The Hobbit Hole IX - A sudden tree or standing stone

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[HairOfTheDog]

Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!

A sudden tree or standing stone

• First thread: New Zealander builds Hobbit hole
• Second thread: The New Hobbit Hole
• Third thread: The Hobbit Hole III - Journey to the Cross-roads! (Congratulations, we filled it up!)
• Fourth Thread: The Hobbit Hole IV - The Road Goes Ever On...
• Fifth Thread: The Hobbit Hole V - Where Many Paths and Errands Meet...
• Sixth Thread: The Hobbit Hole VI - And Whither Then? I Cannot Say...
• Seventh Thread: The Hobbit Hole VII - But not yet weary are our feet...
• Eighth Thread: The Hobbit Hole VIII - Still round the corner we may meet...

New verse:

Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass! Hill and water under sky, Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, Let them go! Let them go! Sand and stone and pool and dell, Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead, We’ll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed!

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[Ramius]

Shameless. :-P

[Fedora]

I didn't see The Ring--was it any good?

[Fedora]

And it will take the Internet down in its entirety. For days.

Sounds like a good plot for a thriller novel! "Frederick Forsythe's Day of the Worm" :)

[Fedora]

Good night, Ruthy!

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Whaaaaat? It was an accident, I tellsya!

;)

[Ramius]

It *is* a good novel topic. The trick is to get it written and published before it becomes a documentary. :-)

Imagine the effect now of taking down the net for even one day. Something that didn't exist in a meaningful form even ten years ago is now something that if it was down for just one day would bring the economy of the world to a grinding halt. The cost would be imponderable.

[Ramius]

What? You gotta sticky mouse there... ? :-)

[JenB]

Net down for a day? I'd go mad!

Please, keep your nightmare scenarios to yourself next time - I'm on my way to bed and I don't want scary dreams!

[Fedora]

Have a good night! BTW you have a second draft of the drawing.

[Ramius]

Now that I think about it... it's especially ironic, given that the whole purpose of the development of the Internet Protocol by DARPA (in the original ARPANET) was to create a communications web that could survive a nuclear strike in some major cities and yet still enable basic communications throughout the rest of the (surviving) country.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Welllll... maybe not.

[Fedora]

Imagine the effect now of taking down the net for even one day. Something that didn't exist in a meaningful form even ten years ago is now something that if it was down for just one day would bring the economy of the world to a grinding halt. The cost would be imponderable.

And we'd all be at the Hobbit Hole trying to post "It's dead, Jim"! :) Seriously, yes, it would be a big mess. And I'm sure various terrorist groups have been trying to figure out how to bring something like that about--something along the lines of those massive blackouts we had last year.

[Ramius]

Please, keep your nightmare scenarios to yourself next time -

OK... sorry... I won't tell you about the one with the poisonous flesh-eating dust-mites... Ever seen one of those things under an electron microscope? Yikers. And just to think... there's millions of those little buggers in your bed. Whew... good thing I didn't bring *that* up.

[Fedora]

The military's network can run independently of the civilian network, though, right? My friend who works in that area was telling me if something like that happened there's a way to reroute the networks pretty easily; I forget the details of his explanation, though.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Don't tell me you didn't know this was coming...

[Fedora]

They had an episode of MST3K where the 'Bots were telling Mike he was gross because his eyebrows were full of those kinda critters. He didn't believe them, despite them claiming they had read it in National Geographic; so they used the Nanobots to prove it. The nano-microscope showed there were indeed whole armies of creatures riding in tanks and conducting wars with each other in Mike's eyebrows. It was also determined that there were eggs and bacon and other things like that which had fallen into Mike's eyebrows and was providing food for the critters to breed. Pretty scary.

[Ramius]

Not anymore... there's only one Internet network (except for Internet2, but that doesn't count yet). But your friend is right too.

The nifty thing about routers is that they can easily be trained and/or forced to route things the way you tell them to. If certain hubs (cities) become unusable, you just adjust your routing tables to not use those places. Most of this happens automatically nowadays anyway. The protocol is perfectly designed to be able to heal communications around a sudden "hole" in the web. But even a web can be brought down if you hit all of the nodes at the same moment.

So much of the web anymore runs through and depends on the backbones of only a few major providers. In fact there was really ever only one true Internet backbone, and that was UUNet. Then MCI bought them out. There's a lot of fiber running all over the country, but for the most part it all runs together in the same trenches, and most of that runs the major highways. For example... take out I-90 at Chicago and (I-80?) in Denver, and suddenly the East coast can't talk to the West Coast.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Heh, I remember that bit! I found the link to it in Ward E, but unfortunately it's a bad link...

[Fedora]

I remember part of his discussion was about rerouting the hubs. On the fiber issue, couldn't that be rerouted through regular phone lines and satellites? I'm sure that'd slow things down, but I'm thinking in terms of the military still being able to communicate if necessary. I'm also wondering if there's buried cables branching off from the main ones and bypassing the highway chokepoints in case of that contingency.

[Fedora]

LOL! Thanks :) I couldn't remember what episode that was.