tagged w/ National Research Council
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This is the first cogent look at the efficacy of waging strategic cyber war and I hope will serve to slow the rhetoric coming from the US Defense community about acquiring cyber offensive capability: “Can cyberattacks disarm cyberattackers? In a world of cheap computing, ubiquitous networking, and hackers who could be anywhere, the answer is no.”
http://information-security-resources.com/2009/10/31/debunking-cyber-deterrence-as-a-strategy/This is the first cogent look at the efficacy of waging strategic cyber war and I hope... more
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When a better way of doing things arises, an analyst who seeks to shed light on the future for their lackadaisical client base would attempt to nudge them towards the light of change: enhanced security, better control, and lower total costs as demonstrated by the Enterprise Class UTM vendors. Never have I seen an analyst firm so adamantly defend the status quo.When a better way of doing things arises, an analyst who seeks to shed light on the... more
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Is the best way to counter the rise of bike gangs in Canada for the government to create a rival bike gang? No. Is the best way to counter Somali pirates to develop piratical abilities? No. Is the best way to fight biologic weapons to develop more virulent pathogens? No.
Federal Agencies and the Defense Department have inadequate cyber defenses, but the course of action should be to beef those defenses up, not to resort to cyber attacks as some sort of deterrent. The best way to counter cyber attacks is with cyber defense.Is the best way to counter the rise of bike gangs in Canada for the government to... more
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A band of pre-eminent scientists and war-fighters has concluded that the nation's military might isn't powerful enough for the 21st Century; and so the National Research Council (NRC), an independent, congressionally-chartered body charged with assessing scientific issues, is urging the Pentagon and Congress to get cracking on developing a weapon capable of hitting any target in the world within an hour of being launched.
The NRC's Committee on Conventional Prompt Global Strike Capability believes that there are threats (like nuclear terrorism) that the Pentagon's fleets of attack planes and missiles cannot handle and which have to be stopped with the immediacy of the push of a button by a future U.S. President. It's not quite a "death ray" but it's the closest existing technology can get to that fantasy weapon. Still, skeptics roll their eyes and say that the report's authors are like a bunch of junior high school boys who have seen all the James Bond movies and believe that if a weapon can be built, it must be built.
To be sure, there are serious arguments both for and against developing such a system. Part of the justification is that the U.S. military already has such a capability. Unfortunately, it's nuclear, which renders it worthless for anything but Armageddon. But for about $1 billion, over the next three years, the nation could convert some Trident missiles — now limited to carrying nuclear warheads in their submarine launchers — to non-nuclear weapons. The plan favored by the NRC panel would replace two of the 24 nuclear missiles on each of the Navy's 12 Trident subs with conventional-armed missiles.
The plan backed by the panel calls for putting up to four non-explosive "dispersible kinetic energy projectiles" atop each missile. Each GPS-guided projectile would contain about 1,000 tungsten rods that would strike the target at a mile a second (a fuse could spew them more widely across the ground, with less impact, or let all 250 pounds hit the same point for maximum destruction). The force of a single rod, the report says, would be similar to that of a hefty 50-caliber bullet. The lack of any explosive would generate precise mayhem, "comparable to the type of limited damage caused by meteor strikes," it adds.
Sounds nifty, until you read the fine print. It notes that Pentagon studies "indicate that in most cases, a single CTM [Conventional Trident Modification] KEP [Kinetic Energy Projectile] will have a high kill probability against fixed soft targets if target geolocation accuracy and guidance, navigation, and control accuracy are as predicted.
Beyond picking off terrorists and nuclear warheads stuck at border crossings, the report cites a couple of potentially cataclysmic events where a conventional strike from out of the blue could save the day. The system would be perfect for destroying an enemy missile carrying a nuclear warhead on its launch pad (apparently, the NRC has some doubts about the effectiveness of the nation's "Star Wars" missile shield and the utility of hundreds of warplanes). It would also be ideal for taking out an unexplained super-weapon (perhaps an electro-magnetic pulse nuclear bomb) that could lead to the "loss of numerous satellites crucial to U.S. command and control."
The report does point out one area of potential trouble in its own proposal. Deploying two kinds of missiles together in the same submarine "raises at least the possibility of an accidental launch of a nuclear weapon instead of the intended launch of a conventional weapon because... prompt global strikes may often allow little time for second checks.A band of pre-eminent scientists and war-fighters has concluded that the nation's... more
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Australian and U.S. scientists said they have copied a process found in plants that uses sunlight to make hydrogen from water, potentially a cleaner and lower-cost method of making the gas for use in fuel cells.
By replicating aspects of photosynthesis, the breakthrough could ``revolutionize the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen, touted as the clean, green fuel of the future, cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale,'' Melbourne-based Monash University said in an e-mailed statement today.
Fuel cells currently used as alternatives to gasoline-powered engines in vehicles run on hydrogen that is mostly produced from refining fossil fuels. The new process would rely on renewable sources, rather than oil or natural gas, and use no electricity, said the scientists.
``Hydrogen has long been considered the ideal clean green fuel, energy-rich and carbon neutral,'' Leone Spiccia, one of the scientists from Monash University, said in the statement. ``The production of hydrogen using nothing but water and sunlight offers the possibility of an abundant renewable, green source of energy for the future.''
The method developed by the scientists uses a catalyst system with a coating that can be impregnated with a form of manganese, a chemical essential to sustaining photosynthesis in plant life, said Monash University.
Testing showed the catalyst system was still active after three days of continuous use, producing oxygen and hydrogen in the presence of water, electric energy and light, it said. Australian and U.S. scientists said they have copied a process found in plants that... more
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Petroleum may be in short supply these days, but the United States does have a related surplus: myths of oil abundance.
You don't have to drill deep into our political discourse to find suspect stories about oil, with politicians peddling the flagrantly false notion that China is producing oil off the coast of Florida, while right-wing activist Jerome Corsi claims oil is not a fossil fuel but "a natural product the Earth generates constantly."
Such declarations serve a political purpose: to make oil drilling seem like an easy solution to our current energy crisis, to marginalize warnings that we are running short on oil, and to stymie efforts at conservation or developing alternatives to fossil fuels.
Along with these high-profile claims, an array of books, Internet forums and YouTube videos constitute a subterranean layer of storytelling, creating a narrative of perpetually cheap domestic oil being denied to us by a dictatorial government. These stories may be working: Offshore oil drilling is now favored by 63 percent of the electorate. But there's another side to them: They reveal our inability to accept that the United States is not always a land of plenty.
"In America, we're a frontier nation, and so the idea is that just beyond the next ridge is the perfect farmland, a giant oil field or an abundant supply of timber," says Robert Kaufmann, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. "People don't like the idea that the frontier is now closed and we've got to live within limits."
These narratives also require spectacularly limited scientific literacy about oil: what it is, how we find it, how much remains.
The evidence for oil's organic origins is robust and diverse. Briefly, it includes biomarkers, or chemical compounds found in both ancient organisms and petroleum formed at the same time; geochemical evidence allowing scientists to match types of oil with their source rocks; lab experiments mimicking oil formation; and literally a world of geological data helping us find oil today.
Thunder Horse, a drilling area that BP operates in the Gulf of Mexico:
Moreover, Thunder Horse also defies "fossil-fuel" oil theorists who like to argue that oil comes from dead dinosaurs and decaying ancient forests. With the water depth of nearly 2 miles, Thunder Horse is truly an ultra-deep project. From the floor of the Gulf, BP has drilled down another 6 miles to hit oil. What evidence is there that any ancient dinosaur ever walked on land that is now 8 miles down? Moreover, geologists identify the deposits in which BP has found oil in the Thunder Horse Field as Miocene, a period that occurred in the Cenozoic Era, some 24,000 years ago. Dinosaurs by then were long gone, having disappeared at the end of the Mesozoic Era, some 65 million years ago.
Corsi makes multiple scientific mistakes here. Scientists never argue that oil comes from "dead dinosaurs and decaying ancient forests." Again, oil derives from fossilized marine microorganisms. The Miocene was not a point in time "24,000 years ago." It lasted from about 5 million years ago to 23 million years ago. In geological language, it's an epoch, not a period, and according to BP, the rocks at Thunder Horse appear to be 5 to 11 million years old. Moreover, oil tends to seep upward over time, so we typically extract it from rocks that are younger than those in which it was formed anyway.
Finally, while dinosaur references are irrelevant to oil, basic geological concepts -- erosion, plate tectonics -- explain how any creature might walk on land that later becomes deeply submerged. The National Research Council suggests students should know these concepts by the eighth grade.
Petroleum may be in short supply these days, but the United States does have a related... more
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