Epsilon Clue

One of the nightmare scenarios sometimes brought up when arguing for the Electoral College and against the popular vote is, what happens in case of a really close election? There would have to be a nationwide recount. Think Florida 2000, times 50.
For instance, take the 1960 election, where Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.17% of the popular vote. He won by 84 Electoral Votes, a comfortable margin, but this seems to be the sort of thing that the close-race argument seeks to address....

I just spent some time banging my head against Ansible, and thought I’d share in case anyone else runs across it:
I have a Firefox role that allows you to define a Firefox profile with various plugins, config settings, and the like. And I have a work-from-home (WFH) role that, among other things, sets up a couple of work profiles in Firefox, with certain proxy settings...

Sometimes you just need to grep recursively in a directory. If you’re using find $somedir -type f -exec grep $somestring {} \;, don’t:
Use xargs to avoid creating a bazillion grep processes:
find $somedir -type f -print | xargs grep $somestring

There’s an idea for a game that’s been rattling around my brain for a while, so I finally decided to learn enough Unity to birth it.
To get an idea of what I have in mind, think Sid Meier’s Civilization, but for elections: you play a campaign manager, and your job is to get your candidate elected. This is complicated by the fact that the candidate may be prone to gaffes (think Joe...