There are a few rules about network security. One of the most important is, "There is no security without physical security." If you do not have positive physical control over who does or doesn't access the machine, then you have nothing at all.
I have worked with hosting environments on both sides, for many years.
Generally, your data won't be looked at, because you are one of many. This obscurity can protect you. Why would someone single out your site, from the tens or hundreds of thousands of others? Unfortunately, the answer can frequently become "just because". Maybe something caught their eye in the logs. Maybe you had an interesting username. Maybe they found a link to your site from another site, and they just wanted to take a peak around. Or in your case, you asked them to look.
I'll use an example. I worked at a startup hosting company at the very beginning of the dotcom era. We were all trying to learn what the heck we were doing, and there were no "big" hosting companies yet. We had ten thousand or so domains on our servers. There was also a strict "no adult" policy. It was a mainstream company that was bent on keeping their mainstream image. It would seem to be a pretty easy thing to do, but with ten thousand domains, there was no practical way to police every one of them. We got a support call in, and the memo was handed over to me to fix it. The site was for an escort. The phone number was her escort phone. She answered in her sexy voice, and I laughed as I told her where I was calling from, to tell her the problem was resolved. Since I didn't sign off on anything on that repair, I just let it slide.
The hosting company MAY have the policy of "your data is private". That doesn't mean that every kid in support with root access is going to follow the policy to the letter. Depending on the size of the environment you may have between 2 to hundreds of people who can at any time view your data.
Some people may suggest encrypting your data. Great, except for the fact that somewhere in your code has to be a way to decrypt it, which is also accessible to them.
Even in most colo spaces, there's the potential of a 3rd party, from site engineering to the company legal department with law enforcement in tow, who may physically access your equipment, boot into single user, and look at anything they want.
The only way to maintain a secure site is to secure your box. That is, your machine, with only you having the passwords, in a space that you can physically control.
Everything depends on how secure you want your stuff, or more importantly, how important is the stuff that you're trying to secure?
I've been subcontracted to do work on people's stuff quite a bit. For example, a little web development and DBA work. Will I look through their data? Not really. I'll make sure everything works, but I won't remember any of it when I'm done. I'm not out to steal anything. There is the very real risk that someone will. Do you have credit card numbers? Email addresses? Real names? Anything worth value, and information is worth something. The environments I work in, there's a high level of trust, but my own server, there's exactly one person with root access (myself), and exactly 3 people with physical access, all of whom I trust. I'm not holding any super secret information, but I prefer to know the exact access list, rather than "Myself, and whoever may work at hosting company X."
When I first got my hands on a Vista machine, I was a little excited. I had tried out some betas, but they didn't work very well (surprise, beta). I worked under the assumption that they had fixed up XP, and gave it a pretty skin. Oh, I was so wrong.
So over a year later, I got a new desktop machine at work. Athlon 64 3800+, 2Gb RAM, SATA drive. For giggles, I let it boot up into Vista. It was something like 20 to 30 minutes to get to the desktop, since it was a first boot. From there it was still dog slow. I had my Athlon 2400+ with 1Gb RAM running XP sitting beside it, and the performance difference was really sad.
Luckily, I had already planned to wipe it, and install Slamd64 (a 64bit Linux). That's a very peppy machine now. So much so, that I have VMWare running all the time, with two or three Linux VM's and a WinXP VM (for a work-required program to run).
I'm far from a newbie user, but if I had been, I may have thought computers were always real slow, and that's just the way it is. That's the only people who are going to be really satisfied with Vista, the ones who don't know any better.
Just because, as you say, we've assigned what we know as matter to the name "fermion", and the non-physical "bosons", doesn't mean that they are only two of hundreds or thousands of other "things" that we have not been able to identify or experience.
We observe through the senses that we have, and things beyond our senses with instruments designed to observe what we've detected through interactions of things that we can observe.
It's been just over 100 years that we've known about radiation, and that was due to the observation of it's interaction with physical matter in a way that we could observe.
For the most part, we observe through the radio spectrum. Very long waves in heat. Then light. We've known about waves higher than light for about 200 years. We've only been able to harness microwaves for about 70 years.
This is all one field of study, and followed a path that we are able to observe. If we had evolved in a different place, we may have had different senses. What if we were able to feel gravitational forces better? There are noted differences in the gravitational pull of the earth by location. NASA has been mapping these for years. Might we now be able to harness these gravitational variations for communication and travel? I don't want to wander off into sci-fi land, but I'm sure someone will want to relate the Star Trek fantasy warp drive here. In their pseudo-universe, they warp space, presumably through strong gravitational forces, to shorten the distance between two places, creating travel much like an inch worm does.
All we know is what we know right now. To say we can learn nothing else is idiocy.
I had an argument with someone years ago, when the 100Mhz computers were first released. He was insistent that it was the fastest computers would ever go. Due to... blah, he was wrong, but he insisted there would be nonionizing radiation leaks, and all kinds of bad things that would happen should a person be unshielded within feet of a processor over 100Mhz. I say that as my 2.4Ghz machine is running about a foot from me.
Don't try to underestimate what can happen. We may hit a lull in our technological advancement, but it will continue to grow.
You have to love someone who posts what almost reads as authoritative, and then puts crap in it like:
> "When power fails, or when you press reset, they will be in a > > "dirty" state, and the system may need to recreate the array. > That is, if it can. I've never tried it, but I can imagine"
MD devices generally recover fine from a power loss. And, I've tried it. A lot. I've had quite a few machines (say hundreds) which have had various events in the past, which caused them to lose power. Here's an example now. Someone accidentally pulled the power cord out on this machine today. It wasn't intentional, they thought they were pulling the one above it.
One of the drives didn't come up. Not surprising, this machine has been up for a long time, under heavy load. I'm pretty sure we're beyond MTBF on most of the components. It will be replaced soon anyways. We swapped drives, and ran:
raidhotadd/dev/md1/dev/hdc2
Now it's rebuilding. There's no noticable performance impact. No data was lost. The only "downtime" was for the tech to realize they pulled the wrong cord, and put it back in.
Back in the day (like, high school) I played sax like a pro..
Then again, I can type over 100wpm, so maybe that helped a lot.:)
People don't quite get the concept of chords. Everything on a sax was a combination of 9 fingers, on even more keys. I don't remember off hand how many there are, but enough to keep you busy. To sound good, you have to get practiced.
I almost (almost) consider it harder than really playing piano, as far as the fingering goes. I don't mean one-fingering it. I mean complex music, where you're physically tired after playing the piece.:)
My wife is pretty sure I'm talking to other women on the computer. I already know perfectly well 95% of the people on the Internet are men (99.9% on Slashdot), and most of the remainder are men pretending to be women.:)
I don't like the visual I get thinking about people on the other side of a chat, so I just don't bother.
Power would obviously need to be part of the site selection process.
There can be power in isolated areas, that don't necessarily have high speed internet access. Those would make excellent relay points, if they have good visibility also.
Everything depends on where his physical locations are, what features exist around those locations, what his budget is, and what his expectations are.
"remote" may 100 miles away from the nearest city, on top of a big mountain, with wind and diesel power generation. It could also mean 1000 miles away from the nearest city, in a valley, with mountains ranging from 2,000 feet to 19,000 feet, with no practical means to get power to any of them. Then he's really stuck, except for satellite.
With so many variables, he can't really just ask the question that he posed. Then again, I wouldn't really suggest outlining your entire company in a Slashdot question.
Ahhh, the mistress... Most of the eligible women I know won't have any part of that. They are only interested in boyfriends, and not the married kind.:)
Well, according to This page, you could lease a single transponder for about $335k/mo (average across the listed rates).
I think for that much, it'd be cheaper to buy a few select pieces of land, put up a 100' tower on each. 100' towers at sea level will get you 28 miles. 100' tower on a 5000' mountain will get you 115 miles. If the sites happen to be so lucky that there's a 5,000' and 7,000' mountain to use, they could be used for 220 miles.:)
Rather than buying land and building towers, you can always lease tower space. But, if you put up towers, you can lease that space, should you be in a good area for it.
There's a whole lot of remote northern Canada, so it's hard to even guess at how many installations would be required.
Oh, you have to be kidding me. Someone should take away your Slashdot license.:)
What would a geek do with a big honkin' parabolic reflector? All kinds of things.
1) The most obvious, pick up old satellite signals. I'm pretty sure (but not positive) that the C and KU bands are still in use. I used to watch live feeds for various news stations, along with all kinds of weird broadcasting. It was my first exposure to local TV in other areas.
2) "Free to air". I won't say anything else about that, it's up to you to research.
3) Listen in on unencrypted government traffic. There was a news story about this a few years ago. Some folks in England were intercepting not-so-secret US Government recon flights over Eastern Europe. (If they were to be really secret, they would have been encrypted and on different satellites). Just because the antenna normally points on one arc, it doesn't mean that's the only things to listen to.
4) One heck of a 802.11b/g antenna.:) Watch out for the FCC though, that's a lot of gain. You may need to put a finer mesh screen over your existing panels. Check your wavelengths.
5) Parabolic reflector + big light source (sun) = quick fried lunch. Cover it in mylar, and don't look into it directly. Better yet, don't be in front of it. It's all natural, and doesn't hurt the environment much.:)
6) Parabolic reflector + microphone = really big parabolic microphone. Since you still have the mylar on from #5, all you have to do is mount the microphone. Well, you may want to use something less optically reflective, like saran wrap, unless you want to risk cooking your $5 microphone.:)
7) Parabolic reflector + Microwave oven magnetron = trouble. Your 802.11b/g transmitter may have been putting off 0.025W (0.200W if you bought a good card). What happens when you pump 700W+ into the dish?:) How about a dozen magnetrons aimed into a smaller dish at the focal point, to reflect back down into the main dish first? 8.4KW and the gain of your antenna. You could cook your dinner from a few miles away. Don't aim it at friends, enemies, or anything you don't want to mess up pretty quick.
8) Get another one the same size, cover them both in mylar, and have your own UFO parked in the back yard. Sell the pictures to the National Enquirer, and then sell the UFO on eBay with a signed copy of that edition.
and on to the boring options.
9) Scrap metal?
10) Pull the panels, and you'll have really big snow shoes.
11) Pull the panels for snow sled racing this winter.
12) Pull the panels, Cover the convex side with styrofoam and fiberglass, and make some totally rad knee boards.
I just wonder where he thinks all of this carbon dioxide is going to come from. If we increased the atmosphere there by 10%, we'd still be losing an awful lot of the Earth's atmosphere. I like the idea of keeping some of it here, since I kinda gotta live here for a while.
You gotta love the idea of a "standard" being an irregular eccentric orbit (eccentric around the earth including the moon, and irregular that the moon moves relative to the earth).
That's like a woman with "standard" mood swings. If I ever meet one, I'll let you know.:)
The weight wouldn't hurt, the inertia of the first object being at a stop, and the ISS attempting to speed it up would hurt.
You'd run into problems with vectors too.:) The return trip may end up being straight into the moon, or a glorious trip into outer space with no return ticket.:)
This is one of the stupidest ideas I've read. I don't know how it made it to be news.
The ISS is designed for one thing, to float around the earth.
It isn't designed for radiation. It's doubtful if the electronics or the crew would survive through the Van Allen belt.
It isn't designed for sustained flight. It's designed to be bumped around very (very) slowly between orbital altitudes, not pushed for long distances.
It isn't designed for long term flight. It doesn't carry sufficient supplies to have a crew that far away.
In an emergency, they'd be screwed. Their evacuation plan involves the Russian resupply modules, which are fine to drop from the ISS in orbit, not push out from the moon and pray. Their reentry velocity would be WAY over what it is coming from the ISS, since they'd be falling towards the earth the whole way. The resupply modules don't carry enough fuel to do the complicated maneuvers that would be required to decrease their velocity enough to survive.
Resupply would be virtually impossible. Sure, we send things up to the ISS now. The ISS flies at between 278km to 425km. The iner Van Allen belt extends from 700km to 10,000km from the earth's surface. The outer Van Allen belt extends from 20,000km to 65,000km. The moon is at approximately 384,000km (average) from the earth's surface . So, the resupply ships would be flying 1000x the distance. With the moon landings, they targeted an object 3,400km wide. To resupply, they'd be targeting an object 58 meters wide. While I'm not going to suggest it's impossible, it's just not within the abilities of the infrastructure that we have right now. By the time we had just the resupply infrastructure built, the ISS would be ready to retire (or have already been retired).
And lets not forget pesky things like solar flares. The ISS does over 15 orbits of the earth per day. With a little good solar forecasting, they can put the earth between the ISS and the sun to avoid the radiation burst. Lounging around between the earth and the sun on a direct course for the moon, they don't have that luxury.
All the ISS navigation is done based on it's gyroscopes and earth based telemetry. If you're not near the earth, all of the Earth based stuff is pretty much worthless. They'd need to establish moon based tracking systems.
I'm sure I missed a few finer points there. I'm not an astronaut, nor do I work for NASA. I've just been paying a lot of attention for the last 30 years or so. It's something about being able to see launches from the front door of my house that may have gotten my attention.
I like the idea as something to do in the future. They *SHOULD* put a platform in a wide orbit around the earth and moon, which would be a significantly better way to not only move crew and supplies between the earth and moon, but give a nice neutral launch site mid trip for further exploration. The platform should have a much higher mass, better shielding, room to process sustainable supplies (plants to grow food and process air), and enough mass so it could tote along other craft, rather than being pushed long by other ships on occasion.
A future platform would be an awesome (like invoking awe, not like totally rad) feat, which would help guide us towards future longer range space travel.
Unfortunately, I don't see that ever happening. All the space agencies are a politically wrapped money pit, that spend more money talking, and less time doing. A well focused, unburdened effort would do us wonders. And yes, I volunteer to run NASA, if they can specifically block it from ALL political and government intervention.:)
Not quite that far back, Mr. Flintstone. Think a happy medium, with a small engine, HEI ignition module (just one) on a distributor cap. The only engine electrical wires required were to the ignition, starter, alternator, and battery.
I do really respect the technology on an old tractor we had as a kid. It was a big diesel Massey Ferguson farm tractor. The thing was old, beat up, and missing parts (mostly rusted off body metal). The alternator didn't work, so you'd have to charge the battery every few weeks, when the engine started cranking slow. It had a mechanical fuel pump, injection, etc, etc. The key lock had broken, so starting it only involved touching two wires to spin the starter. You'd pull the choke to shut it down. It was simple and mechanically indestructible, and was about 40 years old when it was sold.
That's why you have to use coordination. When he's called down to HR, that's when the other admins are cleaning up. By the time he's done pleading for his job and not getting anywhere, he's already locked out.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few rules about network security. One of the most important is, "There is no security without physical security." If you do not have positive physical control over who does or doesn't access the machine, then you have nothing at all.
I have worked with hosting environments on both sides, for many years.
Generally, your data won't be looked at, because you are one of many. This obscurity can protect you. Why would someone single out your site, from the tens or hundreds of thousands of others? Unfortunately, the answer can frequently become "just because". Maybe something caught their eye in the logs. Maybe you had an interesting username. Maybe they found a link to your site from another site, and they just wanted to take a peak around. Or in your case, you asked them to look.
I'll use an example. I worked at a startup hosting company at the very beginning of the dotcom era. We were all trying to learn what the heck we were doing, and there were no "big" hosting companies yet. We had ten thousand or so domains on our servers. There was also a strict "no adult" policy. It was a mainstream company that was bent on keeping their mainstream image. It would seem to be a pretty easy thing to do, but with ten thousand domains, there was no practical way to police every one of them. We got a support call in, and the memo was handed over to me to fix it. The site was for an escort. The phone number was her escort phone. She answered in her sexy voice, and I laughed as I told her where I was calling from, to tell her the problem was resolved. Since I didn't sign off on anything on that repair, I just let it slide.
The hosting company MAY have the policy of "your data is private". That doesn't mean that every kid in support with root access is going to follow the policy to the letter. Depending on the size of the environment you may have between 2 to hundreds of people who can at any time view your data.
Some people may suggest encrypting your data. Great, except for the fact that somewhere in your code has to be a way to decrypt it, which is also accessible to them.
Even in most colo spaces, there's the potential of a 3rd party, from site engineering to the company legal department with law enforcement in tow, who may physically access your equipment, boot into single user, and look at anything they want.
The only way to maintain a secure site is to secure your box. That is, your machine, with only you having the passwords, in a space that you can physically control.
Everything depends on how secure you want your stuff, or more importantly, how important is the stuff that you're trying to secure?
I've been subcontracted to do work on people's stuff quite a bit. For example, a little web development and DBA work. Will I look through their data? Not really. I'll make sure everything works, but I won't remember any of it when I'm done. I'm not out to steal anything. There is the very real risk that someone will. Do you have credit card numbers? Email addresses? Real names? Anything worth value, and information is worth something. The environments I work in, there's a high level of trust, but my own server, there's exactly one person with root access (myself), and exactly 3 people with physical access, all of whom I trust. I'm not holding any super secret information, but I prefer to know the exact access list, rather than "Myself, and whoever may work at hosting company X."
You'd better hurry on that bridge. I already have a prospect with an offer on the table. If you can beat it before 5pm tonight, it can be yours!
When I first got my hands on a Vista machine, I was a little excited. I had tried out some betas, but they didn't work very well (surprise, beta). I worked under the assumption that they had fixed up XP, and gave it a pretty skin. Oh, I was so wrong.
So over a year later, I got a new desktop machine at work. Athlon 64 3800+, 2Gb RAM, SATA drive. For giggles, I let it boot up into Vista. It was something like 20 to 30 minutes to get to the desktop, since it was a first boot. From there it was still dog slow. I had my Athlon 2400+ with 1Gb RAM running XP sitting beside it, and the performance difference was really sad.
Luckily, I had already planned to wipe it, and install Slamd64 (a 64bit Linux). That's a very peppy machine now. So much so, that I have VMWare running all the time, with two or three Linux VM's and a WinXP VM (for a work-required program to run).
I'm far from a newbie user, but if I had been, I may have thought computers were always real slow, and that's just the way it is. That's the only people who are going to be really satisfied with Vista, the ones who don't know any better.
Again, as we understand it.
Just because, as you say, we've assigned what we know as matter to the name "fermion", and the non-physical "bosons", doesn't mean that they are only two of hundreds or thousands of other "things" that we have not been able to identify or experience.
We observe through the senses that we have, and things beyond our senses with instruments designed to observe what we've detected through interactions of things that we can observe.
It's been just over 100 years that we've known about radiation, and that was due to the observation of it's interaction with physical matter in a way that we could observe.
For the most part, we observe through the radio spectrum. Very long waves in heat. Then light. We've known about waves higher than light for about 200 years. We've only been able to harness microwaves for about 70 years.
This is all one field of study, and followed a path that we are able to observe. If we had evolved in a different place, we may have had different senses. What if we were able to feel gravitational forces better? There are noted differences in the gravitational pull of the earth by location. NASA has been mapping these for years. Might we now be able to harness these gravitational variations for communication and travel? I don't want to wander off into sci-fi land, but I'm sure someone will want to relate the Star Trek fantasy warp drive here. In their pseudo-universe, they warp space, presumably through strong gravitational forces, to shorten the distance between two places, creating travel much like an inch worm does.
All we know is what we know right now. To say we can learn nothing else is idiocy.
I had an argument with someone years ago, when the 100Mhz computers were first released. He was insistent that it was the fastest computers would ever go. Due to ... blah, he was wrong, but he insisted there would be nonionizing radiation leaks, and all kinds of bad things that would happen should a person be unshielded within feet of a processor over 100Mhz. I say that as my 2.4Ghz machine is running about a foot from me.
Don't try to underestimate what can happen. We may hit a lull in our technological advancement, but it will continue to grow.
So, when you pissed your pants, that would have actually just been a coolant leak?
Physics, as we understand it.
That's not to say there isn't a whole world of physics that we haven't even begun to theorize about, much less understand.
You have to love someone who posts what almost reads as authoritative, and then puts crap in it like:
> "When power fails, or when you press reset, they will be in a >
> "dirty" state, and the system may need to recreate the array.
> That is, if it can. I've never tried it, but I can imagine"
MD devices generally recover fine from a power loss. And, I've tried it. A lot. I've had quite a few machines (say hundreds) which have had various events in the past, which caused them to lose power. Here's an example now. Someone accidentally pulled the power cord out on this machine today. It wasn't intentional, they thought they were pulling the one above it.
cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid5 hdd2[1] hda2[2]
351421696 blocks level 5, 4k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [_UU]
md0 : active raid1 hdd1[1] hdc1[0] hda1[2]
40064 blocks [3/3] [UUU]
unused devices:
One of the drives didn't come up. Not surprising, this machine has been up for a long time, under heavy load. I'm pretty sure we're beyond MTBF on most of the components. It will be replaced soon anyways. We swapped drives, and ran:
raidhotadd /dev/md1 /dev/hdc2
Now it's rebuilding. There's no noticable performance impact. No data was lost. The only "downtime" was for the tech to realize they pulled the wrong cord, and put it back in.
cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid5 hdc2[3] hdd2[1] hda2[2]
351421696 blocks level 5, 4k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [_UU]
[>....................] recovery = 0.0% (54992/175710848) finish=159.6min speed=18330K/sec
md0 : active raid1 hdd1[1] hdc1[0] hda1[2]
40064 blocks [3/3] [UUU]
unused devices:
I'm thinking of manic paranoid delusional. Or in more modern terms, bipolar.
He believes he's the only one who can save the world (or the network in this case).
Everyone, including staff are out to get him.
And of course, he did counterproductive things which caused more trouble than they solved.
I'd prefer to be the evil mastermind, "stroking" a "cat", with my evil laugh (evil laugh already in place).
I think he just proved it a bit too well...
"oohh.. girl... tight... clothes..."
Brawndo!
Back in the day (like, high school) I played sax like a pro..
Then again, I can type over 100wpm, so maybe that helped a lot. :)
People don't quite get the concept of chords. Everything on a sax was a combination of 9 fingers, on even more keys. I don't remember off hand how many there are, but enough to keep you busy. To sound good, you have to get practiced.
I almost (almost) consider it harder than really playing piano, as far as the fingering goes. I don't mean one-fingering it. I mean complex music, where you're physically tired after playing the piece. :)
And ya, I played both (and more).
They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
My wife is pretty sure I'm talking to other women on the computer. I already know perfectly well 95% of the people on the Internet are men (99.9% on Slashdot), and most of the remainder are men pretending to be women. :)
I don't like the visual I get thinking about people on the other side of a chat, so I just don't bother.
Power would obviously need to be part of the site selection process.
There can be power in isolated areas, that don't necessarily have high speed internet access. Those would make excellent relay points, if they have good visibility also.
Everything depends on where his physical locations are, what features exist around those locations, what his budget is, and what his expectations are.
"remote" may 100 miles away from the nearest city, on top of a big mountain, with wind and diesel power generation. It could also mean 1000 miles away from the nearest city, in a valley, with mountains ranging from 2,000 feet to 19,000 feet, with no practical means to get power to any of them. Then he's really stuck, except for satellite.
With so many variables, he can't really just ask the question that he posed. Then again, I wouldn't really suggest outlining your entire company in a Slashdot question.
Ahhh, the mistress... Most of the eligible women I know won't have any part of that. They are only interested in boyfriends, and not the married kind. :)
Where do you pick up a mistress anyways? :)
My wife would be very upset if she found out I had a girlfriend. The noises would probably be me being killed. :)
Well, according to This page, you could lease a single transponder for about $335k/mo (average across the listed rates).
I think for that much, it'd be cheaper to buy a few select pieces of land, put up a 100' tower on each. 100' towers at sea level will get you 28 miles. 100' tower on a 5000' mountain will get you 115 miles. If the sites happen to be so lucky that there's a 5,000' and 7,000' mountain to use, they could be used for 220 miles. :)
Rather than buying land and building towers, you can always lease tower space. But, if you put up towers, you can lease that space, should you be in a good area for it.
There's a whole lot of remote northern Canada, so it's hard to even guess at how many installations would be required.
That just gets funnier every time I read it.
It's a good thing I don't live in an apartment, and I don't have a big dish. :)
Oh, you have to be kidding me. Someone should take away your Slashdot license. :)
What would a geek do with a big honkin' parabolic reflector? All kinds of things.
1) The most obvious, pick up old satellite signals. I'm pretty sure (but not positive) that the C and KU bands are still in use. I used to watch live feeds for various news stations, along with all kinds of weird broadcasting. It was my first exposure to local TV in other areas.
2) "Free to air". I won't say anything else about that, it's up to you to research.
3) Listen in on unencrypted government traffic. There was a news story about this a few years ago. Some folks in England were intercepting not-so-secret US Government recon flights over Eastern Europe. (If they were to be really secret, they would have been encrypted and on different satellites). Just because the antenna normally points on one arc, it doesn't mean that's the only things to listen to.
4) One heck of a 802.11b/g antenna. :) Watch out for the FCC though, that's a lot of gain. You may need to put a finer mesh screen over your existing panels. Check your wavelengths.
5) Parabolic reflector + big light source (sun) = quick fried lunch. Cover it in mylar, and don't look into it directly. Better yet, don't be in front of it. It's all natural, and doesn't hurt the environment much. :)
6) Parabolic reflector + microphone = really big parabolic microphone. Since you still have the mylar on from #5, all you have to do is mount the microphone. Well, you may want to use something less optically reflective, like saran wrap, unless you want to risk cooking your $5 microphone. :)
7) Parabolic reflector + Microwave oven magnetron = trouble. Your 802.11b/g transmitter may have been putting off 0.025W (0.200W if you bought a good card). What happens when you pump 700W+ into the dish? :) How about a dozen magnetrons aimed into a smaller dish at the focal point, to reflect back down into the main dish first? 8.4KW and the gain of your antenna. You could cook your dinner from a few miles away. Don't aim it at friends, enemies, or anything you don't want to mess up pretty quick.
8) Get another one the same size, cover them both in mylar, and have your own UFO parked in the back yard. Sell the pictures to the National Enquirer, and then sell the UFO on eBay with a signed copy of that edition.
and on to the boring options.
9) Scrap metal?
10) Pull the panels, and you'll have really big snow shoes.
11) Pull the panels for snow sled racing this winter.
12) Pull the panels, Cover the convex side with styrofoam and fiberglass, and make some totally rad knee boards.
Enjoy!
I just wonder where he thinks all of this carbon dioxide is going to come from. If we increased the atmosphere there by 10%, we'd still be losing an awful lot of the Earth's atmosphere. I like the idea of keeping some of it here, since I kinda gotta live here for a while.
You gotta love the idea of a "standard" being an irregular eccentric orbit (eccentric around the earth including the moon, and irregular that the moon moves relative to the earth).
That's like a woman with "standard" mood swings. If I ever meet one, I'll let you know. :)
**DUCKING**
Everyone knows it's in Nevada. Why do you think Area 51 is still off limits. They don't want to dismantle the set, they may have to use it again. :)
*Ducking with you*
Inertia.
The weight wouldn't hurt, the inertia of the first object being at a stop, and the ISS attempting to speed it up would hurt.
You'd run into problems with vectors too. :) The return trip may end up being straight into the moon, or a glorious trip into outer space with no return ticket. :)
This is one of the stupidest ideas I've read. I don't know how it made it to be news.
The ISS is designed for one thing, to float around the earth.
It isn't designed for radiation. It's doubtful if the electronics or the crew would survive through the Van Allen belt.
It isn't designed for sustained flight. It's designed to be bumped around very (very) slowly between orbital altitudes, not pushed for long distances.
It isn't designed for long term flight. It doesn't carry sufficient supplies to have a crew that far away.
In an emergency, they'd be screwed. Their evacuation plan involves the Russian resupply modules, which are fine to drop from the ISS in orbit, not push out from the moon and pray. Their reentry velocity would be WAY over what it is coming from the ISS, since they'd be falling towards the earth the whole way. The resupply modules don't carry enough fuel to do the complicated maneuvers that would be required to decrease their velocity enough to survive.
Resupply would be virtually impossible. Sure, we send things up to the ISS now. The ISS flies at between 278km to 425km. The iner Van Allen belt extends from 700km to 10,000km from the earth's surface. The outer Van Allen belt extends from 20,000km to 65,000km. The moon is at approximately 384,000km (average) from the earth's surface . So, the resupply ships would be flying 1000x the distance.
With the moon landings, they targeted an object 3,400km wide. To resupply, they'd be targeting an object 58 meters wide. While I'm not going to suggest it's impossible, it's just not within the abilities of the infrastructure that we have right now. By the time we had just the resupply infrastructure built, the ISS would be ready to retire (or have already been retired).
And lets not forget pesky things like solar flares. The ISS does over 15 orbits of the earth per day. With a little good solar forecasting, they can put the earth between the ISS and the sun to avoid the radiation burst. Lounging around between the earth and the sun on a direct course for the moon, they don't have that luxury.
All the ISS navigation is done based on it's gyroscopes and earth based telemetry. If you're not near the earth, all of the Earth based stuff is pretty much worthless. They'd need to establish moon based tracking systems.
I'm sure I missed a few finer points there. I'm not an astronaut, nor do I work for NASA. I've just been paying a lot of attention for the last 30 years or so. It's something about being able to see launches from the front door of my house that may have gotten my attention.
I like the idea as something to do in the future. They *SHOULD* put a platform in a wide orbit around the earth and moon, which would be a significantly better way to not only move crew and supplies between the earth and moon, but give a nice neutral launch site mid trip for further exploration. The platform should have a much higher mass, better shielding, room to process sustainable supplies (plants to grow food and process air), and enough mass so it could tote along other craft, rather than being pushed long by other ships on occasion.
A future platform would be an awesome (like invoking awe, not like totally rad) feat, which would help guide us towards future longer range space travel.
Unfortunately, I don't see that ever happening. All the space agencies are a politically wrapped money pit, that spend more money talking, and less time doing. A well focused, unburdened effort would do us wonders. And yes, I volunteer to run NASA, if they can specifically block it from ALL political and government intervention. :)
Not quite that far back, Mr. Flintstone. Think a happy medium, with a small engine, HEI ignition module (just one) on a distributor cap. The only engine electrical wires required were to the ignition, starter, alternator, and battery.
I do really respect the technology on an old tractor we had as a kid. It was a big diesel Massey Ferguson farm tractor. The thing was old, beat up, and missing parts (mostly rusted off body metal). The alternator didn't work, so you'd have to charge the battery every few weeks, when the engine started cranking slow. It had a mechanical fuel pump, injection, etc, etc. The key lock had broken, so starting it only involved touching two wires to spin the starter. You'd pull the choke to shut it down. It was simple and mechanically indestructible, and was about 40 years old when it was sold.
There's a lot to be said for simplicity.
That's why you have to use coordination. When he's called down to HR, that's when the other admins are cleaning up. By the time he's done pleading for his job and not getting anywhere, he's already locked out.