Today in "The War on My Sinuses" news

I tried to buy Sudafed today and was told, "the portal is down". The Sudafed Portal is down you guys. "Can't you sell it to me anyway?" "No."

Of course this is not a problem if you're the Meth-Head-in-Chief:

JRehling:

In 2016, Trump posted a photo of himself that gave away more than he intended. An open desk drawer revealed box after box of Sudafed, piled on top of one another.

Even stranger, although the photo was taken in New York, the boxes include a type that is only sold in the United Kingdom, with a different box and distinctive ingredients not found in the U.S.

Sudafed is sometimes used for a high that includes increased alertness, but also has a side effect of pupil dilation.

Abuse of this drug was rare, but in order to limits its abuse, regulations were passed limiting the frequency in which an individual could purchase it, and requiring the individual show ID.

The desk drawer full of Sudafed, including boxes in New York purchased in the UK indicate that the legal limits of purchase are being circumvented, and that the then-candidate Trump was abusing Sudafed for its high rather than its decongestant effect.

Beyond pupil dilation, more serious side effects include hallucinations and paranoid psychosis.

It is very concerning for the entire planet that someone with access to nuclear weapons is showing signs of abusing a drug that leads to paranoid psychosis.

A desk drawer full of a controlled substance, however benign, shows signs that someone is systematically circumventing the law. The side effects of a cold drug are particularly concerning in this case, and this is a threat to the security of the United States and the world.

CaslerNoel:

Trump snorted Adderall all thru the day on 'Apprentice' he also ate UK. Sudafed like candy. But at night and at parties he switched to cocaine and high-end Methamphetamine that was hand-delivered by Bikers. The point is he was always high. That hasn't changed.

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The lines of code that changed everything

I contributed to this article -- "The Null-Terminated String: The most catastrophic design bug in the history of computing" -- but there are a bunch of other worthy entries in here that I hadn't thought of!

Number 4294967295 might surprise you.

Culturally, code exists in a nether zone. We can feel its gnostic effects on our everyday reality, but we rarely see it, and it's quite inscrutable to non-initiates. (The folks in Silicon Valley like it that way; it helps them self-mythologize as wizards.) We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV -- pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don't sit around compiling lists of the world's most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much.

So Slate decided to do precisely that. To shed light on the software that has tilted the world on its axis, the editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives?

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