Interesting articles. Maybe the economies of scale are outweighed by the dangers of scale when it comes to a power grid. I am liking solar power and the tesla home batterie storage system. I want it not connected to the grid, but that's illegal here in Nevada so far

Yea, unh huh, and when the satellites and electronics fail, yea, that's what you'll use.
Something they always stressed in the bad old cold war days.

I think I will see if aaa still has that

I do not own and do not use GPS. I take my ponies to birthday parties, and the thought of having to back up with my horse trailer for half a mile after going down a road that was somehow "wrong" keeps me tied to printed maps and directions. I discuss the directions carefully with my clients ahead of time.

because we now have a huge interconnected computer controlled system that controls switches, generators, power loads, main lines, transformer blocks. If it goes down, for say, a virus attack, it will not only quit working, but blow up a lot of it. Look at the Quebec failure a few years back, cause by a station that blew up a transformer with a solar storm surge, and cascaded. Took them over a week to get the whole thing up. It is much more interconnected today.

http://www.crn.com/news/security/2165...

http://survivallife.com/5-weaknesses-...

http://phys.org/news/2013-06-cybersec...

Hey! Can you imagine Ragnar steering his ship via GPS? That is: if AS took place in the present period, do you really think he would use that system? Quite apart from the taxpayers' money angle, would you expect him to risk his ship and crew on anything other than his own skill and that of the officers he recruited?

Yep, if the lights go out so will all that. The old AAA road atlas was a good buy at 19.99, Also just knowing the general road number set up (odd N/S even EW) helps.

yes, we are being played like a Strad. -- j
.

We have had grid failures in the past for structural reasons, and recovered in hours or days. How would terrorist actions interrupt them for months?

Just made me think that I depend on gps signals and the Internet when I travel by car. We used to have printed maps to rely on, and maybe I should re-acquire them for the places I might need to visit in the case of Internet/gps failure.

Dale, according to what I read, they got lost at night when they lost their GPS signal. Several other sources indicated it was an intentional jamming attack, in the same way that they downed drone they later revealed. Basic night navigation skill should have sufficed. The only issue is the confusion over whether they were disabled as well. If an EMP beam was used, they well may have had no power at all, but that was never made clear. As is usual with our current government, the facts have never been made clear, as far as I am aware.

That is the big issue that I am confident we are not prepared for. One good attack on the grid, and it will be weeks or months to get it back. We did it to them, isn't it logical to think they will return the favor? But at their own time...

And should not be...

Indeed...

Exactly, you should be an Admiral....

Indeed, but they also sent the "death to Israel" missile off as well. They never had any intention of being peaceful, they just hauled in the gullible Americans..

Exactly, and you cannot have much faith in a military that cannot comprehend that, it shows a total lack of awareness of potential threats. Exactly what happened in the Gulf.

ACK!!!!!!!! A first edition....ahhhhhh..ouch.

One of the issues that has been ongoing for 50 years or so is not just the Presidential aspect (although having 2 sons in the Army and being retired Navy, I can say he has been one of the poorer presidents in regards to military support, and not just financial), it is an endemic rot within the whole command structure: Drugs and cheating in the nuclear missile groups of the air force, such that they fired several top officers, 350 million on a littoral support ship that the crew easily broke, that is still sitting in dock overseas as they try to figure out how to fix it. Just 2 examples, and there are boodles more. It comes from a command structure full of "college grads" who have no real military experience. A lack of upward mobility for enlisted to officer, and a preoccupation with what looks good but may not work well. In 1978 I was on adiesel submarine that had one of the few runaway diesel engines, with fire, to ever happpen in the Pacific fleet. We put the fire out, went back into port, and our engine men over a 6 week period, rebuilt it to new. The 350 million dollar Littoral ship is in a similar situation, and they have no idea what to do with it. It is a slightly more complex issue involving a gear assembly to allow diesels to hitch to main shafts, but anything that expensive and modular should have been desinged with a capability to swap units out as well. You cant have modular mission design without modular engineering to allow for quick repair and back in service. Instead, they have a huge, expensive buoy. I think Mike and Stormi both have valid points, it is a complex issue with a lot of causes and issues.

It is easy in this forum to complain about President Obama. I cited several presidents with Navy experience. Can you tell me that the US Navy shone because of the special insights of President Nixon or President Johnson? How did President Franklin Roosevelt's seven years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy work out for the fleet when he became President? Was George H.W. Bush better for the Navy than President Clinton?

We agree that learning celestial navigation is an important skill.

Haven't looked at them in a while, but I have my dad's sextant, my great-great-uncle's artificial horizon and his slide rule, and my very own 1963 edition of Bowditch, plus my father's 1874 edition he bought in a bookstore while tied up in San Francisco. His first-edition of the same book (Blunt's Practical Navigator, but actually by Bowditch) was tossed out by an ex-relative "because it was old". Those were going for $10,000 30 years ago. Blood boils every time I think of it.

The sextants shots went okay, but I had an "attitude" problem with the book we were using, and didn't use the right hemisphere. Duh. Maybe that's why I never made admiral.

what happened? Was the chronometer out? Was local time zone not factored in?

That tricky little event called EMP will make this skill very very needed.

regardless of our sailors' being lost, they were treated
like hostile invaders. . a nation which just struck a deal
with us should not have behaved like that. -- j
.