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Critics' say that the new US President is just one Big Mac away from a heart attack.

Elon Musk used his 'First Buddy' privileges to sit in with Donald Trump as he pardoned Ross Ulbricht Tuesday, while revealing he's pushing Trump to free a man known as 'Bitcoin Jesus' next.

Drivers were asked to avoid the area where possible

He lost his right leg, survived cancer and battled sepsis twice

The American Idol judge, 41, laid down a list of requests, including a huge entourage and a handmade designer dress, ahead of the gig, which was plagued by technical issues .

Sutton Foster has revealed the simple act that she and Hugh Jackman would do each night before taking the stage together in the revival of The Music Man.

Plus: Google stuffs Gemini into Workspace, with a hidden off switch?

Ready or not, generative AI assistants and productivity aids are getting harder to avoid with a growing number of software vendors enabling them by default.…

Sawyer was talking with a co-worker about how their unique session IDs got created. The concern was that they were only five characters long, which meant there could easily be collisions.

They started by looking at the random number generation function.

Public Function RandomNumberGenerator(ByVal min As Integer, ByVal max As Integer, Optional ByVal numDecimals As Integer = 0) As String '*** the generates a number as a string Dim strNum As New StringBuilder Dim rnd As New System.Random Dim i, x, n As Integer Try i = rnd.Next(min, max) If numDecimals > 0 Then Try strNum.Append("9", numDecimals) n = CType(strNum.ToString, Int32) x = rnd.Next(0, n) Catch ex As Exception x = 1 End Try End If strNum.Remove(0, strNum.Length) strNum.Append(i.ToString()) If numDecimals > 0 Then strNum.Append(".") If numDecimals > 99 Then numDecimals = 99 End If strNum.Append(x.ToString("D" & numDecimals.ToString())) End If Return strNum.ToString Catch Return "1.00" End Try End Function

You always know it's going to be bad when you see the random number generator returns a string.

If numDecimals is zero, the code is bad, but vaguely sane. Generate a random number using the built in functions, then return it- as a string.

It's the use of numDecimals which makes this weird. We start by appending "9"s to our string builder, converting it to an integer, and then generating a random number from zero to whatever number of nines we're using. This is the code of someone who hates and fears logarithms.

Then we clear out our string builder because we're starting over with the actual number. Then we append a ".", then we append our number, formatted with our number of decimals string, which we force to be no larger than 99. And this is where we get the special kind of weird.

When we're generating our random decimal number, we do this: strNum.Append("9", numDecimals). This is going to put numDecimals 9s on the string. E.g., if numDecimals is 9, this would set strNum to be 999999999. Thus, when we generate a random number, we generate one between 0 and 99999999.

But, when we append that formatted value to the string, we do this:

If numDecimals > 99 Then numDecimals = 99 End If strNum.Append(x.ToString("D" & numDecimals.ToString()))

Here, we're treating numDecimals as a format string. We're only ever going to output two digits.

The only good news is that while this random function was used everywhere, it wasn't used to generate their random IDs. The bad news, this is how their random IDs.

Public Function RandomQueryStringGenerator() As String '*** the generates an alpha-numeric string 5 digits long such as aa7bb Dim strPwd As New StringBuilder Dim rnd As New System.Random Dim i As Integer Try For x As Integer = 1 To 5 Select Case x Case 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9 i = rnd.Next(97, 122) If i Mod 2 = 0 Then strPwd.Append(Chr(i).ToString().ToUpper()) Else strPwd.Append(Chr(i).ToString()) End If Case Else i = rnd.Next(0, 9) strPwd.Append(i.ToString()) End Select Next x Return strPwd.ToString() Catch Return String.Empty End Try End Function [Advertisement] Utilize BuildMaster to release your software with confidence, at the pace your business demands. Download today!

Ms Reeves headed for the Swiss mountain resort for the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum as it was claimed that the UK was also heading for a 'debt death spiral'.

The Tories asked the upper house for a debate about Lord Hermer's potential role in a string of controversial government decisions.

Hundreds of fans of the 'fairy porn' genre were spotted waiting outside bookshops across the UK to be the first to get their hands on a copy of Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros.

Church treasurer Pam Ramsay and husband Chris have seen their bills shoot up from £15 a month to occasionally more than £1,000.

Republican lawmakers in Idaho are considering going back to what some consider an archaic execution method because of a recent failure to execute a convicted serial killer via lethal injection.

The Israeli PM 'raised the issue' of Britain having suspended around 30 licences in a phone call yesterday just hours after Donald Trump became US president.

Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI and its principal cloud partner, is losing its designation as exclusive provider of computing capacity for the artificial intelligence startup. CNBC: In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said that it's still in a favorable position with OpenAI. Going forward, when OpenAI seeks additional capacity, Microsoft will have the "right of first refusal" before OpenAI checks with other parties. The change in their relationship was disclosed as part of President Donald Trump's announcement of the Stargate Project, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. Executives from those companies committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be set up as a separate company. Oracle is a "key initial technology partner" alongside Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia in setting up data center infrastructure, OpenAI said in a blog post. JPMorgan, in a note to clients: My takeaway is that MSFT is somewhat reading the room on capex. Softbank and Oracle are taking on some of the financial burden (in order to get some skin in the game) while MSFT still maintains access to OpenAI IP through to 2030 and has right of first refusal on any OpenAI new capacity. Feels like a good outcome for MSFT to me.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump's redecorated Oval Office features some figures and art displayed during his first term, but some images from the famous office when Biden was in office did make the cut.

A day after his father Donald was inaugurated as president, Barron Trump has surprisingly been tipped for a career in the NBA with the New York Knicks.

She's the beloved British-born actress who started her stellar acting career Down Under after moving to Australia as a young girl.

Sir Keir Starmer yesterday admitted he did 'withhold' information about the terrorist links of Axel Rudakubana from the public - but denied he was part of a cover-up.

Slashdot readers jkister and databasecowgirl share the news of President Donald Trump issuing a pardon to Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. An anonymous reader shares a report from the BBC: US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold. Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son. Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports. "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!" Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. During his trial, prosecutors said Ulbricht's website, hosted on the hidden "dark web", sold more than $200 million worth of drugs anonymously.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.