vmarshall23

What page in Dante's Inferno is that alluded to?

Heh. I actually replied below before I saw this, but the sendmail.cf file immediately popped into my head when I read the post’s subject line.

sendmail.cf

Not really on topic, but Steve Jackson has made great games for years: http://www.sjgames.com/

Same. Read every other Adams book at least a dozen times. That one sits on the shelf untouched.

I have a copy of that game sitting in my basement. Loved it, the book, and the whole package. I must go dig it out.

It's also the awesome slogan of the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim, so in that regard, kind of awesome.

Textbook example of: GOOD_IDEA < GOOD_EXECUTION

Good!

Loudest voices to the dumbest people

You'd probably like this as well:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112066.Moments_of_Doubt_...

Amen. I've shown the exact same application on a dingy thinkpad and a shiny new retina iPad, and had diametrically opposite reactions.

Isn't that precisely the job?

I had to automate my job when working full time in grad school, otherwise I never would have passed a class.

Since I entered the work force, most jobs have been some version of "automate some task for other people (customers) to exchange for pieces of paper representing effort($)" or "automate some internal task so company spends less $ paying meatware to do things saving effort($)". Rinse, and repeat until either:

a) company makes $$$$! b) company runs out of $

If you manage to automate all-the-things and haven't hit state a) or b) then you start flame wars on internal mailing lists about how the free company snacks suck or whatever. :-)

For fuck's sake. Don't people like work at work anymore?

aka the Golden Rule. aka "don't be a dick"

Seems a little dodgy to redirect output from an apparent scammers website to an apparent root shell.

Also, WTF, the last thing I'm worried about in SF is not having enough restaurants.

Amen. San Francisco is ground zero for well-intentioned, but ultimately awful public policy. Often these policies further make whatever problem they're trying to solve worse, because it gives the illusion that they've actually done something about it.

I, as a 20 year SF resident, would much prefer Aaron Peskin do something about the feces and hypodermic needles before he worries about cafeterias.

Part of the problem, if not a large-ish part of the problem, is that apparently drugs and alcohol are usually restricted from homeless shelters.

And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter.

So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone.

Universal basic income too. :-)

To be clear, I'm not saying home recycling is completely pointless. I think it does a lot to raise awareness that "all this has to go someplace, so at least think about it". But that's PR, not a solution.

I'd prefer some sort of solution that directly impacted your wallet if you didn't give a shit about what waste you produce. I'm not sure what that is, but a similar example would be "save water during a drought" or just "save water" PR campaigns. Don't waste everyone's time with a bunch of easily-ignored signs and commercials. Charge 5 bucks a gallon for water. When your sprinkler watering the sidewalk all night costs you 1500 dollars, you'll be sure not to do that twice.

And you save money on TV commercials and waste less trees making posters. :-)

So someone still has to sort it. Raise taxes. Hire sorters. Save time and money by having software engineers spend more time learning software engineering, not whether a corn-based plastic spoon should go in compost or recycling.

This has long driven me crazy. I have a version of this argument with my wife every few weeks. I live in a city that has three bins: compost, landfill, and recycling, and overall the city (SF) does a really good job apparently of sorting trash.

But if you want a system that doesn't break down if someone throws a handful of batteries in the compost bin, then someone or something somewhere still has to sort the trash stream.

So, at best, you've used all the labor of everyone in SF to reduce the number of people/things/processes downstream to sort the trash properly.

So, yes, the ball is ultimately in the manufacturer's court for a lot of this, but home recycling is at best a terrible use of labor/time/money. Raise taxes to hire more sorting capability, because if it requires 100 more trained humans sorting somewhere downstream that's surely less than all-the-people-in-SF-a-few-minutes-everyday to do a less-than-perfect job.

Also, I think a lot of these laws also do another disservice in that they make people feel like they're doing something to help the situation which keeps them from actually solving the problem.

Like the new plastic straws ban to keep plastic out of the ocean. If the problem is "keep plastic out of the ocean", then solve "why does plastic get in the ocean" problem. Banning plastic straws might be part of the solution, but what seems to happen so often is that we make one of these "feel-good" laws that keeps a negligible amount of plastic out of the ocean, and I have to drink out of a shitty straw, and people think that someone we've made substantive progress to a real solution.

Well, for nerd books, "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew Andrew Tanenbaum. It was until years later that I realized just how much I had learned from that book, and the consolidated notes from the Usenet flame war between him and Linus Torvalds.

There's just so much "how does all this shit actually work" in there ....

Was anyone else completely blocked from reading that article because all the ads wedged the browser?

Well at least we can all agree that "Coming Home to a Shipping Container" is still preferable to "Coming Home in a Shipping Container" </snark>

turn evil? Patents aside, isn't there a fair amount of FB behavior that already falls in that bucket?

"Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons" is good as well.

Wow. Other than Metallica, I don't own an album by any of these people, and other than Metallica and Michael Jackson, I don't think I'd be able to name a single song by the few others that I do recognize the name.

Oh, and I'm using the word "album". That probably explains it all ... :-)

Open Source Voting Machines - with a take-away symmetric key paper receipts for auditing.