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From: Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Cannot mount root during install?
Date: 12 May 1995 21:39:31 GMT
Organization: Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <3p0kij$cf7@park.uvsc.edu>
References: <3o4lp2$b2i@nntp1.u.washington.edu> <3orbtt$su9@passion.nosc.mil> <3ottl6$l7@park.uvsc.edu> <3ov1ba$93e@agate.berkeley.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hecate.artisoft.com
jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) wrote:
] 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.. :-)
Gimme a break! Like anyone would go to the expense of throwing
a single-use two beam K-alpha reflector cavity with little Pb
wires running out each end just to use the EMP to drive an X-Ray
laser that isn't as powerful as a thermal pumped free electron
laser run through a SHIVA beam amplifier! I'd like to see you
amplify an X-Ray laser, especially since the synchotron you'd use
to do it would be destroyed by your proposed power source!
Oh, yeah, sure, it's self-tunnelling, but it doesn't have to be
an X-ray device to self-tunnel! Geez! That's just a damn bullet
item for the marketing literature!
Even if you could reflect the thing (doubtful: how do you reflect
a gamma laser when you can't reflect gammas?), it's the wrong
frequency for updating CDROMs, even the writeable kind. You'd
probably boil the plastic, the bits, the aluminum backing, and all
the dirt in a 30 meter radius down to the bedrock. The result
be a practically unbootable CD.
And like you can aim worth spit anyway...
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.