Unless the teams are allowed to buy COTS items like heavy launchers and/or to throw money at the existing space systems corporations to customise / extend their existing hardware, I just don't believe this will be possible. Personally I will be dumbstruck with astonishment and surprise that I've lost a number of bets (yes real cash bets) and will also have to go around telling people I was utterly wrong.
Just for starters, what the hell will they use for comms? I can't see NASA renting out slots on the already massively over-subscribed and underfunded DSN. If a private group like the inflatable hotels nutte^w dreamer, or the Falcon crew, or Armadillo or whoever build their own ground station network around the globe, even if it only has enough range for lunar around the world for a radically low, breakthrough sum - say, less than $500 million - that'd be fantastic. NASA / JPL and the ESA would be queuing up to use it. And it's be a relatively small cost to bolt another 10m wide ring around their dishes and boosting the power and sensitivity enough for Mercury, Venus, Mars, the outer planets and all the other vehicles wandering around the sun on similar orbits, which would be an enormous help. The MER vehicles might even be able to clear their flash by uploading the huge backlog of "no time, uplink at later date" material for the first time. If the pared-down, but still hugely ambitious and exciting Mars Science Laboratory works well enough to get wheels on ice, that'll be another fat pipe of imagery and science data to cope with... there are a LOT of live vehicles out there right now and the tubes are getting pretty full. ('Course, I don't expect the private moon lander will be putting much strain on their system...)
Likewise, software security means nothing if the hardware is vulnerable. Whilst it's true that software security can almost always be defeated if hardware has vulnerabilities, it only "means nothing" in the exceptionally rare cases where you're aspiring to perfect security - ie., that your system can defeat all attacks, known and unknown, whatever the circumstances. Over here in the real world, we have 'defence in depth' which is based on two assumptions. 1. As a special class of software, security software (whether in RAM or burned into an FPGA or whatever) inherits the property of always having bugs. 2. humans (aka users and admins) are fallible, and in fact user and admin errors are the only thing you can reliably expect when designing a security model for some system. As I often point out at work, if the NSA (or KGB or similar orgs) really want to pwn you, they'll find a way to do it. What keeps me awake at nights isn't worrying about TLAs; it's the fear waking up to find a story on the Reg saying "Foo Group humiliated as web site hacked, customer data leaked by moody teenage script kiddie. Similarly the thing that bugs me about laptop security offsite is mostly malware infections resulting from connections to untrusted networks; the risk with corporate data isn't Dr Evil spiriting it away to clone our code... it's an opportunistic thief who passes it on to someone smart enough to mount the HD, spot our company name, and either blackmail us or just send it to the press. Frankly even snake-oil obfuscation techniques are probably good enough (XOR, say.)
Note that this is a separate case to the EFF NSA case with the whistleblower from AT&T who provided the schematics showing how all the IX traffic was mirrored to the NSA - that is, they spied on *everyone*, by default. Apparently that's bad news under the US constitution, in theory anyway.
yeah, right, 'cos the current regime have been just showering money on NASA, right? Why, it's almost as if Dubya announced a pie in the sky plan at some far-off-date just far enough ahead that it'll have to be Democrat decision that, sorry, actually you've already spent the NASA Mars budget a few thousand times over in Iraq. (Note that that Planetary Society "success!" press release is about their (ok, our - I'm a member) getting existing funding for space science restored, after it was slashed to try to make up the increasing void between the directive "go back to the moon" and the reality that it costs money to make and fly spaceships and train astronauts. Lots and lots and lots of it, actually.)
Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazingeye-candy.
(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)
There is this discipline called "detection and attribution", whereby the question is asked "to what factors can we attribute the detected warming in global temperature?", and the unequivocal answer is "athropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, in particular CO2 and methane".
The matter is well understood, and the case is closed.
Now there areperfectly genuine areas of doubt and uncertainty, where legitimate debate and research can be conducted, in the field of climatology and AGW. This isn't one of them.
A small "hoorah!" for the civil liberties NGO Liberty, who've been campaigning on this for a year or so. We've got one of these things in the nearest small Gloucestershire market town I go for my beer and pizza, and I haven't noticed any reduction in moody 15 y.o.s hanging round the shopping centre... they just hang around a couple of hundred yards away from the arcade where the thing's sited.
This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI firmly believe that the entire universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Hankerchief", are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory was not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI, and so...
I dunno what's sadder, me sitting here along eating frozen pizza on Valentine's day, or the fact that's all from memory - and that I just checked it back against the original radio shows, and I got it right?
OK, wiseguy, very good, you're very funny OK... it was a rhetorical question.
The complete uselessness of the right to bear arms in the face of, say, the suspension of Habeas Corpus has stood out in stark relief in the last 7 years. I don't know how anyone can still cling to the bonkers claim that the right to gte tooled up is essential to defend yourself against the evil gub'mint with a straight face. If it were true, where the wet rubbery fuck have you all been??
Just admit that you enjoy shooting targets, and that you feel safer carrying it around (or having it under the bed or whatever.)
Hmmm, whilst I'm a card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ORG (and a bunch of similar orgs that aren't so focused on tech issues - Liberty and Amnesty, f'r'instance), and there have certainly been some terrible laws passed in the last decade, we don't have an evil totalitarian regime. We have a bunch of well-meaning idiots who would mostly be horrified to think that the laws they've voted for could be used by a future E.T.R. to enslave the masses, etc etc.
Incidentally a bunch of Muslim students were just released from jail with their convictions squashed after the defence pointed out that reading Jihadist literature is (correctly) not a crime here. When I get my door booted in at 8am (or others' are having that treatment) without recourse to the law for redress, then we have an ETR. Right now, we just have a framework of law under which some ETR activities could be smuggled through.
I'm also highly dubious about the ability of British political establishment to have a successful conspiracy to bring an ETR about. Even if all the MPs were secretly plotting to institute a junta, end proper elections, etc, they'd cock it up.
(a) user credentials get exposed in the unlikeliest places. VPNs, outlook web access, web applications using the corp AD as auth database,..
(b) No-one but multinational banks and government agencies has the spare money floating around to pay someone to sit reading log files. "So buy a system to do it for you!" See previous answer. "Build one yourself!" See previous answer. "Demonstrate the need by showing management evidence of all the attacks!" See previous answer.
Sorry, do I sound bitter? Well, can you guess what I do for a living?;)
...film at 11. C'mon, if you removed all the ill-informed people offering speculation and unfounded personal opinion as fact from the Internet, there'd be very little left apart from busty substances and badger paws.
You're quoting Steve Bellovin quoting Goldfinger, of course. (That's Steve "I invented the firewall, bitch, heard of it?" Bellovin BTW.) See his blog entry here.
I'm also somewhat skeptical that Iran has "dropped off the net" -- see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/attention_iran_is_not_disconne_1.shtml which actually cites a Slashdot post as evidence of how the lie goes round the world before the truth gets it's boots on... just because ITR shows no response from a single router in.ir, that doesn't mean there's no connectivity.
And for the conspiracy theorists, why would cutting cables (with massive collateral damage to all those US and EU businesses that are using Indian call centres and outsourced dev firms) be a precursor to a military attack? Not only would it give the Iranians a completely obvious early warning of incoming trouble, it gives no military advantage at all that I can think of. Presumably the Iranian military do not communicate through IM or blogs...
Slashdot Mirror
800kg to LEO "can be done" for $10 million? Extraordinary claims require some evidence please...
Just for starters, what the hell will they use for comms? I can't see NASA renting out slots on the already massively over-subscribed and underfunded DSN. If a private group like the inflatable hotels nutte^w dreamer, or the Falcon crew, or Armadillo or whoever build their own ground station network around the globe, even if it only has enough range for lunar around the world for a radically low, breakthrough sum - say, less than $500 million - that'd be fantastic. NASA / JPL and the ESA would be queuing up to use it. And it's be a relatively small cost to bolt another 10m wide ring around their dishes and boosting the power and sensitivity enough for Mercury, Venus, Mars, the outer planets and all the other vehicles wandering around the sun on similar orbits, which would be an enormous help. The MER vehicles might even be able to clear their flash by uploading the huge backlog of "no time, uplink at later date" material for the first time. If the pared-down, but still hugely ambitious and exciting Mars Science Laboratory works well enough to get wheels on ice, that'll be another fat pipe of imagery and science data to cope with... there are a LOT of live vehicles out there right now and the tubes are getting pretty full. ('Course, I don't expect the private moon lander will be putting much strain on their system...)
You stupid Ghent.
citizen of the ghost republic on the starboard bow?
Note that this is a separate case to the EFF NSA case with the whistleblower from AT&T who provided the schematics showing how all the IX traffic was mirrored to the NSA - that is, they spied on *everyone*, by default. Apparently that's bad news under the US constitution, in theory anyway.
Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.
(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)
If the US meant what it said about the importance of opposing communist tyranny, fanning the flames of freedom and all that, it wouldn't be repatriating Vietnamese refugees back to communist Vietnam.
Any takers for a bet that this won't even be in the (serious) planning stage in 2020?
>>>>> . It's the world's smallest violin...
If cheesebrained simpletons are the first to go, I say good luck, China.
Or to put it more simply: Kurzweil talks bollocks.
Still, it's reassuring to know that cockup still beats conspiracy, given enough time and sufficient monkeys.
The matter is well understood, and the case is closed.
Now there areperfectly genuine areas of doubt and uncertainty, where legitimate debate and research can be conducted, in the field of climatology and AGW. This isn't one of them.
A small "hoorah!" for the civil liberties NGO Liberty, who've been campaigning on this for a year or so. We've got one of these things in the nearest small Gloucestershire market town I go for my beer and pizza, and I haven't noticed any reduction in moody 15 y.o.s hanging round the shopping centre... they just hang around a couple of hundred yards away from the arcade where the thing's sited.
Spooky motherfuckers.
In the Beginning, the Universe was Created.
This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI firmly believe that the entire universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Hankerchief", are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory was not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI, and so...
I dunno what's sadder, me sitting here along eating frozen pizza on Valentine's day, or the fact that's all from memory - and that I just checked it back against the original radio shows, and I got it right?
OK, wiseguy, very good, you're very funny OK... it was a rhetorical question.
I say we launch it into orbit, and nuke it from the surface. It's the only way to be sure.
Not sure what your point is. Sounds like there's a good chance you're going to elect someone with half a brain for once, what's the problem?
Just admit that you enjoy shooting targets, and that you feel safer carrying it around (or having it under the bed or whatever.)
Incidentally a bunch of Muslim students were just released from jail with their convictions squashed after the defence pointed out that reading Jihadist literature is (correctly) not a crime here. When I get my door booted in at 8am (or others' are having that treatment) without recourse to the law for redress, then we have an ETR. Right now, we just have a framework of law under which some ETR activities could be smuggled through.
I'm also highly dubious about the ability of British political establishment to have a successful conspiracy to bring an ETR about. Even if all the MPs were secretly plotting to institute a junta, end proper elections, etc, they'd cock it up.
(b) No-one but multinational banks and government agencies has the spare money floating around to pay someone to sit reading log files. "So buy a system to do it for you!" See previous answer. "Build one yourself!" See previous answer. "Demonstrate the need by showing management evidence of all the attacks!" See previous answer.
Sorry, do I sound bitter? Well, can you guess what I do for a living? ;)
...film at 11. C'mon, if you removed all the ill-informed people offering speculation and unfounded personal opinion as fact from the Internet, there'd be very little left apart from busty substances and badger paws.
Luckily however, the offical Iranian Government website is still reachable (from here in the UK anyway.) How sad, so sorry, nothing to see here, move along please...
I'm also somewhat skeptical that Iran has "dropped off the net" -- see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/attention_iran_is_not_disconne_1.shtml which actually cites a Slashdot post as evidence of how the lie goes round the world before the truth gets it's boots on... just because ITR shows no response from a single router in .ir, that doesn't mean there's no connectivity.
And for the conspiracy theorists, why would cutting cables (with massive collateral damage to all those US and EU businesses that are using Indian call centres and outsourced dev firms) be a precursor to a military attack? Not only would it give the Iranians a completely obvious early warning of incoming trouble, it gives no military advantage at all that I can think of. Presumably the Iranian military do not communicate through IM or blogs...