Readit NewsIt's possible this could be some secret plot disguised as incompetence, but it's also totally reasonable for an event like this to happen from incompetence alone, and I don't think it would surprise anyone if that were the case. So we ought to focus on the reality that this kind of outage is totally possible due to incompetence and implement measures to prevent that.
To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from.
Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them.
edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
This isn't a dichotomy. My point is that there are clear examples of situations where you aren't just pushing complexity around, but actually achieving great simplifications.
No it wouldn't. The complexity of a pattern can usually be conserved while reducing its length, but for each pattern there is a limit. This is the entire concept behind the Kolmogorov complexity of a system and any patterns that cannot be reduced any further without removing complexity are at their limit already.
This is also related to the idea that you cannot have a universal compression algorithm.
That's what modern, mass-produced agriculture gives us: tasteless, low-cost produce all-year round because price mostly trumps other factors for many, if not most, consumers. But it seems that even expensive mass-produced varieties are just as tasteless as their cheaper counterparts.
There are probably other things going on as well, but this seems to be one of the major factors at play.
If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously.
On the other hand, years of cost cutting and other “efficiency” measures can easily explain both the problems with the power grid as well as the 911 networks.
One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.