fall are those of the IT guys who tried to tell them that the site wasn't ready.
Since the Kochs, Olins, Waltons, and their ilk managed to buy control of Congress.
Internal combustion? Take along oxygen and you should be able to burn the atmosphere.
A balloon wouldn't need any fuel, and there are designs to change buoyancy of the balloon so that it could descend to the surface and sample, and then re-ascend.
Yes, and the Dakota had a much shorter wheel base as well. I had never seen the need for 4-wheel drive before and didn't really understand why some people thought it was necessary until then. Since there aren't any mountains in Michigan until that point I had always figured if you were a competent driver that 4-wheel drive was a waste of money.
With a trebuchet.
No idea what your first line is about, I assume it's something to do with a TV program?
Yeah, the Rabbit pickup was a VW Rabbit with a pickup body and a reinforced rear suspension. IIRC the carrying capacity was pretty much identical to the Toyota Hi-Lux pickup of the same time period. It drove like a Rabbit, which means it was comfortable, responsive, and that you couldn't get it stuck no matter how hard you tried. Truck had 185,000 miles on it when I bought it, I beat the hell out of it for two years and had to replace brake pads and a wheel bearing (maybe front rotors too, don't remember). I didn't have the diesel version so didn't get the 45 mpg, but since there aren't any hills to speak of in Michigan the engine was perfectly adequate.
I grew up in Michigan, had relatives that worked on the assembly lines, and made car parts for a time. You could beat the oil pans we made for Toyota and Volkswagen on the floor without denting them. You could twist the Ford ones out of square in your hands. The US car companies send people to scrap yards to look at vehicles with more than x-many miles on them. If all the parts are worn out except (for example) the starter and the master brake cylinder they will go to the manufacturers of those parts and tell them, "You're overbuilding these parts, which means you're charging us too much, so our next part order will be 10 percent less per item."
My dad's remodeling business had an F-150 and a 6-cylinder Dakota. Any time it snowed and we had a job off the beaten path we would hook up the trailers to the trucks and head as far as the turn-off. We would have to drop the trailer off the Ford there and come back for it with the Dodge after dropping the other trailer off at the job site. Fairly often the damn F-150 would also need a tow or a push as well. We hated that damn thing.
Interesting. Ford apparently thinks that SlashDot is worth sending a marketing drone to monitor the discussion. That's the second or third of these copy/pastas in this thread.
If they have good, experienced engineers
This is Ford we're talking about, the company that has never managed to build a vehicle that didn't get stuck in 4 inches of snow and rust through in just a couple of winters, even when they were still designing and building in Michigan. If this were Volvo, Volkswagen or Toyota that might be a reasonable expectation, but Ford? Not so much.
"Other commodities", like foodstuffs. Speculators have driven millions to the edge of starvation by raising food prices out of reach of the world's poor. A couple of years ago the price of rice tripled, even though the world's farmers had record harvests. The price rise was directly attributable to speculators, and reportedly some boast about that on their resumes.
No, it's Ford. They'll just bolt the pieces together and expect to be able to sell you a new truck in a couple of years. Then five years down the road they'll announce a recall that is only redeemable by original owners.
Aluminum will cost Ford $1500 more, that should raise the actual cost to consumers by at least $3000 if not more.
it's a steel-aluminum hybrid
Seriously? I thought Detroit had learned that lesson already a couple of times, they have to learn it again? Guess I shouldn't be surprised, Ford never even managed to build a truck that didn't get stuck in 4 inches of snow, even when they were still manufacturing in Michigan.
I wish I could get a VW pickup in the US. I had a Rabbit pickup for a couple of years, it was one of the best vehicles I've ever owned.
We garden a lot in the summer and are pretty much continually remodeling our house so I need a pickup with some regularity. My 4-cylinder 2002 Toyota Tacoma truckette is perfectly adequate for what I do, and in all honesty is probably adequate for what 75 percent of pickup owners do. Mileage is around 28-30 mpg, and it's a frack of a lot more pleasant to drive than any F-150 ever made. Unfortunately 2002 was the last year that the Tacoma was still a small pickup, the 2003 Tacoma was almost as large as the 2002 Tundra.