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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?"
The space.com article cited was posted March 6; this posting from the National Association of Rocketry points out the BATF hasn't made it clear whether the regulations will apply to materials already on hand.
Also, this is part of a dispute that's been going on for years then be BATF decided to designate Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (the same fuel used in the Space Shuttle's SRBs) as an "explosive". The 62.5 gram limit was proposed as a compromise measure by the NAR to a flat-out banning of all APCP engines. This way, people could still enter into the higher-power forms of rocketry without dealing with the BATF's arcane regulations and uneven enforcement.
Then came the Homeland Security act and black powder (gunpowder, a/k/a "BP") engines were added to that list of "explosives", causing FedEx and UPS to ultimately refuse to carry them. There's still a bill pending in Congress to make a "technical correction" to remove black powder motors from that list. It's the subject of a phone and FAX compaign to garner support.
Would removing black powder from the 62.5 gram limit mean we see huge BP motors? Not likely, as the thrust/weight efficiency of BP is low enough not to make that a viable trade-off.
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.
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
That's enough for me. Perl it is.
The restrictions are for *specific* chemicals - Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant (APCP) and Black Powder. The propellants are combinations of fuel and oxidizers. The restrictions are limits for ONE engine. Engines may be clustered or staged for greater combined impulse. There are still alternatives such as hybrid systems (which use nitrous oxide and a solid material such as cellulose).
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I like to think that while the zealots are trying to make themselves heard, the important people are behind the scenes doing the important things. Any loudmouth shouting on behalf of any language should remember that the people who love the language most are working tirelessly to change it for the better. Read Larry Wall's Apocalypses and see if I'm kidding--and pay particular attention to the part where he destroys the regular expression as we know it. :-)
I also like to think that the really hardcore programmers out there aren't wasting their time arguing about what language is superior or whining about what you can do in one environment that you can't in another. Real programmers are too busy getting things working, by any means necessary, within the boundaries of the environment. If you are a true programmer, an environment works as well as you force it to work.
I'm very comfortable in GNU now, Linux, Cygwin, and then some, but it wasn't always so. A few years ago, being a Windows only type and knowing no C or C++, I used to work with Visual Basic a lot. When I found out that Perl worked better for about everything I had been using VB for, I switched. When I couldn't figure out how to do SendKeys or AppActivate using Perl and Win32 API calls, did I spend time griping? No! I wrote an ActiveX DLL, figured out enough C to get COM going, and SWIGged it together.
Slightly more recently, I wrote a parser in Perl to implement a workaround to various shortcomings in Greymatter, but I had to make it work with PHP, in which the entire rest of my site was written (because it's way easier to write a page in PHP than in Perl). Was it any problem? No. For the prototype, I had PHP exec my Perl. Was it messy? Yes! Eventually, when I had the time, I rewrote the parser from top to bottom in PHP.
There's no need to be religious about any of this. If you have the option to use the environment of your choice, by all means, use it! But if you are forced to work outside your boundaries, remember, you are a programmer; you can take it. Plus, the last thing you want to do is take out your frustrations on the masters of the unknown domain.
I write programs all the time that my friends want to try but won't because ActivePerl is 12MB to download. I'm not going to scream at my friends for not having Perl; they just can't use my program. If it's worth my time, I may go to the trouble of rewriting in C++. If it pays enough, I might even spring for Perl2EXE to do the work for me.
It's as simple as that. There's always some solution. You write for your environment. You try to convince your client to deploy programming environment N or virtual machine V on all the workstations; if that's a no go, you do something else that is a go--if that's not practical, you lose the sale.
At this point, I know most of what I need to know to get by in Perl, PHP, JavaScript, C, and C++, and maybe a little VB if I search my memory far enough, and I do virtually all my writing in vim (within which, I admit, I don't know every single command that might be of use to me). If somebody needs me to write something in Python, or Java, or Tcl, or Lisp, or JScript on Windows Scripting Host, or any other wacky thing with which I'm not in constant contact, and makes me do it in Emacs or Pico or even Notepad, damn it, should I back down? Hell, no!
First, I try my obviously overdeveloped shoehorning skills! (It's amazing how many different ways you can find to get incongruous program environments to communicate!) :-D
If that doesn't work, then I owe it to myself to take a serious look at what this environment can do, what it can do right, and what I have to work around. Then, I do my work and move on with my life.
I believe that this is a vital part of what is necessary to be a bona fide Renaissance Programmer, and that most programmers who don't feel the same have no business programming.