If they did do such deep penetration (which seems not totally impossible given the numbers of Russians with relatives in Israel), why would they waste it in this rinky-dink raid ?
it is hard for them to be able to modify anything since the finished part will be different than our design file.
How do you check this ? Is there anything like a cryptographic hash on the circuit ? Is it remotely possible to test all input / output responses ? (I thought that would take longer than the life of the universe for even a simple computer chip.) If you have to hunt for changes, how do you know you've found them ?
It seems to me that hardware steganography could be as hard to detect as image steganography.
...was considered an extremely significant part of the eventual collapse of the USSR.
Oh, come on. Was considered by whom, exactly ?
I might point out that both sides stole constantly from each other, in many cases quite successfully (viz, the first Soviet fission bomb), as well as energetically developing their own technology (viz, the first Soviet fusion bomb with the "layer cake" design), and that the USSR did not implode because of external pressure.
You forgot the creative accounting that this would inspire. I have worked with Hollywood companies; I can guarantee you that this scheme would lead to perpetual patents, as somehow the R&D costs would never be paid off. Maybe not for every invention, but for a lot of them.
In craters caused by high velocity impacts, the impacting body is vaporized, and there isn't anything left to see. They hunted for the body that caused the Meteor Crater in Arizona for decades before that was realized.
The rim looks pretty reasonable - new craters have raised rims (see, e.g., the Sedan crater).
What does look a little suspicious is the edge of the rim - I would expect at least some debris sprayed out into the surrounding fields, which I don't see in the pictures. Also, the video from last night is suspicious - why would stuff at the bottom of the crater burn ? That should just be more dirt - meteorite impacts rarely cause fires, and craters rarely have burnable stuff at the bottom.
If this isn't a hoax, I wonder if some World War II ordinance (say, a 500 lb bomb) couldn't have exploded ? Latvia was certainly fought over during the War (2 or even 3 times in places), and old explosives can become unstable and go off for little or no reason.
SHARAD uses 15-25 MHz radar, or wavelengths from10 - 20meters.
Sorry for the mathematical typo. It doesn't change the conclusion, though. You have to use longish wavelengths as generally a radio wave won't penetrate more than a few dozen wavelengths into a planetary surface.
Also, in some ways the Moon is great for low orbiting satellites - these can have quite low orbits (it's a vacuum). Thanks to the "mascons" under the Mare the gravity field is non-spherical enough, however, that objects in low orbits typically won't last for long unless they have fuel to maneuver. The Apollo 16 subsatellite, for example, only lasted for 35 days before hitting the lunar surface.
I think, for habitation, whatever buildings you could put on the surface, you could put in a lava tube, and it would probably be a lot safer. This would be easier to do if horizontal cave entrances could be found, and LRO is indeed going to search for them - from TOA : a proposal is in the works to use LRO's main camera to snap oblique shots of the lunar surface. This could help reveal cave entrances that are not visible in a bird's-eye view.
Now, most of the Mare area is covered with 5 meters or so of rubble ("regolith") from past meteor hits, but you still might be able to find some large cave entrances not completely covered up, and those would be much easier to explore.
Re:Lava, on The Moon, really?
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Moon has highlands and Mares. The highlands are old (saturated by craters at all scales) and mostly made of a type of granite, while the Mare are relatively younger (not saturated by craters at the km scale) and made of basalt lava. This basalt lava is mostly thought to have come from the late heavy bombardment - a period of massive collisions on the Moon about 3.9 billion years ago which is now hypothesized to be from a disruption of the asteroid belt from the orbital migration of the outer planets.
Re:Lava, on The Moon, really?
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's been postulated a long time - 150 years or more. Apollo showed very clearly that the Mare are big basalt lava flows, and there are various other rilles and other lava related features.
Re:Mapping Lunar Caves
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This will not be as easy as it might seem - SHARAD uses 15-25 MHz radar, or wavelengths from 1-3 meters. A 10 meter diameter tunnel (a fairly large lava tube) would only be a few wavelengths across, and thus would be hard to see.
Apollo 17 orbited a 60 meter wavelength radar system, but I don't think that this had either the surface coverage or the resolution to realistically see lava tubes.
With this finding, I expect some nation will find the money to orbit a suitable radar around the moon to hunt for more tubes.
Re:Just one question...
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This lava flow comes from the late heavy bombardment and so the lava tube is well over 3 billion years old. Yes, the roof might fall in, but (given that there is no erosion, and no ground water dissolving the rocks) if it hasn't collapsed in 3+ billion years, the odds are in your favor.
Now, that doesn't mean that these tubes are necessarily stable, and you would certainly want to be cautious on the first visit, and provide a roof to protect against cave-ins caused by human activity, but many of the lava tubes on Earth are quite stable, and similar tubes on the Moon would be great places to set up shop.
These are almost certainly "sinkholes" into lava tubes, where lava runs out the center of a partially frozen lava flow. (Apollo 15 showed pretty clearly that at least the Hadley Rill was a collapsed lava tube.) There are lava tubes you can visit on the big island of Hawaii.
The interesting thing to me about this is that the interior of these tubes, being far from the Sun and in a vacuum, might easily contain an appreciable amount of water ice, for the same reason that the lunar poles might, but with a much more convenient distribution across the Moon's surface.
Besides, wouldn't it be cool to explore these 3 billion year old caves?
In some ways this is very cool, but the drives are 5400 RPM and I don't think are server rated. (In other words, this is not really "server class" - but 3 or 4 of them racked together might be.
Please note, BTW, that X Server is not quite the same as Mac OS X. Close, but not the same.
"The only justification for cloud computing is economic and that makes sense only if your web and db resource usage fluctuates wildly and unpredictably."
I have to wonder about one aspect of this - how the cloud will behave when everyone's resource usage spikes at the same time ? I remember how, during 9/11, the CDN's got through it OK, but many of the news sites with CDN support didn't do so well, as network congestion blocked updates from getting to the CDNs. (A CDN like Akamai, of course, was doing cloud computing way before cloud computing was cool.) The pieces worked OK, in other words, but the system as a whole didn't.
Of course, government web sites are especially prone to correlated spikes in usage, and are also ones we are likely to especially want not to fail under load.
Yes, saving money only makes sense when the funds saved can be used in other parts of your budget, and there are big parts of the budget where you can't do that. (Travel and computers, for example, were always separate, and not mixable, pots of money.) I have worked at private companies, by the way, with exactly the same mentality where any money saved was immediately taken from you, which is even less effective at fostering cost-efficiency.
When I worked for the US DOD every computer consolidation program was actually a bureaucratic power grab that had little to nothing to do with efficiency, and so would wind up costing us more. Every one.
Having read through this article server utilization is the most important factor driving better economics for the cloud :
"Our analysis assumes an average utilization rate of 12 percent of available CPU capacity in the SQ environment and 60 percent in the virtualized cloud scenarios."
(SQ means status quo, i.e., non-cloud.) This factor of 5 improvement in average utilization drives the overall cost savings and they are assuming a cloud overhead of about 45%. (I.e., if you look that their numbers, they assume that cloud CPU cycles cost 45% more than local cycles, but the efficiency is 5 times higher, for a overall cost reduction of a factor of 3.4 in the "public" cloud case, which has the largest savings.)
A factor of 5 in server utilization is huge; the question is, is it realistic ? Note that 60% usage corresponds to 100% usage for 14 hours per day, 7 days a week, or 20 hours of full usage for 5 days per week, and so would be quite high for a government web site. If government web servers dominate the cloud computing, the savings are likely not to be as large as this study supposes, because no amount of aggregation of government web site servers will get you much traffic in the middle of the night.
If you think about it, to be economically effective cloud computing (in the big picture) has to be about saving money by increasing average server utilization (averaged over all users). Cloud servers are not free, and require resources to service and maintain, and clouds have overhead. If some service is barely loading a single server, sure, I can see it being cheaper in the cloud. If servers are maxxed out almost all of the time, I bet that the cloud won't save much money. If the aggregate use is highly time variable, the cloud will not save as much money as a simple calculation would indicate, as the cloud will have servers sitting idle during off hours. For this particular article, its hard to say more as they don't reveal their actual data.
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I wouldn't use WIndows in my defense systems, either. The US DOD, however, has had at times a different view.
If they did do such deep penetration (which seems not totally impossible given the numbers of Russians with relatives in Israel), why would they waste it in this rinky-dink raid ?
This is disinformation IMHO, pure and simple.
it is hard for them to be able to modify anything since the finished part will be different than our design file.
How do you check this ? Is there anything like a cryptographic hash on the circuit ? Is it remotely possible to test all input / output responses ? (I thought that would take longer than the life of the universe for even a simple computer chip.) If you have to hunt for changes, how do you know you've found them ?
It seems to me that hardware steganography could be as hard to detect as image steganography.
...was considered an extremely significant part of the eventual collapse of the USSR.
Oh, come on. Was considered by whom, exactly ?
I might point out that both sides stole constantly from each other, in many cases quite successfully (viz, the first Soviet fission bomb), as well as energetically developing their own technology (viz, the first Soviet fusion bomb with the "layer cake" design), and that the USSR did not implode because of external pressure.
That's all that needs to be said.
Yeah, if such agents were detected the kill signal would go the other way.
So in other words, the statement that they had sex is just his personal opinion?
Yes
You indeed caught my factor of 10 math error. And, I think that SHARAD would have the ability to detect a 370 m lava tube.
Note that SHARAD is part of MRO, in orbit around Mars, not Titan. It can penetrate (Mars) up to 1 km at 15 MHz, which should be deep enough.
I suspect the Italian group that created MARSIS and SHARAD is now trying to figure how to fly a lunar instrument.
Most high velocity impacts form more-or-less circular craters - it takes a very oblique impact to make the crater oblong.
Yes, I have been there. They found maybe a few tons, including that piece. Barringer was looking for 300,000 tons, which was mostly vaporized.
You forgot the creative accounting that this would inspire. I have worked with Hollywood companies; I can guarantee you that this scheme would lead to perpetual patents, as somehow the R&D costs would never be paid off. Maybe not for every invention, but for a lot of them.
In craters caused by high velocity impacts, the impacting body is vaporized, and there isn't anything left to see. They hunted for the body that caused the Meteor Crater in Arizona for decades before that was realized.
The rim looks pretty reasonable - new craters have raised rims (see, e.g., the Sedan crater).
What does look a little suspicious is the edge of the rim - I would expect at least some debris sprayed out into the surrounding fields, which I don't see in the pictures. Also, the video from last night is suspicious - why would stuff at the bottom of the crater burn ? That should just be more dirt - meteorite impacts rarely cause fires, and craters rarely have burnable stuff at the bottom.
If this isn't a hoax, I wonder if some World War II ordinance (say, a 500 lb bomb) couldn't have exploded ? Latvia was certainly fought over during the War (2 or even 3 times in places), and old explosives can become unstable and go off for little or no reason.
SHARAD uses 15-25 MHz radar, or wavelengths from 10 - 20 meters.
Sorry for the mathematical typo. It doesn't change the conclusion, though. You have to use longish wavelengths as generally a radio wave won't penetrate more than a few dozen wavelengths into a planetary surface.
Also, in some ways the Moon is great for low orbiting satellites - these can have quite low orbits (it's a vacuum). Thanks to the "mascons" under the Mare the gravity field is non-spherical enough, however, that objects in low orbits typically won't last for long unless they have fuel to maneuver. The Apollo 16 subsatellite, for example, only lasted for 35 days before hitting the lunar surface.
Didn't Tintin explore some moon-caves? And weren't they full of ice too?
Yes, I remember that one, Explorers on the Moon.
I think, for habitation, whatever buildings you could put on the surface, you could put in a lava tube, and it would probably be a lot safer. This would be easier to do if horizontal cave entrances could be found, and LRO is indeed going to search for them - from TOA : a proposal is in the works to use LRO's main camera to snap oblique shots of the lunar surface. This could help reveal cave entrances that are not visible in a bird's-eye view.
Now, most of the Mare area is covered with 5 meters or so of rubble ("regolith") from past meteor hits, but you still might be able to find some large cave entrances not completely covered up, and those would be much easier to explore.
The Moon has highlands and Mares. The highlands are old (saturated by craters at all scales) and mostly made of a type of granite, while the Mare are relatively younger (not saturated by craters at the km scale) and made of basalt lava. This basalt lava is mostly thought to have come from the late heavy bombardment - a period of massive collisions on the Moon about 3.9 billion years ago which is now hypothesized to be from a disruption of the asteroid belt from the orbital migration of the outer planets.
It's been postulated a long time - 150 years or more. Apollo showed very clearly that the Mare are big basalt lava flows, and there are various other rilles and other lava related features.
Very low frequency radar could do this, such as the SHARAD radar used to map the subsurface water ice on Mars.
This will not be as easy as it might seem - SHARAD uses 15-25 MHz radar, or wavelengths from 1-3 meters. A 10 meter diameter tunnel (a fairly large lava tube) would only be a few wavelengths across, and thus would be hard to see.
Apollo 17 orbited a 60 meter wavelength radar system, but I don't think that this had either the surface coverage or the resolution to realistically see lava tubes.
With this finding, I expect some nation will find the money to orbit a suitable radar around the moon to hunt for more tubes.
This lava flow comes from the late heavy bombardment and so the lava tube is well over 3 billion years old. Yes, the roof might fall in, but (given that there is no erosion, and no ground water dissolving the rocks) if it hasn't collapsed in 3+ billion years, the odds are in your favor.
Now, that doesn't mean that these tubes are necessarily stable, and you would certainly want to be cautious on the first visit, and provide a roof to protect against cave-ins caused by human activity, but many of the lava tubes on Earth are quite stable, and similar tubes on the Moon would be great places to set up shop.
These are almost certainly "sinkholes" into lava tubes, where lava runs out the center of a partially frozen lava flow. (Apollo 15 showed pretty clearly that at least the Hadley Rill was a collapsed lava tube.) There are lava tubes you can visit on the big island of Hawaii.
The interesting thing to me about this is that the interior of these tubes, being far from the Sun and in a vacuum, might easily contain an appreciable amount of water ice, for the same reason that the lunar poles might, but with a much more convenient distribution across the Moon's surface.
Besides, wouldn't it be cool to explore these 3 billion year old caves?
You do know that they have agents on commission who go around looking for violations ?
In some ways this is very cool, but the drives are 5400 RPM and I don't think are server rated. (In other words, this is not really "server class" - but 3 or 4 of them racked together might be.
Please note, BTW, that X Server is not quite the same as Mac OS X. Close, but not the same.
"The only justification for cloud computing is economic and that makes sense only if your web and db resource usage fluctuates wildly and unpredictably."
I have to wonder about one aspect of this - how the cloud will behave when everyone's resource usage spikes at the same time ? I remember how, during 9/11, the CDN's got through it OK, but many of the news sites with CDN support didn't do so well, as network congestion blocked updates from getting to the CDNs. (A CDN like Akamai, of course, was doing cloud computing way before cloud computing was cool.) The pieces worked OK, in other words, but the system as a whole didn't.
Of course, government web sites are especially prone to correlated spikes in usage, and are also ones we are likely to especially want not to fail under load.
Yes, saving money only makes sense when the funds saved can be used in other parts of your budget, and there are big parts of the budget where you can't do that. (Travel and computers, for example, were always separate, and not mixable, pots of money.) I have worked at private companies, by the way, with exactly the same mentality where any money saved was immediately taken from you, which is even less effective at fostering cost-efficiency.
When I worked for the US DOD every computer consolidation program was actually a bureaucratic power grab that had little to nothing to do with efficiency, and so would wind up costing us more. Every one.
Having read through this article server utilization is the most important factor driving better economics for the cloud :
"Our analysis assumes an average utilization rate of 12 percent of available CPU capacity in the SQ environment and 60 percent in the virtualized cloud scenarios."
(SQ means status quo, i.e., non-cloud.) This factor of 5 improvement in average utilization drives the overall cost savings and they are assuming a cloud overhead of about 45%. (I.e., if you look that their numbers, they assume that cloud CPU cycles cost 45% more than local cycles, but the efficiency is 5 times higher, for a overall cost reduction of a factor of 3.4 in the "public" cloud case, which has the largest savings.)
A factor of 5 in server utilization is huge; the question is, is it realistic ? Note that 60% usage corresponds to 100% usage for 14 hours per day, 7 days a week, or 20 hours of full usage for 5 days per week, and so would be quite high for a government web site. If government web servers dominate the cloud computing, the savings are likely not to be as large as this study supposes, because no amount of aggregation of government web site servers will get you much traffic in the middle of the night.
If you think about it, to be economically effective cloud computing (in the big picture) has to be about saving money by increasing average server utilization (averaged over all users). Cloud servers are not free, and require resources to service and maintain, and clouds have overhead. If some service is barely loading a single server, sure, I can see it being cheaper in the cloud. If servers are maxxed out almost all of the time, I bet that the cloud won't save much money. If the aggregate use is highly time variable, the cloud will not save as much money as a simple calculation would indicate, as the cloud will have servers sitting idle during off hours. For this particular article, its hard to say more as they don't reveal their actual data.