*BSD News Article 43901


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh
From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Cannot mount root during install?
Date: 12 May 1995 07:05:14 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <3ov1ba$93e@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <3o4lp2$b2i@nntp1.u.washington.edu> <3orbtt$su9@passion.nosc.mil> <3ottl6$l7@park.uvsc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu

In article <3ottl6$l7@park.uvsc.edu>,
Terry Lambert  <terry@cs.weber.edu> wrote:
>One major point: Have you both tried the most recent snap?  It's
>impossible to magically make fixed bits appear on a CDROM.  Even
>if Jordan had a laser and your missle coordinates, I think
>atmospheric distortion would foil him (Jordan can't afford to buy
>adaptive optics).

Hah!  This is an outmoded, wooden (lowell) defense strategy!  Who
needs adaptive optics when you can simply pop off a one-shot
X ray nuke from orbit, right down the desired trajectory to the
user's location - who needs accurate when you can have brute
force?  You just want to ionize a nice wide tube of atmosphere for
a 10 millisecond window or so, during which you bounce the message beam
down the same trajectory off of another mirrored laser transponder
in medium orbit from a fixed source further out (and out of the way of
that little nuke you just kicked off).  You can use the interval to
scribble on the user (and his CD) at lower power, right down that nice
little ionized port.  Child's play, really.  Just takes a little tight
syncronization and the right resources in orbit.. :-)

						Jordan