A trademark has to be defended against becoming a generic name for a product: look at Kleenex having threatened authors of fiction with lawsuits for describing any stuff you wipe your nose with as "kleenex". If Sarah is successful in trademarking her name, she can sue anyone who is using it in a generic way. So we would not be able to say something like "Pelosi just blew it on that one, she really made a Sarah Palin of herself". Which is the most ridiculously incredible example I can think of at the moment.
Sarah Palin is not an ex-politician. She took an Oath of Office when she became Governor of Alaska. That oath has no time limit on it. She remains a politician for the rest of her life, and beyond, such that any aspect of her life that could possibly shed light on why she acted the way she did while Governor are an open book to the American public. That is part of the deal when becoming an elected official in America.
This is especially important wrt Sarah Palin since she is a unique figure in American politics. Never before has the Governor of a State deserted her office before end of term for no clear reason, apparently just because it wasn't the fun she thought it would be (or was there something else going on?). We really need to know why that happened. And we need to know right now, since there is now the distinct possibility (that I hope is very small but it cannot be ignored) that a future President of the USA might at some point say, "Gee, this crisis is too tough. I'm quitting; I don't like the job any more".
To expand on parent post: Yes, there is the argument that the public doesn't "own" celebrities; that celebrities retain a right to privacy. This applies to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as well as to Barbara Streisand and what's-his-name, the cute little boy action figure actor who is so big on Scientology. All those guys are entitled to some degree of privacy and a certain amount of control over how their name might be used.
But Sarah Palin has moved herself from that group to another one by her deliberate actions. By taking the oath of office of Governor of Alaska, she made herself an an elected American political figure, and that means she has given ownership of much of her privacy and all aspects of her name to the American public. There is no other way the American form of democracy can work. The right of citizens to constantly examine their elected officials and publish their findings trumps the elected officials' right to privacy. This cannot end when the term of office ends, for there is a pressing need for Americans to be able to examine their history in exquisite detail, to avoid repeating mistakes.
That Sarah has deserted her responsibilities as Governor before her term was up does not somehow magically make her a political virgin again; the oath that she took is binding for the rest of her life, and beyond, for as long as any historian shows an interest in her. There is no term limit on that oath. She hopped into that bed; no matter how much she might wish for it, she cannot revirginize herself.
The only way that Sarah can limit her exposure is to move to some country that has stronger protections of its citizen's privacy from journalists than is true for America. North Korea comes to mind.
The physics is undoubtedly good for a one-off run, but it is the chemistry that will determine whether steam engines can be brought to market.
The physics are limited by Carnot equations, but current automobiles perform well below the theoretical limits. Steam engines have effective torques at very low RPMs and have much higher limits on RPMs than ICEs: they can come a lot closer to the theoretical limits. They also reduce the need for a complicated, and heavy, transmission. The power band is, IIRC, very similar to electric motors.
But the problem is the chemistry of water, which is not even touched upon in this story. Water, when put under high temperature and pressure, is THE universal solvent. To make heating coils that will survive long enough to be economical requires some pretty fancy metallurgy. Almost certainly too expensive for the market. And the standard automotive engine that is being used in this race car will be destroyed very quickly. It will be interesting to see what the initial point of failure will be. I'm guessing the piston rings will seize before the valves fail.
As much as I am fan of steampunk like this, I really doubt that there is any future for an automotive reciprocating steam engine.
I've always thought their business model was: "Always do the most clever thing we can get away with, and because we are the Wiley-est coyotes in the country, we will win out over good engineering, sound business practices, the legal system, and every other adversary. Because we are SO clever."
Microsoft is involved in theft of services from Google to boost Bing's effectiveness, even if only to a very small degree. That Microsoft is doing this through hundreds of thousands of unwitting patsies is immaterial.
What might be of interest to IT departments is whether they could now be held partly culpable for knowingly continuing to allow Microsoft to receive this data from the end user computers that they are responsible for. The prudent approach for major corporations with thousands of Windows seats would be to do a corporate wide opt-out of the "feature". Otherwise if Google takes this to court, they might find their corporate name dragged through the mud as an accomplice to criminal behavior. That could have a damaging effect on bonuses and career paths.
Except of course he did write a somewhat inspiring book, which was arguably the reason that a major political contingent coalesced behind him, leading to his nomination and then his election. The celebrations of his election outside of the USA pretty much confirms that the vision he presented was not a parochial USA only thing, but touched a universal chord.
To successfully run for President in the USA based on vision is rare thing. Among the Presidents that I have directly experienced, JFK might also have done that, but I was still in grade school at the time and thus not an objective observer.
And here I thought that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he had the audacity to write a successful and inspiring book that took a lot of the conflicts that were going on in the world and reframed their underlying questions in ways that avoided the childish "us versus them" mentality that underlies wars. His election pretty much confirmed that a large number of Americans felt that he was offering ideas that promised to move the world toward a better place, and the way his election was celebrated in many foreign lands suggests that his message was not just for the American voters, but that he also spoke for a large and diverse world-wide audience.
I realize that this opinion is not espoused by Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh and is therefore highly suspect in some quarters. But that is true of a lot of other fact-based opinions.
Whether it violates Google's TOS (is there one?) is not as interesting a question as whether Bing's behavior constitutes a theft of services. On the face of it, this looks like a criminal activity.
True. Sun was screwing up before Oracle gobbled them up.
Yet calling Oracle's actions a "coup de grace" seems like an overly euphemistic phrasing. It seems more like Oracle managed to shoot itself in the foot. With a large bore shotgun. Leaving it with one less leg to stand on, as well as a bloody mess of a trail as it zombie-staggers forward.
That is one approach (maintaining working copies of MS Office97 to work on legacy documents), and simple enough to implement now, since anyone could afford the hard drive space. Maintaining an appropriate firewall between the old and vulnerable stuff and current activities would be a bit of a pain, but possible.
But maintaining the old skill sets with the ancient software and the contexts that they need to run in (the old OSs, file systems, etc) DOES limit the wetware resources you can devote to staying current in your chosen field. You cannot continuously add to the baggage your brain is carrying forward without starting to drop stuff. If you want to keep on top of tomorrow's technology, you need to purposefully choose which of yesterday's skill sets you should allow yourself to forget. For most of us, Office97 skills are better forgotten, especially since Star Office and its descendants have always been better at managing well-formed Office97 documents. (The keyword being "well-formed": nothing is going to work on those old documents that oh so cleverly depended on bugs and glitches in the original code.)
Short answer: everyone who has been successful for a decade or more in contemporary technologies understands exactly what the phrase "I used to know all that stuff" implies. And is smarter for that now.
Actually, yes, I do think that Microsoft will piss off its customers as it pursues a larger market share or sales of other MS products. I have nearly 30 years' experience with Microsoft products, with the first 15 or so involved in sales and support software written for their operating systems. I have personal knowledge of how they screw over customers going back to Win3.1, where they deliberately failed to fix the bug from Win3.0 in the included calculator applet because salespersons demonstrating its errors in simple division were able to sell more copies of WinExcel.
At the time, this was considered a clever marketing ploy.
Only a fool would regard Microsoft as having anything more than a passing interest in the end users. They are entirely profit driven and explicitly motivated to reach and retain dominance in their chosen markets. The quality of the end user experience is only important to the extent that it supports their efforts toward those goals.
The reason many of us first adopted Star Office (before it even became OpenOffice) was to regain access to older Word documents after the company upgraded us to the latest MS Office.
Microsoft has improved things somewhat, but if you need access to a set of complex MS Office97 legacy documents, you will still have a much easier time of it with OpenOffice than with a later version of MS Office.
I fully expect that LibreOffice has inherited that ability to handle legacy documents.
Let's see, that was user testing with users who showed a preference for Microsoft products, right? I doubt that Microsoft added any ribbon patches to any FOSS products or anything like that.
Yes! The emergence of LibreOffice is an affirmation of the principles of FOSS and a resounding vote of no confidence in Oracle.
TFA failed to mention that LibreOffice has incorporated a number of significant patches that were available to OpenOffice but were blocked from inclusion by Oracle as they did not fit well with Oracle's agenda. LO appears to have done significant work on fixing what was a broken process for NIH patches and extensions. Good job!
I'm not in a position to migrate from OO to LO yet: my work is too dependent on documents received from others whose cleanliness is sometimes suspect. I look forward to migrating once LO is in the Ubuntu repositories and I can be sure of not missing any security patches. Not that I really trust Oracle to patch any security holes OO... I don't think the wait for LO in Ubuntu will be a long one.
In this kind of one-shot job, the code does not have to be good. It only has to be good enough. It would seem that stuxnet was good enough.
There is a certain elegance in not getting any fancier than what will do the job. If the writers of stuxnet had followed the ancient advice of "know your enemy", which apparently they did, they would have known what level of obfuscation was needed, and may have purposefully chosen to code stuxnet to that level.
It will be interesting to see what other malware is found in Iran. For it seems very unlikely that stuxnet was the only arrow in the quiver. It seems much more likely that it is just the first of several products to be discovered.
And yet the salt mines we've got scattered around all over the Earth have been doing this for a few hundred years, without any precautions at all.
It is probably only a matter of time before salt mine flu gains as much recognition as swine flu and bird flu. Who knows what else lies pickled in the briny bubbles?
So one of the arguments Assange's defense is using is that Sweden has in the past capitulated to USA demands for illegal rendition, and that highly influential politicians in the USA have publicly said that they want to see that done with Assange, possibly to execute him or to put him in Gitmo-- either without benefit of legal process, as was done frequently under the previous Administration.
Way to go Palin, Huckabee. The damage you two manage to do to the way the USA is perceived in foreign lands sure does help Al Qada's recruitment efforts.
All elected officials are required to pledge an Oath of Office that includes phrases about protecting USA interests in word as well as in deed. Would it be too much to require politicians who aspire to public office to sign a similar oath, and be held to it? I'm thinking that successful politicians have a demonstrated skill set for swaying public opinion, and like other professionals with specific skill sets (physicians, architects, lawyers, martial arts masters) should be held to a higher standard than the average guy with regard to their skills. This would not be a First Amendment issue since any good politician could make his points without stirring up the crazies among us, or making the USA look to foreign eyes like a lawless land.
I do not understand the parent comment, and do not see the relevance of the reference provided there.
The closest I got was in Chapter 5 of the reference where Apollo 17 found a temperature close to 256 K at a depth of 2 meters (scan down the page to the second chart insert). This is less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and at that shallow depth is probably around the average annual temperature of the surface, as in Earth caves. There is no reason not to expect the temperature to continue to decrease for many more meters before it begins to increase from core effects.
Even if it did represent a measure of the coldest layer of the Moon, it is still quite a bit below freezing, for all but the saltiest ocean water. So I don't see how it challenges the assumption that there may be a zone of liquid water between the Moon's surface and its core.
So I just don't see any relevance. Am I missing something?
I am ambivalent about parent post in a very curious way. I have re-read it several times. Some of the time I think it goes too far. But some of the time I think it does not go far enough.
It would be nice to see it modded up (I don't have mod points at the moment).
The idea that a politician should be held culpable for the effects that their inappropriate speeches have on our unstable American citizens is an interesting one. A politician is someone who seeks to develop a public following, and perhaps they should be held criminally accountable for instigating any assassination attempts. Perhaps what they say and how they say it should be held to a higher standard than Joe Sixpack's words, the same way we hold members of professions to a higher standard of behavior in matters concerning their areas of expertise.
And somewhere in between the surface and the core is a temperate zone where water is in its liquid phase. Since we have found life in every environment on Earth where water is liquid, we need to assume that there is some kind of thermal driven ecosystem inside the Moon.
Are there selenites? Possibly so. I hope the lunar exogeolists are talking with the biologists who have been studying our black smokers.
Hmm. I would have thought that the ellipsoid shape of the Earth would have less influence on an equatorial orbit than the changing relationship of that orbit to the Earth - Moon barycenter.
Relative to our frame of reference on the surface of the Earth, a geosynchronous orbit would of course be stationary above someone's head, while the barycenter would be rushing around some 2,000 km below our feet at an angular speed of 15 degrees/hr, wandering more than 30 degrees north and south of the equator on a seasonal basis. Since all Earth satellites orbit around the barycenter rather than the geometric center of the Earth, you would expect the Earth's dense core to be the primary cause of orbital perturbations.
But what do I know? Any astronomers or rocket scientists want to jump in here?
As an aside, the barycenter does its dance in the bottom of the mantle, just a little bit above the liquid outer core ( here is a quick depth guide. My understanding is that to date, geologists are not trained to look at possible astronomy influences when building models of the Earth's interior, and astronomers do not consider the inside of the Earth to be in their province. So perhaps something very interesting is going on in this region that has so far been overlooked. Or perhaps the barycenter dancing on the margins of the liquid core is just one of those weird coincidences that only a whacko would consider. You know, like continental drift.
It would be really nice to hear from some persons who know a thing or two about this kind of stuff.
An aspect of stuxnet's damage that has not yet been publicly recognized is that stuxnet's activities have created a drain on the pool of available centrifuge technicians.
Someone has to clean up after one of the spinners breaks. And there is only so much UF6 that the human body can tolerate.
Slashdot Mirror
This is especially important wrt Sarah Palin since she is a unique figure in American politics. Never before has the Governor of a State deserted her office before end of term for no clear reason, apparently just because it wasn't the fun she thought it would be (or was there something else going on?). We really need to know why that happened. And we need to know right now, since there is now the distinct possibility (that I hope is very small but it cannot be ignored) that a future President of the USA might at some point say, "Gee, this crisis is too tough. I'm quitting; I don't like the job any more".
To expand on parent post: Yes, there is the argument that the public doesn't "own" celebrities; that celebrities retain a right to privacy. This applies to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as well as to Barbara Streisand and what's-his-name, the cute little boy action figure actor who is so big on Scientology. All those guys are entitled to some degree of privacy and a certain amount of control over how their name might be used.
But Sarah Palin has moved herself from that group to another one by her deliberate actions. By taking the oath of office of Governor of Alaska, she made herself an an elected American political figure, and that means she has given ownership of much of her privacy and all aspects of her name to the American public. There is no other way the American form of democracy can work. The right of citizens to constantly examine their elected officials and publish their findings trumps the elected officials' right to privacy. This cannot end when the term of office ends, for there is a pressing need for Americans to be able to examine their history in exquisite detail, to avoid repeating mistakes.
That Sarah has deserted her responsibilities as Governor before her term was up does not somehow magically make her a political virgin again; the oath that she took is binding for the rest of her life, and beyond, for as long as any historian shows an interest in her. There is no term limit on that oath. She hopped into that bed; no matter how much she might wish for it, she cannot revirginize herself.
The only way that Sarah can limit her exposure is to move to some country that has stronger protections of its citizen's privacy from journalists than is true for America. North Korea comes to mind.
The physics is undoubtedly good for a one-off run, but it is the chemistry that will determine whether steam engines can be brought to market.
The physics are limited by Carnot equations, but current automobiles perform well below the theoretical limits. Steam engines have effective torques at very low RPMs and have much higher limits on RPMs than ICEs: they can come a lot closer to the theoretical limits. They also reduce the need for a complicated, and heavy, transmission. The power band is, IIRC, very similar to electric motors.
But the problem is the chemistry of water, which is not even touched upon in this story. Water, when put under high temperature and pressure, is THE universal solvent. To make heating coils that will survive long enough to be economical requires some pretty fancy metallurgy. Almost certainly too expensive for the market. And the standard automotive engine that is being used in this race car will be destroyed very quickly. It will be interesting to see what the initial point of failure will be. I'm guessing the piston rings will seize before the valves fail.
As much as I am fan of steampunk like this, I really doubt that there is any future for an automotive reciprocating steam engine.
I've always thought their business model was: "Always do the most clever thing we can get away with, and because we are the Wiley-est coyotes in the country, we will win out over good engineering, sound business practices, the legal system, and every other adversary. Because we are SO clever."
Parent post should be modded up.
Microsoft is involved in theft of services from Google to boost Bing's effectiveness, even if only to a very small degree. That Microsoft is doing this through hundreds of thousands of unwitting patsies is immaterial.
What might be of interest to IT departments is whether they could now be held partly culpable for knowingly continuing to allow Microsoft to receive this data from the end user computers that they are responsible for. The prudent approach for major corporations with thousands of Windows seats would be to do a corporate wide opt-out of the "feature". Otherwise if Google takes this to court, they might find their corporate name dragged through the mud as an accomplice to criminal behavior. That could have a damaging effect on bonuses and career paths.
Except of course he did write a somewhat inspiring book, which was arguably the reason that a major political contingent coalesced behind him, leading to his nomination and then his election. The celebrations of his election outside of the USA pretty much confirms that the vision he presented was not a parochial USA only thing, but touched a universal chord.
To successfully run for President in the USA based on vision is rare thing. Among the Presidents that I have directly experienced, JFK might also have done that, but I was still in grade school at the time and thus not an objective observer.
And here I thought that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he had the audacity to write a successful and inspiring book that took a lot of the conflicts that were going on in the world and reframed their underlying questions in ways that avoided the childish "us versus them" mentality that underlies wars. His election pretty much confirmed that a large number of Americans felt that he was offering ideas that promised to move the world toward a better place, and the way his election was celebrated in many foreign lands suggests that his message was not just for the American voters, but that he also spoke for a large and diverse world-wide audience.
I realize that this opinion is not espoused by Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh and is therefore highly suspect in some quarters. But that is true of a lot of other fact-based opinions.
Whether it violates Google's TOS (is there one?) is not as interesting a question as whether Bing's behavior constitutes a theft of services. On the face of it, this looks like a criminal activity.
True. Sun was screwing up before Oracle gobbled them up.
Yet calling Oracle's actions a "coup de grace" seems like an overly euphemistic phrasing. It seems more like Oracle managed to shoot itself in the foot. With a large bore shotgun. Leaving it with one less leg to stand on, as well as a bloody mess of a trail as it zombie-staggers forward.
That is one approach (maintaining working copies of MS Office97 to work on legacy documents), and simple enough to implement now, since anyone could afford the hard drive space. Maintaining an appropriate firewall between the old and vulnerable stuff and current activities would be a bit of a pain, but possible.
But maintaining the old skill sets with the ancient software and the contexts that they need to run in (the old OSs, file systems, etc) DOES limit the wetware resources you can devote to staying current in your chosen field. You cannot continuously add to the baggage your brain is carrying forward without starting to drop stuff. If you want to keep on top of tomorrow's technology, you need to purposefully choose which of yesterday's skill sets you should allow yourself to forget. For most of us, Office97 skills are better forgotten, especially since Star Office and its descendants have always been better at managing well-formed Office97 documents. (The keyword being "well-formed": nothing is going to work on those old documents that oh so cleverly depended on bugs and glitches in the original code.)
Short answer: everyone who has been successful for a decade or more in contemporary technologies understands exactly what the phrase "I used to know all that stuff" implies. And is smarter for that now.
Actually, yes, I do think that Microsoft will piss off its customers as it pursues a larger market share or sales of other MS products. I have nearly 30 years' experience with Microsoft products, with the first 15 or so involved in sales and support software written for their operating systems. I have personal knowledge of how they screw over customers going back to Win3.1, where they deliberately failed to fix the bug from Win3.0 in the included calculator applet because salespersons demonstrating its errors in simple division were able to sell more copies of WinExcel.
At the time, this was considered a clever marketing ploy.
Only a fool would regard Microsoft as having anything more than a passing interest in the end users. They are entirely profit driven and explicitly motivated to reach and retain dominance in their chosen markets. The quality of the end user experience is only important to the extent that it supports their efforts toward those goals.
Parent post should be rated up.
The reason many of us first adopted Star Office (before it even became OpenOffice) was to regain access to older Word documents after the company upgraded us to the latest MS Office.
Microsoft has improved things somewhat, but if you need access to a set of complex MS Office97 legacy documents, you will still have a much easier time of it with OpenOffice than with a later version of MS Office.
I fully expect that LibreOffice has inherited that ability to handle legacy documents.
Let's see, that was user testing with users who showed a preference for Microsoft products, right? I doubt that Microsoft added any ribbon patches to any FOSS products or anything like that.
So there was self-selected sampling bias.
Yes! The emergence of LibreOffice is an affirmation of the principles of FOSS and a resounding vote of no confidence in Oracle.
TFA failed to mention that LibreOffice has incorporated a number of significant patches that were available to OpenOffice but were blocked from inclusion by Oracle as they did not fit well with Oracle's agenda. LO appears to have done significant work on fixing what was a broken process for NIH patches and extensions. Good job!
I'm not in a position to migrate from OO to LO yet: my work is too dependent on documents received from others whose cleanliness is sometimes suspect. I look forward to migrating once LO is in the Ubuntu repositories and I can be sure of not missing any security patches. Not that I really trust Oracle to patch any security holes OO... I don't think the wait for LO in Ubuntu will be a long one.
I think it also useful to point out that
It will be interesting to see what other malware is found in Iran. For it seems very unlikely that stuxnet was the only arrow in the quiver. It seems much more likely that it is just the first of several products to be discovered.
And yet the salt mines we've got scattered around all over the Earth have been doing this for a few hundred years, without any precautions at all.
It is probably only a matter of time before salt mine flu gains as much recognition as swine flu and bird flu. Who knows what else lies pickled in the briny bubbles?
So one of the arguments Assange's defense is using is that Sweden has in the past capitulated to USA demands for illegal rendition, and that highly influential politicians in the USA have publicly said that they want to see that done with Assange, possibly to execute him or to put him in Gitmo-- either without benefit of legal process, as was done frequently under the previous Administration.
Way to go Palin, Huckabee. The damage you two manage to do to the way the USA is perceived in foreign lands sure does help Al Qada's recruitment efforts.
All elected officials are required to pledge an Oath of Office that includes phrases about protecting USA interests in word as well as in deed. Would it be too much to require politicians who aspire to public office to sign a similar oath, and be held to it? I'm thinking that successful politicians have a demonstrated skill set for swaying public opinion, and like other professionals with specific skill sets (physicians, architects, lawyers, martial arts masters) should be held to a higher standard than the average guy with regard to their skills. This would not be a First Amendment issue since any good politician could make his points without stirring up the crazies among us, or making the USA look to foreign eyes like a lawless land.
I do not understand the parent comment, and do not see the relevance of the reference provided there.
The closest I got was in Chapter 5 of the reference where Apollo 17 found a temperature close to 256 K at a depth of 2 meters (scan down the page to the second chart insert). This is less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and at that shallow depth is probably around the average annual temperature of the surface, as in Earth caves. There is no reason not to expect the temperature to continue to decrease for many more meters before it begins to increase from core effects.
Even if it did represent a measure of the coldest layer of the Moon, it is still quite a bit below freezing, for all but the saltiest ocean water. So I don't see how it challenges the assumption that there may be a zone of liquid water between the Moon's surface and its core.
So I just don't see any relevance. Am I missing something?
I am ambivalent about parent post in a very curious way. I have re-read it several times. Some of the time I think it goes too far. But some of the time I think it does not go far enough.
It would be nice to see it modded up (I don't have mod points at the moment).
The idea that a politician should be held culpable for the effects that their inappropriate speeches have on our unstable American citizens is an interesting one. A politician is someone who seeks to develop a public following, and perhaps they should be held criminally accountable for instigating any assassination attempts. Perhaps what they say and how they say it should be held to a higher standard than Joe Sixpack's words, the same way we hold members of professions to a higher standard of behavior in matters concerning their areas of expertise.
And somewhere in between the surface and the core is a temperate zone where water is in its liquid phase. Since we have found life in every environment on Earth where water is liquid, we need to assume that there is some kind of thermal driven ecosystem inside the Moon.
Are there selenites? Possibly so. I hope the lunar exogeolists are talking with the biologists who have been studying our black smokers.
To summarize this and several similar posts:
Mil spec is not at all about quality. It is all about reliability.
Sometimes there is a trade off between quality and reliability.
Thank you very much! I found your explanation lucid and succinct, and I learned something new from it.
Hmm. I would have thought that the ellipsoid shape of the Earth would have less influence on an equatorial orbit than the changing relationship of that orbit to the Earth - Moon barycenter.
Relative to our frame of reference on the surface of the Earth, a geosynchronous orbit would of course be stationary above someone's head, while the barycenter would be rushing around some 2,000 km below our feet at an angular speed of 15 degrees/hr, wandering more than 30 degrees north and south of the equator on a seasonal basis. Since all Earth satellites orbit around the barycenter rather than the geometric center of the Earth, you would expect the Earth's dense core to be the primary cause of orbital perturbations.
But what do I know? Any astronomers or rocket scientists want to jump in here?
As an aside, the barycenter does its dance in the bottom of the mantle, just a little bit above the liquid outer core ( here is a quick depth guide. My understanding is that to date, geologists are not trained to look at possible astronomy influences when building models of the Earth's interior, and astronomers do not consider the inside of the Earth to be in their province. So perhaps something very interesting is going on in this region that has so far been overlooked. Or perhaps the barycenter dancing on the margins of the liquid core is just one of those weird coincidences that only a whacko would consider. You know, like continental drift.
It would be really nice to hear from some persons who know a thing or two about this kind of stuff.
An aspect of stuxnet's damage that has not yet been publicly recognized is that stuxnet's activities have created a drain on the pool of available centrifuge technicians.
Someone has to clean up after one of the spinners breaks. And there is only so much UF6 that the human body can tolerate.
One lesson of Stuxnet is clear:
If you are going to run thousands of centrifuges, you need to migrate from Windows to a Linux distro.