Dislike being fed crap by our leaders. The blackout.

[btiffin]

I'm not in the loop or anything, but the explanation for the big blackout (it occurred on my 40th birthday, minutes after I had received a huge pile of hamburger to take to a bar for a big bbq party) quite distressing.

Can the leaders not fess up to the fact that there was a blackout here, one in Hawaii, one in New Zealand, one in Europe (I can't remember all the major grid failures that happened that summer) and they still like to blame some $5 part in a hydro station in some small town, or the ever popular "we don't know" response?

Seems very fishy to me. Can't they just give us the truth that some cracker has figured out a way to take away our electrical grids, pretty much whenever they want? Or am I simply a paranoid conspiracy theorist living in doubt with zero faith in the powers that be, and an unwarranted dislike of being treated like a mushroom?

Cheers
Edit; improper use of the term hacker, when I meant cracker.

[rizzix]

Actually the power grid is a very delicate system and not all that easy to control -- which is also why it took so long to recover from the blackout.

So it is plausible that the system just crashed on itself. *shrugs*

[Insectoid]

This was the huge blackout happened 5 years ago? I was actually camping at the time, and only noticed something was up as we drove home and every traffic light in every city and town was out. Fortunately, we had no meet in the freezer. There was ice cream though (though it was just cream when we got home). This was the last day of the blackout in our area.

I didn't know there were blackouts all those other areas though.

[Dan]

I very much dought the black out was some kind of conspiracy. There is nothing to be gained by turing off the power for a few hours and very litte to be gained from lieing about a hacker doing it if it was ture.

Also the girds are not connected to the internet or out side networks.

You have to rember that this black out caused a very large area to go down. One operator or one computer probly would not have access to shut down all of the system to make a black out acorse parts of ontaro and in the USA.

It is rather common for power outages to happen in the summer as that is when peoleop are using there A/C units the most and there is a greater demand on the grid. As the world gets warmer (or during hoter summers then average) and our enegery demands get bigger well engery sources become fewer we will see alot more outages. Tho this was not the cause in this case as it was a cascading failure.

Wikipeida has a nice artical about the black out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003 including the causes of it.

I am all for conspiracy theoreys when they have evidence or some kind of testable hypoteise behind them but in this case "a hacker did it" is just as posible as "alines did it" with out any kind of evidence.

Edit: What is intresting about the black out and computer science realted is the race countion bug in there computer systems that failed to send a warning to the other power genating stations to stop the cascading failure.

[octopi]

I got lucky, the Niagara region wasn't affected by the blackout, with the exception of a few flickers, good thing too, as I recall I had a large work project to finish (I work from home)...although I suppose a huge blackout would count as an acceptable excuse

[btiffin]

If it was just our grid that went down I'd drop the conspiracy angle. The other major blackouts barely made our news. And these were major too. Little blips on the news. It's when I started to wonder about being treated like a mushroom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#2003

But, I'm all for NOT being a conspiracy nutter, so ...

Cheers

[md]

The reason it went out all over the place is because it's all interconnected and where it's interconnected there was (and probably still is) insufficient protection. Mostly this is the result of cost saving measures which were poorly thought out.

So, blame our leaders but for being idiots not for some silly conspiracy.

[Dan]

btiffin @ 14th August 2008, 7:32 pm wrote:

If it was just our grid that went down I'd drop the conspiracy angle. The other major blackouts barely made our news. And these were major too. Little blips on the news. It's when I started to wonder about being treated like a mushroom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages#2003

It's intresting to note that 2005, 2007, 2006, and 2008 (even tho 2008 is not even over yet) all have more outages on that list then 2003. The trend seems to be more them being reported and noted on wikipeida then there aucatly being more of them. You'll note that 2002 and 2001 are compltey missing from the list, and i dought there was no power outages in the 2 year period. This looks alot to me of simple of a case of it being reported more then happning.

Also you will note that on that list for 2003 at least 2 of the 8 where weather related, 3 of 8 still have "citation needed", and at least one lasted for less then an hour. The outages also cover about 7 diffrent countries, for a consierpy to be true all of the governments or corepations in theses areas would have to be in on it.

[wtd]

Computers and power grids are both so complex that it's not a mystery when they fail. It's a miracle that they ever work properly in the first place.

[btiffin]

Don't get me wrong. Conspiracy theories are fun, and that is how I like to treat them, fun. But I didn't mean to imply I think that governments are at the root of the outages. More a potential conspiracy of silence at not informing us of the root cause.


Come on ... they are fun. Could the Apollo 13 astronauts have lived through the intense radiation of the Van Allen belt while travelling in the tinfoil thin LEM? Could WTC building 7 have ever dropped straight down if the root cause was simple interior fire? How about the dark side of the moon? How come we never see the dark side of the moon, who set that up? Did the CIA really forge a letter linking Iraq to nuclear material purchases? Was the anthrax scare caused by one single nutter? Did Canada force an entire community of Inuit 800 miles north of the tree line and then tell the world they really wanted to live there, just so we could claim sovereignty over the North Pole? Did the JFK bullet really bounce 8 times and hit three different places? Is the price of gas really a free market? Is the De Beers family really more powerful than all the worlds governments when it comes to setting the price of diamonds? Are the Pentagon papers for real? Area 51? Could Batman and Robin really keep up with Superman and Superboy? Oh so many fun fun theories to ponder while waiting for somebody, anybody, to download the latest REBOL 2.7.6 release so I can finally start talking about something serious.


Cheers

[StealthArcher]

I lived in Yellowknife back then, and nothing happened. I got to chuckle and continue with my AOK:TC matches.

[DemonWasp]

Given as such systems would be completely isolated from public networks, I find it difficult to believe that anyone outside could have done anything. A disgruntled employee might have tried, but they'd need substantial permissions on the systems (my faith in the world would be devastated if they weren't running a limited-privilege *nix environment).

Or they could have just tried cutting some corners on construction and had a cascading failure as a result.

[Vermette]

DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY

As a similar point was made above, I nod to the great point of HOW LITTLE the energy grid goes down. Great engineering and absurd bureaucracy in an eternal struggle.