Monday, January 14, 2008

California Control

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
Ronald Reagan

You stupid Americans. You can't be trusted to control your own thermostats.
“You realize there are times — very rarely, once every few years — when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don’t want to do that,” said Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.
No. I don't. But I also don't want you to take it upon yourself to make that decision for me. Here's something I like in the story.
Mr. Somsel, in an interview Thursday, said he had done further research and was concerned that the radio signal — or the Internet instructions that would be sent, in an emergency, from utilities' central control stations to the broadcasters sending the FM signal — could be hacked into.

That is not possible, said Nicole Tam, a spokeswoman for P.G.& E. who works with the pilot program in Stockton. Radio pages "are encrypted and encoded," Ms. Tam said.
Yeah. And as we've seen in the past, crackers, not hackers, aren't very good at breaking into things that are "encrypted and encoded". Also, what this NY Times piece doesn't say is that there are no provisions for those who are elderly or in poor health who may need it to be warmer or cooler in their home.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

The truly stupid thing is how many shops/offices/private homes?/etc insist on cooling to 16°C (that's 61°F for countries stuck in the stone-age and not using SI unit)in Summer, and heating to 25°C (77°F) in Winter.

If you pick a temperature half-way between the two, and stick to it all year around, then benefits would be massive. I know there's no point mentioning environmental impact on RWRM, that no one here gives a stuff, but in terms of $$$$, the benefit in a country like america would be billions - you could actually fund an extra war on the savings, I hear that Iran's nice this time of year!