I have it on pretty good authority that it is part of the airbag.
Just wait for more images from MER-B (Opportunity). You're about to see some really cool stuff in the next few days. No Martian crabs or bunnies, I'm afraid, but still some awesome stuff.
Erm, JPL is part of NASA. Caltech manages JPL, and therefore a part of Caltech, but it's also as much a part of NASA as KSC, JSC, or any of the other NASA facilities.
True, things need to be tailored to the environment they run in. This was not a box that offered services to the world at large, but I still wished to be accessible to the world at large (I'm out-of-town and want to quickly log in from an unfamiliar place). If I was running I huge E-commerce site, I wouldn't recommend my strategy.
What a luxury that is. Why, in my day, we had to stick the ground wire up our arses and alternatively stick the "1" wire and the "0" wire in our mouths.
It really sucked when the ground wire and the zero wire were the same color, too. Boy, you didn't want to get that messed up.
Not at all, and it's not a half-bad idea, but it's also not what the other poster was saying. He was talking about temporarily shutting down a service, which I interpret differently than firewalling a single IP out.
What I used is really just a variant of your idea, just taken to paranoid extremes. Instead of blocking just port 80, I blocked all of them. Instead of temporarily, it was essentially permanent, except that I was too lazy to work up a "save the updated rules automatically" script, so when I rebooted, those IPs could play again. Since that system had an average uptime of months, those IPs were effectively banned for quite some time.
Unfortunately, you have just created a way to DoS yourself. I just repeatedly hit ports 76-79 and your web server stops. Others I'm sure will cover scanning in non-numeric order as a way around this.
I had a firewall configuration once that looked for connections to closed ports. If I saw one IP address connect to three different closed ports, it dropped ALL subsequent packets from that IP address for an indefinite and highly extended (i.e. weeks) length of time. I could probably adapt that code to do something like this.
They did (implicitly) encode a right to privacy
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 1
The ninth amendment (article the eleventh)
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The tenth amendment (article the twelfth)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Many of the Founders were worried that enumerating rights in the constitution would lead people to believe that those were the only rights they possessed. Therefore these two amendments were added.
Pity that it didn't seem to do much good in the final analysis.
Write your congressman to give NASA a big budget increase. This isn't the 60s when the money was there for the asking. They talk about these rover missions as an 800 million dollar mission, but it's not 400/400. The first one was about 550 (figuring it out) and the next one was 250. We can probably do more MER-type rovers for 200 million a pop now. In terms of interplanetary missions, that would be chump change.
Redundant systems and extra engineering costs money, though. The budget isn't a concern, it's a HARD limit. "DO X with Y dollars, or else don't do X at all." This isn't the Apollo program anymore.
It is a HUGE volume of data, and it comes from all over the place. If you are interested in navigation information, then you can point your FTP client of choice to naif.jpl.nasa.gov and download all the pointing and ephemerides you could want. There's even a toolkit there for various Unixes and Windows to parse this stuff. Science info gets/will get released on the main PDS site I mentioned before. If you want actual mechanical/electrical/propulsion engineering details, I'm afraid I can't help you. I'm a software engineer supporting the scientists, not the engineers.
A caveat: The data at NAIF is not for the fainthearted. There are no "you are here" files. You are welcome to browse and take whatever you like but it is not trivial stuff. I've been working with NAIF kernels and the CSPICE library for two years and there are still parts that give me the shakes when I think about using them. Even a brilliant softwarte developer will have a difficult time making much sense of it without a more than superficial knowledge of ephemerides, remote sensing, and general NASA/JPL procedures and their peculiar argot.
I also apologize if I came off rough before. We get (especially those of us in the Mars community) a lot of flak for not releasing up-to-the-minute data from people who are largely told what to think by Richard Hoa[gx]land and his ilk. I tend to take it a bit personally since there is not one bit of released data for the Odyssey THEMIS experiment that has not gone through software I personally wrote and these people more or less accuse us (ME!) of lying. In more polite societies, a charge of lying could be satisfied with swords or pistols on the field, but now all I can do is get really grumpy about it.:-)
Every scrap of data from NASA science missions get released through the Planetary Data System, eventually. It's just the science teams that actually propose and run the missions get first crack at the data.
If you think this isn't fair, stop for a moment and think about the years of blood, sweat and tears that go into these missions. Do you think it is fair then that the scientist with the best internet connection gets to analyze the data first, just because he has a great internet connection? I guarantee you that would end space research because there's no payback for the teams who actually design the missions.
And if you think they did a crappy job with the analysis, well, eventually all the raw data is released and everybody gets a crack at it.
of watching the images returned by MER-B with a fairly prominent planetary geologist tonight, and what he had to say was "That ain't no [expletive deleted] lava flow."
The next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting, folks. And who said the Meridiani site was going to be boring?
The Meridiani Planum landing site is smack dab in the middle of a large (as in spotted from space using the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer) bed of gray hematite. In addition there are spots of lower albedo in the features there that seem to show greater hydration. Couple that with the data from Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer that shows an extra hydrogen abundance there and it's a prime candidate for a bunch of near surface water.
Gray hematite is a ferrous oxide crystal that normally forms on Earth in water, especially in hot springs and the like. It's a great place to go if you're looking for signs of water. This is the only place on Mars we know that shows gray hematite in any large quantities.
The Meridiani site is easier to get to than the Gusev site, but that doesn't make it look scientifically less interesting.
if you wrote a nifty GNOME panel applet, then why the hell was I asked to write one? Does yours happen to show incidence angle and both mission times in TLST, too?
The engineers and scientists have to pay for their own watches, so you can sleep safe knowing that those thousands of dollars for mechanical watches aren't being paid for by taxes.
And how much do we pay each year to the Feds for military stationed abroad, food stamps, a bankrupt social security system, and debt servicing?
I think that Echostar screwed me, and therefore I will reflexively root for anyone who opposes them, regardless of the merits, ethics and morality of their actions.
Their stress test for landing, IIRC, was dropping the spacecraft from about 10 meters on to concrete, straight down, once.
The problem is, Mars sometimes has nasty winds that would impart a bit of shear to the spacecraft. I doubt it would ever hit straight down like that, given the typical landing conditions.
for interplanetary missions. Since planets are in different reference frames and the cruise phase of an interplanetary mission takes a long time, there are relativistic effects in time keeping, though smaller than the differences in planetary rotation, are much more difficult to compute than the simple difference between days and sols.
The standard time used is normally the Barycentric Dynamical Time (or TDB), which is the time measured by a theoretical aomic clock placed at the barycenter of the solar system. Other time systems are used when needed. TDB is within 2 milliseconds of Terrestrial Dynamical Time (TDT, which is a similar time except computed for the Earth/Moon barycenter), which in turn differs from the more familiar UTC only in that TDT does not have leap seconds to account for variations in the angular velocity of Earth.
There is a standard library used in NASA missions called SPICE that handles these conversions between ephemeris times for planetary systems, spacecraft and TDB. It does a whole lot more (positions, speed and orientation of planetary objects and spacecraft, light travel time computations, etc.). The group that publishes this library is also responsible for publishing data files (called kernels, no relation to Unix) to facilitate these operations.
I wouldn't worry too much about time keeping differences. The only reason MER mission ops is concerned with this is because the rovers only operate in the Martian daytime. Time for missions is otherwise tracked using SCLK (spacecraft clock), SCET (space craft ephemeris time), or in TDB.
Save the output to a file, and view it with the image viewer of your choice. It's even in color, and lasts as long as you want it. No audio though, sorry.
However, individuals are not, unless they are citizens of states that are signatories to this treaty.
The trick then is to become a "stateless" person. For US citizens, this would mean showing up at a US embassy or consulate and signing a form. Your mileage may vary for different countries.
You had best be serious about leaving the planet then, because it's really difficult to get by not being a citizen of any country.
Please be patient. We are working on correcting this problem as quickly as we can. United States Government, LLP, thanks you for your continued business. Have a nice day!
Slashdot Mirror
I have it on pretty good authority that it is part of the airbag.
Just wait for more images from MER-B (Opportunity). You're about to see some really cool stuff in the next few days. No Martian crabs or bunnies, I'm afraid, but still some awesome stuff.
Erm, JPL is part of NASA. Caltech manages JPL, and therefore a part of Caltech, but it's also as much a part of NASA as KSC, JSC, or any of the other NASA facilities.
True, things need to be tailored to the environment they run in. This was not a box that offered services to the world at large, but I still wished to be accessible to the world at large (I'm out-of-town and want to quickly log in from an unfamiliar place). If I was running I huge E-commerce site, I wouldn't recommend my strategy.
What a luxury that is. Why, in my day, we had to stick the ground wire up our arses and alternatively stick the "1" wire and the "0" wire in our mouths.
It really sucked when the ground wire and the zero wire were the same color, too. Boy, you didn't want to get that messed up.
Not at all, and it's not a half-bad idea, but it's also not what the other poster was saying. He was talking about temporarily shutting down a service, which I interpret differently than firewalling a single IP out.
What I used is really just a variant of your idea, just taken to paranoid extremes. Instead of blocking just port 80, I blocked all of them. Instead of temporarily, it was essentially permanent, except that I was too lazy to work up a "save the updated rules automatically" script, so when I rebooted, those IPs could play again. Since that system had an average uptime of months, those IPs were effectively banned for quite some time.
Unfortunately, you have just created a way to DoS yourself. I just repeatedly hit ports 76-79 and your web server stops. Others I'm sure will cover scanning in non-numeric order as a way around this.
I had a firewall configuration once that looked for connections to closed ports. If I saw one IP address connect to three different closed ports, it dropped ALL subsequent packets from that IP address for an indefinite and highly extended (i.e. weeks) length of time. I could probably adapt that code to do something like this.
Many of the Founders were worried that enumerating rights in the constitution would lead people to believe that those were the only rights they possessed. Therefore these two amendments were added.
Pity that it didn't seem to do much good in the final analysis.
Write your congressman to give NASA a big budget increase. This isn't the 60s when the money was there for the asking. They talk about these rover missions as an 800 million dollar mission, but it's not 400/400. The first one was about 550 (figuring it out) and the next one was 250. We can probably do more MER-type rovers for 200 million a pop now. In terms of interplanetary missions, that would be chump change.
Redundant systems and extra engineering costs money, though. The budget isn't a concern, it's a HARD limit. "DO X with Y dollars, or else don't do X at all." This isn't the Apollo program anymore.
It is a HUGE volume of data, and it comes from all over the place. If you are interested in navigation information, then you can point your FTP client of choice to naif.jpl.nasa.gov and download all the pointing and ephemerides you could want. There's even a toolkit there for various Unixes and Windows to parse this stuff. Science info gets/will get released on the main PDS site I mentioned before. If you want actual mechanical/electrical/propulsion engineering details, I'm afraid I can't help you. I'm a software engineer supporting the scientists, not the engineers.
A caveat: The data at NAIF is not for the fainthearted. There are no "you are here" files. You are welcome to browse and take whatever you like but it is not trivial stuff. I've been working with NAIF kernels and the CSPICE library for two years and there are still parts that give me the shakes when I think about using them. Even a brilliant softwarte developer will have a difficult time making much sense of it without a more than superficial knowledge of ephemerides, remote sensing, and general NASA/JPL procedures and their peculiar argot.
I also apologize if I came off rough before. We get (especially those of us in the Mars community) a lot of flak for not releasing up-to-the-minute data from people who are largely told what to think by Richard Hoa[gx]land and his ilk. I tend to take it a bit personally since there is not one bit of released data for the Odyssey THEMIS experiment that has not gone through software I personally wrote and these people more or less accuse us (ME!) of lying. In more polite societies, a charge of lying could be satisfied with swords or pistols on the field, but now all I can do is get really grumpy about it. :-)
Every scrap of data from NASA science missions get released through the Planetary Data System, eventually. It's just the science teams that actually propose and run the missions get first crack at the data.
If you think this isn't fair, stop for a moment and think about the years of blood, sweat and tears that go into these missions. Do you think it is fair then that the scientist with the best internet connection gets to analyze the data first, just because he has a great internet connection? I guarantee you that would end space research because there's no payback for the teams who actually design the missions.
And if you think they did a crappy job with the analysis, well, eventually all the raw data is released and everybody gets a crack at it.
What? Voluntarily take a demotion?
of watching the images returned by MER-B with a fairly prominent planetary geologist tonight, and what he had to say was "That ain't no [expletive deleted] lava flow."
The next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting, folks. And who said the Meridiani site was going to be boring?
Time to go to bed.
The Meridiani Planum landing site is smack dab in the middle of a large (as in spotted from space using the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer) bed of gray hematite. In addition there are spots of lower albedo in the features there that seem to show greater hydration. Couple that with the data from Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer that shows an extra hydrogen abundance there and it's a prime candidate for a bunch of near surface water.
Gray hematite is a ferrous oxide crystal that normally forms on Earth in water, especially in hot springs and the like. It's a great place to go if you're looking for signs of water. This is the only place on Mars we know that shows gray hematite in any large quantities.
The Meridiani site is easier to get to than the Gusev site, but that doesn't make it look scientifically less interesting.
is areographically. FYI.
So everything that gets reported must be "human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!".
if you wrote a nifty GNOME panel applet, then why the hell was I asked to write one? Does yours happen to show incidence angle and both mission times in TLST, too?
Is this a government operation, or what?
The engineers and scientists have to pay for their own watches, so you can sleep safe knowing that those thousands of dollars for mechanical watches aren't being paid for by taxes.
And how much do we pay each year to the Feds for military stationed abroad, food stamps, a bankrupt social security system, and debt servicing?
I think that Echostar screwed me, and therefore I will reflexively root for anyone who opposes them, regardless of the merits, ethics and morality of their actions.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Their stress test for landing, IIRC, was dropping the spacecraft from about 10 meters on to concrete, straight down, once.
The problem is, Mars sometimes has nasty winds that would impart a bit of shear to the spacecraft. I doubt it would ever hit straight down like that, given the typical landing conditions.
with respect to space missions, I'm going to go postal.
It's about as funny at this point as "In Soviet Russia", "all your base..." and "hot grits".
for interplanetary missions. Since planets are in different reference frames and the cruise phase of an interplanetary mission takes a long time, there are relativistic effects in time keeping, though smaller than the differences in planetary rotation, are much more difficult to compute than the simple difference between days and sols.
The standard time used is normally the Barycentric Dynamical Time (or TDB), which is the time measured by a theoretical aomic clock placed at the barycenter of the solar system. Other time systems are used when needed. TDB is within 2 milliseconds of Terrestrial Dynamical Time (TDT, which is a similar time except computed for the Earth/Moon barycenter), which in turn differs from the more familiar UTC only in that TDT does not have leap seconds to account for variations in the angular velocity of Earth.
There is a standard library used in NASA missions called SPICE that handles these conversions between ephemeris times for planetary systems, spacecraft and TDB. It does a whole lot more (positions, speed and orientation of planetary objects and spacecraft, light travel time computations, etc.). The group that publishes this library is also responsible for publishing data files (called kernels, no relation to Unix) to facilitate these operations.
I wouldn't worry too much about time keeping differences. The only reason MER mission ops is concerned with this is because the rovers only operate in the Martian daytime. Time for missions is otherwise tracked using SCLK (spacecraft clock), SCET (space craft ephemeris time), or in TDB.
Here's a python script to generate that:
Save the output to a file, and view it with the image viewer of your choice. It's even in color, and lasts as long as you want it. No audio though, sorry.
However, individuals are not, unless they are citizens of states that are signatories to this treaty.
The trick then is to become a "stateless" person. For US citizens, this would mean showing up at a US embassy or consulate and signing a form. Your mileage may vary for different countries.
You had best be serious about leaving the planet then, because it's really difficult to get by not being a citizen of any country.
Please be patient. We are working on correcting this problem as quickly as we can. United States Government, LLP, thanks you for your continued business. Have a nice day!
It might as well have been.