Category Archives: Technology and Society

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Today’s FBI Friday-Before-Holiday-Weekend Email Drop

14 Comments

I am simply stunned at what came out of it, even the parts that weren’t redacted (one has to wonder how bad the redacted portions are). Here’s Ben Shapiro’s take:

Here’s the bottom line: this is obviously criminal activity. The FBI’s decision not to recommend indictment was a total fraud; they hid behind the fig leaf that she didn’t “intend” to break the law, which was not required by the law. Even so, there is no way in hell that any other human being would be treated with such deference regarding the question of intent. Either Hillary Clinton is either the most incompetent woman ever put in charge of a major governmental department, or she’s a criminal. There’s no in-between here. And we’ve been informed she’s the Most Competent Woman In Human History.

I wonder if we’ve finally reached a point at which even the MSM can no longer support this?

[Update a while later]

Comey was full of it when he said that she didn’t lie to the FBI. She’s been lying to everyone.

[Update later afternoon]

More from former intelligence analyst John Schindler: “Although the FBI’s press release is terse, the documents themselves indelibly portray the Democratic presidential nominee as dishonest, entitled, and thoroughly incompetent.”

But other than that, she’s great.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Python Problem

29 Comments

Anyone have any idea why the following script doesn’t work?

*************************************
#!/usr/bin/env python3

# import modules used here — sys is a very standard one
import sys
#import re

# Gather our code in a main() function
def main():
infile = open(‘File1’, ‘r’)
outfile = open(‘File2’, ‘w’)
for line in infile:
line.replace(“

“,”test”)
#print(“Found string”)
outfile.write(line)

# Standard boilerplate to call the main() function to begin
# the program.
if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
main()
*************************************

When I run it, it simply copies the old file to the new one, without doing the replacement. I know that it’s seeing the pattern, because if I run the replace function in an if statement, it says that it found it.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

This Morning’s Pad Incident

42 Comments

It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.

What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.

It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.

[Update a couple minutes later]

One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, this is timely. The OIG has released a status report on commercial crew certification.

[Update a couple minutes later]

How this will affect Spacecom. Shares are down with the news. I’d call it a buying opportunity.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Also worth noting that it’s been a bad couple days for launch. Long March had a failure yesterday, and the Chinese have been mum about it (as usual).

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust already has a story about the potential ripple effects for SpaceX, SES, and the rest of the affected industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here‘s Loren Grush’s story.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And from Miri Kramer.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.

[Update a while later]

Well, this is bad news.

[Update a while later]

Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is great news, if true.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Why Didn’t She Destroy All Of The Benghazi Emails?

5 Comments

Because in addition to being corrupt liars, utterly indifferent to national security, she and her team are incompetent dolts. But that shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been paying attention for the past quarter century. Which is unfortunately far too many people.

Is there any point at which the Democrats finally come to realize that she and they just aren’t up to the job? They can’t even do a decent cover up.