SoylentNews

Gingrich Says Trump Must Address Business Conflicts Soon, Urges Monitoring

Gingrich: Trump dropping 'drain the swamp'

Trump Adviser Says He Is Ditching 'Drain the Swamp'

Newt Gingrich says Trump is done with ‘drain the swamp’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_MJbgO7SF0

The God Kek demands many more human sacrifices, otherwise Trump will continue to discard all of his campaign promises. Sacrifice children for the glory of Kek and the success of Trump.

Update: The child sacrifices have satisfied Kek, and Trump will continue his policy of draining the swamp.

The FBI Is Investigating Me Because I Tweeted A Joke About Fake News

Duterte: During phone call, Trump praised my drug war as the ‘right way’
Duterte Says Trump Wished His Drug Crackdown 'Success'
Duterte says felt rapport with Trump, assures U.S.-Philippines ties intact
Philippines President Says Trump Congratulated Him on Violent Anti-Drug Crackdown
Duterte Call With Trump Seen Warming U.S. Ties After China Tilt
Rebooting our relations with the US
Trump lauds Du30 grisly drug drive?
Duterte invites Trump to the Philippines

He's just tailoring his message to his audience! There's no way he actually believes that! He's for individual liberties!!!11

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.

The 'editor in chief and publisher' of the MIT Technology Review Jason Pontin took to twitter today. He was replying to WikiLeaks posting a picture of Eric Schmidt wearing a "Clinton Campaign Staff Badge". I with agree with Jason, that image is pretty meaningless by itself. Schmidt private citizen and can support a candidate if he wants to.

However, Jason goes on to say, after being shown differences between suggested searches on DuckDuckGo and Google; "Well, I doubt it... but oooh, no autocorrect: that will swing an election."

Where he goes off the deep end and is either lying or being completely ignorant is when he says "You have no evidence, except your own paranoia, that Google manipulates search results." ... This is from the Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Technology Review.

Here is the leading paragraph from an engadget article written in 2015:

A few years ago, the FTC decided not to pursue an antitrust lawsuit against Google despite finding that its search algorithm really was biased. Now, we finally know the details of that lengthy investigation, thanks to a report written by FTC staffers that recently surfaced due to an open-records request. According to the 160-page report, the employees found evidence that Mountain View was demoting its competitors and placing its own services on top of search results lists, even if they weren't as helpful.

I'm sure most of us have seen the effects of localization and other 'personalization' on search results and suggestions when using Google outside your normal state/country.

This sets an extremely low standard for what the MIT Technology Review publishes from where i'm sitting.

So, I've been sitting here watching the Spam moderations page and the mod-bombs page post-election thinking someone's gonna get butthurt and abuse moderation. It has yet to happen. Kudos to everyone for managing to restrain themselves. You guys make me fucking proud, so I'll leave you with this little bit of humor on an otherwise tense day:

Britain: Brexit is the most shocking thing a country will do this year.

America: Hold my beer...

US election: Trump and the rise of the alt-right

US election: Black Republicans seek converts in Trump's 'war zone'

In pictures: Clinton and Trump through the years

US election: The German comparing Trump's campaign to Hitler's

Reposted from my blog: Operation Sysadmin | Retro Data Structures

One of the more fun things I do with my spare time is to play around with old computers. Specifically, I enjoy my Atari 800. I recently started thinking about a small game to write on the machine, something with a small map, which you can explore. Think Zork, on a very, very limited scale. This is mostly an exercise for me to see if I could pull this off in Atari BASIC.

If you were to make, say a 3x3 grid with a bunch of data attached to it, without getting all Object Oriented, you might choose simple data structure such as a 2-dimensional array, to retrieve data associated with your particular x,y coordinates on the map. A graphical representation of this data might look like this:
      1             2                3
  1 The start   A treasure!        A river.
  2 A monster!   Inscribed Rock   The wizard.
  3 A forest.   A bird.           Home

Atari BASIC, has three basic data types, number, character, and boolean. It also has arrays, you can make an array of numbers which is a standard thing, even today, or an array of letters. You may be tempted to call this a string, and it is referred to as such, but if you think of strings in Atari BASIC as character arrays, you're life starts getting easier. You can also make a mufti-dimensional array of numbers. A think that you absolutely cannot do, however, is make a mufti-dimensional character array, a matrix of strings if you will, at least not in a basic straight forward way. This limitation hit me pretty hard. Living in the modern age, I'm used to slamming together data-types in a multitude of different structures, without worrying too much about it.

So, given this limitation, how do you get all that string data into a data structure that you can reference by some sort of position? One place where Atari BASIC helps us out is that I can reference positions in strings and substrings quite easily, which turns out to be the ugly key we need.

Say, I want an array to hold 3 things. myarray$="Mary Bob I really like dogs, they are my favorite." If I wanted to get the word "Bob" out of this, I'd call for myarray$(6,9). Mary would be myarray$(1,4), the sentence would be myarray$(9,51). The issue of course is that all the lengths are irregular. I can't simply retrieve the nth element without knowing it's position in the larger string. But, what if we make the string lengths regular? First determine what the longest string you're going to allow is. In this case the sentence about dogs is 42 characters. Then, multiple, by the number of elements you'll be holding. 3*42=126, so declare a string 126 characters long. Something like the following BASIC code:

10 ELEM=3
20 MAXLEN=42
30 DIM MYARRAY$(ELEM*MAXLEN)

Now, you can reference the different elements by using MAXLEN as a multiplier to get the proper positions. Bob would be MYARRAY$(43,84), or MYARRAY$(MAXLEN,MAXLEN*2-1)
Mary, would be (1,MAXLEN-1). We can wrap the whole idea in a subroutine (No functions here kids!) make the positional calculations:

40 REM GET THE 2nd ELEMENT
50 GET=2
60 GOSUB 100
100 REM ELEMENT RETRIEVAL SUBROUTINE
110 START=GET*MAXLEN-MAXLEN
120 END=START+MAXLEN-1
130 PRINT MYARRAY$(START,END)
140 RETURN

The interesting thing to me about this approach is how incredibly space inefficient it is, especially noticeable when you're working on a machine with 48K of memory. It's also an good reminder about the kind of stuff that has to go on under the covers in our nice modern languages to make them so comfortable to work with.

Remember though, I'm interested in a matrix of strings! It turns out that with a little math you can extend this scheme to make a 2 dimensional array of strings as well. All it takes is another multiplier in there, which incidentally makes this an order of magnitude less efficient.

10 ROW=3
20 COL=3
30 MAXLEN=50
40 DIM MYMATRIX$(ROW*COL*MAXLEN)
50 REM POSITION
60 X=2,Y=1
70 GOSUB 100
100 REM MATRIX RETRIEVAL SUBROUTINE
110 START=X*MAXLEN-MAXLEN+Y*MAXLEN-MAXLEN-1
120 END=START+MAXLEN-1
130 PRINT ARRAY(START,END)
140 RETURN

In this way by manipulating the X and Y variables, and calling the subroutine we can retrieve different "cells" of data in our matrix.

Go ahead and stare at that second basic program for a few minutes until the math sinks in. The start position is calculated just like in the 1 dimensional example, with an additional Y position offset.

This approach will work decently well, for smaller grids with not too much data. Say a 3x3 grid, with each "cell" containing 255 characters or so, results in a use of just under 2.5K. What if you wanted a larger map though, say a 9x9, well that's 20K, almost 1/2 your memory.

The strategy for dealing with this, is to break your 9x9 down into 9 different 3x3 grids. Since this, in theory a map that we are traversing, imagine another variable to hold your current "grid" number, and subroutine to calculate what grid you'll be in when you move. If it's different, load the new grid grid information from disk. In this way, you can keep the memory foot print pretty small, and 2.5K loads pretty quick from a floppy drive.

When I finish up this exercise I will post the code so you can bask in its glory.

Oculus VR made "factually inaccurate" statements in ZeniMax lawsuit, forensic analyst says

A recently-granted motion in the lawsuit between ZeniMax Media and Oculus VR suggests that the case could be about to get very interesting, and not in a way that's good for Oculus. The motion to "permit disclosure of any 'demonstrably inaccurate' representations made to court," as reported by Polygon, indicates that an independent expert investigating the case found sworn statements that are "factually incorrect," and that "critical log files" on one of John Carmack's hard drives were deleted prior to its collection as evidence.

I'm too lazy to give this one the research needed to produce a coherent submission, since I haven't been following the case.

I'm taking away your Air Force One privileges.

President Obama ridiculed on Snapchat by daughter Sasha

The president also mentioned that his own iPhone was limited to receiving emails and browsing the internet, and would not take photos, play music or make calls. "My rule has been throughout my presidency, that I assume that someday, some time, somebody will read this email," he said. "So, I don't send any email that at some point won't be on the front page of the newspapers."

US election 2016: Indians' verdict on Donald Trump's Hindi

An uncanny mixture: God, alcohol and even cannabis

A Stray: Finding and filming the real Somali immigrant experience

The Skype sex scam - a fortune built on shame