Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
Granted, but how does satellite radar actually see ships at all? How do the ships not blend into the ocean (the relative difference between the distances between ship<->satellite and ocean<->satellite is minescule)?
It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at.
The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).
I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.
Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.
But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close.
For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.
You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel.
Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone.
Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
When you stop moderating input, that's when someone builds a fuse filesystem on top of it. We had those for discord (dsfs), twitterfs, redditfs, yt-media-storage, etc. It's also when someone starts using it to distribute malware, like websites built on a combination of GitHub and a cdn.
We are talking about a different kind of moderation. People want to filter out incorrect information that in their opinion damages the reputation of Arxiv, eg covid stuff. It's not about dumping binary data.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The real question is about moderation with the goal of checking truth and the scientific content. Obviously illegal content and ddos type overloading attacks need to be blocked.
Very different philosophies are clashing here. Arxiv came about in an age of different zeitgeist. We may never get back to that moment.
> Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs?
No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.
> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.
This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.
And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.
The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.
Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).
If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.
> arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.
This just isn't true. arXiv nowadays has to deal with major moderation demands due to the influx of absolute drivel, spam, and slop that non-academics and less-than-quality academics have been uploading to the site.
Moderation for arXiv isn't perfect or comprehensive but they put so much work into trying to keep the worst of the content off their site. At this point while they aren't doing full blown peer review, they are putting a lot of work into providing first pass moderation that ensures the content in their academic categories is of at least some level of respectable academic quality.
volunteer moderators are a valid option however this is also the way peer review works and the system is unfortunately very problematic and exploitative.
First pass sanity checks are also a lot less fun than proper peer review so paying moderators to do it is probably safer in the long run or else you end up with cliques of moderators who only keep moderating out of spite/personal vendettas against certain groups or fields.
Not really? "The projects" are a consequence of a very specific approach to government housing construction.
There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.
i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.
A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.
Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.
Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
> Any program created by the US government can be captured and handicapped, like has been done to the USPS.
Agreed but even despite that they generally are a net positive.
> Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
The same postmaster general who is a longstanding board member at FedEx.
And the US Post was still an extremely effective agency for well over 150 years, only truly beginning to become shackled when Nixon transformed it into the USPS in the 70s, and even then it retained most of its efficacy until the 2000s and 2010s when it truly began to fall onto its last legs.
But also despite being shackled the way it currently is, it's not exactly nontrivial to reform it provided there was any political momentum towards doing so. So it may get its legs back in the days following this administration.
It's worth noting that Left-wing UBI can still be seen as a mechanism to replace social safety programs. It just requires that disability payments, etc be merged with the UBI system such that added disability needs can be treated like additional tax credits that get applied to the fixed-interval interest-free loan disbursement from the government based on your taxes that UBI effectively is.
In such a system you get your base UBI tax credit which pushes your tax burden into the negative. Additional UBI-elligible tax credits can push that tax burden even further negative. You can file the paperwork to adjust this at any point in the year and if it's for the current year the tax credit is prorated relative to the date of the next disbursement date (and the full amount for the next year).
Then your UBI disbursement updates and you get it. It works the same way as updating your W-4 tax withholding for a standard W-2 position.
At the end of the year of course your taxes all need to zero out still and if not you either get a bill or a refund.
And this also moves all of the social safety program fraud prevention together into the same system within your tax agency (IRS for the US, or state/local agency, or whatever else).
So instead of a bunch of different agencies and systems for avoiding and finding fraud it all rolls together into the responsibility of the IRS tax assessors, auditors, and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit. And while the rich hate the IRS and common media frames them as incompetent, the people at the IRS are in general extremely competent and more than willing to help and accommodate your average person (less so for the rich who get caught systematically trying to defraud the IRS).
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.