Again, not a very strong argument. What do you expect the bible to do-- to launch into an explanation of heliocentrism and what happened in orbital dynamics, such that the sun didn't set during the battle?
If the Sun stopped moving across the sky, how would you describe it? I'm pretty sure the first words out of my mouth would not be speculating about how the Earth's rotation had stopped and Earth had stopped in its orbit; instead, I would describe the phenomenon that I was observing-- that the sun stayed fixed above me for whatever reason instead of moving across the sky as normal.
Sorry. That's not what it says. I'm not Christian, either. But I don't see anything in there that favors geocentrism.
Lets see, god creates the Earth first, then creates the sun and moon in the earth sky to rule day and night, then the stars are just an afterthough. Sounds to me like the Earth is the center and most important part of it all.
Interesting. So anything that is created first is the center or most important?
Sorry, if you're going to make an argument about the accuracy of the text, you're going to have to argue based on things actually in the text. You're also going to have to take into account prevailing theories about how the text should be interpreted. There's plenty you can find fault with there, but the way you're proceeding isn't doing your argument any favors.
With respect to cosmology the bible makes claims that the earth is the center of the universe and the church agree for most of biblical history. We know have testable theories that show that earth is but a tiny planet in a large solar system in a larger galaxy, in a larger universe.
I don't believe the bible says the earth is at the center of the universe. Would you like to cite an actual passage that says it does, or instead to stop spewing misinformation?
Man, will you people read how it works before you object?
1:bits:date:resource:ext:salt:suffix
The stamp consists of seven fields. The version number (version zero is simpler, but has some limitations). The claimed bit value. If the stamp does not really hash with the purported leading zero bits, it is not valid. The date (and time) a stamp was minted. Stamps in the future and those too far in the past may be judged invalid. The resource for which a stamp is minted. Perhaps an e-mail address, but also possibly a URI or other named resource. Extensions that a specialized application may want. Any additional data could be placed in here, but in usage so far, this field is generally left empty. A random salt that distinguished this stamp from any other one minted for the same resource and date. For example, two different people may reasonably want to send e-mail to my same address on the same day. They should not be disqualified by my use of a double spend database. But if each of them uses a random salt, their complete stamps will differ. The suffix is the real work of the algorithm. Given the first six fields, a minter must try many sequential suffix values to produce a stamp that hashes with the desired number of leading zeros.
So you'd need to generate your hash table for each email address, time, and salt combination.. ummmmm, I don't think so. The cheapest attack is just the (on the order of) 2^10 operation birthday attack on the 20 bit key.
His brother, Kevin McBride, says the boys were also taught how to shoot. "We were taught to protect ourselves and what was ours at a very early age and started carrying guns for hunting when we were very young," Kevin says.
The problem is that if someone steals your cookie, it's a perpetual credential. So the impact of any other security vulnerabilities that allow someone to steal your cookie are much greater.
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
People had gotten hurt in the past; the jury found that McDonalds was keeping the coffee 40-50 degrees hotter than it was typically served at to cut down on free refills. The woman in question had originally asked just for medical costs; but when the jury was confronted with the facts (including that McDonalds had still not decreased the temperature of their coffee), they decided to award large punitive damages, which were reduced by the trial court to $480,000 (3x what they found to be actual damages).
Is it so clear cut? No. I'm as much of a critic of frivolous lawsuits as anyone, but really, the McDonalds case is a pretty bad example.
Here's the post from google's cache that prompted the secret service-- get it while it's still hot.
From the post:
Please kill George Bush. I hate him so much. I think he is a giant dick and I want terrible things to happen to him. I'm not really big on the specifics of how he dies, but if you could at least arrange it so that the authorities find his dead body on top of an underage black male prostitute surrounded by a mountain of cocaine and child pornography, that would really be super-awesome. And maybe you could have some media people there when the police find the body, so they can take pictures and stuff. That'd be fucking GREAT.
I can see why the Secret Service would want to visit someone after they say something like that.. (sure, context weakens it a bit, but it is borderline nutty and definitely can be construed as a threat against the president.)
If you go back to old articles about SunOS when it was first upgraded to 64 bits (becoming Solaris), you will find plenty of articles describing the flaws and the lack of stability in the product.
Are you on crack?
Solaris 1.x was SunOS 4 (BSD derived)+ OpenWindows; Solaris 2.x was SunOS 5 (SysV derived) + OpenWindows. Both were 32 bit operating systems running on 32 bit hardware (ignoring things like large file support), until UltraSPARC hardware came along and Solaris 7/2.7 added support for 64 bit operation in 1998 (this is 7 years after Solaris 1.0 shipped, and 6 years after Solaris 2.0 shipped).
(no remote buffer overflow exploits, not that it would matter if a buffer were to overflow, since the data would be discarded instead of being passed to the CLI).
I don't think you understand buffer overflow exploits.
Stack buffer overflows exploit the calling conventions of the language an application is written in; for instance, writing past the end of an array on stack to overwrite the return address pointer. When the function experiencing the overflow returns, it runs code of your choice.
Some exploits put the malicious code to be run on the stack. This is an area VMS has traditionally been strong against, because the stack is mapped nonexecutable. But it still is possible to return to code of your choice in the program with an arbitrary stack frame set up.
I agree VMS is very technically nice, but as to it having some magical security properties of the type you describe-- I don't think so.
Most gun manufacturers fire a few rounds from the gun on a test target as QA; many include the brass/target in the product packaging as evidence of this.
As to ballistic fingerprinting-- I don't think this is done in the US except on a limited basis in Maryland, where it has met with little success. The marks/scratches left by a gun are not that distinctive (99 to 99.9% confidence is good enough for criminal cases to see if a particular suspicious weapon is involved; it's not good enough to select a murder weapon from among millions). Furthermore, the marks left change over time with use of the weapon, so measuring what the gun does when brand new would not be very helpful.
One document obtained by the AP, a 1998 U.S. government business solicitation, mandated that "any color printer must include a tracing system that encodes system identification in any output. This will tie the output to the originating equipment so that forensic identification of the equipment is possible in the event of illegal printing of currency images due to failure or circumvention of the recognition system(s)...."
In a number of contracts where the US government has bought printers, they've required tracing features to be present-- effectively forcing them to be in printers sold to the general public as well. So effectively, many color printers are embedding their serial number in output documents. (And this is a lot more damaging-- saying this particular printer made a particular document, rather than a Epson Stylus 700).
Don't forget a UPS otherwise you're still screwed if the power goes out.
From the parent:
Get a double-pole-double-throw relay. This basically connects one line through when there is power, and another when there isn't. Let the line from the Asterisk server go through when there is power, and the unmodified PSTN line go through when there isn't.
Maybe you should read mmkay? He doesn't need a UPS to make outgoing calls on this setup when the power is off.
OK, you're right. I should do less math in my head and more with Google calculator;). Still, a tower 62 miles high bearing those types of load made of out diamond.. is not happening anytime soon. There is a better chance technology will exist to build the space elevator.
Finally, all this talk about radiation is a little irrelevent if Wikipedia is accurate. According to the article on the Van Allen belts, the dose rate for a satellite with 3mm of aluminum cladding is about 2500 rem/yr. Even if it takes a day to go through the Van Allen belts, this is a dose of about 7 rem.
Maximum permissible dose (MPD), dose values based on the general recommendations by the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) (see radiation protection), which stipulate that the average individual occupational dose to the whole body or to radiation-sensitive organs should not exceed 5 rems per year.
The MPD dosing guidelines are a factor of 5 below detectable physiological effects, additional shielding could be provided if launch is so cheap, and the total time to ascend 5995km at 320km/hr is 18 hours (and the time spent in the Van Allen belts is a fraction of this).
Well, ignoring the fact that if you take the space elevator up to about 700km you have the same potential energy as LEO, without spending a substantial amount of time in the lower belts (which don't have that high of a dose rate anyways).
The space "railway" is a ridiculous concept. The author of that paper states that if the mass of the elevator were concentrated in one point (the structural best case), it would result in a column "only" 80cm on the side. Wow, that's only 2.3 *10^8 kilograms of diamond. You're talking (at 100% efficiency), 1*10^14 joules just to lift the column to an average height of 50km (not counting whatever goes on top). Likewise, to make the diamond, just looking at the raw potential difference between graphite and diamond (even ignoring the massive activation energy required, and >99.9% inefficiency in current industrial diamond production processes), you need another 5*10^3 joules of energy. Plus, you need some as-yet uninvented mechanism to bind the industrial diamonds together and maintain the compressive strength. And there will be huge bending moments supplied by wind that will exceed the structural limits of diamond.
Even the space elevator today relies on Unobtanium (undeveloped miracle materials and processes). This "space train" is far worse.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
Um, what? LEO is generally considered to be below 500km or so; the inner Van Allen belts start at 650km. Exactly what problem are you trying to solve?
I agree that for interplanetary stuff you may want something faster than the space elevator.. but for LEO you don't exactly get close to the Van Allen belts. Please elaborate.
That is probably not a valid debt anymore; for instance, in California:
What about the relevant time limits?
The debt does not become some kind of "new" debt just because of being sold. For example, the seven-year credit reporting time limit is still based on the original delinquency date with the original creditor. The statute of limitations for filing lawsuits is also based on that same date. These limits can not be legitimately "reset" by a collection agency that has bought the debt.
However, the statute of limitations may possibly be reset if the debtor makes a specific promise to pay, or a partial payment.
So as long as you haven't told them you're going to pay in the past 7 years, (your state law may slightly vary), the debt is discharged. If they have successfully sued you and gotten a judgment this may be different. They are no longer able to report you to credit agencies for nonpayment; and you can get them to stop calling/harass you.
The whole "I won't put money in the bank" is a little tinfoil-hattish though.
For an aircraft on final, from any vantage point anywhere close to the runway the aircraft is going to remain on a nearly constant azimuth and elevation.
Likewise, you don't need a very well collimated laser to do injury at 5 miles. A power density of 10^-3 watts/cm^2 is certainly sufficient to be injuring to the retina in a very short time. The threshold for temporary blindness is much lower. A 300 watt laser with a beamspread of.05 degrees and 5 km to the target exceeds this power density.
Aiming a laser within.05 degrees would not seem to be very difficult. I routinely point and fire my rifle within 1 minute of angle (~.017 degrees), or twice that handheld. If you assume 1MOA of accuracy, a 30 watt laser is sufficient. This is ignoring the fact you could use a CW laser and just "inch it around" the target. Such lasers can be had in surplus for a couple hundred dollars if you get lucky.
Why do you think this is so hard? It could be done by a human with a riflescope.
Unfortunately, there's nothing directly on this topic. There's things like:In carrying on activities in outer space and on celestial bodies, the astronauts of one State Party shall render all possible assistance to the astronauts of other States Parties.... but that would only govern the activities of the Soviets in space.
Likewise:
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
Putting nukes in space is off limits, as is military activity on the moon.
I agree on the assholes part. The Russians were strongly convinced the Shuttle was a military vehicle, though. (And in fact, some of the capabilities of the Shuttle were required by the Air Force so they could go steal Russian satellites if they felt like it). IMO, though, pointing a laser at the crew of any aircraft or spacecraft with sufficient power to temporarily blind them is equivalent to showering them with gunfire; that is, an overt act with a strong possibility of killing or injuring the crew that could be considered an act of war.
Well, unless you had ultra-precise information on attitude (more precise than the instruments on the aircraft are), the relative bearing of the laser isn't so useful for coming up with a ground fix to direct police by. I mean, a 500 foot error circle is BIG, and that's the distance you get from about 1 degree of total attitude error at 5 miles. Add in position ambiguity of the aircraft. (The plane is potentially moving at 300FPS, so even with a 5Hz GPS, significant ambiguity exists between GPS observations).
Not to mention that pixel bloom on the CCD could effectively limit the angular resolution in measuring where the laser is.
Given that a high powered handheld laser pointer with a tripod is probably enough, spending a huge amount per aircraft to figure out where any laser attacker is within a 25 city block area is probably not worthwhile. And as the need for accuracy, a low false positive rate, and speedy communications of threats increases, the system complexity/cost goes up astronomically.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, not a very strong argument. What do you expect the bible to do-- to launch into an explanation of heliocentrism and what happened in orbital dynamics, such that the sun didn't set during the battle?
If the Sun stopped moving across the sky, how would you describe it? I'm pretty sure the first words out of my mouth would not be speculating about how the Earth's rotation had stopped and Earth had stopped in its orbit; instead, I would describe the phenomenon that I was observing-- that the sun stayed fixed above me for whatever reason instead of moving across the sky as normal.
It's all about frame of reference.
Sorry. That's not what it says. I'm not Christian, either. But I don't see anything in there that favors geocentrism.
Lets see, god creates the Earth first, then creates the sun and moon in the earth sky to rule day and night, then the stars are just an afterthough. Sounds to me like the Earth is the center and most important part of it all.
Interesting. So anything that is created first is the center or most important?
Sorry, if you're going to make an argument about the accuracy of the text, you're going to have to argue based on things actually in the text. You're also going to have to take into account prevailing theories about how the text should be interpreted. There's plenty you can find fault with there, but the way you're proceeding isn't doing your argument any favors.
With respect to cosmology the bible makes claims that the earth is the center of the universe and the church agree for most of biblical history. We know have testable theories that show that earth is but a tiny planet in a large solar system in a larger galaxy, in a larger universe.
I don't believe the bible says the earth is at the center of the universe. Would you like to cite an actual passage that says it does, or instead to stop spewing misinformation?
kthx.
You didn't RTFA then. You might want to get a clue.
It uses SHA-1; the sender has to try and find two things that hash to the same value. Factoring or prime numbers are not involved.
No, wrong.
Man, will you people read how it works before you object?
1:bits:date:resource:ext:salt:suffix
The stamp consists of seven fields.
The version number (version zero is simpler, but has some limitations).
The claimed bit value. If the stamp does not really hash with the purported leading zero bits, it is not valid.
The date (and time) a stamp was minted. Stamps in the future and those too far in the past may be judged invalid.
The resource for which a stamp is minted. Perhaps an e-mail address, but also possibly a URI or other named resource.
Extensions that a specialized application may want. Any additional data could be placed in here, but in usage so far, this field is generally left empty.
A random salt that distinguished this stamp from any other one minted for the same resource and date. For example, two different people may reasonably want to send e-mail to my same address on the same day. They should not be disqualified by my use of a double spend database. But if each of them uses a random salt, their complete stamps will differ.
The suffix is the real work of the algorithm. Given the first six fields, a minter must try many sequential suffix values to produce a stamp that hashes with the desired number of leading zeros.
So you'd need to generate your hash table for each email address, time, and salt combination.. ummmmm, I don't think so. The cheapest attack is just the (on the order of) 2^10 operation birthday attack on the 20 bit key.
No, Kevin McBride is Darl's brother:
CRN's top 25 execs of 2003:
His brother, Kevin McBride, says the boys were also taught how to shoot. "We were taught to protect ourselves and what was ours at a very early age and started carrying guns for hunting when we were very young," Kevin says.
The problem is that if someone steals your cookie, it's a perpetual credential. So the impact of any other security vulnerabilities that allow someone to steal your cookie are much greater.
From the LectLaw link:
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
People had gotten hurt in the past; the jury found that McDonalds was keeping the coffee 40-50 degrees hotter than it was typically served at to cut down on free refills. The woman in question had originally asked just for medical costs; but when the jury was confronted with the facts (including that McDonalds had still not decreased the temperature of their coffee), they decided to award large punitive damages, which were reduced by the trial court to $480,000 (3x what they found to be actual damages).
Is it so clear cut? No. I'm as much of a critic of frivolous lawsuits as anyone, but really, the McDonalds case is a pretty bad example.
Here's the post from google's cache that prompted the secret service-- get it while it's still hot.
From the post:
Please kill George Bush. I hate him so much. I think he is a giant dick and I want terrible things to happen to him. I'm not really big on the specifics of how he dies, but if you could at least arrange it so that the authorities find his dead body on top of an underage black male prostitute surrounded by a mountain of cocaine and child pornography, that would really be super-awesome. And maybe you could have some media people there when the police find the body, so they can take pictures and stuff. That'd be fucking GREAT.
I can see why the Secret Service would want to visit someone after they say something like that.. (sure, context weakens it a bit, but it is borderline nutty and definitely can be construed as a threat against the president.)
If you go back to old articles about SunOS when it was first upgraded to 64 bits (becoming Solaris), you will find plenty of articles describing the flaws and the lack of stability in the product.
Are you on crack?
Solaris 1.x was SunOS 4 (BSD derived)+ OpenWindows; Solaris 2.x was SunOS 5 (SysV derived) + OpenWindows. Both were 32 bit operating systems running on 32 bit hardware (ignoring things like large file support), until UltraSPARC hardware came along and Solaris 7/2.7 added support for 64 bit operation in 1998 (this is 7 years after Solaris 1.0 shipped, and 6 years after Solaris 2.0 shipped).
Your post is factually inaccurate, bigoted, etc.
(no remote buffer overflow exploits, not that it would matter if a buffer were to overflow, since the data would be discarded instead of being passed to the CLI).
I don't think you understand buffer overflow exploits.
Stack buffer overflows exploit the calling conventions of the language an application is written in; for instance, writing past the end of an array on stack to overwrite the return address pointer. When the function experiencing the overflow returns, it runs code of your choice.
Some exploits put the malicious code to be run on the stack. This is an area VMS has traditionally been strong against, because the stack is mapped nonexecutable. But it still is possible to return to code of your choice in the program with an arbitrary stack frame set up.
I agree VMS is very technically nice, but as to it having some magical security properties of the type you describe-- I don't think so.
Most gun manufacturers fire a few rounds from the gun on a test target as QA; many include the brass/target in the product packaging as evidence of this.
As to ballistic fingerprinting-- I don't think this is done in the US except on a limited basis in Maryland, where it has met with little success. The marks/scratches left by a gun are not that distinctive (99 to 99.9% confidence is good enough for criminal cases to see if a particular suspicious weapon is involved; it's not good enough to select a murder weapon from among millions). Furthermore, the marks left change over time with use of the weapon, so measuring what the gun does when brand new would not be very helpful.
Things like this are troublesome, though:
One document obtained by the AP, a 1998 U.S. government business solicitation, mandated that "any color printer must include a tracing system that encodes system identification in any output. This will tie the output to the originating equipment so that forensic identification of the equipment is possible in the event of illegal printing of currency images due to failure or circumvention of the recognition system(s)...."
In a number of contracts where the US government has bought printers, they've required tracing features to be present-- effectively forcing them to be in printers sold to the general public as well. So effectively, many color printers are embedding their serial number in output documents. (And this is a lot more damaging-- saying this particular printer made a particular document, rather than a Epson Stylus 700).
You're thinking i2c. i2o is something else entirely.
Don't forget a UPS otherwise you're still screwed if the power goes out.
From the parent:
Get a double-pole-double-throw relay. This basically connects one line through when there is power, and another when there isn't. Let the line from the Asterisk server go through when there is power, and the unmodified PSTN line go through when there isn't.
Maybe you should read mmkay? He doesn't need a UPS to make outgoing calls on this setup when the power is off.
I was a military analyst for the US army up until Dec 2002...
The Israeli's shoot tank ammo and 5.56, 7.68 mm rounds...
Not a very good analyst, I guess.
Space elevator at 5995 km:
;). Still, a tower 62 miles high bearing those types of load made of out diamond.. is not happening anytime soon. There is a better chance technology will exist to build the space elevator.
Potential: (1 kilogram) * (5 995 kilometers) * (9.8 ((m / s) / s)) = 58 751 000 Joules
((((radius of Earth + (5 995 km)) * 2 * pi) / (((24 hours) * 365.24) / 366.24))^2) * 1 kilogram = 814 074.554 Joules
(58 751 000 Joules) + (814 080 Joules) = 59 565 080 Joules
vs.
Potential: (350 km) * (9.8 ((m / s) / s)) * (1 kilogram) = 3 430 000 Joules
Kinetic: ((8 (km / s))^2) * 1 kilogram = 64 000 000 Joules
Total: 67 430 000 Joules
OK, you're right. I should do less math in my head and more with Google calculator
Finally, all this talk about radiation is a little irrelevent if Wikipedia is accurate. According to the article on the Van Allen belts, the dose rate for a satellite with 3mm of aluminum cladding is about 2500 rem/yr. Even if it takes a day to go through the Van Allen belts, this is a dose of about 7 rem.
Maximum permissible dose (MPD),
dose values based on the general recommendations by the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP) and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) (see radiation protection), which stipulate that the average individual occupational dose to the whole body or to radiation-sensitive organs should not exceed 5 rems per year.
The MPD dosing guidelines are a factor of 5 below detectable physiological effects, additional shielding could be provided if launch is so cheap, and the total time to ascend 5995km at 320km/hr is 18 hours (and the time spent in the Van Allen belts is a fraction of this).
That would be 5*10^13. oops.
Well, ignoring the fact that if you take the space elevator up to about 700km you have the same potential energy as LEO, without spending a substantial amount of time in the lower belts (which don't have that high of a dose rate anyways).
The space "railway" is a ridiculous concept. The author of that paper states that if the mass of the elevator were concentrated in one point (the structural best case), it would result in a column "only" 80cm on the side. Wow, that's only 2.3 *10^8 kilograms of diamond. You're talking (at 100% efficiency), 1*10^14 joules just to lift the column to an average height of 50km (not counting whatever goes on top). Likewise, to make the diamond, just looking at the raw potential difference between graphite and diamond (even ignoring the massive activation energy required, and >99.9% inefficiency in current industrial diamond production processes), you need another 5*10^3 joules of energy. Plus, you need some as-yet uninvented mechanism to bind the industrial diamonds together and maintain the compressive strength. And there will be huge bending moments supplied by wind that will exceed the structural limits of diamond.
Even the space elevator today relies on Unobtanium (undeveloped miracle materials and processes). This "space train" is far worse.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
Um, what? LEO is generally considered to be below 500km or so; the inner Van Allen belts start at 650km. Exactly what problem are you trying to solve?
I agree that for interplanetary stuff you may want something faster than the space elevator.. but for LEO you don't exactly get close to the Van Allen belts. Please elaborate.
That is probably not a valid debt anymore; for instance, in California:
What about the relevant time limits?
The debt does not become some kind of "new" debt just because of being sold. For example, the seven-year credit reporting time limit is still based on the original delinquency date with the original creditor. The statute of limitations for filing lawsuits is also based on that same date. These limits can not be legitimately "reset" by a collection agency that has bought the debt.
However, the statute of limitations may possibly be reset if the debtor makes a specific promise to pay, or a partial payment.
So as long as you haven't told them you're going to pay in the past 7 years, (your state law may slightly vary), the debt is discharged. If they have successfully sued you and gotten a judgment this may be different. They are no longer able to report you to credit agencies for nonpayment; and you can get them to stop calling/harass you.
The whole "I won't put money in the bank" is a little tinfoil-hattish though.
Yah, and the article summary gets it wrong. Watts are a unit of power, and joules are a unit of energy.
For an aircraft on final, from any vantage point anywhere close to the runway the aircraft is going to remain on a nearly constant azimuth and elevation.
.05 degrees and 5 km to the target exceeds this power density.
.05 degrees would not seem to be very difficult. I routinely point and fire my rifle within 1 minute of angle (~.017 degrees), or twice that handheld. If you assume 1MOA of accuracy, a 30 watt laser is sufficient. This is ignoring the fact you could use a CW laser and just "inch it around" the target. Such lasers can be had in surplus for a couple hundred dollars if you get lucky.
Likewise, you don't need a very well collimated laser to do injury at 5 miles. A power density of 10^-3 watts/cm^2 is certainly sufficient to be injuring to the retina in a very short time. The threshold for temporary blindness is much lower. A 300 watt laser with a beamspread of
Aiming a laser within
Why do you think this is so hard? It could be done by a human with a riflescope.
You're thinking of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (eek, what a wordy title).
:In carrying on activities in outer space and on celestial bodies, the astronauts of one State Party shall render all possible assistance to the astronauts of other States Parties. ... but that would only govern the activities of the Soviets in space.
Unfortunately, there's nothing directly on this topic. There's things like
Likewise:
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
Putting nukes in space is off limits, as is military activity on the moon.
I agree on the assholes part. The Russians were strongly convinced the Shuttle was a military vehicle, though. (And in fact, some of the capabilities of the Shuttle were required by the Air Force so they could go steal Russian satellites if they felt like it). IMO, though, pointing a laser at the crew of any aircraft or spacecraft with sufficient power to temporarily blind them is equivalent to showering them with gunfire; that is, an overt act with a strong possibility of killing or injuring the crew that could be considered an act of war.
Well, unless you had ultra-precise information on attitude (more precise than the instruments on the aircraft are), the relative bearing of the laser isn't so useful for coming up with a ground fix to direct police by. I mean, a 500 foot error circle is BIG, and that's the distance you get from about 1 degree of total attitude error at 5 miles. Add in position ambiguity of the aircraft. (The plane is potentially moving at 300FPS, so even with a 5Hz GPS, significant ambiguity exists between GPS observations).
Not to mention that pixel bloom on the CCD could effectively limit the angular resolution in measuring where the laser is.
Given that a high powered handheld laser pointer with a tripod is probably enough, spending a huge amount per aircraft to figure out where any laser attacker is within a 25 city block area is probably not worthwhile. And as the need for accuracy, a low false positive rate, and speedy communications of threats increases, the system complexity/cost goes up astronomically.