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Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail

Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.

Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs — some suggestive — tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained copies of some of the letters showing that Cruz, who had few friends in the outside world, is now being showered with attention.

(Note that I'm still using iOS 10.0.1. In general I am quite hesitant to update any of my software if I'm happy with the version I've got.)

I will attach a sysdiagnose log when I get home this evening.

Summary:

This only happened to me once during the most of a year that I have owned my iPhone 7. It is likely to be quite difficult for you to reproduce.

The combination lock screen and home touch sensor were unresponsive, leading me to believe that my unit was hung.

Pressing the side button once - to turn off the video - then again - to turn the video back on - restored normal operation.

Steps to Reproduce:

Log into an iPhone 7.

Configure your device to use the six-digit combination lock.

Use some apps for a little while. Mostly I use Safari and the Music app.

Press the side button to darken the display.

Press the side button again to light up the display.

Press the home touch sensor to display the combination lock screen.

Touch all the buttons. There is no response.

Touch the home touch sensor. There is no response.

Press the side button to darken the display.

Press the side button again, to light up the display.

The combination lock screen now works normally.

Expected Results:

The buttons on the combination lock screen would respond to finger touches.

Actual Results:

None of the buttons on the combination lock screen responded to touches.

Version/Build:

iPhone 7 Model MNA62LL/A

iOS 10.0.1 (14A403)

Configuration:

256 GB Flash

So a galaxy has been found that contains NO dark matter (all the matter seen is all the matter it needs).
"The astronomers realised something about DF2 was amiss when telescope observations revealed that 10 clusters of stars within it were moving far slower than would normally be expected."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/distant-galaxy-dark-matter-universe-understanding-theories-wrong-space-yale-a8277951.html

Could it not need 'dark matter' because the stars aren't rotating fast enough for inertial effects to kick in?
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2014/01/mihsc-101.html

Dark matter is dead. Please leave the corpse alone.
Close snark.

Tresorit Launches Campaign To Build An End-To-End Encrypted Social Network

Sociall.io

The new technology that aspires to #DeleteFacebook for good (Mastodon)

At the end of these charts, you can see a small spike in Diaspora users.

It might all be in the name. People/"dumb fucks" will sign up for a "Facebook", but "Prevaat"?

I have been at the C++ again. After a few years I have been slowly managing to persuade people that directly testing (using TDD) the C++ code is a good idea.

Also, I have tried to put my C smugness and arrogance away in the spirit of doing things "the right way" i.e. in C++ and the way the earnest and eternally vigilant members of the C++ Inquisition would recommend.

A couple of weekends ago I was on a fairly long train journey so for entertainment I reacquainted myself with the C++ Frequently Questioned Answers and laughed out loud a couple of times much to the bemusement of Mrs Turgid.

I had been asked to supervise a much younger and inexperienced member of the team. He had too much to do and so I was asked to pick up some work he had started. Young people today... So I extracted some of his code into independent methods and put them under test with CPPUNIT which involved hacking on some nasty ANT build scripts (don't get me started...) just to add a few .so files to the linker command line. The build scripts are so bad that it takes upwards of 45 seconds to compile, link and run the unit tests (200 lines of code).

Now to the fun, std::map. Why oh why oh why? Well, because the STL and these are "algorithms" and they've been developed by people much cleverer than you and so they won't have bugs like the ones you would write yourself and they have performance criteria and they use templates so you get type checking at compile time and blah blah blah...

Yes, well, nobody expects the C++ Inquisition. Their main weapon is type safety and code reuse. OK, their two main weapons are type safety, code reuse and generics. Hang on, that's three. I'll come in again. Nobody expects the C++ Inquisition. Amongst their weapons are type safety, code reuse, generics, multiple inheritance, virtual methods, references, the STL... You get the idea.

And what was std::map being used for? To store pairs of strings and integers (hex) read out of an ASCII configuration file. How was the file parsed? sscanf()? No, some fancy stream object with operator<<. And what were the ASCII strings? Names of parameters. And there was a third column in the file that specified a width and was summarily ignored by the parser. And what about the names of the parameters? Well, they were looked up in the map at run time, hard-coded, to pull the values out of the map and put into internal variables with all kinds of shifts and shuffles on byte order. And what if the user changed the names of any of the parameters in the file? Yes, what indeed. The user will be editing this file.

Now I do need to use some sort of dynamic data structure myself in this project. I need to map strings to integers, but with integers as the keys this time. My table needs to be populated with the names of files read from a directory and the files sorted in order. If I were doing this in a sane language like C it would be relatively straight forward. Anyway, we're in C++ land now and the C++ Inquisition are in attendance. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of their book and use std::map<uint32_t, std::string> table or something (note the code is infected with stds all over the place, another cool feature) so I decided I'd better read the documentation. I thought I might use the insert() method and check for duplicate keys in the map. Nope, template error. It seems one must use operator[] but that doesn't check for existing keys, it just overwrites them. The suggested remedy? Ah, scan the entire map from the beginning each time to make sure the key isn't already there. Doesn't it throw one of these pesky exception things? I thought they were the Modern Way(TM)?

::iterator is fun. Try to iterate over an empty map, or to an entry that isn't there. How do you detect it? Well, ::iterator is some kind of pointer (you get at the data with ->first or ->second) so you might compare with NULL (sorry, 0 nowadays) but no way because operator== is not defined. The best advice is not to try to iterate over an empty map or to dereference an iterator that doesn't point to anything.

I could have read my file names into a (sorted) linked list checking for duplicates along the way. It would have been less than 50 lines of C, and I could have written it and tested it in the time it took me to get angry about C++ all over again.

The word is chagrin. I have wasted very precious time and haven't even got any working code.

Edited 20180328 to use proper escape codes for angle brackets.

Just look over Apple's Cocoa and Darwin-Drivers lists.

There has been a great gnashing of teeth that commenced with iOS 2.0, which permitted third-party apps.

Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, and Shark Week: ‘He made me sit and watch’ (archive)

Clickbait? Sure. But reading about the history of "Shark Week" in that context really makes something click.

Stormy Daniels describes her alleged affair with Donald Trump (w/ transcript)

"Wow, you-- you are special. You remind me of my daughter."

Some Soylentil replied to a previous diary about my aim to bootstrap a mining operation, by pointing out that leasing a warehouse would cost far less than colocating in a data center.

While a warehouse might not have enough circuit breakers, I expect most commercial landlords would be cool with me hiring an electrician to install some breakers, wiring and outlets.

For residential use, one Bitmain Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig requires one circuit breaker. Possibly a warehouse could have higher-capacity breakers but really I don't know.

(I'm mining LiteCoin because the L3+ can work with 110 Volts, as God And Nature Intended, rather than that foreign 220V that is a Communist Plot to corrupt Our Precious Bodily Fluids.)

My apartment has three wall-outlet breakers. That yields the insight that the most I could profit by mining at home would be about one grand per month.

Just now I emailed the following to the usual suspects:

Subject: I'm hesitant to commit to a big cryptocurrency mining operation

Dear Suspects,

I wont need to decide until the time comes that I would have the cash to buy a fourth LiteCoin mining rig. I only have one now, so any possible fourth rig won't come until a few months from now.

Stefan points out that it is unwise for me to rely on LiteCoin mining for my livelihood, because the exchange rate could drop at any time. That's a common occurrence among all the cryptocurrencies.

There is a second problem: were I to lease a facility where I could operate more miners, commercial leases are typically three years. Were the price of LiteCoin to go down so much that I could no longer pay the monthly rent I would be quite screwed.

Just tonight I realized that even if mining were to yield enough income that I didn't have to work, not to hold a job would be bad for my mental illness. To work with other people is good for me.

I went totally bananas during graduate school because I had so much homework that I stopped hanging out with my friends. There was no one to point out the error of my ways when I began to grow paranoid about the North Korean nuclear reactor. It was discovered by a US spy satellite during my second quarter of grad school.

I felt the need to inform the entire world that it wasn't as hard to build nuclear weapons as most people thought: the US, in its infinite wisdom, declassified all but one of the Manhattan Project secrets in 1965. The only remaining secret is the "initiator", which is a source of neutrons that gets the chain reaction started in plutonium bombs.

I know enough physics, and even then had enough computational power at my disposal that I figure I could design an initiator all by myself.

Were I to earn enough money through any means - not just mining - that I was no longer required to work among other people, without a doubt I'd be in a straightjacket within six months.

Introspectively,

Misha

• Party at the Post Office
  As the clerk stepped out to lock the door, I dropped my tax return in the slot, knowing that next year I would attend the post office party again.

I'm not clear why Party's URL is among my mental illness essays. It's dated April 16, 1992; I wasn't symptomatic then.

I expect I'll move it to a more appropriate directory but this link will still work because I'll install a redirect.

Yet Another American Football League: The Alliance of American Football

Another New Football League Says It Will Start Play in 2019

The N.F.L. is under pressure from falling television ratings, lawsuits over its handling of concussions, and fan opposition to player protests during the national anthem.

Yet investors keep lining up to help start new football leagues. On Tuesday, the longtime N.F.L. executive Bill Polian and the television and movie producer Charlie Ebersol became the latest entrepreneurs to join the fray when they unveiled plans for the Alliance of American Football.

There have been several short-lived football leagues before, including the United Football League, United States Football League and XFL. Like others before them, Polian and Ebersol say they have a formula for success. They have acquired investments from Silicon Valley firms that will allow their eight-team league to start playing a week after the Super Bowl in February 2019. Their partners include CBS, which will show a few games on its main channel and some on its cable network. They will also launch a smartphone app on which fans will be able to stream games and play fantasy football.

The league will also aim for two-and-a-half hour games (N.F.L. games generally last at least three hours). To achieve that, there will be no kickoffs or extra points — only 2-point plays — and a 30-second play clock, as opposed to the N.F.L.'s 45-second clock. There will also be no television timeouts, which will lead to about 60 percent fewer commercials.

Also at Variety.

Previously: As National Football League Ratings Fall, Could the "XFL" Make a Return?