Guardian photo-journalist Adam Gabbatt was told "No press today for security reasons" for the Occupy Movement's November 17 Day of Action.

Think about that for just a few seconds. News helicopters are being told to stay out of the Wall Street area according to WNBC radio. What is it we're not supposed to see?

After the bankruptcy "reform" of the last decade (which only applied to the lower income levels), we knew it was only a matter of time before the return of debtors' prison and forced work camps. There was never any question that this was where Reaganomics would take us.

I guess I just didn't expect that we'd see it so soon. When the new privatized prison system meets debtors prisons, something very very ugly is going to emerge. And it appears it's going to happen within the next couple of years.

If you are very very wealthy, and you find yourself unable to pay your debt, the government will force citizens to make you whole. If you are part of the working or lower classes and find yourself unable to pay your debt, you have become an enemy of the New Corporate State and will be treated accordingly.

Unless there's a system failure (which is a distinct possibility), Jeremiah Cornelius, an iconoclastic and highly prolific Slashdot journal writer has packed it in and closed his account. Links to his journals are dead and his account only shows the UID number, not his user name.

While sometimes his opinions were the kind that made me uncomfortable (which is something, being iconoclastic and a pain in the ass bordering on the trollish myself), I will miss his energy and his strongly held sincere beliefs.

If he's gone elsewhere, I'd like to know which online community a guy like him would join. We;ve lost some long-time Slashdot users recently. I hate to see a good one go.

Years ago, when my wife was finishing her PhD in Math, I helped her with putting her dissertation into the required format, which was a TeX document. The main thing I remember about it was how much trouble it was just to lay out a document. It was hard enough for her to do all the very difficult Math work and get ready for her PhD defense, but to then require her to learn TeX just seemed like piling on.

The other day, my daughter, who's now a Math grad student, came to me and asked if I knew anything about TeX. It caused a sickening deja vu as I realized that after all this time, TeX is still the required format for technical documents.

Now, I understand the elegance of TeX, and I can appreciate the need for a standard way of typesetting such documents. I've seen the Chinese students taking class notes in TeX and I'm aware of the place TeX holds in the Math, physics and engineering communities.

But jesus christ on roller skates, can no one come up with something a little easier to learn and use? I'm a musician and composer and arranger. I score films. Creating formatting and typesetting a music manuscript is at least as exacting and formalized as setting up a document to show some equations, some graphs and a figure or two. I've got a handful of excellent professional software that makes writing (and printing) music as easy as writing a business letter. I don't have to write code just to put in a D.S. al coda for heaven's sake.

When I was working on my own dissertation decades ago in critical theory, I remember using the DOS version of Nota Bene, because that was what my adviser used and by gawd, that was what I was going to use. It was like an even more baroque version of Wordperfect with all sorts of code and macros and packages for diacritical marks. But the world has moved on since then and now there's open office to fill all my document needs.

I guess I'm just venting a bit, thinking about my daughter having to learn tex on top of everything else she's got going on, and I know I'm going to get hit with questions, which means I'm going to have to go back and brush up. I'm about to install LateX on my machine for the second time in over 20 years and if nothing else, can I get some encouragement? Maybe an explanation of why time has stood still in this one area?

Now let me go get some aspirin.

Wait until Saturday evening, when the point spread hits 5, then take the Bears and the points.

Send my share of the winnings to the EFF or the ACLU.

An under-reported story from 2010 was the apparent proliferation of paid political trolls. Some of us have suspected this was going on, but some recent leaks coming out of Right-Wing political action committees confirms that this is happening on a bigger scale than thought.

This phenomena goes back at least as far as 2002, when it was discovered that an internet lobbying outfit called the "Bivings Group" was found to have created at least two false identities, "Mary Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", that were used to post a prodigious number of posts attacking research showing widespread contamination of corn by genetically-modified bee pollen. Bivings was working for Monsanto at the time. It was widely reported that the McCain campaign did this during the 2008 campaign, but the new paid trolling is taking on new forms and attacking more than the regular political online communities.

A very interesting film, (Astro)Turf Wars, a documentary by Taki Oldham, has a scene that was secretly videotaped during a training session organized by a right-wing libertarian outfit called "American Majority". During this session, the trainer instructed Tea Party members as follows:

âoeHereâ(TM)s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in âoeLiberal Booksâ. I go through and I say âoeone star, one star, one starâ. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. ⦠This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in âoeMovies on Healthcareâ, I donâ(TM)t want Michael Mooreâ(TM)s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. ⦠If thereâ(TM)s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. Thatâ(TM)s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.â

From some of the clips I've seen, this (Astro) Turf Wars film seems like it might be interesting to anyone who has been suspicious of the seemingly organized commenting/moderating activity here on Slashdot.

Pamela Geller is despicable.
  I mean really despicable. If this country is or was ever great, than 9/11 should be no more than a triviality compared to its greatness. Compared to what this country represents, the fact that 19 lunatics with boxcutters flew planes into some buildings and killed 3000 people should be nothing but a blip on our history.

Instead, we've got people like Geller trying to make it the American Reichstag. I've never been more ashamed of other Americans than I am of Geller and Gingrich and Reid and anybody who's tried to turn the building of a community center into something ugly. Even if the people behind this community center were everything they're being accused of, it still does not excuse the kind of behavior I've seen these past few weeks.

I've never felt so disgusted with other Americans. I wish I could pass myself off as Canadian, honest to god. I wish I could get a goddamn visa to live in Finland or Belgium or evem goddamned Serbia. Anything but a country where people like Geller and Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved get treated like patriots for (and despite!) denigrating such basic, founding principles as freedom of religion and property rights. They say things like "oh, it's not about freedom of religion and property rights, it's about good taste". Good taste! Now the standard for freedom of speech is supposed to be good taste. And they say "oh, the muslim group must compromise". If they "must" then it's not a goddamn compromise. I don't care if you hate the idea of a community center with a mosque built near ground zero or near your house. If you go on television and try to compare it to Nazis putting signs up at Auschwitz, that makes you the scum of the Earth. You share a hell with the religious fundamentalists that perpetrated the crime in the first place.

So ten years after the fact, this bunch is going to turn into a bunch of drama queens over 9/11, turn the site of the Twin Towers into hallowed ground (or, as Ben Quale says, "hollowed ground"). Is the USA such a flimsy society? Are Americans such weak sisters that they're going to turn a tragedy into a pyre on which to burn each other (yes, the people who want to build the community center are Americans. Yes, there are bombs being thrown at mosques throughout the US in the last few days. Yes, there are "Americans" burning korans in Wal-Mart parking lots. Fucking mutts). I'm so tired of you, America. Never missing a chance to tell the world how great you are, how superior, how above the behavior of "terrorists" but the veneer of your Christian "reformation" turns out to be pretty goddamned thin, after all.

Things like this make me wish there actually was an afterlife where people were judged for their behavior on Earth. I'm willing to do the time for my crimes, as long as I can do it with the knowledge that people who've tried to spread this kind of ugliness were going to do the time for theirs. I'm so tired of you, America.

Rewriting history textbooks isn't nearly enough for the Religious Right. It appears that the "conservative alternative to Wikipedia, "Conservapedia" has some serious issues with Einstein, too.

The first note in the references section of the Conservapedia entry on "Counter-examples to Relativity" will be of special interest to any physicists out there.

I guess that Colbert's throwaway joke about "reality having a liberal bias" was truer than he knew.

I've been writing many stupid posts recently.

If you see such a post, please don't hesitate. Mod me down.

Modding me down will help to tame me and make me a better person.

Just read in the comics that it's Memorial Day for USA. Just want to wish your countrymen and soldiers a good day.

According to a research article published in the current International Journal of Biological Sciences, genetically modified corn from Monsanto increases the levels of liver and kidney failure in rats, as well as other harmful effects to the "heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system.

Apparently, Monsanto has wasted no time claiming the study was based on "faulty data" saying that it's own 90-day study didn't show similar problems. Of course, that ignores the fact that the organ failure only starts to show up after "5-14 weeks" according to the abstract.

Just thought I would tell the story of what happened to us tonight. I am not sure how widespread the problem was, but I suspect there were many people with the same experience... although I know that no news story has hit the wire... yet

I live a little north of Seattle WA. My martial arts teacher has been very excited over the last few months about UFC 100, which happened tonight. He had Fios installed in the martial arts club, replacing his old internet and phone service, because he wanted to be able to watch the fights. He talked about this for more than a month and invited a few good friends to come to the club tonight and watch. He called yesterday and talked to verizon service to make sure there would be no problem and that the fight was ordered. They assured him that everything would be great. He moved an old (non HD) big screen into the club and hooked everything up. This was not a business thing, just a few friends in a closed martial arts club, after hours, eating chips, drinking pop, and very excited about the historic night, you can picture the scene...

I arrived a few minutes after the fights were to start, right before the club owner, who cut short a weekend at his cabin (a 3+ hour drive away) to come back for the fights. Everybody was already pissed. Our friend was on the phone... on hold and the screen said press OK to order this PPV event. Pressing OK bounced back to the same screen. We started to get updates online about the fights we were missing and he continued to hold. Club owner arrived and eventually they got a person on the phone who answered "lemme guess, UFC right?". They explained the situation and the guy demands we power down the box and the TV and back on again, confirms the account shows it should be working and the charge went through. I already knew this guy didn't know what he was talking about because the TV did not need to be power cycled, it was connected to the box with regular analog composite video, and showing the menu fine... the box couldn't know if the TV was on or off.

After a few minutes on the phone the guy explains that everything was fine now and he was "pushing it through" and it would take about 3 or 4 minutes to go from "server to server". He then hung up! We waited, thinking we had only missed a couple fights and the night wasn't a bust yet. Nothing happened. About 15 minutes later our friend gets back on the phone and waits for another 40 minutes to talk to somebody. She promised not to disconnect until the fights were actually on. He talked to her, power cycled the box... and the TV (sigh) again. nothing. My teacher was looking online and saw that some people have had trouble with the credit limits and ordering PPV events on Verizon. She said she had just checked that, and it wasn't the problem, but she upped the credit limit anyway. Said the charge had already posted to the account and it should be working. Said she was "pushing it through" and we should see the fights soon. Several minutes later she said there must be a technical problem and she would transfer us directly to a tech support person for some help.

20 minutes of holding later a tech support genius came on and had us power cycle the box... and TV (sigh again) one more time. He "checked a few more things" said that everything was fine and should be working, the charge was posted to the account fine... the TV had to be hooked up right to get to that screen... the box seemed fine... still no fights. By the way, if I wasn't clear the lady who promised to stay on the line was long gone. The guy finally said that "too many people had ordered the fight" and there was nothing he could do. He said the system was completely overloaded.

Tech support genius then said he could get us the replay of the fight on MONDAY... for full price. He said there was no way we would get anything at this point (now almost 2 hours into the event). We told him since our party was tonight it made no sense to get a PPV replay for two days from now, and that we would have the fights online by then. He sort of apologized. So we asked that we get a refund posted to the account since no service was going to be delivered. He said he couldn't do that, would have to transfer us back to the other department, but they were very busy and we would probably have to hold for a very long time (don't we know it!). He suggested we call back next week sometime so we wouldn't have to hold quite as long, and ask for the refund. We looked at the timer on the phone and this second call had taken well over an hour!

The weirdest part of the night was after our buddy had been on hold for the second call, for about 20 minutes, the club owner called the same number on his cell phone and got through to a rep 5 minutes faster than the other guy! The phone system wasn't even assigning the calls in the order received!

The lesson learned is that I wouldn't touch anything verizon with a 10 foot pole, and I will tell everyone who listens to stay away also. What should have been a fun Saturday with friends turned into a complete waste of time... and somebody still has to call and beg for a refund.

a complete failure in EVERY way

Just received 15 mod points. This is my second time receiving mod points.

Now I have to STFU or else I can't mod. And I have to read EVERYTHING (all the -1 posts) as well.

Arrgghh, I don't have the time!

Someone wrote that I should get a new moniker. He guessed that I was trying to be funny with "troll8901".

My answer:
Yes, I was trying to be funny, but over the past few months, some of my messages were marked "-1, Troll/Redundant/Off-topic", and quite rightly too. I learned a lot by being marked down.

One of my recent messages might be modded "3, Insightful", but the last line "I just wasted 15 minutes on you!" is pure flame, and I should have STFU. I found that lately I couldn't resist flaming other people sometimes.

Well... I guess I may change my moniker or create a new one, when I can write well, default to 1, and get modded 3 to 5 most of the time. Especially "Funny".