You should hire me instead of him. I've been using python to do statistics and machine learning in a bioinformatics context for the last 15 years. Plus, if you don't, I'll kill this puppy. Isn't he cute? You wouldn't want to be responsible for his death, would you?

Heh, yeah, this is nothing new. There is more than one investment bank in London that hires professional actors to deliver presentations, then the real bankers take the stage at Q&A time. If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either... There are people employed full time to do just that.

We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.

It isn't like Lamo sold out a fellow hacker; Manning had special access, and probably obtained the leaked information using that, rather than any particular skills.

That phone call to Lamo was tantamount to "Hi. You don't know me, but you're now an accessory to treason." Already convicted felon or not, nobody needs that kind of turd dropped right in the middle of their life.

I've always felt that most good programmers go through 3 stages.

Stage 1: Write very simple, naive code, no fancy design patterns, just kind of brute force everything.

Stage 2: Discover design pattens, and fancy obscure programming constructs. Use them everywhere regardless of whether it makes sense or makes the code easier to understand and maintain.

Stage 3: Realize the folly of stage 2, and enter a zen like state where one writes deceptively simple, clean code. Rarely, if ever, use any fancy constructs or design patterns (except where it actually makes sense to use them.)

For the novice programmer looking at someone else's code it's very very easy to confuse stages 1 and 3.

There is a similar trajectory in what you choose to build. In stage 1 you write programs that are conspicuously missing features; in stage 2 you write programs that have too many features (and yet may still be missing some important ones); in stage 3 you write programs that do exactly what's needed.

My experience suggests that one good way to speed the transition to stage 3 is to try to make your programs short. When I was writing On Lisp I spent a lot of time working on programs that had to be short enough to be reproduced in the book, and this cured me of the tendency to pile on features.

Rtm's example probably helped too. His source code is as laconic as he is in person.

You're completely missing the point. Terrorism is about spreading terror, killing people is just a technique. Finding reasons to laugh at these jackasses makes them a lot less terrifying.

The best way to fight their ideas is to avoid buying into their romantic self-image as heroic martyrs, and reveal them as the sad losers they really are.

I think that is what happened here.

Google Maps uses, among others, images from the Ikonos satellite. Here are the specs: http://www.satimagingcorp.com/satellite-sensors/ikonos.html

It has a panchromatic sensor (greyscale) and red, green and blue sensors. Ikonos has a ground speed of 6.8 km per second, so even if the sensors are only a few centimeters apart, the images would need to be recombined at an offset. The offset would be tuned for static ground objects.

So I guess the ghosting is due to both the altitude and the speed of the airplane relative to the ground.