this is not meant to be sarcastic but it seems like testing along this path is equivalent to answering "how prepared is our city for a nuclear explosion" by nuking the city and seeing what happens the associated loss & cost is not worth the data gained
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
The problem is this space weather stuff is pretty frequent. We had a near-miss in 2012 and in the long term it's going to happen. I think a better analogy would be to earthquake drills and seismic testing.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
so is your proposal that we could do the same by blacking out specific areas in order to identify which local systems collapse?
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
I don't know enough about GPS to suggest a method. The point of testing would be to find hidden dependencies. I'm curious whether any patchwork of localized outages could duplicate the effect of turning the system off.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
so essentially GPS is a completely passive protocol, the satellites send their unique signal down to the ground and a receiver collects three or more of these signals to triangulate itself. there’s no request/response communication, the client doesn’t talk to the satellite at all
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which is to say that precise localized blackouts are impossible, if you turn a satellite off overhead all clients within range will suffer equally. you could maybe disable a specific county or small state, but not much granular than that
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if you could see into the future, what broken dependencies would you expect in a post GPS society?
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Replying to @Nexuist @muddletoes
The scary thing in complex systems is the unintentional and unintended couplings that arise between stuff. I'm not afraid of any of the predictable consequences of GPS failure, since those have been designed for. It's the by definition unimaginable dependencies I worry about.
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Replying to @Pinboard @muddletoes
you have to remember that every GPS receiver starts out tracking 0 satellites; the default mode is also the failure mode. since you have to be moving to benefit from GPS, almost everybody has been in a situation where they can’t “lock” onto enough satellites due to location
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if there is some system that relies on 100% GPS uptime it would have failed long ago whenever the owners drove it anywhere with heavy foliage or magnetic interference
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You're conflating sensors that rely on 100% GPS connectivity with systems. Plenty of systems are designed for unreliable access to a 100% reliable GPS constellation. Lots of other systems rely on GPS indirectly, without even being aware of it.
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