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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 Mechanical problems followed, and the trains were withdrawn from service.

They were reintroduced in 1984 but were withdrawn in 1986 for good.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

Well - I struggle to manage RAID arrays and LVM's. I needed to create a new volume tonight, and I set out to refresh my memory, and spent at least an hour going over the finer points of doing it all. Stumbled over this, installed, and created, formatted, and mounted my new volume in about a quarter hour.

For Arch users, it is in the AUR. For CentOS and Ubuntu users, instructions complete with images are available at the link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/127246/linux-sysadmin-how-to-manage-lvms-with-a-gui/?PageSpeed=noscript

Introduction

The Logical Volume Manager or LVM, has already been covered on HTG as well as why you should use it. As LVM is becoming more and more mainstream, where some of the major distribution players like CentOS and Ubuntu with their latest 12.10 release, now installing on LVM by default, you may come across it sooner then you might think. With the above it will probably won’t be long before the time that you would want to administrate an LVM, to increase the space available on the volume for example… with that said, what could be more pleasant then having a nice graphical interface to do the job? Nothing, so lets install one.

____________________________________

Note that the poor grammar was copy/pasted from the original. Administrate? WTF? Ehhh - I probably shouldn't make fun of someone who has helped me out, but, geez Louise!

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.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmhaff/95/95ap25.htm

This is fascinating reading. Virtually all the "studies" that supported gun control in the UK are discredited. Statistics are exposed as either outright lies, or extremely flawed. The methods by which different nations define and account for homicides, violent crime, and gun law violations are explained in some cases, and the impossibility of comparing those statistics is exposed. Basically, if you take the time to read this wall of text, you cannot help realizing that the entire gun control lobby has intentionally misled the masses.

I am still absorbing it. Need an example to whet your appetite?

" 52. To further its own claim of a correlation between gun ownership levels and homicide rates, the Home Office paper cites a comparison between Seattle and Vancouver which showed that the homicide rate in the US city was two thirds higher than that of the Canadian city, all the difference being attributable to gun homicide. That study was somewhat discredited when other researchers showed that the entire difference could be accounted for by demographic factors. Both cities have similar white populations and large ethnic minorities. In Vancouver, the ethnic minority is largely Chinese and Japanese whose homicide rate is far lower than that of the white majority. In Seattle the ethnic minority is black and their homicide rate is 10 times higher than that of the white population. Virtually all the difference between the two cities could be accounted for in that way."

58. Their published results raise some important questions. The supposed direct comparison of gun and non gun homicides fails even to attempt to control for any variables, and in particular for levels of existing gun control. It is known, for example, that the homicide rates in some US cities where guns are effectively banned is extremely high, with Washington DC showing a rate of about 80 per 100,000. In less populous areas, the homicide rates are entirely comparable with European and British levels. Centerwall notes that in Vermont where there is effectively no control on firearms, the mean annual rate of criminal homicide over a four year period was 0.4 per 100,000 whilst North Dakota levels were even lower. Had the comparative figures used Britain, instead of England and Wales, we would find that these US States were lower than those in this country, for Scotland has a homicide rate considerably higher than that of England and Wales.

65. The authors of the UN Report draw a series of conclusions which are not justified by their own evidence. The only conclusion which can safely be drawn in that there is no casual relationship between the number of firearms in a State and the levels of death through homicide, suicide or accident.

  84. The debate seems to assume that the United States is a homogenous unit, but that does not seem to be the case. Homicide rates vary from the extraordinarily high level of about 80 per hundred thousand in Washington DC which has a total ban on the ownership of most firearms, to rates less than those in the UK and Europe in States like Vermont which does not allow any restrictions on firearms ownership.

86. In the United States the distribution of homicide and particularly firearms homicide varies very widely between racial groups, as it does in other countries. The large and well established Japanese population in the San Francisco area has the same access to firearms as any other group, but their rate of homicide has been shown to be slightly lower than the homicide rate in Japan and very much lower than other groups in the same area.

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.