Electric Josh

SYN flood
So if the dearth of bouncy electrons fails to take down the internet, maybe something like this will. Here's to oddball, non-Microsoft operating systems!
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e-
So there's supposed to be a massive blackout; grid problems. Boston has seen no problems at all; not even a flicker. What's more, I can see sites that are hosted across the country (1, 2, 3), along with a bunch right around here, including this space itself, hosted all the way up near New Hampshire.

They're going to be talking about this for weeks. We're going to get a lot of cool explanations about how the electric grid works (or is supposed to work).

The most interesting property I seem to remember (from way back in they day, when I was an academic) about the North American electric grid is that it's a bistable system. That is, it has an "on" state and an "off" state, and the transition from one state to the other is typically a sudden, catastrophic thing. In biology they call it a switch. We read yesterday in this space that climatologists think this is the way ice ages start. It sounds, though, that we might just be looking at a switch in the most literal sense: too much power in the system, one circuitbreaker at a plant goes, thereby increasing the load on the rest of the grid, causing the rest of teh circuitbreakers to flip, too.

Oopsie.
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Oil
Okay, so this is getting kind of creepy. A Financial Times Op-Ed piece [summary] follows the same line of thinking from my short-form ramblings the other day. Or maybe it's just kind of obvious. Cool. Link from our sidebar friends at Cursor.
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Free
Just as I was beginning to suspect that this space wasn't exactly the universal hub of journalistic agendas, along comes Wired with a piece (clearly a response to my blurb) describing exactly what these "charge people for a basically free product" clowns are doing wrong.

Sure, leasing a broadband connection with a Wi-Fi base is cheap. But add a billing system - secure login server, transactional database, credit card processing, tech staff, customer service operators standing by - and the outlay skyrockets to $30, $50, even $70 a day, particularly if there are lots of support calls. (Ironically, most of those calls will be about problems with the billing system itself.)

Back
Adam is back from his two-month tour of Europe. He broke no U.S. laws.
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