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Meet sexcurity theater:

Belgium police investigate Brussels lockdown orgy claims

Police chiefs in Belgium have reportedly launched an internal investigation into claims soldiers and police officers held an orgy while colleagues hunted for terror suspects. Two policewomen and eight soldiers are said to have engaged in a sex party at a police station in the Brussels neighbourhood of Ganshoren.

The city was in lockdown over fears of a Paris-style attack at the time. Soldiers slept at the police station for two weeks during the operation.

"When they left, they organised a small party to thank the police in the area," police spokesman, Johan Berckmans, told Belgian newspaper La Derniere Heure (in French). "We have launched an investigation to find out what exactly happened."

Speaking to De Standaard (in Dutch), the spokesman said 15 to 20 soldiers had been sleeping at the Ganshoren police station during two weeks in November so they did not have to travel so far at the end of their shift.

Learning from the past: What yesterday's media can tell us about the times

If you want to get a real feel for what was happening during a certain period in history, how people really felt about the issues of the day, take a look at the media coverage.

For example, a recent study of how historically black newspapers covered the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, found their coverage not that much different from their mainstream counterparts.

The team of researchers, including a journalism professor from Michigan State University, was surprised by the findings, as they hypothesized that black newspapers would be more sympathetic to the racially mixed couple who challenged the Virginia law.

Historically, said MSU’s Geri Alumit Zeldes, the African-American press is an advocate for civil rights.

“Just knowing how the ethnic press operates, we thought they were going to be very one-sided in favor of the Lovings,” she said. “But they followed the same pattern as the mainstream media such as the New York Times and others.”

Zeldes said one of the lessons learned from this, something that hasn’t changed since the first newspaper was printed, is that news is a cultural mirror of what is going on in society at that point in time.

“If you take a look at the newspapers at the time they were published, they will give you hints as to what the times were like,” she said. “So if we look at the black press at that time period, you can get a sense of what the black community was thinking because those reporters were part of that community.”

Zeldes said that by reviewing the newspapers’ stances on the issue, it gives us a clue to the political and cultural mood of the time.

“It indicates,” she said, “that some segments of society in the late 1960s were ready to lessen social and cultural marriage restrictions, but that other groups in the United States were still undecided.”

News as a Cultural Mirror: Historically Black Newspapers Reflecting Public Views of Loving v. Virginia (1967) (DOI: 10.1111/josi.12144)

From Futurity.

3D XPoint: Not The Point

A fun article about Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint that I was too lazy to submit.

Computing capabilities aside, the $34 billion 2020 estimate from Intel for 3XP DIMMs partially reveals the Earth-shaking nature of this technology. What most people aren't yet realizing is that 3XP is "fast enough" to replace standalone DRAM in the vast majority of use cases. Research from 2011 outlines a hybrid PCM/eDRAM chip that increases performance and dramatically reduces power versus traditional homogeneous DRAM. This was done using assumptions from the old filamentary PCM technology: nano-PCM will improve the numbers even more dramatically.

From the patent applications, we know that the announced 128Gbit 3XP part is heavily sandbagged (i.e. - they don't want it to appear too disruptive). With the expected four planes (instead of two) and four bits per cell, that works out to exactly one terabit. This blows 3D NAND out of the water. This is the part that they were really going to announce - after the ECD bankruptcy had reached closure last summer.

But my article came along in the form of a giant monkey wrench, the ECD bankruptcy closing was further delayed and the Ovonyx CEO was deposed. Microsoft scrambled to put together a stop-gap Windows phone after it became apparent that they weren't going to be able to ship their PCM/3XP phone in the near future (this phone wasn't cancelled - just delayed until PCM is fully-secured).

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There's no incremental technology planned to succeed DDR4 DRAM. The industry is going to fragment at this next step (Micron's HMC, Samsung's WIO and AMD/nVidia/Hynix HBM). This transition is going to produce few winners and many losers. Who's going to win? The US Government has already weighed in on the matter (where "HMC" is Micron's "Hybrid Memory Cube")

http://www.vice.com/read/a-brief-history-of-bizarre-christmas-crimes

Journalists are getting beheaded in Syria, it's near-impossible to get an abortion in Texas, and almost half the world lives on less than $2 a day. Even so, a bunch of assholes dress up like Santa every year, run drunkenly through the streets, and dry-hump each other through sweaty, plush suits. The only good that can come from such a grotesque public display of whimsy is a good old-fashioned bank robbery. Last year, some fucking genius dressed up like Santa during SantaCon, the seasonal Santa-themed pub crawl for people with strong opinions about football and other useless bullshit, and robbed a bank in San Francisco.

The cops never found him.

Cool story, bro.

Warner Bros. thought so too.

http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2015/Announcing-VLC-for-Chrome-OS
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vlc/obpdeolnggmbekmklghapmfpnfhpcndf
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/18/vlc-chrome-os/

The app was made possible by Google's App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which allows developers to repurpose Android apps to work on Chrome OS and other platforms. The team says it was able to "recycle 95 percent of the Android code and optimizations" it utilizes in its existing Android app. While VLC for Chrome OS has been tested on a Chromebook Pixel and an HP Chromebook 14, some users have reported issues on Samsung Chromebooks. If it doesn't work for you, VideoLAN's Jean-Baptiste Kempf says the team will work quickly to fix bugs, so be patient.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/europe/spanish-prime-minister-mariano-rajoy-punched/

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was dealt an eye-watering sucker punch by a teenager during a campaign event Wednesday.

The young man got up close to the Prime Minister, reportedly asking to take a photograph, before unleashing his left fist into the side of Rajoy's head.

The punch knocked Rajoy's glasses off of his face, leaving the leader of the People's Party bruised but otherwise "feeling good," he later said in a tweet.

The 17-year-old attacker was later shown being taken away in handcuffs by security guards.

The 5th Republican debate is underway, and most of the candidates that can remember what encryption is appear to be "against" it. Rewatch the first hour for some truly chilling comments. Only Ted Cruz or Rand Paul appear to deviate from the party line on security, and not that much in the case of Cruz.

Undermining these peoples' fantasies and law enforcement in general should be a top priority for our community.

This was hard and annoying to figure out. So I thought I should tell the internet in case it helps anyone else.

Basically I wanted to know if people were viewing my website on a small screen*

A quick summary of the problems:
- Many mobile devices lie about dpi, screen size, and window size, whether you check with css media-queries or javascript.
- Different browsers report different size numbers on the same device.
- Screen-width (in pixels) doesn't tell you anything about the physical screen size. Several high-end phones have more pixels than your average laptop.
- There is no (supported) standard way to just ask a browser "are you on a phone"
- I don't like using user-agent-strings as it's ugly (you need to keep a big list) and unreliable (users can change or remove it).
- I don't like feature checking for a lot of non-standard browser apis with various prefixes to search for the information. It's ugly, and I don't want to play along with browsers that ignore the standards. We should be past that by now.

This solution is simple. It's not perfect but it seems to work on all of the many devices and browsers I've tested. However I've dealt with web-browsers long enough to know I might have missed something. Any feedback is welcome.

Summary solution:
1 - Set a normal "viewport" meta tag. This is pretty standard and (should) only affect mobile browsers.
2 - Check if the browser is taking up the full screen.
3 - Read the virtual (css-pixels) width of an element that takes up the full window-width.

On probably 99% of smart phones, the browser takes up the full screen. So if you have an element that takes up the full-width of the window, it can tell you how (virtually) big the screen is. Then you can decide whether it's big enough to include a desktop-style interface.

Details:
1 - <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
2 - if ((outerWidth == screen.width) || (innerWidth > outerWidth)) Then you're in fullscreen. That second conditions is a kludge to make it work on iphones who choose not to make the outerWidth work.
3 - <div style='position:absolute; left:0px; right:0px;'> </div> Read the .offsetWidth of this div and it will tell you the virtual/viewport width of the document. Even in portrait mode almost all phones will be less than 700. Virtually no laptops or desktops will. If you have a small-screen netbook or tablet in portrait mode then it might fall below this threshold. Of course you can use a lower threshold depending on your purpose.

Hope this helps. If it seems overly complicated, I'd like to see a simpler solution (really).
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*The best interface for a desktop is not the best interface for a phone and vice versa. There have been many, ridiculous attempts to make a single unified interface which usually end up showing as many useful features on a desktop screen as you can reasonably fit on a phone.

Someone I have been speaking with online sent me a link which might help some folks stop some of the spying and as you can see here there is a ton of work required to turn all the spyware off, frankly it looks like more work just trying to disinfect the thing that it would be to go back to a non infected version of Windows.