SoylentNews

Vatican police arrest ex-diplomat over 'child pornography'

Police at the Vatican have arrested a priest who previously worked at the Holy See's US embassy on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Carlo Alberto Capella was taken into custody after an investigation.

Monsignor Capella was recalled from the US in September 2017 after US authorities told the Vatican about a possible violation of child pornography laws by one of its diplomats.

He was ordained in 1993 and joined the Vatican's diplomatic corps in 2004.

The arrest could draw fresh attention to Pope Francis's efforts to snuff out child abuse in the Catholic Church. He has pledged zero tolerance but critics say he has not done enough to hold to account bishops who allegedly covered up abuse.

Also at NYT and The Guardian.

Are Water Worlds Habitable?

Rehash of this article. But here is a detail that may have been overlooked:

Take the fifth planet within the TRAPPIST-1 system as an example. Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his colleagues think that the liquid water here extends down about 200 kilometers—roughly 20 times deeper than Earth’s Mariana Trench. That much water would create a large ice layer at the bottom of the ocean which would seal the ocean from the land and effectively shut down a geochemical cycle that plays a crucial role in Earth’s habitability.

The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match

Very fast sequential speeds and high IOPS. Endurance could be problematic (600 TB for the 1 TB model, calculated as 0.3 DWPD). I wonder what that ratio will be for QLC 3D NAND SSDs.

Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.

Viral Photo Of Hockey Player Breastfeeding Baby Sparks Debate Among Social Media Users

Online tumult over breastfeeding photo challenges stigmas, highlights hurdles

Furor Over Alberta Hockey Player's Breastfeeding Pic Proves Stigma Still Exists: Experts

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.

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.

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."

my cat. I worked hard for those 50 karma points and then some women comes around, who you let into your private abode, eats your food, takes your sweatshirts, tries to elope with some Indian tech support monkey, and takes a metaphorical piss on your good name.

I consider this unconsensual ultra rape. I've now lost 30 bangladeshi toilet credits, where I normally would've only lost 20 for my outspoken opinions on societal norms in relation to intra-personal communication.

And she didn't bring the terriyaki I asked for. It's terriyaki thursday, why would you do this? Please, control your BPD for one night so I can masturbate with a good conscience. And take your risperidone.

Alarge Hoe, you will rue the day you decided to replace my white-bread toasts with rye.

P.S please return my lotion to its proper place, my knees are getting ashy

EDIT: NO HOLDS BARRED. WE'RE DOWN TO 4 SPAM MODS AND -2 NEW DELPHI POGS. SHE'S CRASHING THIS perfectly legitimate and civilized debater WITH NO SURVIVORS.

EDIT2: I have been barred from posting witty and thought-provoking free-style prose. There was one especially rebellious and introspective piece I had lined up, but I'm unable to get the satisfaction of getting the last quip in. Nor am I able to post anymore for another solar cycle.

EDIT3: In their infinite wisdom, the grand retard wranglers of Soylent News have given me back my manhood and I may rape and pillage once more. For this, I offer you one free redeemable coupon for a commissioned, post-societal portrait, created with bodily fluids, and a Whopper value meal.

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?