It's much easier than you'd think. In Russia, for example, islamists from the "Caucasian Emirate" have quite a few ethnic Europeans (mostly Russians) fighting for them. And remember, you only need one - and you can spare him and coddle him until he's needed for such a mission.

They do have to worry about some other kinds of fanatical extremists that think that Saudi Arabia is not sufficiently Islamic. A while ago I've read an article on one of the Chechen Islamist websites about KSA, where the author has made just that case. His main argument was that KSA has other laws in addition to Sharia, and that the king can pardon people committed in Sharia courts.

But your examples aren't really particularly different when using regex, at least with a sane library. I mean, in Python, for example, they'd be re.search and re.sub, respectively, but everything else is the same.

In what sense? If you mean first-class functions and the associated techniques and patterns, then this is not at all unique to Lisp. The real distinguishing feature of Lisp is code-as-data and manipulations on it, and mainstream OO languages are definitely not anywhere even close.

I wonder how freaked out you would be if I told you that the official maintainer of Python on Windows is a Microsoft employee these days.

It goes beyond "more comfortable", and into "what the fuck were we thinking when we actively avoided using and building on F/OSS". Which is perfectly sensible from a business perspective, because the old MS attitude towards F/OSS was basically the equivalent of tying one's hands behind one's back to avoid accidental masturbation, and then trying to compete in a craft competition. It only works when the game is rigged in your favor in advance, and that doesn't last.

To me, the main annoyance of bash is the constant need to use grep, sed and friends to parse structured data from unstructured stdout, and also many traps with variable expansion, and need to use hacks such as xargs. But I agree that it matters more when writing scripts than when using it as an interactive shell.

OTOH, the huge problem of PS is that it only works on objects in memory. If you are interoping with a classic console app that writes to stdout, that means that you're getting a string. If you don't have enough memory for that, too bad. I also don't like the .NET object model in that role (it's fine as is, just not very appropriate as a generic structured data interop protocol).

If I had to make a list of things for a perfect shell, I'd say it should use a consistent naming scheme more like PS (but with aliases) and similar expansion rules, but get rid of the notion of passing objects around, and stick to text stream - but also define a standard structured format for them, which would probably be JSON for the sake of not reinventing the wheel.

Apple has very little presence in the enterprise precisely because they do those major tectonic shifts where everything breaks so often. OTOH, on Windows, you still have a pretty good chance of running an app originally compiled for Windows 1.0.

Yeah, I'm aware of the Sten. Mechanically it's probably very similar (it's about as simple as an open bolt design can get). But the beauty of what Luty did is going through a set of premade components readily available in hardware stores (mostly pipes) to come up with a list that requires no milling at all, and no other application of machining tools. The barrel of that thing, for example, is literally just a piece of pipe that just happens to be of the right diameter; so is the receiver. Consequently, not only you can make it in your garage, you don't need any tools for it other than a metal saw and a file. This is one step beyond even the Sten, which still requires some machining and welding to produce.

I think the point is to enlist you and other people who would be affected by such regulation as allies (grudging, but ...) to the fight. The wider the bans are, the more people they affect, the bigger the pushback - and in a democratic society that can make the difference (ultimately, if need be, when it comes to voting).

In US, the only part of the firearm that is controlled is the serialized part of the receiver. Usually it's the lower, though on some guns it's the upper. Everything else is just parts, and can literally be bought on Amazon or eBay and shipped to your door.

One exception is stuff that has to do with making guns full auto. The regulatory agency in charge of enforcing that law has declared a while ago that such parts are classified as "machine guns" all by themselves. It's not entirely consistent - for example, an AR bolt that has all the proper cuts for full auto operation is not considered a machine gun, but an AR sear is. Lightning link is considered a machine gun. In fact, at one point they classified a shoe string with one end tied to the reciprocating charging handle (e.g. on AK), and the other end to the trigger, to be a machine gun - and I don't mean the entire arrangement, but just the string "of the proper length" itself (this has since been rescinded).

Milling a full auto AR lower would be considered "manufacturing a machine gun", and is banned outright unless it is for law enforcement or military use (and then you need a bunch of licenses for that). OTOH, milling a semi-auto lower is perfectly legal so long as you don't intend to sell it; you don't even need to serialize it or register it in any way.

Did you mean "fools and their 3D printers"?

BTW, did you know that a working gun capable of shooting full-power shotgun shells can be made out of two pieces of steel tubing and a nail?

You can apparently make a 9mm submachine gun (albeit with unrifled barrel, so effective range is under 50m) with plumbing parts from the hardware store.

(We know that it's a real thing because the author of this book was imprisoned for actually making one after publishing it.)

It depends on the gun. For rifles, it is true. For shotguns, you can literally take steel pipe of the appropriate diameter, and it works great.

The other problem with making barrels regulated is that they're one of the few parts of the gun that not only wears down, but does so at a rather fast and predictable rate - unlike the receiver. Consequently, making barrels regulated would meet with significant pushback from gun owners (and not just the NRA 2A absolutist crowd).

The exception is what makes them legal, so they're obvious not "all illegal".

In practice, (B) means that there are several thousand fully automatic weapons floating around and occasionally showing up on the market. They're very expensive because of the limited supply, and there are many hoops to jump to obtain one, and they're not legal in many states. But you can still legally purchase one in US.

http://www.gunbroker.com/Machi...