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Slashback: Rocketry, Pythonation, Scoffing
Besides which, it's the hidden cameras that matter. An anonymous reader adds this followup to the story posted last month about Wired reporter Noah Shachtman's account of sneaking into classified areas at Los Alamos national Laboratory.
"In an email message to all Los Alamos National Laboratory employees, Pete Nanos, the current Director of LANL, responded with information suggesting that the Wired reporter who thought he had broken in to a 'top secret area' had in fact just crossed a cattle fence:
'The Wired reporter clearly did not enter a Laboratory security area. The Laboratory encompasses more than 40 square miles. The security force protects important assets within those boundaries but cannot -- and does not -- protect every square foot of property. Based on the article, it appears the reporter crossed a barbed-wire cattle fence, not a fence that protects a Los Alamos security area.
There is a small security area with several buildings (roughly 400 feet by 400 feet) near the driveway entrance to TA-33. That area is surrounded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. A security guard is stationed inside that area seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Clearly, the reporter did not climb that fence.
There are several other buildings outside the security area that are locked for property protection interests. They have no security interests. There are several gates and fenced areas on the TA-33 site, which are there for safety access control, not security.
It's unlikely the reporter would be prosecuted for trespassing; the Laboratory does not have law enforcement authority to prosecute, and none of the proper authorities witnessed the trespass.'"
Perhaps we can have a celebrity deathmatch. hfastedge writes "Ok, now that 2 perl conferences have been mentioned, I've been brought over the edge. Python is a language that is just as old, and arguably better from: most importantly a uniform standard of readability (enforced by using whitespace to delimit blocks (instead of {}), by avoiding overuse of cryptic symbols, and by a culture that strives to keep innovations as "pythonic"), and a rich development community. Anyway, normally, there are Python events in Europe, and a trail at O'Reilly's OSCON. But now, there is a far cheaper event taking place on March 24-28 in Washington DC: http://python.org/pycon/.
Examples of Python in action: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7"
Fly up go phhhhhwwwtttpffffff .... MyNameIsFred writes "Slashdot recently discussed whether anti-terrorism laws would destroy model rocketry. The government has ruled, and the message is clear, "When it comes to the hobby of model rocketry, size does matter. And in this case, the magic number is 62.5 grams. That's the largest amount of propellant a single model rocket engine can have in it and still be exempt from a new set of federal rules that will go into effect May 24." What does this mean for the the big guys in model rocketry, who use engines larger than this?"
1. Don't break into gov't installations. Tresspassing onto a cattle rancher's property may get you shot. Tresspassing onto gov't property will get you shot.
2. Python. Not as old as Perl.
3. Rockets. It's a problem of shipping the propellant. If you carry the boosters yourself, you're okay. You just can't ship them.
I have been pwned because my
Test: a Python story is a troll if it mentions Perl. Likewise, a Perl story is a troll if it mentions Python.
Substitute "vi" and "emacs" for "python" and "perl" and rerun.
you don't count.
/. just to be considered a real non-language. ;)
you must have 1 flame war a week on
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can see the headline now:
"Model Rocketry Enthusiasts' Hobby Goes Up in Smoke...."
I'll bet that pun goes over some people's heads.....
-- Horse_Pheathers
Because now it is impossible for a Terrorist or Open Source contributor to make any weapons! I mean shit, to get 125 grams of powder you would have to cut open two tubes, and that's like, harder than hell to do. Thank you, my precious Government, I will sleep soundly tonight.
Someone sounds scared of the Zend engine!!!!!
That's enough for me. Perl it is.
The corner booth at Denny's doesn't need to be reserved in advance, you know.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Quack, quack.
C++ is a scrawny, bald, naked saint in a loincloth who lives in a crumbling adobe hut where the desert and the jungle meet. He speaks in terse riddles, that expand out into pages of text if you bother to solve them. He can do the work of ten engineers and a hundred strong laborers merely by tapping his staff on the ground and shouting cryptic epithets.
Homer Simpson would be very VERY happy.
(roommate's friend blurted out that one in passing).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I was the impression (probably because of one of those feverish Discovery marathons I tend to engage in when I get tired of coding) that the nice folks who guard US installations that contain either nuclear weapons of nuclear materials are allowed under federal mandate to shoot to kill.
A former boss of mine once did a project at Lawrence Livermore, upgrading some of the remote detectors from '50s era electronics to more modern stuff. He told me his (Q?) clearance came up for renewal about a week before project completion. Rather than go to the trouble to renew it for that duration they fell back on an alternate waiver procedure.
As a result, all the while he was working on site there was an armed guard (uniformed military) about two paces away from him. The armed guard, continuously, had his left hand on his holstered pistol, his right hand extended (to fend off my ex-boss should he suddenly attack, giving him time to draw the pistol), and kept his eyes on my ex-boss constantly.
For > 8 hours per day.
My ex-boss had had it explained that, if the guard killed him - even due to halucinating an attack - he would NOT be brought up on charges, while if the guard DIDN'T shoot him in case of trouble he WOULD be brought up on charges. And that the guard knew this.
Needless to say this was a very stressful environment. And he did his best to finish the project before the guard decided to relieve the cramp in his right arm by plugging him. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As an ardent Perl user, all I can say is, "Methinks he doth protest too much."
And this is the product of CS majors switching to an English major. =P
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
However, it does mean massive tab-vs-space flamefests on comp.lang.python! (I'm a tab-hater myself -- tabs are a total PITA, and only advocated by people with stupid editors or people who don't understand that ASCII is not a form of semantic markup).
Sorry, Myriad...I just suffered a setback on my road to recovery and a pun-free life. I'll contact my sponsor immediately.
-- Horse_Pheathers, hanging his head slowly and doffing his jaunty jester's cap in shame, taking care to stifle the merry bells on the pointy bits.....
Examples of Python in action: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7"
And for those Visual Basic programmers confused by that sentence, here is a translation just for you:
Examples of Python in action: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
"Besides, it's not like you can't use more than one engine per rocket."
Ah, yes, the classic Slashdot answer: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
-PhilMills
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, will be quoted out of context on