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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.

I'm not a railway enthusiast at all, but back in the olden days (1960s) there was a British Rail research project to develop a train that could travel at high speed on Birtain's 19th Century railway lines. The project became the Advanced Passenger Train.

The APT employed a tilting mechanism to allow it to go around curves up to 40% faster than conventional trains. It could achieve speeds of 160mph, when not held up by slower traffic. There were even gas turbine-powered prototypes, however in 1981 three electrical trains were built.

Unfortunately, the journalists invited to experience the first Glasgow to London run were plied with drink and reported that the tilting mechanism made them feel sick. Mechanical problems followed, and the trains were withdrawn from service.

They were reintroduced in 1984 but were withdrawn in 1986 for good.

The technology was adopted by other companies in France and Italy, and now Virgin Trains uses the tilting Italian/French Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line.

Lemmy died on 28th December at the age of 70. The Guardian has some of his best quotes (with swears etc.)

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal. In your forties, you just pray it doesn’t hurt too much, and by the time you reach my age, you become convinced that, well, it could be just around the corner. Do I think about death a lot? It’s difficult not to when you’re 65, son.

The BBC and the Guardian both recently reported that Pope Francis has officially recognised Mother Theresa' second miracle, and that her canonisation is expected to take place in Rome in September.

The BBC article states , "The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said."

The Guardian article, however, goes into more detail about the controversial nun and discussed the incident of another alleged miracle, as documented by Christopher Hitchens. "A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumour in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine."

Mother Theresa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is said to have amassed vast wealth and enjoyed the best private health care money could buy, while the poor and sick in her missions in India endured illness without proper medication, pain relief and even had to use second-hand hypodermics, despite the huge sums of money donated to the "good cause."

All miracles are open to public scrutiny, so there should be no doubt!

Let us examine the evidence. Or not.

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.