wesleyd

- Have you been served an NSL? - No, I have not. - Have you been served an NSL? - No, I have not. - Have you been served an NSL? - On the advice of counsel, I decline to answer.

American Economic Orthodoxy insists that rent control can never work, and that price controls are only for home owners, not renters. (Government-supplied, fixed-price mortgages, California's Prop13, etc etc.)

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity" -- GBS

In California, zoning specifies minimum numbers of parking spaces. In UK/Ireland, zoning specifies maximum number of spaces.

I believe this result has important applications in cylindrical stack encryption; it's very difficult to produce a solution, but very easy to verify a given solution.

I'm sure the Watergate burglars had low morale too after they got caught.

Gee, we didn't see that coming.

The common factor in all your dysfunctional relationships is: you.

Next time I do gonzo PR, I shall pick a powerful enemy, create an astroturf campaign, and make it look like my enemy did it.

The US predilection for writing a sender's details on the outside of mail has always struck me as poor civic hygiene.

I use putty and cygwin openssh on windows. (In fact, I use putty as my terminal on windows.)

Having to have two separate ssh-agents annoyed me, so I hacked together something that let me use just pageant: https://github.com/wesleyd/charade

I believe the requirement to maximize profit is a requirement of the stock exchanges, not a requirement of being a company.

A company can be created for many different purposes.

This reminds me of an old dilbert cartoon in which they play the game "Trust". You fall backwards, into your teammates' arms. You can imagine how it goes, but the key lesson learnt is, essentially: Don't trust anybody.

> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s

That's the point!

Thinkpad T series laptops are what apple laptops can only dream of being.

It takes two people to lie, Marge - one to lie, and one to be lied to.

  -- Homer Simpson

The filibuster: it's a feature, not a bug.

I returned mine too. It's not safe to let the kids use it. Amazon insist you have one-click purchase set up even to watch free prime content, and they don't let you set up a pin or a password just for the pay-for stuff. So it's trivial for my children to run up outrageous bills.

(I installed and very soon thereafter uninstalled the amazon prime app on my TV for the same reason: when you watch free prime content, they still seem to send you a $0.00 invoice for every single free thing you watch. Then when your children watch something else, they charge your card, and the "invoice" gets mixed up with all the other $0.00 invoices in your amazon folder or inbox. Fuck That Shit. At least Netflix is safe against that shit.)

If it wasn't Amazon, it'd be a clear-cut scam. But it's Amazon, so I have to hope they come to their senses. Until then, we're getting an ipad, and we're sticking with netflix (even though we have prime ... for now anyway).

Kudos on being able to shut down cleanly.

The world has lots of stories on starting up, but way too few on shutting down. If you can bear to, please write about your experiences!

RIM ... didn't they used to make pagers or something?

"What you make it" - by Michael Marshall Smith

Collection of exquisite short stories. Unputdownable.

That's what a Monty Python sketch of a phone screen would be like.

Is it ok to collude with your competitors?

If you draw over the permanent marker with normal whiteboard marker, they usually both wipe off...

Coding without source control is like using an editor without undo.

Use source control from the very start. Git is pleasant to use.

I read this every year or so. (Usually about the same time I re-read cryptonomicon.) Best travel writing ever.

I'd say do the startup. It'll be the one you'll most regret not doing. Whether you fail or succeed, you'll be ten times more able to tackle whatever you choose to do after.

Yeah, working in close physical proximity to quality people is hard to beat, but you can learn a lot even working remotely on a pre-existing project. So go scratch an open source itch.

Also there ain't no such thing as a free lunch^Wprogrammer.