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Post by JayUtah on Feb 7, 2008 10:30:47 GMT -4
The routes for undersea cables are chosen specifically. They are not just laid haphazardly. As such, it is common to have several cables laid along the same favorable routes. Therefore in the case of a dragging ship anchor, it is more likely (not less) that several cables will be affected; they are likely to run close to each other.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 7, 2008 12:27:02 GMT -4
The conspiracy believer's first reflex to anything unexpected does seem to be "this is mysterious, therefore it must be the actions of a shadowy group", but exterminating them all does seem a bit overboard.
This doesn't sound like terrorist action to me. It's a little too esoteric - not as direct as suicide bombings or destroying bridges. It also sounds like it hurt a bunch of US companies and military forces as much as it did anyone else, so some mysterious US plot is also unlikely.
Given that, accidental seems the most plausible. Sure it's somewhat unlikely that a bunch of cables would all fail at once, but unlikely things happen all the time.
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Post by JayUtah on Feb 7, 2008 13:28:42 GMT -4
It also sounds like it hurt a bunch of US companies...
Yes, it's so much fun to hear that [expletive] modem dialing Bangalore every ten minutes.
Sure it's somewhat unlikely that a bunch of cables would all fail at once...
Not really. Get out the trusty Sawz-All and randomly cut through walls in your bathroom. If you cut a swath that takes out the cold-water pipe to the shower head, how much farther do you have to cut in order to take out the hot-water pipe and the mixture pipe too? Not very far. Why? Because water pipes are not distributed randomly behind your bathroom walls; they are clustered around the fixtures the feed, and follow routes dictated by shortest path from source and common-piping constraints.
Ergo a sufficiently brazen stroke with the demolition saw will disproportionally affect the behind-wall services.
So the question "How likely is it that 3 undersea cables were cut?" is really a begged question. The answer is, "Very likely, if they took the common approach of routing them through the same favorable seabed route and made them thus susceptible to a ship anchor dredging across the route for sufficient distance."
...but unlikely things happen all the time.
Thereby challenging our preconceptions of what is likely and why.
And unfortunately conspiracism is often based on begged questions of statistical probability. They would have you believe that something is colossally unlikely based on common sense, when a careful study of the problem reveals a radically different probability.
As Las Vegas has proven, people are notoriously bad at common-sense estimates of probability.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Feb 7, 2008 15:28:46 GMT -4
I guess they were practising with us about 4 weeks back. The company I contract to has its own cable from NZ to Aust, actually two. There is a router that should switch traffic from the main to the backup if anything goes wrong with the main. Oddly it didn't. When the main cable had issues it shutdown the network here at work, well actually in all offices up and down the country. Strange things do happen. The phase, the Truth is stranger then Fiction is really true. Fiction writers have to generally stick to what sounds plausable, reality doesn't.
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Post by trevor on Feb 7, 2008 17:31:49 GMT -4
Ok,Ok, maybe not exterminate, that's a bit extreme. They do have their uses, like making me feel far more superior than I really am Couldn't we just round them up and flick them with wet towels then?
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Post by 911: Inside Job on Feb 8, 2008 0:56:55 GMT -4
As anyone who read the article would know, the Egyptians ruled out a ship's anchor. They have video of the area where and when the damage occurred.
As for the unlikelihood of conspiracies, how does organized crime work again? Oh yeah, just a bunch of random coincidences. I guess J. Edgar Hoover was right.
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Post by JayUtah on Feb 8, 2008 1:19:25 GMT -4
Actually the five locations are loosely clustered around two locations. And according to people who operate undersea cables for a living, there's nothing really suspicious about the timing or frequency of the cable failures. They just happen to have attracted more attention than others because of the disproportionate effects.
As for the unlikelihood of conspiracies, how does organized crime work again?
How did you become such an expert on organized crime?
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Post by PhantomWolf on Feb 8, 2008 1:23:07 GMT -4
I'd love to know how the Egyptians have video from the one that was damaged in Malaysia.
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Post by trevor on Feb 8, 2008 4:05:58 GMT -4
OK 911,
Lets see,
You think that the cables were cut on purpose by somebody to cut off communication to the Arab nations for some sinister reason, is that right?
Who? Why? What is it that is actually going to happen that will make you say, to us, "told you so"?
How many other forms of communication are available that will need to be disabled before 'something' happens?
As it happens, we had a power failure to the entire airport in which I work, yesterday from 6am till noon. By your reckoning that would have had to have been some enemy state cutting power so as to break through the security systems to turn some of the aircraft into flying bombs which will then fly all over the country, fall out of the sky, explode, and create widespread death and destruction to the civilian population so as to spread confusion and fear allowing for a quick invasion and take over.
Well guess what, a power pole had fallen down and it took a few hours to fix, ooh freaky conspiracy!
Stop looking for crap that aint there.
There aint no bones in icecream.
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Post by tedward on Feb 8, 2008 5:37:01 GMT -4
I understand cable ships are kept on permanent standby for repairs and maintenance. At least they were in my kids science book I used to have. Talking early 70's so assume the main section would be written around the TAT's and cannot see that that would change much. I would also imagine the capacity is a big issue. I assume that at some point a lot of transatlantic, for example, was carried via satellite before fibre. Now fibre has such a large capacity it has taken over. The capacity is the reason it is noticed. I wonder how many breaks the old copper (?) cables had in their life times?
And I bet if you looked back through history, it is littered with coincidences. Not sure what Hoover said but how about this, coincidence is not an impossibility?
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Post by frenat on Feb 8, 2008 9:31:53 GMT -4
As anyone who read the article would know, the Egyptians ruled out a ship's anchor. They have video of the area where and when the damage occurred. As for the unlikelihood of conspiracies, how does organized crime work again? Oh yeah, just a bunch of random coincidences. I guess J. Edgar Hoover was right. And how does the fact that both the "good guys" and the "bad guys" were affected fit into your conspiracy? Or are you just going to disappear again for a few days and ignor the comments and questions posted like you usually do?
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Post by JayUtah on Feb 8, 2008 13:23:14 GMT -4
I haven't seen any evidence yet in support of any deliberate action as the cause for these cables' failures. That conclusion seems to be assumed as the default under the allegations that such failures cannot plausibly have occurred accidentally, and did not hurt U.S. interests but only the interests of putative enemies of the U.S. In other words, this conspiracy theory is yet another indirect, assumed conclusion and not a conclusion indicated specifically by any evidence.
The lack of direct evidence is glaring.
Further, the two allegations upon which the indirect argument is based have been disputed. The proponent of an indirect argument necessarily assumes the burden to falsify the alternatives.
The allegation that U.S. interests were not harmed is shown by considerable evidence not to be plausible. The evidence supposedly supporting that allegation has simply been cherry-picked by people with long reputations as conspiracy theorists.
The allegation that the number, frequency, and distribution of these failures constitutes an anomalous pattern that is not likely to be coincidence has been disputed by those who operate undersea cables commercially. The allegation that the pattern is suspicious is merely a begged question, again on the part of people who habitually see conspiracies everywhere.
The evidence is pretty clear here. Despite the ignorant and blind-eyed assertions of the conspiracy theorists, there is absolutely no evidence that this cable failure is a deliberate act, no evidence that it constitutes a suspicious pattern of failure, and considerable evidence that this is a normal pattern of failures that, in this case, had disproportionally noticeable effects.
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Post by tedward on Feb 8, 2008 17:05:19 GMT -4
Interesting. There is an account out there on cable getting pinched for scrap. There's money in them thar deep...
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Post by JayUtah on Feb 8, 2008 17:21:55 GMT -4
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Post by Halcyon Dayz, FCD on Feb 8, 2008 18:38:58 GMT -4
Interesting. There is an account out there on cable getting pinched for scrap. There's money in them thar deep... The market prices for industrial metals have gone through the roof. Basically because of the appetite of the ever growing Chinese industry. Nice if you're in the recycling business. Theft has gone up too, however. A bronze statue was stolen around here not too long ago.
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