The National Cryptologic Museum

An anonymous reader writes "The NSA's once small National Cryptologic Museum is bigger and better, with new more immersive exhibits like a reconstruction of a listening post from the Vietnam war. The place seems to be caught between the urge to keep your mouth shut and the pleasure of telling war stories. In time, though, the story notes that the need to tell stories wins out. Has anyone visited lately?"

Made a visit last summer...

[ktulus cry]

My brother was down at Fort Meade working for *cough cough cough* last summer, so when we went down to visit we got a tour of the museum. Really cool stuff down there, it's worth a few hours of your day if you're in the area.

With the stuff they tell you there now, about the 60s and 70s, it's almost unfathomable what they DON'T tell us about what's going on now.

Heh, that one' easy

[patio11]

I can brute force the whole plaintext space in, like, 5 seconds. Unless they start creating an arbitrary number of wrong doors leading to distintegration chambers.

Re:Worth the trip

[Mox-Dragon]

It's actually pretty simple to "learn" a language if you understand the basic grammar patterns of a language.

No, it's not. It's fairly easy to learn a small set of grammatical rules that are similar to your native language, or a set of incredibly simple grammatical rules.

Give anybody a massaged data set from a concatenative language and they'll figure out the morphology pretty quick - but be absolutely unable to manipulate it in any meaningful or naturalistic way until they have hundreds of hours of experience with actual instances of language use. Additionally, the basic grammar patterns of a language are rarely (read:never) very regular, let alone perfectly regular. Small irregularities can make for big differences. There's simply too much in languages that's in the lexicon for anyone to be able to "learn" a language in two hours.

Unless you're Kenneth Hale. Which none of us are.